During an appearance on The Eric Metaxas Show, Terry Schilling[…]defended Christopher Columbus. Schilling downplayed Columbus’ crimes, called Indigenous people an “evil, barbaric group of people,” said that Christians “have no business criticizing” Columbus, and that the Americas “needed to be conquered”

“In our lifetimes Columbus has been put forward as a raper of the Indigenous populations, which is mostly nonsense”[…]“What are we to make of this? This attack on Columbus? I mean I don’t know what to say about it anymore”

Schilling called attacks on Columbus “preposterous” and motivated by Marxist ideology. “Once you realize that the common denominator amongst all the attacks on everything that Americans love and know — the common denominator is Marxism and a hatred of anything that upholds truth or glory or beauty or God”[…]
Schilling admitted without going into detail that Columbus “did some bad things” but said that “Columbus contributed more in his life than any of the people that are criticizing him by like a hundred billion times”[…]
“The worst things that they’ve accused Columbus of, if you compare that — what he’s been accused of, not even what he’s been convicted of — to what the Indigenous people were doing here in the Americas, it’s not even close!” he insisted. “Right? The Indigenous people were a barbaric, evil group of people, right?”[…]
“He was not trying to enrich himself. He was obsessed — so when he was doing everything that he did, when he sailed the ocean blue in 1492, everyone was concerned that Christ was coming back, that God was coming back for the second time, and they wanted to reclaim the Holy Lands”[…]
“And what Columbus was obsessed with was establishing new trade routes that could be used to fund the new Crusades and take back the Holy Land so that Christians controlled it when God came back. He was not trying to enrich himself. He was trying to do yeoman’s work. So if you’re a Christian, you have no business criticizing him”