AND NOW: VICE: “Let’s Blow Up Mount Rushmore”

We may have hit peak media crazy here. A prominent online news publication says, “Let’s blow up Mt. Rushmore.” No, this is not al-Qaeda’s “Inspire” magazine or the Islamic State’s “Dabiq” propaganda publication – it’s Brooklyn based Vice News.

On the same day a barbaric terror attack takes place in Barcelona, resulting in 13 deaths and 100 people injured, the popular liberal news org known for its edgy investigative approach and stylistic “cooler than thou” appeal to millennials tweeted out an article which advocates for blowing up Mount Rushmore. 

Vice initially titled the article, authored by Vice Senior Editor Wilbert L. Cooper, as follows:

After fierce online push back on a day there was a literal terror attack unfolding across the Atlantic, Vice hastily deleted the tweet and changed the article title to the toned down, Let’s Get Rid of Mt. Rushmore – this time with an editor’s note at the bottom of the page attempting to explain the change:

Editor’s note: The headline and URL of this story have been updated. We do not condone violence in any shape or form, and the use of “blow up” in the original headline as a rhetorical device was misguided and insensitive. We apologize for the error.

Rhetorical device? The content of the article still supports destroying America’s most celebrated and iconic historic monument dedicated to American presidents. The author literally states he is “onboard” should there ever be “a serious push to blow up Rushmore”:

With the president of the United States basically justifying neo-Nazism, it seems unthinkable that we will ever see a day when there is a serious push to blow up Rushmore and other monuments like it. But if that moment ever arrives, I suspect I’d be onboard.

Cooper further (not so) eloquently calls for leveling the whole place, and presumably all monuments devoted to past US “cults of personality” (as he calls them):

Demystifying the historical figures of the past, pulling them off the great mountain top back down to Earth where they shat, farted, spit, pissed, fucked, raped, murdered, died, and rotted seems like important business for this country. As long as we allow those men to be cults of personality who exist beyond reproach, we’re never going to be able to see them for all of their good and all of their evil.

Disturbingly, the call for leveling such monuments is contained in the conclusion of an article with repeat references equating President Trump with neo-Nazis:

Trump and his white supremacist cohorts believe the reverence some Americans have for these statues is simply respect for history, and that tearing them down is tantamount to ripping pages out of a textbook.

Timestamps. I should probably just take the rest of the day off. pic.twitter.com/jPJwauFf8z

— Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) August 17, 2017

Ironically, the article does acknowledge the truthfulness of Trump’s recent words that we are headed towards a dangerously iconoclastic slippery slope set to end in the demolishing of American history. But the Vice article at the outset essentially says… yes! Let’s do just that:

Donald Trump says removing confederate statues is a slippery slope that could get out of control. Maybe he’s right—would that be such a bad thing?

And if a private citizen said “let’s blow up Mount Rushmore” and published an article which seriously explored destroying the site – an article which was clearly “pro” dynamiting the monument? It doesn’t take much imagination to know who would come knocking if this were anything but a $5.7 billion news organization.