The percentage of Americans who believe there is a war on Christmas is down from 39 percent in December 2022 to just 23 percent in December 2024. This effect is seen consistently across political perspectives. Glad we solved that one. Perhaps this means it’s time for us to reverse the cessation of civil liberties enacted during the war — you know, the one that jammed an Elf on the Shelf into homes, enacting a massive surveillance dragnet against civilians in diametric opposition to their constitutional rights, developing unaccountable and secret Naughty Lists that algorithmically persecute even the holliest and jolliest among us in a Kafkaesque security theater that teaches kids to develop a level of contentment with state infiltration of the private home and inculcates a default state of compliance with authoritarian reprisals in response to behavior not celebrated by the Man? For as Michel Foucault said, “Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance,” and is the Elf on the Shelf anything different than the Elf surveilling the self? [Ed. note: The National Elf on the Shelf Reauthorization Act passed 99-0 in the Senate immediately after this was filed.]
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