The Daily Beast's Max Blumenthal blamed us for the “War On Christmas” in 2008
There are three points you need to know about the War On Christmas.
VDARE.com and its Editor Peter Brimelow have been involved in this struggle since the late twentieth century, but it didn’t start there—we’ve dug up editorials in National Review from 1957 [Krismas, November 26, 1955] and Adam Cohen of the New York Times dug up protests from the early twentieth century [This Season's War Cry: Commercialize Christmas, or Else, December 4, 2005]
In fact, the War On Christmas goes back much further—it was one of the murderous obsessions of Soviet Communism after the Revolution. As Peter Brimelow commented on Nina Markovna’s 1989 memoir of growing up in the Soviet Crimea:
One point that emerges quickly is the sheer scale and nightmare intensity of Stalin's purges. One of Markovna's childhood memories is of inadvertently betraying her mother to a night of NKVD interrogation by remarking to a teacher that sugar was common before the Revolution. Another is of watching her mother and her aunt agreeing instantly to part forever after her uncle's deportation and death, fearing that further contact would attract informers and doom their children. Her uncle's crime: dressing a Christmas tree.
What a funny thing that the War On Christmas would flare up again in America, decades after the fall of Stalinism.
I’m not going to waste my time proving there’s a War On Christmas, what I want to talk about here is War On Christmas Denial.
Wikipedia won’t even call it the War On Christmas, but insists on referring to it as the “Christmas Controversy.”
A search for “there is no war on Christmas” comes up with 400 examples of that specific phrase, like this one from David Kyle Johnson at the London School Of Economics blog: Sorry Fox News, there is no War on Christmas and Santa isn’t White. [December 22, 2013]
Johnson insists that The War On Christmas was “invented in 2005 by Fox News, when Bill O’Reilly started complaining about retailers saying “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” on The O’Reilly Factor and John Gibson (of Fox News radio) published The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought.”
But even in its recent American version, the War On Christmas goes back farther than that. In 2008, Max Blumenthal of the Daily Beast did a typical “investigative”/guilt-by-association/point-and-splutter attack, which Peter Brimelow called a classic statement of War Against Christmas Denial”: Who Started the War on Christmas? “The War on Christmas” started in a white nationalist cabal and spread to conservative media, by Max Blumenthal, December 9, 2008. Blumenthal noted Peter Brimelow and VDARE.com’s war on Christmas competition, which started in 1999. That in turn was predated by a National Review competition which Brimelow persuaded NR Editor John O’Sullivan to start in 1995, and which was dropped after his 1998 dismissal by William F. Buckley, to which it probably contributed.
I suppose Blumenthal’s version is better than O’Reilly getting all the credit/blame, as he does in this recent Daily Kos piece: It's War on Christmas time. Shut up, it's still a thing!, by Hunter, December 05, 2014. Huffington Post has a whole category called Fox News War On Christmas.
The Soros-funded Leftists at Media Matters have been following Fox’s coverage, while denying it:
December 2, 2014 8:56 PM EST clip ››› Media Matters staff
November 19, 2014 9:24 AM EST
In spite of all this War On Christmas Denial, occasionally the mask slips—in 2012, Salon Magazine, which has been at the heart of the War On Christmas Denial movement (see here and here ) came out of the closet with this:
There really is a war on Christmas!And it's being fought by some of the bravest atheists in the country, nonbelievers in rural areas and the heartland
By Daniel Denvir, December 23, 2012
This was its graphic—two grenades under the Christmas tree.
The story made it explicit that in Red State America, Christophobes are more militant because they’re a minority, where as in New York and New Jersey, they rule.
So I’m announcing VDARE.com’s annual War On Christmas competition for 2014, a bottle of champagne for either
Email me at jfulford@vdare.com, Peter Brimelow at pbrimelow@vdare.com, or witan@vdare.com.
Let us know if you want us to use your name and email, or not, when we publish the results.
Selected VDARE.com War on Christmas Coverage from 1999 On
