A privileged black athlete and sports commentator whose includes starring for the iconic Duke basketball program and playing (briefly) in the NBA before transitioning to the booth demonstrated his allegiance to wokeism by suggesting comparisons to Mount Rushmore were out of bounds because of the country’s alleged founding on racism.
Jay Williams, who has never known hardship in his adult life and lives a truly 1% lifestyle, sounded off on the idea of saying great athletes, in this case commenting on a remark that Steph Curry belongs on the “NBA’s Mount Rushmore,” 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.”
“Can we first off just stop with the Mount Rushmore talk,” Williams said in response to ESPN colleague Steven A. Smith discussing the careers of the Golden State Warriors’ Steph Curry to the Los Angeles Lakers’ Lebron James. “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?”
Jay Williams encourages everyone to stop the Mount Rushmore talk pic.twitter.com/S799VOQoeZ
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) May 4, 2023
Unsurprisingly, the woke Disney-owned ESPN employee is hardly the first millionaire black man to espouse the notion America is racist and oppressive and therefore the Mount Rushmore claim is “offensive.”
Jalen Rose, who has really gone off his rocker in his later commentary years, 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.
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.”
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