When people like Dave Rubin dig into Thanksgiving, they remind us of something simple that elites and campus radicals want to complicate: this holiday emerged from a real moment of gratitude and neighborly cooperation, not from an edict of guilt. The story most Americans learn — colonists and Native Americans sharing a harvest meal in 1621 — is rooted in eyewitness accounts and has been celebrated ever since as a symbol of common decency and providence.
The settlers at Plymouth were not vague dreamers but hard-working separatists who left England for freedom of conscience and built a community under brutal conditions that nearly wiped them out the first winter. What we call “the Pilgrims” were part of that fierce Protestant impulse to worship and govern themselves, and their 1621 harvest celebration lasted for days and included local Wampanoag leadership as crucial participants.
It was Native generosity — the help of Squanto teaching corn and fishing techniques and the food provided by Massasoit and his people — that materially saved those early colonists and made that feast possible. The reality of mutual aid at that moment is worth honoring on its own terms, and it should be taught honestly without turning it into a one-note tale of villainy.
Yes, there is a darker sweep of history after 1621: disease, displacement, and bitter conflict devastated many Native communities, and those facts must be acknowledged with seriousness and respect. But acknowledging tragedy does not require erasing the good or surrendering our holidays to nihilistic historical grievance; we can remember both the help the Wampanoag extended and the injustices that followed.
Thanksgiving as a national institution is also an American invention of unity and faith — Sarah Josepha Hale campaigned for it, Abraham Lincoln made it a national day during the Civil War, and Congress and presidents later fixed the calendar so families could plan to come together. That evolution shows the holiday’s purpose: to bind a fractured nation and to remind citizens of God, country, and neighbor amid stormy times.
So when activists declare Thanksgiving a lie and insist it be converted into a symbolic day of shame, they’re aiming less at truth than at cultural demolition. Indigenous voices have rightly demanded their history be told, and many mark Thanksgiving as a day of mourning, but the answer is honest teaching and fuller remembrance — not canceling the simple, irreplaceable practice of families breaking bread and counting blessings together.
Let’s also be honest about the sources: historians rely on a handful of contemporary accounts and a lot of sober interpretation to get at what really happened in 1621, so there’s room for nuance without collapsing into propaganda from either side. Teach the facts we have, teach the suffering that followed, but do not hand our families over to a permanent state of shame for having celebrated continuity, faith, and Providence.
This Thanksgiving, patriots should resist the rising impulse to weaponize history and instead reclaim the day for gratitude, family, and civic renewal. Honor the truth where it belongs, but also protect the traditions that knit Americans together — because faith, thankfulness, and the refusal to be divided by manufactured guilt are what keep this republic strong.
