Even the agents of wokeness apparently know when their cause is in retreat — including in the most populous city named for arguably the progressive left’s most hated historical figure.
In Columbus, Ohio, a statue of Christopher Columbus — the city’s namesake, discoverer of this continent, and horrible terrible no-good awful wretched genocidal colonizer, to hear Zohran Mamdani voters tell it — has been in storage since July 1, 2020, WOSU-TV reported on Columbus Day in 2022.
The statue had previously been on the grounds of Columbus City Hall.
The date of removal, not surprisingly, was just days after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis — a death which began the Summer of Fiery But Mostly Peaceful Protests, and was when the woke wave that had been building all decade began to crest.
When WOSU reported on the statue in 2022, that wave had already begun to break, if not recede — although Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther was still trying to split the baby in that department.
“Columbus is the name of our city and we’re proud of our city and our community,” Ginther said at the time. “This statue does not define who we are as a people, who we are as a city, We are a smart, open, very diverse city and we need to make sure… that we’re telling our full and accurate history.”
Part of this, as The Daily Signal noted, included replacing Columbus Day with Juneteenth as a paid holiday in the city. (This was before it was made a federal holiday, of course.) Then, in 2023, a committee called Reimagining Columbus was organized to figure out what the design for the statue would be.
As part of what officials in Ohio’s capital called “a $3.5 million plan to transform the city’s commemorative landscape to more fully celebrate the diversity and multiplicity of our city” — including a $2 million grant from the Mellon Foundation for the Reimagining Columbus board — Mayor Ginther promised to “take responsibility to tell the truth about colonialism and racism, and to tell the stories of the people who have been overlooked and erased from the telling of our history.”
As Ohio Republican State Rep. Brian Stewart noted on X, what seems to have happened — long after that woke wave crested and rolled back into the sea — is “spend $2 million studying what to do with the Christopher Columbus statue owned by the City of Columbus” and come to the conclusion that the best course of action was “putting it back up somewhere” but surrounding it with “a bunch of hand-wringing woke art.”
Should Columbus be celebrated for his role in American history?
A 19-member board was established to spend $2 million studying what to do with the Christopher Columbus statue owned by the City of Columbus. 🙄
Sounds like they’re putting it back up somewhere but will surround it with a bunch of hand-wringing woke art? 🤷🏼♂️ pic.twitter.com/Wwg1rRaogy
— Brian Stewart (@BrianStewartOH) August 13, 2025
I mean, that’s a sort of progress. Expensive progress, but money has been frittered away on more arrant woke nonsense between the summer of 2020 and now (see: Kendi, Ibram X.).
“The decision to mothball a statute of Christopher Columbus — in Columbus of all place — was a dumb move made at the height of the woke insanity post-2020,” Stewart told The Daily Signal.
And now they plan to re-display it — somewhere. From the Columbus Post-Dispatch, reporting on the Aug. 16 event Rep. Stewart was referencing:
Now, the group has a pitch for city residents and leaders: the statue could be displayed in a new, centrally located park along the Scioto River. Christopher Columbus would not be the focal point of this theoretical park, and his statue would be displayed next to text and artwork that tell the history of the city and the man, including the controversial parts of his legacy involving his treatment of Indigenous people. An exact location for the park was not identified…
“We believe this generational vision really does accommodate all the different viewpoints because it is not favoring one side over another,” said Dan Williamson, a Reimagining Columbus team member with the Werth public relations firm.
There’s no precise location picked out for the park and no dollar figure attached to the proposal because this wasn’t a typical city planning process, Williamson said.
It’s now up to the public and, ultimately, city elected officials, to decide if they want to move forward with the plan, find a location and secure funding.
So you can spend another few million — probably more than that — on a huge park for the Columbus statue that will try (and invariably fail) to take the focus away from Christopher Columbus, or you can put it to the public and elected officials. If the latter, particularly the public, had its druthers about this, the statue would probably just return to city hall.
Nevertheless, Williamson still thinks Reimagining Columbus has done fantastic things.
“I believe this project is unique in that no other community that has removed a Columbus statue has undergone a process to consider how to bring it back,” he told The Daily Signal.
Of course, if any other city in America wants to “undergo a process” to “consider how to bring” Columbus statues back, pay me a crisp $20 and I’ll tell you the most popular and easiest way to do it: Just put it back where it was.
You’ll have saved yourself at least $1,999,980 off of Columbus, Ohio’s bill, as well as a whole lot of hassle in the wokeness healing process.
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