‘The only immigrant not welcome in America’

He said liberals accused this immigrant of “violating the sovereignty of the people who lived here, [and] was the wrong ethnicity”.

This unwelcome immigrant was of course Christopher Columbus.

Carlson also pointed out that the counterargument about any other immigrant or groups of immigrants, their ethnicity or the breach of sovereignty, today would land anyone debating the issue in hot water.

“See how long you keep your job,” if the very same arguments against immigrants are mentioned in public, he noted.

“Happy Columbus Day anyway. Enjoy it while you can – your grandchildren won’t even know it existed,” Carlson concluded.

“The left speaks only about Columbus’ genocide. His ships returned to Europe with syphilis and tobacco,” he added dryly. The Fox News host called the battle over Christopher Columbus, a leftist “war on anything older than last week”.

Carlson also said that it has become clear that the battle over Columbus isn’t really about the Italian explorer, but rather about race and ethnicity.

It is the latest round of the ongoing “full scale assault from within on the West itself,” he said.

At Monday’s Columbus Day Parade in Chicago, the majority greeted the afternoon parade with cheers, with the crowd waving Italian flags, but a small number of protesters instead confronted marchers with signs like “Genocide is nothing to celebrate”.

A man was arrested and charged over the weekend with defacing the Christopher Columbus statue in Chicago’s Little Italy neighbourhood, The Chicago Tribune reported.

Similar claims of “genocide” have led to statues of Confederate soldiers and officials statues being removed in cities across the US.

“I didn’t find out until high school that Christopher Columbus didn’t discover America and that he killed people,” said Kyle Johnson, a protester. “It’s different from the Confederates but pretty much the same. Both enslaved people.”

“It’s very similar [to the Confederate statues],” a black woman told the Tribune. “Any symbol of Christopher Columbus should be taken down.”

In August, Los Angeles became the biggest city yet to stop honoring the Italian explorer and instead remember the “victims of colonialism”.

Austin, Texas, followed suit Thursday. Other cities include San Francisco, Seattle and Denver, which have all booted Columbus in favor of Indigenous Peoples Day.

“The man who opened the Americas to European domination”, as the Detroit Free Beacon noted, must go. “It’s very important to get rid of Columbus Day, to get rid of any celebration of Columbus because he was not a hero,” said Mahtowin Munro, the lead organiser for Indigenous Peoples’ Day Massachusetts.

“We know for a fact that [Columbus] and his men killed, raped, enslaved thousands of Indigenous people. It also gives a completely wrong impression to say that Columbus ‘discovered’ America; as Indigenous people, we often say that he invaded America,” Al Jazeera reported Munro as saying.

“We were not sitting here waiting to be discovered by anybody.”