What would Christmas be without warnings of the secular crusade to destroy it? Thanks to the fulminations of cable news cranks and evangelical moralists, the War on Christmas has become an annual outrage.
The story typically goes as follows: secular elements have intimidated stores into replacing the phrase “Merry Christmas” with “Happy Holidays;” nativity scenes have been removed from public spaces under threat of ACLU lawsuits; a decadent culture is moving ever closer to eradicating Christian morality; and America slouches towards Gomorrah.
The Christmas kulturkampf is a growth industry, providing an effective boost for conservative fundraising and a ratings bonanza for right-wing media. So who was the genius that created it? To find the answer, a visit with the ghost of conservatism’s past is in order.
In his 1995 book, Alien Nation, Peter Brimelow argued that the influx of “weird aliens with dubious habits” from developing nations was eroding America’s white Christian “ethnic core,” and in turn, sullying its cultural underpinnings. The War on Christmas was, in his view, a particularly pernicious iteration of the multicultural “struggle to abolish America.”
In 1999, Brimelow founded what would become the internet’s leading anti-immigration web journal, VDare.com, named for the first British child born in the Americas. Brimelow’s new venture provided a forum to allies like Jared Taylor, a white supremacist publisher, and Kevin MacDonald, an evolutionary psychology professor who has argued that Jews are genetically equipped to out-compete Gentiles for resources and power.
VDare became the staging ground for the War on the War on Christmas. Unlike their more respectable counterparts, Brimelow’s writers dared to name the true anti-Christian Grinch: Jews.
VDare’s 2005 War on Christmas winner, Steve Sailer, a Eugenics enthusiast, wrote, “those exemplars of successful assimilation now seem to be de-assimilating emotionally, becoming increasingly resentful, at this late date, of their fellow Americans for celebrating Christmas.”
By 2005, Fox News personalities Bill O’Reilly and John Gibson were dedicating entire shows to the War on Christmas. While their rants were directed at “secular progressives,” they echoed the arguments of Brimelow’s allies. “It’s all part of the secular progressive agenda,” O’Reilly grumbled. “If you can get religion out, then you can pass secular progressive programs, like legalization of narcotics, euthanasia, abortion at will, gay marriage.” National Review’s website jumped back on the bandwagon, beginning with editor Kathryn Jean Lopez’s promotion of Gibson’s bestselling 2005 polemic, The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought.
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