Topic: Newsmax
Pedro Gonzalez used his July 7 Newsmax column to complain about Juneteenth becoming a federal holiday:
Juneteenth, in truth, marks the death of the old American nation and the birth of a new one, clawing out from the chest of the Republic in a nightmarish vision that would make Ridley Scott squirm.
The new holiday emerged from the mists of June with feeble opposition from Republicans, who spent months railing about the evils of anti-white critical race theory and the New York Times' “1619 Project,” only to turn around and inaugurate a national holiday to honor and validate the basic narrative underlying those things.
Just 14 Republicans voted against federalizing the holiday. It didn't matter to the GOP that a paltry 7 percent of Republican voters wanted it as a new holiday and that more than 60 percent of Americans know "nothing at all" or only "a little bit" about Juneteenth—though that will surely change now.
Gonzalez then tried to bolster this argument:
There is a historical precedent to Juneteenth: President Ronald Reagan’s signing of Martin Luther King Jr. Day into law, an event which Samuel Francis wrote about in the May 1988 issue of Chronicles.
Francis accurately predicted that the logic behind destroying Confederate symbolism would extend to virtually every other symbol of the historic American nation in the shadow of the King holiday.
He also perceived King's entry into the national pantheon, towering over the likes of George Washington, as marking the consummation of a new order that grew out of the smoldering ashes of the old.
"We forfeited the right to revere the Constitution, the governmental principles and mechanisms it established, and the men who wrote it when we put Dr. King into the pantheon," Francis wrote.
"The federalism, rule of law, states' rights, limits on majority rule, checks and balances, and separation of powers that characterize the Constitution," Francis explained, "all are incompatible with the full blossoming of the egalitarian democracy that Dr. King envisioned and which is the completion of the radical reconstruction to which his holiday commits us."
Gonzalez didn't mention that Francis was a racist -- to the point that he was the editor of the newsletter for the whit-supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens until his death in 2005.So, yeah, he was never going to be very complementary to the introduction of a King holiday. Like Francis did, Gonzalez writes for the right-wing journal Chronicles, where he is an associate editor.
