Time to play “What’s wrong with this meme?”
So for starters, Trump’s visit to Mount Rushmore was, in fact, a celebration of white supremacy, and I know this because I know Trump is a colossal racist and Mount Rushmore is a monument to four of the most famous executives in charge of a country founded on white supremacy. Just to make sure everyone got the idea, the sculptor carved their faces into a mountain that was considered a sacred monument by the native Americans who were nearly exterminated through a centuries-long campaign of genocide. So I think the “celebration of white supremacy” is pretty much a fact.
I mean, I realize Mount Rushmore is touted as being a monument to democracy and so on and so forth, because that’s what they taught me in school and that’s even what I believed for so many years, but it’s also a monument to white supremacy. That’s not an incorrect description of it.
And it’s not incorrect to say Trump stood before two former slave owners, or that he stood on land wrested away from Native Americans. That’s factual, too.
I get it that the meme is supposed to make us all grab our chins and go, “Ohhh, so the media tips one way for liberals and the other way for conservatives, ergo they’re blindly driven by an agenda.” And I suppose that might be true, if those stories were out there.
There aren’t any citations in the meme, but the only CNN story I could find that used the phrases “white supremacy” and “former slave owners” when describing Trump’s July 4 speech quoted Nick Tilsen, a citizen of Oglala Lakota nation and founder, CEO and president of the NDN Collective, a nonprofit organization supporting Indigenous people, so it really wasn’t CNN saying those things, it was Tilsen. Not that I think it matters. It’s factual. CNN was reporting the facts. That’s not an agenda, that’s journalism.
I couldn’t find any stories at abcnews.com about Bill Clinton visiting Mount Rushmore in 1996.
There was just one story at CNN.com about Barack Obama (I only searched using the correct spelling of his name – I’ll only go so far when researching this kind of thing) visiting Mount Rushmore on 2008, but it didn’t use the word ‘majestic’ to describe the monument.
And I couldn’t find any stories at CNN.com about Bernie Sanders visiting Mount Rushmore in 2016.
If the writers who created this meme read the stories they claimed said these things, I should have been able to find them. I think they started with the story about Trump, and made the rest of that shit up. I think this came out of a meme factory in Russia, because it’s all over Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, something called iFun – name a social media platform, it’s there, but I can’t trace it back to a source.
I wonder if Russian meme factories are agenda-driven?
This Is Drivel 