This is both a confession and a call to arms. For the past several years, I have been secretly involved in a secret scheme to secretly force religion -- Christianity, in particular -- from the public square. This secret has been laid bare, however, so now I can publicly and proudly proclaim that I am a member of the secular-progressive plot pithily dubbed “The War on Christmas,” and have been authorized by the founder and leader of this movement, George Soros, to acknowledge its existence and call upon our fellow Christmas-haters to make themselves known and to take our no-longer secret campaign to the streets. Down with Christmas!

We have to give credit where credit is due. If it weren't for the dogged investigations of Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, as well as John Gibson's scathing exposé, The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought (Penguin, 2005), average American Christians wouldn't have thought there even was a “War on Christmas,” and they certainly wouldn't have thought it was worse than they didn't think it was. And while I reluctantly concede that they blew the lid off all our clandestine activities, I have to admit that I am a little puzzled at, and certainly suspicious of, just how accurate they were in explaining our tactics and motives.

I remember when the anti-Christmas movement first got started. Soros had just finished discussing with Hillary Clinton how they were going to use their Mafia connections to control the Democratic Party, and they had concluded that in order to implement all of the secular-progressive policies we hold so dear, we first had to eliminate religion in the United States -- just like Hitler had in Germany, and Stalin in Russia. With religion in place, there was no way we could ever hope to see three gay cousins marrying each other while legally smoking hashish next to the deathbed of their euthanized grandfather. So we secretly declared war on Christianity and decided that Christmas would be the central front in this war, wrongly assuming that it was the most Christian of all the Christian holidays. (Turns out that's Easter. Oops!)

We even formulated a three-tiered structure to ensure that the plan would be effectively implemented. Basically, Soros would give a whole bunch of money to the American Civil Liberties Union so it could file lawsuits and intimidate everybody who said “Merry Christmas” in public, and websites like Media Matters would attack and demonize anyone who dared to speak in defense of the holiday. It was perfect. We even had an inspirational quote from Ebenezer Scrooge on the wall of the Christmas war room: “If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”

Well, you can imagine our surprise when O'Reilly, on the November 28, 2005, edition of The O'Reilly Factor, said:

O'REILLY: Just a reminder: George Soros and Peter Lewis are the far-left, secular-progressive billionaires who have funded -- they pour money into the ACLU, they pour money into the smear websites, you know, they buy up a lot of the media time. And they basically want to change the country from a Christian-based philosophical country to a secular-progressive country like they have in Western Europe. OK? Now, the ACLU is their legal arm, and the smear websites are their media arm. And they pour a lot of money into both. And the ACLU runs around the country suing everybody and intimidating people.

[...]

O'REILLY: And in tandem, you use your left-wing smear websites to go after anybody who stands up for Christmas. If you stand up for Christmas, they come after you. So the tandem intimidates. The tandem intimidates. Suing on one hand; smearing on the other hand.

[...]

O'REILLY: There's a very secret plan. And it's a plan that nobody's going to tell you, “Well, we want to diminish Christian philosophy in the USA because we want X, Y, and Z.” They'll never ever say that. But I'm kind of surprised they went after Christmas because it's such an emotional issue.

[...]

O'REILLY: In every secular-progressive country, they've wiped out religion.

[...]

O'REILLY: Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, all of them. That's the first step. Get the religion out of there, so that we can impose our big-government, progressive agenda.

Gibson was also onto us. He wrote on Page 160 of his book:

The war on Christmas is worse than I thought -- and perhaps than you thought, because it's really a war on Christianity. In all the dramas described here that have played out over bans on the public celebration of Christmas, the plaintiff's reason is always that Christmas is Christian, and symbols of Christianity can't be permitted in public places.

I really don't know how Gibson figured this out. I can only assume that he is incredibly crafty. In fact, John Gibson is so crafty that he covered all his bases by writing in the book's introduction that the “War on Christmas” was worse than he or anyone else thought for the exact opposite reason he described in the above passage. From Page xviii of The War on Christmas:

You might think that the war on Christmas is being fought on the grounds that overtly religious symbols in public -- such as nativity scenes and crosses -- violate the separation of church and state that many judges have read into the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

But again, you'd be underestimating the war on Christmas. It's worse than you think. Liberals' attacks now focus on symbols regarded by most Americans -- and even by the Supreme Court of the United States (in its Lynch v. Donnelly ruling) to be secular symbols of the federal holiday that is Christmas. Wannabe constitutional lawyers in local government offices all over the country are declaring unconstitutional normal and traditional Christmas representations such as Christmas trees, Santa Claus, treetop stars, wreaths, the singing of and listening to Christmas carols or Christmas instrumental music, attending a performance of Dickens's A Christmas Carol, the publication of the word “Christmas” itself, and even the colors red and green!

Do you see how tricky this is? I wonder now why we ever thought we could keep the plan concealed from these guys.

Fox News had figured out our game, so we decided that it was time to get some of the media on our side. Given that the entire mainstream press is liberally biased (whoops, another cat out of the bag), we had our pick of literally thousands of media outlets through which to hammer home our secret, anti-Christmas message. The only catch was that we had to choose an outlet that was far-reaching and influential enough to effectively counter Fox News. Almost immediately, we chose the media in Madison, Wisconsin -- not only because of their reach, but also because they privately worship Satan, and we figured that Satanists would be an effective ally in a campaign against Christianity.

But, again, O'Reilly was on to our scheme from the get-go. He nailed us on the December 2, 2005, edition of The O'Reilly Factor:

O'REILLY: All right, well, listen, Jackson, we respect your opinion, but you're dead wrong on this one. Now --

JACKSON BAIN: Well, maybe.

O'REILLY: -- in the South, Richmond Times[-Dispatch], for example.

BAIN: Right.

O'REILLY: Now, this is a conservative city, Richmond. I mean, this is not Madison, Wisconsin, where you expect those people to be communing with Satan up there in the Madison, Wisconsin, media.

BAIN: Sure.

O'REILLY: All right, but not in Richmond. Richmond. “Bill O'Reilly: Christmas Lies Under Siege. Unless defended, it could even disappear.” That's a lie, and they know it's a lie.

The whole thing was beginning to unravel. It seemed as though O'Reilly and Gibson were two steps ahead of every effort at secrecy we tried to make. But there remained one great hope. Our attempts to covertly destroy Christmas through litigation and the media had been exposed, but there was still one key medium we could exploit -- retail. While it is possible to kill Christmas with just lawsuits and editorials, we figured out that the best way to significantly damage the holiday is to make sure that storefront displays and employees at big retail chains, as well as online stores at big news organizations, use only the phrase “Happy Holidays.” This phrase is remarkably insulting to Christians, and if it is repeated enough times to shoppers, they will eventually forget that there is a specific holiday known as “Christmas.”

But we just couldn't beat back O'Reilly's Yuletide of truth:

O'REILLY: See, I think you're, I think you're crazy. And here's why. I think the backlash against stores that don't say “Merry Christmas” is enormous because now people are aware of the issue. There's going to be -- it's like the third or fourth year that we've reported it. I know everybody's hypersensitive about are they going to say “Merry Christmas”? Are they going to say “Happy Holidays”? What are they going to say? Are there decorations that say “Merry Christmas”? They're hypersensitive. And when you walk into a secular environment, most Christians are looking around, and they're really aware of it. Now, the other thing is, I don't believe most people who aren't Christian are offended by the words “Merry Christmas.” I think those people are nuts. I think you're crazy if you're offended by the words “Merry Christmas.”

The final nail in the coffin was hammered in just recently, when our top-secret “Operation Crate & Barrel” was compromised. Crate & Barrel was our last and most promising retail stronghold. Not only do they hate Christmas, they also allow people of non-Christian faiths to practice freely in their stores. The double whammy of a shopping environment that is both Christmas-free and non-Christian is more than even the most stalwart defender of Christmas can withstand. Unfortunately, fate and the Transportation Security Administration intervened, and six imams were removed from an airplane in Minnesota after other passengers saw them praying in the airport terminal. This gave O'Reilly the hook he needed to tear us down for the last time:

O'REILLY: In the “Impact” segment tonight, most American retail stores are saying “Merry Christmas”, as we mentioned, but not Crate & Barrel and Best Buy. Incredibly, Crate & Barrel spokesperson Cathy -- I'm sorry, Betty Kahn -- Betty Kahn told the Minneapolis Star Tribune, quote, “We would definitely not be saying [sic] Merry Christmas.” Wow.

Also in Minneapolis, six Muslim clerics booted off a US Airways jet because some passengers were nervous. The men were handcuffed, questioned for more than five hours before being released.

[...]

O'REILLY: I don't know. Maybe the imams who got thrown off the plane shop there.

MICHELLE MALKIN: Well, there you go.

O'REILLY: All right? I bet you they wouldn't get handcuffed in Crate & Barrel if they started chanting stuff.

There you have it. Fox News has exposed every last shady piece of our secret campaign to kill Christmas. Now we must continue the “War on Christmas” in full view of the public, and figure out just how it was that Bill O'Reilly and John Gibson had such intimate and detailed knowledge of our plans and tactics. Were they leaked secret documents? Not likely. Gibson does not condone reporting based on “embarrassing” leaked documents. Did they have a mole operating on the inside? Probably not. O'Reilly only assigns undercover correspondents to report on college sex parties. And yet, they must have had solid evidence and unimpeachable facts to make the assertions and linkages highlighted above. I mean, they can't just be making all this up ... right?