Leftist vandals in Baltimore, Maryland, smashed a 225-year-old “racist” monument to discoverer of the new world Christopher Columbus with a sledge hammer in the wee hours of Monday morning, posting a two minute video of themselves in the act to YouTube.

As reported by local news site Baltimore Brew, the masked vandal’s video and the signs they left beside the destroyed monument were laden with the same Marxist and college “critical race theory” jargon employed recently against supposedly “offensive” memorials to Confederate war dead and military heroes. An unseen narrator of the video speaks over footage of a be-hoodied man destroying what is described as the oldest monument to Columbus in the country. As he puts it, the crime is justified because:

Christopher Columbus symbolizes the initial invasion of European capitalism into the Western Hemisphere. Columbus initiated a centuries-old wave of terrorism, murder, genocide, rape, slavery, ecological degradation and capitalist exploitation of labor in the Americas. That Columbian wave of destruction continues on the backs of Indigenous, African-American and brown people.

Both Columbus and Father of American Republic George Washington, another recent target of far-left rage against “racism” and “white supremacy,” are described as “genocidal terrorists,” defended by Republican and Democratic “misleaders.” This is all evidence of “the culture of white supremacy … [that is] at the foundation of U.S. culture,” the narrator explains.

Having made his definition of white supremacy clear, the narrator then insists it “must be replaced or people will continue to suffer and the planet will continue to die.” The video ends with a litany of websites and books linked to liberals, communists, and black nationalists.

Popular Resistance, an Occupy Movement-linked communist group led by the likes of Baltimore-based lawyer and former National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) Chief Counsel Kevin Zeese, claims responsibility.

While the group appears to eschew traditional communist imagery and slogans, even a cursory search of their website and social media reveals thinly veiled accounts of Marxist historical materialism and links to glowing appraisals of leading communist intellectuals.

The Genoa, Italy-born Cristoforo Colombo, under his anglicized name Christopher Columbus, was known in America for centuries as the pioneering explorer who enabled the creation of our nation. On his name is based “Columbia,” the poetic rendering of the country, and countless other central aspects of the American identity, including the name of our capital district. In more recent times, his proud memory is honored in particular by millions of Italian-Americans whose shared heritage with Columbus provided a powerful link in their home in the new world that he discovered. Italian groups funded hundreds of Columbus monuments around the turn of the last century.

But Monday’s criminal vandalism is hardly the first leftist attack on the historical memory of Columbus. In 2015, someone in Detroit, Michigan, put a hatchet through a Columbus statue’s head, an apparent reference to an Indian tomahawk. This stunt was echoed Saturday when a few dozen protestors gathered around the same statue under the name “Reclaiming our history: A Detroit without white supremacy.”

Democratic politicians around the country have amplified the efforts of these leftist agitators, caving to calls to replace the federal Columbus Day holiday with the ahistorical counterblast “Indigenous Peoples’ Day.” Beginning in arch-liberal Berkeley, California, in the last few years Seattle, Washington; Denver, Colorado; St. Paul, Minnesota; and countless smaller towns and cities have voted to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

Monday’s vandalism comes as Confederate monuments nationwide are being torn down both by local governments under cover of darkness and illegally by “protesters” in broad daylight under the eye of law enforcement. Meanwhile, large majorities of Americans of all age groups have indicated they want those Civil War memorials to remain unmolested.

The mainstream news media and left-leaning commentators mocked President Donald Trump when he suggested those pushing hardest against Confederate monuments might not want to stop with them. CNN’s Jim Acosta, for example, called the president’s comparison of monuments to the slave-holding George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, “white nationalism-lite.”