Opinion

It’s Time To Blow Up Mount Rushmore

(Courtesy NPS/Handout via REUTERS)

Scott Greer Contributor
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The violence in Charlottesville has renewed efforts by the Left to tear down all Confederate monuments.

The alt-right rally that took place over the weekend was premised on opposing the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue in the Virginia town. Now, with the notion that these site are magnets for neo-Nazis firmly planted in the minds of leftists, other monuments are being targeted for removal.

Seemingly to preempt any violent demonstrations, Lexington, Kentucky, announced Sunday that it was speeding up its removal of Confederate statues in the city.

On Monday, Durham, North Carolina let random demonstrators take a statue dedicated to boys who died fighting for the South. In a scene reminiscent of the Bolsheviks, a leftist mob pulled down the statue and then proceeded to kick it, spit on it and flip it off. (RELATED: Protesters Topple Confederate Statue In North Carolina)

Georgia Democrats renewed their call to blow up the face of Stone Mountain that depicts Confederate generals. There is a precedent for these kinds of removal, as the Taliban blew up colossal Buddhas carved into cliffs in Afghanistan during its reign.

The desire to purge the past puts you in great company.

Many liberals cheered on the illegal razing as a heroic act against white supremacy, indicating they want more mob topplings to continue unimpeded.

Besides saying these monuments should be removed that their tributes to white supremacy, those on the Left also smugly claim that they’re celebrations of traitors. But considering that many of these protesters brandish the red flag of communism and honor black nationalist cop killers like Assata Shakur, it appears the treason angle isn’t actually articulated in good faith.

If fighting against the United States government makes one unworthy of public monuments, then one has to explain why we continue to honor Native American war chiefs who killed thousands of Americans.

The reason for erecting monuments to these Native chieftains is the same reason the South does for Confederate generals — it’s about honoring heritage.

But it appears that Southerners aren’t allowed to honor their heritage, unlike Native Americans.

There’s one thing that is very certain in this situation: they are not going to stop with tearing down Confederate monuments. Any American hero who owned slaves or held views that would be considered bigoted today will likely be up for erasure.

President Trump pointed out this likelihood at his raucous press conference Tuesday, to the shrieking of his press critics. Trump’s foes couldn’t believe anyone would suggest that the angry leftists would go after Thomas Jefferson or George Washington next. (RELATED: Trump: Should Statues Of Slave Owner George Washington Be Torn Down, Too?)

Already, statues to Jefferson — the third president and author of the Declaration of Independence —
have warranted demands for removal from college campuses. (RELATED: Jefferson Statue Smeared With ‘Blood’ At William & Mary)

Why not go after the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C.? Or the namesake for our very capital. What makes Washington exempt from erasure?

If the Left takes follows the course of its own logic, then there’s one landmark they should want to blow up ASAP — besides Stone Mountain.

It’s Mount Rushmore.

All four presidents carved into stone on the mountain would be called white supremacists today. So it would make sense for our progressive nation to wipe them from the face of the landmark.

Let’s start with Washington. He owned slaves. He approved the Naturalization Act of 1790 that restricted citizenship to “free white men.” He also earned the nickname “Town Destroyer” from the Iroquois for he fought against Indian tribes.

Jefferson has a more damning record, according to the Left. He also owned slaves and is widely believed to have had a relationship with one of the women he kept as property. That relationship is considered by many liberals to have amounted to rape.

Besides his personal behavior, the third president considered blacks were inherently inferior to whites. Jefferson also opposed granting citizenship to African-Americans and thought that America couldn’t survive as a multiracial democracy.

Additionally, he described Native Americans as “merciless Indian savages” in the Declaration.

Abraham Lincoln may be the Great Emancipator and one of the greatest presidents in American history, but that can’t erase his racial views. For nearly all of his political career, Lincoln supported colonization for free blacks instead of granting them citizenship and there’s still historical debate over whether he ever gave up the idea.

In the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, the future president argued against the idea that blacks and whites were equal. He also stated in one of the debates, “There is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.”

Theodore Roosevelt, like Lincoln, did not own slaves, but he also did not believe in the equality of races. Roosevelt supported imperialism on the basis that the “civilized” races should hold sway over the world and was a vocal advocate for eugenics.

Additionally, he wrote the famed “The Winning of the West” that celebrated the conquest of Indian land — a historical event that is now considered shameful by modern progressives.

However, all of these figures are undoubtedly great Americans and worthy of emulation, regardless of their opinions on race. But the views of these men described above would make them targets of the crowd wanting to denigrate American heritage. They would naturally earn the label of a white supremacist, which makes them a monster in the eyes of the Left.

Why continue to honor them with carved facades on the side of a mountain?

The anti-statue movement is not just dedicated to tearing down the Confederacy, it wants to eliminate all vestiges of America’s past that do not align with progressive values. Honoring ancestors who fought for the Confederacy is bad because that regime is “American Nazism,” as MSNBC host Chris Hayes put it. Your heritage be damned.

Same goes with Andrew Jackson, even though he fought heroically under the American flag and prevented secession as president. You can’t call him a traitor, but you can call him a racist — which is even worse.

The men on Mount Rushmore may have shaped in America and ensured its survival. In the case of Washington and Jefferson, they helped create the nation.

But those qualities won’t matter if we start to define all American history prior to 1965 as that of a vile white supremacist society.

The stone facades of great Americans will no longer be seen as such. They’ll just be a bunch of dead white males who deserve dynamite, not veneration.

Follow Scott on Twitter and buy his new book, “No Campus for White Men.”