Juneteenth: Reclaiming the Meaning of Freedom

[June 19, 2026]  America stands at a crossroads in our understanding of history. Juneteenth commemorates a profound moment: June 19, 1865, when Union Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, and issued General Order No. 3, which enforced the Emancipation Proclamation and declared the enslaved people of Texas free.

The order marks the end of slavery in the last Confederate stronghold, a hard-won extension of the promise embedded in the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights.

This should be a day of sober celebration: a recognition of the immense sacrifice required to confront and abolish one of humanity’s oldest evils. Slavery was not an American invention; it was ubiquitous across civilizations for millennia.

What was revolutionary was the Anglo-American experiment in ordered liberty, rooted in Judeo-Christian ethics and Enlightenment reason, which mobilized blood and treasure, the hundreds of thousands of young men, to purge it from our nation. Abraham Lincoln called it “a new birth of freedom.” It completed, imperfectly but heroically, the work begun on July 4, 1776.

Yet, as we have seen with so many cultural symbols in recent years, the forces of resentment and ideological possession threaten to corrupt this holiday. What began as a Texas Jubilee tradition, bipartisan in its state origins, with Democratic sponsorship and Republican gubernatorial approval, has been rapidly co-opted.

It is now reframed not as a shared American triumph over tyranny, but as a weapon in the arsenal of identity politics: a rival to the Fourth of July, a rallying cry for “systemic” guilt, reparations, and perpetual grievance. “The real Independence Day,” some proclaim, as if the founding itself were illegitimate.

This is the predictable pathology of the radical left’s postmodern neo-Marxism. It divides the world into oppressors and the oppressed, reducing complex human history to a power struggle of groups. It tells individuals, especially the young, that their worth derives from ancestral victimhood or inherited privilege, rather than from the voluntary confrontation with chaos, the assumption of responsibility, and the pursuit of truth.

It fosters resentment, which Nietzsche rightly warned corrodes the soul, turning potential creators into destroyers. Instead of inviting all Americans to stand in awe of the moral arc bent toward justice through courage and sacrifice, it excludes those who refuse the narrative of eternal national shame.

Consider the consequences. Rituals and commemorations are not trivial; they are how societies orient individuals toward the good and transmit the heroics of the past. The Exodus story in the Bible is not mere history; it is enacted memory: “We were slaves in Egypt.” It calls each generation to responsibility, gratitude, and vigilance against new tyrannies.

America’s Independence Day and now Juneteenth should function similarly: reminders that freedom is fragile, purchased at great cost, and must be renewed personally and culturally. To twist Juneteenth into anti-American agitprop is to profane that memory, to replace the biblical call to “go forth and sin no more” with a demand for endless atonement from one group to another.

The antidote is not to abandon the holiday to its captors, but to reclaim it in the spirit of genuine liberalism and Western tradition. We should celebrate Juneteenth as the beginning of a national fortnight of independence and renewal, from June 19 to July 4.

Honor the Union soldiers and freedmen who faced mortal peril; remember the shared heritage of liberty fought for against crowns and plantations alike. Teach the full truth: the horrors of slavery, the nobility of abolition, the ongoing imperative for each individual, regardless of ancestry, to confront their own capacity for tyranny and to aim upward.

Reject the revisionism of the ivory tower, which would have us believe competence and merit are mere masks for domination.

True freedom demands voluntary sacrifice and personal responsibility, not the externalization of evil onto “the system” or “Whiteness.” All who value the West’s unprecedented achievements in expanding human dignity must reclaim our institutions.

Teach children the story properly: not as a tale of perpetual guilt, but as evidence that even in our fallen state, we can move toward the Kingdom of God through courage, truth, and responsibility.

Juneteenth, rightly understood, is not the Left’s tool for division. It is another chapter in the American covenant, a call to every soul to shoulder the burden of freedom. Let us not let resentment ruin it. Let us build instead.

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Please read my books:

1. “55 Rules for a Good Life,” on Amazon (link here).
2. “Our Longest Year in Iraq,” on Amazon (link here).