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New York Times Targets Mount Rushmore, as Twitter Cries Out Against ‘Woke Police’

This did not go over well online.

Yes, there most certainly is a national awakening occurring in regard to race here in the United States, but some believe that we’re bordering now on “over-woke”.

After the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which occurred at the hands of police in a gruesome and very public manner, America’s collective heart sank.  The scene was too grim to willfully watch, but too shocking to look away.  We knew almost immediately that we would need to do better in order to achieve the lofty ideals put to paper by our founding fathers:  Liberty and justice for all, etc.

We let the youth of the nation guide many of us in this journey, explaining as only they can what was truly, deeply wrong.  The rest of the nation listened, and things began to change.  Confederate monuments started to come down, NASCAR banned the rebel flag, Christopher Columbus could lose his national holiday.

But now that some are calling for the reexamination of Mount Rushmore, a hearty rebuke is reverberating around this great nation.

The New York Times has faced intense backlash over its report about the history of Mount Rushmore.

Ahead of President Trump’s scheduled Fourth of July celebration at the national monument, the Times ran a report with the headline “How Mount Rushmore Became Mount Rushmore,” which outlined how the upcoming event “invited even more scrutiny” regarding the landmark’s history.

Along with the criticisms George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt have faced in recent weeks, the Times reported the condemnation from Native Americans since the monument was built on indigenous land. It also noted how the sculptor Gutzon Borglum had “strong bonds with leaders of the Ku Klux Klan” and has a documented history of espousing white supremacist and anti-Semitic rhetoric.

However, it was a tweet from the Times that summarized an unflattering depiction of Mount Rushmore that really raised eyebrows on social media.

“Mount Rushmore was built on land that belonged to the Lakota tribe and sculpted by a man who had strong bonds with the Ku Klux Klan. It features the faces of 2 U.S. presidents who were slaveholders,” the Times wrote.

Twitter users were soon referring to the New York Times as the “woke police” or a “woke mob”, believing that they had now gone too far.

A popular radio host summed up the issue of where this all ends nicely:

“The New York Times building is located on land the Dutch colonists swindled from the native population They must abandon their stolen land and donate the proceeds to BLM,” radio host Buck Sexton wrote.

Touché.

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