In modern campaigns, a single deleted tweet can become a defining test of a candidate’s credibility, and Francesca Hong’s journey from “Cancel Thanksgiving” to “Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday” is a textbook case of how that flip—from hard-edged rhetoric to belated walk-back—plays out in public.
Key Points
- In November 2020, Francesca Hong posted “Cancel Thanksgiving” and framed the holiday as colonialism and an “original superspreader event” killing Indigenous people, then later deleted the post.
- When CNN’s Kaitlan Collins recently asked if she still believes Thanksgiving should be canceled, Hong declined to give a yes-or-no answer, instead offering a long explanation about her chef background, pain in some communities, and “views can evolve.”
- Days later, Hong told Politico that Thanksgiving is her “favorite holiday” and that she does not want to cancel it, a sharp contrast to her earlier social media stance.
- Republicans and conservative media have seized on the evolution of her remarks as a symbol of ideological extremism followed by political backtracking, amplifying the controversy during Wisconsin’s governor race.
- The episode fits a broader pattern: resurfaced social posts, stripped of their original pandemic-era context, become high-stakes tests of authenticity in an electorate wary of both radicalism and obvious flip-flops.
From “Cancel Thanksgiving” to Campaign Flashpoint
Francesca Hong’s Thanksgiving controversy begins with a concrete, documented act: a 2020 tweet, posted during the COVID-19 pandemic, explicitly calling to “Cancel Thanksgiving” and tying the holiday to colonial violence and disease. According to reproductions in multiple outlets, the post read, “Cancel Thanksgiving. Should have done this in 1621. If it takes a worldwide pandemic for us to realize we should stop celebrating colonialism and the original superspreader event that killed Indigenous folx and women so be it.” The tweet was later deleted, but screenshots and archival reporting preserved its wording.
The message was not a stray aside. Coverage from Wisconsin outlets describes a second November 2020 post in which Hong referred to Thanksgiving as “the colonizer holiday” while discussing pandemic precautions, reinforcing that her critique of the day was deliberate and ideological rather than a single offhand joke. At the time, she was an emerging Democratic Socialist figure, and the posts fit comfortably within a broader set of radical-sounding statements about policing, the Senate, and American holidays that critics now cite as evidence of a consistent worldview.
The CNN Interview: Evasion Instead of Explicit Reversal
What turned those old posts into a full-blown flip-flop narrative was not merely their resurfacing, but Hong’s response when confronted with them live on national television. On CNN’s “The Source,” Kaitlan Collins asked a straightforward question: did Hong still believe Thanksgiving should be canceled. In an environment where voters expect either a principled defense or a candid mea culpa, Hong did neither.
Instead, she delivered a carefully constructed, 40-plus-second answer built around her identity as a chef and restaurateur, her belief in bringing people together around the table, and the reality that Thanksgiving is “incredibly painful for many people in our communities.” She emphasized that “views can evolve” and argued that her hospitality background would help her “bring more people to the table” as governor. What she did not offer was the one thing the question sought: a clear yes or no.
Several outlets described the answer as evasive, “word salad,” or a non-answer that left her original position effectively intact. The Washington Examiner and Forbes both summarized her TV appearance as sidestepping the question and leaning on the “views can evolve” formulation rather than explicitly rejecting the idea of canceling the holiday. TMZ similarly emphasized that she “cooked up” a long response without serving a direct answer. That pattern—acknowledging evolution without stating the new view in simple terms—is precisely why critics framed the interview as a credibility failure.
Public Walk-Back: Thanksgiving Becomes Her “Favorite” Holiday
Only after the CNN clip had ricocheted through conservative and mainstream media did Hong shift to a plainspoken reversal. In a subsequent interview with Politico’s Playbook, amplified by outlets such as the New York Post and Fox News, she declared, “My favorite holiday is Thanksgiving. Yup. I don’t want to cancel it; I actually love it.” Her campaign also told Fox News Digital, “No, she does not want to ‘cancel’ Thanksgiving.”
That second statement does the work her CNN answer avoided: it replaces an absolute—“Cancel Thanksgiving”—with a new absolute—Thanksgiving is her favorite holiday—and explicitly disavows the earlier position. The problem, politically, is sequence. Voters and opponents saw her duck the direct question on live television before watching her adopt a dramatically warmer stance once the backlash was fully formed. That timing fuels the perception that the change was driven less by reflection than by damage control.
Local reporting underlines the abruptness of the shift. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel summarized her earlier social posts condemning Thanksgiving and then noted that she “walked back her anti-Thanksgiving posts” as a new wave of criticism emerged. Slate, looking at the incident through a broader lens on progressive messaging, argued that Hong chose a convoluted defense rather than the simple, load-bearing word voters want to hear from politicians who have shifted positions: “sorry.”
Flip-Flop or Evolving View? How the Evidence Weighs
If you strip away partisan rhetoric and focus strictly on the record, three facts are clear. First, Hong did explicitly urge Americans to “Cancel Thanksgiving” in 2020, framing the holiday as a celebration of colonialism and a deadly “superspreader event.” Second, when initially pressed on national television in 2026 about whether she still held that view, she avoided a direct yes-or-no answer and leaned on a narrative of evolving views and community pain. Third, only after the controversy escalated did she publicly state that Thanksgiving is her favorite holiday and that she does not want to cancel it.
That sequence supports a straightforward conclusion: Hong has changed how she speaks about Thanksgiving, but did so in a way that looks like a political flip-flop rather than a transparently explained evolution. The content of her Politico remarks directly contradicts the spirit of “Cancel Thanksgiving,” yet the path between those endpoints—especially her CNN performance—lacked the explicit acknowledgment that tends to preserve trust when a politician revises a past position.
It is also true that the underlying posts date to a specific moment: the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when public-health officials were warning against large indoor holiday gatherings and progressives were more broadly reexamining national myths around colonialism and race. In that context, calls to “cancel” holidays were partly attempts to fuse health messaging with moral critique. But context does not erase the words themselves, and voters evaluating a potential governor fairly insist on clarity about where she stands now.
Media Amplification and the Culture-War Frame
Once Hong’s old posts resurfaced, the controversy followed a familiar trajectory in contemporary politics. Republican figures, including opponent Tom Tiffany, quickly folded the Thanksgiving tweets into a larger portrait of Hong as an ideological radical—pairing them with her earlier comments about abolishing the police, reshaping the criminal justice system, and criticizing the Senate. Conservative media outlets and online commentators subsequently elevated the story as emblematic of “woke” hostility to American traditions.
Television segments on Fox News, YouTube channels like Actual Justice Warrior, and opinion pieces in venues such as Townhall and The Hill went beyond the holiday itself, presenting Hong’s Thanksgiving remarks alongside claims about her views on whiteness, policing, and institutional abolition. The Thanksgiving tweet thus became both a standalone controversy and a convenient shorthand for a bundle of positions opponents argue are out of step with Wisconsin’s electorate.
At the same time, mainstream outlets treated the backlash as a serious but more contained campaign issue. Forbes, the New York Times, and Slate each framed the episode as a test case for how a democratic socialist candidate navigates past radical rhetoric when seeking statewide office, noting that even some Democrats expressed discomfort with the original “Cancel Thanksgiving” language. That divergence in tone—culture-war cudgel versus sober scrutiny—illustrates how resurfaced posts can be weaponized differently across media ecosystems while resting on the same underlying text.
Francesca Hong remarks Thanksgiving is her 'favorite holiday,' answers she does not 'want to cancel it' https://t.co/F1iRKiKiam #FoxNews
— Greg Shields (@GregShield83077) August 6, 2026
A Symptom of a Larger Campaign Research Pattern
Hong’s experience is not unique; it exemplifies how opposition research now routinely relies on social media archaeology. Virtually every serious candidate has a years-deep archive of tweets, posts, and Instagram captions written for a small audience or during a very different political moment. Those artifacts are now mined for statements that can be framed as extremist, hypocritical, or hostile to broadly cherished civic rituals.
Once resurfaced, such posts are rarely debated in their original context. Screenshots and partial quotes circulate across platforms, stripped of surrounding threads or nuance. The television clip of Hong’s CNN non-answer then becomes as important as the initial tweet, because it offers voters a live test of how she handles uncomfortable past rhetoric. Does she defend it, explain it, or repudiate it? In Hong’s case, the path she chose—deflecting in the moment, then reversing later—supplied critics with a narrative of both radicalism and opportunism.
For candidates and strategists, the lesson is plain. In an era when old posts can and will be exhumed, the only durable way to manage them is to own the evolution openly. That means pairing a clear acknowledgment—“I was wrong” or “My view has changed”—with a principled explanation that respects both those who shared the original sentiment and those offended by it. Hong’s Thanksgiving episode shows what happens when a candidate tries to skip that step: the controversy does not disappear; it ossifies into a “flip-flop of all time” storyline that opponents will revisit long after the holiday itself has passed.
Sources:
redstate.com, forbes.com, jsonline.com, nytimes.com, foxnews.com, youtube.com, instagram.com, slate.com
