War on Christmas is over (if you want it)
By 
On this holiday, be very grateful that your are not an American reactionary, because who would actually want to live like this?
Last week, First Lady Jill Biden, rejecting her predecessor’s loathing of Christmas cheer, posted a sweet and silly video of the Dorrance Dance company performing a tap dance to a jazz reimagining of “Dance of the Floreadores” from “The Nutcracker Suite.”
To normal people, the video was a bit of old-fashioned Christmas cheer in the great American tradition of musical extravaganzas like those of Busby Berkeley. To MAGA-Americans, however, it was a moral and aesthetic outrage that was going straight into their file labeled “Why Now Is The Time For American Fascism.” Tellingly, despite the flood of angry comments, Republicans struggled to articulate exactly what they found so offensive. Vague terms like “weird,” “grotesque and abhorrent,” and “classless” accompanied odd accusations that the performance reminded them of “The Hunger Games.” Chaya Raichik of Libs of TikTok whined that it “should’ve come with a sensitivity label.” To her million-plus Twitter followers, right-wing influencer Brigitte Gabriel groused, “Children should not be watching this smut!”
Soon the New York Post and Breitbart got involved. They, too, were stubbornly unwilling to offer any specifics about their objections, beyond the Breitbart writer complaining that the dancers “are so PROUD of themselves.” (The dancers are smiling broadly, which is the tradition of musical theater.) Even Ross Douthat, supposedly a “reasonable” conservative columnist at the New York Times, couldn’t help but join the anti-joy dogpile.
The fact that birtherism was Trump’s ticket to dominating the Republican Party — while Republican elites either passively acquiesced or affirmatively supported the conspiracy — is an absolutely critical detail.