Just when you thought Minnesota’s Democrat Senate nominee Peggy Flanagan couldn’t get any more unhinged about basic American history, along comes a fresh batch of her deleted tweets to remind everyone why she scrubbed her timeline in the first place.

Peggy Flanagan’s deleted Christopher Columbus tweets. https://t.co/8cKFP3PGSk
— Dustin Grage (@GrageDustin) October 12, 2026

It’s much too long to include all but a tiny excerpt on this blog but if you’re interested in the subject, here’s an interesting article on the subject written back in 2015:

Did America Commit Genocide Against the Indians?

[Spoiler alert: No. — Ed]

A shocking 80 to 90 percent of the inhabitants of the Americas were wiped out by disease, very early in their contact with Europeans. There were roughly 37 million natives in what became Latin America immediately prior to Columbus, including 6 million in the Aztec Empire, 8 million in the Mayan States, 11 million in what is now Brazil, and 12 million in the Inca Empire. There were probably about 7 million more to the north, in all of what became the United States and Canada.
While it is true that smallpox was a disproportionately large part of this catastrophe, other deadly diseases inadvertently introduced by the Europeans included typhus, measles, influenza, bubonic plague, cholera, malaria, tuberculosis, mumps, yellow fever, and pertussis (whooping cough). All of these were chronic in Eurasia, and while deadly there too, the natives of those continents had built up significant resistance over time. The Indians, far less numerous, far more spread out, and isolated to a great degree from each other and, up to that time, entirely from Eurasia, had developed no resistance whatsoever.
There is no disaster quite like it in all of history.
Taking a middle-of-the-road 85 percent figure, what's left is only about 6.6 million people, spread across both continents. That's the population of Indiana (36,418 sq. miles) or El Salvador (8,124 sq. miles), but spread out over a total of 16,428,000 sq. miles. And remember, the overwhelming majority of them remained in Spanish (and Portuguese) lands.
So our first question has to be whether this admitted catastrophe constituted a genocide. But if one posits this, who exactly should we hold accountable? Europeans did not even know bacteria existed (and wouldn't know they were linked to disease for another four hundred years). Does anyone believe that the Chinese should pay reparations for the "genocide" of the Black Death, which killed 50 million Europeans and something between 75 and 200 million globally in the middle of the preceding century?

Bonus material: Map of the Spread of the Black Death, c. 1346–1353