After spending the past four years in a codependent-relationship haze with the outgoing president, Fox News now has some programming decisions to make regarding where it will aim its outrage gun once Donald “Golden Goose” Trump is no longer around as much to power its content cycle. While the president, who appears nearly ready to handcuff himself to the Resolute Desk, hasn’t yet faded into the background, the Joe Biden presidency is on the horizon and conservative media is already showing glimpses of how it will pivot come January 20. In the case of Fox News, the network has lately reverted to one of its primary Obama-era coverage areas: staging another battle in the so-called War on Christmas, and escalating the conflict to include Thanksgiving.
Of course, this holiday season and the culture wars fought around it will not be like past years; a global pandemic that is worsening by the day across the country has already taken nearly 250,000 lives in the United States. The severity of the outbreak has led some state and local governments to issue mitigation guidelines ahead of the holiday season, including advising residents not to travel and limiting the number of people allowed at indoor gatherings. Given the increased travel and holiday socializing that define late November and December, the festivities are a perfect setup for the spread of the virus. But on Fox News, these health advisories, many of which are voluntary, are seen as the radical, baby-Jesus-hating left’s most recent ploy to nuke Christmas.
“This Thanksgiving is when we need each other more than ever before,” said Fox Business host Charles Payne during a Tuesday Fox & Friends segment. Payne went on to seemingly draw a parallel between the head count restrictions for at-home Thanksgiving dinners to the Trump administration’s caging of migrant children: “And the notion that you’re going to come to my house and count how many people are there, that is separation of families. And it’s the most important day of the year, I think, outside of Christmas, and this time it means so much more. We have been separated. We’ve been forced apart.” (Payne is not the first person to sound off about family separations and the holiday season in the same breath, as first lady Melania Trump was recorded in 2018 recalling her personal war on Christmas that took place amid her husband’s migrant-detention scandal. “Who gives a fuck about the [White House] Christmas stuff and decorations?” she said in a tape released last month, adding that she was “planning for the Christmas and they said, ‘Oh, what about the children that they were separated?’ Give me a fucking break.”)
He concluded by suggesting that Americans might start a revolution in the event that their virus-friendly Thanksgiving dinners are shut down by law enforcement, saying, “I think people are going to revolt. Not an in-your-face revolt, but you know what, if you’ve got 15 people coming over, they’re coming over, period. And if you want to take someone to jail for that, that’s on you.” Payne’s colleague Brian Kilmeade then went full “Come and Take It.” “Go ahead,” he said. “While you’re defunding the police, you’re asking them to knock down doors in residence because they invited an extra aunt over, and they take them out in cuffs. Good luck with that.”
Fox News host Sean Hannity has made himself a top general for conservatives soldiering in the annual conflict, tweeting multiple times recently about how the holidays are under attack and claiming this week that “the Left” is launching another offensive in its “war on Thanksgiving.” Hannity, a lifetime New Yorker, is also focusing on the local angle, labeling Mayor Bill de Blasio the “World’s Worst Mayor” after the Democrat tyrannically moved to limit the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. His Fox News primetime colleague Laura Ingraham went after Democratic governors for implementing new COVID-19 guidelines, accusing them of relishing “the prospect of controlling our most intimate choices.” (In the same hour of The Ingraham Angle, her guest, Ramin Oskoui, claimed that “social distancing doesn’t work, quarantining doesn’t work, masks don’t work.”) On Wednesday’s Fox & Friends, Kayleigh McEnany described some of the coronavirus guidelines as “Orwellian,” singling out Oregon’s regulations that limit gatherings to six people.
Aside from Fox News, Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk claimed that the libs want to restrict Thanksgiving gatherings because of their own supposed disdain for the holiday itself, while former TPUSA chief creative officer Benny Johnson, a serial plagiarist who managed to vertically fail his way into a Newsmax hosting gig, wrote in a tweet, “A government big enough to cancel your Thanksgiving is a government that is too big.” While the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh has been having an aneurysm over a former boy band member wearing a Gucci dress on the cover of Vogue, he is also deeply invested in the battle of Thanksgiving. “We’ve been worried about the War on Christmas but the Dems just snuck in the side entrance and canceled Thanksgiving instead,” he tweeted on Friday.
After CNN’s Jake Tapper spoke to White House coronavirus adviser Anthony Fauci on Sunday to discuss how Americans can safely celebrate their first major pandemic holiday in a century, the anchor remarked that, for most people, the usual Christmas festivities and the indoor crowds they draw are “probably not gonna be possible.” Steve Guest, the RNC’s rapid response director, tweeted Tapper’s quote without any context, whipping conservative Twitter into a frenzied circling of the wagons around December 25. “Jake Tapper does not get to tell me whether or not my family celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ,” tweeted far-right influencer Jack Posobiec in a post that was shared more than 11,000 times. The Tapper clip also received the FoxNews.com treatment, with the network pulling the quote in isolation for a perfectly clickable, rage-bait headline that the CNN host denounced as “unjournalistic.”
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