Speaking with Republican primary voters in Iowa over the weekend, 2024 presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy suggested that Juneteenth is "useless" and should be canceled.
The conservative entrepreneur made the proposal while laying out his vision for the future of U.S. elections, which includes switching to all paper ballots and retiring most mail-in and absentee voting.
"Cancel Juneteenth or one of the other useless ones we made up," Ramaswamy said. "You can't have everything be a holiday, but we'll cancel one of the other ones and make election day a holiday."
Asked by NBC News to clarify his remarks, Ramaswamy said holidays like Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Presidents' Day already represent the values of Juneteenth.
He also said Juneteenth was made a holiday under "political duress" stemming from the death of George Floyd in 2020 and the subsequent public demonstrations.
"We shouldn't have redundant holidays that celebrate overlapping purposes. It should have a distinct purpose," Ramaswamy said, adding that "we should not create holidays with a cultural gun to our head, and that's what happened with Juneteenth."
The comments Saturday appear to be a change in position for Ramaswamy on Juneteenth, who celebrated the holiday less than two months ago through Twitter as "a celebration of the American dream."
"We don't just look back and flog ourselves. What we celebrate is how far we've come," Ramaswamy wrote at the time. "And as a first-generation American myself, you better believe I'm proud of it. Happy Juneteenth, everybody."
An aggregate of Republican primary polls by FiveThirtyEight shows that Ramaswamy, an anti-woke activist, is currently in a distant third place behind former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
However, Ramaswamy has gone from less than 1% of the vote in March to 6.7% as of Aug. 3, ahead of former Vice President Mike Pence, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, and Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C.
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