Francesca Hong lost because saying "Woke 1 was crazy" is not enough
The lesson of the "Cancel Thanksgiving" tweet.
Last night’s gubernatorial primary in Wisconsin ended in a shock upset when the progressive frontrunner Francesca Hong lost to moderate David Crowley.
Hong had been in the news for the last week because of a bad tweet she sent in 2020. And though the primary is over, I think the tweet shows why she lost.
Here is the tweet:
“Cancel Thanksgiving. Should have done this in 1621. If it takes a worldwide pandemic for us to realize we should stop celebrating colonialism and the original superspreader event that killed Indegenous folx and women so be it.”
There are a couple of things going on here, so let’s go through them. We will begin with “cancel Thanksgiving.”
During Covid, a bunch of people said everyone needed not to have Thanksgiving dinners because it would get people sick. “Cancel Thanksgiving” in that sense—do not have a dinner this year—given the context is fine. She’s a chef! It was a pandemic! But then she gets cute and moves to a more traditional far-left bit about how Thanksgiving is evil.
For the record, the disease events that ravaged the New World preceded the first Thanksgiving, which is why the Native Americans who were part of it already had a decimated population. It’s nitpicky, but I can’t help myself.
But the main killer she seems concerned about is not smallpox, but colonialism in general, which she says Thanksgiving celebrates despite the fact that it killed “Indegenous [sic] folx and women.”
We’ll come back to that last phrasing, but for the record, as someone who has written extensive defenses of Thanksgiving, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that this is stupid and Thanksgiving is good.
The left loves to whine about Thanksgiving. Every autumn leftists inundate us with predictable rants about how it erases the bad history of American misdeeds toward Native Americans. It is surely true that the United States—and the English colonists whose descendants would eventually found the United States—did some bad stuff to Native Americans. This is uncontroversial. We did need the land! But we could have gone about it better! But Thanksgiving isn’t actually about that.
The real history might be complicated, but Thanksgiving is a holiday about how people of different creeds and colors can come together and break bread. It is about pluralism. It is about being nice to strangers. Of course history itself is more complicated. The Puritans were religious authoritarian fanatics who didn’t like pluralism. There wasn’t turkey served at the dinner; instead they ate eels. But while these are interesting facts about history, they are not very relevant to Thanksgiving the holiday.
The left constantly wants to spoil it by forcing a malevolent meaning on it that doesn’t exist, which is incredibly frustrating because the theme of Thanksgiving is a very beautiful progressive American thing. It’s a day where everyone gets together to celebrate race mixing!
The European mind cannot fathom!
Hong told reporters that she doesn’t hate Thanksgiving. She says it’s her favorite holiday. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it was something close to true, since the left doesn’t actually hate Thanksgiving. They hate an invented Thanksgiving that exists in their addled minds, but the dinner itself, they all tend to enjoy. Complaining about it is not an actual attempt to cancel it; it is in-group virtue signaling. It means nothing. It’s a profoundly annoying way for some very silly people to feel superior and signal to other silly superior people that they’re on the same level.
Speaking of meaningless in-group virtue signaling, “Indegenous [sic] folx and women.”
