Juneteenth and Fake Holidays

Another front on the culture wars

Today is June 19.  No, correction.  Today is Juneteenth.  In many states, it’s a federal holiday.  Below is a partial transcript of “International Man”’s interview on Discern TV with Doug Casey on the subject of the “Rising Number of Fake Holidays”:

Doug Casey: . . . The word “holiday” actually comes from “holy day”; it has a religious derivation. Once upon a time, I’d say as recently as the 1950’s, religion played a very important role in Western culture. It no longer does. Christianity is a dead duck in Europe, and fading rapidly in North America. Much as it replaced classical religions starting in the late Roman Empire, Christianity is being replaced by Wokism/Greenism.

Our holidays, until recently, were still about shared values and shared traditions. They were an acknowledgment of common beliefs, a celebration of what was important among the people of a country or a culture. But that’s no longer the case. The meaning of holidays, as with so many things, has degraded.

. . .

International Man: Identity politics has been a big factor in the surge of new holidays as politicians seek to cater to certain groups.

Juneteenth is a newly declared federal holiday. Columbus Day has been re-branded as Indigenous Peoples’ Day. President Clinton gave the first presidential declaration marking Kwanzaa.

We now have Pride month for those with sexual deviations, February is dedicated to black history, and November is dedicated to Native Americans, and so forth. It seems there is now a day, a week, or a month for every group. What is going on here?

Doug Casey: Holidays have become politicized. Many years ago holidays were times when people would acknowledge common beliefs and traditions; they united people. The newly minted ones see individuals as parts of a group, in effect arraying them against other groups. Of course, I question the value of artificially uniting people in the first place, because it typically emphasizes the lowest common denominator, like race.

Mr. Casey concludes:

Holidays are no longer organic or traditional. They no longer rotate around nature and well-worn traditions. They’re created by fiat out of Washington, and marketers in New York and Hollywood. Ill-intentioned groups that masquerade as benevolent or righteous reformers. These people are identical in character and intention to the Jacobins in France, the Bolsheviks in Russia, or the Nazis in Germany. They try to capture the culture along with the politics and economics of society. Reinventing holidays is just one of many fronts in the culture war. An overture to a real revolution is taking place.

Read the full transcript here.