The Media Research Center’s Kevin Tober complained in a June 19 post:
On MSNBC’s The ReidOut, liberal Republican Charlie Sykes used the occasion of Juneteenth to smear Republicans for declaring America not racist. The insinuation here is that America is still racist and divisive concepts like Critical Race Theory are necessary because America hasn’t changed at all since the days of slavery and segregation.
“What you have from Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley and even Tim Scott is the necessity of checking the box that there is no racism, that we solved that problem, that we had the Civil War and everything is fine,” Sykes claimed.
Sykes insisted it’s ironic that Juneteenth Day is a day “where America remembers this part of history and celebrates it, at the very same time the Republican Party seems very deeply invested in not remembering that history, not going back, taking it out of the schools or downplaying it.”
Tober then bizarrely seemed to insist that the historical ignorance of Americans justified not making it a holiday: “What Sykes failed to mention is that first of all, Juneteenth is a day that many people never heard of until it was made a federal holiday by a bipartisan vote in Congress.” Having done that, though, Tober tried to put a Republican spin in Juneteenth:
Sykes then got triggered by Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk who took to Twitter to criticize many employees getting the day off: “I was watching Charlie Kirk, who’s a big Trumpist, on social media all day, just melting down how everybody should be at work. This is a CRT inspired holiday.”
The rationale for Juneteenth becoming a big deal out of nowhere (at least at the federal level) is because of the modern day Democratic Party’s obsession with America being a racist country and that America still hasn’t been punished for the evils of slavery. The basis for the holiday is important, especially since it was Republican President Abraham Lincoln being the one who abolished slavery and the Democrats fought him tooth and nail.
That’s not quite the full story, though. As actual historians point out, Lincoln was not an explicit abolitionist at the start of his presidency, and part of his motivation for issuing the Emancipation Proclamation (which applied only to Confederate states) was to encourage freed slaves to flee the South and move to the North and fight for the Union. When it came time to pass the 13th Amendment that blocked slavery nationwide, the main argument Democrats put forward against it involved states’ rights — the kind of argument today’s Republicans would make. Tober wants you to forget that Republicans and Democrats essentially traded ideologies in the 1960s in the wake of the civil rights movement.
Tober’s argument here seems to be that Juneteenth doesn’t deserve to be a holiday, but if it’s going to be one, Republicans must get credit. That follows the MRC’s previous hostility toward Juneteenth.