Updated! Depicting Native Americans as Bloodthirsty Savages on Columbus Day
If you've ever wondered why conservatives struggle to win support among racial and ethnic minorities, here's part of the answer.
UPDATED, October 10: Ben Shapiro, the editor of The Daily Wire, has removed the video mentioned below.
My statement on the Columbus Day video that went up on Daily Wire's Twitter and Facebook yesterday. It has now been justifiably removed. pic.twitter.com/ja6h8cW2af
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) October 10, 2017
Today was (or still is, as of this writing) Columbus Day, one of the fakest of all fake ethnic holidays (and trust me, they're all fake). For all the chest-beating on both sides of the issue, Columbus Day was only made a national holiday in 1937, as a sop to Italian Americans, whom Franklin Roosevelt was otherwise fond of insulting as a "bunch of opera singers" and worse.
Yes, self-parodying SJWs at high-end, lily-white safety schools such as Brown deserve derision for renaming the event "Indigenous Peoples Day" and then congratulating "themselves for pushing aside one relatively powerless ethnic group in the name of an even more powerless group." But conservatives such as the retros at The Daily Wire deserve just as much scorn for this sort of sad-sack video. Haw haw haw, Indians were savages, don't you know!
In honor of Indigenous People's Day, formerly known as #ColumbusDay: pic.twitter.com/Z9ver8f4nN
— The Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) October 9, 2017
One of the hallmarks of culture wars is that everything must be reduced to a Manichean struggle of good vs. evil, right vs. wrong, left vs. right, you name it vs. you dread it. Or, perhaps worse, an occasion for sad, strange little men such as Sen. Lindsey Graham to humblebrag about taking a day off to golf with a president who humiliated him in 2015 by calling him even dumber than the eventual secretary of the Energy, Rick Perry, and giving out his phone number to the public.
Really enjoyed a round of golf with President @realDonaldTrump today.
President Trump shot a 73 in windy and wet conditions!
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) October 9, 2017
The only way to win at this game is not to play it. Demand a different and better conversation about politics, culture, and ideas, one in which simply mocking and shouting down other people and perspectives isn't the be-all and end-all. As I noted earlier today in a post about liberal and conservative sexual grotesques Harvey Weinstein and Rep. Tim Murphy, there's a reason why a record-high percentage of us want a major third party to emerge: Stale, old parties and ideologies speak for and to fewer and fewer of us with every passing day.
Especially when that day is Columbus Day or Indigenous Peoples Day.
