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Nov. 24, 2022 - The Michael Knowles Show

25:16

Leftist Thanksgiving Myths DEBUNKED | A Michael Knowles Classic

Thanksgiving is here, and if you need some extra facts to destroy your liberal family member with, this is the video for you. I debunk revisionist myths about Thanksgiving and explain the undeniably divine providence guiding the Mayflower's voyage. Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	Happy Thanksgiving.
	I hope you're all enjoying a wonderful day, sitting maybe in a nice comfy chair, relaxing.
	One of the problems with Thanksgiving, though, and we've all experienced it in recent years, is when your purple-haired liberal lesbian niece or nephew these days starts spouting off about how terrible America is and how the people who helped to build this great nation were awful, evil, genocidal maniacs.
	You know this is going to get a lot worse now that the orange man is back and is declaring he's running for president.
	They're going to turn the vitriol up to 11.
	So I want to arm you with some facts for this Thanksgiving season because the story that we are told by the liberal establishment about Thanksgiving is just complete bunk.
	The evil, terrible Englishman who came and stole the land and were so terrible to the Indians and blah, blah, blah.
	It's nonsense.
	The real history is actually much, much more interesting and edifying than all of that.
	So, without further ado, enjoy the true story of Thanksgiving.
	The land was ours before we were the lands.
	Those are the words of Robert Frost, but they could have been uttered by the pilgrims, who were convinced of a divine providence guiding their voyage on the Mayflower to found a new Canaan in the New World.
	I'm convinced of it, too.
	We will explain the true story of the Mayflower, the Pilgrims' Thanksgiving, and our national destiny.
	The left today mocks claims of a divine hand in our founding, in the founding of our country.
	I think the reason they can so easily dismiss Providence is because they're almost entirely ignorant of the history.
	This is why they'll also claim that purely benevolent Indians selflessly saved the Pilgrims from starvation, only to be betrayed by the English ingrates and callously wiped out.
	That didn't really happen.
	Thanksgiving is the cause of much historical myth-making.
	I don't mean the divine providence of the pilgrim's passage.
	That part is undeniable.
	I don't mean the myths of the patriotic variety, that the pilgrims and the natives sat down, they shared food and goods together, they forged bonds of friendship and peace.
	All of that happened, too.
	I mean the myths of revisionism.
	War came, no doubt, but the circumstances under which war came after 55 years of relatively unbroken peace is far more complicated than the revisionists would claim.
	The pilgrims were not greedy conquistadores, and the Indians weren't helpless innocents.
	War might have come sooner, peace might have persisted for longer, but for the actions and decisions of particular men reacting to complex circumstances.
	I personally have a particular interest in the Mayflower Voyagers because, despite my swarthy Sicilian skin tone, I descend from four of them.
	Only one of them was a pilgrim, Dr.
	Samuel Fuller, he was the only physician in the colony, although his medical training is somewhat doubtful.
	My credentials are a little doubtful too.
	Three of them were so-called strangers.
	These were the non-pilgrim passengers on the Mayflower.
	They were not religious zealots.
	Some of them were downright degenerate.
	One great, great, great, great, great, great, grandpappy Knowles is Stephen Hopkins, who 11 years prior to the Mayflower's voyage had already traveled to the New World, and he had shipwrecked in Bermuda, an incident on which Shakespeare's The Tempest is based.
	Another is Francis Eaton, and the third is John Billington, who Plymouth Governor William Bradford called a knave with a family that was, quote, one of the profanest among them, Great-great-great-great-great-grandpappy Billington appears to have been the biggest degenerate of the Plymouth gang.
	He was regularly punished for rabble-rousing, and eventually he was executed for murder.
	His son John wandered off and almost caused a war, and his wife Eleanor was sentenced to sit in the stocks and be whipped for slander.
	Family memories, they come back to me.
	Enough about my derelict ancestors.
	Back to the Providence.
	Did God ordain the Mayflower Passage and the founding of America?
	Governor Bradford certainly thought so.
	In his account of Plymouth Plantation, he wrote of the group...
	They knew they were pilgrims.
	That's why we call the voyagers pilgrims.
	They wrote of themselves, That was a good thing, because just about every obstacle imaginable appeared to prevent the Mayflower's voyage.
	The pilgrims, for those who don't know, they came from a separatist church that thought the Church of England was so corrupt it could not possibly be reformed from within and must be opposed from without.
	One can only imagine what they would think of my own potpourri, of one of their descendants.
	In the 16th century, several separatists had been jailed and killed, and since the 1603 coronation of King James, pressure to conform began to mount, so the pilgrims left England for Leiden Holland.
	Well, I think.
	But as they prepared to depart, pilgrim William Brewster published a tract critical of King James and his bishops.
	Now, as a young man, Brewster had served as an assistant to Queen Elizabeth's Secretary of State, a man named William Davison, and now the king ordered his arrest, which forced Brewster into hiding.
	Not a good time.
	Nevertheless, they persisted.
	The pilgrims contracted master Christopher Jones and his sweet ship, the Mayflower, along with another vessel called the Speedwell.
	The Mayflower was called a sweet ship because it had sailed the English Channel for over a decade, carrying French wine, and the spilt French wine tempered the stench of the bilge on the ship.
	Some might see the pervading presence of the wine in this first act of departure, the first miracle performed by Christ and a symbol of Christ himself, as an early glimpse of God's plan for the pilgrims.
	Regardless, more trouble lay ahead.
	The second ship, the Speedwell, sprang a leak after reaching Southampton, and another at Dartmouth.
	Having decided that the ship was unable to sail, all of the passengers loaded up on the Mayflower.
	Only later was it learned that the Speedwell's master, Captain Reynolds, had been conspiring against the Pilgrims.
	It was no mistake.
	The Dutch, you remember those damn decadent Dutch, they had sought to prevent the English from settling Manhattan, and so they enlisted Reynolds in their efforts to thwart the transatlantic voyage.
	Ironically, this act of sabotage may have saved the colony in its early years.
	By forcing all of the passengers onto one ship, the separatists and the strangers had to learn to cooperate with one another.
	Had the Speedwell survived, there likely would have been very little contact between the two groups.
	One was drawn to one ship, one to the other.
	Now the pilgrims saw evidence of God's work in just about everything.
	It's an evil generation that looks for signs and wonders, but it's a stupid generation that ignores signs and wonders.
	Almost immediately, a sailor began to mock the pilgrim's seasickness.
	You can imagine it.
	A sea-hardened sailor starts making fun of these Christian zealots.
	As Bradford tells it, quote,"...a proud and profane young man would always be condemning our poor people in their sickness and cursing them daily with grievous execrations." The young man boasted of hoping, quote, Bradford goes on, though.
	But it pleased God, before they came half-seas over, to smite this young man with a grievous disease, of which he died in a desperate manner, and so was himself, the first that was thrown overboard.
	Not to put too fine a point on the incident and what it meant for the Pilgrim's project, Bradford wrote, quote, It was an astonishment to all his fellows, for they noted it to be the just hand of God upon him.
	The rest of the sailors kept their mouths shut.
	Smart guys.
	After 65 days, the Mayflower made landfall, not at their intended and legally granted destination of New York, but hundreds of miles northeast of Cape Cod, where the settlers had no legal right to the land.
	They had been granted land by the Hudson River, but not where they landed.
	When the passengers learned of this, a group of mutineers, led by not one but two of my ancestors, rose up to make, quote, discontented and mutinous speeches.
	Fortunately, few on board listened to them, and the Voyagers signed the Mayflower Compact.
	a, quote, covenant to combine ourselves together in a civil body politic for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid.
	The land was not much to look at.
	Bradford called it, quote, a hideous and desolate wilderness.
	Stranger than the environment, however, was its lack of people.
	There just wasn't anybody around.
	It was unpeopled because between 1616 and 1619, bubonic plague or some similar disease was introduced by European fishermen in modern Maine.
	It killed an estimated 90% of the inhabitants of New England.
	The disease prompted an outbreak of war among various tribes vying for power in the chaos.
	People died so quickly, no one remained to bury the dead, which left the pilgrims to wonder at the whitened bones lying in cleared fields.
	The Indians already had some familiarity with Europeans.
	In 1614, Captain John Smith of Pocahontas fame, that one, the cartoon guy, he led a voyage around the region during which his commander, Thomas Hunt, captured and enslaved a group of natives.
	This led the Indians to slaughter all but three or four of a later group of French travelers who shipwrecked on Cape Cod the next year in 1615.
	The men who were spared ended up being tortured and enslaved.
	But one of them promised an Indian in the Indians' own language that God was angry with them for their wickedness and would destroy them and give their country to another people.
	This was a prophecy doubtless fulfilled and another evidence of the Almighty's plan for the pilgrims.
	By Provincetown Harbor, where the pilgrims first landed, they found a gigantic bushel of corn.
	They just found it sitting there.
	They were starving, they were worried about their ability to feed themselves, and there was just a huge sack of corn, so much that two men could not carry all of it.
	And they debated whether or not to take it, but they feared starvation, so they decided to grab the corn and compensate the bushel's owner later on because, as you know, it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission.
	The pilgrims did, however, refuse to loot what appeared to be Indian burial places, despite finding bows and arrows there.
	Certainly they would have been useful to the pilgrims, but they said, quote, it would be odious unto them to ransack their sepulchres.
	Within a short spell, at least 30 Indians descended on the pilgrims screaming war cries and flinging arrows.
	Miraculously, not a single Mayflower passenger left the encounter with a scratch.
	They realized their new neighbors were not exactly well disposed toward them, so Bradford set out to look for a better settlement option.
	After a month, he discovered Plymouth Bay, where the situation was even stranger.
	There were whole fields perfectly cleared for agriculture, but there were no people to cultivate them.
	Bradford saw in this a clear sign from the Lord, a place that they randomly found, apparently randomly found, perfectly cleared and ready for them to plant.
	He returned to the Mayflower to share his discovery.
	He was so thankful to God, but upon returning, tragedy struck.
	Bradford learned that Dorothy May, his wife of seven years and mother of his three-year-old son, had slipped over the side of the Mayflower and drowned.
	You might be thinking, hmm, it's difficult to slip over the side of an anchored boat.
	And you would be right.
	While historian Cotton Mather called the death an accident, many believe it to have been a suicide.
	The temptation to despair was strong.
	Dorothy May hadn't seen her son in four months, a seven-year-old child on the ship had just died, and two more children were ill to the point of death.
	On top of all of that, and on top of the typically cold New England weather, a little ice age had descended on the region.
	Until Bradford's return five days after his wife's death, the Mayflower passengers had little reason to expect their lot would improve.
	Bradford himself then fell ill as the Voyagers settled into Plymouth.
	He requested some beer from the Mayflower to aid in his recovery.
	The sailors, fearful that their booze supply would run out before they made it back to England—well, the water at that time was virtually undrinkable, so they needed to drink beer on the way—they responded that if Bradford were their own father, he should have none.
	Remember what happened to the last sailor who gave Pilgrims lip?
	You might remember.
	In a replay of that incident, they all started to get sick and die.
	The coincidence even prompted one young officer on the ship to a deathbed conversion.
	Master Jones, too, had a change of heart, and he gave the Pilgrims their beer.
	Smart guy.
	During February and March of that horrible winter, two or three colonists died per day.
	Two or three per day.
	By spring, a majority of the settlers who had originally arrived at Provincetown, 52 out of 102, were dead.
	Here's where things start to get really, really strange.
	As if they weren't strange enough already, here's where it gets to Occam's Razor.
	On March 16th, just two or three months after settling in at Plymouth, a lone Indian walked boldly out of the woods toward the pilgrims.
	On March 16th, just two or three months after settling in at Plymouth, a lone Indian walked boldly out of the woods toward the pilgrims.
	They grabbed their muskets, stood on guard.
	They grabbed their muskets, stood on guard.
	None of that deterred the Indian.
	None of that deterred the Indian.
	He saluted his new neighbors and said two words.
	He saluted his new neighbors and said two words.
	Welcome, Englishman.
	Welcome, Englishman.
	He was tall.
	He was tall.
	He had long hair, no beard.
	He had long hair, no beard.
	He was naked as the day he was born.
	He was naked as the day he was born.
	Interestingly for the racial politics revisionists, the pilgrims made no mention in their records of his race, of the color of his skin.
	Interestingly for the racial politics revisionists, the pilgrims made no mention in their records of his race, of the color of his skin.
	The man's name was Samoset.
	The man's name was Samoset.
	He was a sachem visiting from Maine where he'd learned some English from fishermen, and he just happened to be visiting in precisely the area at precisely the time the English had accidentally landed after they missed New York but didn't know to sail up to the next nicest harbor in Massachusetts Bay.
	Just right there.
	Right exactly where they were, apparently by accident.
	If that weren't coincidental enough, in the following days, Samoset returned with another Indian who spoke virtually perfect English.
	He chatted with the pilgrims about his favorite areas of Spain and his favorite neighborhoods in London.
	That man's name was Squanto.
	Years earlier, Squanto had been abducted by Thomas Hunt, sold into slavery in Spain, escaped or was possibly rescued by monks, made his way to England somehow, hopped a boat to Newfoundland, and walked all the way down to Plymouth, The Pilgrims, after landing 300 miles off their mark, stumbled on perhaps the only person in the Western Hemisphere with a command of the English language.
	This is the Occam's Razor part.
	Occam's razor says, among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.
	So either endless, unique, and impossibly improbable events just happen to occur, or God sent Squanto to help the pilgrims.
	I know which one I think.
	Squanto, unsurprisingly, became the liaison between the Pilgrims and their new neighbors, the Poconocots.
	William Brewster, ever the diplomat, orchestrated a diplomatic reception of the Poconocot-Sachem Massasoit, replete with pillows and carpets and trumpets and drums.
	Within only a few years, Squanto had gone from a slave to the single most powerful person in the region, as only he could communicate between the English and the Indians, and he used his newfound power to his advantage.
	Squanto was a true friend of the Indians.
	He helped them plant corn.
	He was indispensable.
	Governor Bradford loved him like a family member.
	He also played the situation to get an upper hand on Massasoit and the Poconocots.
	There is a bit of strange symbolism in the name Squanto itself.
	Squanto was named after the Indian spirit of night and darkness and cold wind, the spirit the pilgrims identified with the devil.
	There was another one, another indispensable Indian to the pilgrims, a man by the name of Habamak, was also named after this spirit.
	Nathaniel Philbrick, in his excellent story, The Mayflower, in his excellent book, he puts it well.
	A group of people so singularly devoted to serving God that they sailed halfway around the world to do it became entirely dependent on two Indians named Satan.
	The surrounding Indian tribes, in turn, became jealous of the Poconocit Indian Alliance, as it greatly strengthened Mazasoit's position in the region.
	The Matapoiset chief, Corbatant, tried to break the alliance by capturing poor little Squanto.
	He even held a knife to the poor man's neck.
	But while the Pilgrims were generally peaceful, it is nevertheless and always remains a bad idea to mess with fire and brimstone zealots who know they have God on their side.
	Governor Bradford ordered Plymouth's military commander, Miles Standish, to go after Corbatant with guns blazing.
	Standish was already chomping at the bit to do it, and wouldn't you know, all of this had the effect of making all the petty sachems much friendlier toward the English.
	Funny how demonstrations of strength work.
	This brings us to the first Thanksgiving.
	We wouldn't forget about Thanksgiving.
	It occurred around Michaelmas, which is in late September, early October.
	Contrary to popular revisionism, it actually did resemble not only our 20th century ideas of Thanksgiving, but even the dinners that we have today.
	It actually was fairly similar.
	There was a lot of corn, squash, beans, barley, peas.
	They did eat turkey.
	They ate ducks and geese.
	They possibly also ate striped bass and bluefish and cod.
	Nassasoit and his Indian pals showed up with around 100 people, more than twice the English population of the colony, but he knew his manners and he didn't show up empty-handed.
	He brought five freshly killed deer.
	The entire meal was cooked by the four adult women who survived that awful first winter, half of whom lead the genetic line all the way down to little ol' me.
	This festival, however, was not religious in the way that we would consider Thanksgiving.
	They didn't even call it Thanksgiving.
	The real Thanksgiving didn't happen until two years later, in 1623, when Governor Bradford officially declared a day of Thanksgiving.
	This was a civil affair recognized by the civil authority, and it didn't celebrate English-Indian cooperation, as they may have celebrated two years earlier.
	Rather, the pilgrims were thankful that year that they ditched communism in favor of private property, which had in turn given them abundance.
	You see, the pilgrims had tried what they called the common course.
	Not common core, that's also bad, but the common course.
	Communal ownership of property, land, and wealth.
	Turns out it made everybody lazy, dishonest, and thieving.
	Shocking, I know.
	On the brink of starvation in 1623, Bradford instituted private property.
	In his words, quote, "This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious.
	So as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble and gave far better content.
	The women now willingly went into the field and took their little ones with them to set corn, which before would allege weakness and inability, whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression." It's amazing.
	When you give people a stake in their own abundance and their own work, it turns out they work more.
	And by the way, this was not just a conclusion about a particular experience.
	Bradford explicitly condemned communism in all its forms and all its lies and all its empty promises as absurd and contrary to God's will.
	He explained, quote, The experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years, and that amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato's and other ancients applauded by some of later times, little did he know of even later times, that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing, as if they were wiser than God.
	Within two years of landfall, these earliest Americans already realized that communism is the worst.
	Anti-communism is as American as apple pie and Thanksgiving.
	While most local Indian tribes played nice, the Narragansetts refused to abide the Poconocet-English alliance, and they threatened war by sending arrowheads wrapped in snakeskin to the pilgrims in Squanto.
	They're not going to take that, so the pilgrims sent bullets and gunpowder wrapped in snakeskin right back.
	Another reminder, it is not a good idea to mess with religious zealots who travel around the world to live in freezing, desolate wilderness because God is on their side.
	Do not mess with those people ever.
	Now, like any sane society, to protect against threats from without, the pilgrims built a big, beautiful wall around their settlement.
	Hundreds, if not thousands of trees were felled.
	The pilgrims lugged the massive timber by hand, and it stood more than half a mile in length and over eight feet tall.
	The wall's construction was met by shrieking protests and stupid pink hats.
	I'm just kidding.
	That wouldn't happen in America for almost 400 more years.
	Indian relations continued relatively well, very often with the pilgrims playing peacemakers and intervening on behalf of their Indian friends with other tribes.
	When Massasoit demanded Squanto's head after an attempted coup, the pilgrims begged for his life.
	Massasoit agreed, though likely he later poisoned him anyway.
	On his deathbed, Squanto asked Bradford to pray for him that he might go to the Englishman's god.
	Bradford called Squanto, quote,"...a special instrument sent of God for their good beyond their expectation." It's impossible to argue with that.
	He clearly was.
	The pilgrims at Bradford's command later saved Massasoit's life by rushing to his deathbed, cleaning his sores, cooking him food, administering what little medicine they had, doing anything they could, no matter how degrading, no matter how ethereal for Massasoit.
	To thank them, Massasoit told the English of the Massachusetts unprovoked plan to attack the colony.
	The Massachusetts were going to strike.
	But this put Bradford in a difficult position.
	The Pilgrims didn't want to attack the Massachusetts without provocation.
	But if they waited for the Massachusetts to strike, they were doomed.
	The Massachusetts wanted to take care of some Englishmen on their property, and they knew they'd have to hit Plymouth, too.
	So what happened?
	Bradford gave the order, Standish set the trap, and the English averted war by carrying the head of Sachem Wituwamat back to Plymouth.
	Now, it's funny to think of those Bush-era activists who screaked about how awful and unprecedented preemptive war was for America.
	Literally, the first major military assault waged by our country was preemptive.
	Not only that, it worked.
	War was averted, and the Indians who conspired against the Pilgrims apologized profusely, they made amends, and Massasoit consolidated his power even further, creating, thanks to the Pilgrims for the first time, the Wampanoag Nation.
	Peace persisted for decades as the Massachusetts Bay Colony and other colonies were formed, Harvard College was founded, Indians converted to Christianity by the tribe full, and as a result, Indians ranked among some of the earliest alumni of Harvard.
	I'm certain they were far better educated than those shrieking snowflakes today.
	Missionary John Elliott translated the entire Bible into a phonetic version of of the Massachusetts language, since the Massachusetts hadn't developed their own written language, both the Old and the New Testament.
	As happened 1,600 years prior in Europe, the advent of Christianity threatened the political power of sachems because Christ's conquest of death on the cross removed political leaders' only claim to authority, and this led to jealousy now among other Indian tribes.
	Peace endured virtually unbroken for 55 years.
	It only broke when Massasoit's own son, Philip, wrongly blamed the English for the death of his brother, who more likely died of appendicitis or some other natural ailment.
	Philip vowed revenge.
	He began selling off land to raise funds for war, and he thereby exacerbated the need for war.
	Local Indians, notably the Christian and Harvard alum John Sassaman, warned Plymouth of Philip's plans for war.
	Many local tribes rebuffed Philip's belligerence and sided with the English.
	Philip even made an alliance with the French against the English, an offense unforgivable not only to you and me and all right-thinking people, but also to the fierce and not infrequently cannibalistic Mohawk tribe who promptly sided with the English.
	Looking back, it seems miraculous that peace endured so long until, tragically, the hot-headed child of the pilgrim's dear friend Massasoit acted on a bad hunch and destroyed more than half a century of mutual benefit and cooperation, setting the English permanently on their course to possess the whole new world.
	Reflecting on the abject misery the pilgrims endured at the Mayflower's landfall, the miracle of their survival, and their great thanks to God for protecting his people, William Bradford wrote, quote, What could now sustain them but the Spirit of God and His grace?
	May not and ought not the children of these fathers rightly say, Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean and were ready to perish in this wilderness.
	But they cried unto the Lord, and He heard their voice and looked on their adversity.
	The quintessentially American poet Robert Frost looked on the country's destiny with an additional three centuries perspective.
	He wrote, The land was ours before we were the lands.
	She was our land more than a hundred years before we were her people.
	She was ours in Massachusetts, in Virginia, but we were England's still colonials, possessing what we still were unpossessed by, possessed by what we now no more possessed.
	Something we were withholding made us weak, until we found out that it was ourselves we were withholding from our land of living, and forthwith found salvation in surrender.
	Such as we were, we gave ourselves outright.
	The deed of gift was many deeds of war.
	To the land vaguely realizing westward, but still unstoried, artless, unenhanced.
	Such as she was, such as she would become.
	I'm Michael Knowles.
	This is The Michael Knowles Show.

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