“The faces of the four presidents (white conquerors) peer southeast toward a reservation housing vanquished Lakota, who mostly live out forgotten, impoverished lives…”

Last Friday, Professor Jacobson blogged about New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet revealing plans to shift its focus after the Russian collusion failed. Now the publication will focus on portraying President Donald Trump as racist.

Part and parcel with that approach is the paper’s development of “The 1619 Project.” The creators hoped the project would alter our view of our founding to make the introduction of slavery the real beginning point of American history.

Conservative pundit Byron York has this analysis of “The 1619 Project” in The Washington Examiner:

The basic thrust of the 1619 Project is that everything in American history is explained by slavery and race. The message is woven throughout the first publication of the project, an entire edition of the Times magazine. It begins with an overview of race in America — “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.” — written by Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, who on Twitter uses the identity Ida Bae Wells, from the crusading late 19th-early 20th century African American journalist Ida B. Wells. The essays go on to cover the economy (“If you want to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.”), the food we eat (“The sugar that saturates the American diet has a barbaric history as the ‘white gold’ that fueled slavery.”), the nation’s physical health (“Why doesn’t the United States have universal healthcare? The answer begins with policies enacted after the Civil War.”), politics (“America holds onto an undemocratic assumption from its founding: that some people deserve more power than others.”), daily life (“What does a traffic jam in Atlanta have to do with segregation? Quite a lot.”), and much more.

During his show today, the iconic pundit Rush Limbaugh noted that sister publications would shortly push this message as well.

The first out of this nasty gate is The Minnesota Star Tribune, which just posted an opinion piece that portrays Mt. Rushmore as a monument to white supremacy.

The editorial, penned by Ron Way (a former official of the U.S. Interior Department and its National Park Service) even features the KKK!

But the back story of Mount Rushmore is hardly a rich history of a shared democratic ideal. Some see the monument in the Black Hills as one of the spoils of violent conquest over indigenous tribes by a U.S. Army clearing the way for white settlers driven westward by a lust for land and gold. As it was in colonial America, the young country’s expansion was fueled by “Manifest Destiny” — a self-supreme notion that any land coveted by Euro-Americans was, by providence, rightfully theirs for the taking. …The sculptures were chiseled by an imported Ku Klux Klansman on a granite mountain owned by indigenous tribes on what they considered sacred land — land that the U.S. Supreme Court said in 1980 was illegally taken from them.

The way continues in this vein, creating the most delusional piece of historical analysis I have ever seen published. Considering I have read books tying ancient Egypt to extraterrestrials, this is a remarkable achievement.

The racialism and fabulism drip from Way’s account.

…George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. Abraham Lincoln famously emancipated slaves, but he supported eradicating Indian tribes from western lands and approved America’s largest-ever mass execution, the hanging of 38 Dakota in Mankato for their alleged crimes in the 1862 war along the Minnesota River. Teddy Roosevelt, in his “The Winning of the West,” wrote: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are … .”

Even the orientation of the monument is racist!

At Mount Rushmore, you may learn that the sculptures are arranged for maximum sun exposure, itself a cruel irony: The faces of the four presidents (white conquerors) peer southeast toward a reservation housing vanquished Lakota, who mostly live out forgotten, impoverished lives in the shadow of their sacred Paha Sapa that, legally, still belong to them.

The approach is working about as well as Limbaugh predicted.

I really like Mount Rushmore. I’ve never gone there but your tweet has intrigued me. The Indians should be thanking these great men. pic.twitter.com/8OY7AtZSFT — TRUMP CAT (@JSuxdix) August 21, 2019

What the crap is wrong with people who think Mount Rushmore is racist. Do you people have nothing else to do.I guess it’s were you are sitting in your safe place at school seeing who can come up with the stupidest things ever. Get a life !!!! — LeeBates 4 Harvick ???? (@lbates702) August 21, 2019

If the #FakeNews media keeps it up, the election result in 2020 will be such that Mt. Rushmore will be updated.

If Libs think they are triggered by Mount Rushmore right now, just wait ’til we put Trump on there!#MAGA #TrumpLandslide2020 pic.twitter.com/p8VCMs4XTy — A Dude of Horror (@TheHorrorDude) August 20, 2019

[Featured image via National Park Services]



