The Columbus Statue at the White House Is Far More Than a Piece of Marble

In 2020, when the woke revolution replaced smiles and kind words with street violence, BLM’s obsession was tearing down statues. They vandalized Miguel de Cervantes in San Francisco, toppled Father Junípero Serra in the same city, and destroyed Christopher Columbus in Baltimore. The destruction of great icons of Western civilization spread to many European cities as well. Now Donald Trump has installed a replica of the Baltimore Columbus statue at the White House, and yet some people still think it’s an irrelevant gesture. They are wrong. It’s far more than that.

The postmodern Left of the 21st century has given Western society a cosmetic makeover, fully aware that the culture war is won when you can rename things. This has not been a deep ideological revolution but a succession of cultural tweaks, many seemingly trivial, which ultimately achieved their deeper, structural objectives. Remember: ‘Wokeism’ included athletes taking a knee, gendered pronouns in everyday language, and the omnipresent rainbow flag. It is an ideological current seemingly tailor-made for the age of attention deficits, memes, Instagram images, and five-second viral TikTok videos.

The Right tends to overlook the superficial and focus its efforts on the grand philosophy of things: major policies, the economy, employment, international trade alliances, and so on. For much of this century, the Right downplayed the Left’s cosmetic cultural battles as nonsense. Undoubtedly, they were nonsense—but they were not insignificant nonsense.

Foucault laid the groundwork by arguing that power resides not only in laws or force, but in categories and discourses—that is, he believed language is a tool for exercising power and transforming society. Wokeism has essentially been an exercise in Foucauldian power: renaming things, changing categories, with no fear of disregarding logic or biology along the way.

Take the debate over transgender issues: the Left ignored biology and major intellectual debates; we could almost say it simply redefined the linguistic categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman.’ And as long as the Right didn’t recognize the trap, they fared well. The same applies to environmentalism, the war on the countryside and traditional agriculture, the removal of Christian symbols from public spaces, and immigration policy.

Today, the ‘wokeism’ movement is clearly in decline, partly because it went too far in its excesses and partly because, for years, a reaction has been growing throughout the West against the exhaustion caused by so much leftist sectarianism. The key factor: center-right parties, unable to confront wokeism on its own terms, have ceded ground to a new, unapologetic Right that exposes the postmodern Left, lays bare its shameful ideas, and is harvesting substantial results in every election due to its courage.

This is exactly what the Christopher Columbus statue at the White House represents: public recognition of the great civilizing achievement that was the Discovery. Columbus symbolizes the foundation of modern Western civilization, the birth of a prosperous America, the cultural, religious, and political seed of the country that would later lead the Western world. Columbus signifies the crushing of the foolish indigenism embraced by the postmodern Left; it is a tribute to the great European civilizing mission, to how the Spanish enterprise eradicated indigenous savagery and sowed faith, wisdom, law, and hope in those lands.

At the statue’s unveiling, Donald Trump explained who Columbus was: “Christopher Columbus was America’s original hero and one of the bravest and most visionary men to ever walk the face of the Earth.” It is a gesture, of course, but an important one: a way to build a wall against the Left’s cultural poisoning, a recognition that the colonizing adventure was a success and a privilege, not an injustice, and a clear warning to anyone who tries to dismantle the foundations of Western civilization: we will not allow it.

In 2007, the socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero approved the so-called ‘Historical Memory Law,’ aiming to rewrite the history of the Spanish Civil War entirely in service of the far left. In 2022, the social-communist Pedro Sánchez expanded it, making it even more infamous and sectarian. The essence of these laws is cosmetic; among other things, they allowed the wholesale renaming of streets across Spain, erasing any that had connections to Francoism—a purge that extended globally to writers, military figures, and intellectuals who had little to do with Franco. Since then, Spanish streets have been filled with absurd names like “Love,” “Concord,” or “Democracy.” Of course, the next step was removing statues, monuments, and commemorative plaques of any illustrious figures not clearly left-wing.

The People’s Party (PP) opposed the Historical Memory Law in 2007. But when Sánchez expanded and worsened it in 2022, the PP no longer voted against it—they abstained, allowing the law to pass. I recount this Spanish anecdote because it perfectly illustrates how culture wars operate. What was unacceptable to the center-right in 2007 was considered irrelevant in 2022—even when far more extreme and sectarian measures were at stake—so much so that they couldn’t even vote against it. The normalizing jackhammer of left-wing propaganda, in the context of the culture war, had done its work even within the main opposition party.

That is why VOX was born in Spain. That is why a new right emerged across Europe. That is why a Javier Milei became necessary in Argentina. And that is why, in Donald Trump’s second term, no significant gesture in the culture war is ever overlooked as irrelevant. The Columbus statue under Trump is something like the founding charter of the West, a daily reminder that we are in the midst of a reconquest—in the United States and, of course, in Europe.

One last detail I haven’t mentioned: I said the statue is a replica—but it isn’t. Trump’s decision to craft this statue from the remnants salvaged from the one destroyed in Baltimore carries enormous significance. It is not frivolous, not cosmetic—it is much deeper: we are not building a new civilization akin to a previous one, but gathering the remains of the brilliant Christian Western civilization and reconstructing them piece by piece.