Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [8]
The fervor surrounding the “War on Christmas” eventually subsided, and O’Reilly declared in 2007 that “the forces of darkness” had lost.23 He also reassured viewers that secular progressives had not opened up a second front on Easter:
After the thumping that the department stores and all-over crazies took over Christmas, these people say, “You know, I don’t think we want to come up against O’Reilly and these other people on Easter. Let’s just let it go.”24
So much for the all-powerful secular progressive conspiracy.
Conservatives Gone Wild!
But even as the forces of darkness capitulated to O’Reilly, various elements of the formula that O’Reilly popularized spread like a termite infestation through the woodwork of conservative ideology. For example, based on the persecution component of O’Reilly’s formula, Christian victimization became a growth publishing industry with titles like Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christians; Speechless: Silencing the Christians: How Liberals and Homosexual Activists Are Outlawing Christianity (and Judaism) to Force Their Sexual Agenda on America; and the winner in the Self-Important Title category, The Criminalization of Christianity: Read This Book Before It Becomes Illegal! (Five years after release, it’s still available on Amazon.)
Christians are not the only alleged victims of liberal persecution. Other authors have translated the persecution narrative from discrimination against Christians to discrimination against white people. In a book called Liberal Fascism, National Review columnist Jonah Goldberg catalogs the many ways in which liberals resemble fascists, from environmentalism to vegetarianism to hip-hop (hip-hop?), and contends, “The white male is the Jew of liberal fascism.”h Political commentator and one-time presidential candidate Pat Buchanan has written several scary prophesies about the death of white America. In one, he fretted that “by 2050, more than 100 million Hispanics will be in the United States, concentrated in the Southwest that borders on Mexico. As the Serbs are losing Kosovo, so we may have lost the Southwest.”25 Rush Limbaugh called white people “the new oppressed minority.”26 And Bill O’Reilly, ever the narcissist, has taken white persecution personally, complaining that the liberal critics of the New York Times Book Review panned his book Culture Warrior because “they despise the white man power structure.”27
The election of a black president and his nomination of a Latina Supreme Court justice fit perfectly into the narrative of white victimology. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich joined commentators Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh in calling Justice Sotomayor a racist. Limbaugh further suggested that her nomination reflected President Obama’s own racial bigotry, and Glenn Beck accused Obama of harboring “a deep seeded [sic] hatred for white people or the white culture.”i28
Taking it one step further, Beck also applied the white persecution theme to Obama’s health care plan, claiming that it was really just a stealth policy to provide slavery reparations to African Americans by redistributing health insurance benefits from white people. He explained:
[Obama] believes in all the “universal” programs because they “disproportionately affect” people of color. And that’s the best way, he feels, to right the wrongs of the past. These massive programs are Obama brand reparations or in presidential speak: leveling the playing field.29
The specter of health care “redistribution” illustrates the way conservatives like Beck present liberal policies in terms of a zero-sum game. In Beck’s view, guaranteeing heath care is not a way for the country as a whole to take care of its least fortunate; it is a way for the government to take benefits from the white team and give them to the black team.
Other commentators presented an alternative version of the zero-sum game that pitted American citizens against illegal immigrants. Here