I’m here to report a case of mad “Xmas” disease. Elon Musk’s social media platform X, best known these days for promoting Russian disinformation and crypto scams, has been channelling rage in recent weeks about the “wokerati” who are apparently out to ban Christmas.
These include those Satan-worshippers in Dublin City Council who have been hosting a Winter Lights festival each December since 2018 – it includes a ticketed event at Merrion Square.
Among those triggered by the announcement of this year’s Winter Lights was Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín, who complained that it should be called Christmas lights. He suggests a “strain of aggressive secularism in Ireland that seeks to remove elements of faith and culture from the public square” is at play. (This is just weeks after President Catherine Connolly had to take a religious oath “in the presence of Almighty God” when being sworn into office.)
News stories claiming Christmas is being displaced by Yuletide, Winterval and Xmas are hardy annuals for the likes of The Daily Telegraph, but they have been given a new impetus on Musk’s X.
READ MORE
Several of the comments on X go much further than Tóibín and include claims that the State is erasing Christ from Christmas to placate Muslims.
Many more repeat the familiar theory that “they” are out to make ordinary, decent Irish folk strangers in their own country. Much of that commentary knits seamlessly into anti-immigration rhetoric that is amplified by Musk’s algorithm.
The fact that the naming decision was made seven years ago, but is only controversial now, says something about the political times we are in.
Amid a blitz of posts condemning Europe over its perceived leniency on immigration, Musk recently declared in characteristically gnomic fashion: “The Overton Window opens wider each day.” The notion of the Overton window refers to the range of subjects or arguments that are acceptable to the public at any given time. In theory, the wider the window, the more that is open to debate.
In practice, widening the Overton window means creating an environment where a United States president can call Somali people “garbage” and a woman reporter “piggy” without fear of censure. It means Maga bros praising Hitler and calling rape “epic” can be written off as laddish banter. Telling “edgy, offensive jokes” is “what kids do”, said US vice-president JD Vance when downplaying the controversy over the Young Republicans’ leaked chats last October.
Widening the Overton window has also meant redefining the meaning of Christianity. Vance argues Jesus would back America First on the grounds that you should love those geographically closer to you first – a position Pope Leo XIV has publicly contradicted.
Billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel – who has bankrolled Vance’s political career and cofounded Palantir, the data surveillance system used by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deport illegal migrants – is another self-proclaimed Christian eager to reimagine Jesus’s teachings.
Recently, Thiel took to the lecture circuit, delivering a series of talks about “the Antichrist” to audiences in San Francisco. He argues that humanity is in danger of being duped into trading liberty for a false security – suggesting agents of the left are leading us to hell with their nanny state calls for financial regulation and their stark warnings about environmental destruction.
Thiel credits John Henry Newman – founder of the Catholic University of Ireland, later University College Dublin – as the inspiration for the lecture series. There is a superficial parallel. The 19th century theologian delivered a series of sermons arguing that “apostasy” – or rejection of religious belief – was paving the way for the Antichrist.
Thiel sees enemies elsewhere, fearing a hellish fusion between a “woke American pope” in Leo and a “woke American president”. As for the Antichrist? He believes it’s Greta Thunberg. Or at least, the Swedish climate activist is “an Antichrist”, he says. “I don’t want to flatter her too much.”
Asked for a view of Thiel’s lectures, Dan Deasy, director of the UCD Newman Centre for the Study of Religions, says “whether or not Thiel is sincere” in his proclaimed faith ”it has become clear that Catholicism offers an appealing mythos to some people immersed in a certain kind of hyperbolic, good-versus-evil, meme-driven internet culture.
“For instance, I don’t believe Thiel literally thinks Greta Thunberg is the Antichrist. But the hyperbolic claim that she is – that familiar blend of performative sincerity and knowing absurdity – clearly serves a particular kind of techno-infused, end-times, good-versus-evil politics that benefits people like Thiel.”
In truth, the campaign by tech billionaires to widen the Overton window is not about free speech. It’s about flooding the public sphere with enough weird opinion and tribal hate bait so that citizens can’t focus on the issues that really matter: rising inequality, the weakening of democratic institutions, existential threats from technology and, yes, climate change.
For Christians, be they devout or “cultural”, there is a more immediate calculation. Anyone concerned about Jesus being disrespected this winter should not look to Dublin City Council. Look instead to billionaire preachers like Thiel. Because the wokerati isn’t taking Christ out of Christmas, capitalism is. Bad enough that Jesus’s birthday is an occasion for gross consumerism and monumental environmental waste, Christianity itself is becoming – in the hands of a wealthy priesthood – an ideology of cruelty and exploitation.
