Unlike the real forever wars, this one doesn’t require regime change in Washington or elsewhere to officially end.

That era, which gave us the “endless” wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, also gave us one right here at home: the Forever War on Christmas, a never-ending battle of cultural grievance that rages across medium, ideology and subject matter alike. A conflict invented to fill right-wing cable airtime in the early 2000s has expanded to chase the endless boundaries of the social media era, subsuming the rest of the political landscape. Its hazily-defined, Bush-era complaint about encroaching liberal oppression and perfidy is now a part of our political landscape for good, coloring debates from criminal justice reform to election law to foreign policy. The “War on Christmas” has turned out to be simply a battle, a minor skirmish in a far larger war. It hasn’t just survived, it’s taken over.

In Joe Biden’s America, to hear Fox tell it, not even our most anodyne and sentimental traditions are safe from rising crime in blue cities and states governed by bail-happy progressives.Īnd yet: According to a recent poll from Fairleigh Dickinson University, more Americans believe such a “War on Christmas” exists than at any point in the past decade. It wasn’t just an attack on an “American icon,” to quote “Fox & Friends” host Ainsley Earhardt it was direct evidence of a deeper rot in liberal governance. Tucker Carlson declared the fire a “ hate crime.” Correspondent Peter Doocy quizzed White House press secretary Jen Psaki on the subject during a press briefing.

But the rogue arsonist played a perfect part in a narrative that Fox largely invented, and has propagated relentlessly over the past two decades: the “War on Christmas,” a never-ending cultural conflict during which traditional, explicitly Christian celebrations of the holiday season are under assault from the sinister forces of secular pluralism. The fire was almost certainly not a political statement, having been set by a homeless man who recently exposed himself to reporters covering a trial elsewhere. Last week, a random New York City man made his mark on history by allegedly setting ablaze the 50-foot USA-themed Christmas tree outside the Fox News Channel’s headquarters.

Happy holidays christmas tree