While it would hardly be worthwhile to note every gaffe, faux pas, gaucherie, and all the other acts of tactlessness with French names that Bill O’Reilly engages in, it’s worth noting his most recent outburst, in which he told a Jewish caller to “go to Israel” when he complained about the pervasiveness of Christmas celebrations in American public life (specifically in public schools). What follows is a classic O’Reilly rant, which occured right after he lectured his caller on Chanukah‘s “seven [sic] candles…and nights”:

O’REILLY: All right. Well, what I’m tellin’ you, is I think you’re takin’ it too seriously. You have a predominantly Christian nation. You have a federal holiday based on the philosopher Jesus. And you don’t wanna hear about it? Come on–if you are really offended, you gotta go to Israel then. I mean because we live in a country founded on Judeo–and that’s your guys’ — Christian, that’s my guys’ philosophy. But overwhelmingly, America is Christian. And the holiday is a federal holiday honoring the philosopher Jesus. So, you don’t wanna hear about it? Impossible.

And that is an affront to the majority. You know, the majority can be insulted, too. And that’s what this anti-Christmas thing is all about.

So, because a majority of Americans celebrate Christmas, minorities (such as Jews, for whom Chanukah begins at sundown tonight) have no right to object to the promotion of that holiday in a publicly-financed forum such as a public school. Regardless of the merits of the caller’s argument, O’Reilly has once again demonstrated that, like his audience, he is deeply committed to the belief that he shouldn’t have to acknowledge that he lives in a country where many citizens’ beliefs, preferences, and origins are not his own. Indeed, to be faced with such facts is an “insult”.

What’s most interesting about this outburst is that O’Reilly appears to have dropped his trope of referring to his audience (broadly speaking, conservatives, although many conservatives would claim O’Reilly doesn’t speak for them) as an aggrieved minority. It used to be a standard conservative tactic to speak in the language of minority rights–in other words, that recognition of conservative viewpoints was a necessary concession to democratic fairness. Now that conservatives have begun to rebrand themselves as a majority, in the wake of what they are describing as an electoral near-revolution, the recognition of minority viewpoints apparently is not so important anymore.