Hey everybody, welcome back to the Conspiracy Podcast. Glad you’re here with us. Sean, Jorge, Eric. We’ve had some people reach out and they were like, who is who? So we want to let you know. Some person’s like, oh, I knew who Jorge was, and I was like, what? It sounds Mexican. He’s like, I know who he is.

Okay, so tonight’s episode is on Mount Rushmore. Now, do you know a lot about Mount Rushmore? I’ve never been. I know a little bit and I definitely don’t know almost anything about conspiracies on this. I was talking to my wife about it. All I know about Rushmore is from Richie Rich, there’s a vault in there, that’s all I know. So Mount Rushmore is a tourist icon of America. It’s one of the biggest sculptures ever made on Earth. It’s a mountain of four dudes, it’s pretty massive. There are a couple weird little things about it. It is on the list of one of the bigger conspiracies that exist.

So as we do on this show, we like to go into a little bit of the history so that now you know. I also think it helps to formulate an idea on a conspiracy, especially one that you don’t really know about. So I’m going to want to know a little bit of backstory before I drink the Kool-Aid. We got a lot of you guys that listen to all these episodes, so we’d like to give you some facts and then we’ll go into it.

So Mount Rushmore is carved into the southeastern face in South Dakota’s Black Hills National Forest, and there are four gigantic sculptures depicting the faces of US presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abe Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt. I don’t know how Teddy got in that group, but we’ll talk a little bit about it. Two are founding fathers, one’s Lincoln, the goat. Actually, all of those guys are on some form of currency except for Teddy. George Washington is on coins and bills, Lincoln’s on coins and bills, and Jefferson’s on bills. No Teddy. These are 60-foot high faces that were shaped from granite rock between 1927 and 1941.

It took them that long to do that. But it took them 20 years to make the pyramids, just saying. It is in the league of the biggest sculptures on Earth, and it is one of the top American things to see. One thing that’s really cool that I want to do is go to Mount Rushmore on Fourth of July, because they put together this massive fireworks show and it’s right behind them, like the heads are glowing and it’s fireworks going off behind them. That would be cool, in the middle of nowhere, the great sprawling nothing.

But to many Native Americans, Mount Rushmore represents a desecration of the lands that were sacred to the Lakota Sioux, who were the original residents. The USA is a desecration of the Indian people, it’s crazy. The original residents of the Black Hills were Lakota and Sioux, and they were displaced by white settlers. One of the things that I found really interesting, probably one of the few good things I got out of college, I went into the library randomly and I found a book and it had pretty much a timelapse map of the Indian Territory and how it diminished over time. It went from obviously the whole thing, but then there were these massive territories that each individual tribe still had, and then now it’s literally needlepoint dots.

Mount Rushmore is located just north of what is Custer State Park, and it’s in the Black Hills National Forest. It was named for a New York lawyer named Charles Rushmore, who traveled to the Black Hills in 1885 to inspect mining claims. When Rushmore asked a local man what the name of that nearby mountain was, he reportedly replied that there was no name, and so from then on it was known as Rushmore Peak. He’s like, no one’s ever seen it before, I’ll claim it, this is my mountain.

So in the early 1920s there was a state historian named Robinson, and he came up with the idea to sculpt the needles, which were these giant pillars, and to sculpt historic heroes of the West. At the time it was a little different, because the heroes of the West were a little different at that time, like Billy the Kid, like Buffalo Bill. He wanted also a Sioux chief named Red Cloud. Per Robinson, who was a historian of the Dakotas, he probably had a real love of the land and a love of the people. So in August of 1924, Robinson contacted the original sculptor, who was unavailable, so the guy he got was named Gutzon Borglum. At first I was like, oh, this guy was definitely born in Belgium, but no, he’s American. He was born in Idaho.

At that time he was working on a big carving of General Robert E. Lee, and he was doing it in the Georgia Stone Mountain, and he had all sorts of problems with the government and those who commissioned the project. Robert E. Lee was the main general for the South. He’s still considered a hero, he was a classy dude, even though that’s a whole debate. How do you define classy? He surrendered with honor, because he knew that there were brothers in the South and brothers in the North, so the way he conducted himself, I thought, was good.

This is the big debate on statues coming down. The thing about the statue is, look, especially during 2020, we’re not going to say the word. I don’t really care that they made statues to him. You can make statues to anybody. It’s different if it’s a statue of Hitler, okay, take it down, that’s not cool. I do understand the argument because it’s a revolting entity. It doesn’t piss me off as a statue. I was never a slave, my grandparents were never slaves. As long as he doesn’t bring up Thomas Jefferson’s slaves, that’s all I care. Well, Thomas Jefferson was procreating with his slaves, so I might be a descendant of Thomas Jefferson. Fun fact, I did go to a Robert E. Lee Elementary School. There you go, in South Texas. Mexicans allowed.

Let me give you two arguments, both sides. Argument one is that it’s a revolting nation, it’s an uprising, and that’s why Abe Lincoln never acknowledged Jefferson Davis as the president of the South, because he was like, there’s no South, it’s all the United States. You’re revolting, so they lost. This is why I don’t have a problem. It’s history, it happened, it’s the past, it’s the truth. Let’s say you think it immortalizes that person as saying they did great things. But look at Thomas Jefferson, we immortalized that guy and he still had slaves. I’m making the point why the statue should be fine, because you can’t pick and choose. TJ is on money and we’re fine with it. He’s on Mount Rushmore. The last 6,000 years has been slaves. We’re going to cancel all of history? We can’t do it. It happened, it’s not happening now, so let’s be happy and continue.

I’m going to go on a tangent here for a second. Especially as our social media is blowing up, one of my goals is that you can disagree with somebody and not be like, hey, you’re a piece of garbage, hate them forever, try to cancel them. You’re like, hey, I hate mint chocolate chip ice cream, and I’m like, you’re a loser, bro, we’re actually breaking up now. That’s what happens in our current society, you can’t disagree without getting verbally raped. You’re automatically a piece of garbage. Can we have the opinion? Let us have the opinion, and you can have yours. Every great thing has come from someone going against the group. Unless you guys want to be trapped cavemen, let us think different.

We’ll put up some videos about our opinion of something, and people nuke us. We have like a thousand comments, and some are cool, they’re like, hey, you probably didn’t know this, so I’m going to give you some more info, and I’m like, cool, I love that. But then you have people who go, hey, you’re stupid as hell, you’re dumb, and I’m like, your argument is so bad. My favorite is the people who get in fights with each other in the comments. We’re not even involved, and I’m like, keep it going, need some engagement, a little flare.

Borglum convinced Robinson that the sculpture should be in South Dakota and it should depict George Washington and Abe Lincoln, because that would give it a national, not a local, significance. Robinson wanted it to bolster tourism in the Dakotas, so Borglum wanted it to be a national icon. Later he added Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt to the list. The idea is that it’s the birth of democracy. Washington is the father, Thomas Jefferson is the author of the Declaration of Independence and bought the Louisiana Purchase, which was half of the US, and Abe Lincoln saved the union. Then Teddy Roosevelt’s big contribution in this arena was he set up the national parks. He saved America’s beauty, because otherwise it would just be mini malls.

A lot of foreigners, when they say what’s America like, the national parks are at the top of the conversation. It’s beautiful from coast to coast. The US is, I think, the third largest land mass on Earth. If you don’t preserve some of the natural beauty, you’re just a piece of garbage. If Teddy didn’t do that, we would have bulldozed condos. Can you imagine what Lake Tahoe would look like? Just highrises and weird Water World boat things in the middle of the lake. So that was his big contribution, okay, I understand why he’s on it now, it makes sense.

So during the second visit to the Black Hills in August of 1925, Borglum identified the actual location. At that time Native Americans and environmentalists basically picketed and said this is not happening. They called it a desecration of Sioux heritage. So Robinson and President Coolidge traveled to the Black Hills on a vacation, and that’s where they talked him into funding it, giving the thumbs up. So at that point, in 1927, carving began.

To carve the four presidential heads into the face of Mount Rushmore, Borglum utilized new methods. He completely made it up. A majority of this was done through dynamite. They had to blow parts and then take the rough face, because it’s just a flat face, and you’ve got to make indents. So what they do is they drill little holes and then they put the dynamite and they start blowing pieces off. He invented all these different things, or I would call them innovations. They didn’t have these seats, so he created this harness seat and they would jump and swing and start drilling. It was all very creative. These guys are getting paid like 18 cents an hour.

So 400 workers, 14 years, 450,000 tons of rock removed, zero casualties. That’s the most impressive thing. I cannot believe that there’s nobody done that. I was expecting like 60% death, almost all the workers dying. Some of those tons of rock are still down there, they’re like, we’re not moving it, let’s just leave it. So they would arrive at work and have to climb 700 stairs to reach the part, then clock in and begin the work day. They had to build the stairs, and they don’t get travel time for the stairs. This is 1927, there’s no ski lift, no moving sidewalk that takes you up. Roughly 90% of the monument was carved with dynamite, the rest was jackhammers and different finishing tools.

So they were lowered down on the face. Look at his mustache, look at my dude’s mustache, fantastic, it’s impressive. Just a side interesting fact, in 1937, which is mid-construction, there was a bill introduced into Congress to add Susan B. Anthony to the four. Obviously they shut that down. They’re like, sorry, we’ll give you a quarter, oh no, it’s a dollar, Susan B. Anthony’s a dollar. There was a petition to put Trump up there too. I would not be okay with that.

So being that it finished in the 30s or 40s, who would you add later? It’s got to be someone. No Bush, put Bush at the bottom in the scraps. I think nobody, I think JFK would be the closest. I wouldn’t be opposed to FDR. But then nobody else. What are you going to write on there, like from our intro, I am not a crook. So in 1929, during the last days of Coolidge’s presidency, he appropriated funds, a quarter million dollars, to see that it finished, but back in that day a quarter million is little money.

On July 4th, 1930, a dedication ceremony was held, after which they found that there was rock or stone that was weak and they had to move Jefferson’s head to the other side of George Washington. How is that possible? They had to basically scrap it and do a new one. They just exploded the whole thing. So originally Jefferson was over here, and then they were like, no, because there was a weak rock, and they were like, this is going to fail, this is not going to last. That’s pretty cool, that is pretty impressive.

So right before, in 1941, Gutzon Borglum died, and then he turned it over to his son to finish it, and later that year his son dedicated it. At least it was at the end, you’re like, shaving the chin, polishing. He did most of the work and then there is a memorial that he had proposed. He died of something not related to the carving. But here’s the interesting part that gets a little bit conspiracy theory. He wanted to create a shrine of democracy behind it, and his vision for it was that it was collectibles of democracy and the formation of democracy. So it was like a museum where it was all the cool stuff, and he even built a tunnel and a chamber to start building this shrine of democracy.

And so the war started in ’39, so they’re like, we don’t really care about this, we don’t want the money we need, we need bullets, we need tanks. So they stopped it, and so that was the start of the formation, because he did start building. He built the chambers and he built the tunnels in the back. In 1991, Mount Rushmore celebrated its 50-year anniversary, of which they were given by the National Park Service $40 million for restoration, and this is them pressure washing it. One thing is, in Jefferson’s face there was a crack down his face and they had to put filler, and water kept being a problem. When water does a roll, it erodes the rock, supposedly, the Grand Canyon supposedly.

So a couple of things, though. Now, they did find that Borglum in Georgia was associated with the Ku Klux Klan. He was the Grand Wizard of the Klan down there. But over that time, more and more protests occurred, more and more Native Americans saying this is our land, because the land is actually their land. But it’s one of the biggest tourist attractions in America, and I bet they see none of those profits, they go straight to the park service.

So let’s talk a little bit about the tunnel. The tunnel that Borglum had drilled for the Hall of Records sat empty for decades until ’98, when the National Park Service placed a titanium vault in the floor, filling it with information on Mount Rushmore, the presidents, and US history. So there is a vault in there. So that not-so-secret room isn’t open to the public, but it’s been subject of speculation. It’s even in the movie National Treasure, they’re like, the book of secrets. That movie is such a, the first one’s so good, I loved it.

So carved into the solid granite wall of a small canyon running right behind the presidential lineup is an 18-foot doorway. It resembles the entrance to an ancient tomb of Egypt. Anyone crossing the threshold would discover an empty room approximately 75 feet in length with a 35-foot ceiling. That’s humongous. Borglum had intended for this incomplete chamber to be, in essence, his artist statement, explaining the meaning of his sculpture, not for the present generation but for future generations and even interplanetary visitors thousands of years into the future. So this is like a time capsule. This is my 35-foot ceiling time capsule.

And I quote, you might as well drop a letter into the world’s postal service without an address or signature as to send that carved mountain into history without identification. He’s like, I did it, me, Borglum. While the faces of Mount Rushmore are recognizable to kids today, Borglum thought they might one day become a mysterious thing such as Stonehenge. They’re like, who are these people, what’s happening? He said each succeeding civilization forgets its predecessor before it.

On that note, it’s really disturbing, I’ll see the TikToks and the reels where these people go up to random people in the street and ask them the most basic questions about history and math, like, name three countries, and they can’t do it, they’re naming cities, they’re like, Tennessee, the country of Tennessee. But on that point, American history, we need to beef it up. Who knows about American history? Immigrants who are trying to get green cards, they know everything about American history. I saw the other day this new candidate, I think he’s Republican, I think he’s Indian or something. He had a really good point, that one of the things he would change is that in order to vote, if you’re between 18 and 21, you have to take the test the immigrants have to take, the citizenship test, and pass to be able to vote.

I’m not opposed to it, because people don’t know anything about American history at all. I had to do that test, and let me tell you, my own wife didn’t know it. We were studying together back in the day and she’s like, holy hell, I don’t know this. Although it excludes people who shouldn’t be excluded, it excludes people who are illiterate, it excludes a lot of the lower class. Maybe they don’t have access to basic education. I think it’s a slippery slope when you’re trying to restrict people’s rights based on a qualification. I agree we can’t do that because it’ll never get approved, but what we should do is revamp education. The test is also about the three legislative branches, who elects the president, things that you should know. I guarantee the average 18 to 21 year old can’t pass it.

The right to vote is such an important thing, it’s super important, that’s the definement of democracy. That is what gives the citizens power over the government and not giving the government power over the people, and that’s the whole point of a Democratic Republic, which we are, we’re not a democracy, we’re a Democratic Republic.

So Borglum had this grand vision for the back of it, this Hall of Democracy, the 800-foot long staircase he wanted to create, and make it like an Egyptian eternal thing. So just imagine you fast forward 5,000 years. I think this guy just had a big ego. I don’t think it was really about democracy, I think it was about him. He’s like, I want aliens to come here and they’re going to be like, who is this Borglum guy, this guy’s a god. So his idea was to put all this stuff in glass cabinets made with bronze exterior, and then put 20 prominent Americans, their busts, in it. So Ben Franklin, John Hancock, Alexander Hamilton, the Wright brothers, all the American innovators.

His idea essentially was, generations and generations go by, and then what is left, nobody remembers it, but this will help them remember. It’s almost like a book that’s not made of paper but made of bronze busts, kind of like the Egyptians did with the pyramids, giant statues made of granite. They built something that we didn’t think they could build in 20 years, and then they made these halls, and then 4,000 years go by. This is why I acted on this episode. They didn’t believe that we could do this. It took 14 years to build these 60-foot beautiful sculptures, one of the biggest on Earth, in a mountain. Maybe in thousands of years we go, how did they build that?

I’m filled with rage and confusion at Eric’s sneaky, douchy attempts to validate his theories about the pyramids. We need like 40 episodes to build up to the pyramids. Me and Eric have been arguing about the pyramids for the last three years and we haven’t done the episode. Weirdly enough, we actually did the pyramid episode, but we didn’t release it because we wanted to do it again and do it better justice. This is what Eric’s doing, don’t fall for his stuff, don’t listen to him. We will do a legit episode and then you can actually decide. He’s trying to set the table, he’s trying to plant the little seeds for you guys. All I’m saying is, it’s amazing what man can do.

Everything you’re saying is so calculated, you piece of garbage. Isn’t man amazing? Imagine, Egyptian man, you and me, we get a 10-foot rock anywhere in the world. Could I even make an Abe Lincoln face? No, you can’t even draw one. A hundred years ago they did it with dynamite, but we’re saying the pyramids were done with the shittiest iron tools, we don’t know exactly. Aliens. Anyways, moving on.

So Mount Rushmore, originally it was Native American land, and then they struck gold there, and so the US is like, oh, let’s go check it out. They’re like, you know what, what happened before you guys were here? Sorry, forgot, we forgot about it, and you guys are on my land, you see this gold, I put it here, so I came back to get it. It’s still in a struggle today of who owns it. The Sioux people won a case and they were awarded something like millions of dollars, and then they said, nope, we don’t want the money, we want the land. So now they got no land and no money, because they only agreed to the land. Over the last 100 years the US government has learned to just pay. That’s what they did to my people too, Mexicans, we’re still paying them today.

You know what sucks about being white? You have nothing. If I say my people, who are my people? I don’t know who my people are, Eastern Europeans. Half Irish, half Bulgarian, half British, even though that’s three halves. Was there a stigma back when the Mongolians were ravaging and destroying everything? Every Asian-looking person, they’re done. I think in each area there’s bigotry towards something different, towards whoever the ruling party was.

So that’s Mount Rushmore. The biggest conspiracy is that there are hidden things within it, within the vaults. There are movies and books and different things about how there’s gold, a secret gold stash, a little bit of a backup plan for Fort Knox. Then there’s also one about bunkers, like they’re actually for the elite, the elite have Fallout bunkers because you’re insulated by all the granite. There’s no good theory really. People obviously want to believe that there’s some interesting stuff back there because it’s cool. It’s cool to think that George Washington’s body’s preserved in the vault back there. Also, once you hear the story of him wanting to build that monument in the back, then you go, oh, that makes sense, he just ran out of money.

The government’s like, we’re in war, off you go. You renovate your house, you want to do a man cave, and then you build the room and you run out of money, and the next person buys it and he’s like, what is this creepy room? But then they did it in National Treasure 2 where the vault is a secret vault with collectibles. It’s actually not a weird thing, because it’s government property, so they have these vaults in there. What’s to stop them from putting some goodies in there? What if they got nukes in there? If they had nukes in there, you would not be getting that close. They’d be like, lockdown, get away from the mountain. It’s a mountain, it’s huge.

Do you think there’s anything there? I think there probably is something there, they’re probably storing something, but I highly doubt there’s much significance. Maybe that’s where the lost MK Ultra files are, they stashed them up in there. If I was in charge, wouldn’t you store things that were sacred somewhere in the US to preserve against some catastrophic event? What if it’s like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the sacred things of our culture? What if they have all the real versions of those, like the real declaration is stored up there, and they’re just showing us all the fake one at the museum? I’ve been to that and I’m like, whoa, this paper’s so old, take a picture for Instagram.

But truth be told, if you were to do that, wouldn’t you just do it somewhere nobody knows about, dig it into a mountain and make a vault, rather than one of the biggest tourist attractions on Earth? That would make sense. It’s also like hiding in plain sight, like, ah, they have no idea it’s here. We’ll put the Declaration after 2020, that one event that happened in 2020, that secret thing that we won’t talk about. I went up the Statue of Liberty, I climbed the whole thing, that was before 2020, in 2001. I was there pre-911, I went up the two towers, I have photos of me on the towers. It was my high school trip, my high school trip was to DC and the White House. I didn’t have a high school trip, I dropped out.

So do you think there’s any merit to any of this? I think there’s something there. I do think there’s something, but we don’t know what. I think it’d be stupid to not store something there. I don’t have a theory, but the theory is that there’s a vault, it’s a government hidden vault, and there’s something there. Cancer cure stashed away, there’s probably some weird stuff back there, like MJ rookie cards stashed away. But why does it keep going? Because it sounds cool, and you can’t go there so you’ll never know, a hidden chamber behind the presidents.

If they were actually holding the real historical artifacts, they wouldn’t keep it there, it would be some random mountain somewhere that nobody knows, definitely not Mount Rushmore. I had a buddy when I first moved to Florida, he was a nuclear tech in the Air Force, he’d work on the nuclear missiles, he has super high clearance. He’s like, I can’t tell you anything, but bro, you would not believe where these missiles are. He’d have to repel down these underground sites and work on them. Can you imagine, they’re just under your Denny’s nearby, and all of a sudden a giant ICBM, and I’m just eating my Moons Over My Hammy.

When I started learning about the chamber that he wanted to build, this whole Hall of Democracy, the Valley of the Kings kind of thing, it sounds very Egyptian. It sounds like an Indiana Jones movie. It sounds like the pharaoh Khufu, who was very egotistical. This guy was obsessed with himself. He believed that Stonehenge was similar, but it’s thousands of years earlier, that we lost everything around it. Only those parts survived, and there was some sort of message or sculpture almost to look to the great people of that time. We got to do another episode on Stonehenge, that’s a good one. I’ve been near it, we didn’t go, we kind of drove by it. We literally drove, it’s a two and a half hour drive from where we were at, and you can see it, but then you have to go around and pay to get into the park and wait like two hours to get five minutes with it. I was freezing, I took a long-range picture and I was like, sold.

Don’t you hate, everything’s crowded, there’s so many people. Back in the day you’d just roll your horse up and touch it. Have you seen those candid photos of Machu Picchu? Some candid photos show the tourism is overwhelming. My uncle went and he said it was amazing but it was super overrun, thousands of people. Same with the pyramids. If you look at the Great Pyramid, there’s a city right next to it. I follow somebody on Instagram and they did a shot of inside a Pizza Hut, right next to the pyramids, and it’s so ugly, it ruins it, it takes the allure out of everything. Soon there’ll be the hotel, like, come stay at the Giza Hotel.

All right guys, that’s what we got tonight. I guess it was a dud. I appreciate you listening to the end. If you have more theories, please let us know, because we came up real short on Mount Rushmore. Or maybe it’s like an Indian burial ground or something, like the Sioux people. If you have anything on it, send us an email, info@theconspiracypodcast.com, send us a DM on Instagram. I think we’re going to get a lot of hate on this one, so I’m looking forward to it. Bring it on. All right guys, catch you next time.