It is an honor, of course, to be with you this week as we celebrate Indigenous People’s Day, as we speak truth about our nation’s history. Since 1934, every October, the United States has recognized the voyage of the European explorers who first landed on the shores of the Americas. But that is not the whole story. That has never been the whole story. Those explorers ushered in a wave of devastation for tribal nations, perpetrating violence, stealing land, and spreading disease. We must not shy away from this shameful past, and we must shed light on it, and do everything we can to address the impact of the past on native communities today.

The Harris campaign is reeling from the resurfacing of an old video of Kamala denigrating and deprecating Columbus Day, and we’re gonna see not only how this is rocking her already fledgling campaign, but why she’s actually a historical illiterate as well. Hey gang, it’s me, Dr. Steve, here to help you stay sane in these historically illiterate times. So you know what to do. Make sure to smack that bell and subscribe button. Before we dive into the latest Kamala calamity, I have to ask you, if you’re like me, do you have trouble sleeping at night? Because I know I do.

I’m a horrible sleeper for me. I just can’t turn off my brain, and so I toss and turn, often frankly, for hours before I’m able to fall asleep. But gang, I’ve come across something that has absolutely revolutionized my life. It’s called Bean Dream, and it has completely changed the way I sleep. Gang, I sip a nice hot cup of Bean Dream, and I kid you not, I’m out like a light, and I have the most restful sleep ever all throughout the night. It’s become a nightly ritual mind that I look forward to each and every day.

Plus, I never wake up feeling groggy the next morning. Instead, I feel refreshed and ready to take on the day. And they’re offering Turley Talks listeners an exclusive discount of up to 35% site-wide for limited time. Just click on that QR code on the screen or use the link below to get the best night’s sleep you’ve had in years and propel your wellness journey to the next stage. Click that QR code or go to shotbeam.com slash Turley Talks. That’s shotbeam.com slash Turley Talks for your amazing discount and an amazing night’s sleep.

Now, what you just heard and saw there was a 2021 address given by Kamala Harris to the National Congress of American Indians. It’s obviously the last video on Earth she wanted resurfacing just three weeks before the election. She basically insults every single Italian-American in the nation. Columbus Day has long been associated with the Italian-American community being born in Genoa. Columbus was a very important figure in assimilating Italians into American heritage. Back in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Columbus was one of the most revered figures in America. Even earlier, just after the American Revolution, there was a movement to name our country, this new nation, as simply Columbia.

King’s College in Upper Manhattan changed its name to Columbia College in the late 18th century and just a few years later, our nation’s capital, of course, was established as the District of Columbia. Back in 1791, in fact, Hail Columbia was the primary competitor to the Star Spangled Banner as the nation’s official national anthem. So, Columbus has always been a very revered figure historically in our nation when our culture was healthy and vibrant and he’s long been a key figure, particularly Italian identity here in the United States. But now, with the rise of leftist woke ideologues like Kamala Harris, the honor of that very association is being denigrated and deprecated.

As you just heard Harris say, Columbus helped to usher in a wave of devastation for tribal nations, perpetuating violence and stealing land and spreading disease. Unfortunately for Kamala, this is of course the last video she wanted to resurface just days before the election, especially in light of the latest poll of Catholic voters that just came out. Among the battleground states, Trump already leads Harris by five points among Catholics. Interestingly, at this time in 2020, Biden was leading Trump by five with Catholics, but it’s even worse in the key swing states of Wisconsin and Michigan where Trump leads Harris by 18 points and 12 points respectively among Catholics.

And keep in mind, Catholics make up 40% of the Pennsylvania vote. So again, just to underscore, this is the last video that Kamala would want resurfacing for tens of millions of Italian Catholics to see. But more than that, to add insult to injury here, what she said there is just patently and categorically false. I would recommend for all of your reading a wonderful essay by Jeff Lynn Paul. Jeff Lynn Paul’s an Associate Professor of History at Leiden University, and it’s entitled The Myth of the Stolen Country. You can read it online.

It’s a wonderfully rich, well-researched, insightful essay that absolutely crushes this pernicious and divisive Marxist lie peddled by the likes of Kamala. First and foremost, as Flynn Paul points out, indigenous Americans did not own land. This is a simple little inconvenient detail that the Marxist left leaves out of their anti-American screeds. Native Americans did not own land in the way we think of land ownership. The hypocritical irony in all of this is that the very land ownership standards that leftists invoke to denounce European settlers were in point of fact brought to the Americas by those very same European settlers.

It’s the Romans who developed our notion of private property rights that leftists nevertheless appeal to to try to destroy and disparage our nation’s heritage. But it’s not just that technical issue. According to historians, Native Americans were more hunter-gatherers than permanent settlers. They generally farmed and hunted in an area for a few decades until the soil got tired and depleted, and then they moved on to greener pastures, as it were, where the hunting was better and the land was more fertile. They generally had no permanent settlement, and as a result, competing Native American tribes were in constant conflict with other tribes.

Not all of them, of course, but most of them, yes, especially given the scarcity of resources that they were competing after. It didn’t help that there were no clear borders or boundaries when they did settle. And the question of who owned the land was constantly contested by Native American tribes in the pre-Columbian period. And so what the European settlers did when they arrived is they simply became part of that ongoing contestation. It’s very similar to the ways in which Germanic migrations inserted themselves into Northern European tribal disputes or the way the Celts inserted themselves into Western European tribal conflicts.

It’s basically the same thing. That’s what’s so key here to Kamala’s historical illiteracy. The European settlers took part in conflicts that had already been going on for centuries. In the new world in America, sometimes European settlers sided with one indigenous tribe over and against the other. Sometimes they sided with no one. And as it’s widely acknowledged by historians, despite a few sensational cases of duplicity, after all, humans never failed to disappoint. Nevertheless, most of the time, Europeans being encultured in the Roman tradition of property ownership, they purchased their land from the Indians, just like they would buy an acre of land in England.

Far from what Kamala, the historical illiterate insinuated, there’s nothing even remotely akin to theft within this historical framework. And in terms of the whole supposed genocidal element here with the European settlers bringing their epidemics and smallpox and the like, what they did, well, again, what often goes unstated is that it’s now widely recognized, even by the New York Times, that the general health of Native Americans had been deteriorating long before Columbus ever showed up at the end of the 15th century. Paleopathologists have studied upwards of 12,000 skeletons from 65 sites all across North and South America.

What they found was that these Native Americans were highly malnourished. They had very low protein levels. They had early death. It was very common. And so they simply didn’t have the old world, as it were. Anyone coming in, if they came in from China, if they came in from Japan, if they came in from Africa, came in from Asia, didn’t matter. If anyone showed up at those borders of North America and South America, it would have been the same result. It didn’t matter. People from the old world, Europe, Africa, Asia, tended to live in very dense populations that cross-pollinated with each other for centuries, which increased their immunities to the diseases that these populations had already been exposed to.

It didn’t matter who showed up. Native Americans were smaller and more homogenous population than the old world, and their immune systems simply weren’t ready for anyone external to show up. And when you combine that with their hunter-gatherer economy, it was just a matter of time. Sadly, sadly, it was just a matter of time for their population to diminish. And that’s precisely what happened. But this ridiculous notion of weaponizing Columbus, and this absurd notion of marking Columbus Day as a day of intentional and widespread theft and genocide and murder is historically hysterical.

And I’m sick of this. I’m sick of this post-American population, what’s at 30, 40 percent of our country that are not just historically illiterate, but hate our country so much they don’t care. Don’t let facts get in the way of a good Marxist narrative. So now it’s time for Italian Americans to rise up and make sure that in November, the historical hysterics of Harris never, ever, ever make it to the White House. [tr:trw].

See more of Dr. Steve Turley on their Public Channel and the MPN Dr. Steve Turley channel.