Jay Williams, a former star for the iconic Duke basketball program and brief NBA athlete who has since become a game commentator for ESPN, made an utter fool of himself back in 2023, when he argued that Mount Rushmore should be out of bounds as a tool of comparison because of its connection to “racism” in America.
As background, Williams’s take on the matter came in response to a remark that Steph Curry, famous for his three-point shot, belongs on the “NBA’s Mount Rushmore.” Williams slammed it as a poor analogy because, in his words, the four white men carved into the South Dakota mountain were not the “four best presidents” nor were they head of the executive branch when everyone was “able to vote.”
Sparking the incident was Williams’s ESPN colleague Steven A. Smith, who, when discussing the careers of the Golden State Warriors’ Steph Curry to the Los Angeles Lakers’ Lebron James, made a comment about Curry belonging on Mt. Rushmore, which caused Williams to melt down.
Beginning, he snapped, “Can we first off just stop with the Mount Rushmore talk.” Continuing, he clutched his pearls and said, “They’re not even the four best presidents this country has ever had. Everyone in this room was not even able to vote. I just want to say that off the top. That’s our metric for success? That’s our king?”
Also chiming in was Jalen Rose, who blasted the famous monument with even more vitriol, saying it was built on stolen land and “on top of dead” Native American bodies. “Can we retire using Mount Rushmore? That should be offensive to all of us, especially Native Americans, Indigenous people who were the first people here before Christopher Columbus,” Rose said in a viral video on Twitter, per Fox News. “That land was stolen from them when it was discovered that it contained gold.
“And 25 years later, to add insult to injury, four American presidents were put on what we call Mount Rushmore on the top of the dead bodies that is buried right underneath. So, I call for you and for myself — I’m owning this, too — let’s stop using the term ‘Mount Rushmore’ when we’re talking about our favorite rappers, talking about our favorite movies, talking about our favorite players,” he added.
Watch the ESPN panel here:
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Mount Rushmore is one of the left’s latest focal points. It was famously the backdrop of one of the most remarkable presidential speeches a few years ago when Donald Trump staged an epic July 4th event there. Corporate media simply hated Trump and hated what he was doing there. At the time, CNN took the very predictable route of claiming Trump was stirring up racism and dredging up the country’s horrible past. CNN wrote in 2020:
On a very different Fourth of July holiday, when many Americans are wrestling with the racist misdeeds of the country’s heroes and confronting an unrelenting pandemic with surging cases, their commander-in-chief is attempting to drag America backward – stirring fear of cultural change while flouting the most basic scientific evidence about disease transmission.
In a jaw-dropping speech that amounted to a culture war bonfire, President Donald Trump used the backdrop of Mount Rushmore Friday night to frame protesters as a nefarious left-wing mob that intends to “end America.” Those opponents, he argued, are engaged in a “merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children.”