BY FRANK HAVILAND
There are no words in the English Language sufficiently benign that the Left will not market them as a form of hatred. Pity our poor Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, whose lexicon has recently been denuded to the tune of ‘humbug’ and ‘surrender’. Christmas at Number 10 is going to be a rum affair this year I fear. Not only will Bojo wince as Alastair Sim flings the H-bombs around like sweets, I suspect he may be less than confident of those turkey breasts and thighs, er, yielding to his experienced touch.
Actions of which the Left approve are even harder to find. Give to charity these days, and you’re a white saviour. Give birth, and you’re instantly upgraded to a white supremacist. So it was surprising (at least for those not paying attention) that Canada’s premier Al Jolson tribute act, Justin Trudeau, did not receive the usual censure, after revelations that he has spent the past 2 decades singing ‘Mammy’.
Of course he didn’t, because that’s not how this game works. Robert Shrimsley of the Financial Times thought it was bad, though naturally not as bad as when a conservative does it:
In Trudeau’s defence, he does at least understand enough to show remorse rather than trying to brazen it out. In London, a British conservative MP, Desmond Swayne, has boasted about what a good job he once did dressing up as soul singer James Brown.
Brexit’s favourite 30-year-old in short trousers, Femi Oluwole, also couldn’t bring himself to let his hands go, in the absence of his customary sparring partner, Nigel Farage.
Most astonishing of all was the silence from the one and only David Lammy; the man who could find racism for you in outer space, provided none of the ground controllers were white. Here was his big moment; but no big Dave chickened out, preferring to blame it on ‘racist tropes’:
White supremacy is a ‘structural problem’, he said. ‘It’s a subject we don’t like to talk about’ (hard to believe, from a man whose Twitter feed is a decade’s worth of white supremacy cut and paste jobs).
The Left’s double standard is of course hardly news. Elderly Trump supporters wear MAGA hats, enlarging the target sufficiently for even Antifa sissies to land the odd punch. Greta Thunberg is a child who must be protected from criticism, while Mini AOC was bullied off Twitter thanks to death threats. And Joe Biden’s half-century, nationwide gropathon is dismissed by Hillary Clinton as ‘a little annoying habit’, while a 20-year-old squeezed knee will never recover from the evil hands of capitalism.
No, the double-standard isn’t news – what is news, is how easily the right has capitulated. It is now taken as read that the Left not only sets the rules of the game, and enforces them retroactively; but is no longer even required to pretend to follow them itself.
There are those on the Right content to enjoy watching Trudeau squirm a little; a Pyrrhic victory for which they will get no credit. Playing the Left’s game is not only feeble, it’s amoral. We have forgotten the bigger picture: we ought to be fighting for truth, fighting to win, and defending the victims of woke insanity, even if it is the authors themselves.
Loathe Trudeau as you may, there are plenty of valid reasons to despise the man, without inventing them. Critique him for his ‘peoplekind’ lecture, his refusal to call FGM ‘barbaric’, or the fact that he’d be the first to lynch anyone caught singing ‘Swanee’. He’s a phoney, a hypocrite, and an imbecile trading on his father’s name, sure, but should he really be hanged for his choice of costume – what are you, a fancydressaphobe?
Trudeau’s blackface is an indictment of the Right, not the Left; this is about us. Not only should Trudeau be defended, he should not require defending – that’s the point we are missing so widely. We’ve got so used to not standing up when it counts, we’ve forgotten how to do it full stop. Every time we hold our silence, fearing the slurs of ‘Nazi’, ‘racist’, ‘transphobe’, we concede monumental ground.
Our children are now in serious danger, thanks to our cowardice. We let the Left ban us from smacking our children, something which will have negative consequences. We let them pressure our children to gender transition, and now the poor things are trapped in the wrong bodies. We let them accuse our children of absurd racist hoaxes, and never challenged them. We are so busy putting out fires; we’ve forgotten to fight at all.
The Left’s control over the narrative is now so strong, that an ostensibly raving lunatic calling for the policy ‘Save the planet, eat the children’ is not only not an obvious hoax, but is taken seriously enough to merit the Ocasio-Cortez simper. We should worry about this.
If the Right does not start to fight back for the narrative, then I fear dark days lie ahead; and I’m not talking about Trudeau’s back catalogue.