As more professionals begin to rely on artificial-intelligence tools in their work, could their hard-earned skills atrophy?
That possibility is a growing concern for medical specialists, computer scientists and other workers. Seventy per cent of nurses and 77% of physicians, for example, are worried about losing their skills because of over-reliance on AI systems, according to a survey of US health-care workers published earlier this month.
Their fear might be justified. Evidence suggests that AI-driven ‘deskilling’ is starting to happen in medicine, computer science and other fields. Researchers are now discussing how to preserve important human expertise in the age of AI.
“Just being aware that this phenomenon exists hopefully provokes some self-reflection about which skills people want to maintain and which they’re willing to outsource” to AI tools, says Kevin Crowston, an information scientist at Syracuse University in New York.
Spoiled by AI?
A study of physicians in Poland who specialize in endoscopy — the use of flexible probes to examine the inside of the human body — shows how quickly AI tools can erode human abilities. The physicians, who had all performed at least 2,000 colonoscopies during their careers, were given access to an AI system that analyses colonoscopy images in real time and flags a type of precancerous intestinal lesion called an adenoma. The tool was available to the specialists on some days but not on others.
Once physicians began using it, their performance dropped significantly whenever the system was unavailable. During the three-month period before the AI tool was introduced, the specialists found at least one adenoma during 28.4% of colonoscopies. During the three-month period after the tool was introduced, the adenoma detection rate for colonoscopies performed without AI assistance decreased to 22.4%.
The findings, published last October in The Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology, suggest that even highly skilled professionals might get worse at tasks that their job requires as they become more dependent on AI tools, says Robert Wachter, a physician at the University of California, San Francisco, who is the author of a book on how AI tools are transforming health care. The study authors say that continuous exposure to such tools can cause clinicians to become “less motivated, less focused, and less responsible when making cognitive decisions without AI assistance”.
Co-author Yuichi Mori, a physician-researcher at the University of Oslo, says that more studies are needed to confirm the phenomenon. But people who use AI tools should be aware that they risk losing some of their skills, he adds. “There is no established solution against deskilling right now. It should be a very hot research topic in the next decade.”
No lesson learnt
To investigate whether skills are being lost in the field of computer science, researchers at the AI firm Anthropic in San Francisco, California, designed a randomized controlled trial in which 52 software engineers were asked to perform a basic coding task. During the exercise, all 52 participants could search the web and access instructions on how to do the task. Half of the participants were prompted to use an AI assistant as well.
Afterwards, all of the software engineers were asked to complete a quiz about what they had learnt from the task. The participants who had used an AI assistant did significantly worse on the quiz than those who hadn’t: the average score was 50% in the AI group versus 67% in the non-AI group. The AI-assisted participants did particularly poorly on questions that required them to diagnose errors in the code, which suggests that they had failed to learn the concepts behind the code that they had just produced. The study was posted on the preprint server arXiv ahead of peer review.
The findings are of concern, especially for students and young professionals in the field, says Crowston, who is researching how the use of generative AI tools is changing the way that software developers learn and retain coding skills. “Now you have this very odd disconnect between performance and learning,” he says. “People can perform at a pretty high level, because they’re basically borrowing skills from the AI, but they are not developing those skills themselves.”
Outsourcing cognition
Other technologies have made particular skills obsolete in the past, notes Tapani Rinta-Kahila, an information-systems researcher at the Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki. For example, GPS navigation systems have eroded people’s navigation skills. Generative AI tools, however, are “the first technology that automates various cognitive faculties around thinking and interpretation, which were long considered unique human skills.”
Rinta-Kahila’s own work reinforces these concerns. In 2018, he published a study on a group of accountants who had been using an automated, non-AI accounting system continuously for more than a decade. His team found that, when the tool was taken away, the accountants had forgotten how to do several routine work tasks. He anticipates that AI systems will affect work in various ways as they take over basic tasks that were once performed by early-career professionals. “Next generations of programmers may not understand the foundations of coding that well at all, if they lack the hands-on experience,” he says. “The same goes for many other knowledge-intensive professions, such as accounting and law.”
To prevent AI-driven skill erosion, people need to be aware of how much they are offloading to generative AI tools, he says. They also need to understand exactly how generative AI models work and what their limitations are — and should avoid trusting AI outputs without questioning them. “People need to manage the competing dynamics of relying on generative AI and staying mindfully vigilant.”
The Trump administration will not seek new bids to repair the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said Sunday as he faced new questions about the troubled project and the taxpayer money involved.
Like President Donald Trump, Burgum said he was 100% sure that vandals caused the damage to the century-old Reflecting Pool on the National Mall. Trump has charged that a 350-foot gash was cut into the pool’s liner in the midst of recent renovations, while Burgum described it as multiple cuts adding up to that figure. He also said the pool would have to be at least partially drained in the coming week to finish the repairs.
The repairs will not be opened up to new contractors, he said.
“We’ll use the same company, because they did a fantastic job,” Burgum told CNN’s “State of the Union.” ”Thankfully, the vandalism was small. It was bad. I mean, it could cost tens of thousands of dollars to repair, so then it could fall into a felony … just like damaging any other government property could. But the job that was done to fix the Reflecting Pool was done extremely well.”
Trump this spring pledged to beautify the Reflecting Pool before the nation’s 250th birthday celebrations on July Fourth. Water was drained, and the Republican president directed that the bottom be painted a color he called “American flag blue.” But after the site was restored, the water was plagued by an algae bloom for more than a week, and pieces of the new coating have appeared to be peeling off the bottom.
The pool was closed for the Independence Day celebration, but Burgum said that was due to a safety issue related to the fireworks.
The evolving debate over the Reflecting Pool has inflamed the broader fight over Trump’s aggressive push to overhaul Washington landmarks, including the White House, nearly two years into his final term in office.
Authorities have arrested more than a half dozen people in relation to Reflecting Pool damage, including former Olympian David Hearn, who was indicted last week on a felony of property destruction.
The top federal prosecutor in the District of Columbia, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, said Hearn ripped up recently installed sealant on the pool in “a deliberate act” that caused more than $1,000 in damage. She accused him of “forcefully and violently” pulling up the bottom liner “with both hands” and acting belligerently toward an employee who told him to stop.
Hearn’s lawyers, Democracy Defenders Fund co-founder Norm Eisen and Mary Dohrmann, said the charges were “outrageous and should be alarming to every American.” Eisen and Dohrmann construed the case as representative of “the misuse of government power against an ordinary citizen based on a concocted narrative.”Burgum was asked and did not answer directly whether there was photographic evidence of vandals cutting the pool’s liner. He was also asked whether Hearn should face a 10-year prison sentence, which is the maximum legal penalty for his charge.
The Trump administration is scrapping more than three dozen firearms regulations, abandoning a crackdown on illegal sales, restoring gun rights to some people with mental illness, and loosening oversight of private weapons transactions.
The drastic retrenchment at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the federal agency responsible for enforcing the nation’s gun laws, was not entirely unexpected: President Trump campaigned as a champion of gun rights.
In the view of critics and even some A.T.F. veterans, the agency, in closely mirroring the demands made by gun owners and manufacturers to lighten their regulatory burden, is enacting changes at the expense of public safety. The moves, they worry, come as the bureau has already been weakened, with hundreds of its officials diverted to immigration enforcement.
Proponents of the changes point out that some of the reversals would return regulations to what they were only a few years ago, before President Joseph R. Biden took office. After a series of deadly mass shootings, Mr. Biden signed into law gun control measures, ending nearly three decades of gridlock over whether and how to regulate firearms.
The divisiveness illustrates the complicated landscape for gun policy.
“With the Biden regulations that we got and put in place, we advanced the ball,” said Kris Brown, the president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, one of the country’s biggest gun control organizations.
But the Trump administration’s approach “takes us back 100 years,” she said. “It’s really decimating A.T.F.’s ability to regulate this industry.”
A White House official said the administration’s policies reflected Mr. Trump’s commitment to ensuring that Americans could exercise their Second Amendment rights, accusing the Biden administration of bypassing Congress and using the regulatory process to restrict gun rights.
Mark Oliva, a spokesman for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearms industry’s trade association, said the changes were meant to clarify gun regulations.
“We want clarity to know how we’re going to be able to conduct business,” he said, “to be able to produce and to be able to sell firearms in accordance with the laws and regulations that govern our industry.”
Already, the administration has done away with major policies, including a zero-tolerance approach toward gun dealers who repeatedly broke the law. The more than three dozen rules that it has moved to eliminate would raise the legal threshold for revoking a dealer’s license; extend gun rights to buyers who had faced restrictions because of mental illness or inability to manage their own finances; and end extra scrutiny of stabilizing braces, gun accessories that have been used in mass shootings to lethal effect.
The administration is now targeting gun regulations that Democrats have passed at the state and local levels. It has challenged bans on semiautomatic rifles in Colorado, the District of Columbia, and Virginia. On Wednesday, it sued California for its restrictions on the sale of Glock and Glock-style handguns, and Virginia for limits on the sale of semiautomatic rifles, hours after both laws went into effect.
Since his first run for office, Mr. Trump has positioned himself as an ardent supporter of gun rights. In the run-up to the 2024 election, he vowed to be “the best friend gun owners have ever had in the White House.” Days after being inaugurated, he signed an executive order instructing the attorney general to scrutinize what he described as “ongoing infringements of the Second Amendment rights of our citizens.”
By May 2025, the A.T.F. had overturned its “zero-tolerance” policy, which had empowered its inspectors to revoke the licenses of federal gun dealers who were known to have broken the law. Pam Bondi, then the attorney general, said it had “unfairly targeted law-abiding gun owners and created an undue burden.” The policy increased the chances that dealers who had falsified business records, skipped background checks, or otherwise sold guns to people prohibited from owning them would face consequences. The agency ultimately revoked more than 600 licenses. But critics say that the new standards seriously curb the agency’s ability to do so.
It is a part of a broader bid across government to enact changes in line with the president’s directive. The Veterans Affairs Department in February removed the requirement that veterans who require a fiduciary to manage their benefits be prohibited from buying firearms, and veterans who were previously reported to the F.B.I. were being removed from its list. The Health and Human Services Department slashed funding for research into gun violence prevention. The U.S. Postal Service has proposed allowing people to ship handguns in the mail, upending a nearly century-old law.
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A gun show in Phoenix last January. New rules include ending the so-called gun show loophole, which required background checks for gun shows and certain private sales. Credit…Paul Ratje for The New York Times
>>>Let Us Act On The Truths Written In The Document This Time Around!
Napoleon Sarony, “The Declaration of Independence,” 1843–1853. Harry T. Peters, “America on Stone.” Lithography Collection. Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History
NASA is lighting the cosmos in red, white and blue in honor of the 250th birthday of the United States—and the show even comes with sound.
The imagery shows the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A, the dusty nebula NGC 3603, the spiral galaxy Messier 94, and the galaxy cluster ZwCl 0024+1652. Data from the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and ground-based telescopes is portrayed in a patriotic color scheme.
Making this cosmic fireworks display not only visual, but auditory, optical data from three of the images was matched with the sounds of different instruments in a process called sonification.
Cassiopeia A, the only silent image of the new July 4 series, is a supernova remnant 11,000 light-years from Earth. It’s a true cosmic firecracker, a blown-apart star with a blast wave still visible in X-ray emissions. Here, that explosion is shown in blue from Chandra’s observations. Red and white infrared data from the James Webb space telescope shows the expanding stellar material from the explosion in red and white.
Meanwhile, the nebula NGC 3603 looks like a chrysanthemum firework burst in bright red. This star-forming region sits 20,000 light-years away from Earth. NASA scientists sonified the image of NGC 3603 by assigning different elements of the image to a sound. For example, neutron stars and black holes register as piano notes, while Hubble optical imagery becomes the gentle strum of an acoustic guitar. The background hum comes from X-ray emissions detected by Chandra.
In the image of Messier 94, a spiral galaxy that’s also known as NGC 4736, Chandra’s X-ray data becomes a whistling wind while dense features such as neutron stars and stellar-mass black holes ring in crystalline tones from a glass marimba. Piano notes ring out to represent stars and far-off galaxies. This stunning galaxy is 16 million light-years away from Earth, but is so bright that it can be spotted with a good commercial telescope (although not in red, white, and blue, as seen here).
Messier 94’s distance is nothing compared to the trip it would take to get to galaxy cluster ZwCl 0024+1652, which is 5 thousand million light-years from our solar system. This galaxy cluster is known for its unique dark-matter structure, which formed in a collision between two separate galaxy clusters. While dark matter structures often follow the contours of visible matter such as gas and stars, the ring of dark matter at ZwCl 0024+1652 stands apart. Here, it’s seen in Hubble data in brilliant blue. A synthesized sci-fi sound highlights the oddball nature of ZwCl 0024+1652, with the music peaking at the dark-matter ring and again at the cluster’s core of superheated gas. Piano notes highlight background galaxies, while background stars ping as notes on a glockenspiel.NASA’s sonification program began in 2020 to translate astronomical data into frequencies that can be heard by the human ear. It’s part of an attempt to bring outreach to blind and low-vision individuals, but also offers sighted people a chance to explore the universe with a new sense. There’s even a tool allowing anyone to convert space visuals into sound, creating their own song of the cosmos.
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In Cassiopeia A, X-rays from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory are shown along with an infrared image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; IR: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare and K. Arcand
Ask most people who they think Indigenous peoples are, and they will most likely say something like “they are natives who lived in America.” But who are they, and how is that determination made? These are questions with no simple or easy answers and the source of ongoing conflict in Indigenous communities, as well as in the halls of Congress and other American government institutions.
The Definition of Indigenous
Dictionary.com defines indigenous as:
“Originating in and characteristic of a particular region or country; native.”
It pertains to plants, animals, and people. A person (or animal or plant) can be born in a region or country, but not be indigenous to it if his or her ancestors did not originate there.
The United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues refers to Indigenous peoples as groups who:
Self-identify as Indigenous at the individual level and are accepted by the community as their member.
Have historical continuity with pre-colonial or pre-settler societies.
Have a strong link to territories and surrounding natural resources.
Exhibit distinct social, economic or political systems.
Have a distinct language, culture, and beliefs.
Form non-dominant groups of society.
Resolve to maintain and reproduce their ancestral environments and systems as distinctive peoples and communities.
The term “Indigenous” is often referred to in an international and political sense, but more and more people who self-identify as Native American are adopting the term to describe their “native-ness,” sometimes called their “indigeneity.” While the United Nations recognizes self-identity as one marker of indigeneity, in the United States, this alone is not enough to be considered Native American for official political recognition.
Federal Recognition
When the first European settlers came to the shores of what local tribes called “Turtle Island,” there were thousands of communities and bands of Indigenous peoples. Their numbers were dramatically reduced due to foreign diseases, wars, and other policies of the United States government; many of them that remained formed official relationships with the U.S. through treaties and other mechanisms.
Others continued to exist, but the U.S. refused to recognize them. Today, the United States unilaterally decides who (what tribes) it forms official relationships with through the process of federal recognition. There are currently approximately 566 federally recognized tribes; there are some tribes who have state recognition but no federal recognition, and at any given time there are hundreds of tribes still vying for federal recognition.
Tribal Membership
Federal law affirms that tribes have the authority to determine their membership. They can use whatever means they like to decide who to grant membership to. According to Indigenous scholar Eva Marie Garroutte in her book “Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America,” approximately two-thirds of tribes rely on the blood quantum system, which determines belonging based on the concept of race by measuring how close one is to a “full-blood” Indigenous ancestor. For example, many have a minimum requirement of ¼ or ½ degree of Indigenous blood for tribal membership. Other tribes rely on a system of proof of lineal descent.
Increasingly, the blood quantum system is criticized as being an inadequate and problematic way of determining tribal membership (and thus Indigenous identity). Because Indigenous peoples out-marry more than any other group of Americans, the determination of who is Indigenous based on racial standards will result in what some scholars call “statistical genocide.” They argue that being Indigenous is about more than racial measurements; it is more about identity-based on kinship systems and cultural competence. They also argue that blood quantum was a system imposed on them by the American government and not a method Indigenous peoples themselves used to determine belonging, so abandoning blood quantum would represent a return to traditional ways of inclusion.
Even with tribes’ ability to determine their membership, determining who is legally defined as an Indigenous person is still not clear cut. Garroutte notes that there are no less than 33 different legal definitions. This means that a person can be defined as Indigenous for one purpose but not another.
Indigenous Hawaiians
In the legal sense, Indigenous Hawaiians are not considered Native Americans, but they are nonetheless Indigenous peoples in the United States (their name for themselves is Kanaka Maoli). The illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 left in its wake considerable conflict among the Indigenous Hawaiian population, and the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, which began in the 1970s, is less than cohesive in terms of what it considers the best approach to justice. The Akaka Bill (which has experienced several incarnations in Congress for over 10 years) proposes to give Indigenous people of Hawaiian descent the same standing as Native Americans, effectively turning them into Native Americans in a legal sense by subjecting them to the same system of law.
However, activists and scholars who study Hawaiian indigeneity argue that this is an inappropriate approach for Indigenous Hawaiians because their histories differ significantly from those who identify as Native Americans. They also argue that the bill failed to consult Indigenous Hawaiians about their wishes adequately.
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Native Americans participate in the inter tribal dance during the 7th Annual Indiana Traditional Powwow, April 7, 2018, at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.Credit: Jeremy Hogan/Getty Images
Celebrations for the 250th anniversary of the United States’ independence kicked into full gear on Saturday, with parades, historical re-enactments and music at events in small towns and big cities from coast-to-coast.
Though it was muggy and miserably hot in many parts of the country, the day was marked with the usual American exuberance, with fighter jets, tall ships, parachutists and flag-festooned pick-up trucks.
The U.S. Secret Service said in a statement that it has suspended checkpoint operations on the National Mall because of rapidly deteriorating weather conditions. People already within the secure area are being directed to shelter locations by Secret Service agents and the U.S. Park Police, the statement said. “No one is being admitted at this time,” it said. “This action was taken solely in the interest of public safety, and we have no estimate for when screening may resume.”Fearing severe weather, federal and local officials are scrambling to safely evacuate thousands of people from the National Mall and into nearby Smithsonian museums and federal buildings, according to multiple officials.
It is a chaotic scene on the National Mall, as several hundred people refuse to leave despite an order to evacuate because of severe storms approaching. Some are even arguing with Secret Service agents. An officer is sternly repeating the evacuation order over a bullhorn, and the crowd is booing. Many have begun chanting “U.S.A., U.S.A.” One man blamed the situation on “liberals in the weather service,” adding, “I think this is baloney.”
The air show at the National Mall has not stopped amid evacuation orders. Air Force One just flew over, followed by two B-2 stealth bombers.
Crowds were standing still and cheering as they passed. Now, Secret Service officers are making their way down the mall, yelling at people to make their way out.
“A lot of my family are veterans, and many lost their lives for this country. I’m trying to celebrate this 250 like they’re still here.”
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There is plenty of of confusion on Constitution Avenue and 9th Street here in Washington, D.C. because of the threat of inclement weather: Just after 7 p.m., law enforcement officials on hand forcefully — and without further explanation — began imploring people to walk north toward Pennsylvania Avenue away from the National Mall, where scores have been waiting in the hot sun all afternoon for the president’s speech and a promised fireworks show. Families searched for answers as children wondered aloud if the fireworks had been cancelled.
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Celebrations for the 250th anniversary of the United States
It used to be easy to tell when a face was generated with artificial intelligence (AI). Whether it was a distinctive uncanny sheen, impossibly smooth skin, eyes that didn’t quite make sense, or a conspicuous third ear, older AI models’ facsimiles of human faces were simple to spot and easy to dismiss. That’s just not true anymore.
Now, AI image generators can produce portraits so convincing that even careful observers struggle to distinguish fact from figment. That’s why apps such as Zoom and Tinder allow their users to submit biometric identification, such as retinal scans, to help prove that a real person exists behind a profile picture. But a new study suggests you can train your brain to get better at spotting fakes.
Past attempts to teach people to spot AI faces have focused on training viewers to look for visual glitches or statistical fingerprints left behind by a particular image generator, such as a wonky ear or an eye with two pupils. The problem is that those clues can disappear with a software update or by simply using a different prompt. “The AI is getting too good,” said Amy Dawel, an associate professor at Australian National University and the lead author on the study, in a press release. “And fraudsters may avoid using pictures with obvious flaws anyway.” The result is an endless technological arms race humanity seems destined to lose.
Instead, the researchers taught the participants how to recognize broader patterns in how AI systems generate images. “Our training directs people’s attention to global qualities that differ between AI and human faces,” Dawel said.
Current AI image generators are themselves trained on datasets composed of millions of images. When prompted to generate a face, they don’t copy specific faces, but instead compose a new face that is based in part on the mathematical patterns shared across the faces in that data set—these allow the AI to construct a “typical” human face.
The result is that AI-generated faces often drift toward statistical averages. They’re not overly unrealistic, so much as a little too balanced, a little too generic, and a little too conventional. Individually, none of these traits are necessarily suspicious. But together, the whole is blander than the sum of its parts—a subtle banality humans can often implicitly sense.
“Even relatively short training sessions helped participants improve their accuracy,” says Tanya George, a student researcher at Australian National University who trained the study’s participants. “Research like this can help people navigate increasingly complex online environments.”
Compared with real faces, AI-generated faces tend to be more symmetrical, more proportional, and more attractive—while also being less expressive, less distinctive and significantly less memorable. When the researchers trained participants to look for these six markers instead of fleeting artifacts like malformed ears or mismatched jewelry, their ability to spot the AI face almost doubled.
In other words, AI gravitates to the center. Real people do not. Our faces are shaped by countless small deviations from the norm—our subtle asymmetries, distinctive features, and expressions make us memorable. Those imperfections are not flaws. They are our signature.
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SEBASTIAN KAULITZKI/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY via Getty Images
Jessica Pettway / Food Styling by Micah Morton / Prop Styling by Paola Andrea
Cookbook author Nicole A. Taylor takes inspiration from a perfectly grilled watermelon she had in Texas. The juices of the watermelon caramelize beautifully on the grill, which are enhanced by a spice blend of chamomile, cocoa, fennel, and more.
Click the link below the picture!
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Credit: Food & Wine / Photo by Robby Lozano / Food Styling by Chelsea Zimmer / Prop Styling by Phoebe Hauser
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Four months before tough midterm elections, President Trump used the backdrop of Mount Rushmore one night before the nation’s 250th birthday to characterize his political opponents as “godless,” “evil” communists.
“We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms, if we are foolish, stupid and unwise,” he said on Friday, demanding that Congress pass his so-called SAVE America Act, which would impose stricter voter ID rules that would make it harder to vote. He called for terminating the filibuster.
The larger purpose of the speech wasn’t hard to miss. He was sharpening a line of attack that the White House has started to use to head off a newly insurgent progressive wing of the Democratic Party that appears to be resonating with liberal voters.
Mr. Trump read from an apocalyptic script as the stony faces of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln looked on. He said the word “communism” so many times, you might’ve thought the Cold War was still on.
He was not subtle. Communism, he said, “is the enemy of July 4, 1776.” He called it a bigger threat than Pearl Harbor and even 9/11. He name-checked Karl Marx.
The speech began on an upbeat note. The president painted a proud and optimistic portrait of the United States, describing it as nothing short of the greatest society in the history of civilization. The whole first half of his speech boiled down to this line: “You live in a very special place — congratulations, everybody.” The crowd ate it up.
He soon began to pivot. There were people out there who didn’t want English to be the dominant language of the United States, he warned. There were people out there who wanted to take away everyone’s guns, he warned. He promised never to let that happen.
He warned of “newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success.”
It was not the first time he’d used this backdrop to make a speech like this. Six years ago to the day, he spoke here at the end of his first term, when he was campaigning unsuccessfully for a second. Back then, the country was in the throes of the pandemic and gripped by civil unrest after the death of George Floyd, which inspired a national debate about statues and historical figures. Mr. Trump used his speech that night to warn of a “new far-left fascism” creeping up.
He switched ideologies in his second Rushmore speech on Friday.
“Communism is the exact opposite of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” he declared. “It’s death, tyranny and the pursuit of evil.”
This massive and most American of monuments made for quite the stage for this speech. This president loves a production, and he made the most of it. Military helicopters flew back and forth in front of the mountain while AC/DC and Lynyrd Skynyrd blared (“Free Bird,” naturally), followed by a B52 bomber. As the sun dipped below the horizon, big bright spotlights flashed on the fine granite faces of the four presidents, illuminating every contour that had been dynamited into shape almost a hundred years ago.
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President Trump at Mount Rushmore in 2020. Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
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Napoleon Sarony, “The Declaration of Independence,” 1843–1853. Harry T. Peters, “America on Stone.” Lithography Collection. Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History
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Celebrations for the 250th anniversary of the United States
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James' World 2 