The New York Times is being characterized by some critics as the “woke police” following a story which highlighted the checkered history and background of a cherished U.S. monument, Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota.
The story comes as President Donald Trump is planning to stage an Independence Day celebration at the famed site. That plan has spurred cries from some amid the ongoing calls for statues and monuments to be removed over their racially troubling histories — fallout from the riots and protests that followed the death of a black man in Minneapolis in police custody on Memorial Day.
The Times' story, headlined "How Mount Rushmore Became Mount Rushmore," emphasized criticism of the four presidents whose faces are carved into the stone mountain, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. The piece also stressed the condemnation of Indian groups that say the monument was built on indigenous land.
However, the most visceral reactions, according to Fox News, came as a result of The Times’ Twitter post of the story.
The Times promoted the article by noting: “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.”
"OMG the woke police are going all in on Mount Rushmore. They’re really doing it. These people are insane," Donald Trump Jr. said in a tweet.
Former CIA analyst-turned-talk-show-host Buck Sexton sarcastically suggested The Times had to give up its New York headquarters because it was built on land “swindled” from Indians by Dutch settlers.
“The New York Times building is located on land the Dutch colonists swindled from the native population,” he tweeted. “They must abandon their stolen land and donate the proceeds to BLM [Black Lives Matter].”
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