Good morning, #Resistance fighters. A certain white nationalist agitator, let's call her, ummm…."F. Godly"? No, that's too obvious. How about Lord Goldy-mort?…..has been trying to troll her way to single-digit polling numbers in the Toronto municipal campaign.
Normally, this would lead us to have a complete meltdown about the growth of "Trump-style politics", and the need to stand firm against hate speech, but the trouble is that we're already burning through all of our credibility treating Doug Ford, John Tory, Jason Kenney and Andrew Scheer as though they're all extinction-level threats. You can only compare so many Canadian politicians to Hitler at the same time before the voters start to notice.
To make matters worse, She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named doesn't even appear to be trying to win. She just wants to get on the stage at the debate, and have columnists mention her. You would think that a movement based on attention-getting and trolling would be at least take getting attention seriously, but it seems that in Canada, even our identitarian clickbaitmongers play softball. Why must we be made to suffer constant third rate knockoffs in this country?
More to the point, how are we supposed to scare people into voting against her when she repeatedly demonstrates that she has neither the money nor the volunteers to win? Maxime Bernier has both of those, so when he tweets about how we have too much diversity on the anniversary of Charlottesville, we have to dispatch Rosemary Barton from the CBC to call him out even though he was nowhere near Charlottesville when it happened a year ago, and Aith-Fay Oldy-Gay was right there on the scene. Frustrating, we know, but again you have to use your resources wisely.
If that wasn't bad enough, those idiots at Antifa had to go and steal some Sun Media photographer's hat and make him look like a victim. We know, it's hard to see how anyone who's even tangentially affiliated with Sun Media could be a victim, but if anyone could pull it off, it's Antifa. Goddamnit you guys, this is why we can't take you anywhere!
Now the only way we can justify what happened is through some rambly rant about how photographers who work for Sun Media are "parties to an unfolding conflict" and "belligerents", or by asserting that it's absurd to give the hat-stealing-concussion incident any more space than, say, PC Party of Ontario staffers clapping at press conferences.
For now, we have to settle for walking this awkward tightrope between deploring the awful things Filth Grody says and not unwittingly giving those awful things a platform. This lower-tier municipal candidate has us looking over our shoulders and at each other, worrying about who'll be the one to give her campaign the unintentional boost it's so clearly looking for….. which would beg the question of whether her campaign is achieving its goal of hacking the mainstream. Or, at least it would if we were the least bit self-aware.
If only she would confront the Prime Minister and start spouting off about illegal immigration! Then we could have the RCMP detain her as a crowd applauds.
One thing's for sure: The right has absolutely no idea what it's like to not be able to go all out on the attack against someone you find disgusting, no matter how badly you might want to. You'll never catch us trying to fence conservatives in like this, where they're never sure if what they say hurts or helps their cause.
But it's a burden we gladly bear, because of the enormous responsibility we have in shaping the opinions of Canadians every day. This is why we agonize so over the right way to talk about s***birds like "The Woman". This is why we treat her presence on the ballot with such seriousness, while ignoring all the other lunatics and open neo-Nazis running for Mayor of Toronto.
And if she does manage to draw 10% of the vote, well, at least we'll be able to blame Americans and her other fans abroad, who seem to comprise about half of her campaign. What, you thought we were taking the blame for this one?
Written by Josh Lieblein
