Today is Columbus Day, but many people only know what they've been fed in college or leftist media about the old gent, so the reactions PragerU's Will Witt got from students at Wake Forest University on the subject recently were not surprising.
Asked his opinion about Columbus, perhaps not aware he might not have been there had the explorer not made his voyages, one student said, "He sucked. He was a pretty terrible person." Said another one, "He kicked some foreigners out of their homeland."
Witt, wearing a T-shirt with the name of Columbus's ships on them, Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria, asked students what the names of his ships were.
"No idea," said one. "The Mayflower," said a couple of others, including one who added that the name of the day should be changed to "Kicking Foreigners Out of Their Territory Day."
Asked what year Columbus made his first voyage, one said "1792" - just 300 years late.
Completely oblivious to reality, when asked whether the U.S. should give the country back to Native Americans, one said, "I think so." Another said, "Yeah, why not?"
Un-Fair
Conservatives invited to speak at college campuses are driven away, swarmed by protesters or otherwise prevented from getting out their message, but a Georgetown University professor who tweeted that white Republican senators involved in the hearing of Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh "deserve miserable deaths" is only exercising her freedom of expression.
"This does not mean the University endorses the content of their expression," Georgetown University President John J. DeGioia wrote in a statement. "We can and do strongly condemn the use of violent imagery, profanity, and insensitive labeling of individuals based on gender, ethnicity or political affiliation in any form of discourse. Such expressions go against our values."
He couldn't have stated better what professor C. Christine Fair tweeted, but somehow her words didn't fit the statement.
Although Twitter temporarily suspended her account, she lamely said it was all an "experiment" to bait Fox News host Tucker Carlson. She had said they "deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps. Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine?"
Fair later admitted the stunt "was not my most eloquent attempt," but she said the "idea I'm somehow calling for actual violence is preposterous."
Double standard? You bet.
A woman's place is...in her head?
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi recently talked about feeling feminists "crowding" her during her first meeting with then-President George H. Bush after she became House minority leader following the 2006 election.
There, "sitting on the chair with me was [sic] Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Paul, Sojourner Truth, Lucretia Mott, they were all right there on the chair with me," she said. "And I heard them say, 'At last we have a seat at the table.'"
Pelosi's strange comments to the Texas Tribune were reminiscent of former first lady Hillary Clinton's channeling of first lady Eleanor Roosevelt while she and husband Bill resided in the White House.
While the women Pelosi mentioned were all associated with women's rights in their day, at least three of them - Anthony, Paul and Stanton - were pro-life, in contrast to the California representative's militant pro-abortion views.
Nevertheless, in the same interview, Pelosi said a women's right to an abortion is non-negotiable. "That is the thing that is an absolute," she said.
Further, she said, her biggest motivation in politics is "children in America...I pray for them morning and night. I work for them morning and night. I work for them all day."
A pro-abortion politician who sees visions of pro-life feminists but is crass enough to publicly say she is motivated by children: That's the woman Democrats would like to return to speaker of the House.
New season, same feelings
A new season of NFL football apparently has not softened the feelings of people who are sick of having heavy doses of politics served up with their sports.
A Media Research Center/McLaughlin & Associates poll found that when watching live sports or entertainment shows on television, 74 percent of respondents are "trying to get away from politics and do not want to be bombarded with partisan political messages."
Almost half of respondents (43 percent) said they were likely to watch less football and entertainment shows because they have become too political.
Those who said they were watching less football said the top two reasons were because they were "tired of the political statements" associated with the NFL and because of the "political agenda of the announcers and players."
The 74 percent number was just 1 percent lower than the 75 percent who said the same thing in a March poll by the same organization.