Christmas, as it is popularly understood, is a deeply conservative holiday. It is literally about the birth of the Christian saviour, and there is a declared war against it by woke liberals who wish nothing more than to acknowledge a world outside of baby Jesus and His manger. It is a holiday deeply embedded with tradition, symbolism, and in-group community – big conservative values! For those who know me or have read this blog for any length of time, you’ll know me as an anarchistic atheist who disdains power and hierarchy, whether religious or secular. You would assume that someone with such radical beliefs would be antagonistic toward Christmas and all its consumerist, nativist ideology.
You would be wrong.
It was a revelatory moment when I realized that I was a Christmas conservative. Obviously not in the mainstream sense with either of those two phenomena, given the birth of Christ holds no meaning in my life nor do I believe churches ought to be exempt from taxation. I just like to celebrate the way that I’ve always celebrated. Big family affair, some gifts, a real tree, Christmas Eve on Sesame Street, and an immutable canon of movies and songs.
Elf on a Shelf became a thing much later in my life, so I think it’s tacky and creates additional lies that must be maintained on top of an already dubious holiday tradition of Santa Claus and the north pole. They keep making Christmas movies, some of them even fairly well-done, but as much as they might involve the saving of Christmas from a variety of yuletide threats, they will never be truly Christmas to me. People literally mark the beginning of the holiday season with the emergence of Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas is You, rising from the rotting leaves of fall to usher in the season of unending retail insanity. I do not consider it a Christmas classic since it did not come out early enough in my life for me to have had it embedded in the core of my Christmas spirit. I’m not so much a Grinch about Christmas as I am a stodgy, old curmudgeon, set in my ways, whinging about the kids these days who know nothing about what Christmas is truly about – how I personally have celebrated it since I was a kid!
The greatest consequence of global warming is she keeps escaping every single time!
I see value in the way that I celebrate Christmas. It’s important to me, and I wouldn’t want to have to change my ways because I see this holiday as sacred, in my own secular way. My community is small and familial, but meaningful. I have my traditions, my important symbols, and my cherished values deeply entwined with this holiday. I’m hopeful to be able to pass down my traditions to my currently hypothetical children. As much as anyone can be a conservative, I am with Christmas.
When I realized that I was a Christmas conservative, it formed within me a hitherto unknown empathy for the right-wing. It’s nice to have nice things. Change isn’t an inherent good. Progress is nuanced, and blasphemy can truly sting in the yearly attacks of a 90s pop-diva. Maybe the values of typical conservatives don’t come from what they abhor; maybe the values of typical conservatives, perhaps, mean a little bit more…
Some say his bipartisanship grew three sizes that day!
I think the biggest difference in a Christmas conservative like myself and a traditional conservative is that modern Christmas is very clearly diluted in its practice and has been embraced by secularism rather broadly. People get upset when stores have “Happy Holidays” in the window, but they’re not putting it up during Ramadan, are they? Much in the same way that everyone acknowledges that this is the year 2025, we celebrate a Christian holiday without too much fretting over the minute details of its religiosity. It is patently obvious to me that my puritanical Christmas beliefs come from my individual upbringing, but less so to regular conservatives that their own values come from the same place. There are as many Christianities as there are Christians; it’s just that no one acknowledges that, so it’s easier to want to impose a false doctrinal unity on everyone else.
I don’t care if you listen to Mariah Carey, during Christmastime or otherwise. You can sneakily move your elf from shelf to shelf, and I’ll keep my opinions about it to myself. We can still be friends if you don’t like Home Alone, though I won’t necessarily trust the movie recommendations you might make in the future. The need to impose is where I break from the broader conservative movement. Other people don’t need to adhere to my lifestyle; that would be silly. Much in the same way a man kissing another man doesn’t infringe on my ability to kiss a woman, nor does someone born a man identifying as a woman impinge on my own lifelong masculinity, I don’t carry the fear and insecurity inherent in typical political conservatism that needs a mono-culture in order to feel safe in their practices. I can only empathize to a point.
How badly does one need to pee in order to be embrace inclusivity?
So this holiday season, celebrate however you like – or don’t at all! I am neither your real nor your hypothetical father!
Kyle Rittenhouse was 17 years old when he decided to travel to Kenosha, Wisconsin with the intention of using a weapon to “protect businesses” against Black Lives Matter protesters in the most cursed year of our Lord, 2020. Whether or not any businesses were protected by his actions, Rittenhouse did end up using his weapon and killed three people on his quixotic quest to protect the capital of the ownership class. While he was infamously found Not Guilty due to self-defense, those three human beings would still be alive today if Rittenhouse prioritized lives over property and decided to stay home – or even just to travel unarmed. He made the choice to create the opportunity for death to happen, and it did.
For his ethical crimes, if not his legal ones, Rittenhouse was feted by the Republican party with house representatives stumbling over each other to offer him internships, including Matt Gaetz who did so even before the verdict had been established. He received a standing ovation at a Turning Point USA conference. He met with President Trump. He was embraced by the Right for a single act of extreme violence – not in spite of it, because of it.
Escaping legal ramifications for being a terrible person? No wonder they got along!
Daniel Penny was 24 years old when he decided to use a chokehold on a homeless man in distress on a New York City subway train in the still pretty cursed year of our Lord, 2023. Jordan Neely was unarmed, and is quoted as saying, “I don’t have food, I don’t have a drink, I’m fed up. I don’t mind going to jail and getting life in prison. I’m ready to die.” He threw garbage at people, but did not touch anyone. He had a diagnosis of schizophrenia. While intervention was literally being begged for, the kind provided was that of a marine who only had one kind of training. Daniel Penny killed Jordan Neely.
Similar to Rittenhouse, Penny’s acquittal by the courts was widely celebrated by the Republican party. Penny had protected a train full of citizens, after all! He was invited to a football game by Donald Trump and J.D. Vance for his troubles, his accomplishment identical to that of Rittenhouse – he had killed someone.
Quick! Someone give him the Crippler Crossface!
Luigi Mangione was 26 years old when he allegedly decided to murder UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson in the now-tired-repetition-of-this-bit, 2024. He wrote “delay, deny, depose” on the bullet casings used in the killing in likely reference to how insurance companies obfuscate claims to avoid paying them. More than 26,000 Americans die from not having health insurance each year, and Mangione acted in direct response to this as, per his manifesto, “the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”
Mangione is loved by the internet in ways that appear to transcend partisanship. Yet, in terms of established politicians, Donald Trump has called for the death penalty. Murder is back to being bad again. Bernie Sanders, the leftest of the left in terms of establishment politicians, condemned the killing and said that the way to make change is through mass movements, not murder. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the Robin to Sanders’s Batman, said the killing wasn’t justified, but that she understands people’s unsympathetic response to it given how health insurance works in America. There has been a broad attempt to connect the Democratic party to this kind of retributive violence, but the connection simply does not exist. No one is going to invite Luigi Mangione to anything.
Can you even imagine Luigi getting a beer with like, Barack Obama or George Soros or something? Fuck off!
What’s the difference? It’s not like if Mangione is found Not Guilty that it’s going to change anything. Remember that Matt Gaetz asked Rittenhouse to be an intern before the trial was even over, and that the President is a convicted felon. Trump pardoned all of the January 6th insurrectionists and calls them heroes and patriots. Legal responsibility has nothing to do with it. The difference is ideology.
I think it’s important to acknowledge here that all killings are political. If a gangster kills another gangster over a drug deal gone wrong, that’s political. Society has made the choice to criminalize drugs, therefore drug dealers have no civil recourse to resolve their business disputes. Politics also withheld other opportunities from these young gangsters, and incentivized alternative methods of income due to the meagre offerings of the state. We’ve collectively decided that we prefer to have dead gangsters and their collateral damage in order to make a statement on the morality of drugs: they’re bad (except alcohol, sugar, gambling, etc.). Of course, dead gangsters are political killings in the way that American health insurance kills tens of thousands of people a year; the politics is hidden behind the veil of the status quo. People don’t think about the politics because these deaths have been normalized and neutralized. What’s fascinating is that Republicans brought politics into the limelight in these instances. The difference between Rittenhouse, Penny, and Mangione is that Republicans have openly welcomed murder into their fold, and Democrats have not.
Gandalf the White!? Gandalf the Woke!
Republicans could have looked at Rittenhouse and Penny and said that, while it’s important to recognize the value of property and the comfort of (*cough* white) citizens, it’s a tragedy what happened, and we deeply regret how these encounters unfolded. Much in the same way that progressive Democrats talked about Mangione, Republicans could have talked about Rittenhouse and Penny. They chose not to. These killings could have remained relatively neutral and normalized, but by dint of actually embracing these killers, Republicans brought overt capital-p Politics into the discussion. Through the way they’ve responded, Republicans have shown that this is their preference. They are building a politics wherein murder is not just acceptable, but actively encouraged. These killers were rewarded for their deeds.
To be completely upfront, this was the extent of what I wanted to write about this topic. As the length of time between my posts suggests, I tend to procrastinate quite heavily when it comes to putting my blog ideas online. In and of themselves, these killers represent rather well the radical extremity of the Republican party in comparison to the milquetoast Democrats when it comes to how far they’re willing to go in implementing their respective social ideologies. However, as I’m sure you’re aware, there has been a bit of a development in this topic since I began mulling it over.
What could it be??
Charlie Kirk was killed in the back-to-being-funny-again year of our Lord, 2025. Who did it and their motives is irrelevant. Everyone unanimously agreed immediately that this was done because of Kirk’s political views; the killer has been mapped on to what society already wanted to talk about by default. For the Right, the killer is “them.” They’re explicit about this, “They killed Charlie Kirk.” I’ve seen it personally on social media, and you can just trawl through any given Republican’s Twitter feed or speech that they’ve given and see the blame being placed on “the Left” or even Democrats. Representative Nancy Mace said that Democrats “own” what happened to Kirk. Representative Bob Onder said that the “Left” is “pure evil” and that there is no longer any middle ground. Conservative influencer with the ear of Donald Trump Laura Loomer said that the government needs to start prosecuting “leftist” organizations. Trump of course never strays from blaming the “Left” for everything, and refuses to even attempt to unify the country after this polarizing killing.
Compare this to the liberal responses, symbolized in the Ezra Klein article in the New York Times that talks about the tragedy of the killing, as politics should be about debate, free speech, and not killing people you disagree with. Don’t celebrate this, you nerds! It’s the exact same response as with Luigi Mangione; this isn’t the way to move politics forward; if you disagree with someone, build a movement – like Charlie Kirk did! He did politics the right way! Like I said, people are just mapping this event on to the beliefs that they already have. The Right blames the “Left” and continues on their merry way cracking down on groups of people they don’t like. Liberals talk about how the progressive wing just doesn’t understand how politics *really* works. This isn’t marking a turning point (pun intended) in American politics, but a continuation of how each party was going to act anyway. Republicans will keep being fascists, and Democrats will keep not understanding how fascism works, preferring instead to be Voltaire, defending to the death the rights of Charlie Kirk to say whatever he wants! Of course, Voltaire never actually said that, and his most famous work is actually about how everything is terrible.
“You’re a bitter man,” said Candide. That’s because I’ve lived,” said Martin.”
The perseveration on the celebration of Kirk’s death is frustrating. Op-eds keep emphasizing the importance of dialogue and deliberation in response to disagreement, and that celebrating Kirk’s death defiles that sacred tenet of Free Speech. The problem is that this is awfully convenient for the politics of murder that is already in charge and dominating in the United States. Suggesting that sitting around talking while people are having their rights taken away, while a genocide is being enabled, while marginalized groups are being violently persecuted simply for existing, is the height of naive privilege. It’s nice to talk about an ideal society where problems are resolved diplomatically and to philosophize about a marketplace of ideas creating rousing debates that bring us closer to an ultimate truth. This utopia is not our reality. While you certainly can try to talk your way out of someone holding a gun to your head, it’s not that uncontroversial to try to defend yourself through other means. What Charlie Kirk stood for isn’t something that you ‘disagree’ with, it’s something that you fight. Words can be used in that fight, certainly, but the very institutions of deliberation, the American judicial system for one, are being sorely tested in whether or not words will be of any use combating the roaring fascism in control of the country right now. We shall see how effective they are.
Charlie Kirk founded Turning Point USA which, as noted above, hosted Kyle Rittenhouse after he killed those three people. Kirk was against civil rights and thought Martin Luther King, Jr. was awful and bad for America. He thought that immigrants of colour are “replacing” white Americans and should be treated accordingly. He built a movement on these principles, and helped Donald Trump win the 2024 election. The ethnic cleansing of mass deportations that is on-going is a part of Charlie Kirk’s legacy. Charlie Kirk is a significant contributor to the politics of murder that has become part and parcel of the American Right. His death is being used as an excuse to amplify that kind of politics; the tragedy of Kirk’s death isn’t that he died, it’s whatever comes next.
Was Charlie Kirk being killed a good thing? I don’t care. It happened, and it’ll probably spark a vicious, oppressive backlash that defines the success of any terrorist attack. I’ll finish by quoting Malcolm X on the assassination of John F. Kennedy:
I tend to dislike identity politics. I find it shallow and regressive, and as a straight, white man, it is none too fond of me either. I had heard rumblings about liberal backlash against identity politics after the election of Donald Trump, as if women of colour existing had suddenly brought about the rise of fascism, but I disregarded this because it’s stupid. Then, like too many stupid things, it became my problem when I had to listen to someone defend this position in a podcast that I follow. They asserted along similar lines that because the Democrats had too closely linked themselves to identity politics, that Trump was able to seize the economic narrative and soar to authoritarian heights on promises of increased prices through tariffs and trade wars with traditional allies. Clearly a persuasive argument.
This was promised and intentional, and was the bar Democrats needed to surpass in order to win the economic argument. I’m not saying that the stock market is representative of the financial situation of most people, but it’s a simple enough symbol for our purposes here.
At this point I think it’s important to define our terms because what was described in the podcast was any reference to white supremacy or gender issues as “identity politics.” This is never how I’ve ever understood the term. Identity politics in the pejorative sense is the inclusion of a traditional minority into the established mainstream and calling it progressive without changing anything real or substantial. So Disney remaking all of its classics with women of colour in the lead role is identity politics because it’s a shallow cash grab pretending to be something new and edgy because Ariel is black now. Or Hilary Clinton platforming her gender as the primary reason to vote for her in the “I’m With Her” campaign slogan. Or corporations coming out with rainbow-tinged logos for Pride month while raising prices to accommodate such woke largesse. All this capitalistic tokenism is then interpreted as leftism because homosexuality and vaginas are seen as intrinsically leftist concepts! It’s all stupid and fake, but because the people behind this empty astroturf ideology often have all of the money, it becomes the focus of political discourse because it’s so polarizing and in your face (Am I saying that women of colour shouldn’t be movie leads or run for president!?! How dare I!? Get at me in the YouTube comments!).
I’ve always felt there weren’t enough gays toppling leftists governments, but I guess that’s because of my woke mind virus!
I didn’t see a ton of that in the last election from the Harris and Walz campaign, and though I didn’t obviously see every single campaign ad, I certainly heard contemporary coverage approving of that campaign for not fixating on Harris’s identity as a Homeric blasian heroine. Somewhat ironically, the worst I saw were ads focusing on Tim Walz as the folksy white football coach, trying to pander to the superficial identity of the traditional right. Frankly, I saw more identity politics from the Republican side with Trump literally questioning Harris’s blackness, and their ad saying that, ”Harris is for they/them, and Donald Trump is for you!” using the identity of non-binary people in purely shallow framing to fearmonger an Us versus Them dynamic. Per this metric, identity politics were actually quite successful in this last election, and maybe the Democrats should have done more to categorize people into these simplistic labels for the sake of petty politics!
But… but… how can this be identity politics if Tim Walz doesn’t have a vagina of colour!?
The important thing to keep in mind during this tiresome deliberation is that class is a marker of identity! To suggest that the Democrats ought to focus solely on the economy and not “identity politics” is to miss the truism that all politics is inherently based on identity! The suffragette movement was identity-based. The civil rights movement was identity-based. The New Deal’s G.I. bill was identity-based – it was dedicated to veterans! Drug laws are for drug users; prostitution laws are for sex workers; healthcare is related to the spectrum of ability. All of us exist across intersections of identity, and all laws and policies bleed across them in varying ways. The G.I. Bill brought so many Americans into the middle class after World War II, but only if we define those Americans as white. So too the Nazis brought Germany out of the Great Depression, but their own infamous identity politics left much to be desired beyond the economic recovery. Class and more populist economic policy is something the Democrats certainly need to absorb into their political philosophy (as per their stunning defeat to Donald Trump on this issue), but this literally cannot be detached from identity, nor should it. We cannot talk about Trump barring refugees from everywhere in the world save for those “fleeing” from a manufactured genocide in South Africa without discussing white supremacy. We cannot talk about the impacts of overturning Roe without acknowledging that the people affected by that the most are those with a uterus. These are atrocities, and ignoring them is tantamount to ignoring the “identity politics” of the Nazis as they resurrected Germany’s economy. We cannot and should not. Identity is a web; class is connected to everything else which is in turn connected to class.
So what the fuck are people even talking about? The podcast guest later in the show gets in a heated argument with the host over how Palestinian deaths aren’t being fairly reported in American mainstream media, in blatant hypocrisy to his earlier dismissal of identity politics as worth mentioning. Per his meltdown, you would think he had forgotten that being Muslim or Palestinian is just as much an identity as being white or a woman. Should we ignore the genocide in Gaza? He would disagree, strenuously, but that is “identity politics” per his definition! I guess identity only matters when it’s one of your own. While this was not explicit in the show, and I think I’m just extrapolating this from the broader political discourse and think it’s irrelevant to what they actually think on that podcast, but this disregard toward identity is entirely about trans-people. When people say that Democrats should focus on the economy and not on “identity politics” without giving a definition of what that means, they mean that they’re fine with throwing trans-people under the bus if it means that everyone else can get the Medicare for all. This is the only thing that makes sense given the arguments and hypocrisies they are making.
Unless you need it for hormone replacement therapy, in which case, tough shit
Harris was criticized because she believed prisoners should be able to access gender-affirming care if they needed it. This is not identity politics in the actual definition of the term, this is a genuine, honest-to-goodness policy. It’s policy for a particular identity, in the way that voting rights have historically been for particular identities, but it’s healthcare policy. People on the left and the right spoke about it as if it were superficial and unnecessary identity politics because acknowledging the healthcare needs of the transgender community is seen as superficial and unnecessary, akin to a rainbow Nike swoosh. If we don’t see transgenderism as a real thing, if it’s a disguise for attention or sexual predation, then it’s easy to dismiss their legitimate needs as shallow and fake. This isn’t something unique to the right. Much of the so-called left struggles with the needs of transgender people too, which, to be clear, is mostly social acceptance and healthcare and is not to participate in elite-level sports.
Democrats, and liberal governments across the globe, are failing in how they address the economic needs of their citizens, and it is fair and necessary to criticize them on that failure. More than criticize, disrupt and dismantle them for something better. Do not, however, try to suggest that “identity politics” is the barrier to that kind of economic and social change when you really mean acknowledging the existence of trans-people. Corporate gimmicks and Disney remakes should also be criticized too, but they are not leftist; the capitulation to fascism among the ownership class shows the hollowness of their “progressivism” quite clearly. You can continue to trash identity politics, as I am sure I will too, but be honest in your bigotry and stop pretending that you’re advocating for a social restructuring for all.
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