Latest / Tales From Aztlantis / Episode 87: Trump & The Cult of Columbus

Transcript

Episode 87: Trump & The Cult of Columbus · Tales From Aztlantis

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: Excuse me.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: Greetings, dear listeners, and welcome to Tales from Aslantes, where we take you on a journey through Chicano, Mexicano, and Mesoamerican history and archaeology, and we push back against the spread of disinformation about these very topics.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: I am your host, Curly Tlapoyawa.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm gonna be doing a solo episode today.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: My good friend and co-host, Dr.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: Ruben Arriano Tlacatecat, could not be joining us, but fear not, you have me here to help guide you through the chaos that is enveloping the world around us.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Trump and the cult of Columbus.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: It was October 9th in Washington, DC, and the orange-tinted man child sat hunched in the Oval Office, surrounded by the usual clown show of bootlickers, propagandists, and professional ass-kissers.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: Cameras clicked away as the stench of urine, axe body spray, and fascism filled the room.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: With a greasy sharpie and a look of divine idiocy, he scrawled his signature across a proclamation, declaring that every second Monday in October would henceforth be Columbus Day.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: No Indigenous People's Day, no nuance, no reality.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Just Columbus, the original Imperial psychopath, reborn as a true American hero.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: This wasn't just another PR stunt.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: It was a desperate howl from the pit of America's id.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: Another volley in the endless culture war.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: If he squinted hard enough, you could almost see the ghost of Joseph Goebbels smiling in the corner, whispering, Good work, Donald.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: You've weaponized nostalgia.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: But fear not, dear listener, I'm not going to subject you to the fool Trumpian ramble he signed that day.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: No one deserves that, but here's a taste of the Kool-Aid the faithful are drinking.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I quote, Today, our nation honors the legendary Christopher Columbus, the original American hero, a giant of Western civilization, gallant and visionary, yada yada, reclaim his extraordinary legacy from the left-wing arsonists who have sought to destroy his name, and so on.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: Barf, industrial grade vomit.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: He kept going, of course, something about faith and courage, noble missions, glory to Spain, and spreading the gospel.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: It was like a maniacal sermon served from the pulpit of a racist game show.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: Trump, the high priest of cheap fantasy, anointing a genocidal navigator as the patron saint of manifest destiny.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: He painted a picture of Columbus as some glowing avatar of Western civilization, carrying wisdom and reason across the ocean.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: Never mind that his arrival in 1492 unleashed centuries of rape, enslavement, and murder that nearly erased entire peoples from the face of the earth.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: Now, in Trump's alternate universe, this was all just the price of progress.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then came the real kicker: his declaration of war on anyone who dared tell the truth.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: Outrageously, in recent years, Christopher Columbus has been a prime target of a vicious and merciless campaign to erase our history.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Left-wing radicals toppled his statues.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: Under my leadership, these days are over.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: And there it was.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: The eternal Trumpian Gospel.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: We are the victims.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: The poor, oppressed white man under siege by reality itself.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: He wrapped it all up by shamelessly slobbering over Italian Americans and pledging faith, family, and freedom, the holy trinity of the fascist playbook.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: The room cheered.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: Fox News ejaculated in unison.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: Somewhere, a bald eagle wept into its warm bloodlight.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: This grotesque theater came at a time when cities, states, and even universities across the country were finally starting to tell the truth, replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous People's Day.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't an attack on history.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: It was an attempt to set the record straight.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: But to Trump, that's heresy.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: To paraphrase Orwell, truth is treason in the Empire of Lies.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: When Columbus sailed into the Caribbean in 1492, he didn't find a new world.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: He found a world already ancient, alive, and thriving.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: Taino people trading, creating, believing.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: And what did he do?
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: He saw them not as equals but as merchandise.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: In his own journal, he wrote.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: They willingly traded everything they owned.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: They do not bear arms and do not know them, for I showed them a sword.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: They took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: They would make fine servants with fifty men.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: We could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so he did.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: Columbus took land, enslaved entire villages, and ran a death machine so efficient it would make a Nazi bureaucrat blush.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: Those who didn't meet their gold quotas had their hands chopped off.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: The rest died in fields, mines, or despair.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: Within decades, the population of Hispaniola collapsed from hundreds of thousands to a few hundred individuals.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: This was not divine destiny.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: It was genocide.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: Columbus bragged in letters to Spain about selling young girls as merchandise, writing gleefully of nine and ten-year-olds fetching good prices.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: He promised the crown endless gold, spices, slaves and mastic, anything to keep the royal purse open and the blood flowing.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: Today there is so much gold found.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: There is division on where is there more to gain in theft or in toiling the mines.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: For a woman, a hundred Castellanos are paid, as much for a good farmstead, and it is very much in fashion, and there are many merchants who were looking for girls of ages nine or ten are now appreciated, but a good merchant should have of every age.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: In another letter, the lunatic declared, and I quote, their highnesses will see that I can give them as much gold as they desire if they will give me a little assistance.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: Spices, cotton, as much as their highnesses may command to be shipped and mastic, as much as their highnesses choose to send for, which until now has only been found in Greece in the Isle of Geos, and the Signoria can get its own price for it, as much lying aloe as they command to be shipped, and as many slaves as they choose to send for, all heathens.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: Even some of his contemporaries couldn't stomach it.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: Bartholomew de las Casas, a priest who saw the carnage firsthand, wrote that the Spaniards thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties, and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: This is the legacy of the man that the great orange prophet just called a true American hero.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: Columbus's arrival opened the floodgates for European conquest, justified by the doctrine of discovery, a papal permission slip for genocide.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: It declared that Christian powers could lay claim any land not already inhabited by Christians.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: This legal abomination still underpins US law today.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: You can thank Columbus for that too.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: Celebrating Columbus isn't patriotism.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's ancestor worship for delusional conquistadors.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's a ritual cleansing of the empire's sins by pretending that the blood on your hands is red, white, and blue.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: By the late 20th century, people began to wake up.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: South Dakota renamed the holiday Native American Day in 1990.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: Cities like Berkeley, Denver, and Seattle soon followed suit.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: In 2021, Biden issued the first official recognition of Indigenous People's Day, acknowledging the painful history of wrongs and atrocities.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: This simple act wasn't anything revolutionary or groundbreaking.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: It was just true.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: Indigenous People's Day isn't about erasing history.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's about refusing to lie about it.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: It says, yes, Columbus came and he brought death.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: But us, we're still here.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: Trump's latest proclamation is not about heritage, it's about dominance.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's the cultural equivalent of urinating on a protest mural and calling it patriotism.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's a test.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: Will America keep worshiping its conquerors or finally listen to the marginalized?
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: Reading through the proclamation, five things hit me.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: One, it ignores accountability and justice.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: Celebrating Columbus is not a neutral act.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: It glorifies atrocity.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's a moral lobotomy disguised as tradition.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: Honoring him uncritically obstructs opportunities to teach history honestly, confront injustice, and heal from the legacies of colonization.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: Two, it silences indigenous voices.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: Declaring Columbus untouchable tells Indigenous people again that our pain is not only inconvenient to power, but it's ultimately irrelevant.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: Three, it weaponizes history.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: Trump framed it as a war, the left versus true Americans.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's not history, that's propaganda.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: That framing inflames, wounds, and pits communities against one another over symbols and memory rather than inviting collective reflection and meaningful dialogue.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: Four, it rejects progress.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: We could be honoring survival resilience and justice.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, he doubles down on the ghost of empire.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: And five, it feeds the beast.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: Every time he invokes Columbus, statues fall, tempers rise, and classrooms turn into battlefields.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: But that's the point.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: Division is the product.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because make no mistake, Trump knows exactly what he's doing.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: His entire brand is to dip his flaccid micropenis into our collective punch bowl and call it lemonade.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: He's betting that his followers are too stupid to see the con and his critics too exhausted to fight it.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: When a president, any president, declares a vile criminal a true American hero, it's not about holidays.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's about worldview.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's the same twisted catechism that says conquest is courage, oppression is order, and history belongs only to the victors.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: The cruelty is the point.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: But America's story is not just one of conquerors and killers, it's also a story of survival, of nations that refused to die.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: We are still here despite everything.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: This land remembers.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: The rivers still carry their names, the people still speak their languages, sing their songs, and raise their children.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: Doubling down on Columbus Day in 2025 isn't returning to our roots.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's digging deeper into the rot.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's not patriotism, it's pathology.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: A sick, desperate attempt to maintain white supremacy under the banner of heroism.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: But the time for myth is over.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: The time for reckoning is now.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: Only when we stop worshipping the butchers of history can we begin to properly honor the people who survived them.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: Not long before writing this piece, I watched Trump lose his mind over not getting the Nobel Peace Prize.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: He looked like a spoiled toddler denied a trophy at a beauty pageant for tiny-handed fascists.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: A friend joked online, give it some time, and he'll invent his own damn prize.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: The MAGA medal of universal peace, wisdom, and prosperity, I responded.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I can see it now, engraved with his putrid orange scowl made of melted AR-15s, handed to himself on live TV.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe that's where we're headed.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: A country where our national story is forever rewritten in Cheeto-colored crayon, where history itself is just another campaign prop.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: The truth, made Tlaloc help us, is the last casualty of Empire.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: This is America.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: And until we stop mistaking killers for heroes, it always will be.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_01: I think she might have.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: She was very nice.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I've been, you know, I've been helping her along the way.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: They need a lot of help in Venezuela.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's a basic disaster.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: So uh and you could also say it was given out for 24, and I was running for office in 24, you know, all of the transactions that we did in terms of closing.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_01: But uh there are those that say we did so much that they should have done it.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: But I don't take uh I'm happy because they saved millions of lives.