Tag: history

Why Juneteenth Proves The ‘1619 Project’ Crowd Wrong

On June 19, 1865, Union General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, two months after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. He announced to the city’s residents that all slaves in Texas were free by the Emancipation Proclamation. Some slaves remained enchained in the border states of Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri until the 13th Amendment’s ratification on Dec. 6 of that year, but ratification was a forgone conclusion. The amendment had already passed both houses of Congress, and mourning over Lincoln’s assassination assured assent in three-fourths of loyal state legislatures.

Thus, the Union’s recapture of Texas marked slavery’s practical extinction in America. The anniversary has long been celebrated by some black Americans as “Emancipation Day,” “Jubilee,” or “Juneteenth.” In 2021, Joe Biden signed bipartisan legislation making Juneteenth a federal holiday after unanimous Senate approval. 

Conservatives have had a lukewarm relationship with Juneteenth so far, in no small part because Biden codified it in an effort to pander to the Black Lives Matter-led leftist rage mob in the wake of George Floyd’s death. The right has generally viewed Juneteenth as a leftist attempt to subvert Independence Day and divide Americans along racial lines. To the extent that we conservatives let left-wing institutions and media portray the holiday as only a sectarian one, the criticism is justified. But it needn’t be that way.

Conservatives should embrace this holiday as complementary to Independence Day, not in competition with it. Juneteenth symbolizes the triumph of liberty over arbitrary rule, the American Revolution’s culmination. Commemorating Juneteenth repudiates the 1619 Project’s make-believe version of the American founding and embraces our foundational creed as revivified by Lincoln and the Union’s victory.

The 1619 Project, a widely debunked New York Times series, claims that protecting slavery motivated the American Revolution, founding, and, ridiculously, the very Constitution that Frederick Douglass called a “glorious liberty document.” Parents of all races and creeds rebelled as these ideas, meant to undermine our basic freedoms by association with slavery, were introduced into classrooms. But Juneteenth, properly understood, is completely incompatible with the 1619 Project worldview.

This new holiday commemorates the successful effort to hold the Union together and, for the last two years of the Civil War, end slavery. Abraham Lincoln framed his opposition to slavery in terms of the founding, and this formulation found wide electoral support in both 1860 and 1864. Even more tellingly, pro-slavery radicals and Confederate leaders did not embrace our supposedly racist founding. Instead, they openly disdained the Founding Fathers.

John Calhoun, the South Carolina statesman who nearly started the Civil War 30 years early, said that the Declaration of Independence’s claim that “all men are created equal” was an “error.” Calhoun further pilloried Thomas Jefferson for being too idealistic and abstract in crafting the Declaration.

Calhoun said Jefferson’s belief in universal freedom caused him “to take an utterly false view of the subordinate relation of the black to the white race in the South; and to hold, in consequence, that the former, though utterly unqualified to possess liberty, were as fully entitled to both liberty and equality as the latter; and that to deprive them of it was unjust and immoral.” According to John Calhoun, the American founding was not about protecting slavery. It was not even compatible with slavery. Its underlying principles were antagonistic to slavery and would eventually threaten the institution. He was right about that.

Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens said in his infamous “Cornerstone Speech” that the founders “rested upon the assumption of the equality of races,” an idea that he called “fundamentally wrong,” before asserting that the Confederacy “is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.” Paraphrased, the Confederate VP said, “The United States was not founded on institutional racism, and that is why we seceded.”

Stephens’ “great truth” lost. The founders’ greater truth that “all men are created equal … endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” won. That victory was a nationwide effort that involved ancestors from Americans of all races.

The Civil War claimed more lives than any other American conflict, both in absolute and population-proportional terms. Many casualties were black troops who volunteered to fight under the same flag that the 1619 Project today instructs us to revile as racist and offensive. They understood themselves as defending their own rights and the law itself.

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A Republic or an Empire?

The Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, embraces two value sets. The first is natural rights, and the second is limited government. After 250 years, neither value has survived, and the opposite of each currently prevails in America.

Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration in three days while staying at a rooming house in Philadelphia. He had been greatly influenced by the British philosopher John Locke. Locke is the godfather of the theory of natural rights, which he extrapolated from the natural law teachings of Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas.

Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) did not argue that humans have inherent natural rights, but rather that the concept of justice demanded by human nature should be “naturally just” when addressing claims for protection of persons and property, whether those protections were legislated or not. The “whether legislated or not” is the first known articulation of a higher civil law, higher than the government’s own laws.

St. Augustine (354-430 A.D.) also did not define explicitly the existence of natural rights, but he did argue that norms of human behavior are knowable from the exercise of reason aided by revelation. He is the seminal thinker to express the view that right and wrong is knowable to all persons, whether legislated or not; and this knowledge — because it is common to all — is itself a higher law. He called this universal knowledge the natural law.

St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 A.D.) did not articulate natural rights, but he did proceed deep into the ideas of Aristotle and Augustine and taught that all human beings possess innate moral claims and innate moral obligations to honor the moral claims of other persons; and these claims and obligations are knowable by the exercise of reason.

John Locke (1632-1704), whose writings Jefferson read at the College of William and Mary, and which James Madison read at Princeton, drew upon all three philosophers to argue that Aquinas’ moral natural law claims are really natural rights, and these, too, just like knowing right from wrong, are inherent in our humanity and are superior to the government.

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Happy Juneteenth Holiday – The New US Holiday Where Democrats Try to Make You Forget About Their Racist Slave Owner Past

Happy Juneteenth!

Today is the day the United States celebrates Juneteenth, a little-known date that was recently dug up to divert attention from the slave owner past of the Democrat Party and the real civil rights achievements by brave Republicans who fought to free the slaves.

When the Civil War ended, and after Republican President Abraham Lincoln liberated the slaves, Democrats initiated Jim Crow laws to punish blacks. Democrats discriminated against blacks. In fact, the KKK was founded as the terrorist wing of the Democratic Party.

The Ku Klux Klan assassinated many Republicans, including Republican Representative James M. Hinds (December 5, 1833—October 22, 1868) of Little Rock. Hinds represented Arkansas in the United States Congress from June 24, 1868, through October 22, 1868, before his violent death.

Damani Felder took to X and DESTROYED the liberal narrative behind the recent Juneteenth Holiday.

Damani Felder: I’m about to ruin Juneteenth for some of y’all, but it needs to be said. Juneteenth only exists because Democrats did not want to give up their slaves. And even now in the present day, they still do not want to give them up. And let me tell you why. Juneteenth actually exists because Union General Gordon Granger had to go down to the beaches of Galveston, Texas on June 19th, 1865 to tell the slaves there that they were free.

Now, those of you who understand history realize Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation two-and-a-half years earlier on January 1st, 1863. So what happened in that two-and-a-half years period? Basically, the Southern Democrat slave owners kept their own slaves in the dark because they did not want to give those slaves up and remove those literal chains. So Gordon Granger had to go all the way down there and tell the slaves they were free. And if he had not, then many Democrats would’ve kept those chains on those slaves forever.

People are gonna hear that information and feel some kind of way. I don’t really care about that. What I care about is the fact that yes, Joe Biden made this a national holiday because it was originally only a state holiday here in Texas until very recently. But he did this intentionally because the Democratic Party wants to rewrite history and they’re doing everything in their power to to do that and to distance themselves from their own negative history.

People will now say, oh, well, the party switched.

And the reason they say that is because they do not want you to realize that the very same reason that those Southern Democrat slave owners did not want to tell the slaves they were free is the same reason they will not tell people today that they are free and can actually make their own choices, which is why they keep individuals in the Black community shackled to the Democrat Party, shackled to the inner cities that don’t serve them, and shackled to policies that ultimately do not serve their best interests. So the fact of the matter is, someone can sit there and complain and say, oh, the party switched. Oh, you’re rewriting history. No, I’m telling you the actual facts. You can look them up for yourselves, but you are the one who has to make the decision to take those chains off.

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The World Government That Wasn’t

There are certain episodes in Cold War history that modern conservatives are expected to treat as either sinister fantasy or liberal delusion. The McCloy–Zorin Accords of 1961 occupy a curious place. Explain the concept today and half of the audience assumes you are describing a proto-globalist fever dream hatched in Manhattan conference rooms full of Scandinavian furniture and earnest men in rimless spectacles.

Yet for a brief moment — and this is the part that ought to unsettle both the utopians and the cynics — the United States and the Soviet Union formally agreed that the ultimate goal of international politics should be the abolition of war itself.

Not metaphorically. Literally.

The “Joint Statement of Agreed Principles for Disarmament Negotiations,” better known as the McCloy–Zorin Accords, was negotiated between American statesman John J. McCloy and Soviet diplomat Valerian Zorin in September 1961 and endorsed unanimously by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1961. It envisioned phased and verified general disarmament under international control, including the eventual elimination of national military establishments and the creation of a United Nations peace force.

This was not drafted by Woodstock pacifists smoking hashish in Vermont. McCloy was the very model of the American establishment insider: Wall Street lawyer, banker, Assistant Secretary of War, and one of the founding grandees of the postwar Atlantic order. Zorin, meanwhile, was a hard Soviet apparatchik who had spent decades navigating the darker corridors of Kremlin diplomacy.

And yet there they were, at the height of the Berlin Crisis and only a year before the Cuban Missile Crisis, jointly sketching a roadmap toward “general and complete disarmament.”

The irony is that the men closest to this project were not starry-eyed internationalists in the modern sense. They were realists in the older and more serious tradition. They had lived through industrial slaughter on a civilizational scale. Twenty-seven million Russians had died in World War Two. They understood that thermonuclear war was not a talking point but an extinction event. The generation that built the United Nations had watched Europe commit suicide twice in thirty years and concluded, however imperfectly, that sovereign states armed to the teeth and gripped by ideological hysteria might not indefinitely coexist.

Dag Hammarskjöld, the Swedish Secretary-General of the UN, became the moral and administrative face of this ambition. Today he is remembered, if at all, as the Nordic bureaucrat whose name adorns the plaza outside the UN building by the East River in New York and the library inside that skyscraper. In his own time he was treated almost as a secular pope. The press followed him obsessively. In the newsreels, he emerged from turboprop airliners with a mysterious Swedish smile. A new conflict, a new day for Dag. For a few years from the mid-fifties to very early sixties, the UN became a repository for a tired planet’s hopes. Diplomats regarded him with awe, irritation, or both. He believed the UN could become not merely a debating chamber but an actual mechanism for preventing great-power war.

This is the part modern conservatives are supposed to laugh at.

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The King’s Rubber Empire: Democracy at Home, Terror in the Jungle

First published in 1999 and updated in a revised 2006 edition, Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost serves as a stark historical warning at a time when Western politicians and commentators habitually frame global politics as an epic struggle between virtuous democracies and barbarous autocracies. The book shows in forensic detail how one of Europe’s most constitutional monarchies oversaw a regime of forced labor, mutilation, rape, torture and mass death on a scale comparable to the worst atrocities of the twentieth century. Hochschild, an American historian and journalist long associated with investigative historical writing and a former editor at Mother Jones, brings to the subject both archival rigor and narrative discipline. His central claim is simple but explosive: between roughly 1885 and 1908, the personal colony of Belgium’s King Leopold II was governed through systematic terror, producing a demographic collapse that may have halved the population of the Congo basin. The significance of this story is not confined to colonial history. It illuminates how democratic states can commit vast crimes beyond their borders while maintaining liberal institutions at home, and how those crimes can be forgotten within a generation.

The Congo Free State was not a rogue outpost or a temporary aberration. It was the creation of a king operating within the norms of late nineteenth-century European imperial diplomacy. Belgium at the time possessed a functioning parliament, an active press, and competitive political parties. Suffrage was limited by modern standards, but by the late nineteenth century Belgium had introduced one of the most progressive electoral reforms in continental Europe, expanding male voting rights and institutionalizing party competition. While the Congolese population had no voice in Brussels, Belgium itself was widely regarded as a constitutional success story. Hochschild’s narrative therefore challenges a comforting historical assumption: that domestic political liberty naturally restrains external brutality. The crimes of the Congo Free State offer a stark reminder of how a constitutional monarchy could construct a regime of terror overseas while maintaining institutions at home that ranked among the most liberal and democratic in the world at the time. On the historical V-Dem Electoral Democracy Index, Belgium in 1908 scores higher than both the United States and the United Kingdom.

The book begins with Leopold’s personal obsession with empire. Unlike Britain or France, Belgium was a small state with no overseas possessions. Leopold, frustrated by this lack of prestige, sought to acquire territory in Africa through a mixture of private diplomacy, humanitarian rhetoric, and commercial deception. He established ostensibly philanthropic organizations dedicated to ending the Arab slave trade and promoting civilization in central Africa. These fronts persuaded European and American elites to support his territorial ambitions, culminating in the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, where European powers recognized his claim to a vast region around the Congo River. This territory, roughly 67 times the size of Belgium, became Leopold’s personal property.

Once in control, Leopold, who never visited the Congo, constructed a system designed to extract ivory and, increasingly, rubber. The global demand for rubber surged in the 1890s with the expansion of the bicycle and automobile industries. Wild rubber vines grew abundantly in the Congo’s equatorial forests, but harvesting them required enormous amounts of labor. Leopold’s administration therefore imposed a regime of compulsory rubber collection on millions of Africans. Villages were assigned quotas measured in kilograms of dried rubber. Men were forced to spend weeks in the forest gathering sap, often under threat of violence. In many regions, the quotas were so high that fulfilling them required virtually full-time labor, leaving little time for farming or hunting.

The enforcement mechanism was the Force Publique, a colonial army composed of European officers and African conscripts. Hochschild documents how this force operated through a mixture of hostage-taking, village burning, and public executions. Soldiers would seize women and children from a village and imprison them in stockades until the required amount of rubber was delivered. Food was often scarce in these camps, and mortality was high. The practice was not an occasional excess but a routine method recommended in official manuals distributed to colonial agents.

Perhaps the most notorious feature of the regime was the systematic cutting off of hands. European officers demanded proof that ammunition had not been wasted in hunting or misused. The standard proof was a severed right hand from a person shot by a soldier. This policy created an incentive structure that encouraged the mutilation of both the dead and the living. Hochschild cites testimonies from missionaries and survivors describing soldiers carrying baskets of hands.

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Charles Lee: The Alternative “George Washington” You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

History repeatedly demonstrates the difficulties faced by large conventional powers confronting decentralized resistance movements. From the American Revolution to Vietnam and Afghanistan, weaker forces have often offset military inferiority through mobility, dispersion, decentralization, local support, and the avoidance of decisive engagements.

While George Washington and the American Patriots are often credited with defeating the British Empire through asymmetric warfare, Washington arrived at that strategy belatedly and embraced it only partially. His instinct was to fight as a state—with a professional army, centralized administration, and conventional military institutions.

Charles Lee, on the other hand, recognized much earlier that America’s greatest strengths lay in decentralized resistance, militia warfare, and making British occupation prohibitively expensive. The distinction mattered not only militarily but politically, as conventional warfare demanded many of the fiscal and administrative measures that accompanied the Revolution. In reality, Washington gradually moved toward a strategy of exhaustion, avoidance, and attrition, while Charles Lee had recognized from the beginning that America’s greatest military advantage lay in avoiding the sort of conventional contest Britain wanted to fight.

The Continental Congress had the option between both men—George Washington and Charles Lee. In Conceived in Liberty, Rothbard wrote regarding the choice between Washington and Lee, “What Congress decided to do about that army would determine what it would do about the entire Revolution.” These men had entirely different strategies as to how to fight the British and maintain independence. Obviously, Washington was chosen over Lee, however, this article seeks to explore the little-known alternative: What if Charles Lee and his strategy had been chosen instead?

At the outset, a word of caution is necessary. We always have to be careful with speculation from counterfactual history and not overstate unverifiable conclusions. There are limits on the conclusive power of available evidence and there were negatives of Lee’s strategy. Human decisions, unforeseen circumstances, and countless variables make definitive conclusions impossible. Moreover, Lee’s proposed approach was not without risks or drawbacks of its own.

We can, however, examine what did happen, the available evidence, appreciate Lee and the logic behind his proposed strategy, and recognize some of the drawbacks of Washington’s strategy. Such an exercise helps guard against historical determinism—the assumption that the course of events was inevitable—or that Washington’s state-centered approach to warfare was the only realistic option. The American Revolution could have been fought differently. Charles Lee believed it should have been, and his arguments deserve closer examination.

This key decision of the Continental Congress matters because the way a war is fought affects the outcomes. It is the contention of this article that the choice to fight like a state means either losing or winning like a state.

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Unearthing Namibia’s forgotten genocide through forensic archaeology

The Namibian genocide was one of the first genocides of the 20th century. Between 1904 and 1908, tens of thousands of Ovaherero and Nama people were killed under German colonial rule.

Despite the scale of these events, the material and human legacy of this genocide remains less understood than later atrocities. Historical accounts exist, but are often incomplete or shaped by the perspectives and priorities of the colonial period in which they were produced.

The landscapes of Namibia that testify to this violence still survive, but are under increasing pressure from urban expansion, infrastructure development and environmental change. Archaeological research is playing a key role in documenting and protecting this heritage.

The Centre of Archaeology at the University of Huddersfield has, in conjunction with community representatives, the research groups Forensic Architecture and Forensis and the Swakopmund Genocide Museum, conducted fieldwork in Namibia across two seasons (2023 and 2025). Our work has focused on sites linked to German colonial concentration camps in Swakopmund and Lüderitz.

Using forensic methods, our project seeks to locate, document and protect burial sites associated with the genocide. We aim to demonstrate how archaeology can confirm historical events, provide physical evidence, support commemoration and strengthen claims for reparations.

The research combines archival study with field methods including: GIS mapping (computer-based spatial mapping and analysis of archaeological data), walkover survey (systematic on-the-ground inspection of visible archaeological features), Ground Penetrating Radar (a geophysical technique that uses radar waves to detect buried structures without excavation), GPS survey, drone imagery and targeted excavation.

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French Far-Left Leader Claims ‘White, Christian’ France Never Existed

A leading leftist in the National Assembly has claimed that France was never a white and Christian country, and that the idea is merely a “fantasy” of the so-called far-right.

Mathilde Panot, who leads Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (France in Rebellion/LFI) party in the lower house of the French parliament, not only championed the idea of a “New France” but appeared to suggest that Old France never actually existed.

Speaking to Le Média, the MP for Val-de-Marne’s 10th constituency said that it is imperative for the political left to “never concede anything whatsoever to the far right” as it is through the acceptance of premises through which the “far right becomes socially acceptable”.

Despite Christian heritage in France dating back to the 5th century with the conversion of Clovis I, she claimed that the right “fantasises about a France that does not exist and has never existed… a France that is supposedly a ‘white’ France, a ‘Christian’ France… a France being ‘invaded’ by—well, by who knows whom. In short, they are completely lost in a fantasy regarding the true nature of this country.”

“The only way to defeat the far right is to remain steadfast in one’s principles and refuse to yield even an inch to them regarding issues of racism, immigration, and—well—all such matters. Anyone who actually cedes ground to them is, in effect, helping them advance every single time—because, by doing so, they are effectively playing right into the far right’s ideological framework,” Panot continued.

The LFI leader made the comments in reference to a growing consensus across the political spectrum against mass migration into France, with fellow leftist leaders such as François Ruffin, who was formerly in the same party as Panot, coming out last month in favour of limiting the influx of foreigners to protect the wages of French workers.

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Conservative Journalist SCHOOLS Vile Democrat Pollster with a Very Important History Lesson After He Launches Smear Against America’s Founding Fathers

A young conservative writer delivered a powerful lesson to a nasty Democrat hack regarding the U.S. Constitution and America’s Founders on Friday during a discussion on CNN over musicians bailing on President Trump’s concert celebrating America’s 250th birthday.

As TGP readers may know, several musical artists have been withdrawing from the US Freedom 250 concert under pressure from left-wing activists. The artists dropping out include luminaries such as Martina McBride, The Commodores, and Bret Michaels.

Freedom 250, which was launched last year by the Trump administration, has scheduled events across America to celebrate the nation’s semi-quincentennial.

National Review columnist Caroline Downey astutely explained that the reason it is so hard to bring people together on both sides is that those on the left don’t think America’s Founding Fathers were among the world’s most brilliant visionaries.

Democrat pollster Joshua Doss proved her point by quickly smearing the likes of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as nothing but immoral slave owners. Downey fired back by pointing out that the Constitution set up a method to undo the evil of slavery.

Americans ended up fighting the bloodiest war in our nation’s history to end the practice.

Doss could only play dumb when confronted with this damning truth, while Downey tried to drill it through his thick skull.

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Three Debates Americans Have Had For 250 Years

George Washington rode west from Philadelphia in command of 13,000 troops on a mission that would test his leadership unlike any previous campaign.

These men were not soldiers in the Continental Army. They were citizen militiamen—forerunners of the National Guard—called up from Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New Jersey. And Washington was no longer simply a general. He was president of the United States.

The year was 1794, and Washington had made one of the most fateful decisions of his presidency: to use armed force against fellow Americans.

Congress, desperate for revenue to pay war debts, had enacted a tax on whiskey. Grain farmers in Western Pennsylvania saw the tax as immoral and unjust.

Protestors attacked revenue agents, destroyed the property of tax-paying farmers, and fired shots that killed a local militiaman.

Growing bolder, they fashioned banners on “liberty poles” with slogans like “Equal Taxation and no Excise” and “Liberty or Death.”

For two years, Washington searched for a peaceful resolution. But when 5,000 rebels gathered outside Pittsburgh, vowing to take the city, he knew the time for action had come.

In the end, the Whiskey Rebellion was anticlimactic, resulting in no further violence.

Yet more than 200 years later, Americans still strenuously disagree on basic questions of government.

When is a president justified in mobilizing the National Guard? At what point does a protest become an insurrection? What counts as free speech?

Some fundamental issues were settled at the nation’s founding, a panel of scholars told The Epoch Times. But more were left unsettled. And Americans continue to debate those same issues today.

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