1492: The Year “Alternative Facts” Were Born

Before Donald Trump declared himself the master of “truthful hyperbole,” Christopher Columbus had already proven how far a lie can travel when wrapped in power and privilege.

He wasn’t a visionary. He wasn’t brave.

He was a monster — a man who brought slavery, mutilation, and terror to people who welcomed him with open hands.

Columbus met the Taíno — kind, peaceful, generous people — and within days he was plotting their enslavement. “With fifty men,” he wrote, “we could subjugate them all.” He made good on that threat, seizing people from their homes, shipping them off in chains, and forcing the rest to mine for gold that barely existed. When they failed, he cut off their hands.

He kidnapped girls as young as nine and handed them to his men to rape. He burned people alive. He unleashed dogs to hunt down and devour children. He fed babies to those dogs.

“Such inhumanities and barbarisms were committed in my sight as no age can parallel,” wrote Bartolomé de las Casas, who witnessed it all.

Columbus didn’t just steal land — he destroyed entire civilizations and called it progress.

Spin, Spectacle, and Suppression

Like Trump, Columbus understood the power of a story — even a false one. Both built empires on ego. Both sold cruelty as courage and turned suffering into spectacle. Both demanded worship over truth and called it greatness.

Columbus called it “civilizing.” Trump calls it “making America great again.” The script hasn’t changed — only the slogans.

Columbus reported home not the truth, but the propaganda: that the “Indians” were thriving under his rule, that gold was abundant, that God blessed his mission. He rewrote genocide as glory, just as modern strongmen rebrand oppression as “security” and fascism as “patriotism.”

His brutality wasn’t the mark of a genius — it was the proof of how evil can masquerade as destiny when no one dares to speak the truth.

America’s First Fake News

The myth of Columbus was America’s first disinformation campaign. It told Europe that genocide was divine, that greed was noble, and that murder could be sanctified if done in the name of progress.

That lie didn’t just create a hero — it created a system. It made denial patriotic. It gave future tyrants a playbook: dominate, exploit, then rewrite the story until cruelty sounds holy.

So when Trump defends Columbus statues as “heritage,” he’s not protecting history — he’s protecting the myth that conquest equals courage. Because once America admits its first “hero” was a butcher, the myth of moral superiority collapses.

The MAGA movement thrives on that same denial — the refusal to see that the rot was built into the foundation.

The Courage to Tell the Truth

Patriotism isn’t about worshiping false idols — it’s about loving your country enough to face its sins.

Columbus didn’t “discover” America; he desecrated it. He set the standard for centuries of propaganda that turned oppression into pride. The same sickness that let him mutilate the innocent now lets leaders lie about history and call it freedom.

Indigenous Peoples’ Day isn’t about guilt. It’s about integrity. It’s about honoring those who survived what he tried to erase — and reclaiming truth from the ruins of denial.

The land remembers. The oceans remember. The people remember.

It’s time we do too.

Because if “greatness” requires forgetting, it was never greatness to begin with.