People who "hate America" don't care much about Thanksgiving and about respecting the story of the Pilgrims and their perseverance, Sen. Tom Cotton said Wednesday.
"I think you see a lot of political correctness from the left," the Arkansas Republican said on Fox News' "Fox and Friends." "Look at The New York Times and their so-called 1619 Project, which tries to date the true founding of America to that year which couldn't be more false. The foundation of America is the Pilgrims of 1620 and the patriots of 1776."
But, he added, "if you hate America and if you want to undermine everything that America stands for, then, of course, you don't care much for the Pilgrim story either."
This Thanksgiving is "remarkable," said Cotton, because it marks the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims' arrival in Massachusetts.
"They had to persevere through a bitter, difficult winter," he said. "They lost half of the passengers that came over on the Mayflower. That's the story of America, that kind of perseverance. In the middle of all of that, they wrote the Mayflower Compact which has been called by John Quincy Adams the very first modern Constitution. John Adams helped model the U.S. Constitution on it."
Cotton added that "all Americans" should be proud of that history and "our Pilgrim fathers, and it doesn't really bother me what some radical left-wingers say."
Cotton's comments come on the heels of a column he wrote praising the Pilgrims. In it, he also slammed a recent article in The New York Times that examines the impact of the Pilgrims' arrival and the subsequent colonization of the United States and mistreatment of Native Americans, many of whom see the holiday as a painful reminder of what was lost, rather than an occasion to celebrate.
© 2021 Newsmax. All rights reserved.