Thanksgiving Attacks on Francesca Hong Show Enemies’ Desperation

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong talks during a primary debate in Milwaukee, Tuesday, July 28, 2026. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh) — Democratic gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong talks during a primary debate in Milwaukee, Tuesday, July 28, 2026. Photo: AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh

Sean Bell is a writer and journalist based in Edinburgh.

Francesca Hong, who looks set to become the Democratic Party’s nominee for the governor of Wisconsin, is not going to abolish Thanksgiving. This really should not require clarification, as no one seriously believes otherwise, but the fact that it does tells us what a beleaguered state the Democratic establishment finds itself in as it seeks to defeat Hong.

A 37-year-old democratic socialist, state lawmaker, and former chef, Hong has emerged as the frontrunner despite increasingly frantic efforts from her moderate opponents in the primary, who have belatedly rallied around Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley. Even with the backing of outgoing Gov. Tony Evers, Crowley looks unlikely to derail Hong’s momentum, which may explain why the last days of the campaign — the primary is today — have reeked of desperation. It’s also why the vast majority of media coverage surrounding the race is now oriented not around Hong’s policy platform but her supposedly nefarious designs against the holidays.

“Cancel Thanksgiving,” Hong wrote in a now-deleted tweet from 2020. “Should have done this in 1621. If it takes a worldwide pandemic for us to realize we should stop celebrating colonialism and the original superspreader event that killed Indigenous folx and women so be it.”

In the midst of Covid-19, the suggestion that getting everyone around the dinner table might be inadvisable should not, in any sane world, have been remotely controversial; neither should the suggestion that the truth behind Thanksgiving — that a bunch of settler-colonialist religious fanatics managed to survive their first winter in the New World, and having done so, promptly set about the work of genocide and land theft — is not a national origin story worth celebrating. Evidently, others felt much differently: Hong had impugned the sacred day of families coming together and burning down the backyard while failing to deep-fry a turkey. Obviously, this was more worthy of discussion than anything so prosaic as issues of actual relevance to Wisconsinites, such as the need for free childcare, a moratorium on data centers, or restoring the state’s Limburger industry to its former glory.

“A Democratic Socialist Disparaged Thanksgiving,” a New York Times headline ominously intoned on Wednesday. “Can Voters Forgive Her?” (The Times’ on-the-ground reporting managed to dig up precisely one Wisconsinite who would not.) In the New York Post, opinion columnist Kirsten Fleming darkly imagined Hong presiding over a dystopian socialist future with “no football and no precious family gatherings.” After the candidate’s antagonists unearthed a 2021 interview in which she said she wrestles with her “proximity to whiteness” (Hong has a biracial son), Center for American Progress President and CEO Neera Tanden challenged Hong on X: “In the kitchens you’re in, do people hate Thanksgiving? Because that all feels pretty faculty lounge to me.”

In light of the manufactured furor, an outside observer could be forgiven for thinking Hong posed some existential danger to Thanksgiving, or that her opinion of the holiday is a matter of great salience to Wisconsin’s voters. In the United States, however, governors are not empowered to dissolve national holidays, and if elected, Hong’s ability to imperil Turkey Day would be roughly equivalent to her chances of blowing up the moon. Regrettably, Hong does not represent a credible threat to Americans’ inalienable right to combine yams with marshmallows.

Hong had impugned the sacred day of families coming together and burning down the backyard while failing to deep-fry a turkey.

But the amount of media attention Thanksgiving-gate has accrued is unsurprising, as it allows the centrist commentariat yet another opportunity to pursue their favorite hobby of telling the Left it must disavow any hint of radical thought and prostrate themselves to placate “normal” people (or whatever version of them exist in pundits’ fevered imaginations). This is critically important for their grift to persist. For all their jubilant schadenfreude over the supposed “vibe shift” since Trump’s re-election, the specter of Woke can never be declared truly destroyed, as this would severely inconvenience all those commentators who have fashioned careers railing against it. In one representative example, Slate’s Luke Winkie — after admitting that he lacked the “hoity-toity intellectual hardware” to know if colonialism and the genocide of the Native Americans are good or not — advised Hong, “If they ask if you still believe in the tiresome, unpopular, and ultimately peripheral positions you took in the white heat of 2020, you can just say no.”

Hong has pretty much said exactly that, now claiming that Thanksgiving is her favorite holiday that she in no way wants to cancel (a concession that is not likely to satisfy her critics, but who knows — being forced to pretend you like Thanksgiving may actually make Hong more relatable to voters who have an uncle they hate). The notion that the historically literate might have a problem with Thanksgiving was around long before Peak Woke — it was, in fact, a plot point in a 27-year-old episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Native Americans, if you cared to ask, have been rather vocal on the subject of why many of them aren’t exactly enthused about a holiday that serves to either obscure or celebrate centuries of atrocity. Even allowing for the fact that the attacks on Hong follow a well-established right-wing tradition—let us never forget those who laid down their lives in the War on Christmas—why has such a ridiculous controversy come to dominate efforts to quash her campaign?

The answer is simple: Nothing else has worked, and that failure indicates a worrying pattern for the Democratic establishment terrified of an insurgent Left. As the numerous recent victories for DSA-backed or progressive Democratic candidates have demonstrated, attacking the Left on policy is not the winning strategy it once was. Many voters no longer recoil at the mere mention of universal healthcare, rent controls, or the dreaded “socialism.” Even centrist stalwart Jonathan Chait had to grudgingly acknowledge, after Abdul El-Sayed’s primary win in Michigan, that AIPAC spending and unconditional support for aid to Israel are now albatrosses around the necks of any Democratic candidate. Among Democrats who despair over the DSA’s rise, there is a distinct lack of enthusiasm for detail-oriented debates over why cheap groceries are a bad thing, whether there is any circumstance under which they would not throw trans people under the bus, and why abolishing the murderous, paramilitary apparatus of ICE is unthinkable.

In lieu of anything substantive or policy-based to sink their teeth into, Hong’s enemies have turned to increasingly bizarre tactics, none of which have produced their desired results. Attacks on her previous mental health challenges were widely read as the grubby, ham-fisted ratfucking that they were, and the fruitless, never-ending search continues for a plurality of Democratic primary voters who share the party establishment’s inveighing against Hasan Piker as a kind of demonic imp who must be exorcised. “Cancel Thanksgiving” was the only bullet left in the gun, which does not render it any less pathetic.

There is perhaps some deeper meaning to read into this confected controversy. Historically, painting those on the Left as un-American has been of entirely too much political utility for centrists and conservatives to abandon it now, despite its diminishing returns. If you can force a candidate to refrain from questioning America’s foundational myths, from recognizing the historical truths of colonialism and genocide rather than a fairy tale about pilgrims fleeing persecution, you place limits on how far they can go in criticizing the United States that exists today as a result of that history.

Instead, you demand devotion not to the American people—many of whom have views on the day-to-day realities of America that are less than rosy—but to a nebulous idea of America defined less by what it is than what it is not. This America is not the result of colonialism and genocide; it is not predicated upon systemic racism and economic inequality; it is not, and never will be, socialist. All must swear fealty to this fantasy, or else people might cease to believe in it. That’s a possibility that petrifies Hong’s enemies far more than the thought of losing their day to eat dry turkey.