Every year it’s the same story. Thanksgiving rolls around, and suddenly half the country is being told to feel guilty about eating turkey. According to the Left, Thanksgiving isn’t about gratitude or family — it’s a celebration of genocide, colonial oppression, and white supremacy.
That’s right. Headlines in the Washington Post and Time have called the holiday a “harmful lie” and blamed centuries of violence on the Pilgrims. In 2021, the Post ran a piece titled, “The violence at the root of our Thanksgiving myth has been hemispheric.” In 2019, Time Magazine published an article titled, “The Thanksgiving Tale We Tell Is a Harmful Lie.”
“Indigenous” writers and progressive outlets talk about “decolonizing” Thanksgiving, claiming that the story we learned in school—Pilgrims and Native Americans sharing a feast—isn’t just inaccurate; it’s a cruel myth hiding the truth of colonization. In 2023, The Nation published a piece arguing, “Thanksgiving’s roots are intertwined with colonial aggression.”
“I do not think we need to end Thanksgiving. But we do need to decolonize it,” it said.
Some go even further. The World Socialist Website paints Thanksgiving as a symbol of everything wrong with America today: millions going hungry while billionaires swim in cash, AI replacing workers, and government programs cut to the bone. For them, that turkey on your table is just a reminder of a bankrupt social order, not a family meal. And activists have signed a change.org petition telling newspapers like Wall Street Journal to stop publishing Pilgrim accounts, calling them racist. On social media, activists and progressives argue that celebrating Thanksgiving honors oppression rather than gratitude.
Conservatives, of course, see this differently. To us, Thanksgiving is about more than a history lesson — it’s about what makes America…well, America. Yes, history was messy. But it wasn’t all darkness. The Pilgrims and the Wampanoag made a treaty, shared a meal, and cooperated — a model of people from different backgrounds working together. That first feast shows grit, ingenuity, and faith in God. The Mayflower Compact? That’s the first written constitution in the New World, the kind of experiment in self-government that would later inspire the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. Those are things worth celebrating.
We don’t deny the wrongs in history. But leftist attacks on Thanksgiving are less about truth and more about hatred of anything that celebrates America’s virtues. Gratitude, family, cooperation, hard work—these are values that built this country, not lies to hide injustice.
So when the woke brigade tells you Thanksgiving is a holiday of shame, remember: it’s really about remembering who we are, what we’ve survived, and what we can still be thankful for.
And maybe, just maybe, pass the turkey without an apology.
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