I’ve always thought that the Mount Rushmore monument was weird. I even said so to my mom when we visited there on a road trip when I was six. That was before I learned that Gutzon Borglum’s other major project was the Stone Mountain lost cause monument. Borglum’s whole man over nature ethos is creepy as was his association with the KKK in Georgia.

I’m not the only who thinks Mount Rushmore is weird:

“A member of South Dakota’s House of Representatives went on a podcast and claimed that Mount Rushmore is a “freemason shrine” and a portal for demonic entities to enter and spread communism throughout the country. 

“What the Lord has revealed to me is that Mount Rushmore has a direct ley line to Washington, D.C.,” Joe Donnell, a Republican member of the South Dakota House of Representatives, said in a May 31 episode of the “Now Is the Time” podcast.

“In order to understand the spiritual realm of what we’re facing, we have to realize that in order for the enemy to do anything, it needs the agreement of human beings. In order to be empowered to do more damage he needs the agreement of human beings and oftentimes that comes in the form of an altar that acts as a portal for other demonic things. What we’re really dealing with in that portal is communism. That witchcraft, altar, those things that are happening in the Black Hills, what we’re dealing with is communism. It’s the ideology and all the demonic entities and spirits behind that.”

That’s beyond weird. It’s just plain nuts. If there’s a portal to commie hell, why is it in South Dakota? Does that mean that former South Dakota Senator George McGovern was in on the plot? Nah, he lost to Lucifer in 1972

I gotta give Donnell credit for  having a vivid imagination. It sounds like the plot of a bad horror flick: It Came From Mount Rushmore. A title and concept that Alfred Hitchcock would have surely rejected as far-fetched and downright dumb. That’s the state of the Republican party in 2023.

I just did more research than Donnell has ever done and found this image of presidents who were Masons at the Truman Library’s web site:

Uh oh, three of the giant heads on Borglum’s weird monstrosity were Freemasons. Abe was the only outlier. Does that prove Donnell’s wack-a-doo theory? Hell no.

I decided to go with Abe in the post title because Dr. A and I watched John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln on Independence Day. It’s a fine film that’s full of apocrypha but captures the essence of Abe Lincoln better than more historically accurate movies. It’s certainly more accurate than Donnell’s weird notion of witches, commies, and freemasons gathered at Mount Rushmore.

This could have been a malaka of the week post, but the title gave me license to write about Young Mr. Lincoln. And that is why Joe Donnell is NOT malaka of the week.

The last word goes to Frank Sinatra: