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Help VDARE.COM Defend Christmas! Max Blumenthal
Kicks Off Our 2008 War Against Christmas Competition!
See also:
War Against Christmas Competition
[blog]
2007,
2006,
2005,
2004,
2003,
2002,
2001,
2000,
1999,
Peter Brimelow writes:
We’ve had our differences with
Max Blumenthal, son of
Clinton consigliere
Sidney “The Scumbag” [©
Taki] Blumenthal, but I
was amused by his classic statement of War Against Christmas Denial
just posted in The Daily Beast webzine (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 |
6:09am). Putting aside the ethnic paranoia and
adjusting for abuse (“white
nationalist”, sigh) and various
minor inaccuracies—apparently Barry Diller can’t afford fact
checkers—it’s a relatively good account of VDARE.COM’s role in
exposing the War Against Christmas, the backlash against which
has been one of the most
significant cultural developments
for many years.
James Fulford and I have
loving annotated it; we will give an inscribed copy of Steve
Sailer’s new book
AMERICA’S HALF-BLOOD PRINCE:
BARACK OBAMA’S "STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE"
to whoever reports the most outrageous attempt to abolish
Christmas in 2008.
Email entries to us at
christmas@vdare.com.
Don’t forget to go in through a VDARE.COM Amazon
link (like
this) when you buy
Christmas gifts—we get a commission at no cost to you. Don’t
forget to buy gifts at our
VDARE.COM store. Ho Ho!
And PLEASE don’t forget to
donate.
Blumenthal says
we’re “the
internet’s leading
anti-immigration web journal”. (He doesn’t approve) This
can only continue if you help NOW.
by Max Blumenthal,
(Originally posted The
Daily Beast, December 9, 2008 | 6:09am) (links in Blumenthal’s text
in original)
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.
[VDARE.COM:
All
correct. Especially the part about the
ACLU lawsuits, but the
Gomorrah part is
pretty accurate, too.
]
Judging from the panicked tone of
movement conservatives, this year’s War on Christmas campaign
threatens the country’s moral fiber more than ever. According to
The Wall Street Journal’s
Daniel Henninger, the secular Grinch has claimed the economy as
its latest casualty. "A
nation whose people can't say 'Merry Christmas' is a nation
capable of ruining its own economy," he
fumed on November
20. [Mad Max and the
Meltdown] Having laid off 20 percent of its staff the day
after Election Day, Christian right mega-ministry Focus on the
Family declared
"Merry
Tossmas",
imploring its supporters to toss out holiday season product
catalogs that wish shoppers
"Happy Holidays." (The 201 freshly unemployed staffers might have
more practical reasons to trash their catalogs.)
[VDARE.COM:
Actually, there aren't
"201 freshly unemployed staffers"—they laid off 149, and decided not
to hire another 53. Blumenthal was misled by the fact that the
story said that they'd eliminate 202
"positions". (Focus
on the Family to cut 202 jobs at headquarters, Denver
Post, November 18, 2008) But why should an economic
downturn change a conservative organization's position on the
War ON Christmas?]
On December 2, Utah Republican state
senator Chris Buttars sponsored an
urgent resolution
demanding that stores greet shoppers with the phrase,
"Merry Christmas."
"I'm sick of the
Christmas wars," Buttars proclaimed.
"We're a Christian nation and ought to use the word."
[Buttars
takes aim at stores waging 'war on Christmas', By
Cathy Mckitrick, The Salt
Lake Tribune,
December 2, 2008]
The Christmas kulturkampf is
a growth industry in a shrinking economy, 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.
[VDARE.COM:
Of course, it wasn't conservatives who
created
the War on Christmas;
conservatives are the ones fighting back.
Tom Piatak, quoting
Adam Cohen of the New
York Times,
traced the War on Christmas back a hundred years to
"a walkout of 20,000
Jewish students from the
New York City public schools in 1906
to protest the singing of Christmas carols", and
William F. Buckley (!!!)
editorialized against the New York City School Board's banning
of religious symbols at Christmas back in November 26, 1955. (Krismas,
PDF)]
Back during the culture wars of the
1990s, Peter Brimelow, then a Fortune
[VDARE.COM note: actually,
Forbes] magazine
editor, grew incensed with the increasing use of the phrase
"Happy Holidays" by retailers like Amazon.com.
"I just got real
interested in the issue," Brimelow told The Daily Beast,
"because I noticed over the years there was this social shift taking
place where people no longer said ‘Merry Christmas.’"
In his
1995 book,
Alien Nation, Brimelow argued that the influx of
"weird aliens with
dubious habits" [VDARE.COM: See the
(large PDF) online version,
page 267, for the context:
"In politics as
elsewhere, if you ask a stupid question, you get a stupid
answer—or at any rate a terse answer. And asking people if they
want their communities to be overwhelmed by weird aliens with
dubious habits is a stupid question. The answer is inevitable.”
Of course, this is meant facetiously, the point is that it would
never be asked in that form, but obviously the answer will be
"No!"]
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."
Brimelow went to his fellow Briton
and Tory, John O’Sullivan, then editor of the conservative
movement’s flagship publication,
National Review, with
a big idea. National
Review should host
"an annual competition for the most egregious attempt to
suppress Christmas." Though O’Sullivan liked Brimelow’s
idea, he was replaced as editor on Christmas Eve 1997 by Rich
Lowry. [VDARE.COM:
More accurate version at
VDARE says Merry Christmas and VDARE
says the hell with it,
By Peter Brimelow, December 12, 2000]
With the exception of a 2001 column
in which O’Sullivan blamed
"religious minorities"
for the War on Christmas, the issue disappeared from the pages
of National Review. At
the same time, the magazine jettisoned O’Sullivan’s
anti-immigration politics in favor of the Big Tent conservatism
preferred by younger writers like Jonah Goldberg and Ramesh
Ponurru. [VDARE.COM:
Sic, it's Ponnuru.
Blumenthal doesn't link to the John O'Sullivan column,
Scrooge on the Prowl,
December 19, 2001, but Blumenthal seems to be hinting that when
O’Sullivan used the phrase
"religious minorities", he meant
"guys named Blumenthal". Not at all—here's the context:
"The sensible response of
religious minorities to the sight of Christians celebrating the
birth of Our Lord is surely to mark their own religious
festivals with equal enthusiasm. And, to a considerable extent,
that is now happening: Hannukah, Eid (the feast at the end of
Ramadan), and even the Afro-American nationalist holiday
invented in 1966, Kwanzaa, are celebrated by their devotees and
increasingly promulgated to the rest of society." Of course
O’Sullivan also said
"Attempts to make it a celebration of season or snow or mere
meteorology will fail — but there is a danger that they will
succeed in annoying most Americans to the point where they will
wish others a Merry Christmas not from merriment and kindness
but as an act of irritation, defiance and aggression.
And that really would be the triumph of Scrooge."
While Ann Coulter is both nicer (really!) and better looking than
Scrooge, when she says Merry Christmas in New York, she says
"it really is an aggressive act".]
The shift at
National Review forced
Brimelow even further into the political wilderness. Shunned by
conservatives there rankled by his unabashed racial
resentment—Goldberg
belittled him in a 2002 column as a
"once respected
conservative voice"—Brimelow [VDARE.COM:
see his
reply] 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 [VDARE.COM:
nationalist]
publisher, and
Kevin
MacDonald, an evolutionary psychology professor who has
argued that Jews are genetically equipped to out-compete
Gentiles for resources and power. In 2003, four years after
VDare’s founding, the Southern Poverty Law Center classified the
journal as a "hate
group".
[VDARE.COM:
We are starting to get tired of hearing that the SPLC did this
or that. The SPLC's living comes from finding hate among their
political opponents, so they'll find it, and Media Matters
complaining that a given MSM source
"failed to note"
that we're "white nationalist" or a "hate group" is equivalent to conservatives complaining that the
media quotes a liberal source and fails to mention that
Ann Coulter called him a
traitor. And she's a lot
more likely to be right than the SPLC. As for providing a voice
for the heterodox, that's our job.
]
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. The winner of Brimelow’s 2001 War
on Christmas competition, a
"paleoconservative"
writer named Tom Piatak,
insisted that those behind the assault on Christmas
"evidently prefer"
Hanukkah, which he called the
"Jewish Kwanzaa," a
"faux-holiday."
"Teaching children about Hanukkah, rather than the beliefs that
actually sustained Jews on their sometimes tragic and tumultuous
historical journey," Piatak fumed,
"inculcates negative lessons about Christianity, not positive ones about
Judaism."
[VDARE.COM:
Here's what the Piatak piece actually said:
"The malice of the multiculturalists is revealed in the way they present
the alternative holidays they so evidently prefer. Kwanzaa,
Hanukkah, and all the rest are presented as faux-Christmases,
even anti-Christmases, in order to compete with, diminish, and
ultimately efface Christmas. If Hanukkah customarily fell in
October, would anyone other than observant Jews even notice it?"
Piatak did not use the
words "faux-holiday", which Blumenthal must have accidentally edited in,
out of force of habit.
As for the expression
"Jewish Kwanzaa", that's not Piatak's but, as Piatak says in
the article, Frederic Schwarz's. Schwarz is the author of
Merry Chanukah,
American
Heritage Magazine,
December 2000, in which he used the expression to make the
commonplace point that
Hanukkah was a minor holiday which expanded to fit in with the Christmas
celebrations of the larger American society.]
VDare’s 2005 War on Christmas
winner,
[VDARE.com:
Wrong—Steve is a
VDARE.COM writer, and couldn't be winner of the competition, he
just wrote an article on the subject.] Steve Sailer, a
Eugenics enthusiast and author of the new biography of Barack Obama,
America’s Half-Blood Prince,
picked up where Piatak left off. [VDARE.COM:
The early 20th Century liberal eugenics movement had a
number of things wrong with it, most of them involving excess
government power, (forced sterilizations of people believed, on
little evidence, to be defective) and this movement has been
condemned by Steve Sailer himself in
Free
To Choose? Insemination, Immigration, And Eugenics.
However, all government programs that affect population and
parenthood, including tax rates, welfare policy, and immigration
policy, are ipso facto either eugenic or dysgenic, whether we like it or not.]
"American Jews," Sailer
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." Sailer went on to quote at length from a column
by the purportedly Jewish writer, Bert
[sic]
Prelutsky, called "The
Jewish Grinch Who Stole Christmas."
[VDARE.COM:
We have no idea why
Burt Prelutsky is referred to by Max Blumenthal as
"purportedly Jewish"—Blumenthal
does see cabals and conspiracies where most people wouldn't.
Burt Prelutsky is a
Hollywood writer and
Townhall.com columnist
who says he's Jewish. If
you want to know how a previous generation dealt with this, you
can go back in time through
archive.org and listen to
Jewish radio comedian Jack Benny celebrate Christmas with the
gang. Except for the fact that they usually had Dennis Day, an
Irish Catholic tenor, sing Adeste Fideles,
they had no problem having a Christmas part with a turkey and
such. ]
Brimelow was ambivalent when I asked
him about Sailer’s theory on Jewish de-assimilation.
"It’s an argument,"
was all he would say.
Following the invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush’s re-election,
and the Republican sweep of Congress, Brimelow said conservative
movement elites could no longer ignore the right-wing populism
sweeping the nation. Suddenly the War on Christmas was gaining
traction. "This issue became very popular in the conservative grassroots, so
conservative media had to pay concession to it," he said.
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.[Amazon link ]
Of the conservatives who once
dismissed his Christmas crusade, Brimelow remarked with a
self-satisfied chuckle, "They went over to the dark side."
From its origins in Brimelow’s
website and fevered imagination to its popularization by the
conservative media, the War on Christmas has become an
institution. And the rest is holiday cheer.
Max Blumenthal is a
senior writer for The Daily Beast and writing fellow at The
Nation Institute, whose book,
Republican Gomorrah (Basic/Nation Books), is forthcoming in
Spring 2009. Contact him at
maxblumenthal3000@yahoo.com.
[VDARE.COM:
The
War on Christmas,
obviously, didn't start with Peter Brimelow, or VDARE.com,
although we're happy to take credit for raising conservative
consciousness about it. We would like to thank Max Blumenthal
for calling us
"internet’s leading anti-immigration web journal",
which may cause a certain amount of
annoyance in the much
better funded
Center For Immigration Studies, for example. And we
have been slogging away on this issue with our limited funding
since 1999.
Max Blumenthal wishes to illuminate for the benefit of the
Daily Beast's readers how
much harm we've done. We'd like to think of it as how much
good we've done.
As for his standard attempt at
guilt by association, we hardly think that a writing
fellow at the leftist
Nation Institute,
associated with the
George Soros funded/David
Brock run
Media Matters For America,
has any business telling anyone who they should be associated
with.
But if he's right that we have this much influence—and we do have
a good deal—then we can
only continue with your help. Please give generously in the
spirit of Christmas, Past, Present and Yet To Come, so VDARE.com
doesn't become an empty chair by the fireside, like Scrooge's
vision of
Tiny Tim.
]
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