We’re told that abusive husbands and the like “rationalize, minimize, and deny” their abuses. Rationalize: “You deserved to be hit,” Minimize: “I hardly hit you at all,” and Deny: “I didn’t actually hit you.”
Now here’s the Washington Post’s Philip Bump on the War on Christmas (Emphases added):
Theoretically, Fox News’s least-serious on-air personality is Greg Gutfeld, the guy who hosts a humor-adjacent program in the channel’s late-night hours. But Gutfeld is continually challenged for that title by the guy who sits to his right on the Fox News show, “The Five”: Jesse Watters.
Watters isn’t unserious simply because he tries to work jokes into his patter, though he does do that (and generally to better effect than Gutfeld). He’s unserious because he’s not serious, because he elevates silly, unimportant issues and coats them with ridiculous rhetoric. It’s what’s helped make him one of the channel’s stars.
On Monday night, Watters again spent a few minutes of his audience’s time focused on a deeply unserious issue, albeit one on which he has well-established credentials: the left’s “war on Christmas.”
There’s not much point in walking through the claims Watters made in the segment, which aired during his prime-time program. He acknowledged that it’s a putative fight he’s been fighting for some time, airing a clip from 2015 in which he accosted a small-town mayor who was suing residents who had an over-the-top, electricity-guzzling Christmas display. The residents won the suit; the mayor won a bunch of hate mail after unwittingly appearing on Fox News. [More]
This whole thing is meant to imply that the War on Christmas doesn’t exist, isn’t important, and shouldn’t be “pushed” by Fox News. What Bump discovers is that Christians are now aware of Christophobia, and discrimination against whites and Christians — and he feels they shouldn’t be.
It’s probably because wokeism is now the focal point that the “war on Christmas” has been shunted to the background. That plus the rise of Donald Trump — who, in the pre-woke era, made “we’re gonna say Christmas again!” an applause line at his 2016 rallies — meant that the issue (such as it is) didn’t have the same energy behind it.
What’s more, the job had been done. Republicans already feel as though Christians are embattled, the sense that Watters hopes to stoke with his segment. In October, YouGov asked Americans how much discrimination different groups face in the United States. Republicans were more likely to say Christians faced at least a fair amount of discrimination than they were to say the same of Jewish people or Black people. (They were more likely to say White people faced discrimination than to say Black people did.)
This is the non-silly part of all of this. A decade-plus of Fox News portraying traditional American values — which is to say the primacy of Christianity — as under attack has had the desired effect. Trump’s rise in national politics has heavily centered on this argument, with Christian conservatives becoming one of his most loyal bases of support.
The thing is, there is a War on Christmas, and it wasn’t started by conservatives or Christians, who are the ones fighting back. There is deliberate and official discrimination against Christians and against white people. And polls, which Philip Bump thinks point to some kind of “false consciousness,” show that people are starting to realize it.
