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. “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.’”
He tried to get the National Review interested, but a shift in editors around the end of 1997 put the kibosh on that, and the NR only ran one column on it, in 2001. Brimelow was pushed out of NR with help from younger conservatist columnists like Jonah Goldberg, and went on to found the webzine VDare.com, the leading anti-immigrationist website named after the first British child born in North America. The irony here is palpable.
He attracted several like-thinkers and started blaming (who else?) the Jews for his imaginary War on Christmas.
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,”
Phht! Coffee all over the monitor here! Channukah, really? The "Jewish Kwanzaa?"
I think I just got dumber.
So, anyway, nobody paid a whole lot of attention to Mr. Brimelow until the World Trade Center fell and all of a sudden it became imperative to our very survival to cultivate racism and invade countries for being the wrong color and having oil. Then, suddenly, the War on Christmas took off. Following what David Neiwert calls the "transmission belt," this massive lie flowed from Brimelow to Rush Limbaugh to Bill O'Reilly, who made it his pet issue.
Of the conservatives who once dismissed his Christmas crusade, Brimelow remarked with a self-satisfied chuckle, “They went over to the dark side.”
Oh, wow. That statement is just packed with smugness and self-righteousness. How can someone be so self-congratulatory about being so wrong?
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