The Liberal Strategy Revealed

Justin Trudeau seems to have declared his line of attack for the next election. Every time now, in the Commons, he is asked anything about the SNC-Lavalin scandal, he responds by demanding that Andrew Scheer denounce white supremacy. At last Friday’s Liberal Party convention in Mississauga, he accused the Conservatives of planning to cut the federal budget, abandon the fight against global warming, and embrace white nationalism.

I expect that the Conservatives would have little quibble with Trudeau’s claims that they want to cut government costs and kill the carbon tax. Fair enough. Here Liberals and Conservatives disagree.

But Trudeau’s attribution to the Conservative Party of white nationalism and white supremacy is dishonest.

Are there any white supremacists in North America? No doubt; but no more than might fit in a clubhouse up some backyard tree. To denounce them is therefore counter-productive, if your intent is to oppose white supremacy. You are giving the position publicity and respectability. You are forcing it to the public’s attention. Some will want to know what all the fuss is about. If it is immediately and self-evidently false, then no harm done. And nothing useful done. In any other case, you are promoting it.

This Trudeau is blatantly doing for short-term political gain—to distract from scandal. Scheer would be irresponsible to do likewise.

There is another fundamental problem with denouncing “white supremacy.” It is the inclusion of that modifier, “white.” To denounce “white supremacy” as a stand-alone item is to imply that other forms of racial supremacy are fine: black supremacy, Asian supremacy, Muslim supremacy, aboriginal supremacy. The problem is not with supremacy, then; it is with whites. That is extreme racism. And should be called out as such.

There is a vital distinction to be made here, between white supremacist and white nationalists. Not the same thing.

Are there any white nationalists in North America? That’s a more interesting question: it illustrates the likely effects of Trudeau’s strategy. Just a few years ago, say 2015, there was apparently also no “white nationalist” movement to speak of in Canada, or for that matter in the US. When the term “alt-right” was first coined and aggressively promoted on the left, the people it was referring to and demonizing were only geeky kids on the Internet playing with memes, just yanking legs. But the aggressive promotion of the term―on the left―seems to have now summoned up such a movement for real. Faith Goldy, for example, seems to be a genuine white nationalist; as was the guy who shot up mosques in Christchurch. Before the left invented the “alt-right,” they probably would not have come out with their views, even if they entertained them in private. It may well have been the left that suggested to them that others apparently felt the same way. All I can say about that is that I followed conventional right-wing news sites and aggregators throughout the relevant period, and heard for months not a peep about the alt-right, nor any views endorsing anything like white nationalism. For months, all the noise about it was coming exclusively from left-wing sources. Only eventually did right-wing sources begin to be heard—all either dismissing the alt-right, or condemning it. 

An early "alt-right" meme: the flag of Kekistan.

Nice job, lefties. White nationalism is your baby, not Scheer’s.

Now Trudeau and his like are hell-bent to up the ante to promoting white supremacy. And, by declaring any view on any issue and any person with which they disagree “white supremacist” and “alt-right,” the left suggests real white supremacy is equally reasonable. If everyone is Hitler, including really nice people, what’s wrong with Hitler?

And the white nationalists are creatures of the left, of the Trudeaus of the world, in yet a third and more direct sense. Nationalism of all kinds, or, more accurately, tribalism rather than nationalism, has been aggressively promoted by the left over the past forty years. They call it “multiculturalism,” and even make it legally mandatory. They have long insisted on black tribalism, and Cree tribalism, and Inuit tribalism, and Iroquois tribalism, and Innu tribalism, and Muslim tribalism, and Quebec tribalism, and Irish tribalism, and Greek tribalism, and Ukrainian tribalism, and Sikh tribalism, and Hispanic tribalism, and Portuguese tribalism. Even gay tribalism, and transgender tribalism. It is obviously arbitrary, discriminatory, and dishonest for them to object only to white tribalism. They have been promoting it all along, the only distinction being the substitution of the word “white” for more specific ethnic categories.

It’s Trudeau’s tarbaby. Scheer and the Conservatives have nothing to do with it, and they have no call to sully their hands with it. It is up to Trudeau to denounce tribalism in all forms.

Nor is this playing this “white supremacy” or “white nationalism” card hard likely to work for Trudeau. To begin with, it seems unlikely that the public are gullible enough to be distracted by this from the SNC-Lavalin scandal. But even if they are: is it even by itself a winning issue? The Liberal government has suddenly reversed its policy on accepting refugees. From open borders and an open invitation, now they are proposing to deport everybody. Their own opinion polls are apparently telling them something. Apparently unhindered by principles, they are pandering to “white nationalism” themselves.

Hard to do that while scapegoating the Conservatives for hypothetically wanting to do the same. And it looks as though, arrogant and utterly out of touch, they are trying just like Hillary Clinton to insult as “white nationalists” and racists the very average voters they are expecting to vote for them.