USA - Corporate-owned Vice Magazine posted an article urging “Let’s Blow Up Mount Rushmore” which called for Americans’ politics, culture, and history to be purified by political fire. “Let’s take with us the righteous ideas and beliefs and leave everything else on the pyre,” says the article about Rushmore by Wilbert Cooper, who is a senior editor at Vice.com.
The media company is part-owned by Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox, and by A&E Networks, which is fully owned by Hearst Communications and Disney-ABC Television Group. According to Cooper:
"More than ever, old monuments to famous white American men are being threatened … [because] the only way we can help America fulfill her promise is by shedding the faith and facing the truth. A big part of that process probably involves taking those men we’ve placed so high and bringing them back down to Earth where we can judge them for who they really were… 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."
The article’s headline was later changed to “Let’s Get Rid of Mount Rushmore.” Cooper argues that the nation’s historical markers and monuments help preserve a political system of racial exploitation and inequality, and should be erased to help build a new society.