Announcing VDARE.com's War Against Christmas 2010 Competition!
WAR AGAINST CHRISTMAS COMPETITION 2010: [blog] [I] [2] [3] [4] [5] - See also: War Against Christmas 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999
Announcing VDARE.com's War Against Christmas 2010 Competition!
By Peter Brimelow aka. the Christmas Crank
(Yeah, yeah, but cranks rule the world. I learned that watching the late Jude Wanniski preaching the virtues of tax rate cuts to the secretaries and typewriters in the offices of the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page when I incongruously guested there in the summer of '78. Did you know that tax rate cuts cure the common cold? And that tax rates were, in fact, cut?)
Let's get the announcement out of the way:
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" and a 2010 VDARE.COM anthology to whoever reports the most outrageous attempt to abolish Christmas in 2010. 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!
I got John O'Sullivan to start a War Against Christmas Competition in the mid-1990s, when he was Editor of National Review. (I called it "War Against Christmas", but "War On Christmas" has obviously won out in popular usage, so I've adapted, with characteristic grace).
The last NR competition ran in 1997, at which time William F. Buckley for his own discreditable reasons had already fired O'Sullivan, but not yet leaked the cover story that he was "resigning to write a book." The War Against Christmas Competition was promptly dropped, along with the cause of immigration reform—not coincidentally. In 2000, NR itself actually published a "Holiday Edition."
VDARE.COM was launched on Christmas Eve 1999, and one of our first postings was Clinton HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo's elimination of the word "Christmas" from HUD's "Celebration of Holiday Traditions" party. In 2000, we re-started the War Against Christmas competition.
By an amazing coincidence, 2000 now seems to have been NR's Nativity nadir. In 2001, Christmas reappeared at NR—if only, a VDARE.COM reader mordantly suggested, because Christians were now needed to fight a war. In 2003, to our great amusement, NR's Jay Nordlinger actually started a War Against Competition in his column. (This was the—rather weak—result). In 2004, however, he announced "I'm not going to go on any, or many, can't-say-'Christmas' tirades this year. That is my gift to you!" (Just what we needed).
You can read our annotated version of the story of VDARE.com's War Against Christmas competition as told in 2008 by fashionable left journalist Max Blumenthal in the Daily Beast here.
Blumenthal (who last year was unscrupulously ripped off without attribution to either of us by Time's Alex Altman) was trying to discredit War Against Christmas Bigfeet like Bill O'Reilly by alleging that it was invented by evil white supremacist dybbuks e.g. us. But of course the War Against Christmas reprises far more significantly the unmistakably similar Communist campaign in post-Revolutionary Russia. Why doesn't the MSM talk about that?
However, the truth is that no single group invented the War On Christmas backlash. In retrospect, it's now clear that the backlash—we sometimes call the whole thing the "Khristmaskampf", after the Kulturkampf, Bismarck's drive to eliminate Catholic influence in the German Empire—was a precursor of 2009's Town Hall insurrections and 2010's Tea Parties, and before that intense public reaction that stopped the Bush Administration's Amnesty drives in 2006 and 2007. All were spontaneous, grass-roots, leaderless-resistance movements that took the entire American elite, liberal and "conservative", entirely by surprise. (Ludicrously though the latter has been scrambling to catch up).
Another example: the extraordinary popular response to Sarah Palin—not, unfortunately, based on much she's actually said, but all the more significant for that very reason.
And, above all of course, the Republicans' unexpected resurrection in the 2010 mid-term elections, including the recapture of the U.S. House of Representatives.
The root cause in all cases is the same: an American elite which is increasingly divergent, culturally and even ethnically, from the rest of the country.
This divergence became starkly obvious with President Obama's election in 2008—55% of American whites, a.k.a. the people who would have been described as "Americans" until well within living memory, voted for his opponent. Absent the demographic shift brought about by immigration policy, that would have been enough to elect John McCain president as recently as 1976. This dramatic and completely undebated dispossession is, at last and quite naturally, provoking unprecedented if implicit unease.
So unprecedented, indeed, that it raises the specter of imminent profound convulsion in American politics. In 2010, the GOP got 60% of the white vote, its highest share for many years (not without reason). The White Giant is stirring.
Which at some level explains the increasingly hysterical elite reaction to the War On Christmas backlash as the decade wore on. Got to keep those peasants down!
The elite's determination to keep the peasants down explains the very interesting Khristmaskampf development of 2009: a sudden outbreak of Main Stream Media proclamations that the War On Christmas was now "over"—or at least that there's a truce or ceasefire. The key example, amplified through the MainStream Media echo chamber: Peace on Earth in Our Time: The "war on Christmas" is basically over, by Christopher Beam, Slate, Dec. 17, 2009. (Slate doesn't seem to have addressed the War this year).
We've seen this eerie unanimity before. In 2006, our friend Ryan Kennedy wrote us about the then-new phenomenon of War On Christmas Denial:
"It's amazing how the national debate is so uniform. Even up here in Anchorage, AK we have liberal pundits uniformly insisting there is no war against X-mas. There must be some secret meeting they all attend."
My reaction was: Yes, Ryan—there are secret meetings!
When I published Alien Nation in 1995, I was inclined to sophisticated socio-psychological explanations of why liberals move in concert—what Joe Sobran used to call "the Hive". By 2006, I just thought it was all a goldarn conspiracy.
By then, I thought that there were indeed memos, blacklists, organized activist networks—not least because VDARE.COM had seen them in action. What else do these lavishly-funded Political Correctness enforcers do with their time and money anyway? How different is it is from the Anti-Defamation League's arrogant annual directive to public schools on what it claims is "The December Dilemma".
This, of course, was before 2010's Journolist scandal.
Now I am confident that there's a reason the Main Stream Media absolutely suppresses any mention of a possible anti-unemployment immigration moratorium; or of the mathematical fact that the GOP would be better off appealing to its white a.k.a. American base rather than whoring after Hispanics (what we call the "Sailer Strategy"<
