Race relations in the United States have unraveled in recent years, not only because of genuine disagreement, but because many Americans now grow up believing the nation is fundamentally unjust — racist to the core, perhaps even irredeemable.
This idea, once fringe, now enjoys institutional backing. Critical race theory and DEI ideology assert that the U.S. was founded on slavery and white supremacy. And they dominate schools, corporations, and government agencies alike.
Don’t displace the Fourth of July. Don’t divide what should unite us.
As a result, America has seen a quiet comeback of sanctioned segregation. Colleges increasingly host race-based graduation ceremonies. Society encourages people to define themselves first by racial identity, not shared citizenship. That should alarm anyone who once marched for equal rights in the 1950s and ’60s.
When Americans stop thinking of each other as fellow citizens, the glue that holds the republic together dissolves.
Consider one example of this trend: the push for a separate “independence day” for black Americans.
On June 17, 2021, Joe Biden signed Senate Bill 475 into law, establishing a new federal holiday: “Juneteenth National Independence Day.” The bill commemorates June 19, 1865, when Union Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Texas and issued General Order No. 3, announcing that slaves in the state had been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation — two years after it was signed.
Former slaves in Texas celebrated, and in the years that followed, Juneteenth spread across the South. But it never held central importance in the broader civil rights movement.
Juneteenth did not abolish slavery. It merely marked the day slaves in one state learned they had been legally freed. The Emancipation Proclamation, issued in 1863, applied only to states in rebellion — excluding Union-supporting border states like Kentucky and Delaware, where slavery remained legal until the ratification of the 13th Amendment in December 1865.
Some activists now argue that Juneteenth should serve as “Black Independence Day.” That’s a mistake.
This view implies that African Americans have no rightful claim to the Fourth of July or to the principles of the Declaration of Independence. But those ideas belong to all Americans — not just the descendants of the signers.
It’s true that many historical figures sought to exclude black Americans from the promise of the Declaration. Chief Justice Roger Taney made that argument explicit in the Dred Scott decision. Confederates like Alexander Stephens and John C. Calhoun claimed that “all men are created equal” never applied to African Americans.
They were wrong.
Some cite Frederick Douglass’ famous 1852 speech — “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” — to support the idea that black Americans should reject the founding. But they ignore the full context.
Douglass, speaking two years after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, condemned the hypocrisy of a country that declared liberty while tolerating bondage. “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?” he asked. “A day that reveals to him ... the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”
But unlike Taney, Stephens, and Calhoun, Douglass didn’t reject the Declaration. He upheld it.
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Douglass took hope from the principles it proclaimed and called on America to live up to them. He dismissed the Garrisonian claim that the Constitution was pro-slavery. “Interpreted as it ought to be interpreted,” he said, “the Constitution is a glorious liberty document.”
He believed America’s founding held the moral resources to defeat slavery — and it did.
America’s founders didn’t invent slavery; they merely inherited it. At the time of the Revolution, slavery was a global institution, practiced on every continent and defended by every empire. Slavery, including African slavery, was a manifestation of the argument of the Athenians at Melos as recounted by Thucydides in his history of the Peloponnesian War: “Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Even Africans sold fellow Africans into slavery.
The Declaration of Independence marked a sharp break from that past. It asserted that all human beings possess natural rights — and that no one may rule another without consent.
Thomas Jefferson famously observed that humanity had long been divided into those born "booted and spurred” and those “born with saddles on their backs.” The founders rejected that model. They established a republic based on equality before the law, not the interests of the stronger over the weaker.
They also knew slavery contradicted those ideals. Many believed the institution would die out — an Enlightenment relic destined for extinction. Still, the political compromises they made to preserve the Union allowed slavery to persist, and it took a war to end it.
The Civil War was not a rejection of the founding. It was a fulfillment of it.
As Harry Jaffa wrote, “It is not wonderful that a nation of slaveholders, upon achieving independence, failed to abolish slavery. What is wonderful ... is that a nation of slaveholders founded a new nation on the proposition that ‘all men are created equal,’ making the abolition of slavery a moral and political necessity.”
The Declaration of Independence lit the fuse that ultimately destroyed slavery.
So let Americans celebrate Juneteenth — gratefully, joyfully, and historically. Let the holiday recall the biblical jubilee it was meant to evoke.
But don’t displace the Fourth of July. Don’t segment America’s founding. Don’t divide what should unite us.
As Douglass said: “I would not even in words do violence to the grand events, and thrilling associations, that gloriously cluster around the birth of our national independence.”
He went on: “No people ever entered upon the pathway of nations, with higher and grander ideas of justice, liberty and humanity than ourselves.”
Douglass understood something too many have forgotten: The genius of the American founding lies not in who it excluded but in the promise that, one day, it would include everyone.
Expect a wave of corporate media pieces today, all aiming to elevate Juneteenth’s importance in the American consciousness. These articles are sanctimonious, astroturfed exercises in progressive virtue signaling — gaslighting the public into believing Juneteenth deserves equal or even greater recognition than the Fourth of July.
But Juneteenth neither marks the beginning of slavery nor its end. Activists have hijacked the holiday to undermine the moral clarity of Independence Day.
Juneteenth has been weaponized to fracture America’s identity through deception and denigration.
Juneteenth commemorates the day Union Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Texas on June 19, 1865, to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation and declare the end of slavery in the state. Early celebrations called it “Jubilee Day,” marking the delayed but welcome fulfillment of the Constitution’s promise and the Declaration’s revolutionary spirit — at least in Texas.
For decades, Juneteenth remained a Texas tradition. It held official status as a state holiday for 41 years and an unofficial one since 1866. But in recent years, radical activists have repurposed it as a tool to advance a racialist rewrite of American history.
Before George Floyd's death in 2020, few progressives were even aware of Juneteenth's existence. But after Black Lives Matter-led riots caused over $1.5 billion in property damage and left at least 20 dead, the left seized the cultural moment. Activists bullied lawmakers into submission — both figuratively and literally.
That year, members of Congress knelt in kente cloth as a gesture of obedience. The Pentagon renamed military bases to satisfy a new moral order. Corporations slapped critical theory slogans on products. The so-called “black national anthem” was played at sporting events, eclipsing the actual national anthem.
And then came the crowning gesture: the creation of a new federal holiday. Juneteenth became the woke sacrament, signaling America’s supposedly unending racism.
It was ludicrous then. It’s borderline insane now.
Texas has every right to honor Juneteenth. The holiday commemorates the fulfillment of America’s founding ideals and the abolition of one of humanity’s most enduring evils. But beyond Texas, it holds no national significance.
Juneteenth doesn’t fall on the date of the Emancipation Proclamation. It doesn’t mark the actual end of slavery in the United States. Activists howl in protest, but the truth remains: Juneteenth has been repurposed to challenge and eventually replace Independence Day.
Most of the people writing solemn op-eds about Juneteenth don’t know its history — and they don’t care. What they do care about is creating a “new” Independence Day, one that fits a progressive narrative. Its placement on the calendar — just weeks before July 4 — is no accident.
This is part of the left’s long march through American institutions. National holidays shape national identity. And Juneteenth now functions as a tool to fracture that identity under the guise of moral progress.
Under the Biden administration, some military installations flew flags calling Juneteenth “National Independence Day.” The Department of Defense distributed official guidance using that exact phrase. Nikole Hannah-Jones, architect of the historically illiterate “1619 Project,” uses Juneteenth to promote her claim that America’s true founding began with the arrival of African slaves, not the signing of the Declaration.
As a former Marine and combat veteran, I recognize these tactics: divide and conquer, rewrite and replace. They follow a playbook.
Juneteenth’s federal recognition aims not to celebrate American emancipation but rather to distract from the actual Independence Day. The broader goal is to erode national unity and advance a Marxist agenda: divide Americans by race, replace shared history with grievance, and erase what came before.
RELATED: We should scrap Juneteenth, aka George Floyd Day, for a holiday commemorating America’s 1865 rebirth
I lived in Texas for many years. I’ll celebrate Juneteenth as a Texas holiday. The end of slavery deserves celebration. I would even support a national holiday that commemorates the abolition of slavery, honestly.
But I won’t join in the farce that Juneteenth represents America’s independence. Too many Americans gave their lives to preserve our constitutional republic and the revolutionary idea that all men are created equal and endowed by God with unalienable rights.
Independence Day remains the foundation of this nation. It paved the way for emancipation, the defeat of fascism, the collapse of communism, and the rise of the most prosperous country in world history.
The radical left understands this. That’s why it has targeted Juneteenth as a cultural wedge. Leftists expect Americans to bow at the altar of wokeness and pretend not to notice. And if we object, they call us pro-slavery.
I reject that lie.
I refuse to bend the knee to a movement that seeks to destroy everything good and true about this country. The stakes are too high — and the truth is too important to surrender.
We need more philosophers to resign from their university posts.
Graham Parsons, a philosophy professor at West Point, resigned from his tenured position in protest. Good for him. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth responded bluntly: “You will not be missed.” The question is, what exactly was Parsons’ “principled stand” — and should others follow his lead? I think they should, though not necessarily for the reasons one might expect. If more professors who insist on injecting gender ideology into the curriculum refused to teach, we might finally begin to salvage the American university.
Professors like Parsons saw themselves as soldiers in the struggle for social justice, fighting racism and oppression. Now they’re being asked to face an uncomfortable reality.
So, why did Parsons quit? In his own words: “I cannot tolerate these changes, which prevent me from doing my job responsibly. I am ashamed to be associated with the academy in its current form.” He accuses West Point of “failing to provide an adequate education for the cadets” under current leadership. That’s a serious charge. Parsons blames policies linked to Trump and Hegseth for undermining what he views as essential to a proper military education.
But what does he actually mean by “adequate education”? What does he believe West Point no longer teaches? That’s the real question — and one worth examining closely.
Parsons explains his position in the New York Times: “Whatever you think about various controversial ideas — Mr. Hegseth’s memo cited critical race theory and gender ideology — students should engage with them and debate their merits rather than be told they are too dangerous even to be contemplated.”
There it is. Parsons frames the issue as a crackdown on academic freedom, where professors no longer have permission to address controversial topics or challenge prevailing orthodoxy. Educators, he argues, must now parrot the government’s message and abandon real critical inquiry. He adds that “uncritically asserting that [America] is ‘the most powerful force for good in human history’ is not something an educator does.”
But Parsons isn’t just teaching anywhere — he’s at West Point. His objection isn’t a minor complaint about classroom nuance. It amounts to a rejection of teaching American greatness and a defense of gender theory and critical race theory as serious intellectual frameworks. He calls the academy “uncritical,” but what he really objects to is any attempt to affirm America’s moral legacy. In practice, Parsons sees the affirmation of the United States as inherently disqualifying.
The result? Criticizing CRT gets framed as dogma, while embracing it becomes the default. Rather than weigh arguments, educators must now accept gender ideology and race theory as truth — and sideline any defense of the country’s founding principles.
Parsons does offer specific examples of the curriculum changes he opposes. He claims West Point interpreted directives from Trump and Hegseth not just as a rejection of critical race theory and intersectionality, but as a broader ban on using race and gender as organizing principles in the curriculum.
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Parsons says department heads ordered a review of syllabi and forced faculty to revise them. “West Point scrapped two history courses — ‘Topics in Gender History’ and ‘Race, Ethnicity, Nation’ — and an English course, ‘Power and Difference,’” he writes. The academy eliminated the sociology major and shut down a black history project. Department leaders also told professors to remove readings by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and other minority authors.
He then describes how these directives affected his own classroom. “One of my supervisors ordered professors to get rid of readings on white supremacy in Western ethical theory and feminist approaches to ethics in ‘Philosophy and Ethical Reasoning,’ a course I direct that is required for all cadets,” Parsons writes. He even claims the West Point debate team was barred from arguing certain positions in an upcoming competition.
These details offer a clearer picture of his true grievance. Parsons didn’t resign over routine administrative changes. He stepped down because he could no longer teach what he believes: that white supremacy and feminist critiques of ethics are essential to understanding just war theory — a subject he has written about. He wants to use critical theory to criticize America, but he won’t subject critical theory itself to scrutiny.
Parsons demands that others question everything — except the assumptions behind his own beliefs. He’s like Descartes, but with highly selective skepticism.
In one of his articles, Parsons writes, “War theorists should be much more concerned with the gender and war literature and find common ground with feminists who have treated the problem of the political standing of soldiers as a philosophical priority.” This isn’t a neutral invitation to critical inquiry — it’s ideological advocacy. Parsons seems to think his view is correct and wants his students to adopt it. He’s not interested in weighing all perspectives; he’s advancing a particular dogma.
West Point, by contrast, has begun restoring a classical standard of education. Instructors are expected to equip students to identify flawed arguments and refute them. Professors must demonstrate why certain ideas fall short — and train cadets to do the same.
Parsons wants us to believe he resigned because he could no longer teach students how to think critically. He suggests the academy is censoring dissent. On the surface, that sounds like a position many academics might support. But his resignation tells a different story. It wasn’t about open inquiry — it was about losing the ability to promote his ideology without challenge.
Let me explain what it’s like to be a conservative inside a university. I’ve been told to revise my curriculum to fit a “decolonized” version of philosophy. At Arizona State University, I was the only professor who spoke up and said that crossed the line. Where were my leftist colleagues who now applaud Graham Parsons? Where were all the philosophers who claim to care about examining every perspective? For the past two decades, philosophy departments have resembled Socratic dialogues where only one voice gets to speak.
In truth, most professors only raise objections when institutional changes threaten their own deeply held beliefs. When administrators impose leftist ideology in the classroom, faculty members who share that ideology rarely object. They don’t see it as dogma — they see it as truth. They call it justice, a necessary correction to history. But when directives come from a conservative administration, they suddenly call it censorship and resign in protest.
This creates a profound dilemma for professors like Parsons. They saw themselves as soldiers in the struggle for social justice, fighting racism and oppression. Now they’re being asked to face an uncomfortable reality: They may have perpetuated the very racial essentialism they once condemned. For years, they operated within a system that marginalized conservatives — just look at the partisan breakdown in university faculties. That mirror reflects something they can’t bear to see.
They became what they claimed to hate.
It is time we restored the American university to the pursuit of truth and wisdom.
Here’s my final prediction: The immediate response from these professors will be to ask, “But who gets to say what is true or wise?” And of course, that’s the most telling response of all.
That’s critical theory talking.
Philosophy professor, know thyself.
U.S. civil-military relations rest on a fundamental contradiction. The United States operates as a liberal society — one designed to protect individual rights and liberty. Yet the military, which defends that society, cannot function under the same liberal principles.
To succeed, the military must maintain effectiveness, which demands a distinct and separate ethos. Liberal norms do not translate to battlefield realities.
Trust and cohesion — core elements of military success — cannot survive a system that prioritizes categories over character.
Civil society may tolerate — or even celebrate — behaviors the military must prohibit. The armed forces uphold virtues many civilians regard as harsh or barbaric, but those values serve a purpose. The military remains one of the few professions where issuing a direct order to “go die” is not only possible but sometimes necessary.
In his classic 1957 study, “The Soldier and the State,” Samuel Huntington defined a central tension in American civil-military relations: the clash between the military’s functional imperative — to fight and win wars — and the social imperative, the prevailing ideologies and institutions of civilian society.
Huntington broke down the societal imperative into two main components. First, the U.S. constitutional framework that governs politics and military oversight. Second, the dominant political ideology, which he called liberalism — “the gravest domestic threat to American military security” because of its deep anti-military bias.
Huntington warned that over time, the societal imperative would eclipse the functional one. Civilian ideology, not military necessity, would shape the armed forces, weakening the virtues essential for combat effectiveness.
He also identified two outcomes of this liberal pressure. In peacetime, liberalism pushed for “extirpation” — shrinking or abolishing military power altogether. In times of danger, it favored “transmutation” — reshaping the military in its own image by erasing the traits that make it distinctly martial.
Today, the ideology of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” has taken that process to an extreme. This isn’t just transmutation. It’s transmutation on steroids.
The military began its embrace of DEI during Barack Obama’s administration, following the 2011 report “From Representation to Inclusion: Diversity Leadership for the 21st Century” by the Military Leadership Diversity Commission. That report shifted military priorities away from the functional imperative — effectiveness rooted in merit, performance, and mission — toward the societal imperative, with “diversity, equity, and inclusion” elevated as the new ideal.
In practice, the Department of Defense replaced equal opportunity with “equity,” enforcing outcome-based preferences that favor certain demographic groups over others. Military leaders declared “diversity a strategic goal,” sidelining effectiveness as the primary objective.
This shift has fractured the ranks. By treating race and sex as markers of justice instead of emphasizing individual excellence, DEI pushes identity politics into the chain of command. That approach divides more than it unites. Trust and cohesion — core elements of military success — cannot survive a system that prioritizes categories over character.
The military depends on unity to function. DEI erodes that unity. As a governing ethos, it has proven deeply destructive — undermining the very effectiveness the armed forces exist to deliver.
The rise of DEI has created a generation of senior officers who place ideological conformity above military effectiveness. Former Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley spoke openly about “white rage” and promoted critical race theory. His successor, Air Force Gen. CQ Brown, and former Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Lisa Franchetti followed the same script — championing diversity for its own sake while sidelining readiness and merit.
The Trump administration aims to reverse course and re-establish the military’s functional imperative as its central mission. It has issued executive orders with three clear goals: restore meritocracy and nondiscrimination in place of equity quotas; define sex in commonsense terms and respect biological differences; and eliminate divisive programs rooted in critical race theory.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth now carries the mandate to restore the military’s traditional ethos — and put war fighting, not social engineering, back at the heart of military policy.
Standing in opposition to a president elected to root out DEI from the military is a generation of flag and general officers molded by an era of “woke” liberalism. These leaders embraced the demand that the military mirror the politics and ideologies of civil society. Many now cling to the dangerous fiction that the military can remain professional and effective while operating under the dictates of identity politics.
Officers once defended the military’s traditional ethos against efforts to civilianize the chain of command. Today, many senior leaders treat DEI as essential to military identity — and believe they can ignore the lawful orders of the commander in chief. That isn’t leadership. It’s insubordination, plain and simple.
The Trump administration has made clear its intent: restore a professional, apolitical military ethos and rebuild public trust in an institution weakened by a decade of ideological drift. This return to principle marks the path toward healthier civil-military relations — where the armed forces serve their proper purpose: protecting and defending the United States.
As nearly half the states battle the federal government to maintain discriminatory equity and inclusion practices in public institutions, billions of taxpayer dollars are at stake.
Michelle C. Reid, the district's superintendent, has described these initiatives as 'both central and intentional in [its] work,' and this year, FCPS paid DEI staff a total of $5.76 million to implement the racialized policies.
'If you identify as white, acknowledging your white racial identity and its privileges is a crucial step to help end racism.'
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