According to a Bloomberg article from 2021 and based off data from an entity called the Monument Lab (whose politics are apparent within seconds of perusing their website), Christopher Columbus has 149 monuments in America, mostly in the northeast.

Only George Washington and Abraham Lincoln have more monuments on the American urban landscape.

Since the Leftist prosecution of Columbus began in the 1970s, 36 have been removed, and in some instances decidedly unceremoniously.

Ironically he still stands tall in leftist bastions such as Manhattan and in front of Union Station in Washington, DC, though in the case of the latter the marble monument unveiled in 1912 has been repeatedly vandalized, once having been stained with blood hurled by an AIDS protestor in 1992.

Just north in Baltimore, Columbus was brazenly yanked down, destroyed, and its pieces rolled into Charm City’s harbor by protestors on July 4, 2020 though there had been discussions about relocating it somewhere else.

Naturally Democratic city officials did little to intervene in this telegraphed act of vandalism and in the aftermath described the act as “part of a national and global reexamination about monuments.”

Though in America’s second deadliest city (behind New Orleans), Baltimore leaders can no more be expected to protect statues of dead explorers when they fail so spectacularly at protecting alive residents.

Aside from Washington (Presudents’ Day is a department store sale not an actual federal holiday) and Martin Luther King, Jr., the Italian explorer is the only other individual with his own national holiday and the only non-citizen with that distinction.

There was a time when Christopher Columbus was revered for his role in discovering and sowing the seeds of the New World, of which Americans of all races are the beneficiaries, including those who view Columbus as a war criminal colonizer yet won’t atone for their own continued presence by vacating back to the Old World.

Perhaps those on the sentimental (emphasis on “mental”) Left believe that the entire western hemisphere should’ve been left alone as some sort of Avatar-esque indigenous people and wildlife preserve, honored by the Great Powers of the world at the time in perpetuity, forgetting of course that said 15th and 16th century kingdoms and empires got to be who they were by….doing the exact same thing on their own continents.

The history of not just people and civilization, but non-human mammals is a story of migration.

Surely they do not believe that Chinese, Italians, Africans, Arabs, Indians, and other ethnic groups randomly hatched from eggs expelled from the soil on the places where they currently inhabit.

They wandered around and killed people where they moved. That was the way of survival. Consider the case of the Tainos, the indigenous people whom are portrayed as Columbus’ first victims when the truth is the Caribs, another indigenous people, had been driving them away before the Nina approached the Bahamas in October 1492.

Also lost on the anti-history crowd is a subject they ought to be familiar, but unsurprisingly not: climate change.

Before there were steel plants, SUVs, oil refineries, and the plastic straw production complexes (though flatulating cattle were around), the seas and the temperatures radically changed.

Why? Because the Earth is a dynamic planet. There’s no thermostat at some Environmental Ministry in London and it doesn’t care what Greta Thunberg has to say about it.

Camels were native to North America and then moved across the Bering-Siberia land bridge to Asia. Horses were also native to the America’s but went extinct and were first reintroduced back to this side of the Atlantic by….wait for it…. Columbus.

So considering that Columbus’ practices were hardly atypical from anyone in charge of any kingdom or tribe at that time and that his legacy is a prosperous and powerful New World that has twice bailed out the Old World in three global conflicts in the past century alone, why the obsession with Columbus?

It’s not about the man but the reaction to him.

In its modern incarnation, though with ideological roots reaching out to the French Revolution, the Left doesn’t believe in heroes, which serve as pillars of an established civilization, nation, and a society.

The Neo-Brave World cannot be built until the existing structure and its foundation have been bulldozed.

This is what the Jacobins, Communards, Bolsheviks, National Socialists, Taliban, and ISIS do.

Taking down Columbus isn’t so much an end but a means…to take down more of everyone.

That cities stood idly by and allowed mobs to engage in the destruction of public property is about normalizing the behavior so it can be repeated against other newer villains.

Civil War figures followed Columbus and they were then followed into the mob war crimes dock by anyone who owned slaves. They were in turn followed by those whose views of society did not meet today’s standard, even if those individuals had distinguished themselves in other arenas.

Even the Great Emancipator, who was slain over a century and one-half ago, could not live up to such a standard.

And somehow Kate Smith of God Bless America and War Bond sales fame had her memorial tossed upon the same scrap metal heap of history.

Like Robespierre ‘s court, there are always villains to prosecute in the name of the people with Orwell ‘s Memory Hole taking the place of Jacobin France’s National Razor.

The war on Columbus isn’t about Columbus; it is and always been about history and America.

It’s fitting that in a society where free thinking is considered dangerous that a brave man who utilized science to challenge the existing notions of the world and put his life on the line to do so is so hated.