What Classical Conversations Got Wrong
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Jon talks about a post made on Classical Conversations social media accounts framing support for Juneteenth as an ongoing revolution for greater levels of equality. He then discusses the different reasons conservatives object to Juneteenth as a national holiday and contrasts this celebration with other holidays such as the Fourth of July.
#july4th #juneteenth #classicalconversations
00:00 Introduction
02:58 Equipping the Persecuted
04:26 Classical Conversation's Post
08:34 Why Not Juneteenth?
23:43 The 4th of July
25:33 Final Thoughts
- 00:10
- Welcome to the Conversations That Matter Podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. We're going to talk today about why classical conversations blew it.
- 00:19
- Yes, why classical conversations, the homeschool curriculum, in my opinion, blew it, or at least the person running their social media accounts.
- 00:26
- So I should say before I get into this that I'm not telling you that they're thoroughly compromised.
- 00:31
- You should dump their curriculum. I'm sure many watching this or listening are using classical conversations for their children.
- 00:38
- I know the church I attend, there's a co -op that meets there, and many of the parents who attend my church as well use classical conversations.
- 00:46
- So I'm not saying that the whole thing's bad. I don't know enough about it. All I'm saying is that this one post is pretty bad.
- 00:53
- And a lot of people seem to be unable to understand why it's bad, which is why
- 00:58
- I felt compelled to make this video, because I've gone over Juneteenth before, which is what this post is in relation to, but I think that I need to apply it to a specific case.
- 01:10
- This is a specific case to apply some of that critique of Juneteenth, and it's really not even of Juneteenth.
- 01:15
- It's the way Juneteenth is framed. And this is just such a textbook example of the bad framing that we've been getting since it was made a federal holiday.
- 01:24
- And so I want to talk about that. And I've been critical of Juneteenth for a while, but this goes beyond being critical of adopting
- 01:32
- Juneteenth as a federal holiday. This is the way that it's framed. And I'll go through it piece by piece and show you why
- 01:39
- I think this is not good. And this was reinforced to me. I didn't know about this post until today, which is why it was weeks ago.
- 01:47
- But I posted it today, and it kind of became a controversy, because it went mini -viral, and people were, most people were supporting what
- 01:57
- I was saying about it. I just said that Classical Conversations had one job, which was to not reinforce regime propaganda.
- 02:06
- Of course, I'm insinuating this is regime propaganda, which is what I'm going to argue and stand by. But most people were supportive, but there were many who weren't.
- 02:14
- Even people insinuating that being critical of this post means you must be a white supremacist of some kind.
- 02:21
- So I think that's a brain -dead take, of course. But when
- 02:26
- I went to the Facebook page for Classical Conversations and I looked at this post, there was a lot of support. And I was like, man, people, you know, we should be able to see through this, come on.
- 02:38
- But I realize a lot of people don't see through it, and so I figured I'll give you my take on it.
- 02:43
- So here's the post. It says, We remember the day that all Americans became truly free and celebrate the steps we continue to take toward freedom for all.
- 02:53
- I'm going to explain what's wrong with that post after a word from our sponsor, Equipping the Persecuted. If you are interested in helping our persecuted brothers and sisters in Nigeria, please consider supporting and sending a donation, perhaps, to Equipping the
- 03:08
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- 04:26
- All right, like I said, we are talking about why Classical Conversations blew it. And the post that they made for Juneteenth, on June 19th, was we remember the day that all
- 04:35
- Americans became truly free and celebrate the steps we continue to take toward freedom for all.
- 04:42
- Now, I'm going to go through this sequentially, but then I'm going to go into more detail. So real quick, sequentially, we remember the day.
- 04:49
- Okay, June 19th, 1865, was not the day that chattel slavery ended, even if you think that's what makes
- 04:55
- Americans truly free. That's inaccurate. It was still legal in many regions and states.
- 05:00
- The 13th Amendment made it illegal, but that was later on. That was in December. The second part of this, that all
- 05:07
- Americans became truly free, well, what does that even mean? All Americans became truly free?
- 05:13
- Because the next sentence seems to contradict this, because it says, and celebrate the steps we continue to take towards freedom for all.
- 05:18
- So if all Americans became truly free, why are there additional steps we need to take? Well, ah, that is the hook.
- 05:26
- That is why I am skeptical of Juneteenth, and I'll give you some more examples that are like this.
- 05:33
- The left often, I've noticed, for years I've noticed, does this thing when it comes to historical moments in America's past.
- 05:40
- They'll have a snapshot moment where they say, oh, look, women got the right to vote. Child labor laws were passed.
- 05:47
- We had civil rights legislation. We freed the Jewish people from concentration camps.
- 05:53
- Whatever it is, right, that, and some of these things are legitimately perhaps good things, right?
- 06:00
- Certainly, you know, freeing people from concentration camps is, but whatever it is that the left decides, hey, that's a really noble, good thing, and generally it's an egalitarian cause of some kind.
- 06:15
- What they'll do is they'll take that snapshot and they'll make that, hey, that's the moment that we're proud. That's when we became free.
- 06:21
- That's when we became good Americans. And then in the next breath, they'll say, you know, but we have so far to go.
- 06:28
- Every time the Democrats get a piece of legislation passed, hey, this is, we were pushing for this.
- 06:33
- Everything was going to be great when we got this. And then as soon as they get it, oh, we have so far to go.
- 06:38
- It's like it didn't do anything or it did little. And so I see the same thing in this sentence, and this is from Classical Conversations again.
- 06:45
- This isn't a left -wing group, but, you know, Americans, all Americans became truly free. What does that imply?
- 06:52
- Well, they weren't truly free before, you know, all that 4th of July stuff, that wasn't true freedom for everyone because we had slavery.
- 06:59
- But what would you say in 1865? Women still couldn't vote, right? Does that mean all Americans became truly free?
- 07:05
- No, it's the snapshot moment. It's the snapshot where you feel like, hey, we truly made some progress.
- 07:11
- We're truly free. And then in the next breath, you use that to push for greater and greater levels of egalitarianism of some kind, of equality, of DEI now.
- 07:23
- So we celebrate the steps we continue to take towards freedom for all. So what are those steps? Juneteenth has been used this way since it became a federal holiday and perhaps before that, but at least since I've been watching on the federal level, that's what it's been.
- 07:37
- And I'll give you some examples of that. So I made a post and this was on June 19th.
- 07:43
- This was not related to this Classical Conversations post, but this is a post about June 19th. And I said this,
- 07:50
- I said, I talked about negative monuments in American Monument, which is a documentary that I helped produce free on YouTube.
- 07:56
- By the way, check it out if you haven't seen it, American Monument. And while you're at it, go check out the 1607 Project, also free on YouTube.
- 08:03
- Let people know, a little side tangent here, but I could really use your help if you like the 1607
- 08:08
- Project, which just came out last week. Please let your favorite talk show hosts know about it, post it on social media.
- 08:16
- We'd really love to get this out there. And I don't mind doing interviews. I'm sure many of the people interviewed would not mind doing interviews on other podcasts and radio shows, etc.
- 08:24
- So trying to get the word out about that anyway. American Monument, though, is a documentary I made a few years ago.
- 08:30
- And what I said was that there was these things called, I call them negative monuments, it's my own term,
- 08:37
- I guess. But I said they aren't to people's achievements, but to their alleged failures. Juneteenth is a negative holiday.
- 08:43
- It's not about our greatness. It celebrates the revolution that dispels our notion of greatness. And I stand by this 100%.
- 08:50
- I think that's exactly what's going on. If you notice, even with the monument stuff, the left doesn't just take monuments down.
- 08:56
- They take them down to replace them with their own stuff. And that's what they're doing now.
- 09:01
- They want to put up their own commemorations to Stonewall. They want to put up that ridiculous
- 09:08
- MLK thing in Boston, this weird thing, but it's kind of honestly, it's an eyesore.
- 09:16
- But that's the kind of thing they put up. I know people have sent me a lot of other stuff where the left has, in places where they've taken down, in Boston, I think they took down a
- 09:26
- Lincoln statue a few years ago. But then they put up this MLK thing and that's just how they operate.
- 09:33
- And I saw that also, I remember in Richmond, when I was in Virginia, they were taking down all these
- 09:38
- Confederate statues and they put up some, I don't know if it was called the Emancipation Statue or what, but it had
- 09:45
- Nat Turner on the back, of all people, basically a terrorist on the back of your monument to commemorate him, but not
- 09:52
- Stonewall Jackson. So this is what the left does. And when they put up this stuff, it's not to people's achievements.
- 10:03
- They might frame it that way. They might say that. But really the way that it's used, and I would submit to you a holiday or a monument, what it does, how it's used, is the purpose of it.
- 10:16
- And it's really a reminder of the failures of a certain group. It's a wedge.
- 10:21
- It's not to unite people. The Civil War monuments even were reconciliation monuments.
- 10:28
- Really all the war memorials are that. It's to national spirit.
- 10:35
- And it, in a certain sense, could belong to everyone. The left, of course, puts wedges there and so forth.
- 10:41
- But that was kind of the point. Well, the left doesn't think in those terms.
- 10:47
- They aren't trying to put things up. They might say it's about uniting people. But the effect of their symbols and their statues and everything isn't to unite people.
- 10:56
- It's actually, what it does is it divides. It ostracizes a certain group, a certain modern political enemy.
- 11:03
- And it points out the failures of America, the things that we shouldn't be proud of, the figures we shouldn't respect, because they didn't honor certain things that we now think are so important, yet egalitarian strides we've supposedly made.
- 11:20
- And I think that's what Juneteenth is ultimately about, at least on the federal level. It's a negative holiday. It's not about our greatness.
- 11:27
- It really does celebrate the revolution, dispels our notion of greatness. And if you don't believe me, on June 19th of this year,
- 11:35
- Biden made an announcement. And I want you to notice how it's framed. He said,
- 11:42
- Black history and Black stories will not be erased, denied, or banned from our nation's conscience, no matter how hard people may try.
- 11:51
- Now, that's what he has to say on Juneteenth. Black stories won't be erased. They won't be denied. They won't be banned from our nation's conscience, no matter how hard people try.
- 12:00
- Well, what does that imply? Well, there's a whole bunch of people that are trying to ban these stories. They're trying to erase these stories and deny them from our nation's conscience.
- 12:08
- I mean, how horrible is that? And Juneteenth is one of the things that says and shows and helps combat these people because it reinforces this
- 12:21
- Black history, these Black stories. And so as long as we have this, we're not in as much danger of these things being erased, banned, or destroyed.
- 12:30
- But this is Joe Biden and how he used the holiday. That's not a uniting message for all
- 12:35
- Americans. Of course, that is a way for Biden to signal friends and enemies, to make a distinction and say, hey, there's us and there's them.
- 12:46
- There's friends and there's enemies. And we know who the enemies are, right?
- 12:52
- Of course, it's Donald Trump. It's right -wingers. And I think C .J. Engel is right.
- 12:57
- He said the purpose of a holiday is what it does. And I think that's exactly what the purpose of this holiday is. That's what it does.
- 13:04
- Now, a few things I want to say about just Juneteenth. Now, there are organic holidays, holidays that just form.
- 13:11
- People celebrate them and they end up becoming so widespread. They're just, they're recognized. It's not that they're created.
- 13:18
- They're recognized. And some people say Juneteenth is this, but obviously on a national level, it's not.
- 13:24
- You know, maybe you could say in Texas in a region, but I'm even skeptical of that. I don't know that this was a big thing in Texas unless you were in certain regions.
- 13:33
- In West Texas, were they celebrating this? I don't know, but let's just give that, let's just say that that happened.
- 13:40
- There were parades there in Houston and there was stuff going on in Texas. It's not an organic holiday for the whole country.
- 13:47
- It hasn't had time to form. Even Donald Trump said, and he supported the holiday, it's actually an important event, an important time, but nobody has ever heard of it.
- 13:56
- That's what he said, I think it was in 2021 when it became a federal holiday. There's a difference between that and forced holidays, which is what this is.
- 14:06
- It's forced. It's risen to national prominence. You even get a day off for it.
- 14:13
- And you're, well, I was going to say you're forced to celebrate, but I don't even know what the celebration is.
- 14:19
- Most people, they just take a day off. It's like Labor Day. What do you even do? I guess whatever you want. So I don't know, there's a certain meaningless to it.
- 14:27
- It seems like the only thing that matters, the only purpose it serves is to reinforce leftist narratives.
- 14:35
- That's how it's often used. And so from the beginning,
- 14:41
- I think this lacks the legitimacy that we see in other holidays, like the 4th of July, for example, which is a nationwide holiday, organically forming and then recognized.
- 14:50
- It wasn't forced. Thanksgiving would be another one like this. It takes time to, well, in normal circumstances, it takes time for these things to develop.
- 15:02
- Number two, though, it's a fake holiday. On June 19th, 1865, Union forces arrived in Galveston, Texas and declared to the population of that state that the
- 15:11
- Emancipation Proclamation had freed its slaves. At that time, 17 states still had slavery.
- 15:19
- 17 states still had slavery, or the blacks were enslaved in 17 of them. The 13th
- 15:25
- Amendment was December 6th of that year. That would be the day if you really wanted an
- 15:31
- Emancipation Day. So there's an inaccuracy here. I think that the left loves the Emancipation Proclamation.
- 15:36
- That's the basis for the Proposition Nation. If you don't know what that is, go watch the 1607 Project, you'll know more. And this is a celebration of that.
- 15:44
- It's not the 13th Amendment. So that may be the reason, but fast forward, it ebbed and flowed, whether this was celebrated or not.
- 15:54
- It was mostly celebrated in the black community in Texas, as far as I understand. And most people didn't know anything about this.
- 16:00
- It wasn't even a huge, huge thing. But Al Edwards, who was an associate of Al Sharpton, radical guy, described by the
- 16:08
- Texas Monthly as one of the Texas worst legislators. In 1980, he wrote legislation, and it was passed, that enshrined it as a state holiday in the state of Texas.
- 16:21
- And it's funny when he talked about his victory and how this became enshrined as a state holiday.
- 16:28
- He used Jefferson Davis's birthday celebration, which had been celebrated in Texas before, as an example of what needed to go and needed to be replaced by Juneteenth.
- 16:37
- And this is one of the points I keep trying to make. It's with music and church. It's with, it's really the nature of just tradition.
- 16:44
- When you, we only have a certain amount of things we can honor. We have a certain limited amount of time.
- 16:52
- We have a scale, a human scale that we operate on. And it means that we can't sing all the songs.
- 16:58
- It means that we can't honor all the people. It means that our minds can't hold all the stories, right? So we have to pick and choose which ones are we going to honor?
- 17:05
- Which ones are important to us? Which holidays do we celebrate? And one of the things that should occur to you with something like Juneteenth is, and this happened actually with MLK as well, with Martin Luther King Jr.
- 17:20
- Day, is when you put on a holiday, when you start celebrating it, something else is generally going to be diminished or it's going to go.
- 17:31
- In the case of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Washington's birthday was celebrated. Lincoln's birthday was celebrated.
- 17:37
- Now they're just combined into President's Day. And Martin Luther King Jr.
- 17:43
- gets his own day, which apparently he did not need to share with Juneteenth. Juneteenth is its own thing too.
- 17:49
- So once you start adding these holidays, which, and sometimes you can add holidays.
- 17:55
- I'm not saying it's wrong to add holidays, but also think through what is going. And in this case,
- 18:02
- Al Edwards was pretty, let's just say aware that, hey, this is coming in.
- 18:08
- Jefferson Davis's birthday is going out. So whatever link or connection
- 18:15
- Texas had to celebrating Confederate heroes, its contribution to the
- 18:22
- Confederacy, that's gone. And this video is not about discussing whether that should go or not, but I'm just saying that that went and this came.
- 18:32
- And he thought, hey, that's a great thing. That shows that we're good Americans. That's what Americans should be doing.
- 18:38
- We should be celebrating this and not that. And this is really what you have with holidays. It's inescapable, especially when you reach a saturation level and have a lot of different holidays.
- 18:48
- You can't celebrate all of them. Barbara Rose Collins was a
- 18:56
- Detroit Congresswoman in 1996. She started pushing for this on the federal level. And then of course, John Cornyn in 2021, he's actually a
- 19:03
- Republican, was the one who wrote and passed the legislation or wrote the legislation that made
- 19:09
- Juneteenth a federal holiday. And of course this was in reaction to, in the whole context to the death of George Floyd, the
- 19:16
- BLM riots and all of that. And the Republicans were frantically trying to prove that they weren't racists, that they were good people.
- 19:24
- And that was really the knee -jerk reaction. A lot of things were canceled during that time. You had flags,
- 19:30
- Mississippi state flag, right? Was taken down and tons of, hundreds of statues were taken down.
- 19:37
- Our curriculums changed even in school for the worse. There was a lot of changes that happened.
- 19:43
- And Republicans were desperate to somehow cash in on this. And that's really what the context in which
- 19:49
- Juneteenth was passed. And it's become, this is my third point, I've already teased this, but a negative holiday.
- 19:56
- It doesn't unite. Let me give you some more quotes. From 2021, when this was first made into a federal holiday,
- 20:02
- Biden said, President Biden, this is a day in my view of profound weight and profound power.
- 20:08
- A day in which we remember the moral strain, terrible toll that slavery took on the country and continues to take.
- 20:15
- Does that sound like a uniting holiday? No. It's saying, hey, this stain is still with us.
- 20:21
- So that means the guilt's still with us. We're still dealing with these problems. And we remember this moral stain.
- 20:30
- We remember this horrible thing. And that's the purpose of this day.
- 20:36
- So it's a negative holiday. It's to remind you of how terrible we were as a country and how terrible we were is still affecting us today.
- 20:44
- We're still terrible. Kamala Harris at the dedication according to NBC said, these are days when we as a nation have decided to stop and take stock and often to acknowledge our history.
- 20:56
- She urged people to be clear eyed about the realities of slavery and the long fight for freedom. So this is about acknowledging history, but it's more than that.
- 21:06
- It's about focusing on the realities of slavery. It's not even celebrating emancipation as much as it is how terrible slavery is.
- 21:14
- That's a negative holiday. It would be like on the 4th of July if we just thought about how terrible the
- 21:19
- British are and how horrible the things we still deal with is a result of how the
- 21:25
- British treated us, right? That would make the 4th of July a very different day, wouldn't it? We don't celebrate the 4th of July that way because it's not a negative holiday.
- 21:33
- It's a uniting holiday, unites all of us. It's just a day to celebrate what we've achieved, not the setbacks we had.
- 21:43
- It's not about how bad it was. It's about how good it is. Well, that's not
- 21:49
- Juneteenth. That's not at least the way it's celebrated. That's not the way it's framed. That's not the way it was sold to us. And of course, the post that I made on June 19th,
- 21:56
- I talked about it before, it was in reaction to Cori Bush. And Cori Bush made a post that said, it's
- 22:06
- Juneteenth and reparations. It's Juneteenth and community safety. It's Juneteenth and housing for all.
- 22:12
- And it goes on and saying, it's Juneteenth and Medicare for all, education, equity, voting rights, union jobs, and, and, and.
- 22:20
- That's what Juneteenth is. It is a, that's it. I think that's the greatest description of what this is.
- 22:26
- And the purpose of this is to put a wedge and push for all these modern political things.
- 22:33
- To use the guilt, to use the moral framing and the moral high ground that Juneteenth gives the left to now take that conscience.
- 22:43
- Because you can, you can get a guilty conscience to do what you want it to do. And to push for these other things to say, hey, make it right.
- 22:50
- Slavery was so terrible. America is so terrible. You want to make it right? Yeah, I want to make it right. Okay, reparations. Okay, housing for all.
- 22:57
- Okay, Medicare for all. You know, that, that's the way that you write this wrong. That's what Juneteenth has always been about.
- 23:03
- And I, and I've seen it from the beginning and it just baffles me that some people don't see it. But it, like I said, it dilutes other holidays.
- 23:10
- There are, there are 44 days off now people get. Federal holidays, right? If you're a federal worker, you get 44 days off now.
- 23:17
- Juneteenth is adding to that. And, and so for those reasons,
- 23:22
- I think that classical conversations saying we remember the day that all Americans became truly free and celebrate the steps we continue to take towards freedom for all.
- 23:31
- I think for the reasons I've just mentioned that this is reinforcing propaganda from the government, regime propaganda.
- 23:40
- And I think it's just a terrible post. So that's why I said what I said about it.
- 23:45
- And I stand by that. There's so much more that could be said about this, I guess. But I'll just end this way and say, look, the 4th of July has been different.
- 23:55
- I've already outlined some of that, but yeah, it organically formed. This is something that people could get behind.
- 24:01
- It unites people. It celebrates victories. It's not a negative holiday. It really is an origin story that those who have even integrated into the
- 24:10
- United States and assimilated can be part of and say that this is part of the heritage of America and what makes
- 24:19
- America good, what makes America the way it is today. And I don't know.
- 24:25
- It's just the spirit of it is so much different than Juneteenth.
- 24:30
- And I don't think every holiday has to be the 4th of July. But if you look at our other holidays, they're either religious,
- 24:37
- Christian, like Christmas and Easter Sunday, or Thanksgiving, I could say, is even religious,
- 24:46
- I suppose. Or they're civic. They're Memorial Day, Veterans Day. You know, even
- 24:52
- Father and Mother's Day. These are civic holidays that we recognize because there's actually a civic virtue in them.
- 24:59
- There's a good in them that unites us and really sets a high standard for what our character ought to be.
- 25:07
- Hey, we ought to be thankful. We ought to be brave. You know, we ought to be giving.
- 25:13
- We ought, like, these are the kinds of things these other holidays represent. And Juneteenth, what is it
- 25:19
- Juneteenth has? We ought to be feeling bad. That's how it's presented publicly by the people who pass the, well, the people who lead the country, who use the holiday for these purposes, who sign the legislation for the holiday.
- 25:36
- And now Classical Conversations is just reinforcing that same crummy take. And it's just, none of it's true.
- 25:43
- It just serves as the revolution must continue. That's what Juneteenth represents to me.
- 25:48
- The revolution must continue. And we have so far to go. And we're gonna use this to propel ourselves into more political objectives that the
- 26:01
- Democrats think of as good egalitarian things for us to achieve.
- 26:08
- So takeaways. One of the things I kept thinking about when I was reading some of the comments on the
- 26:13
- Facebook page for Classical Conversations is fathers really need to be involved in educating their kids.
- 26:19
- And I'm not saying you have to do everything. I know you're at work all day, but you need to at least be paying attention to this kind of thing.
- 26:25
- And I'm not saying that there aren't good discerning moms out there. Praise God there are. But I do think that with the maternal instincts that mothers have, they are more susceptible to these underdog stories and the way it's framed, the way it's sold.
- 26:41
- And I think fathers need to be involved in their children's education, looking at even curriculums, looking at...
- 26:48
- You don't even have to read the whole thing. You just have to go to certain sections. And I remember my dad did this years ago when I was in community college.
- 26:54
- I started early because I was homeschooled. And I remember I took this American history course and he looked at my textbook and he just went to like a few places that he's like, well,
- 27:01
- I lived through that. So let me see what it says about that. Oh, wow. Because the Vietnam War, totally wrong. I remember he threw my textbook in the trash and said, you're not...
- 27:09
- I was younger. I was like 16. You're not gonna be in that class. And I think dads actually do have to do some of that.
- 27:16
- Like there does need to be some kind of like an acknowledgement that there are...
- 27:23
- Even in our supposedly Christian conservative circles, there's a whole lot of people who don't think they're leftists, who don't think they're ideologues, who actually are.
- 27:32
- And they bought into a lot of this stuff unknowingly and they're pushing it. Some of it can come through in the curriculum and it actually can affect your kids.
- 27:43
- It can turn your kids into ideologues and in valuing and platforming and putting things in places in high, like respectable places where other things actually belong.
- 28:00
- Juneteenth, I think is just one example of that. Like emphasizing that so much that we were this crummy country and, hey, look, we have this revolution that did some good things and we have so far to go.
- 28:13
- Instead of the reinforcements of internal virtue, the heroes that represented that kind of virtue, that American spirit, that independence and bravery and self -sufficiency and the kinds of things we think about when we...
- 28:30
- It used to be common, so I hope it still is somewhat, but we think about being quintessentially American.
- 28:36
- Those things are represented in our other holidays and they make you strive for something better as a person, as an individual.
- 28:46
- They reinforce the connections you have to one another. Juneteenth doesn't really do that. Not the way that it's framed.
- 28:54
- I'm not saying it can't be framed differently, but universally, since it's been passed on the federal level,
- 29:00
- I have not seen it framed to just be like, hey, we're all
- 29:05
- Americans and this is a great celebration for, hey, we ended this labor practice that wasn't good.
- 29:11
- And we're all just really thankful that we ended that and it took some bravery and courage.
- 29:20
- One of the, I think, inhibitors to this, I'll just add this, I probably should have said it earlier, is the fact that about a million slaves, it's estimated, starved or had diseases after they were freed.
- 29:33
- They died. It was a horrible situation. Freedom for what? I was just freed into a war -torn economy and I don't know what
- 29:41
- I'm doing. And the white Southerners are having a really difficult time and I'm now sharecropping and I can't get out of it or I'm mining and I can't get out of it.
- 29:52
- Read the slave narratives. Read Booker T. Washington's book. His dad was a miner in West Virginia. It was terrible in many ways.
- 29:59
- And so you see that, you see the conditions that even by and large, the black community lives in today.
- 30:07
- And it's just, it makes it somewhat difficult, I will admit, for people who probably want to say, hey, like things are just so, so much better.
- 30:18
- Yeah, in some ways, yeah, there's more opportunity in some ways. And there's, in fact, now with the scholarships you can get and everything else,
- 30:27
- I mean, there are things, but it's, I don't know how to put it.
- 30:32
- Like, it's just, there's, what I've suggested would be more inspirational is like a
- 30:38
- Black Heroes Day. If you're gonna do something and you really wanna make something for the black community, like St.
- 30:46
- Patrick's Day is for the Irish and I don't know, like what other ethnic, I guess
- 30:52
- Oktoberfest. That's not a federal holiday though, but even Columbus Day to some extent, the
- 30:57
- Italians seem to really like Columbus Day. I don't think it's specifically Italian, but Italians are kind of behind,
- 31:02
- I think the effort to make that a thing, even though that's being replaced with Indigenous Persons Day. You know, if you wanna do something for black
- 31:12
- Americans, something they can be proud of, something they could gain inspiration from and something that they can share with the rest of the world.
- 31:18
- So, and the rest of the country, I should say, so that we can all can have our, you know, confer identity from it and have a great time.
- 31:26
- I thought maybe a Black Heroes Day, maybe, you know, something like, expand it to people like George Washington Carver and the
- 31:36
- Tuskegee Airmen and, you know, people who actually achieve some things, Clarence Thomas and make that the thing, like that's the inspiration, but instead they're burdened with these constant reminders of how oppressed they are and how passive they were and they were just, they didn't have any agency and life was bad and it's still bad because of what used to be bad.
- 32:00
- And like, it just doesn't inspire anything. I think it's a terrible holiday. That's just my take.
- 32:05
- I think it's a terrible holiday, at least the way that it's been celebrated on the federal level. And I think
- 32:11
- I'd probably beaten the dead horse if I keep talking about how I don't like it, but that's the effect of it.
- 32:17
- That's what I don't like. And I think if you fill your young kids full of that thinking and they start framing in their minds constantly, like thinking we got to strive for more equality, more equality, more equality, like it's a never ending train.
- 32:35
- It just keeps going. And you're setting them up to, for their minds to just be framed in that way that that's going to be the highest good to them.
- 32:46
- The way this works, because I was even noticing in the comments that some of the people who thought like, oh, he's a white supremacist because he doesn't like Juneteenth, like bunk, okay?
- 32:55
- But the way it works is if you don't get on board with their holiday, their new innovative holiday, they want to force on everyone, right?
- 33:03
- If you don't get on board with that, then what they do is they say, oh, like you must like you some slavery.
- 33:10
- That must be what it is. And then what they'll do, like, and generally the way most, especially white people who are faced with that react, it's like, oh no, no, no.
- 33:19
- You can have your holiday. I'll celebrate it too. And they cave. And then the next thing comes and they want to celebrate,
- 33:27
- I don't know, pride month. And you're like, I don't know about that. And then it's, oh, like, what do you hate homosexuals?
- 33:34
- Like, no, I don't hate them. Oh, of course you can have a pride month. And it just like national visibility day, transgender visibility day or whatever.
- 33:42
- And it just keeps going. And that's how this works until your whole calendar is flooded with these things.
- 33:49
- It's like a liturgical calendar for a godless left filled with their holidays, their celebrations, their commemorations, their figures.
- 33:59
- And it's crowded out all the people that actually had virtue that you respect and the events that actually are significant that bind you together with other people.
- 34:09
- That's the purpose of a holiday or at least one of the major ones. It's not even all about like what you're bringing in.
- 34:17
- Like I said, it's about what's falling off the back of the cart when you put on the new load. And so we have to reject that because if that's the constant strain is like more and more equality and more, like that's the highest good, then you're just going to end up with a situation where you end up flooding your calendar, flooding your parks with monuments to these egalitarian crusaders, flooding your textbooks with the emphasis being those who stood against this racist, homophobic, sexist, horrible society.
- 34:52
- And you end up with a society that can't take pride in anything but the fact that they're ripping on their society, that their society is so terrible.
- 35:01
- So the pride we have is that we don't like where we live and who we are. That's where we're going. I'm just telling you, that's where we're going.
- 35:07
- I've seen it for years. And at some point someone has to say, no, no, we're not doing this.
- 35:14
- And someone should have said no. Someone should have said no on the MLK holiday, to be quite frank with you. Not just because of his character, but his character is a big part of that.
- 35:21
- But because of what it did to the two other holidays that it combined in a president's day. Someone should say, no, he doesn't have that level of significance.
- 35:33
- And once you say, once you elevate the more egalitarian or revolutionary crusaders to that significant level, then it just becomes a tailspin and you keep having to go.
- 35:45
- So I've said my piece. That's why I think Classical Conversations should not have posted that.
- 35:51
- And maybe they should rethink who's running their social media. If it's a social media problem, maybe that is their curriculum. Maybe that's what they're doing now.
- 35:57
- I don't know. But yeah, maybe some people agree. Maybe they disagree. If you have some agreement, feel free to share in the comment section.
- 36:10
- And if you disagree, you can share there as well. And maybe you'll come up with some things I haven't thought of. But those are my thoughts.