Trump at Mount Rushmore, Lincoln at the Emancipation

Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican President of the United States. If the progressive woke earthly powers had their way, Donald Trump may have been the last.

July 17, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

Over the fifteen years that I have been writing a weekly post for this blog, the month of July has always been a bit of a disappointment. As many readers know, there is no air conditioning where I live. Residing on the top floor of a four-story dormitory setting where 24 grown men must share one bathroom with two toilets, the stifling heat, lack of activity and seasonally subdued reader attention have all combined to strip away much of my enthusiasm to write in July.

So I chose an older post as a summer rerun for this week. July is also often a slow news time. I chose this post just before the events of July 13 when a political rally for Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania exploded in news across the globe. I had wrestled with whether I should rethink my choice for this week’s post.

After I first wrote it a few months before the 2020 election, I was assailed in messages from a few readers for having the audacity to write of him without the usual vague sense of vitriol that so much of the rest of the media utilizes for all things Trump.

“Vitriol” is an interesting word with a strange etymology that results in nearly opposite usages. It refers to bitter or corrosive feelings about someone or something. In chemistry, vitriol is another name for sulfuric acid which can corrode metal. But in another usage it refers to having the properties of glass, transparent and resilient.

I hope you don’t have the impression that I like Donald Trump, or that I now endorse him for president. Priests should probably refrain from such things even though we all have opinions like everyone else. What I do like is the idea of Donald Trump, of the fact that a non-politician with no apparent appreciation for Washington, DC politics-as-usual can be elected president against overwhelming odds. Only in America!

What I do not like, at all, is a mindset that has grown in U.S. politics that is mercilessly set against him. If you turned on MSNBC News anytime of day or night before the assassination attempt against Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania you would witness exactly what I mean. Even MSNBC has lightened up just a bit, but only because it is politically insensitive to attack a presidential candidate who has just been shot.

I support the right of U.S. citizens to resist a domineering woke agenda that seeks to nullify your vote with its own prejudice by denouncing Donald Trump at every turn. It is for voters, and not the elite of Washington politics, or the entrenched progressive news media, to decide this coming election. Every possible subversive effort has been employed to confiscate your will and turn your vote against this man. It is not right and it is certainly not American. And when all the lawfare and rhetoric failed to circumvent the will of the people and steal this election, the unthinkable happened. Those subversive earthly powers utilized a delusional young man with a rifle and a bullet to ultimately do what all the pundits could not do.

Donald Trump survived — seemingly miraculously — and now it seems that the rest just enters into history. History is the real subject of this 2020 post that I have chosen to rewrite and update for this 2024 summer rerun:

Trump at Mount Rushmore, Lincoln at the Emancipation

American psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002 for his research into the power of “availability bias,” a sort of groupthink in which a proposition is widely accepted as true merely because it has been repeated in the media. Kahneman’s research challenged the long-held view that people make decisions rationally, based on their own self-interest. His research demonstrated that groupthink can result in irrational decisions that are contrary to self-interest.

The threat of groupthink, though not in so many words, was at the heart of George Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, about a future totalitarian society in which human will is controlled by established norms. Since Orwell wrote his landmark novel, studies have shown that decision-making groups often fall victim to groupthink, a phenomenon that excessively demands group concurrence and condemns dissent. Members blindly convince themselves that the group’s position is correct by suppressing all evidence to the contrary. It sounds very familiar.

We have heard a multitude of examples in recent months. Some of our leaders have embraced the groupthink, for example, that Covid-19 is easily spread among Catholics at Mass but not at all among mass protesters, plunderers, and rioters in a “woke” demand to cleanse history. Any dissent from the approved doctrine is met with group condemnation.

History would call this “The March of Folly.” My favorite among the many historians I have read is Barbara Tuchman, twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize. And my favorite among her books is The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam. In it, Dr. Tuchman analyzes four turning points in history that illustrate a group’s actions against self-interest.

Her choices for this analysis were: (1) the Trojan War; (2) the breakup of the Holy See provoked by the Renaissance Popes (I wrote of this one in “Michelangelo and the Hand of God: Scandal at the Vatican”); (3) the loss of the British loss of the American Colonies by King George III, and (4) the United States’ folly in Vietnam. Barbara Tuchman’s Introduction contains a wise caveat that should be the hallmark of every historian:

“Nothing is more unfair than to judge men of the past with the ideas of the present.”

— The March of Folly, p.5

Were Barbara Tuchman alive in some distant future, I wonder if she might add a fifth turning point: The folly of 2020, the point at which America turned on itself by destroying its monuments to history, committing on a national scale the same unfair judgment of the past that Tuchman described above.

History must be clearly understood by every generation lest it repeat itself. When the Third Reich came to power in 1939 Germany, it was all about amassing power by convincing the people that certain of their neighbors, and certain of their neighbors’ ideas, were dangerous. Books were burned. Monuments were destroyed by fired-up mobs. Businesses were looted and burned to the ground. The past was stripped away from the present.

An Independence Day Address at Mount Rushmore

The usual critics were loudly vocal, but not exactly truthful, about President Trump’s speech on the eve of Independence Day 2020 before a crowd gathered at Mount Rushmore. The memorial features the heads of Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. The impressively massive sculpture was carved into the granite rim of Mount Rushmore 500 feet above the valley floor. Each face is 60 feet tall. The monument was begun in 1927 and completed in 1941 as the United States entered World War II.

The rhetoric surrounding President Trump’s appearance there has been astonishing. The vile disparagement that took place among much of the U.S. news media is evidenced in these headlines:

“At Mt. Rushmore, Trump Uses Fourth of July Celebration to Stoke a Culture War”

— Los Angeles Times

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“Trump Uses Mount Rushmore Speech to Deliver Divisive Culture War Message”

— New York Times

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“Trump Pushes Racial Divisions, Flouts Virus Rules at Rushmore”

— Associated Press

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“At Mount Rushmore, Trump Exploits Social Divisions, Warns of ‘Left-Wing Cultural Revolution’ in Dark Speech Ahead of Independence Day”

— Washington Post

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“What really struck me about the speech... was that [Trump] spent more time worried about honoring dead confederates. [He] spent all his time talking about dead traitors.”

— Senator Tammy Duckworth at CNN

The claims from Senator Duckworth seemed the most puzzling of all. Even The New York Times, no fan of this President, reported that Mr. Trump “avoided references to the symbols of the Confederacy.” In a later article, the Times added, “[Trump] avoided specifically mentioning anything related to Confederate monuments!” He never mentioned any of the “dead confederates” cited by Senator Duckworth who appears not to have actually heard the speech.

During the presidential primaries of 2016, some of the same media reported on Senator Bernie Sanders’ visit to Mount Rushmore. Of the monument itself, Mr. Sanders was quoted: “It really does make one proud to be an American.” When Mr. Trump spoke there on the eve of Independence Day 2020, a CNN reporter characterized it as a speech “in front of a monument to two slave owners on land wrestled away from Native Americans.”

Somehow between 2016 and 2020, Mount Rushmore — and America itself — became a symbol of oppression to the media left. So did Donald Trump. The Wall Street Journal’s assessment was vastly different, however.

In “Trump at Mount Rushmore,” a lead editorial of July 6, 2020, editors commended the President for delivering “one of the best speeches of his presidency”:

“Contrary to the media reporting, the America Mr. Trump described is one of genuine racial equality and diversity. He highlighted the central idea of the Declaration of Independence that ‘all men are created equal.’ As he rightly put it, ‘These immortal words set in motion the unstoppable march of freedom’ that included the abolition of slavery.”

In a published Letter to the Editor on July 6, 2020, one Wall Street Journal reader wrote that after following all the anti-Trump Facebook rhetoric about the Mount Rushmore speech, he conducted a little experiment. He posted an excerpt of the speech on Facebook, but without attribution. The passage was:

“We are the country of Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, and Frederick Douglass. We are the land of Wild Bill Hickock and Buffalo Bill Cody. We are the nation that gave rise to the Wright Brothers, the Tuskegee Airmen, Harriet Tubman, Clara Barton, Jesse Owens, General George Patton, the great Louis Armstrong, Alan Shepherd, Elvis Presley, and Muhammad Ali. And only America could have produced them all. No other place.”

The passage merited a barrage of Facebook “likes” from the same people who had been condemning the President’s Mount Rushmore speech — obviously without ever actually hearing or reading it.

The Emancipation Memorial

Another debate has been raging over a longstanding Washington, DC monument in Lincoln Park known as the “Emancipation Memorial.” The monument was dedicated on that site in 1876 by Frederick Douglass, a former slave who campaigned for the abolition of slavery. His widely celebrated autobiography described his life as a slave in the South, as a fugitive in the North, and as a prominent African American orator, journalist, and antislavery leader.

In later life Frederick Douglass worked for full civil rights for African Americans while holding several U.S. government positions. Despite his dedication of the Emancipation Monument, he had misgivings about its design. The current controversy over the monument unearthed a previously unknown letter in which Douglass wrote that the former slave depicted there, “while rising, is still on his knees.”

Two Letters in The Wall Street Journal (July 7, 2020) captured the opposing views of the controversial monument. One writer knew its history. The other judged it solely by impressions of the present when separated from its history. I leave it to you to decide which expresses the monument’s original meaning:

• WSJ READER 1: “The image shows a clear hierarchy of power — Abraham Lincoln with elegant clothes dominating Archer Alexander [a former slave] wearing only a piece of cloth... No back story, facts or prestigious titles you wave in our faces will convince people to see ‘emancipation’ there. What might have been questionably allowed in 1892 isn’t acceptable now.”

• WSJ READER 2: “The scene depicted actually happened. Admiral David Dixon Porter accompanied President Lincoln to Richmond to accept the surrender of the Confederacy, and recounted the story in his 1885 memoir. Lincoln was recognized by hundreds of newly freed slaves who crowded him. When one fell to the ground at his feet, Lincoln said, ‘Do not kneel to me. You must kneel only to God and thank Him for your liberty. Liberty is your birthright. God gave it to you as he gave it to all others. It is a sin that you have been deprived of it for so many years.’ It was Admiral Porter’s account that inspired the statue’s design. Little more than one week later, Lincoln was assassinated.”

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this important and timely post. We also recommend these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

Neither Donald Trump nor I Should Wear That Scarlet Letter!

Cardinal Bernard Law on the Frontier of Civil Rights

Wikileaks Found Catholics in the Basket of Deplorables

The Hamas Assault on Israel and the Emperor Who Knew Not God

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

A Soap Opera at CNN Amid the Winds of War

While Russia invaded Ukraine with its nuclear arsenal on high alert, the White House and media were compromised by partisan secrets and selective reporting.

March 9, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

A lot of media angst and ink have been spilled over the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin has silenced Russian media to keep his own citizens from witnessing the horror he has inflicted upon the people of Ukraine. However, the Free World has a media problem of its own. As I began this post on March 4, 2022 my account on Facebook was disabled and taken down. This is the message I received from Facebook: “Your Facebook account has been disabled. This is because your account, or activity on it, doesn’t follow our Community Standards.” The offending post, which Facebook disabled based solely on the title and introductory quote was “Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich: The Rise and Fall of a Moral Panic.”

I actually wrote that post several years ago, and shared it then on Facebook with no problem. This time I shared it on Facebook’s Catholic groups which should have a particular interest in its subject matter. Eighty years ago the government of Germany launched a moral panic accusing and arresting without evidence, 300 Catholic priests on trumped up sexual abuse charges. It was all a fraud, and after many months in prison all but six were exonerated, and even several of them were falsely accused. For unknown reasons, Facebook did not want Catholic groups to see that post. I can no longer share my posts among the fifteen or so established Catholic groups and News groups such as Catholic News Agency on Facebook. But you can. Today, it seems, that the media of the “Free” World cannot abide such a story. We will be reassessing our use of social media, so if you have suggestions, please let us know.

I very much miss Walter Cronkite, the most trusted broadcast journalist of the 20th Century. He was the longtime anchor of CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1981. I grew up with him on my TV screen from the age of nine to almost twenty-nine. Walter Cronkite guided us through the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. From our living rooms, he navigated the Civil Rights movement and the war in Vietnam. He was with us as the nation held its breath in 1969 while Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, and he navigated a long cold war with the Soviet Empire. Yet no one I know could tell me today whether his personal politics leaned left or right.

In his career, Cronkite won five Emmys and the George Polk Journalism Award. He was a newsman and pundit in the strict sense of the term, and I wanted to emulate him. For some today, the word, “pundit” has a negative connotation confused with “spin doctor.” Its origin, however, is the word “pandit” from the Sanskrit word “pad itah” spoken in parts of India and Sri Lanka. It refers to a learned sage or scholar, someone to whom everyone else would be wise to listen.

Few stand out in the news media of today as Walter Cronkite did. I am just a minor voice in modern media, but as I began this post I was surprised to receive an invitation from the PEW Research Center to join its survey of journalists. “The views you share will tell us about experiences of journalists like you across the country.” While writing for Beyond These Stone Walls, I was also invited to serve as a Wall Street Journal Opinion Leader. That may be the reason for my PEW Research Center invitation, but I hope it is also because I try to write truth without political filters. As a result of writing with that in mind, some have come to appreciate Beyond These Stone Walls as a source of truth and reflection about truth. Over the last few years, BTSW has received several citations as a reliable news source at the “In the News” section of Catalyst, the Journal of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.

Our most recent Catalyst citation was for a post that demonstrated a double standard in public perceptions about accused Catholic priests. It was one of the most widely read posts of 2021 and still dominates traffic in 2022. Of interest, that post was widely read and shared by the thousands of readers at the r/Catholicism forum at Reddit. That post was “Bishop Peter A. Libasci Was Set Up by Governor Andrew Cuomo.”

I was happy about its success because that post in particular strove to cover the truth without spin. Its bottom line was something challenging to the news media status quo: that to be accused means to be guilty. In that case, the accused was my own bishop. I also have an unhappy history with him due to some of his actions and policies. Ryan MacDonald laid those out in a most important post, “In the Diocese of Manchester, Transparency and a Hit List.”

But I was proud that I set those concerns aside to take the high road in reporting on the story of allegations against my bishop. I believe him to be innocent of any such suspicion against him. However after publication of my post about a connection between former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and claims in a civil lawsuit against my bishop, I was “permanently banned” from ever again posting content at the Reddit r/Catholicism community. Then BTSW’s invitation for membership in the Catholic Media Association was rescinded without cause or explanation. The reasons for these, and the Facebook dismissal, were political and had nothing to do with the truth of what I posted.

Political Fallout at CNN

Long after posting that first story, above, its connection to former Governor Andrew Cuomo kept it in the neon lights of online interest, something I neither intended nor expected. Because the Governor’s brother, Chris Cuomo, was a lead anchor at CNN, the spotlight of investigation fell on him as well. It was discovered that he used his position as a news anchor to coach his older brother on how to navigate the news media against multiple sexual misconduct allegations. Then similar allegations were leveled at Chris Cuomo as well, among other ethics concerns.

On his way out the CNN door under a cloud, it is suspected by some in the media that he acted as a whistleblower pointing at CNN Executive Director Jeff Zucker for a long term consensual relationship with another CNN upper management employee, Chief Marketing Officer Allison Gollust. In the end, both of them were also forced to resign from CNN under a cloud of ethical concerns amid charges of violations of their due process rights leveled by some of the remaining CNN staffers.

Allison Gollust also once briefly served as Governor Cuomo’s spokesperson. Sources at CNN today claim that Mr. Zucker and Ms. Gollust “pushed hard” to orchestrate and promote a series of CNN interviews between Chris Cuomo and Governor Cuomo while navigating the earlier days of the pandemic. The interviews were for the sole purpose of countering President Donald Trump’s daily news briefs about managing the pandemic. Some staff at CNN now charge that the daily Covid-19 pandemic interviews between the Cuomo brothers set the stage for the very thing for which Chris Cuomo eventually lost his job: a blurring of the borders between news and politics.

The CNN on-air interviews between Chris and Andrew Cuomo were pushed by CNN despite their straddling an ethical line because they were a boost for ratings. Since the presidential election of 2020, ratings at all three of the 24-hour cable news networks plummeted costing the networks billions in advertising dollars, but CNN and MSNBC suffered far more than Fox News. So journalistic ethics took a back seat to ratings concerns at CNN.

This is something I have long noticed. The blurring of news and opinion at all three of these networks spilled over into the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news formats. Ratings and advertising dollars at all three were lagging behind the cable news networks which in turn were lagging behind their pre-2020 election standings. It became clear that former President Donald Trump was the cause.

CNN and MSNBC had to find ways to compete with FOX News which maintained comparatively healthy post election ratings. They could only do this by appealing to their virulently anti-Trump base. So you may have noted, as I did, that at some point around mid-2021 both CNN and MSNBC returned in their prime time news and opinion formats to a daily disparagement of Donald Trump long after he left office. This also spilled over into some print journalism. As I type this post, I have in hand a resent copy of The Week magazine which decidedly leans to the usual journalistic left. The issue I am looking at, dated in mid February 2022, contains one reference to sitting President Joe Biden and five references, all negative, to former president Donald Trump.

Of interest, CNN now plans major changes. After a merger between its parent WarnerMedia with Discovery Inc., former MSNBC producer Chris Licht will become chairman and CEO of CNN Global. He is reported to be planning to adjust CNN’s broadcast format to include an emphasis on hard news and less opinion especially in its prime time schedule.

A Laptop Window onto Corruption

As I write this, Russian President Vladimir Putin is waging a full scale invasion of Ukraine. It is frightening to watch this unfolding reminder of the old Soviet Union and its savage consumption of neighbor states. For the most part, MSNBC and CNN are taking a little break from disparaging Donald Trump, but even now I hear the occasional blame aimed at Trump's foreign policy. We are not at all well served in this partisan distortion of news, but it is even worse than you think. Vladimir Putin knows well that both the sitting President of the United States and the American news media are compromised. There is simply no other way to say this, and I know that, for some, it will label me as a pro-Trump partisan which is not at all the truth.

A few months ago, a reader gifted me with a small book entitled Laptop from Hell by New York Post columnist Miranda Devine. I was interested in the book because I was fascinated by media — and social media — treatment of this story in the months before the 2020 U.S. presidential election. We were a nation in denial about our own addiction to partisan politics, and the news media had become our greatest enabler as it struggled for ratings and advertising dollars. Now, with the Russian thirst for war, the truth of this story is at risk of being buried forever. So please let me do my own small part in preventing this even if it is painful. It is nonetheless the truth.

Our President is compromised, and so is much of our mainstream media. In 2019, drug-addicted Hunter Biden left his laptop at a Mac repair shop in Delaware, and then promptly forgot about it. It was just six days before Joe Biden announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination. Months later, just as the 2020 primaries got underway, the owner of the repair shop discovered the abandoned laptop along with a signed repair invoice from Hunter Biden who never returned to retrieve it. The laptop ended up in the hands of the New York Post, the fourth largest newspaper in the United States.

Hunter Biden was unresponsive to inquiries to ascertain that the laptop was his. He later finally owned it by stating in an interview that “I just wasn’t keeping very good track of my possessions then.” Since no one claimed it in time, the Post began to have it analyzed and discovered the entire contents of its hard drive. Miranda Devine described it as:

“A treasure trove of corporate documents, emails, text messages, photographs and voice recordings spanning a decade. The laptop provided the first evidence that President Joe Biden was involved in his son’s ventures in China, Ukraine and beyond despite repeated denials. Hunter [Biden] had something to sell. He was the son of the vice president who would go on to become the leader of the free world.”

While Joe Biden was vice president, Hunter Biden mysteriously landed a $1 million per year position on the board of Burisma, a Ukraine oil company under suspicion for corruption. Hunter Biden had zero previous experience in that industry. Miranda Devine’s account of the contents of the “Laptop from Hell” reveals a series of emails to Hunter from shady figures in Ukraine demanding that he make good on his position by bringing political pressure to bear to remove a Ukraine prosecutor who had set his sights on investigating Burisma.

Joe Biden, while vice president, then set his own sights on that same prosecutor. In an impromptu speech before the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018, Joe Biden told the story of how he had flown into Kyiv aboard Airforce-2 and threatened to withhold from the Ukraine government $1 billion in U.S. aid unless Prosecutor General Shokin was fired. Vice President Biden boasted:

“I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”

— Laptop from Hell p. 95

In the months leading up to the presidential election of 2020, most of the mainstream media, and the powerful social media platforms at Twitter and Facebook, suppressed this story and many other related accounts covered by the New York Post. This is not about the outcome of that election. It is about trust in government and the news media to cover news without partisan political considerations. The existence of the book, Laptop from Hell by Miranda Devine, and the political efforts to silence it before a national election, now place our trust in both the media and our government at risk in a time of war. As Miranda Devine points out: “Hunter Biden found himself at the center of a titanic struggle between the US and Russia over energy... How the vice president’s son got involved with such a shady operation has always been obscured.”

Truth be told, our president and much of our news and social media credibility are now compromised by this story and Vladimir Putin knows this.

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Update from Father Gordon MacRae: As reported in this post, our Facebook page was taken down on March 4th. On March 8th, after I wrote the above post, I published a short article at Linkedin entitled “Banned by Facebook for a True Story of Anti-Catholic Oppression.”

A few hours after it was published, our Facebook page was reinstated without explanation and is now back online. However, when we attempted to post this post on my Facebook page, Facebook refused it with a message stating that other readers may not agree with it. Welcome to the world of the Facebook Speech Police.

We also want to bring to your attention a new addition to our “Voices from Beyond” section. It was first published a few years ago in the National Catholic Register newspaper, and it was the first time mainstream Catholic media had taken up my case. The article, by Brian Fraga, is “New Hampshire Priest Continues the Long Road to Clear His Name.”

There is more to come next week on the terror unfolding in Ukraine. Please share this post, and please pray for the people of Ukraine and Russia who are now pawns in these current events.