Dave Rubin did what too few commentators bothered to do this Thanksgiving season: he pushed back against the cheap, shame-driven version of our history and reminded Americans of the fuller story of the holiday we actually celebrate. In a Direct Message clip he urged viewers to resist the performative purges of our past and to remember Thanksgiving as a moment of gratitude, community, and faith rather than a cudgel for leftist guilt-tripping.
The historical record shows the 1621 harvest gathering in Plymouth was a multi-day celebration attended by the Pilgrims and leaders of the Wampanoag, including Massasoit, with Native hunters contributing deer and sharing in the bounty. Far from the sanitized pageant of schoolroom pageants or the caricatures used by activists, the evidence is short, sober, and rooted in primary accounts that describe cooperation and mutual aid at a difficult time for both peoples.
Historians rightly point out that the “First Thanksgiving” we teach in kindergarten was largely stitched together later by 19th-century writers and patriotic campaigners, not recorded as a national founding myth by the participants themselves. That does not mean the holiday is illegitimate; it means Americans should be honest about the past while refusing to let a broom of ideological rage sweep away the virtues that actually built this country.
It was Abraham Lincoln, in the middle of the Civil War, who helped turn regional harvest days into a national moment of unity and thanks, and later presidents and Congress codified the day we observe today. The modern date was finally set by federal law after the mid-20th century confusion, proving that Thanksgiving’s present form is the product of American governance and tradition, not the invention of any woke curriculum.
So why are campuses and some school districts suddenly rewriting Thanksgiving as a story of pure oppression instead of a complicated chapter with lessons in gratitude and neighborliness? Because the progressive impulse in our institutions has moved from honest inquiry to moral performance, teaching children to see America only as a project that must be punished rather than a nation worth defending and improving. This classroom rebranding is not education — it is indoctrination, and it needs to be called out.
Americans who still believe in family, faith, and the hard virtues of gratitude should reclaim this day from the cancelers and the cynics. Celebrate honestly: acknowledge the complexities, teach the facts, but refuse to trade our shared national traditions for a politics of shame. Keep Thanksgiving as a day to give thanks, to gather, and to pass on the founding spirit of resilience and gratitude to the next generation.
