The True History of the Pilgrim Fathers and Our Founding Myth

“History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” – George Orwell, 1984

If you want to undo a nation, you start by falsifying its history until no one remembers anything but the “endless present.” Thus, every Thanksgiving it seems like fewer Americans know the true history of this national holiday commemorating our nation’s founding myth. Few even understand the concept of a founding myth.

So, it has become a Thanksgiving tradition here at Breitbart News to tell the true story of our Pilgrim Fathers and the founding of their Plymouth settlement in 1620, an event which President John Quincy Adams described as the “birthday” of our nation.

In recent years, the history of the Pilgrims has become the plaything of left-wing and right-wing revisionists—that is, when the Pilgrims aren’t airbrushed out of our cultural memory all together....

The same wokesters who have been busy toppling statues are also unfairly maligning our Pilgrim fathers and reframing the history of the nation they founded in 1620....

Ann Coulter gave an excellent summary of the woke interpretation of Thanksgiving: “As every contemporary school child knows, our Pilgrim forefathers took a break from slaughtering Indigenous Peoples to invite them to dinner and infect them with smallpox, before embarking on their mission to fry the planet.”...

Our knowledge of the Pilgrims comes from two primary sources. The earliest account is from Edward Winslow, whose report on the founding of the Plymouth settlement was published in London in 1622, just two years after the Pilgrims arrived in the New World.

Engraved portrait of Edward Winslow with his signature, 1639. (Getty Images)

The more detailed and authoritative account comes from the Pilgrims’ second governor, William Bradford, whose poignant and eloquent history Of Plymouth Plantation, written between 1630 and 1651, tells the story of the community from their formation in England to their exile in Holland and their eventual founding of the Plymouth Colony.

Any fair reading of the primary source documentation will give you all the evidence you need to understand why we chose the Pilgrims’ arrival at Plymouth as the date of “our true founding” and as the basis of our founding myth....

There is a reason why we chose the Pilgrims and their establishment of the Plymouth Colony in 1620 as our origin myth, not the Virginians who settled in Jamestown over a decade before that date. Our reasoning had everything to do with the Pilgrims lack of racism....