Every year, up until recently (I thought), the RWNJs from places like the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) and the Murdoch gutter media have maintained that there is a war on Christmas. I wrote about one instance of this back in 2016, when Murdoch’s national budgie cage liner, The Australian, maintained that the Labor Victorian Education Minister was going to ban the singing of Christmas carols. This, of course, turned out to be a lie, and was promptly put down by that Education Minister1. It made whoever wrote the piece in The Australian look like a complete buffoon, at best.
This war on Christmas was averted in 2018 when the idiotic Chris Kenny was made to look even more foolish than usual when the people supposedly changing the lyrics to Christmas carols and waging the supposed war on Christmas were in fact a bunch of Christians who were concerned about climate change2.
There was one war on Christmas that I missed, in 2019, and it can be found in the Daily Cut and Paste (Daily Mail) in which the pretend journalist Stephen Johnson stated that Australians would be banned from having Christmas parties or even using the words ‘mum’ or ‘guys’ at work if corporate activists for political correctness got their way. The Daily Mail blamed the Diversity Council of Australia (DCA). Yet a couple of lines later Johnson states that the term ‘Christmas parties’ will be replaced by the term ‘holiday season drinks’. This was, of course, a lie. The DCA responded with: “At no stage has DCA ever urged bosses not to mention Christmas. We are simply saying that it’s worth remembering that many Australians do not celebrate Christmas religiously, either as followers of non-Christian religions, or as individuals with no religious affiliation, and there is a lot organisations can do to make them feel included at this time of year”3. This is just another instance of the far right media using the dog whistle.
Now the supposed war on Christmas has reared its silly head again. This time it is the poor, benighted IPA mouthpiece, Bella d’Abrera, who I presume has written a laughable piece of drivel in Murdoch’s other Melbourne budgie cage liner, the Hun (Herald Sun). I don’t have a budgie, and have some self-respect, so I do not subscribe to the Hun. However, the IPA provide a link to it via their Twitter account, and they head this link with:
“’The 2021 Census told us that nearly 45% of Australians identify as Christian yet calls to ban Christmas grow louder. It seems ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ includes everyone except Christians,’ said the IPA’s Bella d’Abrera in today’s Herald Sun”4.
While I cannot read the article, I know that there have been no calls to ‘ban Christmas’ just as there have been no such calls previously. As Oliver Caffrey replied with: “‘Every year, like clockwork, the weird right cry out for attention by falsely claiming people are trying to cancel Christmas’ there, fixed it”4. This gets it about right (no pun intended).
What is surprising is that the IPA admits that less than half the population identify as Christian, based on the 2021 census data. Indeed, it is likely that the proportion of the population identifying as Christian may actually be less than that, mostly because the question in the census was considered to be leading5.
What stunned me with the IPA tweet was the photograph of Bella d’Abrera. She clearly was not happy to have the photograph taken. She has the look of ‘why do I have to write this crap’. She is listed as the ‘Director of the Foundations of Western Civilisation Program’. For conservatives, ‘Western Civilisation’ is code for Christian white supremacy. As I have said here before, conservatives live in mortal fear of someone they regard as inferior being considered an equal6.
The Liberal Party have apparently moved further right since being walloped in the federal election, mostly because many of their so-called moderates were defeated by Teals at the time. Electing Peter Dutton as leader didn’t do anything to allay that suspicion of the rightward drift either. The Liberal Party in Victoria, including as it does a fair proportion of cookers and religious nutters, keeps going backward in its quest to form government and they cannot seem to work out why. The funny thing is, the Liberal Party’s boosters in the Murdoch media, most notably on SkyNews, seem to be convinced that going further to the wacky right is what the Liberals need to do to arrest their decline, which could well be terminal. In addition to this, the drivel spouted by such people as d’Abrera seems to be getting more and more unhinged as time passes.
After my item on ‘no war against Christmas, 2018’, I thought that avenue of madness may have been deserted by the IPA or Murdoch, but here we are again. It is not only on this bogus war on Christmas, but just about everything else as well, where they are becoming more unhinged. These RWNJs still deny climate change (they usually quote Dorothea McKellar rather than the scientists in the IPCC), and whine about consideration for others (they call it wokeness), cancel culture (which doesn’t exist despite them whining about it in Murdoch newspapers, unaware of the irony), virtue signalling (which is asserting that a statement made is only to garner approval), political correctness (they seem to believe it is fine to discriminate against or marginalise people), identity politics (which others do, but not these conservative white Christians), and cultural Marxism (which doesn’t exist anyway). The RWNjs are so desperate to get ‘their side’ of politics back in the running that they will say or do anything, no matter how bizarre or out of touch with reality it is. They seem unaware that their activities are likely having the opposite effect.
Sources
- https://blotreport.com/2017/01/20/war-on-christmas/
- https://blotreport.com/2018/12/23/no-war-against-christmas-2018/
- https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7808115/How-Diversity-Council-Australia-advocates-end-Christmas-parties-words-mum-guys.html
- https://twitter.com/TheIPA/status/1605443006395518977
- https://blotreport.com/2022/06/28/and-so-it-continues/
- https://blotreport.com/2022/12/13/fear-and-hatred/
If they quote Dorothea Mackellar, do they include the first verse, with its descriptions of England – green and shaded lanes, grey-blue distance, soft dim skies? Or do they conveniently ignore that bit, which has no suggestion of global warming? If they are like most Australians, they probably do not even know that verse exists.
Yvonne,
I learnt the poem at school, but now only remember the ‘droughts and flooding rains’ and ‘rugged mountain ranges’ and not much else. That is probably because it keeps getting quoted in assorted diatribes by RWNJs