Although the Thanksgiving story is typically associated with the harvest feast of Pilgrims and Wampanoags in Plymouth, Massachusetts, 404 years ago this fall, the national holiday Americans celebrate every fourth Thursday of November only began thanks to a presidential proclamation from Abraham Lincoln in 1863, the same year he delivered the Gettysburg Address.

That’s not just historical trivia. What we are meant to commemorate on Thanksgiving isn’t merely a mythologized version of our origins. It’s a celebration of American rebirth — and of the possibilities, personal and political, that go with it.

The idea for a national Thanksgiving holiday was not Lincoln’s own. It came from Sarah Josepha Hale, among the most influential Americans you’ve probably never heard of. “A partial list of Hale’s achievements on behalf of women,” wrote Melanie Kirkpatrick, Hale’s biographer, “includes leading the fight for property rights for married women, campaigning for women to be welcome as teachers in public schools, supporting medical education for women, creating the first day care center for small children and the first public playground, founding a society dedicated to increasing the wages of working women, and helping to found Vassar College, the first college for women.”

That wasn’t all Hale did. She wrote a bestselling antislavery novel. She spent decades as editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, the most widely circulated magazine in the United States before the Civil War. She wrote “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” And, beginning in the 1840s, she petitioned president after president to make Thanksgiving a national holiday.

Why was Hale obsessed with setting a national date for Thanksgiving? “There is a deep moral influence in these periodical seasons of rejoicing in which a whole community participates,” she wrote in 1835. But her purposes were also political: A national holiday, she argued, could help preserve the Union. Among her fiercest opponents, unsurprisingly, were Southerners who thought that designating a holiday was an issue for the states to decide.

In September 1863, following the Union’s victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Hale again petitioned the president for an “annual Thanksgiving” to have “a National and fixed Union Festival.” In Lincoln and William Seward, his secretary of state, she found receptive ears. On Oct. 3, Lincoln proclaimed “a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.”

The proclamation, drafted by Seward, is somewhat verbose. It extols American plenty even amid the carnage of war. “Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense have not arrested the plow, the shuttle or the ship.” But there are also unmistakably Lincolnian touches. It speaks of “our national perverseness and disobedience,” implores “the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation,” and commends “to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers.”

Those lines would echo, more poetically and profoundly, in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. They are also of a piece with Lincoln’s larger political project, which went beyond saving the Union or even abolishing slavery.

It was about the perpetuation of our political institutions — the subject of Lincoln’s first significant political speech, at the age of 28, in Springfield, Illinois, in 1838. How does one keep faith with the spirit that animated the founding of a liberal republic once the founders are long dead? How does one establish a “rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression,” as he put it in an 1859 letter in honor of Thomas Jefferson?

Part of the answer, Lincoln believed, lay in ritual. In 1838 he had spoken of the need to create a “political religion of the nation,” to which “the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.” In 1863, Hale supplied him with an ingenious solution: a festival in which everyone could — and would want to — participate, not from a sense of obligation but with a feeling of joy.

That’s the genius of the holiday. Nobody — except your uncle — likes to talk about politics at the Thanksgiving table. Nobody should need to, either, because the occasion itself is inherently political. It’s an opportunity for families and friends and, by extension, communities, states and the country itself, to have a national reset. It’s when we remember that we can still be capable of setting everyday arguments aside, of recalling common bonds, of indulging a soft patriotism that’s also potent because it’s so unobjectionable. Thanksgiving, far more than the star-spangled Fourth of July, is what makes us Americans all over again.

That was also the spirit of the Gettysburg Address, another purported act of remembrance of the dead that is, in fact, an opportunity for rededication by the living — a “new birth of freedom.” The question for successive generations of Americans is: What kind of freedom should it be?

For Lincoln, the new birth meant saving government of, by and for the people, and a nation where all are equal. For Hale, it meant extending the boundaries of opportunity for women. For Thomas Edison, it was about advancing the reach of science: In 1877, just 14 years after the first national Thanksgiving and while Hale was still alive, he read “Mary Had a Little Lamb” for the first-ever phonograph recording.

Down the generations, what we can most give thanks for isn’t just abundance. It’s the abundance of freedom, created by people for whom possibility and renewal, even in a world of bitterness, was theirs — and ours — to seize.

Bret Stephens writes a column for the New York Times.

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When President Donald Trump claimed that members of Congress deserved the death penalty last week, he showed yet again that he doesn’t respect the rule of law.

The president turned to social media last Thursday morning to accuse six Democratic members of Congress of “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH.” The commander in chief made this astonishing comment in reaction to a video these elected officials, all former members of the military or the intelligence community, had posted the day before. In it, they remind current military service members: “You can refuse illegal orders” and “no one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.”

The Democrats’ message could have supplied better context, and perhaps spelled out what sort of “orders” they were worried about. Republican pundits are probably correct to suggest that Democrats also made the video to garner political attention.

But the video simply states the obvious: Every member of the military takes an oath to obey the Uniform Code of Military Justice — which states they must not obey an order if it “is contrary to the Constitution” or “the laws of the United States” even if it is given by a superior officer or the commander in chief.

Trump was so rattled by the video that he unleashed a stream of 19 posts or shares that included the all-caps: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP???” A predictable surge of threats against the lawmakers followed, prompting the House Sergeant at Arms and the U.S. Capitol Police to provide them with additional security.

When White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt weighed in, saying the president would never authorize an illegal order, she inaccurately claimed the Democrats were “encouraging” members of the military “to defy the President’s lawful orders.”

The reality is that the situation is entirely of Trump’s own making. For weeks, military service personnel have been seeking outside legal counsel about orders they’ve received, especially the U.S. strikes against alleged drug boats and the military deployments to American cities. The legality of the attacks on boats in the Caribbean is disputed and federal judges have ordered the administration to halt its National Guard deployment to U.S. cities while lawsuits proceed.

The torrent of questions raised by all of this has led to a spike in inquiries to The Orders Project, a nonpartisan program independent from the federal government and run by the National Institute of Military Justice. It was created at the end of the first Trump administration to assist military personnel in understanding their options when faced with orders they believe may not be legal.

Lt. Col. Frank Rosenblatt, a former U.S. Army lawyer who runs the program, told the PBS NewsHour that most of the calls are coming from military officers, not lower-ranking enlisted members, and often from those not directly involved in the operations. Callers have indicated that “they’re feeling pressure from their higher-ups” to concur with the Pentagon’s decision to carry out the strikes, he said.

The impact of all these legal arguments can be challenging for the rank-and-file military, said Gen. Randy Manner, a retired two-star Army Major General. While there are a few clearly illegal orders that every military member knows, such as firing on unarmed Americans or shooting prisoners of war, it’s a mistake to assume that individual junior members of the military can analyze every order to ensure it is legal, he told me.

Manner said he spent part of his active-duty career working with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Air Force and the Army helping them “ensure that legal reviews were done of all intent and all actions” before they were sent to the various combatant commanders.

“The average soldier, sailor, airman, Marine, does not understand the nuances of the law,” he explained. “By the time orders get to a junior enlisted person, they should have absolutely been vetted by the generals, the admirals, the senior officers with JAGs to ensure that the orders they receive are lawful.”

Trump has not only made the jobs of the military commanders more difficult, recent decisions by what is now called the Department of War may compromise the ability of new enlistees to assess the legality of their orders. Under Trump, the department has removed from basic training instructions on the Geneva Conventions.

“Without that training, our soldiers and sailors and our Marines are not going to know what right looks like,” Manner said.

With the lack of transparency about Trump’s military operations, and the legal questions around them, the president created the conditions for the Democrats’ video.

Sen. Mark Kelly, a 25-year combat pilot in the U.S. Navy and a Democrat from Arizona, told CNN on Thursday that they made the video because Trump continues to talk about sending troops into more U.S. cities, invoking the Insurrection Act, and in 2020 asked his then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper about whether he could shoot Black Lives Matter protesters in the legs.

“That is an example of an illegal order — if it was given,” Kelly continued. “He didn’t give the order, but it’s obviously rattling around in his head.”

If Trump is disturbed by the reaction to his decisions, he should be. But the best response is not to seemingly call for the execution of members of Congress, but to reconsider how he ought to use the world’s most powerful military.

Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades.

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The recent presidential pardons of figures who tried to overturn the 2020 election are part of a broader effort to rewrite one of the most sordid episodes in recent memory. The effort should be rejected, and the pardon power — abused by presidents of both parties for far too long — needs to be reined in.

Earlier this month, the president pardoned nearly 80 staffers, lawyers, officials, operatives and other allies who attempted to accomplish through artifice what the Jan. 6 rioters tried to do by force: reverse the voters’ verdict. Their collective effort to ignore the election results and adopt slates of fake electors was an affront to American democracy.

The scheme collapsed thanks to Vice President Mike Pence, who honored his oath to the Constitution rather than participate in the brazen power grab. Ever since, the president and his closest allies haven’t stopped trying to repackage the perfidy as patriotism.

On his first day back in the White House, the president pardoned hundreds of people charged with and convicted of crimes related to the storming of the Capitol. Many of them had pleaded guilty to assaulting police officers. One has since been rearrested after threatening to kill House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

Even though the president previewed his actions during his 2024 campaign, many Republicans failed to take him seriously, including his running mate. “If you committed violence on that day,” Vice President-elect JD Vance declared in January, “obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.” Obviously.

Although the latest round of pardons surprised no one, and some recipients may still face state-level criminal charges, it’s no less dangerous. It sends the message that breaking the law is acceptable when it serves the president’s interests. And it’s only one part of a broader effort to rewrite the history of the 2020 election. The Department of Justice has fired prosecutors who handled Jan. 6 cases and placed on leave those who referred to a “mob of rioters” in a sentencing memo. Meanwhile, House Republicans recently established a committee to reinvestigate the events of that day, forcing taxpayers to fund an apparent effort at whitewashing the riot and its causes.

Unfortunately, abuses of the pardon power haven’t been confined to the 2020 election. The president has pardoned others convicted of fraud, bribery, tax evasion, drug trafficking, insider trading and other crimes. Many of them have something in common: They’ve paid tribute to the president in one currency or another.

In one case, a pardon was issued after a $1 million super PAC donation. In another, clemency followed nearly $1.7 million in campaign support. And in the most staggering case, a pardon arrived after a $2 billion crypto investment in a company founded by the president’s sons. Even by the low standards of past presidents — Democrats, including former President Joe Biden, have also abused the power — this spree appears to be egregiously self-serving.

Although the president’s pardon power is enshrined in the Constitution, Congress should move to circumscribe it around a few basic principles: No pardons should be permitted in exchange for anything of value. Self-pardons should be barred. And pardons issued in conjunction with a case involving presidents or their family members should trigger the release of all relevant investigative materials to Congress, to ensure greater public transparency.

Such provisions will surely invite legal challenges. But even the president’s strongest supporters would be hard-pressed to oppose them on the merits. More to the point: Doing nothing would be unpardonable.

— The Bloomberg News Editorial Board

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Audiences already know the story of Frankenstein. The gothic novel — adapted dozens of times, most recently in director Guillermo del Toro’s haunting revival now available on Netflix— is embedded in our cultural DNA as the cautionary tale of science gone wrong. But popular culture misreads author Mary Shelley’s warning. The lesson isn’t “don’t create dangerous things.” It’s “don’t walk away from what you create.”

This distinction matters: The fork in the road comes after creation, not before.

All powerful technologies can become destructive — the choice between outcomes lies in stewardship or abdication. Victor Frankenstein’s sin wasn’t simply bringing life to a grotesque creature. It was refusing to raise it, insisting that the consequences were someone else’s problem. Every generation produces its Victors. Ours work in artificial intelligence.

Recently, a California appeals court fined an attorney $10,000 after 21 of 23 case citations in their brief proved to be AI fabrications — nonexistent precedents. Hundreds of similar instances have been documented nationwide, growing from a few cases a month to a few cases a day. This summer, a Georgia appeals court vacated a divorce ruling after discovering that 11 of 15 citations were AI fabrications. How many more went undetected, ready to corrupt the legal record?

The problem runs deeper than irresponsible deployment. For decades, computer systems were provably correct — a pocket calculator can consistently offer users the mathematically correct answers every time. Engineers could demonstrate how an algorithm would behave. Failures meant implementation errors, not uncertainty about the system itself.

Modern AI changes that paradigm. A recent study reported in Science confirms what AI experts have long known: plausible falsehoods — what the industry calls “hallucinations” — are inevitable in these systems. They’re trained to predict what sounds plausible, not to verify what’s true. When confident answers aren’t justified, the systems guess anyway. Their training rewards confidence over uncertainty. As one AI researcher quoted in the report put it, fixing this would “kill the product.”

This creates a fundamental veracity problem. These systems work by extracting patterns from vast training datasets — patterns so numerous and interconnected that even their designers cannot reliably predict what they’ll produce. We can only observe how they actually behave in practice, sometimes not until well after damage is done.

This unpredictability creates cascading consequences. These failures don’t disappear, they become permanent. Every legal fabrication that slips in undetected enters databases as precedent. Fake medical advice spreads across health sites. AI-generated “news” circulates through social media. This synthetic content is even scraped back into training data for future models. Today’s hallucinations become tomorrow’s facts.

So how do we address this without stifling innovation? We already have a model in pharmaceuticals. Drug companies cannot be certain of all biological effects in advance, so they test extensively, with most drugs failing before reaching patients. Even approved drugs face unexpected real-world problems. That’s why continuous monitoring remains essential. AI needs a similar framework.

Responsible stewardship — the opposite of Victor Frankenstein’s abandonment — requires three interconnected pillars.

First: prescribed training standards

Drug manufacturers must control ingredients, document production practices and conduct quality testing. AI companies should face parallel requirements: documented provenance for training data, with contamination monitoring to prevent reuse of problematic synthetic content, prohibited content categories and bias testing across demographics. Pharmaceutical regulators require transparency while current AI companies need to disclose little.

Second: pre-deployment testing

Drugs undergo extensive trials before reaching patients. Randomized controlled trials were a major achievement, developed to demonstrate safety and efficacy. Most fail. That’s the point. Testing catches subtle dangers before deployment. AI systems for high-stakes applications, including legal research, medical advice and financial management, need structured testing to document error rates and establish safety thresholds.

Third: continuous surveillance after deployment

Drug companies are obligated to track adverse events of their products and report them to regulators. In turn, the regulators can mandate warnings, restrictions or withdrawal when problems emerge. AI needs equivalent oversight.

Why does this need regulation rather than voluntary compliance? Because AI systems are fundamentally different from traditional tools. A hammer doesn’t pretend to be a carpenter. AI systems do, projecting authority through confident prose, whether retrieving or fabricating facts. Without regulatory requirements, companies optimizing for engagement will necessarily sacrifice accuracy for market share.

The trick is regulating without crushing innovation. The EU’s AI Act shows how hard that is. Under the Act, companies building high-risk AI systems must document how their systems work, assess risks and monitor them closely. A small startup might spend more on lawyers and paperwork than on building the actual product. Big companies with legal teams can handle this. Small teams can’t.

Pharmaceutical regulation shows the same pattern. Post-market surveillance prevented tens of thousands of deaths when the FDA discovered that Vioxx — an arthritis medication prescribed to more than 80 million patients worldwide — doubled the risk of heart attacks. Still, billion-dollar regulatory costs mean only large companies can compete, and beneficial treatments for rare diseases, perhaps best tackled by small biotechs, go undeveloped.

Graduated oversight addresses this problem, scaling requirements and costs with demonstrated harm. An AI assistant with low error rates gets extra monitoring. Higher rates trigger mandatory fixes. Persistent problems? Pull it from the market until it’s fixed. Companies either improve their systems to stay in business, or they exit. Innovation continues, but now there’s more accountability.

Responsible stewardship cannot be voluntary. Once you create something powerful, you’re responsible for it. The question isn’t whether to build advanced AI systems — we’re already building them. The question is whether we’ll require the careful stewardship those systems demand.

The pharmaceutical framework — prescribed training standards, structured testing, continuous surveillance — offers a proven model for critical technologies we cannot fully predict. Shelley’s lesson was never about the creation itself. It was about what happens when creators walk away. Two centuries later, as Del Toro’s adaptation reaches millions this month, the lesson remains urgent. This time, with synthetic intelligence rapidly spreading through our society, we might not get another chance to choose the other path.

Dov Greenbaum is professor of law and director of the Zvi Meitar Institute for Legal Implications of Emerging Technologies at Reichman University in Israel. Mark Gerstein is the Albert L. Williams Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Yale University. They wrote this column for the Los Angeles Times.

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