Hating Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving brings with it three things: turkey, family, and guides on how to win political fights with family members. The latest entry in this popular proggie pastime is Lauren Duca of Teen Vogue who not only offers a guide to fighting with your family members, but urges future lonely proggies like her who face a future of hookups followed by cat hoarding, that refusing to fight at the dinner table is racist.

"The crisis of white politeness will persist so long as we 'keep it nice' and avoid talking about politics. Breaking the spell requires us to actively unlearn the stories and patterns of the white supremacist patriarchy," Duca rants.

Not picking fights at the dinner table is a conspiracy by the white supremacist patriarchy which wants you to be nice to people. The woke crowd understands that niceness is racism. Now enjoy your turkey.

When lefties aren’t ruining Thanksgiving by being ‘Ducas’: they’re attacking the existence of the holiday.

The New York Times can’t allow a single Thanksgiving to pass without cursing its existence. The latest entry is “The Vicious Reality Behind the Thanksgiving Myth”. The Smithsonian informs readers that Thanksgiving is really about, “massacres, disease and American Indian tribal politics”.

Both are promoting a book by a George Washington University professor who insists that Thanksgiving should be a “national day of mourning.”

And you thought Duca would be the worst person to share a Thanksgiving table with.

The Zinnian book at the center of all this is another forgettable revisionist history which amplifies what lefties care about, conflicts between English settlers and Indian tribes, while dismissing what Americans care about, the ability of different groups of people to find moments of common ground.

And that’s the point.

History is complicated. The relationship between the settlers who came across the Atlantic Ocean and the much earlier settlers who crossed the Bering Strait was neither all bad nor all good. The complexities of that history have not been forgotten. These revisionist works don’t uncover anything we don’t already know. But we build holidays, not around our history, but around our values. Holidays allow us to celebrate who we are and who we want to be. That’s what canceling Thanksgiving is really about.

Thanksgiving teaches us two values that lefties hate: gratitude to a higher power and coexistence.

The guides to ruining Thanksgiving by fighting with your relatives about Black Lives Matter and a border wall, and the attacks on the existence of Thanksgiving are not separate phenomena. They are one.

Coexistence, to lefties like Lauren Duca and the authors of so many of these guides, is something white supremacists do to cover up the evils of an oppressive society where no one could or should coexist.

The lesson of Thanksgiving, that pilgrims and Indians could coexist, and help each other, is an alien one to an ideology built on simplistic paradigms of oppressors and oppressed where historical conflicts don’t end or even interrupt with moments of tolerance and fellowship, but climax in violent revolutions.

That’s why Thanksgiving offends the Left. Not because it celebrates colonialism, as they insist. But because it sets forth a vision of a world in which we can get along without working out all of our historical conflicts, checking our privileges, and ‘Marxising’ out all of our human relationships.

Days of thanksgiving were not unique in American history. But Thanksgiving as a paradigm of man’s relationship with G-d, and man’s relationship with man, is part of American exceptionalism. It’s how English, Scottish, French, and Dutch settlers were able to come together. And how waves of German, Irish, Jewish, Swedish, and Italian immigrants joined them to make the United States of America.

It’s why, despite the weight of history, African-Americans, Mexicans, and American Indians could all meet around a common national table in thankfulness and fellowship even in a divided nation.

And it’s why lefties who break up family Thanksgiving celebrations are wrecking the country.

The real lesson of Thanksgiving is not that history isn’t complex, or that oppression doesn’t exist, but that oppression is not the most powerful force in human history. Fellowship and gratitude are. Politeness and civility are not a white supremacist conspiracy. They are the ways that we live together.

Assuming that we want to live together.

Thanksgiving doesn’t mean that we don’t have fundamental differences. The pilgrims and the Indians certainly did. They don’t mean that we have never fought and will never fight again. Only that we will not fight in this moment, that we will appreciate our common humanity, and the higher power that blesses us with prosperity and peace. If we can’t do that even for a moment, then we can’t coexist.

And that, not history, is the real crisis of Thanksgiving. The pilgrims and the Indians managed to get along better than the two poles of our political system do. They could sit around the same table all those centuries ago, while today lefties insist that picking fights over politics at the table is their sacred duty.

If we can’t share a common table or a common country without resuming the fight, then what’s left?

That’s the real question of Thanksgiving today.

What happens when you invite people to a Thanksgiving dinner and they won’t stop fighting you? What happens when you share a country with radicals who won’t stop going for your throat even on Thanksgiving? What happens when you try to coexist with people who reject the idea of coexistence?

Then you’re left with a choice of living on their terms, in the government or at the dinner table, or fighting on your terms. That is the fight we’re in, in Washington D.C. and in the living room.

We all deal with it in one way or another.

"As we gather together for Thanksgiving, you know, some people want to change the name Thanksgiving,” President Trump said at a Florida rally.

Columbus Day has become a casualty in many parts of the country. Thanksgiving is next. And then the Fourth of July. Each of those days plays a vital role, not only in the nation’s history, but in its present. They’re part of an ongoing journey, of discovery, coexistence, and independence that has not ended.

Holidays aren’t just our history. They’re our present. They show us the way forward.

Thanksgiving is a weapon that shatters the politics, history, and economic theorems of the Left. That weapon is the transcendence of gratitude. The politics of radicalism are fueled by outrage. Nothing is ever forgotten or forgiven. There is never a moment’s peace. Not even at the dinner table.

But Thanksgiving reminds us that we don’t have to be prisoners of the past. That our conflicts, past and present, personal and national, can be set aside if we choose faith and love, even for a moment.

The Left wants us to be prisoners of the past. In its iron dialectic, there is no escape from history. Their world is a binary prison of oppressors and the oppressed, a cycle of revolutions and tyrannies, outrage and death that no one is ever allowed to leave behind for even a single day, evening, or moment.

They call this justice. We know it to be the worst form of tyranny.

Thanksgiving liberates us from that prison, as it liberated the ancestors of our nation. Americans are not the prisoners of history. We make our own history. We transcend our past and build our future.

That is the power of Thanksgiving. It frightens the Left. And it should.

Thanksgiving, from its earliest days, had the power to unite a nation. The greatest weapon of the radicals is division. They amplify the divisions of family and nation, breaking us apart and driving the wedges deeper. But the true power of Thanksgiving can defeat them and reunite a nation.





Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Thank you for reading.


Comments

  1. Not even sure that Teen Vogue agrees with people like her. Maybe they are. They are in the business of selling magazines. And this is what's selling these days.

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  2. I come from a family of proggies and EVERYTHING was political to them. My in-laws were the worst. It got so bad I stopped going to visit them and family dinners were the first thing to go. They got worse. They started coming to our house and dragging their politics and virtue signalling with them... and I told the wife that had to stop too.

    Then they went to work on our daughter and I just quit. I told the wife she could come with me, or go with them... but she couldn’t do both. It had gone beyond politics now, they were attacking my morals and ethics... and tolerance and acceptance only went one way with them.

    We haven’t seen them in four years now and it has been just wonderful. We should have parted ways much sooner than we did.

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  3. "What happens when you try to coexist with people who reject the idea of coexistence? Then you’re left with a choice of living on their terms . . .

    Precisely the choice 97% of Americans made long ago, seeemingly.

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  4. Right you are: Columbus Day first, next Thanksgiving. The triumph of Zinn. Thank God President Trump recognizes the threat, but fear the next president.

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  5. Anonymous1/12/19

    Daniel, gratitude and forgiveness are truly transcendent. Thank you for the blessings you bring in your work.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Anonymous1/12/19

    "The lesson of Thanksgiving, that pilgrims and Indians could coexist, and help each other, is an alien one to an ideology built on simplistic paradigms of oppressors and oppressed where historical conflicts don’t end or even interrupt with moments of tolerance and fellowship, but climax in violent revolutions. “

    This sums up the democrat party and their entire existence. The “oppressed” are their cherished diversity and the “oppressors” are the white man. I hate democrats and only hope one day they get what they truly deserve.

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  7. Anonymous1/12/19

    "Americans are not the prisoners of history. We make our own history. We transcend our past and build our future."
    Amen and G_d bless you and yours Mr. Greenfield.

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  8. The Conservative Curmudgeon1/12/19

    Well one thing Trump can't say is this is "Fake News" because the gullibles eat up his "Deep State"/"Swamp' conspiracy theories like Thanksgiving dinner. Seeing that this is a "War on Thanksgiving" he could grant pardons to any Deplorable "War Criminals" or at least offer to "financially defend them in court" like he told his rally supporters he would do after they commit violence. After all if he can get away with shooting someone on Fifth Ave.he wants his minions to at least believe they can also. But never fear your Commander in Chief will simply declare victory like he did against ISIS or his victory over the war against Christmas and all of the "Deplorables" heads will bob up and down and their conscience will be appeased. What faithful deplorable would doubt the "CHOSEN ONE" when he kept his promise to have "all American troops come home from Syria" and assured you "North Korea no longer is a threat"?

    My money says all you arm chair Generals will avoid this topic like you do with all intelligent conversation and be satisfied with his hollow victory declaration by giving it the middle finger. Tribalism is easier than thinking.

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  9. Anonymous1/12/19

    At 18, I was argumentative, arrogant, and
    much smarter than my parents. Small wonder
    that I had been indoctrinated by my freshman
    college professors. I was easier to take in
    September; at Thanksgiving, I would settle
    for no less than the Nuremberg Trials.

    A prime trick against “normal” conservative,
    white, productive people is shame of your
    “tribe”. Seems so virtuous and humble, and
    can be aimed at parents and elders. For
    extra virtue, don’t forget to invite your
    new handicapped, trans-sexual, refugee love
    interest.

    No joy, fellowship or affluenza left in this
    house. Mission accomplished.

    Charlie

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  10. The ultimate goal of the left wing is the destruction of all human life. As a result the left hates and fears the effective use of the human mind to solve problems and in particular a holiday such as Thanksgiving (Their rant against Christmas will probably start soon if it isn't already under way.) which celebrates human productivity and the plenty which come from it. Thank you for opposing the vicious tyrannical left wing.

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  11. Meanwhile, just screw the Indians.........(sarcasm)

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  12. Anonymous1/12/19

    Let’s not let the opportunity for delirious
    humor evade us. Gavin McInnis does his classic
    Thanksgiving rage skit. Sooo good!
    https://youtu.be/E7yIPuA7zCU

    Charlie

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  13. Anonymous1/12/19

    "Meanwhile, just screw the Indians"

    Do you mean the marauding imperialist Chinese colonial invaders who crossed the Bering Stait ice fields 3,500 years ago and stole the virginal pristine American continents from the neolithic indigenous humanoids who were the original native people soon genocided and erased from human memory by their Chinese murderers and their descendants? Oh yeah. Them. Chingachgook, Minnihaha and Squanto were reactionary racist Peking Man conquistadors who killed, ate up and spat out the real autochthonous first peoples of the Western hemisphere, Cro Magnon and Neanderthals from Europe who crossed from Greenland. Go back far enough in history and see that the main feast at Thanksgiving is not turkey but lies. Truth or illusion, George? Truth or illusion.

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  14. Excellent column Daniel, a breath of fresh air in the upside down PC world of leftism. Liberalism (leftism) poisons everything it touches.

    ReplyDelete

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