4 Years Later: Rush Limbaugh’s Final Rendition of the True Story of Thanksgiving Barney Burstein/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images

The late conservative radio legend Rush Limbaugh delivered his final annual rendition of the true story of Thanksgiving in November 2020. Thanksgiving 2024 marks the fourth year that Americans go without his beloved tradition, but many are still keeping the tradition alive, ensuring that the youngest generations know what actually happened and what Thanksgiving is truly a celebration of.

Limbaugh delivered his final rendition November 24, 2020, and during that — when he was in the midst of battling advanced-stage lung cancer — he noted that the “True Story of Thanksgiving” is spreading.

“And I couldn’t be happier about that. Bottom line: It is spreading. I’m just gonna cut to the chase here before getting into reading the text. The Real Story of Thanksgiving, going back to the very first early days of the Pilgrims arriving at Plymouth Rock, is that socialism failed,” Limbaugh said, setting the scene of the arduous conditions the Pilgrims faced after landing in the New World, as documented by William Bradford.

Limbaugh reminded his millions of listeners that their first winter was harsh and unforgiving, and half of them died of “starvation, of sickness, exposure to the elements.”

“Now we’re getting close to what you were taught in school. When spring finally came — and, by the way, writing that doesn’t do it justice. Spring didn’t just finally come. It was a survival. It was an act of survival that you and I cannot possibly relate to or understand,” he explained.

“American Special Forces can. Military people who’ve been trained can understand what the Pilgrims were — you and I can’t. We’ve never done anything like that first winter in the New World. They survived it. Spring finally came. They did meet the Indians, the Native Americans who were there, who did help them in planting corn and fishing for cod. They showed ’em where the beavers were so the beavers could be skinned for coats, other things. You animal rights people are not gonna like some of this story, but it happened,” he continued, although he explained that despite the help from the Native Americans, there was a lack of prosperity.

“They had the Mayflower Compact. They had these laws they were living by, and there was no prosperity. And I wonder why. Now, this is important to understand here, folks, because this is where modern American history lessons end, with the Indians teaching the Pilgrims how to eat, how to fish, how to skin beavers, and all that,” Rush Limbaugh said, delving into what schools do not typically teach.

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Per his transcript from RushLimbaugh.com:

That’s where it ends. And that’s the feel-good story. But that doesn’t even get close to the true story. You know, Thanksgiving is actually explained in some textbooks as a holiday for which the Pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians for saving their lives. It wasn’t that. That happened, but Thanksgiving was a devout expression of gratitude, the Pilgrims, to God for their survival, and everything that was a part of it.

Now, here’s the part that has been omitted. The original contract the Pilgrims entered into in Holland — they had sponsors. They didn’t have the money to do this trip on their own. They had sponsors. There were merchant sponsors in London and in Holland. And these merchant sponsors demanded that everything that the Pilgrims produced in the New World would go into a common store, a single bank, if you will. And that each member of the Pilgrim community was entitled to one share.

So everybody had an equal share of whatever was in that bank. All of the land they cleared, all of the houses they built belonged to that bank, to the community as well. And they were going to distribute it equally because they were gonna be fair. So all of the land that they cleared and all the houses they built belonged to everybody, belonged to the community, belonged to the bank, belonged to the common store. Nobody owned anything. They just had an equal share in it. It was a commune.

The Pilgrims established a commune, essentially. Forerunner of the communes we saw in the sixties and seventies out in California. They even had their own organic vegetables, by the way. Yep. The Pilgrims, forerunners of organic vegetables. Of course, what else could there be? No such thing as processed anything back then.

Now, William Bradford, who had become the governor of the colony ’cause he was the leader, recognized that this wasn’t gonna work. This was costly and destructive, and it just wasn’t working. It was collectivism. It was socialism. It wasn’t working. That first winter had taken a lot of lives. The manpower was greatly reduced. So William Bradford decided to take bold action …

…

… Bradford … threw it out and took bold action. He assigned a plot of land to each family. Every family was given a plot of land. They could work it, manage it however they wanted to. If they just wanted to sit on it, get fat, dumb, happy, and lazy, they could. If they wanted to develop it, if they wanted to grow corn, whatever on it, they could. If they wanted to build on it, they could do that. If they wanted to turn it into a quasi-business, they could do whatever they wanted to do with it.

He turned loose the power of the capitalist marketplace. Long before Karl Marx was even born, long before Karl Marx was a sperm cell in his father’s dreams, the Pilgrims had discovered and experimented with what could only be described as socialism, and they found that it didn’t work. Now, it wasn’t called that then. But that’s exactly what it was. Everybody was given an equal share. You know what happened? Nobody did anything. There was no incentive. Nothing worked. Nothing happened.

“There was no prosperity; there was no creativity because there was no incentive,” Limbaugh said. “Here’s what Bradford wrote about the failure: ‘For this community [so far as it was] was found to breed much confusion and discontent …’ They were not happy, in other words. ‘[T]his community was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.'”

“It’s when they introduced what turns out to be capitalism. They didn’t have the name for it, but when they turned loose individual incentive — keep what you produce, sell what you don’t need — it went crazy. This is not something they were taught by anybody by self-experience. It was not the Indians. None of this is said to put anybody down. Don’t misunderstand,” he continued, explaining that the colony experienced success after they had “abandoned socialism and tried what was essentially capitalism, the word spread throughout the Old World of this massive amount of prosperity that was there for the taking in the New World.”

“And guess what happened? The New World was flooded with new arrivals. The success and prosperity of the Plymouth settlement attracted more Europeans and began what came to be known as the ‘Great Puritan Migration,'” he continued:

Now, many of the Pilgrims literally believed that God had sent Squanto to save them. And they believed, the Pilgrims believed, that without Squanto they never would have survived, or thrived. And they experienced a tremendous harvest in 1621, and that’s the big gathering that is taught in the history books, the native Indians and the Pilgrims joined together for a huge feast, which is the foundational story of the Thanksgiving story that’s taught in public schools.

“But, again, that is not The Real Story of Thanksgiving. That’s the textbook brand,” Limbaugh said. “It did happen, but it’s so much more than that.”

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