It’s become something of a Thanksgiving tradition that each year we are treated to the same tired op-eds about how the story of the first Thanksgiving is fake and we should feel guilty about making this continent our home and what a difficult day this is for Native Americans. One suspects that this year that tradition may be nearly dead. There are plenty of things wrong with Donald Trump as a political leader, but his 2024 victory is undeniably a victory over a class of scolds who have taken the view that the problem with America is that our public is uniquely morally bad and the only way to fix this is by endless lectures about white supremacy, male supremacy, “trusting the science,” carbon emissions, or anything number of other topics.
This took the name “wokeness,” which is a tired topic but also describes a very real trend of petty bureaucrats and useless activists who try to control us through shame and micromanagement. To libertarians, perhaps the most hostile to being lectured and micromanaged of any demographic in America, this has been something of a personal hell. With Trump’s popular vote victory—these same scolds think the Electoral College is illegitimate because it is “racist”—it seems as if they have finally been silenced and a weight has been lifted off America.
It’s easy to try and block out how bad this situation was for many years, especially given the constant string of social panics and new trends in scolding. Though the history of liberal academic scolding goes back decades, it was with the election of Barack Obama that this became prominent. It’s something of a curious matter, since he was elected on a promise of “hope,” and many felt that having a black president represented an endpoint to a history of racial injustice. However, Obama himself had a tendency towards scolding when he didn’t get his way, and his supporters always jumped to America being racist to explain when something didn’t go right for the administration of a man who had an unprecedented lack of experience when elected.
Things went into overdrive when Donald Trump was first elected in 2016, an event seen by liberals as the ultimate moral failing of a nation which once dropped atomic bombs on populated cities in order to show them off to a third country. Though in most measurable way things were as good in America from 2017-2019 as they had been in decades, a culture of forcing misery on the public arose among the media, Democrats, and their various fellow travelers. Between COVID and the 2020 riots, where it was explained how we were morally bad if we opposed mass street violence, we hit the peak public scolding.
At the time it seemed it may never end. It’s a silly thing, but when the reunion of the popular sitcom Friends aired on HBO in the spring of 2021 it was incredible that it was clearly made to be enjoyable and entertaining, not to browbeat the public. The strange thing is the media is supposed to be in the business of entertaining, but as with so many other industries, they seem to have forgotten their core mission of generating profit by selling a product which consumers want. Instead, they made their goal reshaping our country by haranguing us into what has been colorfully described as “gay race communism.” It is more accurately a bizarre and secular form of puritanism, in the sense that they were terrified that someone, somewhere was having a good time (to paraphrase H.L. Mencken).
The most prominent example of the shame brigade during the 2024 election was after Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, which we were endlessly reminded was once the site of a Nazi rally, as if nothing else has ever happened at Madison Square Garden. (As a point of interest, it isn’t even the same building or location as during the infamous Nazi rally). The bulk of the scolding involved the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe making a joke calling Puerto Rico an island of garbage floating in the ocean. Now, I will grant that the wisdom of having an insult comic speak at a political rally shortly before an election is questionable, but it was a clear reference to Puerto Rico having a lot of garbage (the island in fact has a landfill crisis). It was only two days later that I learned that the liberal scolds believed he was calling Puerto Rican people garbage, because their bad faith and latent racism causes them to take everything in the worst way.
A massive national media campaign was launched insisting that Trump had insulted a key demographic and this would lose him the election, and further that only hubris would have caused him to do this in New York, the home of the media. However, an Emerson College poll, the only one I saw which asked this specific question, said that recent coverage of the MSG rally showed 26% said it made them less likely to vote for Trump, 25% made it more likely, and the rest were unchanged. Of course, one would hope a large rally makes people more likely to vote for you, but it’s incredible that the nationwide, non-stop scolding propaganda blare was only able to move the poll to one point in the negative (and if you figure the amount by which polls were off, it was probably a net gain for Trump). Further, Trump made unprecedented gains in New York City and among Hispanics generally and Puerto Ricans specifically, making this media campaign one of the most stunning failures of scold culture thus far. It is hard to come to a different conclusion than that wealthy white Anglos demanding they not take a joke had a reactionary impact on Hispanic voters.
Immediately before the election there was one final rebellion against scold culture. In a now infamous episode, the state of New York decided to murder a pet squirrel and raccoon—Peanut and Fred—on the grounds that they were illegally kept wildlife. This resonated with the public to an enormous extent, and seems to have even pushed some people over the edge for Trump. However, some scolds went as far as to defend this, and demanded to know how people could want the government to enforce immigration laws but not think they should enforce laws against squirrel ownership. This, of course, only makes sense if you see the law as abstract and don’t consider the human impact. There is no hypocrisy in supporting the enforcement of laws relating to public safety and not supporting laws which arbitrarily oppress the public over nonsense. Someone complained and the state felt the need to enforce a particularly ridiculous example through literal “fun police.”
This is only a small sample of what we have gone through with scold culture, and there will still be struggles, but it is obvious this era is ending. In all likelihood the words “gay” and “retard” will make full comebacks as acceptable insults in 2025, in just one of many impacts of the reaction against political correctness. This means that, hopefully, in most homes and in our society at large, this holiday season won’t be a struggle session about indigenous rights, white supremacy, the environment, or anything else. Hopefully the “how to talk to your ____ about ____ at Thanksgiving” genre of terrible op-eds is nearly dead. As a society, we should no longer give credence to anyone calling these holidays “problematic.”
To everything there is a season, and in America, it is time to enjoy our lives again. Have a Happy Thanksgiving and Merry Christmas, enjoy the meals, enjoy the football (no need to fret about concussions!), and get drunk and argue with your relatives about politics, because that is what the holidays are all about. The time of walking on eggshells is over. It seems that, by losing, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz did actually bring “joy” back to America.
