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The Ideological Aim Of Juneteenth Was To Replace The Fourth Of July


Screenshot via X [Credit: @amuse]

Let us begin with a simple proposition: a nation that loses grip on historical truth will soon lose the very liberty it claims to defend. In the case of Juneteenth, the official narrative peddled by government institutions and media organs insists that June 19, 1865, marked the end of slavery in the United States. It did not. The same narrative suggests that slaves in Galveston, Texas, were ignorant of their freedom until Union General Gordon Granger arrived and read General Order No. 3 from a balcony. That too is false.

So, why the deception? Why enshrine a historical inaccuracy into federal law, complete with flags, hashtags, and official observances? The answer lies not in a celebration of liberty, but in its quiet replacement. Juneteenth, far from being a spontaneous commemoration of emancipation, is a politically engineered holiday whose true function is to decenter the Fourth of July, recast the American Founding as a fraud, and promote a new narrative steeped not in liberty, but in grievance. At bottom, Juneteenth is not about celebrating the end of slavery. It is about reinterpreting the American project itself.

Screenshot via X [Credit: @amuse]

To understand why, we must begin by clarifying the two foundational myths upon which Juneteenth rests.

First, it is not true that the enslaved people of Galveston only discovered they were free on June 19, 1865. Historical evidence clearly demonstrates that the Emancipation Proclamation was published widely in Texas newspapers, including the Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph as early as February 2, 1863. Galveston, a major port city, had direct access to this information. Moreover, slave narratives collected by the Works Progress Administration confirm that news traveled fast among the enslaved. Felix Haywood, a former slave from Texas, remembered vividly, “Oh, we knowed what was goin’ on in it all the time… We had papers in dem days jus’ like now.” Slaves did not live in informational quarantine.

Second, and more damning, is the simple historical fact that slavery did not end on June 19, 1865. That date marks the enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas, and only in Texas. Slavery persisted in Union-loyal states such as Delaware and Kentucky for nearly six more months. On June 19, 1865, over 227,000 Americans remained legally enslaved. Not until the ratification of the 13th Amendment on December 6, 1865, were those people truly and legally freed. If one were seeking a holiday to commemorate the end of slavery in America, December 6 would be the logical choice. Yet Juneteenth was chosen. Why?

To answer that question, one must consider the architects of Juneteenth’s national elevation. The push to federalize the holiday accelerated in the wake of the George Floyd riots of 2020, a period marked not by unity but by division, not by historical celebration but by symbolic iconoclasm. Statues of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln were defaced or toppled. The American flag itself was reimagined by progressive activists as a symbol of systemic oppression. In that context, Juneteenth became useful not as a historical commemoration, but as a cultural replacement, a new moral center.

To be clear, there is nothing inherently wrong with commemorating emancipation. But Juneteenth does not do this honestly. Instead, it inserts a deliberately misleading narrative into the American consciousness, one that suggests slavery ended not through constitutional means, not through war and statesmanship, but through a lone Union general bringing news to an isolated group of ignorant slaves. It recasts emancipation not as the culmination of the American project, but as a necessary correction to its founding. In doing so, it subtly poisons the well of American civic pride.

The mainstream media’s repeated claim that Juneteenth marked the end of slavery in America is not just mistaken, it is irresponsible. Worse, it reveals an underlying ideological motive. If the Fourth of July celebrates the birth of a nation founded on liberty, Juneteenth is fast becoming its foil, a holiday that implies that liberty was a lie, that 1776 was hypocrisy incarnate, and that true justice only arrived by federal bayonet in Galveston. Such framing is not merely revisionist; it is revolutionary.

Cultural Marxism is often derided as a conspiratorial term, but the essence of the critique is straightforward. In place of economic revolution, it promotes cultural revolution: dismantling Western traditions, symbols, and moral narratives to clear the way for a new social order. Juneteenth fits neatly within this paradigm. It is not an apolitical holiday. It is an ideological tool, useful for reframing American identity around victimhood and systemic injustice.

If this seems harsh, consider the coordinated media campaign surrounding Juneteenth. NPR, PBS, and the New York Times have all run pieces uncritically parroting the falsehood that June 19 marked the end of slavery in the US. School curricula increasingly highlight Juneteenth while diminishing Independence Day. Government offices fly the Juneteenth flag, a symbol that didn’t exist two decades ago, with greater enthusiasm than they display the American flag. Even corporations like Amazon and Nike promote Juneteenth with the kind of vigor once reserved for the Fourth of July. None of this is accidental.

The effect, intentional or not, is to suggest that the real America began not in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence, but in 1865, at the end of slavery. This is the same conceptual pivot that underlies the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which argues that America’s true founding began with the arrival of the first slaves, not the drafting of the Constitution. That project, like Juneteenth, seeks to invert the American story: liberty becomes accidental, oppression becomes essential.

There is a revealing story about how Donald Trump first encountered the push for Juneteenth as a national holiday. In 2020, during the planning of a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, originally scheduled for June 19, Trump was unaware of the date’s political and cultural significance. A Black Secret Service agent informed him of the controversy, explaining the nature of Juneteenth and why activists were pushing its prominence. Trump promptly rescheduled the rally to June 20, citing respect for the holiday. He later quipped that he had made Juneteenth “very famous” by drawing national attention to it. Far from resisting its elevation, Trump was initially unaware of the ideological momentum behind it, which only underscores how rapidly the holiday was weaponized by political elites to rewrite national symbolism. When Juneteenth became a federal holiday in 2021, it was not because the public demanded it, but because the political class saw its utility in reframing the American narrative.

The irony is that the true story of American emancipation is one of triumph: a brutal war fought to extend the promise of the Declaration to all citizens. Lincoln understood this. So did Frederick Douglass. So did the men who fought and died at Gettysburg. That story deserves honor. But Juneteenth does not tell it. Instead, it substitutes a fable: a handful of slaves in a remote part of Texas learning, belatedly and for the first time, that they were free. It’s a compelling story, but it is not history.

A better holiday might be “December Sixth,” marking the actual legal end of slavery. It would anchor emancipation in the text of the Constitution rather than the dramatic flourish of a Union general’s order. But such a holiday would not serve the ideological purpose Juneteenth now fulfills. It would point us back to the genius of the Founding and the fulfillment of its promises, not away from it.

Juneteenth, as currently framed, is a myth masquerading as a milestone. It deserves scrutiny, not sanctification. For history’s sake, and liberty’s, we must insist on truth.

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The gross, and I do mean gross injustice of slavery reparations


It’s absurd to hold Americans, let alone ordinary ‘Britoneons’ responsible for the slave trade.

The gross injustice of slavery reparations

Commonwealth leaders concluded last week’s summit in Samoa by announcing that Britain should commit to reparations for its role in the transatlantic slave trade.

UK prime minister Keir Starmer had tried to refocus the summit around ‘future-facing’ challenges such as climate change. His chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was more blunt. She told the BBC last week that ‘We’re not going to be paying out the reparations that some countries are speaking about’. Yet in the end, it was to no avail. A day later, the 56 heads of government, including Starmer, signed a letter agreeing that ‘the time has come’ for a ‘meaningful, truthful and respectful conversation’ about Britain paying reparations.

This outcome was hardly a surprise. Over the past few years, the demand that the UK pay vast sums to the descendants of slaves has gained momentum. In August 2023, Patrick Robinson, a judge at the UN, argued that Britain owes £18 trillion in reparations. In March this year, the Church of England announced it would raise £1 billion to address its historic links to slavery. An All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Afrikan Reparations has been launched to push the issue in Westminster. And in David Lammy, we now have a foreign secretary who has repeatedly endorsed calls for reparations.

The reparations movement has gained so much traction because of the lack of any well-articulated rebuttal, especially from Britain’s political class. This has allowed pro-reparations campaigners to shape the narrative without challenge.

The argument for reparations rests on the contention that slavery and colonialism are solely responsible for both the wealth of former colonial powers and the poverty of former colonies. As Kehinde Andrews, an academic and staunch advocate for reparations, put it recently on BBC Two’s Politics Live: ‘The wealth we have today directly comes from slavery and the former British Empire.’

This narrative is widely propagated. It is also incredibly simplistic and overlooks the complex web of factors that has influenced global economic development over the past few hundred years. As then business and trade minister Kemi Badenoch rightly pointed out earlier this year, Britain’s prosperity cannot be attributed solely to colonial exploitation – and the economic challenges facing Britain’s former colonies cannot be blamed entirely on British rule, either.

Singapore, for example, was a British colony between 1819 and 1965. Despite this legacy, it has emerged as a global economic success story, largely due to political and economic reforms under former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew. At the same time, slave trading is hardly a guarantee of future wealth. Quite the opposite. The slave trade in the American South arguably stunted the region’s economic growth by creating an over-reliance on an outdated agrarian economy.

Reparations campaigners will also point to what they consider to be a monumental injustice – namely, the then British government’s decision in 1835 to take out a loan of £20million (worth over £2.5 billion today) to compensate slave-owners for their ‘loss of property’. Yet, in many ways, the nature of this payment is misunderstood. The British government was effectively paying for the slaves’ liberty, rather than ‘rewarding’ slave-owners. It was a pragmatic decision taken to overcome the resistance of slave-owners and to expedite the emancipation of their slaves.

Moreover, Britain was hardly a nation of slave-owners. In fact, only about 40,000 British individuals actually owned slaves during the abolitionist era and only 3,000 received reparations. The vast majority of British people at the time were economically marginalised themselves and did not directly benefit from the slave trade. Asking today’s working and middle classes to ‘compensate’ for the actions of a small elite from two centuries ago is wrong and historically misguided.

Here we come to the nub of the problem. Too often reparations campaigners distort the tragic and painful history of slavery to make their arguments. They overlook inconvenient historical facts, such as the role of the African rulers who actively participated in the slave trade and frequently resisted abolition. African leaders such as King Ghezo of Dahomey (modern-day Benin) directly benefitted from slavery, amassing wealth and power by selling captives from rival tribes to European traders. When the British sought to end the trade, King Ghezo reportedly resisted, declaring that, ‘The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people – it is the source and the glory of their wealth’.

I am far from opposed to reparations per se. I would support reparations for living victims of state injustices, from Holocaust survivors to Japanese Americans interned during the Second World War. If individual families wish to pay reparations for their forebears’ role in the slave trade, as the Trevelyan family has done, then that is their choice. However, it is a very different matter to make vague demands of the entire U.S. and British public for reparations for events from centuries ago.

Chattel slavery and colonialism were devastating and morally abhorrent chapters in human history. But the best path forward is to treat individuals from all backgrounds as equals, free of the reductive labels of historical victimhood and unburdened by grievance.

Rather than obsessing over the past, Britain and its former colonies should look toward opportunities for partnership, development and trade. The reparations movement risks becoming a drain on moral and political discourse in both countries and beyond, shifting responsibility from modern elites who can enact change to a defeatist focus on historical grievances.

In the U.S. and Britian, the issue of reparations only fosters division and resentment. If our leaders want to prevent the call for reparations from gathering yet more momentum, they need to come up with a clear and reasoned response – one that acknowledges the complexities of history without conceding to misguided demands for financial atonement. Instead of allowing past injustices to dictate future policy, the focus should be on building a future that upholds true equality, freedom and shared prosperity.

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