Flashback: Minnesota Star Tribune Piece Links Mt. Rushmore to White Supremacy

The New York Time’s polemical “The 1619 Project” has inspired a wave of anti-American revisionist history among leftist outlets across the nation.

The main focus of “The 1619 Project” is to alter the view of America’s founding by explaining every development in American history by pointing to slavery and race.

The Legal Insurrection recently reported on a piece published a few years back at The Minnesota Star Tribune , which portrays Mt. Rushmore as a monument to white supremacy.

This piece was written by Ron Way, a former official of the U.S. Interior Department and its National Park Service.

In it, he tries to connect Mt. Rushmore to the Ku Klux Klan.

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.

Way continued with his race-focused interpretation of American history.

…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 … .”

The author even pointed out that the orientation of Mount Rushmore has racial implications.

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.

This article showed the Left’s new strategy of historical iconoclasm before it became diligently implemented since 2017.

All it took was the Charlottesville rally in 2017 to galvanize them.

Now, we are witnessing a new front in the culture wars.

With time, the Founding Fathers are fair game for a Left that is hell-bent on destroying American history.

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