I want to talk today about the idea of canceling Thanksgiving, and why I don’t think that’s a very good idea. Now, that might not sound like the most controversial take — but we’re actually talking here about a candidate named Francesca Hong. She’s 37, a state representative from Madison, Wisconsin, and she’s currently running for governor in the Democratic primary in Wisconsin.
Who Is Francesca Hong?
Francesca Hong is the daughter of Korean immigrants who has had a pretty impressive life. She was born and raised in Madison and spent most of her career as a chef. She became an executive chef at 23, then co-owner of a ramen restaurant that got shut down during COVID — and that’s what drew her into politics. She was elected to the state assembly in 2020, the first Asian American in the Wisconsin legislature. She’s also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and part of the Assembly’s Socialist Caucus.
The Democratic governor of Wisconsin, Tony Evers, has chosen not to run again, and the race for the nomination has become chaotic on both the Republican and Democratic sides. The lieutenant governor’s campaign imploded over campaign finances. The Milwaukee County executive dropped out, then jumped back in. Mandela Barnes, a very popular figure in Wisconsin politics, exited the race just last week. Hong has outlasted all of it. She’s the clear front-runner heading into the primary on Tuesday, August 11th, leading by roughly 30 points — with plenty of undecided voters still in play.
But the primary isn’t really what people are concerned about. People are thinking about the general election. Tony Evers, the current governor, has not endorsed Hong — he’s endorsed one of her rivals, David Crowley, and said publicly he doesn’t think she can win in November. Prediction markets flipped over to favoring Republicans in the general election just within the last week. The most likely GOP nominee is Representative Tom Tiffany, endorsed by Donald Trump, who is already framing the race as a battle between socialism and common sense — clearly anticipating a matchup against Hong. Wisconsin is a swing state, narrowly divided, where statewide races are typically decided by one or two points.
The Tweet
That’s the context for why a tweet Hong sent in November 2020 has suddenly resurfaced and become a five-alarm fire in American politics. She wrote:
Cancel Thanksgiving, we should have done this in 1621. If it takes a worldwide pandemic for us to realize we should stop celebrating colonialism and the original super-spreader event that killed indigenous folks and women, so be it.
That tweet is very 2020, if you have any recollection of that period — referencing COVID and the debates over whether people should gather for the holidays. If the tweet were just about COVID, it would be a debatable point: should you forgo gathering with family and friends in the specific year before a vaccine existed, as the pandemic ravaged the country? But she goes further, arguing we should have done this in 1621, and that we should stop celebrating colonialism and an event that killed indigenous people and women.
Things really got crazy when Hong, after the tweet resurfaced on social media this past week, sat down with Kaitlan Collins on CNN Monday night and was asked whether she disavowed the tweet — whether she wants to cancel Thanksgiving. Right-wing media has gone completely nuts over that interview. One tweet of the clip alone has gotten more than 11 million views on X this week. Hong is still probably going to win the primary; it’s unlikely this unseats her front-runner status. But Republicans are going to have a field day with it, and Tom Tiffany — a MAGA election denier who participated in Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election — now has a powerful rhetorical weapon. If he becomes governor of a swing state like Wisconsin, he will have a role in certifying results there in 2028. That’s dangerous, and we need somebody like Hong to stand up against him. But she has just handed him a huge argument to help him win.
The Actual History
If this were a liberal arts seminar, it would be a worthwhile discussion — the kind of theoretical reckoning with American history that belongs in a well-rounded education. If Hong wanted to turn this argument in as an undergraduate paper, she might get a good grade, because it’s genuinely an interesting conversation. There are Christian nationalist roots to the American Thanksgiving holiday, going back to Puritan New England.
The Puritans developed two paired practices: days of thanksgiving and days of fasting and humiliation, both proclaimed occasionally by magistrates rather than annually, and neither originally a harvest festival. Their theology held that the colony was a covenant people, akin to Israel in the Hebrew Bible — God’s favor or judgment was legible in events. A good harvest, a safe voyage, a military victory: all were evidence of divine approval. In 1621 in Plymouth, there was a harvest feast described in Puritan sources as a celebration of plenty — though the participants likely wouldn’t have called it a “Thanksgiving.” That’s the loose link to the holiday invented later.
What Hong actually seems to be referencing — the killing of indigenous people — happened later, in 1637, when English forces burned a fortified Pequot village at Mystic and killed hundreds, including women and children. The Massachusetts Bay Colony proclaimed a day of public thanksgiving for subduing the Pequots and for the soldiers’ safe return, folded in with some good news from Germany at the time.
The uncomfortable point isn’t that Thanksgiving commemorates a massacre, which the tweet implies — the history is more convoluted than that. The real point is that Puritan theology couldn’t tell the difference between a good harvest and a successful slaughter. Both counted as God vindicating them. That’s Christian nationalism in its seed form: God is on our side, and every advantage we have proves our superiority. That is true, and it matters. Since 1970, Native activists have observed a National Day of Mourning in Plymouth on Thanksgiving Day as part of this same critique.
Even in the founding era, George Washington proclaimed national days of Thanksgiving and prayer, especially in 1789. Thomas Jefferson stopped the practice, believing in separation of church and state. James Madison revived it, then later regretted it, concluding it wasn’t constitutionally proper for presidents to proclaim days of Thanksgiving. So even the objection about church-state overlap is as old as the nation itself.
The form of Thanksgiving we celebrate today actually comes from the Civil War. A magazine editor named Sarah Josepha Hale campaigned for decades to nationalize it, and Lincoln finally agreed in October 1863, setting it as the last Thursday in November. His proclamation leaned fully into covenant theology, describing the nation’s blessings as “the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, has nevertheless remembered mercy” — a day of “thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.” Christian nationalists today point back to proclamations like Lincoln’s as evidence that America is, and always was, a Christian nation. Their use of the holiday is about those declarations, not about the meal itself.
And yet, in practice, the holiday has been thoroughly desacralized. What’s emerged is maybe the least creedal thing in American civil religion. Even though it began as a day of thanksgiving to God, there’s no required deity, no liturgy, and it’s celebrated across every faith — and by plenty of people with no faith at all.
Why This Was a Political Mistake
Hong’s tweet, and her refusal to disavow it, is a bad idea on several levels. YouGov, which tracks public approval of holidays, finds Thanksgiving is the most popular holiday in the United States — more popular than Christmas, with roughly 81% approval. And 96% of Americans say they celebrate it. It is not just popular; it is nearly universally practiced.
Partisan politics is not a college seminar. It’s about uniting people and proving you care about what they care about. There is no hue and cry from the American public to cancel Thanksgiving. You don’t win general elections by saying you’d like to cancel a holiday that 80% of the country loves. What is the constituency, in either party, for that? This plays straight into the hands of Trump and the Republicans — it hands them a simple caricature: these people don’t like America, and they don’t like God, and they want to take away the things you love.
Thanksgiving is the least sectarian thing in American civil religion. No creed, no required denomination. In practice, it’s celebrated by Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and atheist Americans, by recent immigrants, and by descendants of the enslaved. It’s a meal and a word of gratitude — one of the rare national observances that actually functions pluralistically, rather than merely claiming to. Many Native Americans object to it, and that objection matters too; it’s part of the story. But the list of genuinely shared American practices is short and getting shorter, and burning down one of the few that remain is not a strategy.
Thanksgiving can hold both things at once. It’s good that the holiday and the National Day of Mourning coexist on the same day — that’s part of how we live in the tension of American history, and it’s appropriate to help people understand how complicated that history is. But if we go around stripping out everything connected to Christian nationalism or to harm done to different populations, pretty soon there won’t be any holidays left. This is our history and our culture, and facing it honestly doesn’t require eliminating it.
The Fights That Actually Matter
There are real threats from Christian nationalism in the United States right now — I spend my day-to-day life cataloging them. The ongoing practice of Thanksgiving is not one of them. The real threats include: misogynistic, Christian-supremacist theology fueling an ideological takeover of the U.S. military high command under Pete Hegseth; state-mandated religious curricula and classroom displays of the Ten Commandments tearing at the separation of church and state; the dismantling of church-state jurisprudence, including IRS policy changes allowing pastors and churches to endorse political candidates; extremist networks embedded in and advising the White House; the dehumanization of migrants and refugees; and a rising tide of Christian antisemitism on the far right.
These are the actual fronts in the conflict we’re having with authoritarianism — fights over power, theology, and who counts as a legitimate American. None of them is a fight over a meal. Those are the fights we need to have.
Why the Margin Matters
Democrats do not merely need to win majorities in the elections ahead. Trump and the MAGA coalition have already shown their willingness to contest, obstruct, and rig outcomes. Even a narrow 51% victory can be litigated, decertified, delayed, or simply refused. What’s needed is a margin so wide it cannot be argued with or overturned — something closer to a supermajority.
Supermajorities are built out of supermajority issues: things that benefit and inspire the vast majority of Americans. Thanksgiving is a supermajority issue. Eighty-one percent of Americans say they like it. Ninety-six percent of us celebrate it. So the question for any candidate, any staffer, any very-online activist drafting the next tweet, if they’re considering political office someday: when 81% of Americans tell you they like something, and that something is a meal shared with family and friends, why on earth would you attack it?
I genuinely hope Francesca Hong wins the primary next week, and I hope she can win the general election in November. But I have my doubts. I hope she finds a way to change her talking points on Thanksgiving and states unequivocally that she’s not out to cancel it — that will only help her campaign. These are serious times, and we should approach them with sober-minded, practical strategy aimed at uniting a coalition that can defeat the authoritarian movement currently gripping national power. The more we’re talking about old tweets and canceling Thanksgiving, the harder that task becomes.
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