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Oct. 8, 2023 - The Michael Knowles Show
09:50
Anti-Columbus TikTok DEBUNKED | Michael Knowles

Another year and another liberal attack on Christopher Columbus. Watch Michael Knowles debunk awoke TikTok attacking Christopher Columbus.

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As Ronald Reagan said, the problem with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant.
It's just that they know so much that isn't so.
We went through the woke Christmas TikToks of a creator by the name of Cassandra.
And because you all enjoyed the thorough debunking so much, we've decided to take on Cassandra's historical musings about one of my favorite men in history.
There is no evidence that Christopher Columbus thought manatees were mermaids.
Christopher Columbus.
All right, let's start off with the least uncomfortable fact.
He thought manatees were mermaids and he tried to date one.
Put a pause there.
There is no evidence that Christopher Columbus thought manatees were mermaids.
Christopher Columbus said that he saw mermaids.
And liberal, scientific squishes have pretended that what he saw was a manatee.
He may have just seen a mermaid.
He didn't try to date the mermaid, by the way.
He didn't try to date a manatee or a mermaid.
But I don't know why people are so convinced that the man saw a manatee.
Manatees and mermaids don't look very similar.
And I think there's at least a 10% shot he just saw a mermaid.
Keep going.
He thought Earth was shaped like a boob, and the top part was the nip, and the top part also so happened to be Eden, like the biblical Eden.
Put a pause right there.
I'm glad at least she's not saying that he thought that the Earth was flat, or that everyone thought the Earth was flat, but Columbus had the suspicion that maybe it wasn't flat at all.
I'm glad, because that just isn't true.
That's a ton of misinformation.
People thought the world was flat for crying out loud.
So, what's interesting here is that she's saying Christopher Columbus is a big dummy, because he thought that the Earth wasn't perfectly spherical.
Spherical!
But of course the Earth is not perfectly spherical.
The Earth has topography, right?
The Earth has mountains, the Earth has valleys, the Earth has volcanoes, the Earth has all of it.
So if her argument against Columbus is, Christopher Columbus was a big stupid idiot because he thought there were mountains on Earth, which obviously there are, but he thought one of the mountains was really, really big.
Okay, how could you?
I want this lady to draw me a map of the earth, and I want her to get the topography exactly right.
Good luck, lady.
I think Columbus is going to be a lot more right than you are.
Keep going.
He created one of the first slavery rings.
Many of these slaves were sold to his friends who were known murderers.
Put a pause there.
He created one of the first slavery rings?
Are you insane?
The man sailed the ocean blue in 1492.
Slavery has existed since the dawn of man, especially in Africa.
Sub-Saharan Africa and Northern Africa.
No, it existed everywhere in the world.
It existed in the Americas long before Christopher Columbus ever got there.
And furthermore, slavery continues to exist today everywhere outside of the West.
But he says he created one of the first Slave rings.
Where do you think he got the slaves from?
Slaves.
He got slaves from Native Americans, some of whom were already enslaved, or who were being attacked, captured, and cannibalized in some cases by those wonderful natives.
The word cannibalism comes from the Carib Islanders.
And then, as slavery developed in the New World, new slaves were imported from Africa.
Where did they get those slaves?
They got those slaves from other Africans who had been enslaving them.
Keep going.
He forced natives to work in gold mines and he considered them his property.
The way he treated natives was absolutely barbaric.
He would test the sharpness of his blades on them, throw them in vats of boiling soap.
I mean, beheadings, just the most- Put a pause there.
Yes, there was this system, the encomienda system, and other systems of forced labor in the Americas.
A lot of it was about getting gold.
The purpose of getting gold, though, by the way, was not so that Columbus could buy a corvette.
It was so that Columbus could fund another crusade so the Christians could retake the Holy Land from the Muslims who had conquered it.
Which I think is an absolutely virtuous and valiant good cause to be used with this gold.
But, furthermore...
Christopher Columbus, though he is accused of all this awful mistreatment of the Native Americans, more often than not was actually the defender of the Native Americans against the Spaniards who had come with him and who were running this colony.
So the worst sort of claims against Christopher Columbus in this regard come from a man named Francisco de Bobadilla.
Francisco de Bobadilla, though, was the guy who took Columbus's job as the governor of the Americas.
So, Francisco de Bobadilla was the guy who was Columbus's chief political rival.
It would be like looking at the crimes of Hillary Clinton and relying only on the diaries of Donald Trump.
Or vice versa.
The crimes of Donald Trump, relying only on the diaries of Hillary Clinton.
That is simply not reliable.
there are many cases recorded of the Spaniards trying to torture and kill Native Americans, and Columbus would come in on their side.
I think the best authority on this matter is Bartolome de las Casas, who was the first resident bishop of the Americas, who remained a Columbus admirer and defender until the end.
And Bartolome de las Casas is considered one of the greatest defendants of Natives in American history.
Keep going.
He even used these humans as dog food.
There was about 10,000 people that he did this to.
When he first met the Arawaks, he wrote that they were peaceful, handsome, and they traded everything they owned.
He also mentioned that they didn't have swords, and with 50 of his men, he could do whatever he wanted with them.
After these people showed him nothing but kindness, when he ran out of money and he needed funding, his writing completely- Put a pause there!
So...
When Columbus first met the Tainos and the other natives around the Caribbean, it is true he said these people are very simple, we'll be able to conquer them very easily.
He said things like this.
He also told the Spaniards not to take advantage of them.
You see this in very reliable historical accounts, especially Admiral of the Ocean Sea by Samuel Elliot Morrison, a very, very respected Harvard historian.
So, yes, he was engaged in a mission of conquest.
That is true.
But he wasn't some genocidal, psychosexual killer or anything like that, okay?
That is a bunch of nonsense.
And in many, many cases, he was the one urging charity and prudence and restraint.
Keep going.
He wrote that they're evil, savage cannibals with dog-like noses who drink the blood of their victims.
Pause there.
Some of them were.
Some of them were.
Not the Taino Indians, but the Caribs were.
They were cannibals.
They were savage cannibals.
Who would eat the Tainos?
He noticed, Columbus saw when he arrived, that the Taino Indians had marks on their bodies.
And he said, where'd you get those marks from?
They got the marks from these maniac Carib Islanders, from whom we get the word cannibal, you know?
So maybe this lady doesn't like that, but to quote my colleague over here, facts don't care about her feelings.
Keep going.
Also, historians are pretty sure he wasn't even Italian.
He was a brave Italian explorer.
He wasn't even good at speaking or writing Italian, and they believe he was the illegitimate son of a Portuguese prince.
Oh my goodness, put a pause there.
Historian.
Give me a break.
What historian?
You notice she doesn't cite the historians because there aren't any.
All of the top Columbus historians are quite convinced that the man was Italian.
He may not have written Italian very well, But he didn't write Italian very well, because the man didn't come from a ton of means.
The man was largely self-educated, and he wrote in Spanish.
I mean, he became a Spanish sailor, though he was an Italian himself.
Keep going.
He also never even stepped foot in what we know as the United States.
He landed in the Caribbean.
So, big misconception.
Is that a misconception?
Put a pause there.
Who thinks that Christopher Columbus Walked around New York.
I'm walking here!
Who thinks that?
Nobody thinks that.
No Columbus defender thinks that.
It's only the big libs who hate Columbus, who pretend like this is a big misconception.
Just like the libs who say, you know, all these dumb people used to think the Earth was flat.
What a misconception that was.
No, they didn't.
People have known that the Earth is roughly spherical.
Spherical?
Since antiquity.
You're the one with the misconception about people's misconceptions.
Keep going.
After his horrific crimes, he was taken back to Spain in shackles.
But he was forgiven so graciously that they even gave him his own holiday because they thought the good outweighed the bad.
Okay, but put a pause there.
No, the Spanish didn't... The Columbus Day holiday, to which I assume she is referring, was established in 1891 in the United States because there was a mass lynching of Italian-Americans in Louisiana.
And then the Columbus holiday kept cropping up every so often.
In the 1930s, it cropped up under FDR, and so they established it as a holiday for Italians, though.
It was actually a holiday just to give Italians a little bit of a feeling that they were welcomed into the country.
Columbus Day is a day of Italian pride.
Columbus was sent back in shackles because Bobadilla outfoxed him in the Americas and took his job and sent him back.
And Columbus was absolutely furious about this.
And he wrote in his diaries that he said, if there is any justice whatsoever, these people will all burn in hell for what they've done to me, for the slander and defamation that they have undertaken.
And also, by the way, he wasn't forgiven so graciously.
That did not happen, even from the wonderful monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella.
Columbus made it back, but part of the reason that he was kept in his shackles, part of the reason why I think the Crown was so inclined to believe Bobadilla, was because the Crown owned Columbus a lot of money.
And so, if they were able to accuse him of a crime, they wouldn't, they would be far more justified in not giving him all of the money that they owed him.
Keep going.
It is now 2021, and for the life of me, I cannot figure out why this man still has a holiday.
Right, you can't figure it out because you don't know anything about how the holiday was established.
You don't know anything about who the man was, or what the man did, or your own civilization.
Without this man, you would not be here, okay?
You don't know anything about any of that.
And so you can't figure out why he's got a holiday.
Maybe you should first learn all those things about the man, and who he was, and what he did, and what his relation is to you, and then you might have a greater appreciation of it.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
See you tomorrow.
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