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Dec. 25, 2020 - The Michael Knowles Show

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"The War On Christmas: A History" | Classic Episode

The battle rages on! Please enjoy this look back on a classic episode of The Michael Knowles Show "Ep. 71 - The War On Christmas: A History." Merry Christmas! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	Hey everybody, Michael Knowles here, host of The Michael Knowles Show.
	One thing I know a lot of people like to do at Christmas is take a look back.
	You know, go back and look at old scrapbooks and photographs and family movies.
	So we're going to do the same thing.
	We're going to go all the way back to episode 71 of this show, years ago, to the war on Christmas, a history.
	I know a lot of conservatives even deny that the war on Christmas exists.
	All the leftists deny that the war on Christmas exists, but it does.
	So, for your delight, for your edification, for the cause of fighting the war on Christmas and defending the Christmas side of that, in which I consider myself a three-star general, please enjoy this classic episode, and Merry Christmas to everybody.
	Today I assume the role of candy cane chomping Douglas MacArthur in The War on Christmas.
	Does it exist?
	Are we winning?
	I will explain why the war on Christmas really matters.
	And I will be wearing this helmet the whole time in case any lefties try to break in and attack me with euphemistic language.
	Plus, the mailbag.
	I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
	Is there a war on Christmas?
	Of course there's a war on Christmas.
	Stop trying to be a cool guy and get the New York Times to like you by pretending there isn't.
	There obviously is.
	It's now fashionable in some conservative circles where people care what the New York Times thinks to say that the war on Christmas is some crazy illusion of...
	I'm not that kind of conservative.
	No, no.
	I'm educated and fancy.
	And I think, wait, wait, don't tell me is clever.
	I'm not one of those middle state rubes who pays attention to the degraded culture belched out every year by our sophisticated betters on the coasts.
	Stop it.
	Stop it.
	You're embarrassing yourself.
	Of course there is a war on Christmas.
	To begin, here's the first bit of evidence.
	Barack Obama struck the word Christmas from the White House Christmas card.
	A quick look back through history shows this is not the norm.
	Calvin Coolidge wrote in his 1927 White House Christmas card, FDR wrote some variation of Merry Christmas from the President and Mrs.
	Roosevelt each of the 150 years he reigned in the White House.
	Harry Truman wrote, quote, As 1950 ebbs to its close, our hearts turn once more to Bethlehem and to the coming of a little child, the divine infant that brought love to a weary world.
	Six paragraphs later, six paragraphs later, he concluded, quote, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace and goodwill toward men.
	Eisenhower wrote a curt...
	Typical season's greetings for Christmas and New Year.
	JFK, Happy Christmas.
	The pieces of LBJ's card available still don't show the wording, but given his preference for four-letter epithets, that's probably for the best.
	Language on the other cards is hard to track down as well until we get to George W. Bush who included verses from Psalms on the Christmas card.
	Then we get to Barack Obama, who not only struck mention of Christmas entirely, but according to his own White House social secretary, tried to ban the creche, the nativity scene, from the East Room of the White House.
	Now, why would you do that, you ask?
	Why would he want to do that?
	because they wanted to make Christmas more, quote, inclusive.
	That's the line offered, by the way.
	That's how you know that there is a war on Christmas.
	School districts will replace Merry Christmas and Happy New Year with the vague happy holidays, retail outlets, work environments.
	Christmas parties have become vague holiday parties.
	In many circles, particularly in the cultural centers of the country, to say Merry Christmas has become a political act that expresses to the retail worker or the acquaintance your political and politically incorrect point of view.
	And if you harp on this long enough, as I do, as I do every year, you will inevitably get the same reply.
	Well, yeah, but why shouldn't the greeting be more inclusive?
	You know, not everybody celebrates Christmas, you know, and that's the moving of the goalposts.
	First there wasn't a war on Christmas, now there is, but it doesn't matter.
	That's how you know.
	The other trick that those who deny the cultural movement will say is that it isn't a war.
	The language, it's hyperbolic.
	It's ridiculous.
	There isn't a war.
	You don't say.
	There aren't guns.
	That's true.
	There aren't tanks and bullets.
	Christmas is not literally being cut down by machine gun fire.
	That's because the war on Christmas is a figure of speech, much like the war on poverty, say.
	Poverty is not being cut down by bullets because, like Christmas, it isn't material.
	What is meant by the, quote, war on Christmas is a battle of language and culture.
	There is a belligerent group of left-wing cultural warriors which seeks to replace clear, traditional, precise language, Christmas, with vague, meaningless euphemisms like happy holidays and season's greetings.
	Of course, both phrases have been around for a long time.
	But whereas in the past they referred specifically to Christmas and New Year's, like Eisenhower's Christmas card Seasons Greetings for Christmas and New Year, now they serve as a replacement for the politically correct term, what the modern mind considers the grave offense of Christmastime, Merry Christmas.
	But aren't there other major holidays during Christmas time beside Christmas and New Year's?
	This is usually what they ask.
	Not really.
	There are holidays, to be sure, but no major ones.
	The closest contender we have is Hanukkah, which is the Jewish festival of lights.
	But while Hanukkah is indeed an ancient holiday, it dates back about 2,000 years, it is a relatively minor holiday.
	Major Jewish holidays are biblical.
	They feature restrictions on work.
	Because Hanukkah is non-biblical, there are few religious restrictions on work.
	According to historian Diane Ashton, Hanukkah rose to prominence in America as it did, not in the rest of the world, because of two reform rabbis in 19th century Cincinnati who worried their children had little connection to the synagogue.
	Before that, there is little record of Hanukkah celebrations.
	The rabbis modeled the celebration in gift-giving after Christmas.
	As Ashton explains, quote, That's Hanukkah.
	The far less credible pretender is Kwanzaa, which is a socialist contrivance invented by a criminal L.A. City College Africana Studies professor named Malana Karenga in 1966.
	He created Kwanzaa to be a holiday specifically for black Americans, even though black Americans already celebrated Christmas.
	Ironically, while virtually all African slaves were brought to America from the west coast of Africa, Kwanzaa is a Swahili word meaning first fruits that originated in East Africa, which means none of the slaves brought to America would have understood it.
	Now, one of the seven principles of Kwanzaa is communism, Ujamaa, cooperative economics, and Milana Karenga himself was sentenced to prison in 1971 for felonious assault and false imprisonment after he sexually assaulted and tortured multiple women.
	As the LA Times reported, he ordered them to strip naked, whipped them with an electrical cord, and beat them with a karate baton.
	Karenga then placed a hot soldering iron in one woman's mouth and against her face and tightened her big toe in a vice.
	He finally put detergent and running hoses in their mouths and hit them on the head with toasters.
	As the Black Power movement of the 1970s has waned, so too has the celebration of the holiday.
	On the high end of estimates, 0.3% of Americans acknowledge the supposed holiday.
	That rate continues to decline.
	So why pretend Christmastime does not center around Christmas?
	Why pretend there are so many other major holidays on equal footing?
	There's New Year on January 1st.
	And we've long said, good tiding for Christmas and a happy new year.
	There's Hanukkah, a relatively minor holiday.
	But by the way, we don't say happy holidays instead of happy Labor Day, even though Rosh Hashanah, which is a far more important Jewish holiday than Hanukkah, sometimes occurs around the same time.
	You don't say that.
	We don't say happy holidays or season's greetings instead of happy Columbus Day, even though Yom Kippur, another much more important Jewish holiday, sometimes occurs around that time.
	Well, actually, now we don't say Happy Columbus Day either.
	We say Blessed Indigenous Peoples Day or something like that.
	That's another story.
	There is Kwanzaa, a virtually non-existent holiday.
	What else is there?
	There's Boxing Day, which no one in the United States celebrates.
	There's the Winter Solstice, which people pretend is a thing, but nobody celebrates.
	And of course, it isn't about the celebrants of Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or the Winter Solstice who are waging the war on Christmas.
	It's the atheist left who constantly seeks to replace clear, vivid language with bizarre secular euphemisms.
	This is the essence of political correctness.
	The essence of political correctness is to replace clear language with euphemisms to remove the strength of that language.
	So we have abortion.
	Abortion isn't the killing of babies in the womb.
	It's women's reproductive health.
	Assisted suicide isn't killing the old and the sick.
	It's euthanasia.
	Euthanasia is a word that literally means good death.
	The good day, you know, it's good.
	It's nice.
	So it's no surprise that his political correctness reached peak potency in the late 1990s and early 2000s, We see the war on Christmas.
	Denver banned religious floats from its Christmas parade.
	New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg displayed the city's holiday tree.
	Major department stores like Macy's removed references to Christmas.
	Public schools began removing Christian symbols from Christmastime display all around this time.
	How coincidental.
	Now, the left alternately denies that the war on Christmas exists, and then when they can't deny it any longer, they say it doesn't matter.
	Who cares?
	Who cares?
	It's just language.
	You're just arguing over semantics.
	Sure, but semantics means meaning.
	If the language doesn't matter, then why are the war on Christmas belligerents so insistent on changing the traditional, clear, and precise language?
	If it doesn't matter, then great.
	Great.
	That's perfect.
	Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
	Forget about Happy Holidays.
	But of course language matters.
	Of course.
	Those who insist on the bizarre, vague euphemisms, they know precisely that.
	Because politics sits downstream of culture.
	You know, who else knows that is President Trump.
	Here he is on the campaign trail.
	You know, we're getting near that beautiful Christmas season that people don't talk about anymore.
	They don't use the word Christmas because it's not politically correct.
	You go department stores and they'll say Happy New Year and they'll say other things and it'll be red.
	They'll have it painted, but they don't say, well, guess what?
	We're saying Merry Christmas again.
	This was a great promise.
	People didn't really take it seriously because they don't take these language issues seriously.
	But here is President Trump as president.
	The Christmas story begins 2000 years ago with a mother, a father, their baby son, and the most extraordinary gift of all, the gift of God's love for all of humanity.
	Whatever our beliefs, we know that the birth of Jesus Christ and the story of this incredible life forever changed the course of human history.
	Each and every year at Christmas time, we recognize that the real spirit of Christmas is not what we have.
	It's about who we are.
	Each one of us is a child of God.
	That is the true source of joy this time of the year.
	That is what makes every Christmas merry.
	And now, as the President of the United States, it's my tremendous honor to finally wish America and the world a very Merry Christmas.
	There's nothing like just sitting here with a little candy cane pipe and watching that.
	That is pretty good.
	And there's good news.
	The great news in the war on Christmas is that clear language and tradition are finally winning after a decade or a decade and a half.
	According to a 2005 Gallup poll, 41% of respondents deferred to Happy Holidays over Merry Christmas.
	Ten years later, a similar survey, albeit through a different research center, found that number had dropped to just 25%.
	Now, the last two years have brought a cultural exuberance to the right, and it's given us myriad early Christmas presents.
	We've got tax reform, originalist judges, responsible foreign policy, massive deregulation, Obamacare mandate repeal.
	The list goes on and on.
	Now, all of this has been possible because of a cultural shift in the country, away from insidious euphemisms and political correctness, the pinnacle of insidious euphemisms.
	Now is not the time to retreat or seek the approval of the New York Times.
	David McCullough observed that to write well is to think clearly, and that's why it's so hard.
	Don't give in to fashionably muddled thinking, especially around the incarnation of the divine logic himself.
	I'm going to put down my candy cane pipe, and we're going to get into the mailbag.
	First question from David.
	Hi, Michael.
	First, I'd like to point out I'm a big fan of your show.
	Thanks.
	You had made an argument for venerating Mary.
	I understand having great respect to Mary as the woman chosen by God to bear Jesus in human form, but I'm curious as to how does praying to Mary not conflict with the first two commandments?
	I myself am a Christian and base my faith on scripture and use scripture as the basis to evaluate practices, ideologies, etc.
	Thanks, David.
	A good time of year to be asking that question.
	You know, I think a lot of this boils down to this question that some Protestants ask, which is, why would you pray to anybody?
	Why not just pray directly to Jesus?
	Why would you pray to saints?
	Or why would you have people on earth pray to you?
	In Revelation chapter 5, here's a verse.
	And when he had taken it, the four living creatures and the 24 elders fell down before the Lamb.
	Each one had a harp, and they were holding golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of God's people.
	So we have the saints offering prayers to God in heaven.
	They're offering prayers for what?
	They're not offering prayers for themselves.
	They're in heaven.
	They're offering prayers for other people.
	So as early as the first century of the Christian tradition, we see people asking for intercession, praying for intercession, and we have the city of God, the saints who are in heaven, praying for those of us who aren't there yet or who need their prayers.
	We have 1 Timothy from Paul, which is pseudepigraphal, but...
	It might tell you something.
	Certainly, we still read 1 Timothy.
	"First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgiving be made for all men, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life, godly and respectful in every way.
	This is good and pleasing to God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth." Now Paul asks others to pray for him all the time.
	Romans, Ephesians, Colossians, 1 Thessalonians, 2 Thessalonians.
	And he prayed for others.
	We see that in 2 Thessalonians.
	Christ himself tells us to pray for others.
	He says, quote, Why wouldn't he tell them?
	I'll just have them pray to me directly.
	No, he says you have to pray for others.
	Pray to whom?
	Pray to him.
	Jesus regularly supplies for one person based on the faith of another person.
	So in Matthew, we see Christ says, O woman, great is your faith.
	Be it done for you as you desire, and her daughter is healed.
	So it's not the daughter praying.
	It's someone interceding for the daughter and praying, and based on the woman's faith, the daughter...
	The daughter is healed.
	We don't hear about the daughter's faith.
	We only hear about the mother's faith.
	Another in Matthew.
	Lord, have mercy on my son, for he has seizures and he suffers terribly.
	In Mark, teacher, I brought my son to you, that he has a spirit that makes him mute.
	In Luke, do not fear, only believe, and she, your daughter, will be well.
	So one thing we also know from James is that the prayers of the righteous work especially well.
	So James says, the prayer of a righteous man has great power in its effects.
	We know that Mary is quite righteous.
	There's the Immaculate Conception.
	She was selected to be the Ark of the New Covenant, to give birth to the Incarnation, to our risen Lord.
	Seems to me she would be a good person to pray for you as well.
	I think that's a lot of words.
	I think probably you could answer that question by saying she's the mother of Jesus.
	She's the mother of God.
	I hope that clears it up a little bit because very often I think people say, well, I don't think we should do these rituals or these traditions or have this liturgy because it's not in Scripture.
	But actually, it is in Scripture.
	It does come from Scripture.
	The liturgy comes from Scripture.
	And you just have to read a little more broadly or more closely to see exactly how that fits in.
	It's not always clear to people who aren't in the tradition itself.
	Next question from Bridget.
	Hey, Michael.
	So I've made a bit of a political come around in 2016 due to all the election craziness.
	I was pretty far to the left in most ways and still am on a lot of economical issues, but I've recently become more devout in my Catholic faith and have changed my position from pro-choice to pro-life.
	I'm afraid to tell my pro-choice friends and family because I'm afraid they'll ostracize me and I was wondering if you have any advice.
	I do.
	This is hard.
	This is a hard thing.
	It happened to me.
	I was pro-choice back when I was – I wasn't really left-wing, but I was pro-choice.
	I'm from New York.
	New York Republicans are just not terribly conservative.
	As I got more conservative, it was clear to me that abortion isn't good and we shouldn't have – Have it be a legal thing.
	Diana Schaub, who's a bioethicist, convinced me of this over a lunch.
	And when it happened, I didn't know how to tell my friends.
	The way you have to do it is two things.
	Unapologetically and patiently.
	Don't apologize.
	The left sees pro-life as anti-woman.
	They really earnestly believe that.
	It's not just some joke.
	And so you have to be unapologetic.
	You have nothing to apologize for.
	But you also have to...
	Be patient with them.
	They're not going to understand.
	Be calm.
	Usually the first person to get angry and start screaming in an argument is the one who doesn't understand really what you're arguing over.
	So be patient.
	Be calm about it.
	And Louis C.K. had a good bit on this.
	Louis C.K., the now disgraced comedian, but he had a good bit.
	He said, you know, abortion, I don't think it's a big deal.
	It's like going to the bathroom.
	It's just going to the bathroom.
	It's not a big deal.
	Or it's killing a baby.
	It's either completely meaningless like excretion, or it's murdering a baby.
	And I think you have to explain those premises.
	Because if you explain those premises, and it's perfectly logical and compassionate from there, and then you just debate the premise.
	Is this...
	Baby in the womb.
	Is it living?
	Yes.
	Is it human?
	Yeah.
	It's not a dog.
	It's not a giraffe.
	It's human.
	So is it independent or is it part of the mother?
	It's independent.
	It has its own genome.
	It will develop into its own personality.
	It has a beating heart within not very many days.
	It's obviously independent, or separate rather.
	It's obviously dependent for food on its mother.
	And so if all of those things are true, then the question is, Are you willing to risk what is the moral equivalent of murder on the premise that it doesn't yet have human dignity when you're going to abort it?
	If you put it in those terms, I think you might not bring them totally to understanding, but they'll begin to understand the premise.
	That's it for now.
	The Daily Wire hopes you're having a terrific Christmas holiday.
	We will be back January 4th with new episodes of The Michael Knowles Show.

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