Americans can lay to rest any doubts they had about what top Democrats think about this country thanks to an ill-considered tweet from party chieftains that they quickly removed.
On Sunday, the party’s official Twitter account briefly featured a post that called President Trump’s planned July 4 rally at Mount Rushmore an event “glorifying white supremacy,” and linked to an article from the Guardian, the hard left, anti-American, anti-Christian British newspaper.
Though wiser heads prevailed and removed the hateful remark, a top Trump campaign official captured it and gave it the widespread publicity it deserved.
The Tweet
“Trump has disrespected Native American communities time and again,” the tweet began. “He’s attempted to limit their voting rights and blocked critical pandemic relief. Now he’s holding a rally glorifying white supremacy at Mount Rushmore — a region once sacred to tribal communities.”
The Democrat Party thinks that if you celebrate the 4th of the July, you’re a white supremacist. https://t.co/uoL5UTvMuN
— Matt Wolking (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@MattWolking) June 30, 2020
Underneath that scurrilous claim was the piece from the Guardian.
The rally “comes amid a national reckoning over racism and a reconsideration of the symbolism of monuments around the globe,” the leftist newspaper reported. “Many Native American activists say the Rushmore memorial is as reprehensible as the many Confederate monuments being toppled around the nation.”
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Many Americans, meaning millions, disagree, but anyway, the Guardian appealed to a Native American for credibility:
“Mount Rushmore is a symbol of white supremacy, of structural racism that’s still alive and well in society today,” said Nick Tilsen, a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe and the president of a local activist organization called NDN Collective.
“It’s an injustice to actively steal indigenous people’s land then carve the white faces of the conquerors who committed genocide.”…
For many Native American people, including the Lakota, Cheyenne, Omaha, Arapaho, Kiowa and Kiowa-Apache, the monument is a desecration to the Black Hills, which they consider sacred. Lakota people know the area as Paha Sapa — “the heart of everything that is.”
The Guardian then explained what was wrong with the four presidents on the monument: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt.
The first two owned slaves, Lincoln OK’d hanging 38 Dakota Indians in Minnesota, and Roosevelt uttered this line, riffing off Union General Philip H. Sheridan: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every 10 are.”
Even worse, the Guardian explained, Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor who created it, joined the Ku Klux Klan to raise money for the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial in Georgia, which he left to create the remarkable faces on Mount Rushmore.
In other words, like every other statue and monument that radical leftists and Black Lives Matter vandals have defaced, toppled, or destroyed, this one, too, is irredeemably racist, and anyone who would think of holding a July 4 celebration there must be a white supremacist.
Party hacks deleted the imprudent tweet, but its opening line still shows up in a Google search.
Matt Wolking, the Trump campaign’s deputy director of communications, captured the tweet before the Democrats could remove it: “The moment the Democrat Party attacked Mount Rushmore, which features George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, as a symbol of white supremacy,” he tweeted.
Then he provided the appropriate summary of the Democrats’ candid view of patriotic Americans: “The Democrat Party thinks that if you celebrate the 4th of July, you’re a white supremacist.”
Trump the “Racist”
“Trump is a racist” or “white supremacist” has been a regular refrain of the radical Left and Democrat Party leadership since at least 2015 when he announced his run for the presidency.
Yet even with the many times top Democrats — including communist sympathizer Bernie Sanders, Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — have called Trump a racist, their party’s claim that celebrating July 4 at Mount Rushmore is “white supremacist” was a tad too much.
And so orders came down — from whom is unknown — to get the anti-American remark off the Twitter feed and stop tweeting before the party looks more ridiculous and anti-American than it already does.
Problem was, the horse had bolted the reservation, and Americans got another eyeful of the Democrat Party’s contempt for the United States and its storied past.
Image: JamesBrey/iStock/Getty Images Plus
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.