A Great Italian Explorer Who Wasn’t

Columbus gets a resurrection, the CDC gets decapitated, and America gets measles again, but at least George Stephanopoulos still has a spine.

Good morning, America and happy Indigenous Peoples Day! Whether your calendar calls it that or the version Donald Trump resurrected from the racist archives: “Columbus Day,” mine, like yours, was quietly relabeled overnight, as if the software itself got a memo from Stephen Miller.

Trump marked the holiday by standing before cameras, declaring Christopher Columbus a “great Italian explorer,” and beaming as though he’d personally discovered Ohio. Not a whisper about Spain, which financed the voyage, or the genocide that followed. No mention of the enslaved Indigenous people, the stolen gold, or the centuries of forced conversion that Columbus set in motion. Just another Heritage Day for the Proudly Oblivious, sponsored by erasure and denial.

This is how Trump governs now, one revisionist proclamation at a time. Rename the day, rename the agency, rename the enemy. Deport the Spanish-speaking, celebrate the slaver, call it patriotism. I have a full essay on this topic posting later this afternoon.

In Chicago, Silverio Villegas Gonzalez became the first casualty of Trump’s latest immigration purge, shot dead by ICE agents twelve minutes before his morning shift at a neighborhood diner. DHS called him a “criminal alien.” His friends called him steady., and his kids called him Dad.

The administration calls this “law and order,” but it’s really just the same empire logic that turned explorers into conquerors and migrants into targets: erase the inconvenient, elevate the myth.

Across the country, four people died and twenty were wounded in a mass shooting on St. Helena Island, a historically Black community in South Carolina’s Lowcountry. The local sheriff called it a tragedy. The White House, at this writing, has so far called it nothing.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem didn’t just parrot Trump’s “law-and-order” line, she amplified it into a domestic war doctrine. At a White House round-table, she declared that “Antifa is just as sophisticated as ISIS, Hezbollah, and Hamas,” a line so deranged it would make Joe McCarthy blush. In the same breath she thanked the president for “standing in the gap at such a time as this,” as if quoting a Sunday-school pamphlet about holy warfare.

The so-called ANTIFA Executive Order that followed was pure propaganda: a decree against a phantom. There is no membership roll, no hierarchy, no “founder’s girlfriend” (though Noem boasted they’d arrested one). What the order really does is grant federal agencies license to treat dissent as terrorism. It’s a loyalty test masquerading as counter-terrorism, giving political cover to the violence already happening on American soil, from Franklin Park, Illinois, where ICE shot Silverio Villegas Gonzalez, to St. Helena Island, South Carolina, where four people died under the familiar soundtrack of automatic fire.

That is why calling Noem a “puppy killer” barely scratches the surface. She is part of a system that turns manufactured fear into authorization for bloodshed.

Trump’s mythology of discovery and domination, re-christening Indigenous Peoples Day as Columbus Day, meets Noem’s mythology of terror. Both erase reality to justify control. Both rewrite the living into caricatures so that state violence can be repackaged as virtue. It’s the same empire, just with better branding and worse syntax.

So yes, Kristi Noem is a puppy killer. But she’s also an architect of violence dressed in folksy God talk. Her lies create the atmosphere where men like Silverio Gonzalez end up dead on their way to work.

Late Friday night, the Trump administration fired 1,300 CDC employees in what they called a “Reduction in Force.” By Saturday, they had to un-fire 700 of them, blaming a coding error. The purge, evidently, ran too deep for the optics team to handle.

While bureaucrats scramble to find their logins again, measles, yes, measles, is back like a bad 18th-century sequel. NPR reports 1,563 confirmed cases this year, the most in over thirty years, though experts say the real number could be closer to 5,000.

In South Carolina, 150 unvaccinated children are now quarantined for three weeks. In Arizona and Utah, the virus is spreading so widely it’s showing up in wastewater. Nationwide, the CDC has logged 44 outbreaks in 41 states, nearly all among the unvaccinated.

Why? Because vaccine coverage has dropped to 92.5 percent, thanks to Trump’s anti-science crusade, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s conspiracy fetish, and Acting CDC Director Jim O’Neill, who thinks we should “break up” the MMR vaccine into three separate shots, an idea so unscientific it might as well have come from a séance.

Among the wrongly terminated were the editors of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the CDC’s last bastion of unvarnished science, and Athalia Christie, the nation’s measles incident commander. What better time to fire your measles team than during a measles outbreak?

Dr. Debra Houry, one of several top CDC officials who resigned after Trump ousted Director Susan Monarez, said the chaos isn’t an accident. “The damage is the point.” And she’s right. Trump even bragged Friday that he was firing “a lot” of federal workers because they were “Democrat-oriented.” We can think of it as ideological extermination.

AFGE has already filed suit, calling the move illegal during a shutdown. Legality likely isn’t the point, but humiliation is. The CDC has been turned from a scientific agency into a warning label for what happens when evidence collides with ego.

When a government fires its epidemiologists, kneecaps its scientists, and replaces them with talk-show guests, this is what happens. We used to eradicate diseases. Now we rebrand them as freedom.

Amid all this madness, a sliver of light.

In Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square, 65,000 people watched as all 20 remaining living Israeli hostages were released by Hamas after more than 700 days in captivity. Parents embraced sons; children clung to fathers. Tears flooded the plaza as live footage streamed across two giant screens.

Omri Miran’s family called it “a victory for an entire people.” The family of Matan Angrest, a captured IDF soldier, offered “an eternal thank you to the president of the United States,” crediting Trump for brokering the deal, a rare moment where his obsession with spectacle briefly intersected with mercy.

Air Force One even circled over the crowd as Trump headed to Jerusalem to declare, “As far as I’m concerned, the war is over.” Whether that’s remotely true remains to be seen; the ceasefire is just phase one of a 20-point peace plan, fragile as glass. But for the first time in two years, Hostages Square filled with joy instead of grief. Even cynics can allow a little applause.

For dessert, a rare treat: accountability, broadcast live.

ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked Vice President JD Vance a simple question about a recorded FBI tape allegedly showing Trump’s immigration chief, Tom Homan, accepting $50,000 in cash. Vance dodged. Stephanopoulos asked again. Vance filibustered. Stephanopoulos smiled, said, “You didn’t answer the question,” and ended the interview.

Click. Roll credits. Cue outrage.

Within minutes, Vance was on X ranting about “fake scandals” and “left-wing rabbit holes,” confirming he’d been humiliated in real time. And for once, America didn’t need a fact-check. The lie self-destructed on air.

After a weekend of chaos, from bureaucratic purges to outbreaks to propaganda, this was the sound of something still working: a journalist who refused to be part of the show. Truth, briefly, got the last word. True confession, I watched that clip several times because it was so refreshing.

So yes, today’s calendars may lie, our leaders may gaslight, and our data may glitch, but at least one microphone in America still knows when to shut itself off.

Marz and I are celebrating Indigenous Peoples Day the old-fashioned way, by putting one foot in front of the other. We’re breaking in new walking shoes, reclaiming a little ground for ourselves, step by step. After a week of revisionist history and bureaucratic absurdity, it feels good to remember that truth, like endurance, isn’t erased, it’s earned, mile by mile.