The Left’s next target? Mt. Rushmore. Seriously

The Left’s next target? Mt. Rushmore. Seriously

Yesterday, I wrote a post that focused on a larger-than-life test case in the Left’s mania for obliterating America’s past. Having contented themselves with tearing down oxidized bronze castings of dead white Americans on both sides of the blue-gray divide (on Wednesday the Lincoln Memorial was vandalized!), they were now turning their sites to larger monuments such as the giant bas relief carving at Stone Mountain Park in Georgia.

I concluded the article with a rhetorical question: “If the work is destroyed, can Mt. Rushmore be far behind?” Little did I know the question was already in the process of being answered by one Wilbert L. Cooper, who writes for VICE. An article by him originally titled “Let’s Blow Up Mt. Rushmore,” later “toned down” by the editors to the far more reasonable suggestion “Let’s Get Rid of Mount Rushmore,” went live shortly after my own.

Cooper’s modest proposal still begins thus:

Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?

More than ever, old monuments to famous white American men are being threatened in the name of progress.

That unbiased view of what constitutes progress sets the tone for an argument grounded in the conviction that destroying all vestiges of America’s past will somehow thrust into the light the one chapter of history the Left wants preserved and told repeatedly. That is how, for the first and only time in the history of mankind, one group of heartless men captured and enslaved another group. I don’t need to tell you which group is which.

Cooper intimates at the outset that he got the idea for the article from “far-right sites” that have themselves wondered aloud whether the Left’s passion for blowing up history would extend to this famed monument. But then he gets to wondering himself:

If Rushmore ever did get “blown up,” what should those dudes be replaced with? Fact is, I’m not sure there is any American president worthy of being etched into the side of a 60-foot mountain with explosives and jackhammers.

Certainly, he doesn’t need to see the faces that are currently there. He did once, he tells us, in the summer of 2015:

Standing in front of it conjured feelings of both wonder and disgust in me. 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.

Yep, they “enslaved their fellow man.” Let’s never forget that. America as a nation has been paying for that mistake in one form or another since 1964, but the sin will never be totally absolved.

So, sure, let’s tear down all the monuments. Burn them — burn them all. And once they’re all gone, the mobs can turn their attention to books and historical records. And after that, there will be nothing left to destroy but people themselves. I wonder if ridding the world of them will settle the score.

Howard Portnoy

Howard Portnoy

Howard Portnoy has written for The Blaze, HotAir, NewsBusters, Weasel Zippers, Conservative Firing Line, RedCounty, and New York’s Daily News. He has one published novel, Hot Rain, (G. P. Putnam’s Sons), and has been a guest on Radio Vice Online with Jim Vicevich, The Alana Burke Show, Smart Life with Dr. Gina, and The George Espenlaub Show.

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