First Lady Melania Trump visits with children at The Nest: Children’s Home Friday, Oct. 5, 2018, in Limuru, Kenya. (Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks)
“After witnessing the recent spectacle of a significant minority of U.S. senators endorsing the presumption of guilt, this week Americans can turn to various media for fresh assaults on Western tradition,” writes James Freeman in the WSJ.
The NYT can’t help itself in being critical of the Trumps. Melania is taking cheap shots from the Times for wearing a pith helmet while on safari in Kenya. The pith is a symbol of colonial rule, don’t you know.
Readers will no doubt also notice in the latest Times story that the only people quoted by name criticizing the First Lady’s wardrobe are academics at U.S. universities, not Kenyans.
Leftists on Twitter apparently celebrated Indigenous Peoples Day by hoping their twits would make people forget the enormous role Winston Churchill played in defeating both Nazi and Soviet tyranny.
For those interested in learning about Churchill’s gargantuan role in the great 20th century battles for liberty, they might start by reading his June 18, 1940 speech to the House of Commons.
And now that what used to be Columbus Day is behind us, Mr. Freeman suggests that rather than focus on Columbus’ faults – real and perceived – readers focus on Angela Rocco’s op-ed from last year:
It’s intellectually dicey to judge those who lived hundreds of years ago according to modern norms. Doctors who routinely infected women during childbirth out of ignorance of the germ theory of disease are not reviled today. But European explorers who were similarly ignorant about how diseases are spread are routinely abused for the illnesses that befell inhabitants of the New World from lack of natural immunity.
The Columbian exchange benefited Old World and New by spreading knowledge of science, agriculture and nutrition. Without Columbus, the Renaissance may not have succeeded. Without his discoveries, Italians wouldn’t have marinara sauce, the Irish wouldn’t have mashed potatoes, and the Swiss wouldn’t have chocolate. Because America and its freedoms exist, children no longer contract polio and many other diseases. America saved the world from totalitarianism twice in the last century.
Today Columbus’s reputation is under siege. But those seeking to delegitimize the Genoan explorer’s legacy may actually have a larger target in mind. Statues of Columbus and tributes to his achievements are in many ways proxies for the Western tradition of freedom, liberty and the rule of law. America had better protect Columbus and win this war.
There is no one else to save the world next time around.
If you’re willing to fight for Main Street America, click here to sign up for the Richardcyoung.com free weekly email.
