Christmas Warfare

(Content warning: Trump, also Alex Jones' face).

"Mine now. China!"

It really is the most tiresome of all conservative talking points this idea that there's a war on the idea of Christmas. Donald Jodocus Trump, the Woody Allen of US presidents, recently used it as a talking point in a speech to the Pseudo-Christian Hypocrisy Values Group (or some such bunch of cretins, anyway) to huge applause because these people are so desperate to feel oppressed its pathetic.

Of course, Trump had to go as far as possible in making his goat-bothering audience feel as masochistically oppressed as possible by claiming you never heard anyone say Christmas anymore. Bearing in mind this is the same man who recently claimed he invented the word “fake” we should be grateful he didn't claim that Christmas was itself a Trump-branded event.

There is no war on Christmas.

Every Western government maintains Christmas as a bank holiday (or whatever the local equivalent is); every corporation that sells product to the public spends millions upon millions on Christmas branding to the point that a particular Coca-Cola advert is literally considered an absolutely mandatory component of the season; every broadcaster has dozens of special projects made for broadcast over Christmas; an entire Hollywood genre exists to make movies about Christmas.

No other holiday gets that. Easter comes close which is, again, a Christian festival.

But these people are so desperate to feel oppressed that they'll take whatever they can get. They see people who are actually marginalised getting attention and concessions and actual legal rights and they feel left out because they have the collective emotional maturity of a five year old noticing their baby sibling (gender neutral phrasing there, suck it, social conservatives!) is getting more attention than they are.

So they latch on to the fact that the Starbucks coffee cups have “Happy Holidays” written on them instead of “Merry Christmas” (yes, this is an actual thing these people lost their shit over last year, I am not even slightly joking) because this is such a blow against the fact that the whole of Western society rearranges itself to accommodate this one religious observance. In their minds the mere acknowledgement that other winter festivals exist (and they exist in almost every culture) and that people might celebrate them is an act of terrible censorship and probably also somehow tied in with issues of ethics in games journalism.

Its fetishistic, this desire they have to be downtrodden, it really is. I remember the good old days when socially conservative pseudo-Christians just stuck to being self-loathing closeted homosexuals. Bonus points if they were also a televangelist!

"Lister... DO. YOU. HAVE. A CAT!?"

Also, is it just me or is Alex Jones (who claimed recently he lost custody of his son but we all know that was just a child actor hired to garner public sympathy. I know, I was shocked when I found out too) starting to look like Captain Hollister from Red Dwarf?

Not relevant but I was on a roll.