SEE? The Zombie-Thanksgiving Story STILL LIVES

Recently,  in The Pittsburgh Current, this appeared:

No, the colony of Pilgrims in what is now Massachusetts was not an example of a failed socialist experiment. I mention that because it’s Thanksgiving week and that means it’s time for that stinky rightwing landfill gas (that the Pilgrims were socialist failures) to burp up into the conversational air that everyone else has to breathe.

I have it on pretty good authority that the verb originally used in this piece was the far more onomatopoetically pleasing "blurp" instead of the still-acceptable but far less interesting "burp."

Copy editors, whatareyagonnado?

Anyway, the current Current piece outlines how the settlement was paid for by some wealthy landowners in England and that the settlers were simply tenant farmers who had to pay the landowners back - hardly socialism, to be honest.

And still, John Stossel over at our favorite conservative paper, the Trib, could not help blurping up the rightwing swampgas:

The Pilgrims were religious, united by faith and a powerful desire to start anew, away from religious persecution in the Old World. Each member of the community professed a desire to labor together, on behalf of the whole settlement.

In other words: socialism.

But when they tried that, the Pilgrims almost starved.

But let's play out Stossel's story anyway. Take a look at how he described how the Pilgrims were "united by faith" and "professed a desire to labor together."

What Stossel states is socialism was an act of faith for the Pilgrims.

Is he really pushing the notion that a secular governor (in this case William Bradford) has the authority to veto faith-based acts even for a private religious community?

Wait, I thought John Stossel was a libertarian.

Oh, and then there's this:

In America today, religious groups practice different rites but usually don’t demand that government ban others’ practices.

Really?

I STAND WITH THE PGNEWSGUILD.