Watch This Rising Dem Star Collapse When Asked if She's Pro-Thanksgiving - Her Answer Makes Kamala Look Like a Genius
Facing only the tiniest of pressure, she choked.
Francesca Hong, the former chef and failed restaurateur who is almost certain to win the Democratic nomination for governor in Wisconsin next week, was hit on Monday with a difficult question in usually friendly terrain for Democrats.
She responded with the kind of word salad that would have embarrassed even Kamala Harris.
Hong, a member of the state Assembly from Madison, Wisconsin, was appearing as the front-runner heading into Wisconsin’s Aug. 11 primary with a commanding lead in the polls.
The most recent finding by the Badger State’s Marquette Law School, published July 29, had her up by 22 points over her nearest rival, former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, 38 percent to 16 percent.
As an avowedly leftist Democrat backed by the Democratic Socialists of America — and with the DSA riding a lefty wave of success in Democratic primaries this year — Hong had plenty of reason to be complacent making an appearance on CNN’s “The Source.” If a lefty can’t feel comfortable on CNN, she can’t feel comfortable anywhere.
But then host Kaitlan Collins — not exactly a right-wing fire-breather — broached the topic of a tweet Hong published in 2021 on the social media platform then known as Twitter.
“Cancel Thanksgiving,” Hong wrote. “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.”
Collins: Do you still believe that Thanksgiving should be canceled?
Hong: I’m a chef, and one of the first meals that I made was for the community when I was 16 was a Thanksgiving meal. But Thanksgiving is also a time that’s incredibly painful for many people in our communities.… pic.twitter.com/Kd5kBZMxZS
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 4, 2026
“The post has been deleted. Republicans have been highlighting it,” Collins said. “Do you still believe that Thanksgiving should be canceled?”
Hong’s response was not well done.
Clearly she’s been prepared for the question, and clearly she thought she had a clever way around it. But it wasn’t clever enough at all.
Starting with a pointless — and probably exaggerated — story about one of her first meals as a chef being a Thanksgiving celebration, she moved on to calling the holiday a time that’s “incredibly painful for many people in our communities.”
(That might be true for Detroit Lions fans, who follow a team that has made its annual Thanksgiving Day game an almost certain loss since the century began. But Thanksgiving isn’t “incredibly painful” for anyone who doesn’t want it to be. And it’s a good bet that the vast majority of the people who want it to be are the kind of white, self-loathing libs you find voting for Democrats in Madison, Wisconsin.)
“And so I think there, I wanted to make sure that people understood that there are multiple views, but views can evolve,” she said.
“And the position that I’m running for right now, and I think my background as a chef will actually help me become a better governor that’s able to bring more people to the table.”
Ha-ho! Bring more people to the table!
If Hong hired a consultant to come up with that, she should fire him. If she came up with it herself, she should quit the race out of basic decency.
Because what it came after was simply nonsense.
She thinks, but isn’t quite sure, what she was getting at in a social media post published all of five years ago? In a post that demanded the cancellation of the most American of American holidays? She didn’t know what she meant by “original superspreader event that killed indigenous folx” — basically calling Thanksgiving a precursor to genocide?
As the social media storm that followed showed, the cowardly pretense fooled no one with any sense:
Ambiguity on something this mainstream is usually a political liability.
— raffHELL (@raffhell) August 4, 2026
Has anyone noticed that when asked about policies that are unlikely to be received positively, she always clarifies that she doesn’t think they make sense AT THIS TIME?
— Gayle Conrad (@gayle10001) August 4, 2026
“Views can evolve” is a pretty interesting answer when the question is whether Thanksgiving should be canceled. 👀🇺🇸
— Angelina (@DraganaAngel981) August 4, 2026
Then again, as CNN resident sane man Scott Jennings noted, Democrats like Hong’s voting base.
This would get a standing ovation at the next Democrat national convention. https://t.co/Gr6ilBA1O5
— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) August 4, 2026
“This would get a standing ovation at the next Democrat national convention,” he wrote.
And that’s the most stomach-churning part of all this.
Hong and her comrades — like New York’s “warmth of collectivism” Mayor Zohran Mamdani — didn’t just spring fully formed into American politics, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus.
Their leftism was fed for the past decade by a Democratic Party deranged and derailed by the rise of Donald Trump.
The “squad” of the 2018 midterms was only an appetizer for the full-course insanity of the Biden years, when even as the party in power Democrats aimed almost entirely at doing the opposite of what Trump had done. (And in the area of illegal immigration, the damage they did will last for generations.)
And now, as the midway point of Trump’s second term approaches, his political opponents are proving themselves ever more out of touch with mainstream American sanity.
Less than a decade ago, Democrats knew enough about the difference between men and women to base lies on them. (See, for example, the Kavanaugh hearings.)
A little more than a decade ago, they understood illegal immigration versus legal immigration. (Barack Obama was once called the “deporter-in-chief.”)
Now, after 10 years of Trump Derangement Syndrome, the front-running Democratic candidate for governor in a Midwestern swing state can’t actually explain how she feels about Thanksgiving without making a hash of it?
Hong might well win the Democratic primary next week. But if Wisconsin voters are really listening, come November, she should be toast.
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