As a Manhattan Contrarian reader, probably you spent your Thanksgiving day being thankful for the many blessings in your life. Obviously, that is your moral failing. If you had any moral compass, you would have spent the day feeling guilty.

But wait, you say. What have I done to feel guilty about? Right there is where you’ve got it all wrong. It’s not that you’ve done anything wrong, or even that you’ve done anything at all. Your guilt is collective guilt, not resulting from your own actions, but rather principally resulting from the sins of your ancestors, and transmitted to you via your genes, and probably based on your race.

Now, I’m not saying that I buy into this collective race-based guilt thing at all. I say, lead a good life, treat everyone around you well, and enjoy yourself. That’s why I’m not a progressive. But for our post-Thanksgiving entertainment, let’s consider some of the more unhinged exercises in race-based guilt and shaming taken from the media over just the past few days. There are a near-infinite number of these things to choose from, so I’ll select just a few.

In the New York Times on Thanksgiving day, they had not one but two op-eds on the subject of the guilt and shame you should be feeling on this day. There was “The Vicious Reality Behind the Thanksgiving Myth” by George Washington University professor David Silverman. And then there was “The Horrible History of Thanksgiving” by regular Times columnist Charles Blow. From Silverman:

The Wampanoags, who are the Indians in this tale, have long contended that the Thanksgiving myth sugarcoats the viciousness of colonial history for Native people. It does. The Pilgrims did not enter an empty wilderness ripe for the taking. . . . Contrary to the Thanksgiving myth, the Pilgrim-Wampanoag encounter was no first-contact meeting. Rather, it followed a string of bloody episodes since 1524 in which European explorers seized coastal Wampanoags to be sold into overseas slavery or to be trained as interpreters and guides.

And that one is mild compared to Blow:

[A]fter the visits to the New World by Samuel de Champlain and Capt. John Smith in the early 1600s, “a terrible illness spread through the region” among the Native Americans. . . . This weakening of the native population by disease from the new arrivals’ ships created an opening for the Pilgrims. . . . But many of those native people not killed by disease would be killed by direct deed. . . . Just 16 years after the Wampanoag shared that meal, they were massacred.

And don’t get the idea that anyone in the New York Times had a single nice word to say about Thanksgiving. My God, that could even be taken as support for Trump.

But suppose this high moral indignation about conduct some 400 years ago by people who probably aren’t even your ancestors just isn’t catching hold with you. Then perhaps you need something a little more up-to-date to feel guilty about. Heather Mac Donald, writing in the Wall Street Journal on November 26, provides an example from a visit she recently made to the campus of the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts: What you need to feel guilty about is the “oppression” of students who are members of minority groups attending elite colleges and universities. Before this, you may have thought that poor and minority students given the opportunity to study at a place like Holy Cross are among the luckiest young people in the world and should be filled with gratitude and thankfulness. That’s where your moral compass is off by 180 degrees. Here’s how Mac Donald describes the reaction of a “majority of the audience” who attended her speech:

[A] majority of the audience . . . stood up and started chanting: “My oppression is not a delusion!” The chanters then declared that my sexism, racism and homophobia weren’t welcome on campus. “You are not welcome,” they added, as if I didn’t know. The protesters drowned out my response before filing slowly out of the room, still loudly announcing their victimhood.

Really, how dare you victimize these poor young people? You are guilty, guilty, guilty!

And if that hasn’t got you feeling guilty enough, I’ve got yet another incontrovertible example of your wrongdoing: gentrification. Do you have the idea that gentrification of formerly run-down urban neighborhoods is a good thing? Buildings get fixed up, and homeowners — mostly from minority groups — make big financial gains on their real estate investments. What’s not to like? Again, your moral compass is pointing you straight to hell. Writing at Quillette on November 25, Coleman Hughes quotes progressive icon Ta-Nehisi Coates on the correct moral view of gentrification (at least for those of the progressive mindset):

“[G]entrification” is but a more pleasing name for white supremacy. [It] is the interest on enslavement, the interest on Jim Crow, the interest on redlining, compounding across the years, and these new urbanites living off of that interest are, all of them, exulting in a crime. To speak the word gentrification is to immediately lie.

Any questions? Now, please go spend the rest of your Thanksgiving weekend wallowing in guilt and shame. Or as an alternative, you could decline to buy into the progressive worldview.