NY Times Explains Why Mt. Rushmore is, Like, Totally Racist and Awful

The New York Times has yet to find an anti-Trump story that doesn’t meet their standards for publication, so it should come as no surprise to see them jump on the bandwagon of left-wing stories criticizing the president for presiding over a 4^th of July celebration at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota.

In the Age of George Floyd, of course, every single aspect of Americana is problematic, racist, and terrible, so naturally Mount Rushmore – with its immense carvings paying tribute to four great American presidents – fits the same bill. Trump’s going there to celebrate Independence Day? Well, time to churn up a story explaining why this is just another expression of white supremacy.

The Times manages to hit the story from several angles.

One, the sculptor was racist:

The sculptor who was ultimately chosen for the project, Gutzon Borglum, settled on a concept to pay tribute to four former commanders in chief. Before he was recruited to create Mount Rushmore, Mr. Borglum had been involved with another project: an enormous bas-relief at Stone Mountain in Georgia that memorialized Confederate leaders.

It was eventually completed without him, but Mr. Borglum formed strong bonds with leaders of the Ku Klux Klan and participated in their meetings, in part to secure funding for the Stone Mountain project. He also espoused white supremacist and anti-Semitic ideas, according to excerpts from his letters included in “Great White Fathers,” a book by the writer John Taliaferro about the history of Mount Rushmore.

Two, the monument was built on Indian land:

Prospectors seized the land during a gold rush in the 1870s, violating the Fort Laramie treaty of 1868, which recognized the Black Hills as belonging to Native Americans, Mr. Tilsen said in an interview.

Over a century later, the site was occupied by a group of Native Americans protesting treaty violations, and a 1980 Supreme Court decision upheld a ruling that more than $100 million should be given in compensation to eight tribes for the illegal seizure.

Three, the presidents themselves were racist:

But each of these titans of American history has a complicated legacy. Washington and Jefferson were slaveholders. Roosevelt actively sought to Christianize and uproot Native Americans as the United States expanded, Professor Smith said. “He was a racist,” he added.

And although Lincoln was behind the Emancipation Proclamation — a move some have characterized as reluctant and late — he has been criticized for his response to the so-called Minnesota Uprising, in which more than 300 Native Americans were sentenced to death by a military court after being accused of attacking white settlers in 1862.

We love this last part especially. It’s now open season to accuse Lincoln of being “reluctant and late” in signing the Emancipation Proclamation? My goodness, if you ever need further proof that progressivism is a mental illness…

“OMG the woke police are going all in on Mount Rushmore. They’re really doing it. These people are insane,” Donald Trump Jr. tweeted in response to the article.

“Now, the woke mob at the New York Times is coming after Mount Rushmore. If we give this mob an inch, they’ll take a mile,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) noted.

Any day now, the left will be telling us that the Atlantic Ocean is a symbol of white supremacy because it was used to transport slaves from Africa. And we’re sure the little part right around Mar-a-Lago will be found to be particularly racist.

We’d love to imagine that these people are not serious, but we all know better by now, don’t we?