Fox News defends 'brutal' Christopher Columbus: His holiday 'is celebrating the ethnicity of America'

A Fox News segment on Monday celebrated the works of explorer Christopher Columbus, who is responsible for rapes, murders and genocide of indigenous people.

Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy began the segment by blaming "cancel culture" for the effort to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day.

Talk show host Joe Piscopo argued that Columbus Day should not be replaced because it would dishonor his Italian grandparents.

"They were treated with the utmost disrespect and they fought so hard," he whined. "They wanted to come here just to be American. That's all they wanted."

"Why are they trying to take this away?" the former comedian asked. "You diminish the fight and the journey of my grandparents by trying to cancel out Columbus!"

Campos-Duffy went on to slam historian Howard Zinn as a "Marxist" because he had advocated for ending Columbus Day in an effort for the United States is to reject its racist foundations.

"You know, I don't know how that got into the school system," Piscopo complained. "But you have to understand is, what we celebrate today, Columbus Day, is even beyond Columbus. It's celebrating the ethnicity of America. The ethnicity and the mosaic is the foundation of the United States. It's the strength of America. They literally, by their hands, built this great country, the Italian Americans, the Jewish Americans, the Latino Americans, the Black Americans, the Chinese Americans. We're all in this together!"

He added: "And once you cancel out one of these groups, the Italian Americans, you hurt all of America."

"They say that he was so brutal," Campos-Duffy said of Columbus. "It's interesting that those who are trying to cancel Christopher Columbus are the same people who are trying to cover up the brutality of communism and socialism in the 20th century."

Watch the video below from Fox News.