And the argument that they make is that Columbus came over to the Americas, and he enslaved all the peoples, and he raped, killed, pillaged, and burned, and he was a vicious tyrant and a murderer, and he did all of these awful things because he was a genocidal maniac.
And the problem with that narrative is not just that it's unfair or it's out of historical context.
It's actually that it's not true.
In the words of Carol Delaney, who is a preeminent Columbus historian, The left accuses Columbus of things that he actually did
not do, that other Spaniards did, that actually in many cases Christopher Columbus tried
I am joined by the most notorious Christopher Columbus apologist on all of the internet, a man who also wrote one bestselling book with no words and another bestselling book with words that the New York Times decided not to put on their bestseller list.
Also, he left me behind in crazy Cali while he moved to the free state of Tennessee.
Yeah, you know who it is.
Michael Knowles, welcome back to the Rubin Report.
And I said, well, Chris Columbus, I thought perhaps you were the expert on the director, Chris Columbus, of Home Alone and Harry Potter and Mrs. Doubtfire.
Yeah, okay, so let's talk about Christopher Columbus, because I actually know that, joking aside, this is sort of close to your heart, the way that they've sort of changed the very life and the history of Christopher Columbus.
I've watched a couple things that you've done on this before.
So, actually, I'm not even gonna ask you a question to start.
Why don't you just start?
Where should we start when talking about Christopher Columbus?
I think we ought to quote that great historian, Tony Soprano.
I'll clean up the language a little bit for your show, because it's a family program.
When his son AJ is going off about some Howard Zinn, revisionist, woke nonsense about Christopher Columbus, Tony cuts him off and says, hey, enough of that!
In this house, Christopher Columbus is a hero, all right?
And that's the end of the story.
And I think that's absolutely true.
There are two reasons here why we focus on Columbus Day and why this is near and dear to my heart.
First of all, The Identity Politics.
I am an Italian-American from New York.
Columbus Day is considered an Italian-American holiday.
It was instituted for the first time.
In 1892, this was on the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus sailing the ocean blue.
The approximate cause of this is that the year prior, 11 Italian-Americans had been lynched in New Orleans.
It's the largest mass lynching in American history.
And so to make the Italians feel nice and welcome here in America, there was this initial Columbus Day celebrated, and then later on Franklin Roosevelt made it an annual thing.
So the Italians, especially those from the tri-state area, feel very close to it.
Beyond the usual sort of identity pride that everyone seems to be focused on these days, why on his own merits would Columbus get a holiday?
Well, the answer is simple.
Without Christopher Columbus, we would not be here.
And he's a great embodiment of Western civilization.
He is an Italian, a Genoan of low birth, who is basically a self-made man.
And he educated himself, and he traveled all over.
He became one of the greatest sailors of his age, even when he was still a young man.
He had this crazy idea to sail to the Indies, to find a short sea route to the Indies.
The reasons for this were, somewhat were economic, to find a trade route, but they, and this is often overlooked, they were religious, they were spiritual.
He wanted to, he was a devout Catholic, he wanted to fund another crusade, actually, and on his ships he said the Book of Hours, he led the men in prayers, he had confession in the Eucharist before he set sail, he was a deeply pious religious man, and he was intrepid, he was fearless, he sailed to Iceland, to Ireland, to parts of Africa, He makes it to the Indies, he goes three times, discovers a new world, and because he so embodies our civilization, the left hates his guts.
You know, the Italians are a swarthy people, getting back to our identity politics, so I don't know how or where they fall on white supremacy, but I think, yes, to the left, he was an embodiment of white supremacy, and the argument that they make is that Columbus came over to the Americas, and he enslaved all the peoples, and he raped, killed, pillaged, and burned, and he was a vicious tyrant, and a murderer, and he did all of these awful things, because he was a genocidal maniac.
And the problem with that narrative is, Not just that it's unfair or it's out of historical context, it's actually that it's not true.
In the words of Carol Delaney, who is a preeminent Columbus historian, the left accuses Columbus of things that he actually did not do, that other Spaniards did, that actually, in many cases, Christopher Columbus tried to stop the Spaniards from doing.
When they first landed, they met the Taino people, Columbus told the Spaniards, don't be cruel to these people.
Now, there were other islanders in the area, notably the Carib Islanders, who were a little less kind and polite than the Taino Indians.
Columbus noticed that the Tainos had a lot of scars on them, on some of them, and so he asked, where is that from?
It was from the Carib Islanders.
The Carib Islanders is where we get the word for cannibal.
They were an island of cannibals.
This is well documented and, you know, this brought the idea of cannibalism even.
into our lexicon, our cultural lexicon.
So, not all of the natives created equal.
Christopher Columbus befriended one of the Indian leaders and actually raised his orphaned son.
So, to call him racist, bigoted, genocidal, unjust, it just, it is so overly simplistic, it's so dishonest, and frankly, it's more fanciful and fabulous than any of the traditional narratives we have that admire Columbus.
So since we're taping this actually a couple days before Columbus Day, I'm sure that we're in agreement that there's no doubt like 80,000 hit pieces out right now.
They're doing hit pieces post, you know, post-death hit pieces on Christopher Columbus right now.
There's no doubt.
They're saying, you know, slaughtered indigenous and all of the stuff.
Does this, in some ways for you, because you care about this, and at the identity politics level, it's okay to be an Italian, proud of Italian heritage and history and all of those things, that it's like, we can't defend any of our freedoms now, we can't even defend our current, you know, history from 10 years ago, that this is one that it almost feels like the ship has sailed, no pun intended, like they're coming for Christopher Columbus, whether we like it or not.
They are, and these hit pieces, they crop up every year, and they've really increased in frequency and vitriol since the mid-2000s.
And whenever you look at a hit piece, what's the first question you gotta ask?
The first question is, what are the sources?
Where did they get this stuff from?
It was a little weird that these hit pieces all cropped up in the 2000s, and the explanation was that new documents revealed that Columbus was not a great guy, that actually he was a terrible genocidal maniac.
What were the documents?
It's actually, you'll notice on a lot of these articles, you can't find, they don't cite their sources.
It all goes back to a document from a man named Francisco de Bobadilla.
Francisco de Bobadilla was Christopher Columbus's rival for political power in the New World.
Columbus was not just the greatest explorer of his age, but he also was the governor of the Indies.
He was a less competent governor than he was an explorer and actually a lot of the harsher treatment
of the Native Americans was as a result of Christopher Columbus being outfoxed politically
by much less scrupulous men.
And so one of the people who stabbed Columbus in the back was this guy, Debo Bedea.
Regardless of what, I'm not saying Christopher Columbus was perfect, obviously he wasn't, he was a human.
No human is perfect.
Not in this day and age at least.
And I can really only name one person.
One, maybe two, I don't know.
You Dave, you're a nice guy, but I don't think so.
Thank you, thank you.
When we look at this historical record, I think the comparison here would be
if you were looking at a history of Hillary Clinton and you said, okay, well, what's a fair history
How about this one written by Donald Trump?
That's what I'm going to use this as my sole evidence that Hillary or vice versa, you know, the history of Donald Trump written by Hillary Clinton, regardless of the facts on the ground.
And we can talk about all of the complex facets of Columbus's life.
It's simply preposterous.
To take his chief political rival as the gospel truth on the man, especially when that narrative is so contradicted by many other esteemed historians and people who were there at the time.
I mean, I think of Bartolomé de las Casas, the first resident bishop of the Americas.
Bartolomé de las Casas was honest about Columbus's faults, and he said, you know, the man didn't govern perfectly, but he's considered one of the greatest defenders of the Native Americans, and yet de las Casas Remained a lifelong admirer of Christopher Columbus.
And I think we need to take into account that historical perspective as well before we throw the guy over the ship, as it were.
Yes, the thing you need to know about Christopher Columbus's exploration
is that the man was unique.
This is not something to be looked at as the mere tides of history and someone was going to discover the Americas and oh, you know, if it wasn't Chris it would have been somebody else.
No, Christopher Columbus was so ruthlessly determined and ambitious to find this sea route That he, first of all, educated himself.
He educated himself, became literate, became a Spaniard.
He was an Italian guy, but he became a Spaniard because he thought that was going to be basically his best chance to go on over.
He lobbied the King of Portugal.
The King of Portugal refused.
He then goes and lobbies the King and Queen of Spain.
They refuse as well, but through basically sheer tyranny of will and personality, he finally gets Isabella, Queen Isabella, to relent and fund this voyage.
He had already had a lot of experience at sea before that, and then he sets to sea.
What does he have?
All these wonderful tools at his disposal?
No, he's got a compass and the stars.
He used dead reckoning to make it across.
So you'll often hear people today say, "Christopher Columbus, he didn't even end up
"where he wanted to end up.
"He wanted to end up in the East Indies "or what he found Bermuda, you know, or whatever.
"Not Bermuda, he found the Bahamas, he found the Caribbean."
And you think, well, I don't know, the guy had a compass and he had the stars.
You know, on this voyage, as they were going a far greater distance, I think, than many people were prepared to undertake, Christopher Columbus had to put down a mutiny.
So here you do see a little bit of his leadership skill.
Maybe he wasn't the greatest governor of the Indies, but he did keep these men in line, and they finally do spot land.
I think owes a lot of it to his faith in God.
I mean, when he finally does land in the Caribbean, the first island he lands at, he calls it San Salvador, right?
The Savior.
And he deals with all of these difficult political problems.
He is brought back to Spain in chains, so he undergoes a lot of persecution.
And Columbus doesn't just complain about this, by the way.
He thinks he was unjustly persecuted.
I think he was largely unjustly persecuted.
There are some cynical motives for it, which is that as long as Christopher Columbus was a criminal, then the crown didn't need to pay him what they owed him.
So there were a lot of political machinations going on in Spain.
But he understood that perhaps he was suffering because of his own failing.
And he writes about this in his journals.
So he actually does look in on himself.
And the two-dimensional picture is just so silly, not to harp too much on the criticisms
of him, but I think there is an important one that we need to focus on here, which is
ourselves.
You know, in the spirit of Columbus looking in on his own failings, we need to look in
on ourselves.
Without Christopher Columbus, we would not be here.
Without Christopher Columbus, the Hispanic people would not exist.
There would be no such thing as Latinos or Hispanics, right, which is Latino people come from the mixture of the American indigenous peoples and the Spaniards who come over.
So if you are an Hispanic person, you owe your very ethnic identity to Christopher Columbus.
And we, of course, owe our existence here in the new world.
And so I think before we cast stones, we should recognize that we are standing on the shoulders of giants, this giant in particular, and yet we think that we're flying.
There are some interesting stories, though, when he lands on the first time.
And I think this is also really important when we're talking about the Native Americans, you know, the indigenous peoples from the region.
Because I don't mean to downplay the suffering that they endured.
Many of them did endure a lot of suffering.
But the Native Americans that he encountered, I mentioned this a little bit earlier, We're all sorts of different people, and some of them were good, and some of them were not so good, and some of the groups of Native Caribbeans were good, and some of them were not so good, and the thing we find about them when we read Columbus's writings, when we read the writings of other people who were on the voyage, is that those indigenous peoples
were a lot like us.
That is, they were people.
And they had some good characteristics, and they had some bad characteristics.
And the way that these peoples developed over time... Like, when you're talking about that interaction of Columbus with the natives there, you're talking about the first modern colonial interactions in the modern era.
And so, if there were going to be problems, if there were going to be failures, if there were going to be mistakes made, Recognize you're talking about something that is so historic that Columbus is credited in many ways with giving birth to this modern era that we're all living in.
Would you like to see the modern American-Italian community stand up more for Columbus's legacy?
I mean, that episode of The Sopranos, I know the one you're talking about, it's the very famous Columbus Day episode, when they're trying to tear down, you know, some activists are trying to tear down a statue somewhere in Jersey.
I wonder, should the Italian community be getting more up in arms over this?
I do think that the Italians have a special role here in defending Columbus.
You know, I don't love identity politics, and it's not like I wake up every morning and I think, gosh, I'm proudest of the fact that my skin is a little swarthy and I eat cannoli and things like that.
But the Italians have a special role here.
If they're not going to defend Columbus, who will?
And the Italians ought to be Happy about their influence on America.
You know, I mean, there are a lot of Italian... First of all, America is named after an Italian.
Amerigo Vespucci, the mapmaker.
You've got the Verrazano Bridge.
You've got, you know, Christopher Columbus, obviously.
So many places named after him.
And I think this raises another question.
Why are towns Universities, state, countries, old countries, named after Christopher Columbus.
Why did people once admire him and they don't admire him anymore?
I suppose part of that might be because unscrupulous journalists are relying on ridiculous historical records.
But I suspect it has to do more with Ourselves.
We don't like ourselves so much anymore as a civilization.
And Columbus, because he played such a role in developing that civilization and embodying it, I think he bears a lot of the brunt of this sort of thing.
You asked for interesting episodes from those first encounters he had.
Most of what we see from those earliest encounters between Columbus and the natives are him imploring people to treat them well, do not Please, Spaniards, do not deceive the natives.
Do not deceive them in trade.
Do not be too harsh on them.
And, you know, that side of the man you never really get to see.
Later on, more difficult circumstances developed, of course.
No one is denying that.
It reminds me of Chesterton's fence.
G.K.
Chesterton, the English writer, has this famous idea that there are two kinds of reformers, right?
The reformer who goes up and sees a fence in the middle of nowhere, just a white fence, doesn't seem to serve any purpose, and he says, tear down that fence.
I have no reason, I have no idea why that fence was erected in the first place.
And then there's another type of reformer who says, hold on a second.
If you do not know the purpose of that fence, if you don't know why that was erected in the first place, then don't touch it.
Go figure out why it was erected in the first place and then tear it down.
And I think that's what we should begin with here is a little bit of humility to say, why was this man admired for so very long?
Well, maybe shockingly, it's us here in 2021 who are missing something.
And it's not just the diluted old awful people who came before us that we've got to tear down.
I hope we can defend the great Christopher Columbus.
I hope people don't tear down his statues too much into the near future, because the thing is, when you tear down your entire country, when you tear down your entire civilization, one, some of those statues might clobber you and clobber the things that you love, but you're going to end up living amid ruins.
All cultures, all civilizations are going to have to admire certain people, we're going to have to admire certain values, and I want to live in a civilization that admires the great men who came before us, who gave us our culture, that admires the intrepid, determined, faithful, intelligent, Ambitious sort of episodes that I think are really well typified and really well exemplified by Christopher Columbus.
Or we're going to admire a lot of the bad guys who are running around, running roughshod over our culture.
In many ways, that's exactly what the whole damn thing is about right now.
And Knowles, you are the living embodiment of Christopher Columbus because you left Los Angeles for the unchartered, the unknown country, country of Tennessee.