Lifehacker.com has advice on computing that I’ve found useful, and they have lots of cooking, tool, and appliance tips, but when they get on the subject of politics, they are conventional Leftists.

This week they’ve taken on the War on Christmas, with links that suggest they’ve copied and pasted from some site like Media Matters, the Daily Beast, or possibly Snopes:

The phrase ”War on Christmas” originated in 2000 on this blog post by Peter Brimelow, but it caught on shortly after a 2004 broadcast by Bill O’Reilly featuring a segment called ”Christmas Under Siege.”

”All over the country, Christmas is taking flak,” Reilly intoned, before pointing out that cities were erecting ”holiday trees” instead of ”Christmas trees” and pointing out instances of public schools banning religious content. From there, books were written, tweets were tweeted, and outrage was stoked until the phrase ”War on Christmas” was known by all.

But the sentiment behind the ”War on Christmas” dates back way further than its heyday in the early 2000s, to at least 1921, when noted antisemite (and car manufacturer) Henry Ford wrote: ”Last Christmas most people had a hard time finding Christmas cards that indicated in any way that Christmas commemorated Someone’s Birth.”

While O’Reilly and his ilk tend to not specifically name an enemy in the War on Christmas, Ford wasn’t shy.

What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: The ’War on Christmas’
The ”War on Christmas” is nothing new, and despite this year’s relative quiet on the topic, it’s not over, either.
By Stephen Johnson, LifeHacker, December 14, 2023

As you can expect, they go into deep antiquarian history to blame Henry Ford and the John Birch Society (which objected to UN propaganda at Christmastime in 1958) and decrying conservatives for stoking ”outrage” and talking ”nonsense,” and their explanation for the actual War on Christmas is this:

Post-war America’s religiosity eventually led to prayer and Christmas celebrations in public schools, and that led to a backlash where courts ruled much of it was unconstitutional, and that time of uncertainty led to the publication of ur-War on Christmas texts like the pamphlet ”There Goes Christmas?!” by Hubert Kregeloh of the John Birch Society:

The idea that there was no Christmas or Christianity in American schools before the era of Billy Graham (the link on Post-war America’s religiosity goes to what’s called the ”Fourth Great Awakening” 1960-1980) is crazy, and saying this ”led to a backlash” where courts just happened to rule against Christmas, prayer in schools, and the like, ignores the huge secular campaign of lawfare against Christianity in schools.

Their basic position is that the War on Christmas isn’t happening, the people who say it’s happening are crazy, and that it’s fine that it’s happening.

They’re wrong, and furthermore, they’re pointlessly alienating some part of their audience, because they think everyone thinks like they do.