Yellowstone Wants Its White Audience To Embrace Replacement

The hit show’s season finale reveals its insidiousness

Yellowstone, the favorite show of many red staters, finally came to an end this week. The two-hour series finale drew massive ratings while also offering a questionable resolution to the Dutton family’s affairs. The heir to the family’s ranch, which they have possessed for over 140 years, sells it to Indians for a paltry $1.25 an acre. It’s the same sum the family bought it for in 1883, in an apparent theft of Indian land. The Dutton heir wanted to atone for this alleged sin through the sale.

The new owners honor the family by protecting the Dutton cemetery from the vandalism of Indian youths.

Some conservatives found this an inspiring message. Dana Loesch, a former Never Trumper, said the episode was great. “The tribal elders and the Duttons realized they were on the same side all along and Mo [one of the elders] defended the family's sacrifice for the land,” she posted on X. Other personalities shared Loesch’s opinion and insisted the scene proved their beloved Yellowstone wasn’t woke.

This is a textbook case of missing the big picture. The show celebrates a white family giving up their land out of guilt over their ancestors allegedly stealing it. One tribal elder telling some Indian teens to stop knocking over their gravestones doesn’t negate that. It just tells whites they should give up what their ancestors created and non-whites might not disturb your resting place.

This is deeply anti-white. It’s especially insidious because the show is primarily watched by white conservatives. Despite what its fans say, the show is, in fact, woke. It dresses it up in rural aesthetics and traditional masculinity, making it palatable to its audience. Yellowstone has a clear message for its audience: you live on stolen land and you must make amends for it.

It’s the same message that underlines land acknowledgements. Conservatives find these obnoxious, yet they say the same thing as Yellowstone’s finale. It’s white people remorsefully accepting that they are on “stolen” land. It implies whites shouldn’t even be in North America and we disrupted the perfect harmony of the New World. Ultimately, we have to feel sorry for winning against the Indians and developing the land into a great country.

It’s wrong on multiple levels. One, conquest and dispossession weren’t brought here by the white man. The Amerindians did this among themselves aplenty. They constantly warred upon one another and pushed out weaker tribes. This is a grim fact throughout human history. Every nation in the world today stands theoretically on stolen land. But only whites have to apologize for this. Unlike other peoples in the past, Americans did not exterminate the “natives” or erase their memory. We kept many of their place names, built monuments to them, created self-governing reservations for them, and depicted them as admirable individuals in our art.

For all this, we’re obligated to feel bad for what we built.

Yellowstone’s premise that the Duttons should hand over their prosperous ranch to the Indians is ludicrous. The white family developed that land into what it is. They poured their blood, sweat, and tears into over many decades. The Indians didn’t do anything with it when they had it. They did not create the ranch–the Duttons did. Like our cities, roads, airports, bridges, and everything else associated with civilization in this country, the property belongs to the settlers who built it. The Indians didn’t. Modern-day Indians, in contrast to the show’s image, aren’t even interested in ranching. The new owners would allow the Dutton family possession to fall into dilapidation. That would dishonor the men buried in the graveyard the elders supposedly respect.

The sale represents a transfer of white wealth and land over to worthier non-white successors. It’s a surprisingly common theme in media loved by conservatives. The most famous example of this is the 2008 film Gran Torino. The Clint Eastwood vehicle depicts a crotchety old white man living in the Detroit ghettos. Eastwood’s character is the last of his kind in the neighborhood. His own family doesn’t even visit him. He befriends a young Hmong man who’s trying to escape from a gang. Near the end of the movie, the old man sacrifices himself to deliver his Asian friend from the gang’s clutches. In his will, he bequeathed his only prized possession–a Ford Gran Torino–to the Hmong instead of his children. The film makes clear that the Asian migrant is a more worthy successor to Eastwood’s character than his white progeny. The movie supports idiotic notions that whites are lazy and entitled as opposed to hard-working migrants. The few good whites should sacrifice themselves for the New Americans. It leaves little doubt in the believer’s mind as to who deserves to inherit this country.

Gran Torino at least didn’t lecture about white guilt and white privilege. The same can’t be said for Yellowstone, which once featured a college professor lecturing her classroom about their white privilege. The very same professor is married to the Dutton who sells the family ranch. So much for being non-woke.

Much of Yellowstone’s audience are boomers. They want to know that the country will be in good hands when they depart. They want to think that whoever populates the country–whatever their color or creed–will respect the memory of those who came before them. They hope non-white leaders will protect their heritage and monuments in the same way the tribal elders safeguards the Duttons’ graves.

But we already know that’s not what will happen. We witnessed a decade of iconoclasm against America’s heritage from our diverse citizens. Whether Confederate, Founding Father, or even abolitionist, all fell just the same. Non-white activists toppled them because they’re dead white men. They don’t want to honor these honkies anymore. The Indian youths desecrating the graves are a more accurate representation of the future than the magnanimous elder. That’s America’s future if it’s handed over to those who despise its heritage.

Yellowstone’s wokeness doesn’t mean people can’t watch the show. One can find entertainment in culture with leftist themes. I know several people who simply enjoy the characters and storylines. That’s perfectly fine.

However, people shouldn’t pretend Yellowstone rejected wokeness. It merely figured out how to tailor it to Red America.