06-19-25 - 6am - The history and meaning of the Juneteenth Holiday

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
It is an iHeart holiday and a Rod's not here.
I'm here. I walked in color out of the morning
news isn't here. The news room is empty. There's one
person back there. And I'm not I'm not saying any
of that because I'm patting myself on the back because
I'm here today. It's just that when we got this

(00:20):
message from our traffic department, which is not the like
the vehicular traffic, it's the people that put together the
spots and the commercials, and so they wanted to know,
you know, it was a not all hands but all
you know, all on air people email that said I
need to know if you're And of course whenever I
see those, I read them and I'm I'm you know,

(00:44):
I'm not being egotistical. I'm just saying when I get
something that asked the question like are you going to
be here on such and such date? I take that
personally and by that I mean I assume you're asking me,
am I going to be here on Thursday June nineteenth,
because we need to know whether to put recorded spots

(01:06):
in place of your lives or not. And I scratched
my head, thinking, why why are you asking me if
I'm want to be on a random day, Like when
this email came out two weeks ago, why am why
am I going to be here on a random day
in June? Why why are you asking me that? So

(01:26):
I stepped right into it by writing her name, steph
I wrote Stephanie right back and said, what why are
you asking? Oh? Because it's a company holiday. Oh oh,
it's Juneteenth. So I was of the mind that, no,
I don't want to take a Thursday off. I don't

(01:48):
want to look, I don't want to take Thursday off
and then come back and work on Friday. And I
don't want to waste a vacation day because I have
my other vacations planned, you know, things to do in
New Mexico, and I got some trips to make and
things to do, and so no, I don't I don't
want to waste this day. So I went I went
to the program director. I went to my boss, who's

(02:09):
probably sound asleep right now like everybody else in the company,
and and said, hey, can we make a deal. Do
I have to take Juneteenth off or can I take
that holiday and can we bank it and use it
somewhere else? And of course, you know, because and I
think he was actually glad that I said that, and
he goes, well, you're certainly welcoming to bank it. I'm

(02:30):
more than happy to do that for you because iHeart
doesn't have any you know, like they do if well,
Memorial let's see Memorial Day. Yeah, Memorial Day that was
a Monday. Isn't inything that all federal holidays seem to
be on a Monday, except well, well Juneteenth isn't, but
I guess maybe Veterans Day isn't some others. But iHeart

(02:54):
doesn't provide any what they call fill in programming so
that you know, they don't have to find fill in
hosts and stuff. They just run you know, whatever crap
they run, you know, throughout the day. So he, you know,
my guy was kind of like, oh, yeah, really, if
you want to come in and work that day, that's
fine with me because we don't have any fill in
bro programming. So I'm not even thinking about it. And

(03:17):
I well, actually I was thinking about it last night,
but I wasn't thinking of consciously thinking about it this morning.
And I walk in and I see Shannon, and Shannon's
kind of wandering around, and I see that color out
of the morning news. The studios over in Kowa are dark.
There's nobody there. I kind of survey the newsroom and

(03:37):
there's nobody. There's I think Chad's out in the newsroom.
There's there's one person in the newsroom. And I'm I'm
just I'm just kind of I just find it odd.
I find it odd. And you're really going to understand
why I find it odd when we go through some
of the history of Juneteenth, and then I'm going to

(04:00):
you something about Juneteenth that some people will accuse me
of being, you know, a conspiracy theorist, or you know,
a nut job or a wackadoodle or crazy or insane
or stupid or whatever, you know, all the usual agitives
that are applied to me normally. So let's get started
about June teenth, celebrated annually on June nineteenth, commemorate commemorating

(04:27):
the end of slavery in the United States. Specifically, However,
it's not really commemorating the end of slavery in the
United States. It's it's marking a particular day, June nineteenth,
back in eighteen sixty five, when enslaved African Americans in

(04:50):
one little place, which is actually a nice place. My
aunt used to live down there. I loved it. Galveston, Texas.
That's the day they were told, hey, you're no longer slaves. Now.
In African American history, American African culture, and just their
kind of storytelling, it's known as Freedom Day, Emancipation Day,

(05:17):
or make a footnote on this one America's second Independence Day.
We'll get back to that in a second. Today it
symbolizes the liberation and the ongoing fight for equality. Well,
isn't that interesting? All right? A little history just to

(05:38):
put it in perspective. The Civil War eighteen sixty one
eighteen sixty five fought obviously, I mean, you know, I
started to say, I'm not trying to be condescending here,
and I'm certainly not trying to tell you something you
don't already know. But I would surmise that they're maybe

(05:59):
not within this. But I bet there are products of
public education that probably don't know what I'm about to say.
The Civil War? Do you know the years that was fought?
Eighteen sixty one to eighteen sixty five? Do you know
who fought the Civil War? Yes, it was between the Union,

(06:21):
the Northern States, and the Confederacy the Southern States over
issues including slavery and economics and states rights and blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah. You know as well
as I do that. On January one, eighteen sixty, eighteen
sixty three, the President Abraham Lincoln issued and signed the

(06:45):
Emancipation Proclamation, which itself declared that all enslaved people in
the Confederate held territories were to be set free. It
was essentially an executive order. It applied only to areas
under Confederate control, not the Union controlled states, and obviously

(07:06):
enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation depended upon Union military advances. Now,
in practice, the proclamation had limited immediate impact in places
like Galveston, Texas, where Union troops were, you know, kind
of scarce, and the enslavers often kind of either ignored

(07:27):
the news or they suppressed the news, because clearly, if
if you're an enclave that still has slavery, you really
don't want to know that the yahoo Abraham Lincoln back
in d C. Has emancipated you and you're free. You
really don't want your property, as they were called, You
really don't want them to know that, So you suppressed

(07:47):
the news and then to do June nineteenth, eighteen sixty five,
Major General Gordon Granger galloped into Galveston, Texan, Texas. He
had I don't know, some two thousand Union troops with him,
and what was he doing there? He was there to
enforce the Emancipation Proclamation and maintain order when he announced that, hey,

(08:12):
all of you slaves are free. So Granger issued what's
called General Order number three, which announced the people of
Texas that quote, all slaves are free, and that the
relationship between the former enslavers and the enslaved people would
become one of employer and hired labor. That's all in

(08:33):
General Order number three. Probably not taught whatsoever in high
school history anywhere. Now, the announcement came over two years
after the Emancipation Proclamation and two months after the Confederacy
had already surrendered at Appomatics back on April nine, eighteen

(08:54):
sixty five, which that date effectively marked the end of
slavery in one of the probably the last strongholds of
the Confederacy. Now, why the delay in letting somebody in Galveston,
Texas know well geography? It was isolated, limited Union presence

(09:15):
resistance from the enslavers themselves, who kept trying to maintain you.
They were kind of like the last vestiges of slavery.
They were the last holdouts. So the free African Americans
in Galveston and pretty much all across Texas, they started
celebrating June nineteenth as a day of liberation as early

(09:35):
as back as eighteen sixty six. They had prayer services, feasts, music, storytelling,
community gatherings often held in churches or out in open fields.
And of course they held riots, and they you know,
they were mostly peaceful riots, but they held riots. No,

(09:56):
I just made that up because I wanted to swerve
into and how we got to where we are today,
because where we got today is probably not going to
make a lot of people happy. Well, you may understand,
because it's just factual. So let's get in with a
simple proposition. A nation that loses grip on our historical

(10:21):
truth will soon lose the very liberty that we claim
to defend. I've said a bazillion times on this program
that passes prologue that we don't know our history, and
we need to understand our history in order to understand
not just where we are, but where we're headed. And

(10:42):
in the case of this holiday Juneteenth, the official narrative
that keeps getting peddled by government institutions at which you'll
probably hear about today on the Cabal insists that June nineteenth,
eighteen sixty five, that that date marked the end of
slavery in the United States, And as you know by
what I've just previously told you, it did not. The

(11:04):
same narrative suggests that slaves in Galveston were ignorant of
their freedom until General Granger arrived and read General Order
number three from a balcony. Guess what that to his faults?
So why do we have to go through all the deception?
Why enshrine historical inaccuracy into federal law, complete with flags.

(11:31):
There'll be hashtags all over X today, There'll be posts
all over Facebook, and there'll be official observances around the country.
Let me suggest that the answer doesn't lie in a
celebration of liberty, but the answer probably lies in a
quiet replacement. Juneteenth, far from being a spontaneous commemoration of emancipation,

(11:57):
is a politically engineered holiday whose true function is to start,
not to accomplish, but to start. This is progressivism. This
is Marxism. Its true function is to desenter the fourth
of July and an attempt to recast the founding of

(12:21):
this country as a fraud. The sixteen nineteen project, for example,
is to promote a narrative that is steeped not in liberty,
but in grievance. You know what do we celebrate on
July fourth? Independence Day? Oh? Think about the name Independence Day.
We celebrate our independence, our freedom, and our liberty. Juneteenth

(12:48):
is actually based in grievance, in victimhood. At the bottom,
June teenth is really not about celebrating the end of slavery.
It's about an attempt to reinterpret the American project itself.
It's about an attempt to reframe completely how this country
was founded and where we're going. Do you understand why

(13:10):
I didn't want to take today off? I celebrate the
freedom of slaves. I think the Emancipation Proclamation is one
of the cornerstone documents of American history. It's why even
though Abraham Lincoln, like all presidents, did things that I

(13:32):
vociferously disagree with, and we can argue about many things
that Abraham Lincoln did, But between the thirteenth Amendment and
the machinations that Lincoln went through to get the thirteenth
Amendment passed. By the way, if you don't know what
that is, just like I tell you with certain words,
go look it up. I'm not going to you know,

(13:53):
I'm not going to read the thirteenth Amendment to you
today because if you don't get what that's about, then
you really might be a product of public education. So
to understand why I make the claim that this is
really about grievance and not about celebrating liberty and freedom,

(14:15):
we need to clarify two foundational myths upon which June
teenth rests. First, it's not true that the enslaved people
of Galveston only discovered that they were free on June nineteenth,
eighteen sixty five. We have historical evidence that clearly demonstrates

(14:37):
that the Emancipation Proclamation was published very widely in newspapers
all across the country, including the Houston Tri Weekly Telegraph,
as early as February two, eighteen sixty three. Remember the date.
The thing that we're celebrating today occurred in eighteen sixty five.

(14:59):
The Emancipation Proclamation hit the newspapers and was published published
in the Houston Tri Weekly Telegraph as early as February two,
eighteen sixty three. Now, why do I point out the
Houston Tri Weekly Telegraph. If you know anything about the
geography of Texas, Houston and Galveston are inextrificly, inextricably linked together, geographically, historically, culturally,

(15:25):
and every I mean everything about it. They're all linked together.
In the Houston Tri Weekly Telegraph. Maybe not on the
day of publication, but on the day after, was distributed
widely in Galveston, Texas. Galveston, a major port city, had
direct access to that information. But then this is the

(15:49):
to me, this is funny and ironic at the same time.
Remember the Works Progress Administration, the WPA put in by
Fire is one of the work projects to try to
get us out of the Great Depression slave narratives. Well,
they did, like oral histories. They went through for example,

(16:13):
and many of the photographs that you see at the
Dust Bow were commissioned were photographs that were commissioned by
the Works Progress Administration to hire photographers to go historically
record what was going on in the Dust Bow. Well,
another part of the Works Progress Administration was to collect
narratives from former slaves about their history, their stories, the

(16:40):
slave narratives, well, the WPA. When you look in the
archives of the WPA, their archives confirm that the news
of the Emancipation Proclamation traveled fast among the enslaved. The
word of mouth was just lightning speed, the speed of light.

(17:05):
In fact, in those archives you'll find a story by
Felix Heywood, a former slave from Texas, who in the
WPA archives remembered vividly quote, oh, we knowed what was
going on in it all the time. We had papers
and end days, just like now. The slaves, as much

(17:29):
as the enslavers and the slave owners may have wanted
to suppress information. Key, isn't that interesting? Slave holders, just
like those anti libertarian, anti liberty, anti freedom, progressive Marxist
communists today who want to control the flow of information

(17:50):
to you, also wanted to control the flow of information
to their slaves. How do you keep someone enslaved by
controlling the information they have access to? But slaves did
not live and an information quarantine any just like you
and I today have, whether it's social media or we've

(18:14):
got chat groups, or we have all sorts of information
we got, we have all sorts of way ways to
get information. They did too. They had ways as their
owners would travel from town to town and their slaves
would be accompanying them. You didn't think that they didn't
whisper among each other when they had the opportunity to
do so. Of course they did. But I think the

(18:38):
most damning historical fact, and the simplest historical fact, is
this slavery did not end on June nineteenth, eighteen sixty five.
That date marks something else. It simply marks the enforcement
of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas, and only in ten

(19:01):
Why do I say that, Well, don't go away. Really sad, sad,
sad sad. But you know what, sometimes, you know, you
got to get to the bottom of the barrel to
find somebody to produce your program for you. So we
looked around, and quite honestly, as I told Shannon when
he came in this morning, I didn't realize a rod

(19:22):
wasn't working. So I just, you know, I just I've
got to go by this. I gotta fly by the
seat of the pants and work with the dreads of society.
And so here I am working with the dreads of society.
How dare you? So let's go back to juneteenth. It's

(19:42):
just a simple historical fact that slavery did not end
on June nineteenth, eighteen sixty five. That date. That date,
as I said earlier, marks the enforcement of the actual
date when slaves were freed, which is the date of

(20:02):
the Emancipation Proclamation. This is just the date of the
enforcement of the proclamation in Texas. Now, slavely persisted in
in Union loyal states such as Delaware, in Kentucky for
nearly six more months. On June nineteenth, eighteen sixty five,

(20:24):
more than two hundred twenty seven thousand Americans still remained
legally enslaved, because it wasn't until the ratification of the
thirteenth Amendment on December sixth, eighteen sixty five, where those
people truly and legally freed. So if we're going to
seek a holiday to commemorate the end of slavery, December

(20:45):
sixth would be the logical choice. That's the ratification of
the thirteenth Amendment. Yet for whatever reason, Congress chose June teenth,
Why this day? Well, to answer that question, you really
have to go back and understand the underpinnings of how

(21:09):
all this movement actually got started. The real most significant
push to federalize the holiday really got its acceleration in
the wake of the George Floyd riots of twenty twenty.
Now that's a period that is marked not by unity

(21:30):
but by division, not by historical celebration, but by symbolic iconoclasm.
Think about this. On the day that we're supposed to
be celebrating the liberation of slaves, they were tearing down.
Statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and even Abraham Lincoln

(21:55):
were defaced and toppled. The very president that saw the
Emancipation Proclamation, that pushed for and dragged the Thirteenth Amendment
through the Congress, his statues get toppled, the faced, vandalized,
torn to pieces, kind of like Saddam Hussein being torn

(22:18):
down in that iconic video. And then the American flag.
This symbolizes liberty and freedom. The flag itself was reimagined
by all these progressive activists during the George Floyd movement
as a symbol of systemic oppression. So in that context,

(22:42):
JUDENTEEH became useful, not as a historical commemoration, it became
a cultural replacement. They're trying to shift the moral center
from individual liberty and individual freedom to this country is,
and the flag and Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation

(23:03):
and all of that is actually a symbol of oppression.
This country is systemically oppressive, according to them. I despise
those people. Now. To be clear, there's nothing inherently wrong
with commemorating emancipation, but June teenth does not do it honestly.
June tenth inserts a deliberately misleading narrative into your consciousness,

(23:29):
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 news supposedly news
ignorant slaves. It recasts emancipation not as the culmination of

(23:54):
the American project, not as something that the founding fathers
themselves wanted to eliminate but knew they could not form
a more perfect union, could not get the thirteen colonies
to come together unless they put certain clauses in the constitution,
knowing that we have to work over time to get

(24:17):
something done. You know, it's really it recasts emancipation, as
I said, not as the culmination of the American project,
but as kind of a necessary correction to its founding,
and that in a very kind of subtle way, poisons

(24:39):
the well of our civic pride. Now, the Cabal's repeated
claim that Juneteenth marked the end of slavery in America
is more than just a mistake. I think it's irresponsible,
and even worse, it reveals an underlying ideological motive. I
know you're shocked the Cabal has an ideological motive. Of

(25:00):
course it does if the fourth of July. Think about
it this way, If if the fourth of July celebrates
the birth of a nation that is founded on individual
liberty and freedom, then Juneteenth is fast becoming a foil.
It's becoming a holiday that implies that liberty was a lie,

(25:23):
that seventeen seventy six was hypocrisy incarnate, and that true
justice only arrived by a federal banet in Galveston, Texas.
That's not merely revisionist history. That's trying to be revolutionary.
No different than the authors of the sixteen nineteen project

(25:47):
were revolutionaries, and any more than the founders of Black
Lives Matter are our self avowed Marxists. What we have
as a federal holiday today is both revisionists and it's
an attempt at revolution. Now, when I use the phrase

(26:09):
cultural Marxism. Some people drive that as a conspiratorial term,
but the essence of the critique by using the phrase
cultural Marxism, I think is very straightforward. In place of
economic revolution, it promotes cultural revolution, and that cultural revolution

(26:30):
is dismantling Western traditions, the symbols of this country, and
the moral narratives so they can clear the way for
a new social order. And June teenth fits neatly within
that paradigm. This is not an apolitical holiday. Today is
an ideological tool. It's a tool that's being used to

(26:53):
reframe the American identity around victimhood and around systemic injustice
as opposed to around liberty, freedom and the things that
we did that we literally killed each other for in
the name of liberty and freedom, to free black people
in this country, to believe to free the slaves. It

(27:18):
is an ideological tool, and it is an attempt to
reframe our identity around victimhood and systemic injustice. And if
you think that seems harsh, then you ought to step
back and listen to the coordinated media campaign that surrounds
June teenth. You'll hear it today, you can find it

(27:39):
historically ever since it was approved a couple of years ago. NPR, PBS,
the New York Times, they all run pieces. They all
have news stories uncritically parroting the falsehood that this day
marks the end of slavery. And you'll find it in
school curricula increasingly highlight Juneteenth while diminishing Independence Day. Now

(28:06):
they won't do it under Trump, I don't think, but
you'll probably find it in Colorado or in your state,
where state offices will fly the Juneteenth flag, a symbol
that did not even exist two decades ago, and they'll
probably you know, I think about as much as I'm

(28:27):
tearing apart June teenth, then I think about gay people,
bless their little peepick in hearts. It's Pride month, and
between the Iranian Israeli conflict, between the border stuff going on,
and between my dismantling of Juneteenth, poor pride flags are
just getting decimated everywhere. I feel sorry for them. Corporations, Amazon,

(28:57):
I'm sure there are corporations all over the country all
will promote Juneteenth with the kind of vigor that they
once reserved for the Fourth of July. This is not accidental.
The effect, intentional or not, is to lay the seeds
to plant the seeds that the real America did not

(29:22):
begin in seventeen seventy six with the Declaration of Independence,
but in eighteen sixty five, at the end of slavery.
That's the same conceptual pivot that underlies the New York
Times sixteen nineteen project, which argues that America's true founding
began with the arrival of the first slaves, not with

(29:42):
the drafting of the Constitution. And that project, just like
the Juneteenth Project, tries to invert the American story. Liberty
becomes accidental, oppression becomes essential. Well, I won't surmise how
you might have heard it, So here's the irony. The
true story of American emancipation is one of triumph. We

(30:04):
fought a brutal war, and that war was to extend
the promise of the Declaration of Independence to all of
our citizens, regardless of their color, to get rid of slavery.
And Lincoln understood it, as did Frederick Douglas and the
men who fought and died at Gettysburg. That story deserves honor,
But June tenth does not tell that story. Instead, juneteenth

(30:28):
substitutes a fable. Because remember this story about these slaves
just learning about it is false. A handful of slaves
in a remote part of Texas learning but lated lean
for the first time that they were free. Oh it's
a great story, but it's not history and it's not accurate.
If we really wanted to celebrate the end of slavery,

(30:49):
we might have December six, you know, the day that
actually marks the real end, the legal end of slavery,
with the adoption of the thirteenth Amendment. That would anchor
a mansion patient in the text of the Constitution, rather
than the dramatic flourish of a general running into Galveston
and posting General Order number three. But you know what,

(31:10):
that won't work because that won't serve the ideological purpose
that Juneteenth now fills, because that would point us back
to the genius of the founding fathers and the fulfillment
of the promises that we keep striving to perfect. Juneteenth
as it is currently framed is a myth masquerading as

(31:32):
a milestone. It deserves scrutiny, not sanctification. And I insist
on living in the real world in this program. I
believe in individual liberty and individual freedom. I believe in
the Constitution. I believe that documents like the Declaration of
Independence were divinely inspired. I believe that the if you've

(31:57):
ever seen I forget which movie it is, but the
About or maybe it was a television series about Abraham
Lincoln and the machinations he had to go through to
get Democrats to adopt the thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. Oh there,
I just let it slip. That's what the thirteenth Amendment's about.
If you hadn't figured that out already. So as you

(32:20):
pull up to a bank to make a deposit today,
or you go and realize you can't do that, or
as you realize when you go to the mail box
to collect your mail and oh, you realize, oh, I
can't do that. I want you to remember this segment.
This is about reframing the entire foundation foundational principles of

(32:45):
this country. And it's all based on a lie, a lie,
and that lie was perpetuated and really started getting pushed
during the George Floyd mostly peaceful riots by self of
Marxists like the founders Kali Caris Koulus or whatever her
name is from Black Lives Matter, and of course all

(33:08):
the useful idiots, the United States Congress that capitulate because
oh my gosh, we can't say anything that might be
construed as being, you know, anything that oh goes against
the narrative that they want you to believe. I hope
you found this worthwhile