Make Juneteenth the Liberty Holiday the State Fears Most
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Juneteenth, Liberty, and the Death Spiral of Collectivism
Why Libertarianism Must Own the Celebration of Freedom and Expose the Rot Within
Every June, the American calendar gives us a kind of Rorschach test: Juneteenth. Some see it as a cause for celebration, reflection, and gratitude, as the final legal blow to chattel slavery, when the last group of enslaved Texans learned they were free. Others see just another excuse for empty virtue signaling or political posturing. And now, in the strangest plot twist of all, a vocal minority within the so-called “liberty” movement has started painting Juneteenth as… communism.
If you’re hearing this for the first time, you’re probably confused. If you’re not, you’re probably already disgusted. Let’s get something straight: the fact that anyone wearing the libertarian label can look at a holiday celebrating emancipation from state-sanctioned slavery and call it a leftist plot proves just how far the movement has drifted from its philosophical foundation.
Note: PorcFest, Juneteenth, and the Elephant in the Room
Here’s the irony you won’t see discussed from the main stage. Every year, Juneteenth lands smack in the middle of PorcFest: New Hampshire’s biggest libertarian gathering and a parade of radical individualists. Yet, despite the rhetoric, the field is overwhelmingly white. Racial minorities have confided, sometimes quietly and sometimes not, that attending can feel intimidating in a state that is, demographically, a monolith.
Some have felt mostly welcomed. Others report the opposite: moments of casual racism, rare moments of overt racism, or just a faint background sense that they don’t belong. It’s a running joke for some. It’s a barrier for others.
Here’s the missed opportunity: This intersection of PorcFest and Juneteenth could be a strength, not a weakness. Instead of shying away from these uncomfortable truths, libertarians should see Juneteenth as a chance to invite, highlight, and empower minority voices who already live and breathe the ideals of liberty. The movement doesn’t need less diversity; it needs more. Not for its own sake, but because liberty is universal—or it’s nothing.
If you want to know why libertarianism isn’t sweeping the country, start here. It will only truly succeed as a movement when more blacks and minorities wake up to its reality: real freedom is for the individual, not just the individual who looks like you. Thomas Sowell and other black libertarian voices are living proof, but their example won’t scale if the movement’s culture remains closed, intentionally or not.
PorcFest and Juneteenth falling together every year is an open invitation: Will libertarianism become the movement that truly welcomes anyone who wants to live free, or will it stay a cultural ghetto, always wondering why its greatest potential allies never cross the field?
Racism Is Collectivism. Collectivism Is the Enemy.
Libertarianism, at its core, is radical individualism. It is the absolute, unqualified rejection of every doctrine that treats people as mere extensions of their group: race, class, gender, nationality, whatever. If you believe that any human being's rights come not from their nature as an individual, but from the tribe they are assigned to by birth, you are the ideological descendant of every tyrant in history. YOU are the problem, not the solution.
Racism is the purest form of collectivism. It’s not an “edge case,” not a “lesser evil.” It is the fundamental betrayal of everything the liberty movement is supposed to stand for. Racism says, “You are not yourself. You are your group. You are guilty, or innocent, or valuable, or disposable, based on what you look like and where your ancestors came from.” That’s collectivism, pure and undistilled, every bit as poisonous as anything Marx ever dreamed up.
Collectivism is anti-freedom by definition. If you believe rights are collective, then rights are an illusion; they can be revoked by the mob, the state, or the flavor of the month. Individualism, the sanctity of each human being as an end in themselves, is the only antidote to every atrocity committed in the name of “the people,” “the master race,” or “the greater good.”
If you are a racist, you are a collectivist. If you are a collectivist, you are not a libertarian. There is no such thing as “libertarian” racism. That’s like vegetarian cannibalism. It is pure idiocy in its contradiction.
The New Rot: Brand Dilution by Contrarian Clout-Chasers
How did we get here? Not by being too “pure,” but by surrendering the microphone to trolls, dropouts, and social media contrarians. There’s no meaningful bar for entry anymore, just the ability to get attention by being more abrasive and outrageous than the last guy. The only “principle” left is a sneer and a punchline.
It is a growing trend of brain rot as a nihilistic free-for-all where anyone can slap the label “libertarian” on whatever grudge they’re nursing, so long as it sounds vaguely anti-establishment. These are people who’d join a biker gang, an ironic online cult, or the “post-left,” if they thought it would get them more retweets. Now they’re here, soiling the flag of individual liberty and calling it “edginess.”
Every time these sick jokes trend, they torch decades of philosophical groundwork. Normal people, even most actual libertarians, see a tweet like “Juneteenth is communism” and back away slowly. Meanwhile, the enemies of freedom seize the opportunity to paint the whole movement as unserious, bigoted, or just plain nuts, and when actual liberty lovers see this kind of collectivist ideology, of course they shift leftward thinking that their personal overton window might be further in that direction.
Scapegoating, Collectivism, and the Lazy Collapse of Principle
It’s easy to see why this happens. Standing up for liberty requires real thinking, self-restraint, and a willingness to defend unpopular ideas on principle. That’s hard work. It’s much easier to just bash the out-group, sneer at anyone different, and call it “owning the libs.” This is how collectivist rot seeps in, under the guise of “defending the tribe.” That is the cruelest poison of tribalism in an individualist movement.
When the liberty movement abandons individualism for tribalism, it becomes just another flavor of the same poison it claims to fight. The only thing that changes is the target: today it’s Juneteenth, tomorrow it’s some other scapegoat. Congratulations, you’ve become everything you claim to hate.
Egalitarianism, Communism, and the Conceptual Dumpster Fire
Let’s address the rhetorical shell game: Egalitarianism (properly understood) means equality before the law: No man is the property of another. That’s the philosophical bedrock of liberty. Communism is forced equality, destroying individual rights in pursuit of a utopian collective. Collectivism underpins both, but only in communism does the group obliterate the individual entirely.
But here’s the kicker: Racism is even more primitive and toxic than forced egalitarianism. It’s the most anti-individualist idea possible: your rights are determined by the accident of your birth. A “libertarian” who attacks Juneteenth because they hate egalitarianism, but then traffics in overt racism, is just performing conceptual seppuku. If you do that, you are basically like the main villain in every dystopian novel.
Juneteenth: A Holiday Libertarians Should Own
Now for the real heresy: Juneteenth should be the most libertarian holiday on the calendar.
It marks the defeat of state-enforced slavery, government violence at its most obscene, by the universal recognition of individual rights. Every lover of liberty should celebrate it. In fact, we should have more holidays celebrating emancipation, revolution, and the defeat of tyranny in all its forms. If you can’t see that, you’ve been mugged by your own prejudices and handed the keys of your brain to the very collectivism you claim to despise.
Imagine a year where we don’t just grudgingly acknowledge Juneteenth, but light up the calendar with days celebrating the collapse of gulags, the abolition of Jim Crow, the defeat of tyrants, the right to free speech, and the death of every collectivist regime that ever tried to erase the individual.
That’s what it means to love liberty... not to gatekeep, not to perform for the algorithm, not to hurl group slurs at every opportunity. To stand for the individual against every mob, every state, every tyrant, every time.
If You’re Angry... Good You Should Be
If you’re a libertarian, you have two choices:
Grow a spine, call out this rot, and reclaim your movement.
Or get used to being lumped in with people who stand for nothing but their own resentment.
Libertarianism doesn’t need more holidays. It needs more courage. We need the courage to confront not just the state, but the creeping collectivism within its own ranks.
Conclusion: There Is No Liberty Without Individualism
This isn’t just a Juneteenth issue, or a branding issue, or a messaging failure. It’s a test of intellectual honesty.
Do you stand for the individual, or do you stand for the mob... any mob?
Are you ready to torch the dead wood in your own movement, or do you want to sit back and watch it burn from the inside out?
The enemies of liberty love nothing more than to watch its defenders betray their own values. Don’t give them the satisfaction.
Celebrate Juneteenth. Celebrate freedom. Torch every vestige of collectivism, right, left, or center. There is no other way.