Trump vs. Leftists on Juneteenth: Is It Just a DEI Holiday?

By Selwyn Duke

Affirmative-action holidays, encouraged by value-signaling white liberals, are quite something. A Zambian friend of mine once remarked that in Africa he’d never even heard of “Kwanzaa,” a supposedly African holiday coinciding with Christmas. Of course not. It was made up out of whole cloth in 1966 by black American activist and criminal “Maulana Karenga.” (Birth name: Ronald McKinley Everett.) This said, at least Kwanzaa is not a federal holiday. Yet this isn’t the case with “Juneteenth,” the June 19 observance ostensibly commemorating slavery’s final extinction in the United States. It was declared a federal holiday on June 17, 2021 in the emotionally charged wake of the George Floyd riots.

Now, “Juneteenth” references the notion that slavery actually ended on June 19, 1865 — even though it didn’t. But, whatever. AOC told us in 2019 that being “factually” correct is overrated.

Whatever those facts, though, here’s another: President Donald Trump believes there are too many federal holidays. And some leftists, such as comedian Jimmy Kimmel, are none too happy that he chose yesterday, Juneteenth, to say so.

In fact, Kimmel and others have in response called Trump and his supporters “racist.”

He Said, She (or Whatever the Pronoun Is) Said

Some may find it odd that leftists would zealously defend a holiday commemorating another Republican attempt to free Democrats’ slaves. But so it is. As to the current controversy, here’s what Trump wrote on Truth Social:

Donald J. Trump Truth Social 06.19.25 07:03 PM EST pic.twitter.com/gHNZ02VIkP

— MAGA Resource (@MAGAResource) June 20, 2025

Kimmel, in whose head Trump apparently lives rent-free, jumped on this, saying Thursday on Jimmy Kimmel Live!:

If Trump were to acknowledge Juneteenth, he would risk upsetting his not-at-all-racist-and-how-dare-you-say-we-are base. They’re like, “We’re the ones who stopped enslaving — they should have a holiday for us!”

The irony is that the sentiment Kimmel mocks is actually true. The Republican Party was created in 1854 for the expressed purpose of ending slavery; it succeeded in doing so, too.

Kimmel probably doesn’t know this, though, given his displayed grasp of history. As he later added:

I don’t know, to me, it seems like a holiday that celebrates the end of slavery is one we should all be for.

(Again, June 19, 1865 doesn’t actually mark slavery’s extinguishment. Perhaps Kimmel graduated from the AOC School of Facts.)

Other leftists joined Kimmel in the TDS hate-fest, as the following tweets illustrate.

And here it is… Trump’s Juneteenth post. He wants to take it away, as I predicted earlier today. Racist scum. pic.twitter.com/ANnwXriv1l

— 💥Arbiter of Cool💥😎✌ðŸ»ðŸ‘ŠðŸ» (@ArbiterofCool) June 19, 2025

Formerly Unknown

There is an irony to all this anger. As Michael Schwarz writes today at The Western Journal, adding perspective:

To earn a PhD, and then to go on and teach Early American History at the college level, I had to read many books written by the best historians of the last 60 years, most of them liberals.

In all that time, I never once came across a reference to “Juneteenth.”

I myself am somewhat of an amateur historian, and I never did, either. The kicker: Neither did virtually all the leftists now circling the wagons around Juneteenth. Created, again, in George Floyd-inspired social madness’ midst, it’s perhaps like a rash action taken during a weekend bender. Upon sobering up Monday morning, you realize you probably shouldn’t have gotten that tattoo of Mickey Mouse holding a beer and smoking a joint. But it’s hard to undo. Now, though, leftists defend Juneteenth as if it actually is what “holiday” is a contraction of: a holy day.

The reality is that the “George Floyd” impetus behind Juneteenth was a deception. (There is no “police war on blacks.”) And, in a way, so is the holiday itself.

DEI Holidays

Juneteenth marks the day one Major General Gordon Granger brought news, which traveled slowly then, of slavery’s abolishment to Texas. This might have completely ended slavery in that state (maybe). But as Schwarz also writes:

Juneteenth, however, does not mark the date of the Emancipation Proclamation (Jan. 1, 1863) or the ratification of the 13th Amendment (Dec. 6, 1865), which formally ended slavery throughout the United States.

What about March 13, 1863, the date the famous all-black 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment was formed? …

By comparison, Juneteenth was a relatively insignificant event….

In other words, are we going to throw activists a DEI-holiday bone every time there’s racial unrest? Well, there are plenty of meatier bones out there. So how many more slavery-oriented federal holidays will we ultimately have?

Moreover, what of equal time? Will we next have federal holidays geared toward Hispanics? Asian-descent Americans? American Indians? Muslims? Feminists? Sexual devolutionaries (i.e. “LGBTQ+”)? The rabbit hole of identity-politics holidays can be deep — very deep. Should we ever have started digging it?

Symbolism Over Substance

It’s not just leftists advocating for Juneteenth, though. On Thursday, commentator Bill O’Reilly said he supported the holiday because because “African-Americans have gotten it worse than any other minority in this country.” Question, though:

How does creating a frivolous DEI holiday improve black Americans’ lot?

(Martin Luther King Jr. Day’s birth sure didn’t do so.)

Note here that blaming slavery for blacks’ woes is illogical. For as the late Professor Walter E. Williams would point out, blacks were doing better socially a century ago — closer to the time of slavery. Their unemployment number then was lower than whites’ rate, and most blacks at the time were raised in two-parent households. Their crime and abortion (a crime itself) rates were lower, too. In fact, Professor Thomas Sowell has said that growing up in Harlem in the 1930s/’40s, he never heard a gunshot.

Today, the black/white unemployment picture is the reverse (though black joblessness has dropped notably under Trump). Seventy-three percent of black children are born out of wedlock. Homicide is black youths’ leading cause of death, with 92 percent of those victims murdered by other blacks. And, generally, violent crime rages in black communities.

The reason for this isn’t a lack of slavery-centric holidays. It is, as Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson has put it, a “lack of moral character.” Put differently, black Americans must, as all people must, cultivate virtue, that “set of objectively good moral habits.” People who care about people — and not just popularity, power, and pocketbook — will publicly proclaim this, too. Good physicians present the cure, not snake oil.

Then again, we could just offer another DEI holiday. That’s a lot easier and more politically expedient than telling the Truth.

                   This article was originally published at The New American.