VDARE.com's Peter Brimelow joins Richard to discuss the secular liberals' war against traditional Christian European folkways.

A concerted effort is currently being made by some cultural dissidents to expose the wide-ranging campaign undertaken by our betters to expunge all aspects of Christ from the holiday of Christmas, and what's more, to eradicate all aspects of Christmas from the gift-exchanging season of late December. In fact, this "war on Christmas" has been ranging for decades, epitomized in the numerous instances of newly renamed "holiday trees," corporate-mandated salutations of "happy holidays" or "season's greetings" instead of "merry Christmas," and forced removals of manger scenes from public places.

It is quite true, as Samuel Francis has recently pointed out, that the campaign against Christmas is a mere skirmish in the more widespread war against the West. Christmas is, after all, a Christian holy day, and Christianity is the spiritual foundation upon which Western civilization was built; hostility toward unabashed celebration of the birth of Christ does indeed spring from a hatred of all things Occidental. But it is a bit more complicated, and more bizarrely perverse, than that. For the war against the West is largely being waged by ... Westerners.

We are hastening our own demise by embracing the idea that it's tacky to believe in Christmas, or, at least, to be too open about about our religion in public, in front of "those who might believe differently." But it isn't representatives of opposing religions who are spearheading this movement against Christianity. Instead, it is mostly nominal Christians — that is to say, Christian Westerners who have lost the faith of their fathers but occasionally step into a church to witness a relative's funeral or a friend's wedding — who want to remove the baby Jesus from the proverbial inn and banish him to the proverbial manger.

For those folk, their very cultural identity (white, Western, and at least historically Christian) is a source of no pride but only endless embarrassment; they will do whatever they can to distance themselves from their heritage. Ironically, in so doing they are only embracing what it means to be a white, Western, nominal Christian in the post-modern 21st-century Western world. In their very diffidence and opportunistic self-loathing (opportunistic, since being anti-white, anti-Western, and anti-Christian is the only way to exhibit oneself as a "respectable" person these days, if one is white, Western, and of Christian heritage), they increasingly embody the debased, degenerated disposition of their own kind. They personify the suicide of the West.

I'm a pushover for Christmas. The older I get, the more I realize I like everything about Christmas. I like the exalted sacred side of Christmas, and the sentimental, secular aspect as well. I like the annual satirizing of the crass commercialization of Christmas, as in "A Charlie Brown Christmas," and, truth be told, I like the crass commercialization, too.

Not surprisingly, the annual War Against Christmas strikes me as particularly perverse. Who would be so Grinch-like as to not find something enjoyable about Christmas?

The movement to turn Christmas into That Which Must Not Be Named is usually attributed to America's "increasing multicultural diversity." But a loathing of Christmas is hardly widespread among blacks and Hispanics. A recent poll cited in Tom Piatak's VDARE.com article last week found that 96 percent of Americans celebrate Christmas.

In a department store in Beverly Hills last week, I engaged in what has become my seasonal subversion strategy. When a Latino or African-American clerk would dutifully wish me a store management-required "Happy Holidays," I'd reply "And Merry Christmas!" and watch their faces light up.