Failing Leftwing Axios Attacks ‘Myth of Thanksgiving’: Holiday Is About ‘Racial Exclusion’

The Thanksgiving holiday is manufactured propaganda that has been used to further “racial exclusion,” leftwing Axios claimed on Thanksgiving Eve.

The outlet insists that Americans need to reject “the myth of Thanksgiving” and understand the holiday better because “the nation is growing more diverse and requiring new voices to tell the country’s history.”

Most of the article focuses on race, condemning not only white Pilgrims but even a white abolitionist and families watching football.

Axios acknowledges, “The first proclamation of an American ‘Thanksgiving’ was November 1, 1777, when the 13 colonies joined together to celebrate the victory of [sic–it was the American victory over the British] the British at Saratoga,” but credits a public relations push by abolitionist Sarah Josepha Hale for the holiday.

Axios says Hale’s PR play to adopt “a national Thanksgiving holiday as a tool for unity” finally convinced a war-weary President Abraham Lincoln to establish the holiday in 1863. The article then attacks the ardent abolitionist Hale for “support[ing] the idea of free Black people leaving the U.S. for ‘colonies’ in Africa.”

The Axios article even included a condemnation of the American tradition of watching football on Thanksgiving since “until the 1950s, many Black Americans were barred from playing college games or attending games in nonsegregated settings.”

The outlet wants to have its turkey and eat it too, simultaneously disputing the traditional Thanksgiving narrative – that “Starving Pilgrims who landed on present-day Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, got needed help from friendly Wampanoag members” – while attacking conservatives who, like Axios, disagreed with that narrative. The report says:

Conservatives, like the late Rush Limbaugh, attacked what they called revisionist histories of Thanksgiving and dismissed anything challenging the myth. Before he died in 2021, Limbaugh falsely claimed Native Americans had “little, if anything, to do with the prosperity” the Pilgrims experienced.

Axios, founded by former journalists at another leftwing publication — Politico — has fallen on hard times.

In August, Axios laid off ten percent of its staff – about 50 employees. Jim VandeHei, Axios’s chief executive and a co-founder, attributed the cuts to “changes in the media business.”

“This is the most difficult moment for media in our lifetime,” he lamented in an email to staff obtained by The New York Times.

One week before Election Day, amid Trump’s dominance in polling and early voting numbers, VandeHei and Axios’s Mike Allen reported on what they called the “shards of glass election.”

“The mainstream media’s dominance in narrative- and reality-shaping in presidential elections shattered in 2024,” they wrote. “How and where Americans get informed has broken into scores of pieces — from young men on Joe Rogan’s podcasts, to suburban women following Instagram influencers.”

While Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos acknowledged in October that establishment media suffer from a “lack of credibility” – “[m]ore and more, we talk to ourselves,” he wrote – and must work to regain the American public’s trust, Axios appears to hold a different view.

Days before thanksgiving, VandeHei went on what many on social media called an “unhinged rant” and a “meltdown,” complaining “everything we do is under fire,” belittling new media for diluting establishment media’s gatekeeper status, and attacking those who don’t understand the importance of journalism – and journalists.

“Elon Musk sits on Twitter every day, or X today, saying, like, ‘We are the media! You are the media!’” VandeHei said. “My message to Elon Musk is: ‘Bullshit! You are not the media!'”

“Like, what we do, what journalists do, … You proclaim yourself to be a reporter? Like, that’s nonsense,” he added. “Like, being a reporter is hard, really hard. You have to care. You have to do the hard work. You have to get up every single day and say, ‘I want to get to the closest approximation of the truth without any fear, without any favoritism.'”

As outlets like Axios and traditional media lose influence, Trump is considering rearranging White House press briefings in a move that could leave establishment media outlets hanging out to dry.

Donald Trump Jr. revealed Monday on his podcast Triggered! that his father thinks it is a “great idea” to shake things up and make space in the briefing room for new media.

The White House briefing room holds seats for only 49 credentialed members of the press, and the White House controls which outlets are credentialed. Currently, the independent White House Correspondents’ Association decides who is seated, and where, although no White House has yet made a serious and prolonged pushback against that established order.

The name Axios, translated from Greek, means “worthy of,” although the name does not make clear what the publication is supposed to be “worthy of.”

Bradley Jaye is a Capitol Hill Correspondent for Breitbart News. Follow him on X/Twitter at @BradleyAJaye.