WH Issues Misguided Indigenous Peoples’ Day Proclamation

BUCK: I’ve got a lot to talk to you about today even though it’s kind of a holiday. It’s Columbus Day, or as the White House is now making it clear, Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples’ Day. And I have to wonder, first of all, why can’t it just be one? Why don’t they have another day that’s Indigenous Peoples’ Day? Right? Why would they do it on same day?

Because you’re celebrating Columbus the connection, the incredible feat of crossing the Atlantic and connecting the world of Europe and Asia and North Africa with North and South America, effectively, right? Pretty big deal. And also, the beginning of a new era of global exploration. So why not have it on another day?

Why combine it? Well, because they don’t want to have dual celebration. They really want to replace one with the other because they’re trying to transition away from any actual celebration of Columbus Day. That’s what the left, that’s what the Democrats who are now dominated by the left.

The left used to be their fringe. Now it is their vanguard. That’s what they want. They want it to become effectively just Indigenous Peoples’ Day and I keep asking the question, “Okay, what are we celebrating exactly? Is it a commemoration?” Because depending on what you see, in some statements about this, they’ll discuss the genocide against Native American people.

So that’s obviously an issue of memorializing, not celebration, right? That’s what they’re saying. But then they’ll say, “Oh, but also all the great cultural achievements today.” And I say, “Is it about cultural achievements today or is it about 500 years ago?” What are they really doing here? They don’t have answers, folks. They just know Columbus was a white, male European guy who did some things that in his period of time were quite commonplace.

But of course, we know morally were deeply objectionable, and because we are no longer able to separate out one person… You can no longer say, “Wow, what a great painting it happen it has to be.” “Well, was the artist woke enough 200 years ago? Where did that artist 150 years ago stand on trans rights? I don’t think we can say it’s a good painting anymore.”

That’s where the left ultimately takes you. This is also why they say they want fewer white male authors celebrated in the academic canon. “No more Shakespeare. Let’s find female playwrights of the Caribbean circa 18 something or other,” right? This is why you have academia always jumping through all these different hoops to try to find greater equity in the reading list. But I digress.

We’ll come back to the Indigenous Peoples Day/Columbus Day situation later on ’cause I think there’s a lot here. What do we do about the whole indigenous peoples who are actually engaged in plunder, slavery, mass murder, mass rape like the Aztec Empire and the Mayan Empire? Do we pretend like they didn’t do that stuff? How does that work?

The human sacrifice, the large-scale human sacrifice, the Aztecs were still engaged in when the Spanish conquistadors arrived. Pulling people’s hearts out, pretty awful stuff. But, no, let’s just talk about how, “Yaaay, Indigenous Peoples’ Day!” Do we talk about all of it or only parts of it? ‘Cause clearly they want to talk about all of Columbus.

There’s some aspects of this that I feel they don’t really want to get into. Are they familiar with the Comanche, for example, that indigenous tribe and what they did to other tribes in this country? Because if you have the new, woke grammar school/grade school level teaching on this is the white European plunderer and evildoer, Columbus shows up.

And it was just this incredible peaceful land where everybody was in harmony with each other and with the earth and it was just all magical and great. That’s of course a total fantasy and absurd. But I don’t know. I’m waiting. Okay. Well, let’s celebrate the literature of the… What cultural achievements are we looking at? The literature of indigenous peoples? I’m awaiting that list. I’d like to see what it is and what they want us to read and teach in schools. I’m curious. I’m curious.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BUCK: I just want to, though, say the back-and-forth over Columbus Day today because it is Columbus Day and, obviously, I’m here working. I’m sorry a lot of you are, too. And to the many, many people who are engaged in their day-to-day work, I’m right there with you. We got a lot of truckers I know listen to this show.

They write in. Thank you for making sure that the goods that do come to U.S. shores at least are still being distributed. I love my Team Buck truckers. They’re always listening. But here we are on Columbus Day, and just to give you a sense of how crazy the left is, Columbus Circle is not far from where I’m doing this show in New York City.

It’s a very well-known area. Actually, CNN’s headquarters — well, New York headquarters — used to be there. Boooo. But now they’re gone, so yay! And Columbus Circle is a place where you’ll see a huge police presence. A lot of cops all over the place. You’ll say, “What’s going on and why?” and there are fences and barricades.

It’s because of the statue, because they’re worried that some woke left wing mob of loons (Biden voters) are going to gather together and decide to try to tear down this iconic statue of Christopher Columbus in New York City. So they have to protect it like it’s something that’s constantly under threat, and I’ve seen a police presence of at least dozens of officers.

They’ll mark a few… They used to call them paddy wagons. I’m Irish. I’m allowed to say it. I’m allowed to say it, ’cause that’s what that gets referred to. See, the Irish used to get into their fair share of trouble back in the day in this country, so that’s where we got the notion of the paddy wagon. You put the Irishman in the back when they were a little too rowdy after having a little too much to drink.

I know these are all stereotypes, but at least I can have fun with the stereotypes where I’m allowed to say it. I’m about half Irish. I did that 23andMe thing recently, and I’m about half Irish. So Columbus Day is a time when we see how the left is both simultaneously trying to rewrite history and use their narrative of history for the purposes of political power and control today.

Some questions that I would want answers to. Why do Indigenous Peoples’ Day today? hy not have it on another day? One of our producers here told me that Canada has Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and it happens to be on the same day as… Well, it’s very close. Okay.

Well, anyway, they have an Indigenous Peoples’ Day, but it’s not on Columbus Day. So why is it that we have Indigenous Peoples’ Day on the same day as Columbus Day? Because they’re looking to replace really one with the other, to take the celebration of Christopher Columbus, and apparently… It’s never been, “Oh, he’s a great guy. We love him because he was so nice to everybody.”

No! We didn’t even know him! It’s he did something that changed the world and was a pretty extraordinary thing to do. That’s it. The same way that if someone discovers how to split the atom or someone discovers what a radioactive isotope is or what gunpowder is. Nobel discovered TNT, explosives, and then created the Nobel Prize to kind of deal with his conscience afterwards.

‘Cause, oh, my gosh. Explosives, right? They can be used for great things — clearing out mountains for trains to go through or any number of explosive ordnance usages that are peaceful — but obviously also you can use it to blow people up. So we celebrate the acts that Columbus engaged in that changed the world, and they want to replace that with essentially a celebration of victimization.

That’s what the whole narrative is, and they will avoid talking about some aspects of the history, and this is a part of it that I like to talk about because I think people find it really interesting when they’re presented with this history. First of all, there were indigenous peoples in the Americas who engaged in cannibalism, who engaged in human sacrifice, who engaged in slavery.

So this notion that you have, that people come up with this idea that it was almost the Disney cartoon version of the movie Pocahontas or something here? That’s not reality. It was not all in balance and everything was perfect and being kind to each other. The Aztec Empire of multiple millions of people was a slave-based empire with human sacrifice as a central religious practice.

What do we say about that? Do we repudiate it? Do we even engage and talk about this? If you’ve seen the movie Apocalypto… It’s Mel Gibson. So obviously, “Oh, gosh,” people will say. “Oh, you’re not allowed to…” Braveheart is my favorite movie of all time. People can say whatever they want about Mel Gibson; I don’t care. Great movie.

He was a great director and greater actor. Apocalypto shows you some aspects of the tyranny of the Aztec Empire. Now, I understand we could say, “Buck, do we even care?” Well, we care insofar as they’re constantly engaged in — the left is engaged in — this very selective rewriting of history, and they’re doing it today to try to dominate the narrative, to try to change the curriculum, to teach your children something.

“Some people in history are good. Other people in history are bad.” They’re picking who falls into those categories and they’re using historical ignorance as an excuse or as an advantage in that process. How many of the people listening right now ever learned in school, for example — we’re going back to the 1500s, the 1600s, even to the 1700s — the scope and scale of the massive Muslim slave trade of white European Christians that went on for hundreds of years?

I wonder how many people have even heard of it. It wasn’t taught to me in school. I’ve read several books on it, because I find it fascinating. I find that whole period of Mediterranean history in the High Renaissance fascinating. Yeah, I’m a little bit of a… Yeah, this is what I do on the weekends. Maybe it’s why I’m not married.

But I find that period in history to be particularly interesting. But they don’t teach in school that the first foreign war we fought, right — “to the shores of Tripoli” — was actually about the Muslim conquest of and enslavement of a lot of Europeans and Americans on the high seas, and they would bring people back.

It was human trafficking, slavery of the worst kind. They’d bring the males back and they’d work them to death either on the rolling benches of the galleys or in the salt or other mines they had in North Africa. And because they didn’t have to go very few to get them, by the way — just as a basic economic practice — they felt like the Christians they seized were very disposable.

“Can always get more where that came from. We’ll just pick them off the coast of Spain! We’ll pick them off the coast.” Remember, this is the same period the explorers 1492, beginning of the 1500s, what I’m telling you about, this was happening then. So we’re talking about the same period in history. Why doesn’t anyone know about this?

Why aren’t there people that are putting…? The White House today put out a statement about how sad we’re all supposed to be about the bad things that Columbus and some of the conquistadors did. Is anyone putting out a statement…? Is Algeria or Tunisia or you name it putting out a statement saying, “Wow, all that slavery we engaged in of Christian Europeans, we feel really badly about that today.

“We probably should have slowed that down a little bit. It wasn’t a good thing.” No, they don’t do that. Why did we go to the shores of Tripoli? We went because the Muslim Barbary States were gabbing our people and enslaving them and when Jefferson sent an emissary overseas to tell them is to stop, they said, “Sorry, you’re infidels; this is how it goes. What are you gonna do about it?”

And thanks to the United States Navy, the United States Marines, our answer was, “Oh, we’ll see you in just a little bit,” and we did. But you don’t learn about this. No one teaches this history in school. Why? Well, maybe it would complicate things a little bit more for the white colonial oppression is an evil that we still have to constantly be apologizing for today.

As if some of us right now arrived on foreign shores and tried to convert everything to Christianity and slaughtered people and took them into slavery. Neither you nor I did that, but we’re supposed to be sorry for it and be silent when they try to rewrite the history and downplay the greatness of the act of exploration of Christopher Columbus.

They certainly don’t tell you about the centuries of slavery that the Muslim-African Barbary States led to against Christians and that that led to our first foreign war in 1801, 1802 ’cause that would make the narrative a bit more complicated. People might start to realize, “Hold on a second. You mean that centuries ago the human condition was ‘might makes right’?

“You mean that centuries ago there were countries or states or tribes or whatever all over the world who would pillage and plunder and destroy each other based upon what we view today as superficial characteristics that by no means should be used to undermine a person’s humanity, right? We’re all children of God.

“That mentality did not exist a few hundred years ago, anywhere, whether it was in the Americas with indigenous people, whether it was the Comanche or the Aztecs or the Mayans — or the entire Muslim world, which felt like it was fine to enslave and murder Christians.” This was a few million people, by the way, over the centuries. It was not a minor practice.

They don’t teach that in schools though. You have to ask why. You have to wonder, hmm. Why is it that no one has ever explained that there were slaving raids made as far north as Ireland and Iceland in the 1600s and 1700s where Christians were seized by Muslim pirates and sold into slavery and that was the end of it? You’re probably hearing this for the first time right now.

By the way, please check any of this. You’ll see all of my facts are correct. All of this is true. But they want to control the history, the narrative of history because they want to control you today, and that’s why this fight matters. That’s why this is something that we should actually push back on; tell the truth about. You want to celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day?

Fine. What are we celebrating? If we’re just celebrating the existence of people who were here Columbus arrived, let’s talk about what those people were really up to, what things were really like here. Let’s have an honest conversation about it. You’ll find the left doesn’t really want to do that. They just want to lecture you. That’s what they’re really into.