Vice says, yes, indeed, it’s time to tear down Mount Rushmore.
If you’ve never never seen it, you better go soon, before some Antifa takes a surface-to-air missile and destroys it. For the good of the nation, of course.
More than ever, old monuments to famous white American men are being threatened in the name of progress. Naturally, this has become a rallying cry on the far right, with plenty of encouragement from the most powerful man in the world. At the same unhinged press conference in which Donald Trump again blamed both sides for the deadly violence in Charlottesville last weekend, he also painted a picture of a slippery slope where those fighting for the removal of Confederate statues today might be destroying tributes to more mainstream slave-owning icons like George Washington tomorrow. He lamented this prospect once more on Thursday, opining on Twitter that “the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!” Far-right sites like the Daily Caller have been running with the theme, publishing alarmist takes with headlines like, “It’s Time to Blow Up Mount Rushmore.”
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Obviously, Washington and Thomas Jefferson were remarkable individuals who helped usurp British rule in America and, eventually, establish a new empire. But they also enslaved their fellow man, committing special kinds of inhumane acts that should never be confined to footnotes. Unfortunately, that is exactly how those troublesome truths are treated when you face the awesome grandeur of Rushmore, a monument so incredible it obscures the multifaceted nature of these old dudes, transmogrifying them from individuals with a capacity both for greatness and evil into pure American deities.