Saargon Marshall here. Welcome back to the realignment.

This week we're joined by Hudson Institute Senior Fellow, Melanie Kirkpatrick,

Melanie's a former editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page,

and she's the author of Escape from North Korea, the untold story of Asia's underground railroad.

But more importantly for this week, she's the author of Thanksgiving, the holiday at the heart of

the American experience. Our long-time listeners are going to know that we spend a lot of time on this

podcast talking about doom and gloom, challenges whether past, present, or future. So we thought

this week of all weeks would be exciting to take a step back and focus on something a little lighter,

something that highlights the fact that all in all our lives are actually pretty great.

We have families, we have colleagues that we're thankful for, and speaking of Melanie's book

was a great opportunity to have that. We actually start with the four surprisingly controversial

centuries of Thanksgiving in this country, ever since 1621. It's a story that includes everything

from the very first Thanksgiving to President George Washington, President Abraham Lincoln,

and FDR. So it's a really cool sort of illustration of the fact that the story of Thanksgiving is

actually deeply intertwined with our actual evolving nature as a country. We then actually go into

Thanksgiving traditions, what things are the same, what things are different, why was it exactly

that people would need cranberries at the very first Thanksgiving? And finally we go into

what Melanie herself is so thankful for. That got me thinking about what I for one,

and thankful for here. The realignment podcast is really a branch out from the 2016 presidential

election. Now you can feel however you'd like about that result. But what it ultimately gave us was

the ability to have conversations about longstanding political dogmas and say, is that really the

right way to run this country? And that's something that we haven't had since the 1920s and the 1910s

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