Vice President Kamala Harris’s big problem “connecting” with people in the United States who aren’t in coastal woke lands is evident in a 3-year-old clip of her sternly lecturing an audience about the evils Christopher Columbus inflicted on the New World he found.
The video is, as they say, going viral. In this case, “viral” is literal as well as figurative.
Harris, as is the wont of the woke Left, was denigrating Columbus by calling his holiday “Indigenous Peoples’ Day,” which is decidedly not the name of the federal holiday. Federal holidays are created by legislation, not by presidential proclamations.
Literally refusing to even use the name Columbus, Harris, who, at the time of the video, was already vice president, spoke angrily about “the voyage of the European explorers who first landed on the shores of the Americas. But that is not the whole story … Those explorers ushered in a wave of devastation for tribal nations — perpetrating violence, stealing land, and spreading disease. We must not shy away from this shameful past.”
Of course, she is right insofar as that statement goes, but her version of the “let’s bash those evil Europeans” game is far from the whole story, and it’s not only dishonestly incomplete but also hypocritical.
It is, of course, true that both the Mayans and Aztecs, among others in the Americas, had thriving civilizations and built wondrous structures, such as the pyramid and city of Chitzen Itza. However, it wasn’t exactly Europeans who brought “violence” to those tribes, as they were infamous for their ritual human sacrifice, brutal “games” in which the losers were killed, widespread practice of slavery, and other abominations. Savagery ran rampant in those days in both the Old World and the new one. The behavior of Columbus and his men was reprehensible but far from unfamiliar to the people of the islands or the two American continents.
Meanwhile, as much as Columbus and those who followed him engaged in acts of conquest, the collapse of the various New World civilizations owed far, far more to the natives’ lack of immunity to the diseases that Europeans brought (or to other social and geological factors that helped the diseases spread). For all his terrible faults, Columbus’s goal was not to wipe out the natives but to Christianize them while plundering their gold, which, it must be said, Europeans valued much more greatly than the natives did.
It is here where Harris’s scolding most rankles. No matter what else can be said of the Europeans, the lethality of the viruses was not their fault. Nobody back then understood virology or bacteriology, nor did anyone know that what passed for mild ailments in Europe would quickly destroy 95% of the indigenous American population. Yet Harris’s whole attitude — this is far from the only time she has railed against the European despoilers of the poor, innocent “indigenous peoples” — is one of anger against the “European explorers” who brought the diseases they themselves did not understand.
This is what makes her hypocritical. While she blames Columbus’s sailors for unknowingly bringing those germs and viruses, she literally says it was racist for former President Donald Trump (and plenty of others of us) to blame China for COVID-19, which it likely created, whose lethality it understood but whose dangers and origins it covered up then and still covers up today.
Yes, Harris literally introduced a resolution denouncing all labels such as “Wuhan virus” and “Chinese virus” as “racism, discrimination, and religious intolerance” and demanded that the Justice Department “investigate and prosecute perpetrators” of hate crimes that, in her fevered nightmares, stemmed from those monikers. Never mind, of course, that the monikers were true.
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It’s also true that, for all Columbus’s faults, his astonishing courage and achievements are a part of the “whole story” that Harris, acting in the role of “Her Supreme Wokeness,” completely ignores. The daringness, sense of adventure, and desire to discover, explore, and learn are both great human traits, in general, and particularly core components of American character.
For her to focus on the disease-carrying nature of those explorers, with no nod to their bravery and grit, is for her to be a vector for the worst political disease of all: A sneering anti-Americanism.