Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [7]
The Plot Heard around the World
O’Reilly’s simple conspiracy formula—slippery slope, secret plot, and persecution—was extremely effective for garnering public attention, galvanizing supporters, and growing his audience. Prior to his 2004 “Christmas Under Siege” program, the idea of a concerted “war” on Christmas had been limited to a fringe website, vdare.com, favored by white supremacists. Once O’Reilly debuted his conspiracy theory on Fox, eager conservatives tripped over one other to join battle against the evil secular progressives. Heedless to the risk of being sued and smeared by Soros and company, conservative commentators fearlessly regurgitated O’Reilly’s three or four examples of Christmas oppression and added their own perverse conspiracy theories.
• December 13: Pat Buchanan blamed “the gay lobby” and insisted that Macy’s generic holiday messages constituted “hate crimes against Christianity.”12
• December 13: Jerry Falwell called the ACLU’s attempts to “purge God from America” a “national crime.”13
• December 16: Rev. Franklin Graham, son of Rev. Billy Graham, told Fox News host Sean Hannity, “There are groups in this country that hate Jesus Christ. They hate God’s son. And they want to do everything to discredit his name, to take his name out of our society.” Hannity replied, “There’s outright hatred and bigotry on a level that I don’t think we have seen in our lifetime.” (Liberal beanbag Alan Colmes said nothing of consequence and was ignored as usual.)14
• December 16: Proving that Canada had not been completely lost to secular drug-loving pedophiles, Judi McLeod of the Canadian Free Press complained of secularism at Target department stores and alleged that “politically correct times have the assassination of the Christmas spirit on radar.” (For the record, there are no Target stores in Canada.)15
• December 17: Charles Krauthammer eruditely blamed “the more deracinated members of religious minorities, brought up largely ignorant of their own traditions, whose religious identity is so tenuous that they feel the need to be constantly on guard against displays of other religions.”16
• December 17: Paul Weyrich, cofounder of the Heritage Foundation, blamed the ACLU and the “militant secularizers” who make up 14 percent of the population.17 (This number is somewhat at odds with O’Reilly’s claim that 90 percent of the population celebrates Christmas.18 O’Reilly not only refused to back down but responded the following year by raising the total to 95 percent.)19
• December 21: From the European front of the war on Christmas, Anthony Browne of the Times, a British daily, blamed the BBC and declared that “Christianity is being insidiously erased from the map.”20
• December 22: Colonel Oliver North imagined the Magi walking along an American highway “accompanied by a vast army of liberal protestors chanting, ‘Hey hey, ho ho, Jesus Christ has got to go.’”21
• December 22: William F. Buckley Jr. drew a careful distinction between the bureaucrats who “have drunk deep of ACLU doctrines” and “genuine anti-Christians: people who wince when Christianity is deferred to, people who hate Catholicism as the axis of Christianity and who will seek any opportunity to hinder or belittle it.”22
And so on. The many blog posts and screeds from obscure fringe publications inspired by O’Reilly’s program were even more hyperbolic. And that was just 2004. By the following Christmas, Fox News anchor John Gibson had written a bestseller entitled The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought, and the Heritage Foundation, which calls itself a think tank, sponsored a symposium to discuss it. Anxious culture warriors founded a new organization to combat the persecution of Christians called the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission (not the most original folks). Christmas 2005 also boasted a few boycotts and more extreme outrage from the original participants and other conservative bigwigs who missed the