In the spirit of Columbus Day 2010, 2015 and 2017, one or more moonbats continued the new Elmwood tradition last year — bloodying the explorer’s likeness — and chained to its base a sign: “"Stop Celebrating Genocide.”

For other nudniks who likewise confound Americana with wrongdoing, massacres and iniquity, there’re freshmen city councilpersons Kat Kerwin of Providence (D) and Alex Kithes of Woonsocket (D). Anti-genocide, pro-abortion Kerwin defended — and praised to the ProJo as “an incredible, brave person” — those cowardly hands which abused city property under cover of darkness in Elmwood, and furthermore called to junk Columbus, statue and holiday, in 2020. She demands we wish each other “Happy Indigenous People’s Day” instead because, I guess, she likes a mouthful.

Like her vocal fry and upspeak, Kerwin’s position might repulse Gene Valicenti and his listeners, but heckler’s veto for vandals — over public monuments and holidays — fits cozily on the Democrat platform between free healthcare for illegals and votes for felons.

The party of kleptocrat, thugophile DAs (like Chesa Boudin in San Francisco and Larry Krasner in Philadelphia), of subpoenas for journalists’ phone records, and of death-by-fentanyl sanctuary cities — Thanks Elorza! — today’s left represents all but law-abiding citizens.

Shortly after Columbus was doused a second time, Councilman Kithes bid us these cheerless tidings on Thanksgiving via twitter: “remember that today is rooted in colonization and imperialism, and that Europeans stole this land.” An eye-witness to the first Thanksgiving, William Bradford, tells us differently in his journals. New policies of personal responsibility among the settlers brought about agricultural surplus and prosperity — a happy foretoken of American Exceptionalism — whereas old ones on the Bernie Sanders model had brought about (as they invariably did later in the USSR or Venezuela) starvation and misery.

Let’s never mind the long, bloody turf wars between Indian tribes which antedate the pilgrims or Columbus; the dispossession of “natives” (even from their own occupancies) is, like slavery, a banality of world history uniquely invoked to incriminate us palefaces for flourishing on this continent as well as in Europe.

Columbus is a hero vilified in our squeamish time over his “politically incorrect” record, but to render final judgment on historical persons by today’s standards lacks empathy, honesty and imagination. Not even progressive Roger Williams, who maintained “Rhode Island was purchased by love,” will long withstand the captiousness of “woke” historicasters when comfortable parasites, like Kerwin and Kithes, find political advantage in his extirpation. The only glowing reviews dead white men receive come after black or latino actors play them in musicals.

Seed of hatemongers and massacrists, if we have no right to be here, we have no right to govern here in our own best interests. Burdened by our sovereignty and prosperity, we will gladly surrender both to whatever crackpot redistributive schemes our betters prescribe as atonement (e.g. reparations, amnesty, or diversity quotas). But isn’t the notion that here is not our perfect and rightly-appointed place a contradiction to the very name of “Providence”?

Either Columbus stands, or we fall.

Zachary A. Cooper
Bristol