Staff Reports
Every Thanksgiving, conservative listeners have long waited for Rush Limbaugh’s annual retelling of the Pilgrims’ origins — and this year that message is alive again on conservative channels, circulating as a YouTube clip that reminds Americans why the holiday matters. The clip revives the Limbaugh tradition of arguing that the lesson of Plymouth is not victimhood or grievance but the triumph of faith, property rights, and personal responsibility over collectivist failure.
Limbaugh’s “True Story of Thanksgiving” bluntly reframes the Pilgrims’ early experiment as a warning about enforced equality: he recounts how their communal “common store” arrangement collapsed and how prosperity returned only after families were given private plots. His point — uncomfortable for today’s campus apostles of egalitarianism — is that incentive and ownership, not forced sharing, made the colony survive and flourish.
That is not just Limbaugh’s rhetorical flourish; it’s what Governor William Bradford himself recorded. Bradford’s account in Of Plymouth Plantation describes how the original communal labor bred “much confusion and discontent,” and how allotting land to families made “all hands very industrious” and turned near-starvation into abundance. Conservatives who teach history the way it actually happened point to Bradford’s own words as the clearest record of the lesson.
Rush didn’t invent the anecdote; he popularized it. He first printed versions of the tale in his writings and turned it into a yearly on-air sermon that connected our founding lessons to modern politics, insisting that students should learn what actually worked at Plymouth rather than a sentimentalized myth that ignores economic truth. For generations of listeners, that straight-talking history was part of what made Rush indispensable.
Meanwhile, too many schools and mainstream outlets push a different Thanksgiving story that centers trauma and grievance, treating the holiday as a moment for national apology rather than a celebration of providence and hard work. Historians and commentators point out there are multiple Thanksgiving narratives — from early Spanish and French feasts to the Plymouth harvest — but the conservative case is simple: teach the full record, including Bradford’s experiment and its clear economic lesson, and don’t let ideology erase the virtues that built this nation.
If you grew up on the Rush version of Thanksgiving, you know why it still chills the spine: it’s a story about grit, faith, and the freedom to reap the rewards of your labor. In a moment when leftist education fancies itself the arbiter of truth, conservatives should proudly keep telling the unvarnished history — because a people who forget the lessons of the past are the ones who are most likely to repeat the errors of collectivism.
