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"<