Lib Writer Tries to Pretend Juneteenth Has Always Been Major Holiday, But Social Media Has Receipts

Happy belated Juneteenth, for those of you who celebrate.

I would have written this post to coincide with the holiday, but I think I had to wash my hair, or that episode of “Friends” where Reese Witherspoon plays Rachel’s younger sister was on “Nick at Nite” and I didn’t want to miss it. Something like that.

As we learned in 2020, Juneteenth — a portmanteau of June 19, when it is commemorated — is a holiday that’s more important than Christmas, Thanksgiving, Independence Day, the Super Bowl, and Talk Like a Pirate Day combined into one.

Six years on, the left still pretends that it is. The question remains, though: What the heck is it?

We know it’s a black — sorry, capital-B Black — holiday. We know that the reason it became a federal holiday in 2021 was because then-President Joe Biden felt the need to atone for the martyrdom of St. George Floyd of Counterfeit $20s the previous year.

The controversy began when conservative pundit Vince Dao pointed out (correctly) that Juneteenth as a national institution “started in 2020 because race communists weaponized an obscure holiday to cancel Trump’s Tulsa rally and call us racist for not knowing what it was (nobody did).”

This prompted a terse tsk-tsking from leftist activist and journalist Joe Catron: “Literally every American making a basic attempt at cultural literacy knew what Juneteenth was before 2020.”

Literally every American making a basic attempt at cultural literacy knew what Juneteenth was before 2020.

— Joe Catron (@jncatron) June 20, 2026

Okay, then, multiple choice quiz for those of you who’ve made a “basic attempt at cultural literacy” — What’s Juneteenth?

1. The day the Emancipation Proclamation was signed.
2. The day slaves in Louisiana were freed by Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman.
3. The day “Calvin and Hobbes” was first published in newspapers in 1985.
4. The day slaves in Texas were freed after the end of the Civil War.

If you answered No. 4, you were probably lucky. If you answered No. 2, maybe you actually kind of should make “a basic attempt at cultural literacy,” as much as “Calvin and Hobbes” remains an enduring corpus of work better than most 21st century novels or visual art.

However, while the holiday has been celebrated in a minor key since 1866, it was mostly celebrated in Texas — you know, where it happened, which makes sense — and then as a uniquely regional matter.

I will admit to being vaguely aware of it before the Summer of Floyd, if only because it was the title of Ralph Ellison’s posthumously published second novel. (Spoiler alert, for those of you who haven’t read it: There’s almost always a reason completed or mostly completed novels are published after the author dies, and it’s not because they’re good. If you’re one of those people striving for a “basic attempt at cultural literacy” — like Mr. Catron demands you must — the only Ellison novel still worth reading is “Invisible Man.”)

But anyhow, Ralph Ellison’s literary chops aren’t the issue here. Mr. Catron is apparently a huge Juneteenth booster and knew about its ingrained cultural significance before 2020, so surely he was vocal about it as an activist and a writer, right?

You didn’t celebrate Juneteenth even once before 2020 pic.twitter.com/4mmk5Ji68J

— PoIiMath (@politicalmath) June 20, 2026

To be fair, it’s only been celebrated since 1866. He probably had a lot going on during those 153 Juneteenths to neglect to mention it.

But boy, in 2020, was he ever on that holiday like white privilege on rice:

Crazy you knew about it but didn’t mention it until 1 day before it in 2020 pic.twitter.com/pS1KdFJyQL

— CEC (@WayneHornet25) June 20, 2026

Guess he was just making up for lost time. Or maybe something else happened that year. Probably the latter.

The Catron-Dao discourse on X was pretty much the problem with Juneteenth as a national holiday in microcosm. Nobody has an issue with Juneteenth qua Juneteenth: a regional holiday celebrated by the black community in Texas and some other parts of the country, albeit in a minor key because it’s a minor thing in the major drama that was the American Civil War.

The fact that Union Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger ordered slaves freed and the Emancipation Proclamation enforced in one state is something to celebrate, of course. But since 2020, it’s been neither minor nor a celebration. Instead, it’s an occasion for white liberal self-flagellation, followed by a mass cudgel-wielding against anyone who didn’t don the hairshirt of privilege-guilt on June 19.

It’s good to know, however, that 2020 was the year that Joe Catron — like so many of his other fellow travelers — finally attained basic cultural literacy. Seldom, however, are the receipts (and the arrogance that prompted social media users to produce them) this blatant.

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