A COUNTERPUNCH Point-And-Splutter About The War On Christmas
12/23/2015
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The Old Left webzine Counterpunch has produced The War on Christmas, or How to Build Mass Support for Right-Wing Ideology by Mary-Anne Henderson – Brian Platt December 23, 2015. This is a 2,300 word plod through assorted references to Christmas repression on the American Right over the past century. There frequent pauses to point and splutter, much chanting of “Right Wing Propaganda!” and no consideration for the possibility that there might be any validity in War on Christmas complaints. It reads like an uninspired High School book report – and one of the authors is indeed a High School teacher.

But it is thorough and consequently stumbles across VDARE -

While working as a writer for Fortune Magazine in the 1990s Peter Brimelow began to resurrect the idea of the war on Christmas arguing that it served to weaken America’s white Christian ethnic core. Brimelow would later create the openly racist website VDare.com which made the war on Christmas an annual event with headlines like “Yes, Virginia, There IS a War on Christmas—And on America.”
The link on “Peter Brimelow” is to Max Blumenthal’s Who Started the War on Christmas The Daily Beast 12.09,08. Notwithstanding the inevitable leftist slant this really is a piece of fine historical writing and largely accurate.
Back during the culture wars of the 1990s, Peter Brimelow, then a Fortune magazine editor, grew incensed with the increasing use of the phrase “Happy Holidays” by retailers like Amazon.com… 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.”
Blumenthal reported the consequence
Though O’Sullivan liked Brimelow’s idea, he was replaced as editor on Christmas Eve 1997 by Rich Lowry.

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.

and the response
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…. VDare became the staging ground for the War on the War on Christmas.
Blumenthal does note that NR did return after several years to the Christmas issue but not the reason, which I believe I identified in 2006 in NRO Remembers Christmas And Chooses A Gift: More War.
The Surge is coming. Orders have gone out from NeoCon Central: mobilize the serfs. Use this Christmas thing. Just not where we have to listen to it.
Although Henderson and Platt lack the intellectual acuity to realize it, other forces besides Capitalists have utilized Christmas!
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