Conclusion: Militarizing Politics

In 2003, Bill O’Reilly declared a “War on Christmas.” Or, to be more precise, he declared that there already was a war on Christmas being conducted by “liberals” (sometimes “secular progressives”), and therefore “we” had to fight back. Just why “secular progressives” would care very much about Christmas, let alone engage in war about it, might seem puzzling, and so O’Reilly explained the long-term goal of this war:To anyone familiar with the principles of argumentation, or even Canada, this description is absurd. And yet O’Reilly was not the first person to insist that there was already a “war on Christmas,” nor that specific and normal policy disagreements should really be understood as part of “liberals’ war” on America (Coulter 2004; Feder 2022), business (Lin 2022); Christians (Media Matters “Fox News” 2022); Christmas (Gibson 2006; Kassam 2015; O’Reilly 2004, 2015); conservatives (Hanson 2019; “Oversight Project” 2023; “We Have Entered” 2022); the family (Stoll 2015); men (“Coming War” 2020; Venker, 2015); the police (Grassley 2021; Limbaugh, 2021a, 2021b; MacDonald 2022); religion (Gregg 2020); Republicans (Knefel 2022); the rich (Perkins 2014); the right (Hanson 2019); statues (Robertson 2018); suburban property values (Limbaugh 2020a); Trump (Goodwin 2023); the unborn (Cassidy 2023); white males (Lifson 2017); white people (Cegielski 2021; Limbaugh 2020b; Massie 2017); women (Limbaugh 2021c); “you and your family” (O’Reilly, qtd. in Stabile 2020).