By my count, there are now three photos and one video of Justin Trudeau in blackface (or what some are kindly but confusingly calling “brownface”) circulating online, two of the photos being from an Arabian Nights Party when he was 29 and one from back when he was in high school. If the election was taking place on Twitter, Trudeau would be a backbencher already—the story of the first photo was released by TIME Magazine, and he’s been trending worldwide since last night. Canada is back, and that apparently means there are photos of our PM with a painted face and his hand placed rather inappropriately on a young woman on the front page of CNN and the BBC. Trudeau, as it turns out, is not as advertised—and his promiscuous accusations of unwokeness directed at other politicians appear to be a bad case of the pot calling the kettle black.
As others have already noted, if this was Andrew Scheer or any of his candidates and not Justin, their careers would already be over, with Trudeau thundering his indignation in their wake. But just as the incident where he groped a young reporter as a young man and then told Canadians that this was an opportunity for all of us to learn something, Trudeau has a knack for bouncing back from this sort of thing with his enormous sense of entitlement and self-righteousness intact. Perhaps this means that nobody believes his woker-than-thou shtick in the first place, but he obviously believes he can ride this out. (His actions do seem to have briefly halted Gerald Butts’ nasty habit of calling people Nazis on Twitter, now that Trudeau has been exposed. Butts must be suffering enormously right now.)
I have no idea if this is going to hurt Trudeau in the polls, but I think it will certainly destroy the mountains of Liberal oppo research that they have been successfully rolling out—and maybe, just maybe, it will even mark the end of weaponized political correctness as an effective tool to blow up careers. During his apology press conference, Trudeau actually said that people shouldn’t be held to account for things they did years ago, which is a de facto condemnation of his party’s entire strategy for winning this election. For the rest of the campaign, the Liberals are going to have a pretty difficult time rolling out their latest evidence of pro-life convictions or what-have-you with their characteristic breathless outrage when they know that the response is going to be: “Your guy wore blackface. When he was almost thirty. After spending his entire life in the spotlight because his dad was prime minister.” If Jagmeet Singh doesn’t bring this up at the leaders’ debates, he’s the worst politician in the country.
Speaking of Jagmeet, I really hope the Conservatives just shut up and let Singh attack Trudeau from the Left on this one. That way, Trudeau’s campaign blitz will turn into an apology tour while the Conservatives can stick to talking about the issues that most Canadians actually care about. Rule One of warfare is to never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake, and the Conservatives are never going to beat the NDP and the Liberals in the Woke Olympics. A strong NDP means a much greater likelihood of a Conservative government, and any swings by Singh have a far greater likelihood of landing and being taken seriously. We’ve all known that Trudeau is an insufferable hypocrite for some time, but this has just made it all more obvious—and he’s become a laughingstock in the international press to boot. Conservatives should avoid the temptation of driving this home and just let Trudeau twist in the wind. There’s nothing they can do to make it worse for Justin, and plenty they can do to irritate the voters, so the Tories should enjoy the civil war on the Left and go to work.
My final (and unpopular) point is that I don’t understand why people are so “shocked” by this. Again, we’ve known for a long time that Trudeau was a fundamentally frivolous person well into adulthood (and some, like myself, would argue that he still is.) His track record with women has been sketchy, and his belief that the rules are for other people obvious. He has long expected us all to see that his virtue is so obvious that he gets a free fondle once in awhile—his reward for being such a good person–and when he gets nailed with it, he takes the opportunity to explain what we, as Canadians, can collectively learn from his experience groping a young reporter at a beer fest. That is Justin Trudeau, and we’ve got the chance to get rid of him. And if left-wing voters forgive him, they will prove once and for all that political correctness was never something they actually cared about–it was just something they used to bludgeon their enemies.
