By John Kass

May 7, 2025

I must admit that I’m prejudiced in favor of the Italian people of Chicago, because I married one almost 40 years ago now.

My Lovely Sicilian is upset and with good reason.

“They’re treating us like fools, like chumbolones,” she said the other day. “Where’s the Christopher Columbus statue?”

Where?

It’s nowhere.

It’s in the shadows, now hidden away by Mayor Brandon Johnson in a thoroughly embarrassing deal agreed to by some Italian groups that make a complete mockery of the Italian people on the Columbus issue.

But it gives Johnson and the other Chicago leftists room and was thought to buy silence from the Italians.

I don’t think that’s working.

And now it turns out that Johnson has taken advantage of the Italians by using the screw up by the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans as a cheap excuse to cancel Columbus permanently and remove all Columbus statues from the city’s parks. This is what the the neo-Marxists have wanted for years. They loathe Christopher Columbus. And the Italian Americans are being treated as fools.

My advice? Don’t treat the proud Italians as if they’re idiots or chumbolones with ridiculous Bozo shoes. They don’t like it. And they won’t shut up.

The news this week is that the controversial Columbus statue, removed from the Chicago Parks to appease the Democrat Party and the rest of the anti-American hard left, will return to Taylor Street. At least that’s how gullible Chicago media is framing the issue.

Not so says Lou Rago, former president of the JCCIA–Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans.

This narrative, Rago says, is a self-serving lie.

“JCCIA President Ron Onesti and select board members are peddling the narrative that the statue is being returned to its rightful and historic place in public view in the Taylor Street neighborhood,” said Lou Rago of the Italian American Human Relations Foundation.

“The truth is: Under a long-rejected deal proposed initially by former Mayor Lori Lightfoot, the statue will be hidden away indoors—out of public sight—as part of an  undefined ‘museum-style’ exhibit.” This is not a return; it is a burial,” Rago said.

“The level of betrayal is staggering,” said Carlo Vaniglia. “This is cultural treason. The JCCIA leadership has traded a symbol of our heritage and pride for political favor and personal convenience.

“They’ve sold out our community.”

I’ve spent decades covering Chicago politics, watching the squabbling of so-called “leaders,” but here I must agree with Rago and Vaniglia. It is as if it were planned, an inside job. The one question the Italians of Chicago might ask themselves is Cui Bono? Who stands to benefit?

I can’t say. I’m not a political player putting together exhibits and a museum that might be in need of a favor from the mayor. I’m just a guy, married to a Sicilian girl who wants to walk through the Chicago parks and see the Columbus statues where they belong, in public, so the public can see them, as in the old days. And she can’t. Columbus is hidden away, part of the censorship of the left that hates Columbus.

It is cultural treason. It is betrayal that reaches back across time. It also touches on accommodation of power and the kind of inter-ethnic infighting that plagues many ethnic communities.

If this were just a squabble among Italians it would be bad enough. You could shrug and let it go. Yet if you dig a bit deeper, you’ll see a rot afflicting America herself, her foundational origin story hijacked by the hard left that aims to destroy this nation.

But to get to the nut meat, first we must crack some nuts, so let’s get to cracking.

 

The Real Story

That statues were once part of Chicago’s parks, symbolic of an America that finally recognized the racism and hate that had been directed at Italian immigrants, and there were other statues commemorating Columbus in cities all across America.

The Columbus statues and the national holiday honoring the great explorer who found the New World were a response to terrible violence directed at Italians—including a series of lynchings.

In New Orleans for example, where my father-in-law later lived and became an orphan, an angry mob lynched 11 Sicilians in a crime that horrified the nation. Apparently, the only ones not horrified were the bigots and editors of the New York Times who applauded the mob attacking and murdering Italians without trial.

Later, as a result of this horror, statues of Columbus were erected in the hopes of appeasement, to make amends. And there were Columbus Day parades.

Discrimination against Italians was common. Italians were not even considered to be whites. Similar discrimination visited Greeks in Chicago and other Southern Europeans. Greeks it is said, did not become “white” until America’s princess Jackie Kennedy married Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. I was there. I saw it. I grew up with it. How many times did I hear “greaseball” and “dago” and ‘wop.” And all the jokes about the Outfit and Capone by frightened boys who would wet their pants if confronted a real wiseguy.

Finally, America washed her hands of it all. But the Marxists were there to take advantage. Their teeth had been filed razor sharp at the universities for years.

 

 

The hard political left that is the base of the Democrat Party, the neo-Marxist, neo-Jacobin left whipped themselves into a frenzy about Columbus.  And President Donald Trump was in office when Minneapolis police killed violent drug dealer thug George Floyd. And Black Lives Matter, along with corrupt legacy journalism, transformed the thug Floyd into some kind of plaster saint so all the Angry White Female Leftists could genuflect.

The left whipped their political troops to greater frenzy to hurt Trump. The Black Lives Matter riots tore the country apart and cities were destroyed as the legacy media lied as to the cause. The left was thrilled. But downtown Chicago has never recovered. And before the goofus that is Brandon Johnson, Chicago’s mayor during those Black Lives Matter riots was Lori Lightfoot. aka Mayor Phallus Maximus. She removed the statue to appease her lefty allies.

But though Columbus was relegated to the socialist gulag of problematic public art, other hateful images—including those directed at Jews by the pro-Palestinian left—are allowed in public Chicago.

A controversial art exhibit at the Chicago Cultural Center depicting Uncle Sam and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu as murderers was allowed, even defended at City Hall. But the Italians and Columbus aren’t allowed.

If you ask, you’re told by official Chicago and the media: Forget about it.

I suppose you want consistency? But the left laughs at those of us who seek consistency. To the left Columbus is not the brave explorer who opened the New World. To them he is a European colonizer who must be wiped from history. Among his sins. He was a Roman Catholic. He believed in God. And he was white, though such racial designations weren’t commonly understood.

Critical race theory mushroomed in feeding the hatred of Columbus. And had their own foundation myth, the 1619 Project of the New York Times, based on faulty, deranged Marxist dreams. In 2020, there were three Christopher Columbus statues in Chicago that were removed: In Grant Park, Arrigo Park (Little Italy), and South Chicago’s Drake Fountain.

The Italian American people have done nothing to be treated like chumbolones, like clowns. And they should not be treated as such by their own representatives, the kind that elbow their way to the front for the photograph in the ethnic newspapers.

There is no excuse for it.

Mayor Johnson is a lost cause, an idiot, a failure. You might as well write him off along with his political boss, Boss Toni Preckwinkle. They will remain in power protected by the Chicago Teachers Union and the great city will continue to fall of its own sodden corrupt weight. There is no saving Chicago now.

And please remember that Communism, the hard left, the neo-Jacobins, the neo-Marxists,  are not something new.

Is Satan new?

And as Whittaker Chambers reminds us in Witness:

“It is, in fact, man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: “Ye shall be as gods.”

“It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man’s relationship to God. The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God.

“It is the vision of man’s mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world. It is the vision of man’s liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational intelligence, redirecting man’s destiny and reorganizing man’s life and the world. It is the vision of man, once more the central figure of the Creation, not because God made man in his image, but because man’s mind makes him the most intelligent of the animals. Copernicus and his successors displaced man as the central fact of the universe by proving that the earth was not the central star of the universe.”

Communists become their own gods. And then they prepare the Killing Fields. This is the violent road they’ve been marching on for years and years. If you can’t see where they’re marching, you can feel it.

So, whenever you hope to understand them, think of the serpent promising ultimate power:

Ye shall be as gods.

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About the author: John Kass spent decades as a political writer and news columnist in Chicago working at a major metropolitan newspaper. He is co-host of The Chicago Way podcast. And he just loves his “No Chumbolone” hat, because johnkassnews.com is a “No Chumbolone” Zone where you can always get a cup of common sense.

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