The Biden-Harris regime sent out nearly identical greetings in succession: at 9 a.m. on Christmas Day, there was “Merry Christmas from the Biden-Harris Administration!” Exactly three hours later, we got “The Biden-Harris Administration wishes you and your loved ones a Happy Hanukkah!” Then at 10 a.m. on Dec. 26, there came “Happy Kwanzaa from the Biden-Harris Administration!” Accompanying each were cheesy but serviceable clip-art illustrations. Presidential administrations have sent out these kinds of pro-forma greetings for many years; nevertheless, the insidious nature of what the Biden-Harris regime was doing here should not be overlooked.
It's perfectly reasonable for this White House or any other administration to send out Christmas and Hanukkah greetings, but Kwanzaa? Besides Kamala Harris, who celebrates Kwanzaa, anyway? There were recent celebrations in Brooklyn and Staten Island, as well as in Minneapolis, South Bend, Ind., and a few other places, but these are all the more noteworthy for being unusual. Despite herculean establishment media efforts, Kwanzaa still hasn’t become part of the American mainstream holiday tradition.
The New York Times tacitly admitted this failure on Friday, when it ran a doggedly upbeat but quixotic piece entitled “Yes, Kwanzaa Is Made Up. That’s Why It’s Great.” The subhead elaborated on the Paper of Record’s desperation: “There’s something uniquely American in both its wanton borrowing from existing tradition and its naked admission of artificiality.” Yeah, sure, that’s it.
The author of the Times article, Ismail Muhammad, recalls ruefully: “When I told other kids that my family celebrated Kwanzaa, I was met with slack-jawed incomprehension or, worse, gimlet-eyed ridicule, before being asked the inevitable question: Isn’t that a made-up holiday? And when I went away to college in New York, I found that Kwanzaa was something of a joke among my classmates.” It’s easy to feel for him, but it was his parents who put him in that position by insisting on celebrating a holiday fashioned out of whole cloth in 1966 by a man who was convicted of torturing two women.
Nevertheless, the Biden-Harris regime’s calculation here is obvious: it sends out Christmas greetings to court the vote of Christians, including the cultural Christians who make up a considerable portion of the American electorate. It sends out Hanukkah greetings to try to take the sting out of its craven betrayal of Israel and to keep leftist Jews pulling the lever for Democrat candidates. And it sends out Kwanzaa greetings in order to affirm its support for the black American community and to try to keep too many black voters from realizing how the Democrats have used and betrayed them over the years.
Yet it isn’t just politics as usual. The felonious inventor of Kwanzaa himself, Ron Karenga, admitted the truth in, of all places, the Washington Post back in 1978: “People think it's African. But it's not. I wanted to give black people a holiday of their own. So I came up with Kwanzaa. I said it was African because you know black people in this country wouldn't celebrate it if they knew it was American. Also, I put it around Christmas because I knew that's when a lot of bloods (blacks) would be partying!"
There it is: “I wanted to give black people a holiday of their own.” Now just imagine if, say, David Duke had cooked up some fake holiday that he said originated in Scandinavia and explained: “I wanted to give white people a holiday of their own.” The Biden-Harris regime certainly wouldn’t be sending out greetings for that; instead, it would probably sic Merrick Garland on anyone who dared to celebrate such a holiday and open files on them as suspected “white supremacist terrorists.”
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In endorsing Kwanzaa, however, the Biden-Harris regime is endorsing the racial division, resentment, and hatred that this fabricated holiday was designed to reinforce. By elevating Karenga’s ersatz holiday to the same status that Christmas and Hanukkah enjoy, the regime is strongly implying that Christmas is for white people only, with Kwanzaa for black people and Hanukkah for Jews. The leftist goal of the stratification of American society into squabbling subgroups that only a massively powerful federal government can keep pacified is advanced yet again.
It could be worse. In that 1978 article, the WaPo noted that Karenga “also established Kuzaliwa, a tribute honoring Malcolm X's birthday on May 19, and Uhuru Day, a commemoration on Aug. 11 of the 1965 Watts civil disturbance.” Those haven’t caught on widely enough to get official White House greetings. Maybe if Kamala Harris had been elected, she would have told us about how her family always celebrated them.
In any case, the incoming Trump administration should end the Kwanzaa greetings. Maybe it could replace them with a brief note about how Christians of all races celebrate Christmas, or a few words about the importance of national unity. In the name of that unity, it’s long past time to recognize Kwanzaa for what it is, a racist effort to exacerbate hatred and grievance, and relegate it to the dustbin of history.
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