According to Sujata Gupta, a columnist for ScienceNews, our positive narrative of Thanksgiving is a “myth.” Digging through her mountain of words, her contention seems to be that most Americans do not know the actual history of our nation and that, if they did, they would inevitably understand that America is irredeemably evil. The article—long, obtuse, and, ultimately, as ludicrous as it is slanderous—is only noteworthy because, bizarrely, Real Clear Science is pushing it as their topline story.

Let us start with the relevant history. By the time Europeans came to America’s shores, almost a millennium had passed since Christian nations and groups began directing that a day be given to thanking God for His blessings—or, as they said, a day for “humiliation and fasting” in response to calamities. The first national “day of thanksgiving” in the newly formed United States occurred when President George Washington proclaimed that November 26, 1789, was to be a day for the United States “to acknowledge the Providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor.”

Over the next seven decades, various presidents directed several other national days of thanksgiving. None of these occasional national celebrations was annual, nor did any reference the feast that 52 Pilgrims and some 90 Wampanoag Indians celebrated at Plymouth in 1621.

It’s thanks to Sarah Josepha Hale that America established a national celebration of Thanksgiving, along with its unofficial but indelible association with the feast at Plymouth. Ms. Hale (b. 1788), a novelist and the first female editor of a national U.S. publication, lived in New England where, each year, the people celebrated a day of Thanksgiving tied to the 1621 celebration. It was Ms. Hale’s favorite family holiday, and she wrote about the Pilgrim’s Thanksgiving often in editorials and her novels. For instance, in her 1827 novel, Northwood, Ms. Hale devoted Chapters VII and VIII to the celebration. In 1863, Ms. Hale wrote a letter to President Abraham Lincoln that convinced him to make Thanksgiving an annual national holiday.

Image: The first Thanksgiving by Jean Louis Gerome Ferris.

Now, to return to the atrocious calumny from Sujata Gupta. According to Gupta, our national narrative of Thanksgiving is that, in 1621, the Pilgrims and Indians “had this peaceful meal and powwow [while] singing kumbaya.” Science, she baldly asserts, shows that is false because the “tidy tale ignores context, particularly the deadly diseases and bloody wars that devastated Indigenous populations both before and after the occasion.”

She then says this “science” can be found in a paper by three academics—an English professor and two Psychology professors. This trio claims that “our national origin stories,” including that of Thanksgiving, are not supported by non-contemporaneous “facts,” such as slavery, disease, and the like, all of which the authors deem relevant.

As a threshold matter, this is not science. Science is a process to validate or disprove objective facts. Ultimately, Gupta and the academics she relies on have written bald opinion pieces about historical events. They drape themselves in the word “science” to justify writing this garbage without actually having to make and support their arguments with reason and logic.

At no point does Gupta tell us what facts surrounding America’s iconic “first Thanksgiving” are wrong. Only at the very end of her screed does she give away her animus. She begins by embracing the “1619 Project,” the single most fraudulent rewrite of history in the past century. Then she tells us that our nation “needs a racial reckoning,” finally quoting an academic who opines, “The common narrative makes the settlers look like the good guys. Once you start chipping away at it, then everything falls apart….”

Ms. Gupta’s arrogance and bad faith, as well as that of the academics she quotes throughout, are stunning, To call this “science” is a bad joke. I’m still struggling to understand why Real Clear Science made this piece of angry historical revisionism its topline story the day before Thanksgiving.

Wolf Howling is a pseudonym.