Thanksgiving is over, and the stores have filled with winter holiday decorations. Time for the “War on Christmas.” Fox network Sean Hannity opened his salvos in the war in all caps warning that “CHRISTMAS IS UNDER SIEGE.” He went far beyond protesting a greeting of “Happy Holidays” or a lack of Christmas items in retail stores to lambast a Massachusetts church that used a figure of baby Jesus in the Nativity scene behind a fence, pointing out what would have happened 2,000 years ago if the family faced the same problems as current refugees. Church leaders hoped that the display “will provoke conversations about how immigrants are being treated at the U.S.-Mexico border, including the controversial separation of children from their parents.”
Hannity warned his audience that they might not want their children to see an image of a doll in a cage although he lacked similar reservations about showing photographs of real children in cages. Laura Ingraham continued the barrage on her show after Hannity, and her guest, Dan Bongino finished Ingraham’s segment by exclaiming, “Friends don’t let friends mess with baby Jesus!” Earlier this year, Ingraham called the separation of migrant children from their parents as a summer camp.
On Christmas Day, white right-wing Christians join others in celebrating the birth of Jesus, a Palestinian, while they celebrate the mass slaughter of Palestinians by Israelites. He came from the town of Nazareth in Galilee in the northern territory of Palestine and spoke Aramic. Israelites began the ethnic cleansing of indigenous Palestinians in 1000 BCE, a process that is continued in current times. One story of Jesus’s birth describes the family’s flight as refugees from the genocidal infanticide of King Herod.
More than 100 migrant children continue to be separated from their parents seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border after last summer’s purge and remain in custody, sometimes in abusive situations. Despite DDT’s claim that he has stopped separating families, any vague or unsubstantiated allegations of wrongdoing of minor violations against parents are currently used to resume the separation process as a deterrent to asylum seekers. DOJ asserts that a court order does not require them to report these new separations to the ACLU.
Bill O’Reilly, gone from the Fox network because of expensive consequences for his sexual misconduct, brought the “war on Christmas” to media’s forefront in 2005. Chauncey DeVega, politics staff writer for Salon, theorizes about reasons for conservatives’ obsession with the subject. A half-century ago, history Richard Hofstadter pointed out that the conservative movement employ emotional appeals for manipulation and control of political power of its anti-intellectual audience who are prone to belief in conspiracy theory that lack any factual basis. The GOP and conservative control of the Fox network content provide effective state propaganda that conditions viewers to believe falsehoods.
Conservatives use their form of Christianity to weaponize religion by falsely purporting that liberals, gays, Muslims, atheists, “secularists,” and any other “enemy” oppresses white Christians, the most powerful and dominant group in the United States. The “war on Christmas” comes from white identity politics designed to make white right-wing Christians control all other groups.
University of Oregon sociologist Randall Blazak, a leading expert on the neo-Nazi and white supremacist movement who gained his information from infiltrating neo-Nazi skinheads and other white supremacist hate groups, discussed this movement. According to Blazak, the white working-class men have lost their picture of the American Dream through the demographic changes during the last half century which has made others more equal to them. They perceive this growing equality as a loss of status from the 1950s when white males reigned supreme.
The Tea Party, which took over Congress in 2010, holds similar false narratives to white supremacists—President Obama as the Muslim outsider, the media as “enemy of the people,” desire for Christian control of the nation—ideas that evolve into violence. White supremacists told the murderer of nine people in a black Charleston church that he couldn’t get a date because black men were taking white women, and the killer’s actions progressed from that fear. The simplistic world view for white supremacists is that if other people gain, then they are losing. It’s their job to take back the country through violence.
The simplistic view of these people is the importance of saying “Merry Christmas” to suppress the multiculturalism taking over the United States. Supporters of the “war on Christmas” concept lack the skills or refuse to develop ones to cope with social change.
Fundamentalist Christians continue to boycott stores in their “war on Christmas”: Target for allowing transgender people to use bathrooms (although the Liberty Council also complains that Target doesn’t make Christmas its main advertising focus); Barnes & Noble for losing “focus on the Reason for the season”; Burlington Coat Factory for “severe lack of Christmas advertising with biblical meaning”; and Lord & Taylor (“reindeers and Santas hide the love of the Nativity”). Nothing yet about Starbucks not putting the word “Christmas” on its cups and J. Crew for not using nativity scene clipart to sell sweaters.
In accordance
with the freedom of religion laws, the Chicago chapter of the Temple of Satan put up its celebration of the holidays in the Illinois state capitol. The four-foot sculpture of a snake coiled around an outstretched arm holding an apple sits between a Christmas tree and a menorah. The plague reads “Knowledge Is the Greatest Gift.” In previous years, the building has hosted a “Festivus” pole, a fictional holiday from the TV sitcom Seinfeld. The mission of the Temple of Satan is to “encourage benevolence and empathy among all people.”
Last year, 90 percent of people in the U.S. said they celebrate Christmas, but only 46 percent do so in a religious way—a drop of almost ten percent from 51 percent just four years earlier.
This year, Starbucks seems to have avoided the political accusation that its cups show a “war on Christmas.” Or maybe people are just tired of complaining that the cups aren’t Christmasy enough. Four lovely cups feature red stripes, red and white flames, mistletoe-like coffee cherries, and stars—all pagan designs. Lest we forget, Christmas evolved from a rowdy pagan winter celebration and was banned by the Puritans who settled America. Now it’s a patriotic holiday in which God is wrapped in the U.S. flag. And the White House celebrates it in blood red.
Nel's New Day 