MSNBC host Joy Reid and “The View” panelist Sunny Hostin have lent their support to a burgeoning movement among progressive women opting to forgo Thanksgiving with family members who voted for President-elect Donald Trump.
Professor and essayist Andrea Tate is among those who’ve gone public with their decision to sever familial ties over politics. A Facebook post from her spouse celebrating Trump’s election to a second term was the last straw, she wrote.
“I love you, but out of respect for me and all my liberal writer friends, can you please take down that post?” she wrote. “Also, tell your family I love them, but I will not be coming for Thanksgiving, and I won’t be hosting Christmas. I need space.”
It’s a controversial decision, one many feel only adds to the divisiveness infecting the national conversation (or lack thereof).
“Family isn’t like gender. You can’t fix it by cutting off members,” comedian Bill Maher joked on his HBO talk show, “Real Time.
He referred to an interview Reid conducted with Yale University chief psychiatry resident Dr. Amanda Calhoun, who endorsed the idea of putting politics and your own mental health over familial relations.
“Think about that, a mental health professional advising people to isolate during the holidays,” Maher said. “And don’t forget to drink too much and put on weight.”
Reid, in a video posted on TikTok, said Trump supporters are the ones who should be held accountable.
“If this thing goes way south, autocracies go south real fast and things get ugly and people get asked to do things and turn people in and point people out and turn on them,” said Reid, speaking in a hushed tone.
“And if you’re voting affirmatively, gleefully for this, people might — I don’t know, may not feel so confident in you anymore,” she continued. “That’s real, and you kind of have to live with it. So if you think that you can vote for what people see as their destruction and then demand that they still are cool with you and kiki with you and have Thanksgiving with you, like, I think you’re kind of missing the point of what people are upset about.”
In her essay, Tate said she was simply not going to bite her tongue anymore, telling her husband, “I don’t want to disrespect your parents or your brother and his family in their home, or our home, so it’s best this way. No scenes. You can go see them. Seriously — I will not be in a room of 15 people who voted for Trump.”
Hostin said she was sympathetic to the holiday boycotts against MAGA relatives, arguing that Trump “is a different type of candidate. When people feel someone voted not only against their families but against them and people they love, I think it’s OK (to take a break),” she said.
But Christmas, said noted atheist Bill Maher, should transcend politics “if we ever want this nation to heal, this is what we have to do, force ourselves to reach out and find out why someone feels the way they do, and make the choices they make without prejudging them a monster.”
“And they must do the same for you,” he said.
