A Juneteenth message from a Project 2025-affiliated think tank

Palmetto Promise's Oran Smith focuses on a horrific incident of violence against Black people, but leaves out all of the context.

Before we dive into our usual recap of the week, we wanted to take a moment to acknowledge that June 17th marked the 11th anniversary of the shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (commonly known as Mother Emanuel) in Charleston. One of the deadliest attacks against a place of worship at the time, the hate-driven shooting claimed the lives of nine people, including State Senator and Senior Pastor Clementa Pinckney. Our thoughts and prayers are with the families affected by this senseless tragedy as another year passes by.

—Oran P. Smith, email from Palmetto Promise Institute

Today is Juneteenth, and Oran Smith, Senior Fellow at Palmetto Promise Institute sent out an email this morning with the title “Two Debates and a Sobering Anniversary”. (Palmetto Promise, which belongs to the same funding network as the Heritage Foundation and ALEC, was formerly run by current Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver, and was a member of the Project 2025 advisory board).

Happy Juneteenth!

Strikingly, the anniversary Smith chose to reference today isn’t the one many Americans are actually celebrating today. That one, Juneteenth, commemorates the day Union soldiers arrived in Texas— two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation— to declare Black Texans free.

Screenshot of the order declaring the freedom of “all slaves”. (Via Library of Congress.)

The “sobering anniversary” Smith does briefly reference is one from earlier in the week: the June 17 anniversary of Dylann Roof’s mass murder of Black parishioners at the historic Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, SC. On that day, Roof shot and killed nine people who were worshipping during the service. Roof explicitly tied the shooting to a white supremacist “awakening” in his “manifesto”.

Smith doesn’t mention Juneteenth at all (or the racial motivations for Roof’s shooting, calling it merely “hate-driven). His decisions about what to avoid and what to include are especially striking is because of Smith’s own history.

Smith edited the neo-Confederate Southern Partisan magazine in the 1980s and 1990s. The magazine platformed everyone from revisionist “lost cause” historians to overt white supremacists, including Robert Whittaker, creator of the neo-Nazi “Mantra” and a proponent of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory that ultimately inspired Dylann Roof and other mass murderers.

I wrote about Smith’s and The Southern Partisan in great detail a few years back, when Smith was just about to be confirmed to the SC Commission on Higher Education. You can read about it here:

Maybe Smith legitimately feels his right-leaning (and probably predominately White) audience should be thinking about the Mother Emanuel shooting today (and maybe he’s right). He has claimed in the past that the shooting is what changed his thinking— presumably away from his explicit support of Lost Cause talking points and explicit platforming of people like Whittaker (whose essay for Southern Partisan, entitled “Southern Nationalism,” appears in the 1993 anthology Smith edited for the magazine).

In “Southern Nationalism,” first published in the magazine in 1982, Whittaker writes, “Those who espouse the ‘melting pot’ as the purpose of the United States have made it their announced intention to destroy every vestige of cultural and ethnic diversity in this country, which, of course, includes the Southern nation as a primary target.”

Header for Smith’s June 19, 2026 email.

Perhaps Smith no longer thinks that sentiment is worthy of publication.

Perhaps between 1993 and 2015, Oran Smith became a different man. Perhaps he intentionally raised the specter of a horrible, white supremacist shooting on Juneteenth, for some other reason. My guess would be that he’d like to distract from his overtly racist past by lobbing an easy one at his audience: let’s not kill each other. There’s even the famous Martin Luther King quote about how darkness cannot drive out darkness at the top of the page. Conveniently, this fits into a very common tactic for everyone from Heritage types to the “white moderate” King railed against in Letter from Birmingham Jail: blame racial violence on “hate” generally, in order to both-sides a situation that was explicitly caused by white supremacists, at the expense of Black people.

As King wrote,

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”

Oran Smith’s silence in not mentioning Juneteenth— a day with great symbolic significance to many Black South Carolinians, and to those who see the end of slavery as a central turning point in our history—and his simultaneous “reminder” about a particular recent incident of racist violence (which he never bothers to cast as an incident of racial violence), speaks volumes, whether he wants it to or not.

For what it’s worth the Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts (the guy who famously said, “We are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” also wrote:

The left has co-opted Juneteenth to push for radical racial policies like reparations and exclude most Americans from its celebration. As a result, many conservatives now oppose the federal holiday.

Roberts argued that in tying Juneteenth to protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and calls for reforms to systemic racism, “the left” was ruining its origins as a celebration of the end of slavery in Texas. He ended his piece by demanding, “It’s long past time conservatives start reclaiming our institutions—let’s start on June 19.”

Some might argue that, even leaving aside the rhetoric of connected organizations like Heritage Foundation, someone with Smith’s long and well-documented history of bad-to-awful takes on race probably shouldn’t comment on a white supremacist shooting at all, unless it’s to suggest concrete ways to address the ideas that caused it— ideas he once intentionally disseminated to the public.

Despite Smith’s wishes, we can’t “see a window into [his] heart” to know how he feels about South Carolina’s history of systemic racism. But he has a huge platform as both a Senior Fellow at the powerful Palmetto Promise Institute and a member of the Higher Education Commission. He has every opportunity to use his influence to put his money where his mouth (vaguely) is, and to uplift all South Carolinians while addressing ongoing structural racism.

Given that the legislature spent most of the year giving voucher money to people who already had it, outlawing updates to historical monuments, and trying to ban diversity training, and Smith didn’t seem to have much to say against any of it, I won’t hold my breath.