
While You Were Celebrating Thanksgiving, YouTube Was Trashing It
Never ones to miss a chance to virtue signal to the left, YouTube on Thursday decided to skip out on any positive Thanksgiving messages. Instead, the Google-owned video service tweeted out a message celebrating something called “Unthanksgiving,” a new holiday where – instead of using this time of year to gather with friends and family in a spirit of gratitude and love – people can reflect on the atrocities visited upon the Native Americans. Fun!
“For Indigenous and Native Americans, the fourth Thursday of November is dedicated to Indigenous history, activism, and resistance. It’s called Unthanksgiving,” YouTube solemnly informed us. “Unthanksgiving is about acknowledging, educating, and honoring centuries of Indigenous resistance. Coinciding with New England’s National Day of Mourning, Unthanksgiving activates Alcatraz Island, the site of a 19-month occupation by Bay Area Natives in 1969.
“For generations, Native Americans and Indigenous persons have shared their experiences, using Unthanksgiving as an opportunity for intergenerational and intercultural dialogue,” they continued. “Generations before have lived on these lands. Days like Unthanksgiving are opportunities for learning and understanding whose land you live on.”
YouTube concluded: “Unthanksgiving is about honoring Native American and Indigenous heritage, to better understand this history. How are you connected to – and connecting with – Indigenous heritage and history where you live?”
Not content to let YouTube have all the fun of trashing a cherished American holiday, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) – he of the Green New Deal legislation – used the day to call on the public to learn the “true history of Thanksgiving.”
“While we celebrate all that we are grateful for today, we must also remember the true history of Thanksgiving and recognize the atrocities committed against Native Americans, as well as the widespread disease brought by European arrival which decimated the Native population,” wrote Markey. “In Massachusetts, on this 400th anniversary of the Mayflower’s arrival, we continue to stand with the Wampanoag people who first met the Pilgrims and celebrate their continued sovereignty and land rights.”
In that spirit, we would encourage Ed Markey to give up his seat so that a Native American may take his place. We urge the owners of YouTube to hand their controlling interest in the site to Indigenous Peoples, without whose decimation there would be no such thing as the United States and almost certainly no such thing as the internet. It seems awfully wrong for these palefaces to profit off a system that was kicked off by these “atrocities.”
No one alive fails to recognize that the history of the United States – nay, the history of humanity – was written in bloodshed, war, and other not-so-nice things. But we fail to see why or how teaching Americans to hate themselves, their culture, and their country will set any of that right.