The Matt Walsh Show - Thanksgiving Is Not A Sinister Holiday | Proof For Your Liberal Friend
Aired: 2025-11-27
Duration: 11:13


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[00:00:55]  The pilgrims overtook the Native Americans and took everything that they had worked so hard for.
[00:01:03]  Well, you know, Thanksgiving is a wonderful time.
[00:01:05]  It's my favorite holiday.
[00:01:07]  It's a time for celebration, gratitude, time to gather around the table with your family, enjoy a wonderful meal, reflect on all the things that you're thankful for, unless you are a deranged leftist.
[00:01:20]  In which case, you will insist that Thanksgiving is not so simple.
[00:01:23]  There are nuances, as you like to say.
[00:01:26]  Thanksgiving is deeply problematic.
[00:01:28]  And that's why every year around this time of year, you'll start seeing articles like this one, which was just published in The Nation headline, Should America Keep Celebrating Thanksgiving?
[00:01:37]  Now, the article presents two competing perspectives.
[00:01:40]  Both sides of the discussion are put forward, and you have to give the nation credit at least for giving both sides of the debate.
[00:01:46]  As dumb as you might think the debate is, at least they gave both sides.
[00:01:50]  And, you know, that's honestly more than I would expect from this publication.
[00:01:53]  So here's the first argument presented by a guy named Sean Sherman.
[00:01:57]  Quote, The sanitized version of Thanksgiving neglects to mention the violence, land theft, and subsequent decimation of Indigenous populations.
[00:02:05]  Needless to say, this causes tremendous distress to those of us who are still reeling from the trauma of these events to our communities.
[00:02:13]  Thanksgiving's roots are intertwined with colonial aggression.
[00:02:16]  One of the first documented Thanksgivings came in 1637 after the colonists celebrated their massacre of an entire Pequot village.
[00:02:25]  I do not think we need to end Thanksgiving, but we do need to decolonize it.
[00:02:30]  That means centering the Indigenous perspective and challenging the colonial narratives around the holiday and every other day on the calendar.
[00:02:37]  By reclaiming authentic histories and practices, decolonization seeks to honor Indigenous values, identities, and knowledge.
[00:02:44]  This approach is one of constructive evolution.
[00:02:46]  In decolonizing Thanksgiving, we acknowledge this painful past while reimagining our lives in a more truthful manner.
[00:02:55]  Now, by the way, in case this wasn't clear, that was the pro-Thanksgiving side of the debate.
[00:03:01]  So they have two sides of the debate.
[00:03:02]  That's what the pro sound side sounds like.
[00:03:06]  The Thanksgiving defender is a guy who thinks that the European settlers were evil, genocidal colonizers.
[00:03:13]  So if that's what he thinks, here's what the opponent of the holiday has to say.
[00:03:18]  You want to give thanks?
[00:03:19]  Give thanks to Native nations who granted settlers some form of legitimacy by entering into treaties recognizing them to be in our homelands.
[00:03:26]  Those treaties recognize that Americans are now under our spiritual custody and have rights to pass through our country.
[00:03:32]  As soon as Americans were able to impose their will on Indigenous nations, the treaties were violated.
[00:03:38]  Some Indigenous nations do not have treaties, and legally this means their nation should be intact.
[00:03:43]  Those of us who have treaties have defensible legal claims to lands that are now occupied by private American settlers under U.S. law.
[00:03:50]  November is already Native American Heritage Month.
[00:03:53]  Thanksgiving could be something better.
[00:03:55]  A day to appreciate the truth of a Native American history and Native Americans' contributions to our lives.
[00:04:00]  Let's tell a different story by dropping the lie of Thanksgiving and begin a truthsgiving.
[00:04:07]  Yes, let's tell the truth of Thanksgiving, he says.
[00:04:10]  Let's tell the story that no one's ever heard before.
[00:04:14]  And that's why every year around this time, there are dozens of articles and videos talking about the alleged truth that nobody is allegedly talking about.
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[00:05:40]  Let's get back to the table.
[00:05:41]  It's true that the traditional story of Thanksgiving that they used to tell young children in school decades ago is simplistic.
[00:05:51]  And there's probably a certain element of legend to it.
[00:05:54]  Every country has its legends.
[00:05:56]  Every country has its foundational myths.
[00:06:00]  There is nothing sinister about that.
[00:06:02]  Stories are passed down through the generations.
[00:06:04]  Details are lost over time.
[00:06:06]  Sometimes details are added, all to preserve the central theme or message in the story.
[00:06:13]  Every culture has its legends.
[00:06:15]  And really, our understanding of all historical events from centuries ago is at the very least incomplete.
[00:06:23]  We don't have camera footage to review, so we can only go by what people involved said happened, or what people who talked to people involved said happened.
[00:06:34]  So none of this is revelatory.
[00:06:36]  We all understand this.
[00:06:39]  Okay, so every time they say, well, did you know, you know, what they told you in second grade about Thanksgiving?
[00:06:44]  Did you know that wasn't the whole story?
[00:06:46]  Of course it's not the whole story, you idiots.
[00:06:48]  This is second grade.
[00:06:49]  I assume it wasn't the whole story.
[00:06:51]  None of that changes the basic meaning of Thanksgiving or undermines or debunks the basic central story of Thanksgiving.

=== Focus On Living Pain (04:21) ===

[00:07:00]  Besides, the old simplistic story of the holiday has now been replaced with a new simplistic story.
[00:07:07]  In the new simplistic version, the Native tribes were all a bunch of peaceful tree-hugging hippies in tune with the earth and nature, singing kumbaya when they were viciously slaughtered by the white man.
[00:07:18]  The pilgrims overtook the Native Americans and took everything that they had worked so hard for.
[00:07:24]  The actual truth is that the Native tribes were in a constant state of war long before any white man set foot on these shores.
[00:07:30]  Violence was an integral part of so-called indigenous culture, all indigenous cultures, because it was not just one culture.
[00:07:37]  These were disparate tribes stretched out all over the hemisphere, and violence was an integral part of all of them, no exceptions.
[00:07:46]  As for their contact with European settlers, sometimes the contact was peaceful on both sides.
[00:07:51]  On some occasions, the settlers committed atrocities.
[00:07:54]  On some occasions, the Indians committed atrocities.
[00:07:56]  On some occasions, the atrocities on either side were basically unprovoked.
[00:08:00]  On plenty of occasions, there was mutual combat between the two sides.
[00:08:04]  They don't mention any of this.
[00:08:06]  They never do.
[00:08:07]  They never acknowledge even one of the many, many, many countless instances of Indian tribes inflicting horrific, savage violence on innocent colonists, including women and children, and on each other.
[00:08:23]  They never acknowledge it because they don't want you to realize that this land was not stolen.
[00:08:27]  It was conquered fair and square.
[00:08:30]  The previous conquerors of this land were then themselves conquered.
[00:08:34]  That's the way it goes.
[00:08:35]  By the way, I've got news for you.
[00:08:37]  400 years ago, almost everybody's life was brutal and tragic.
[00:08:41]  If we're supposed to be sad about misfortunes suffered by people we never met way back in the distant past, then we will never stop being sad.
[00:08:48]  Almost everyone everywhere suffered greatly back in those days.
[00:08:52]  There are plenty of people still suffering greatly today.
[00:08:55]  If you want to empathize with people's pain, maybe choose people who are currently living, not people who had decomposed in the ground 400 years ago.
[00:09:03]  Not people who died 300 years before the automobile was invented.
[00:09:08]  Now, in final analysis, history contains an essentially infinite amount of suffering and atrocities and outrages and injustices.
[00:09:16]  It also contains heroism and sacrifice and courage and achievement.
[00:09:22]  It is up to us to decide which of those things in our national history we will focus on.
[00:09:28]  I contend that the healthiest category to focus on, the thing that you focus on if you want to be a thriving and happy and healthy society, is the latter, which isn't to say that we outright deny and never discuss the former.
[00:09:40]  Of course we acknowledge that bad things were done in our history.
[00:09:43]  We shouldn't try to erase that from the history books, and nobody is.
[00:09:46]  But ultimately, you will look back on your history with pride and gratitude or with resentment and despair.
[00:09:52]  You will focus on the triumph or the tragedy.
[00:09:56]  The people of all other nations across the world, or at least the non-Western world, they choose to focus on the triumph of their ancestors, which breeds national pride and patriotism and gratitude.
[00:10:08]  In the modern West, we are the only ones who have decided to basically ignore all of the positive and concentrate almost exclusively on the bad.
[00:10:18]  So much so that even our day of Thanksgiving has become, at least in some corners, times of mourning.
[00:10:24]  And what has that strategy gotten us?
[00:10:26]  It's only made us resentful, sullen, depressed, ungrateful.
[00:10:31]  It has made us worse people and our country a worse country.
[00:10:37]  That's why I will not partake in this historical self-flagellation.
[00:10:41]  Instead, I celebrate the incredible valor and intrepidness of my ancestors.
[00:10:47]  I take pride in this country's history and those who made it possible for this country to exist in the first place.
[00:10:55]  I am happy that they came here and that they conquered.
[00:10:58]  I am thankful for their conquest.
[00:11:02]  I will give thanks for it on Thanksgiving and for so much else.
[00:11:08]  And for everybody else, I will say they are today cancelled.
[00:11:12]  Canceled.