As everyone knows, Thanksgiving is cancelled. You are not to travel, see family, hug anyone, or play loud music. In fact, it’s probably best not to eat all day — to be safe. Just sit on a disinfected chair and stare hungrily at your wall alone, peasant. It’s for your health.
If you must partake in human interaction, do it over Zoom. Wearing a mask. And make sure you shut down your computer before 10pm. This will ensure that the virus particles, which love to party, do not hear you pumping tunes late at night and mistake your Thanksgiving celebration for a rave. Though they are allergic to 1995 Châteauneuf-du-Pape when drunk in large groups by public health officials and/or the Governor of California, COVID particles are known for their love of raves. If they think you are having one, even over Zoom, they will travel digitally through the computer to infect and instantly kill everyone you love. This is science. It is known.
If, however, you are a science denier who cares so little about the elderly that you don’t want to leave grandma alone in a nursing home on her favorite day of the year, then you are going to have to make sure you avoid saying the wrong things. Saying the wrong things is hate speech, and hate speech is violence, and violence can kill people, just like COVID. So while you cannot avoid spewing noxious germs out of your filthy plebeian mouth, the least you can do is refrain from allowing your disgusting wrongthink to infect the ears of your beloved friends and family whom, to reiterate, you should probably never see again for the rest of your life until they and you all die of natural causes — to be safe.
In light of all this, I, the Daily Wire’s designated authority on correct thought and speech, have generously set aside some time on the plane flight I am definitely not taking on the way to see family with whom I am definitely not gathering for a delicious meal we are definitely not eating, to provide you with this comprehensive list of all the things you are definitely not permitted to say at Thanksgiving dinner. No need to thank me: it’s a public service I freely provide out of the pure goodness of my heart, which is much better than yours. All I ask in return is that you please — for the love of God — not breathe on me.
“Happy Thanksgiving.”
This should be obvious. In addition to being cancelled because of COVID concerns, Thanksgiving is also canceled because it is a vile white supremacist holiday commemorating the tragic subjugation of Native Americans, who lived together in harmonious perfection right up until the moment that white men killed them all, every last one, in cold blood. That’s just history.
If, as a society, we had any decency at all and were not rotten with systemic racism from our putrid roots to our foul branches, we would declare the final Thursday in November a day of public mourning on which the only rituals would be listening to spoken-word poetry by BIPOC and screaming at the sky.
But since America has yet to cast off the shackles of her colonialist oppressors, the least you can do on this solemn day is refrain from dredging up painful memories of the time when devout Christians risked life and limb to give their children a better life and killed exactly zero Natives in the process, making a decades-long peace with their fellow Christian, Squanto, and the Wampanoag Indians. This miraculous story of heartwarming brotherhood is simply too dangerous to be recalled or recounted. Stay well clear.
Basically Any Pronouns
Unless you are prepared to sit through a PowerPoint presentation of minimum three hours in length on the subject of your nonbinary child’s voyage to self-actualization, you are almost certainly not sufficiently enlightened to grasp the subtleties of their/zis/xear postgender identity. And let’s be real: you probably wouldn’t understand anyway, which is why you should not refer to your child at all for the duration of the meal, or acknowledge zir/zoom/Steve’s presence in any way.
However, it is also vitally important that you acknowledge and respect your child’s validity, so do not fail to address zim/flim/floomf at least once every 30 minutes. If your child wishes to perform an interpretative dance at or on the dinner table during the meal, you should be grateful for the privilege of witnessing this sacred stage on the journey to authentic self-discovery. Applaud for no less than five minutes straight afterward, then immediately fall silent. Respect the process.
So, to review: do not mention your child, because that is ignorance, but do not ignore your child, because that is erasure. To be absolutely sure that you do not cause harm, you must never speak with or look at your child, but also never stop speaking at or looking at your child. This isn’t hard, bigot.
“Trump is the President.”
This is misinformation. It is especially dangerous misinformation because it is true. It’s bad enough that Donald Drumpf is out there undermining our democracy by performing such misleading actions as “honoring those who served” for Veterans day. Those sorts of autocratic power-grabs can at least be flagged with the appropriate warnings on social media. But if you go around saying such things as “the Constitution dictates that the new presidency does not become official until the state electors meet and the Inauguration takes place on January 20,” there will be no heroic social media authorities around to keep your irresponsible claims in check. Your friends and relatives might actually believe that Trump is still the president which, again, is no less harmful for being technically accurate.
Indeed, the fact that Trump really is the president actually makes saying so worse, because bad facts are only bad if people are allowed to acknowledge them and speak them out loud. If we all make sure that no one ever says the bad things, they will go away. This applies not only to Trump’s presidency but also to such facts as the immutability of chromosomal sex and Aunt Stacy’s unfortunate tendency to drastically overcook the sweet potatoes. Don’t mention these realities. If you do, people might get the idea that they can just say any old thing just because it’s true. This would be a deadly blow to social justice.
“Would you like some pumpkin pie?”
This implies that you have stayed so long at your forbidden gathering that it is time for dessert, which in turn is probably past the government-mandated curfew. Might as well ask Uncle Schmendrick to pass the COVID, you super-spreader, because at this point night has fallen and the virus has come out of the cave under the earth where it sleeps during the day. And once that grim beast emerges to stalk the earth, God help us all.
“May I use your restroom?”
Restrooms are extremely unsanitary, which is why you should urinate and defecate in your pants at the table during the meal. Also, there probably isn’t any toilet paper.
“I am thankful (for anything)”
By definition, anything you are thankful for is a privilege. You should not be thankful for your privilege. You should atone for it at every second with bitter self-recrimination and weeping. If you allow yourself a moment’s peace from the constant self-doubt and rancorous envy which measures every person’s gains and blessings against your own, then you might find that you are set free into a peace which passes all understanding and a joy which grows even in the telling of it. This would eliminate your need for people like me to tell you what to say and think, which would be an utter disaster — not least of all for my paycheck.
“All Lives Matter.”
You should never say this. Ever. Not just at Thanksgiving. It is the hate speechiest kind of hate speech. Saying “All Lives Matter” means you do not believe black lives matter most of all, and that is racist. It is racist to believe that every human life is shaped by hand in the image of God, our common Creator whose love for us explodes every human category and shatters every human boundary, penetrating down into the very depths of creation to carry us bodily out of the hellish torment to which we would otherwise be consigned by the totality of our sin. There could hardly be anything more hateful than to say that the Lord Jesus Christ, through whom all things were made and without whom nothing is made, wields a power of salvation for all mankind in the face of which race, class, disability, and every other one of the puny obstacles that we raise up against his love are of no account.
So again, whatever you do, do NOT spend any time at Thanksgiving meditating, as the Pilgrims did, on the power beyond all speech or thought in light of which all the demons which plague our fallen world will flee like so many shadows and by whose power Death will be swallowed up forever on the Last Day. The Pilgrims were genocidal maniacs, as we have already discussed, and their retrograde beliefs are extremely dangerous because they imply that the lives of black people (you know, the real kind — the kind that voted for Joe Biden) do not matter inherently more than the lives of other people.
Thus if you even for one second say or so much as think that the power of the Black Lives Matter movement, much like the power of every nasty tribalist hate group that has ever oppressed mankind since the fall, will be shattered in a moment’s work by that mighty justice which shall one day roll down from heaven, then you my friend, like Thanksgiving, are cancelled. In fact, do not allow your mind to pass even once beyond COVID lockdowns, race riots, or any of the empty madness which plagues the present moment, or you might contemplate eternity and recall that though we shall have trouble in this life, yet we are pilgrims upon the earth and destined for a heavenly country. That in itself would be reason enough to gather with your family and thank God together, forgetting not all his benefits. And we wouldn’t want that.
Spencer Klavan is host of the Young Heretics podcast and associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books and The American Mind. He can be reached on Twitter at @SpencerKlavan.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.