Senate Majority Leader John Thune drew thousands of angry replies after marking Native Americans’ Day instead of Columbus Day, a move his party’s online base rejected.
The South Dakota Republican posted on X on Monday to honor a state holiday that has replaced Columbus Day for more than three decades, and the reaction was swift.
Commenters flooded the post with fierce pushback and open praise for Columbus Day, turning a routine holiday message into another flare-up in the fight over which history gets celebrated in public life.
Washington Examiner reporting described the episode as the latest case of Thune drawing ire from the party’s online conservative base.
Thune’s message was short and ceremonial. He cast the day as a chance to recognize tribes central to his state’s story.
"Today is Native Americans’ Day in South Dakota, an opportunity to celebrate the heritage and contributions of the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota people,"
That framing did not sit well with readers who wanted the Italian explorer’s holiday defended, not set aside.
South Dakota became the first state, in 1990, to replace Columbus Day with a holiday celebrating indigenous peoples. The observance falls on the second Monday of October, the same calendar slot long tied to Columbus Day elsewhere.
Thune has marked the South Dakota holiday with similar posts in years past. Monday’s version still landed like a culture-war spark.
The state has one of the highest shares of Native American residents in the country. More than 11% identified as such in the 2020 Census. That local reality helps explain why a South Dakota senator would note the day. It does not erase the national argument over what got displaced.
Columbus Day has often been celebrated by Republicans. Forms of Indigenous Peoples’ Day have tended to win recognition from Democrats. The split is not subtle, and social media does not reward subtlety.
This was not the first time Thune’s holiday post drew organized anger. Last year, the Italian American Civil Rights League denounced a similar message in blunt terms.
The group branded that earlier post a “racist, insensitive and frankly Anti-Trump post,” and accused him of “trying to erase Italian Americans.”
Those charges go to the heart of the dispute. Critics see the swap of Columbus Day for indigenous-focused observances as more than local custom. They see a campaign to scrub an Italian explorer from the civic calendar and treat European discovery as something to apologize for rather than remember.
Thune’s office and the post itself offered no lengthy defense of the tradeoff. The text celebrated Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota heritage and left Columbus unmentioned. For a base already on alert about historical erasure, the omission was the point.
Monday’s replies did not stay polite. The post met a barrage of critical comments, thousands of them, and repeated cheers for Columbus Day.
That pattern matters. Party leaders who treat holiday language as harmless local color keep running into voters who treat it as a loyalty test. Columbus remains a symbol of exploration and Western achievement for many conservatives. Replacing his day reads, to them, like institutional surrender to progressive pressure that started in places like South Dakota in 1990 and spread from there.
Thune leads the Senate Republican majority and represents a state that made the change long ago. Both facts can be true at once. Neither quiets a base that wants elected Republicans to defend Columbus Day out loud, not route around it.
No injuries, investigations, or formal party sanctions came with the pile-on. The fight stayed where so many of these fights now live: on X, in quote posts and hard replies, over which names America still elevates.
Christopher Columbus’s voyages in the late 15th and early 16th centuries opened lasting contact between Europe and the Americas. That record is why his holiday existed. It is also why activists worked for decades to knock it down. South Dakota moved first. Other jurisdictions followed in different forms. The online right has not forgotten who pushed the change, or what it cost.
Heritage worth keeping does not need to be traded away to prove compassion, and conservatives just reminded their leaders they still know the difference.
