The Patriot Post® · Left Wants to Cancel Thanksgiving ... Forever
A number of Democrat governors, county executives, and mayors across America have issued edicts limiting the number of individuals allowed in people’s homes to celebrate Thanksgiving — excusing the blatant Fourth Amendment violation by claiming to be combatting the coronavirus pandemic. But there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that many leftists would love nothing more than to cancel the holiday forever. Why?
According to leftist revisionist historians, Thanksgiving was established to whitewash history — as in covering up the evils of America’s “white supremacist” founding. In an article titled “After a summer of racial reckoning, is America ready to learn the truth about Thanksgiving?” USA Today’s Eryn Dion writes, “As Americans looked for an origin story that wasn’t soaked in the blood of Native Americans or built on the backs of slavery, the humble, bloodless story of the 102 Pilgrims forging a path in the New World in search of religious freedom was just what they needed, according to [George Washington University history professor David Silverman]. Regardless of whether it was rooted in historical fact, it became accepted as such.”
Silverman himself dubiously contends, “How are we supposed to improve on this sorry record if we don’t understand the sorry record?” Ironically, it appears that “improvement” for those like Silverman is to shade the truth of what occurred by painting the Pilgrims in the most negative light possible. Additionally, he portrays the natives as perpetual victims of the white man, an all too popular, deceitful, and patronizing “systemic racism” trope.
But what may be the most offensive claim Silverman makes is that religious freedom was not what motivated the Pilgrims to cross the Atlantic in the first place. He says, “Many white Americans hold it very dear, the idea that the main impetus for colonization was the search for religious freedom. If you ask the general public, even educated people, that’s the most common explanation. It’s not right.” He points to the Pilgrims getting a charter from The London Company to start a colony in the New World, with survival and turning a profit as the primary concern and the impetus to leave Holland. How exactly this supersedes or undercuts the underlying reason the Pilgrims initially left England for Holland in the first place — the desire to freely practice their faith — is not clarified. The truth is, the Pilgrims, wanting to maintain their English culture and freedom to practice their faith, elected to leave Holland and journey to the New World to do just that.
What Silverman does in his retelling of history is conflate the actions of the Pilgrims with that of other European settlers in the New World. In so doing, he is then able to weave his tale of Thanksgiving being little other than a feast put on by the Pilgrims after they made a politically savvy peace deal with the native Wampanoags that allowed for their survival … and therefore the exploitation of the natives by the white man. In other words, it wasn’t really about freedom of religion and thanking God for sustaining them.
The real focus of this attack on Thanksgiving and our celebration of it is an attack on the heart and spirit of America. Throwing shade on Thanksgiving is an effort not to better understand history but to undercut and diminish the heroic efforts and motives of our nation’s forefathers by painting them as racists motivated primarily by white supremacy. It’s all about destroying the foundations of our nation.
Thanksgiving is a uniquely American holiday where we come together with family and friends to celebrate and thank God for the wonderful and abundant blessings He has gifted us. Those blessings are not merely of a material nature, but, more significantly, they consist of family, faith, and freedom.
Read the REAL History and Legacy of Our National Thanksgiving.