While most people were prepping for their Thanksgiving feasts, Axios decided to take a different approach. Instead of lauding what is typically a time for family and gratefulness, the left-wing news outlet decided to focus on how supposedly problematic the holiday is. This kind of handwringing from the press has become an annual tradition.
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You see, instead of unity and turkey, you should be concerned that Thanksgiving is actually grounded in “racial exclusion.”
ALSO SEE: Your Official Thanksgiving Day Strategy Guide for Every Meal
Thanksgiving in the United States is based on a mythical feast between the Wampanoag people and Mayflower Pilgrims.
The holiday’s real story is mixed with national unity and racial exclusion. https://t.co/RwD6ETpEuH
— Axios (@axios) November 27, 2024
The big picture: The nation’s annual Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday brings millions of families together, but the nation is growing more diverse and requiring new voices to tell the country’s history.
State of play: Debates over Thanksgiving’s origins have been reduced to political-cultural battles amid a divided nation, yet a new generation of historians say we need to understand the holiday better to understand ourselves.
No, a national holiday that has officially existed since George Washington’s proclamation in 1789 does not need “new voices to tell the country’s history.” It needs press outlets to stop being miserable scolds. It’s as if journalists can’t stand to see other people being happy. That’s probably because many of them have no ability to put down their avocado toast and park their politics for long enough to just enjoy being with family. Yes, even those who didn’t vote the way you would have preferred.
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As to this “new generation of historians,” they can also go pound sand. Every nation has aspects of its history that could be seen as objectively wrong through a modern lens. It is not helping people better “understand” themselves by constantly trying to make them ashamed of their ancestors and their country. On the contrary, it’s highly corrosive to society.
With that said, what is Axios’ actual argument? It’s as pedantic as you would imagine.
The story told to most elementary school students for decades goes like this: Starving Pilgrims who landed on present-day Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, got needed help from friendly Wampanoag members.
- They showed the immigrant Pilgrims, who had escaped religious persecution in England, how to fish, hunt and harvest in the harsh New England climate.
- After a successful harvest, the Pilgrims invited the Wampanoag, including Chief Massasoit, for a feast where they held hands, prayed for thanks and ate turkey together.
…
Reality check: Historians believe a day of thanks did take place in Plymouth Colony in 1621, but it’s unlike the event passed down to generations of children.
- According to the nonprofit group Partnership With Native Americans, the original feast lasted for three days and attendees ate fowl (but turkey wasn’t mentioned in the early descriptions).
- The Wampanoag showed up for the feast out of concern over gunshots rather than from invitation. (This was their land, after all).
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Yes, you read that right. The big “gotcha” here is that they may not have eaten turkey and that the Wampanoag originally showed up due to gunshots (though, they were invited to stay). We might as well stop celebrating Thanksgiving after those enormous revelations.
It just gets dumber from there. Axios goes on to point out that 50 years later, colonists and the Wampanoag would go to war. What’s not mentioned? That the Wampanoag were the ones who declared war on the colonists. The article then goes on to mention the enslavement of some Native Americans. Unmentioned? The Wampanoag also enslaved other Native Americans.
I’m not trying to make this into a competition on who was worse because clearly, slavery was wrong for anyone to practice. The point is that everything written by Axios in the article was selectively chosen to make the colonists appear distinctively evil while obfuscating how complicated history is. The piece even goes on to trash Thanksgiving football games and abolitionist Sarah Josepha Hale because what else should we expect?
In a sign of hope for humanity, though, the piece was ratioed to the moon. Here are a few of the responses.
Fixed it. pic.twitter.com/BBpE8loEhO
— John Cooper (@thejcoop) November 28, 2024
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Trump won, you guys. You don’t have to do this anymore.
— Magills (@magills_) November 28, 2024
This would be a real banger on BlueSky.
— Casey Mattox (@CaseyMattox_) November 28, 2024
Don’t think this is going to work guys pic.twitter.com/0C51JeWw05
— Melissa Chen (@MsMelChen) November 28, 2024
While history is complicated, this isn’t. A nation and its people are allowed to have holidays that celebrate unity and thanksgiving. We don’t need pedantic historians and press outlets trying to shame people with “context,” much of which, as I showed above, ends up being out of context anyway.
