Dan O'Donnell

Dan O'Donnell

Common Sense Central is edited by WISN's Dan O'Donnell. Dan provides unique conservative commentary and analysis of stories that the mainstream media...Full Bio

 

Media Liberals Really, Really Hate Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a time to gather with family and friends and reflect on and give thanks for the blessings bestowed upon us…except, of course, for media liberals. Thanksgiving to them is yet another time to remind America how terrible it is; from its gluttony to its Neanderthal love of football to especially its genocidal founding.

Thanksgiving to them isn’t so much a holiday as a day of mourning.

In fact, CNN produced an in-depth report on a group of Native Americans in Plymouth, Massachusetts who actually do refer to Thanksgiving as a National Day of Mourning.

This theme, that America today is no better than it was 400 years ago, runs through news story after story, opinion piece after opinion piece—dozens in just the past few weeks alone—all reminding America that Thanksgiving, the most uniquely American of the major holidays, is actually a celebration of everything that’s wrong with America.

As MSNBC’s Joy Reid put it: "We are just over two weeks away from one of the most beloved American food holidays, Thanksgiving, where problematic actual history meets delicious cuisine."

National Public Radio is very concerned about how Thanksgiving is being taught in schools—specifically, that it only focuses on one moment of cultural unity and not how terrible European colonists were.

Time Magazine similarly focused on the need to change the way Thanksgiving is taught in schools in a lengthy piece entitled ‘I Was Teaching a Lot of Misconceptions.’ The Way American Kids Are Learning About the 'First Thanksgiving' Is Changing.

The New Yorker expands on this idea to inform its readers that it’s not just Thanksgiving, but the entire fall season that is problematic:

Autumn is the season for Native America. There are the cool nights and warm days of Indian summer and the genial query “What’s Indian about this weather?” More wearisome is the annual fight over the legacy of Christopher Columbus—a bold explorer dear to Italian-American communities, but someone who brought to this continent forms of slavery that would devastate indigenous populations for centuries. Football season is in full swing, and the team in the nation’s capital revels each week in a racist performance passed off as “just good fun.” As baseball season closes, one prays that Atlanta (or even semi-evolved Cleveland) will not advance to the World Series. Next up is Halloween, typically featuring “Native American Brave” and “Sexy Indian Princess” costumes. November brings Native American Heritage Month and tracks a smooth countdown to Thanksgiving. In the elementary-school curriculum, the holiday traditionally meant a pageant, with students in construction-paper headdresses and Pilgrim hats reënacting the original celebration. If today’s teachers aim for less pageantry and a slightly more complicated history, many students still complete an American education unsure about the place of Native people in the nation’s past—or in its present. Cap the season off with Thanksgiving, a turkey dinner, and a fable of interracial harmony. Is it any wonder that by the time the holiday arrives a lot of American Indian people are thankful that autumn is nearly over?

This line of thinking has even seeped into food blogs. San Francisco Chronicle food writer Soleil Ho writes in an essay entitled “Why do we celebrate Thanksgiving?”

Though one could argue that Thanksgiving can and should be an apolitical occasion, the persistent retelling of history that occurs around the holiday is steeped in our national myth making. We still popularly romanticize the origin of the holiday — and by extension, the origin of the country — as one where pilgrims from Europe broke bread with Native Americans, who freely gave and gave until there was nothing left to give. I’m sure I’ll get more than a few email responses that speak to that fact.
Yet so much ink has been spilled and so much breath has been expended in service of clearing up the story of the holiday. As Dennis Zotigh, a cultural specialist at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, writes, “Why should Native peoples celebrate Thanksgiving? Many Natives particularly in the New England area remember this attempted genocide as a factual part of their history and are reminded each year during the modern Thanksgiving.”

It’s not just news media that encourages this idea that America should be ashamed of Thanksgiving. This year, entertainment media has picked up this notion. On the ABC comedy Single Parents, a particularly woke teacher shows up unannounced at one of her students’ homes:

“The Simpsons” similarly expounded on the horrors of Thanksgiving by extending their annual “Treehouse of Horror” Halloween special to a Thanksgiving horror show and dressing up two aliens, Kang and Kodos, who constantly try to take over the world, as pilgrims.

You see? The colonists were just like aliens who invaded the planet and tried to kill as many people as they could. And Americans are still killing today. According to the Huffington Post, with Thanksgiving we’re even killing the planet itself.

In a particularly woke piece entitled “The Environmental Impact of Your Thanksgiving Dinner,” author Alexandra Emanuelli wonders:

How much damage are we doing with our epic Thanksgiving meal every year? We spoke with three researchers to find out more about Thanksgiving’s carbon footprint.
It turns out that your food isn’t the biggest holiday culprit of carbon dioxide emissions — traveling for the meal is.
No one should be discouraged from enjoying the holiday or celebrating with family and friends, but we’re here to provide insight into the ingredients and dishes that have the largest ecological impact. The researchers we interviewed shared suggestions and alternative ingredients that cause less environmental damage.
The biggest carbon impact is caused by people, not food, traveling extensive distances. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon determined that four people flying a 600-mile trip produces 10 times the emissions of the Thanksgiving meal. Driving is less detrimental, but American cars emit close to a pound of CO2 per mile driven. Orchi Banerjee, a recent graduate of the department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon, said, “It may help the environment if [your guests] stayed home and cooked their own meal.”

Sharing Thanksgiving with loved ones, you see, is problematic. Thanksgiving itself is problematic. It destroys the environment and celebrates the destruction of an entire culture. Rather than focus on a moment of unity in an entirely historically normal cultural clash, the modern American left wants to transform Thanksgiving into “Grievance Sharing”—less of a holiday to be celebrated than a marker of America’s evil to be shamed.

"The Dan O'Donnell Show" covered this extensively Monday. Click on the player below to listen and click here to subscribe so you don't miss a single podcast!


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