Having carefully read Trump's Mount Rushmore speech and analyzed it line by line, I will now look at the mainstream media headlines.

Go to the previous post for my untainted assessment of the speech. I will now see what's being said:

The front page of the Washington Post has "Ahead of July 4, Trump exploits racial, social divisions/In a dark speech at the foot of Mount Rushmore's monument, President Trump focused on what he described as a 'left-wing cultural revolution' that aims to rewrite U.S. history and erase its heritage" — reworded at the article page as "At Mount Rushmore, Trump exploits social divisions, warns of ‘left-wing cultural revolution’ in dark speech ahead of Independence Day."

Oh, it's a "dark speech." It was full of optimism and painted the beautiful version of American history, but what the Washington Post saw is darkness. But it certainly did attack the left — for its dark vision. The article brings that out, giving the most highlighted position to this quote from Trump:

"The radical ideology attacking our country advances under the banner of social justice. But in truth, it would demolish both justice and society. It would transform justice into an instrument of division and vengeance and turn our free society into a place of repression, domination and exclusion. They want to silence us, but we will not be silenced."

The New York Times has "Trump Uses Mount Rushmore Speech to Deliver Divisive Culture War Message/Down in the polls and failing to control a raging pandemic, the president cast himself as waging battle against a 'new far-left fascism' that imperils American values and seeks to erase history." The speech is full of material that can be used to make the argument that Trump was pulling Americans together, but he was calling on us to reject the destructive message that he ascribed to the far left. The left is very conspicuously "waging battle" against American values, so it's not as though Trump is starting it. He's fighting back. Whether he's fighting for America — as he says — or because he's "down in the polls and failing to control a raging pandemic" is a matter of opinion.

The quote the NYT puts in the most highlighted position is:

"Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children. Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.”

The CNN headline is "Trump tries to drag America backward on a very different July 4th." He's "stirring fear of cultural change." The highlighted quote is "merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children."

NPR has "Trump Flouts Virus Rules, Warns Of 'New Far-Left Fascism' In Speech Ahead Of July 4th." One way to spin the speech is to downplay the text and stress the disease risk in holding an event at all. Like CNN, NPR highlights "merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children."

Politico has "Trump seeks to claim the mantle of history in fiery Mount Rushmore address/The president’s speech, part of a July 4 weekend celebration, comes after weeks of protests against racism and police brutality that have forced broader discussions over America's monuments." What's most interesting about that is that it's not a big headline on the front page. In fact, it's squirreled away under the much larger headline, "Yes, Biden is thrashing Trump. But he could still blow it/Biden’s polling lead over Trump is significant, though not unprecedented." I'm going to interpret this to mean that Political saw an effective speech and is afraid and seeing an immediate need to boost Biden. The Biden article is long, and it's not about any news, just speculation about what could go wrong:

Biden might say the wrong thing at a debate, or have an awkward moment in an interview or at a press conference.... Biden’s campaign might make poor decisions about spending allocations in the battleground states.... It is possible that Trump before November will announce a coronavirus vaccine.... And it is possible that the economy will improve....

Oh, heavens, no! Not a coronavirus vaccine and an improved economy! The double whammy!!

Trump's Mount Rushmore speech came on too late for me, but...

... I've got the transcript, and I'm going to live-blog my reading of it. I'm fixing punctuation as I go and adding boldface:

There could be no better place to celebrate America’s independence than beneath this magnificent, incredible, majestic mountain and monument to the greatest Americans who have ever lived.

Somebody went heavy on the alliteration, but "incredible" sneaked in there. He's on the side of the monuments, not the destroyers of monuments.

The superlative — "the greatest Americans who have ever lived" — is a provocation. Not only is he defending these 4 men against the recent attacks, he's saying they are greater than every other American in history — greater than Frederick Douglass, greater than Harriet Tubman, greater than all of them. He didn't have to say the greatest. He could have said "among the greatest."

It would mean something just to call them "great" at all and not to qualify it with something like, though they did not escape the moral failings characteristic of their time. But he went big. He put the 4 above everyone else, which is the message of the mountain.

Today we pay tribute to the exceptional lives and extraordinary legacies of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt.

He's got the great men on his side, not like those people who want to tear down statues of all of them.

I am here as your president to proclaim before the country and before the world, this monument will never be desecrated, these heroes will never be defamed, their legacy will never ever be destroyed, their achievements will never be forgotten, and Mount Rushmore will stand forever as an eternal tribute to our forefathers and to our freedom.

That's big! Very grand. Very much a stand against the protesters and rioters... without mentioning them.  This is hyperbole, because Trump cannot protect the monument forever, and indeed, an understanding of geology would tell you that it's impossible for the monument to stand forever as an eternal tribute.

But he's not promising. He's proclaiming. I think of the proclamation on the plinth of Ozymandias. You can proclaim it is eternal, but that doesn't make it eternal. I'm going to live forever! I'm going to learn how to fly! Sing it joyously, but you're still going to die some day.

"There are many Lakota who praise the memorial.... But others argue that a mountain-size sculpture is a singularly ill-chosen tribute. When Crazy Horse was alive..."

"... he was known for his humility, which is considered a key virtue in Lakota culture. He never dressed elaborately or allowed his picture to be taken. (He is said to have responded, 'Would you steal my shadow, too?') Before he died, he asked his family to bury him in an unmarked grave. There’s also the problem of the location. The Black Hills are known, in the Lakota language, as He Sapa or Paha Sapa—names that are sometimes translated as 'the heart of everything that is.'... Nick Tilsen, an Oglala who runs an activism collective in Rapid City, told me that Crazy Horse was 'a man who fought his entire life' to protect the Black Hills. 'To literally blow up a mountain on these sacred lands feels like a massive insult to what he actually stood for,' he said. In 2001, the Lakota activist Russell Means likened the project to 'carving up the mountain of Zion.' Charmaine White Face, a spokesperson for the Sioux Nation Treaty Council, called the memorial a disgrace. 'Many, many of us, especially those of us who are more traditional, totally abhor it,' she told me. 'It’s a sacrilege. It’s wrong.'"

From "Who Speaks for Crazy Horse?/The world’s largest monument is decades in the making and more than a little controversial" by Brooke Jarvis (in The New Yorker).

This is an excellent article about the twisted commercialism of the gigantic unfinished Crazy Horse monument, which is run by the Ziolkowski family and seems to work for tourists as some kind of antidote to Mount Rushmore.

I wanted to give this post the tag "humility," but I only have "humiliation" and "modesty." "Humiliation" is plainly wrong, but is "modesty" okay? Wikipedia's article "Modesty" says "This article is about body modesty. For the concept of modesty in a broader sense, see humility," so I'm going to go with the tag "modesty," and please understand that I mean it in the broader sense that Wikipedia treats at "Humility":

Humility is an outward expression of an appropriate inner, or self regard, and is contrasted with humiliation which is an imposition, often external, of shame upon a person. Humility may be misappropriated as ability to suffer humiliation through self-denouncements which in itself remains focused on self rather than low self-focus.

Humility, in various interpretations, is widely seen as a virtue which centers on low self-preoccupation, or unwillingness to put oneself forward, so it is in many religious and philosophical traditions, it contrasts with narcissism, hubris and other forms of pride and is an idealistic and rare intrinsic construct that has an extrinsic side.

"Why had I dragged my family — my wife and our Snapchatting 12-year-old daughter and our longhaired, talkative 9-year-old son — away from work and school to see, of all places, Mount Rushmore?"

Asks Sam Anderson in a NYT Magazine article with a title that caught my attention, "Why Does Mount Rushmore Exist?/This gargantuan shrine to democracy has never felt so surreal." How does anybody know the how surreal Mount Rushmore has felt over its close-to-one-century existence? Whose feelings have counted and why does Sam Anderson — speaking of feelings — feel that he should behave as if he's the arbiter of surrealism?

But now I'm wondering why he's taking his children out of school to go on a trip? Is truancy just some concept relevant to other classes of people than those who write for the NYT?

Here's Anderson struggling with the question in the post title:

I couldn’t say, exactly. All I knew was that I seemed to be suffering a crisis of scale. America was taking up a larger part of my mind than it ever had before. It was dominating my internal landscape, crowding out other thoughts, blocking my view of regular life. I couldn’t tell if it was reaching its proper size, growing the way a problem tends to grow just before a solution is found, or if it was swelling the way an organ does before it fails and bursts.

Is this about Trump? Wait. I get it. America, growing way beyond its proper size and failing and bursting. Big President heads carved out of a South Dakota rockscape in the 1920s and 30s are showing us the horror of Donald Trump's dangerously swelled ego that's about to blow.

And it began to seem foreign to me, our American obsession with size. We are born a fantasy of bigness. We are tall and strapping, with big hats and big hair and loud clothes and booming voices....

We are? 

Why does goodness have to be huge? It is a dangerous belief....

But who believes it?

"A Georgia artist wants to add Outkast to the Confederate version of Mount Rushmore."

"In his petition on MoveOn.org, which stemmed from a Facebook exchange with another animator, [Mack] Williams argues that Stone Mountain, though 'an impressive and historic work of art,' is unacceptable. It 'only represents a small, regrettable time in the history of the Peach State. It’s high time we added a bit more of our history and culture to this monument,' he writes in a proposal to Georgia lawmakers: 'I believe that Daddy Fat Sacks [Big Boi] and Three Stacks [Andre 3000] should be carved riding in a Cadillac (as is their wont). This will help the new carving blend nicely with the Confederates who are on horseback. Outkast are two of the greatest Georgians in the history of our state. It’s about time the Empire State of the South paid proper tribute to them, while also improving a great monument and tourist attraction.'"

I was hesitant to post this, on the theory that it might be racist. But the petition is on MoveOn.org, so it's not politically incorrect, right? The article is at Quartz. I don't know what Quartz is. Hmm. Seems to be an offshoot of The Atlantic. That feels safe. I'll add a poll (for further insulation):

Is it racist to be drawn to this story of adding Outkast to Stone Mountain?

Yes.

No.

Only if you love Stone Mountain.

 

pollcode.com free polls

"The National Park Service placed cones along highway viewing areas outside Mount Rushmore this week, barring visitors from pulling over and taking pictures..."

Cones! The dreaded cones!

After I read that, this song verse played in my head:

If you drive a car, I'll tax the street,
If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat.
If you get too cold I'll tax the heat,
If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet.

ADDED: Meade reads this post and asks: "Was it even a federal highway?" Yeah, was it the interstate? Why don't they close down the whole interstate highway system? Obviously, they're not doing everything they can, they're just choosing particular things, trying to be annoying in just the right way to sculpt public opinion. They're poking at us. With orange cones. And we are annoyed. But which way are we annoyed?

AND: If the giant head of the President has blocked your sight line to the giant heads of the Presidents, here's another sculpture for you:



ALSO: The government doesn't seem to know that a lot of those visitors to South Dakota ride motorcycles. A motorcycle can get right in there between the cones.

IN THE COMMENTS: TosaGuy said:

I lived in South Dakota for five years. Orange comes don't stop anyone from doing anything in the land where every sign on a rural road has a shotgun blast in it.

Mr Obama, tear down your Barrycades!

Hagar said:

This has to be State Highway 244 that goes by Mt. Rushmore. U.S. Route 16A is farther away, and, of course, neither has anything to do with the interstate system. However, South Dakota, like every other state, receives Federal money for their highway systems through the FHWA, and per Murphy's Golden Rule, whoever controls the gold gets to rule.

That's not true in Wisconsin! Scott Walker resisted the pressure to shut down state parks.

No Federal money comes without strings, but in this case I think the FHWA would have to side with the Park Service, and I think it is not like they have any actual jurisdiction; all they could do would be to threaten to be difficult and withhold future funding for this road (and other projects?), I think.

Yeah, that too happened in Wisconsin, after Scott Walker rejected the federal money for a "high speed" train. But let's remember that at some point, conditions on spending count as coercion and the federal government cannot force state government to do its work.

Russell Means "styled himself a throwback to ancestors who resisted the westward expansion of the American frontier..."

"... and, with theatrical protests that brought national attention to poverty and discrimination suffered by his people, became arguably the nation’s best-known Indian since Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse."

Russell Means, dead from esophageal cancer at the age of 72.

He rose to national attention as a leader of the American Indian Movement in 1970 by directing a band of Indian protesters who seized the Mayflower II ship replica at Plymouth, Mass., on Thanksgiving Day. The boisterous confrontation between Indians and costumed “Pilgrims” attracted network television coverage and made Mr. Means an overnight hero to dissident Indians and sympathetic whites.

Later, he orchestrated an Indian prayer vigil atop the federal monument of sculptured presidential heads at Mount Rushmore....

Theatrical protests...

Religious monuments, government speech, Justice Breyer's "freak out" test, and Justice Stevens's Vietnam memorial hypothetical.

Dahlia Lithwick covers the oral argument in Pleasant Grove City v. Summum, the case about whether a city that has put up a donated 10 Commandments monument in a public park is stuck having to put up some other donated monument. (Here's the PDF of the transcript.) It shouldn't matter that the other monument represents a weird religion, should it? "Weird" is Lithwick's word:

With its pyramids, and mummification, and nectars, and hairless blue aliens, Summum is an existential stew of transcendental Gnosticism and particle physics: Isaac Luria meets Star Trek Voyager.

Lithwick quickly quips that it's always the other person's religion that seems weird, while your own religion seems "rational." But the reason the 10 Commandments seem more acceptable than the Summum "Seven Aphorisms" is not so much that we are not members of Summum -- maybe a few of you are -- it's that the 10 Commandments are a component of a long tradition that is elaborately integrated into the history of the United States.

That is the reason -- or part of the reason -- why the Supreme Court found -- in Van Orden v. Perry -- that it didn't violate the Establishment Clause for the state of Texas to have a 10 Commandments monument on its state capitol grounds. By the way, the 10 Commandments monument in Pleasant Grove is basically identical to the monument in Van Orden. The context is a little different though, in that the Van Orden monument has been where it was for more than 40 years, and the Pleasant Grove 10 Commandments only dates back to 1971. Also, the city of Pleasant Grove was founded by Mormons, and the 10 Commandments monument isn't the Mormon version of the 10 Commandments, so it doesn't reflect the history of the city in quite the same way.

Back to Lithwick:

In 2003, Summum's founder, Summum "Corky" Ra, requested permission to donate a monument to the park celebrating the Seven Aphorisms upon which their beliefs are based. (The Seven Aphorisms are, in brief: the principles of psychokinesis, correspondence, vibration, opposition, rhythm, cause and effect, and gender.) Summum holds that these aphorisms were revealed to Moses at Mount Sinai, but he demurred because his people were not yet ready for them. The Decalogue was the rewrite.

Not surprisingly, the city doesn't want this monument in its park. But if they accepted the 10 Commandments monument from the donor (the Fraternal Order of Eagles), does it violate freedom of speech to reject the message Summum wants to express? Is it unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination to favor the Judeo-Christian speech -- in monument form -- over the similarly stone-carved Summum speech?

Summum isn't before the court as a religion case. It was brought as a free speech case, and, as Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice learns about three minutes into oral argument this morning, if he wins this case as a result of the court's free speech jurisprudence, he will be back in five years to lose it under the court's religion doctrine. The more zealously the city claims ownership of its Ten Commandments monument, the more it looks to be promoting religion in violation of the Constitution's Establishment Clause.

Chief Justice John Roberts puts it to him this way: "You're really just picking your poison. The more you say that the monument is 'government speech' to get out of the Free Speech Clause, the more you're walking into a trap under the Establishment Clause. … What is the government doing supporting the Ten Commandments?"

Sekulow replies that the display is 100 percent Establishment Clause kosher in light of [Van Orden and its companion case McCreary]. Justice Stephen Breyer was the deciding vote in each of those cases, which—read together—stand for the current Third Aphorism of Religion Cases: Government establishment of religion is only impermissible when it freaks out Justice Stephen Breyer.

Is that really the law, you may ask, or is that some kind of joke? Here's the post I wrote about the cases at the time. Breyer's opinion was the deciding vote, and he eschewed any clear rule, opting instead for what he called called "legal judgment," "tak[ing] account of context and consequences measured in light of" the purposes of the religion clauses -- promoting tolerance and freedom.

Lithwick's line -- "Government establishment of religion is only impermissible when it freaks out Justice Stephen Breyer" -- is a joke with some truth to it -- and also some serious inaccuracy. It assumes a conclusion that is in issue: that the monument is a "government establishment of religion." And Breyer seems like too cool a character to be "freaked out" by anything. Plus, he votes against government religious expression much more than we'd see on anything like a "freak out" standard. (See McCreary.) It would make more sense to say Breyer permits government religious speech when the idea of courts stopping it freaks him out.

Lithwick notes that Breyer signaled his dissatisfaction with the doctrinal rules -- the "artificial kinds of conceptual framework." Breyer sent very similar signals at oral argument in Van Orden, which I noted at the time.

But it looks as though there is room for a clear rule here:

Justice Samuel Alito observes that there is a difference between free speech, in the classic sense of protests, leafleting, and speech-making, and hauling around massive granite monuments, then demanding public-forum analysis be applied to "the Washington Monument or the Jefferson Memorial." Joseffer says that when the government is "acting as curator," it can engage in viewpoint discrimination. In other words, it can choose the speech. "You can't run a museum if you have to accept everything, right?" says Scalia.

When government takes on the role of curator, it is no longer a question of the free speech of the original speaker. The government that chooses or rejects objects for presentation in one of its own displays is exercising its own speech, and it doesn't violate anyone else's free speech rights. It might violate the Establishment Clause, but that is another question.

Pamela Harris has 30 minutes to represent Summum, and Roberts hits her with the hypos: "You have a Statue of Liberty; do we have to have a statue of despotism? Do we have to put any president who wants to be on Mount Rushmore?"....

Even the most doctrine-loving justices seem to be bothered by the practical problem of city parks becoming cluttered with hate monuments, weird stuff, and, eventually, rusted-out cars.

I think it's pretty obvious that the city will win as the Justices (like Scalia) who support free speech for the government will have the support of the Justices (like Breyer) who look at real-world consequences and think practical thoughts.

But there still should be some hand-wringing over the one hypothetical that really did freak out everyone -- well, not Scalia, but almost everyone: What if the United States had decided to express itself by excluding the names of gay soldiers from the Vietnam memorial? Justice Stevens posed the hypothetical, and the Justices struggle with it. From the transcript:

JUSTICE BREYER: That seems to be the problem here. And what I have in this is the -- the problem I have is that we seem to be applying these subcategories in a very absolute way. Why can't we call this what it is -- it's a mixture of private speech with Government decisionmaking -- and ask the question, as we do in election cases, is the restriction proportionate to a legitimate objective? I know how you're going to answer that question. You're going to say: Of course, it is. But what's interesting me is, are we bound in these cases to apply what I think of as an artificial kind of conceptual framework or are we free to ask what seems to me to be at the heart of the matter? The answer to Justice Stevens's hypothetically is: Of course the Government can't do that because it's disproportionate.

JUSTICE STEVENS: I didn't get the answer. Did you --

MR. JOSEFFER [representing the United States, as amicus curiae]: Yes, the Government can choose to memorialize who it wants on the mall. When the Government is -- now, to be clear, that's under the Free Speech Clause.

JUSTICE BREYER: So what is the answer to the -- what is the answer to Justice Stevens's hypothetical? What is the answer to the homosexual hypothetical? What is the answer?

Breyer seems to be verging on freak-out mode there.

MR. JOSEFFER: The only question --

JUSTICE BREYER: Because that tests the theory.

MR. JOSEFFER: Well, as a matter of the Free Speech Clause, there are no limits on the Government's ability to speak freely. Under the Equal Protection Clause, the Establishment Clause, perhaps the Due Process Clause, there might be thought to be independent checks on the Government's speech. But the Free Speech Clause, whatever else it does, does not prevent the Government from speaking freely.

JUSTICE SCALIA: It seems to me the Government could disfavor homosexuality just as it could disfavor abortion, just as it can disfavor a number of other things that in -- in many States people are free to do. The Government can disfavor all of it, can't it?

MR. JOSEFFER: The Government would be powerless to do anything if it cannot first formulate and then express its own viewpoints....

JUSTICE KENNEDY: Does the law always require us to adopt an all-or-nothing position? Aren't there some extreme cases indicated by the hypothetical where the First Amendment does enter in? Do we have to decide this case that it's all or nothing?

So will the city win with a clearly stated rule, will the city win with a "legal judgment" based on the whole context, or will the city win based on a clearly stated rule that has an escape clause comprising Justice Stevens's Vietnam memorial hypothetical?

ADDED: Lawprof Chris Lund reads the transcript:

... Summum argues that the display was the Eagles' message in 1971, and it's the Eagles' message now. But that claim is really hard to square with the fact that the display has been owned and controlled by the government and has been sitting in a government park for 36 years. The Eagles haven't really been involved since 1971 -- so how is this their speech? So Summum's counsel says that the crucial thing is this -- it can't be the government's speech until the City officially adopts it by some sort of resolution....

JUSTICE SOUTER: So this case -- your claim would disappear if this town in Utah had passed an ordinance saying we adopt the Ten Commandments Monument?

MS. HARRIS: It would, Justice Souter. We would no longer have an equal access right going forward --

JUSTICE SOUTER: But that's -- I mean, if that's all that's involved here, we're engaging in kind of a -- almost a silly exercise in formality.

Now Summum's counsel tries to say it's not a mere formality. She suggests that much of the Mormon population might object to the display because it's not the Mormon version of the Ten Commandments.... But besides being arguably a formality, it's difficult to see where the "official resolution" requirement would be coming from in terms of precedent or principle....

Lund thinks Summum may lose 9-0.