Rioters in Richmond, VA, Tuesday night pulled down a statue of Christopher Columbus, spray-painted it, torched it, and drowned it in a lake. After spray-painting it and setting it on fire, it seems the watery finale was a bit counter-intuitive. But who expects common sense from these idiots?

The statue was torn down using ropes at about 9 p.m. in William Byrd Park and later thrown in nearby Fountain Lake.

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One is reminded of a similar storyline on “The Sopranos.” One could also hope for a similar outcome. It seems to have slipped the mind of the rioters, most likely middle class white kids, that but for Columbus their ancestors may have never slipped the surly bonds of whatever European bog they inhabited and come here to spawn the kind of masochistic descendants who have such a loose grip on historical reality.

Columbus was an Elon Musk of his time: a seafaring entrepreneur, he knew the big prize, his Space X, lay far across the western horizon. Granted, he thought he was getting to India, hence “Indians” in the Americas, but he “discovered” (Yeah, the Vikings got here earlier, but didn’t establish permanent colonies. How could they? The NFC North was really tough in 1001 AD) the New World and the fruit of his discovery laid the foundations for our world today.

But as a nasty dead white male, he is stripped of that honor by the academic thugs and slobbering rioters of our current age. His achievement (it was a hell of a voyage here) and his subsequent life are now food for the leftist maw. In faculty lounges from sea to shining sea lazy professors and their minions have been teaching for over forty years that Christopher Columbus was nothing more than an Indian rapist, environmental pillager, and despoiler of noble savages in general.

Sure, everything they have they owe to his European claims on the New World, not to mention his bringing the light of the Holy Roman Catholic Church to the indigenous types (I can hear heads exploding all over after that line). However, that fine notion pales in comparison to riding the PC train to the next intellectually anemic academic conference titled something like “A Progressive Native American LGBTQ Columbus Symposium: Can we rename that city in Ohio?”

The rioters, not happy with the cancel culture only in regards to Rebel soldiers and Columbus —given they will probably pay no price for their vandalism— will now go on to bigger and better targets. The spray-painting of the Lincoln Memorial, the sacking of historic churches, and the attempted destruction of other national locales in DC during the recent unrest are merely the beginning.

Funny eyebrows (okay, funnier) eyebrows on Mount Rushmore? A dunce cap atop the Washington Monument? Toilet-papering the halls of Congress? (We may get behind that one.) All of those thought-provoking acts of performance art could be on the agenda for the kind of person who thinks if you trash a statue you kill an idea. Not quite, kids. In fact, making Columbus take a swim and thus get a headline just reminds us how much we owe the guy and also how much he gets to those on the Left. Which, of course, is a very good thing in and of itself.