Please Advise! How Crazy Can Trudeau Haters Get?

[Editor’s note: Steve Burgess is an accredited spin doctor with a PhD in Centrifugal Rhetoric from the University of SASE, situated on the lovely campus of PO Box 7650, Cayman Islands. In this space he dispenses PR advice to politicians, the rich and famous, the troubled and well-heeled, the wealthy and gullible.]

Dear Dr. Steve,

Last week in Belleville, Ontario, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was swarmed by a group of angry protesters. Video of the incident caught people calling Trudeau a pedophile and “a pathetic Jew.”

Does this worry you, Dr. Steve?

Signed,

Concerned Gentile

Dear CG,

Speaking of Jews: Jesus. The Christian Messiah is rarely described as a politician, but he got one aspect of the political gospel profoundly right. Love your enemies. Bless those who curse you. For they are doing more for you than a busload of spin doctors and a TV advertising budget the size of Walmart's.

That last sentence isn't actually in the Bible, but it is included in the Dr. Steve version, the Political Sermon on the Mount. Love your political enemies. They are often your best pals.

The yahoos attacking Trudeau in Belleville gave the prime minister the opportunity to look reasonable, courageous and thoroughly sane — which to his credit, he took. Trudeau was seen at one point comforting a young boy apparently upset by the braying of the spittle-flecked loons. In that moment Trudeau looked like a firefighter who has just returned a treed kitten to its teary-eyed young owner. Mission accomplished, chuckleheads. Pierre Poilievre owes you no thanks.

Writer Robert Conquest had a rule he repeated to friends: “The behaviour of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.” Conquest may have applied his rule to bureaucracies, but Dr. Steve has found it applies equally well to political parties and activists. Dr. Steve’s variation on the rule is that the fiercest partisans of any political cause are usually its biggest problem.

This is true on both right and left. Your average Fox News host may gleefully blow things wildly out of proportion, but rants against the excesses of academia and social justice warriors are often launched by legitimate examples of overreach. You get ideologues on both sides — see U.S. left-wing activist and presidential candidate Cornel West's recent Putin-friendly attacks on NATO for starting the war in Ukraine. But it seems to Dr. Steve that these days partisans are more likely to be shooting themselves in the right foot.

Ron DeSantis has certainly blown off a few toes of late. The Florida governor has promoted a school curriculum that touts the benefits of slavery. As best as Dr. Steve can tell, the new Florida explanation of the American Civil War is that plantation owners started a really successful internship program but the woke North got jealous. Florida's ludicrous white-washing of history has been a beribboned gift for Democrats.

But it was congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene who really made the extra effort to provide the most thoughtful gift. In a recent speech MTG referenced FDR and LBJ while asking WTF? She accused President Joe Biden of following in the footsteps of presidents Roosevelt and Johnson in offering social programs that would advance the satanic agenda of improving people's lives. So succinct was Greene’s case that the president was simply able to tag it with “I'm Joe Biden and I approve this message” and boom, the online ad was ready to run. At this rate Greene will soon be accusing Biden of inventing the bacon cheeseburger.

Republican generosity can even extend to Hollywood. Case in point: the American Right vs. the new film Barbie. Professional bloviator Ben Shapiro launched a 43-minute jeremiad against the Greta Gerwig-directed bin of woke garbage and even burned a Barbie car with Barbie and Ken inside. It was a Bonfire of the Barbities, a Barbatrocity, the martyrdom of Barbie of Arc. In short, Ben did not enjoy the flick. Perhaps he prefers Klaus Barbie.

At any rate Shapiro was far from alone in his doll-exterminating crusade. Republicans claimed Barbie was not just anti-male but Chinese government propaganda. This may refer to rumours of a deleted scene in which Barbie holds up her Little Pink Book and declares “Women hold up half the sky, and now we want your half too, bourgeois males. Die, running dogs of the patriarchy!” According to Fox News, Sen. Ted Cruz “declared war on Barbie,” which Cruz may have considered safer than declaring war on Oppenheimer.

Wrong. The anti-Barbie battle turned out to be a rerun of Bambi vs. Godzilla. And this time Godzilla was dressed in pink. Barbie pulled in a huge $155 million at the U.S. weekend box office. Was Shapiro perhaps offered a percentage of the box office gross for his help? Will Cruz get a little pink piece of the action?

There is another possible view of all this extremist showboating though — could it be effective? On ABC’s The View, Ana Navarro attacked DeSantis’s Florida education meddling and concluded, “That’s why you’re 30 points down in the polls.”

Well, not so fast, Ana. We're talking about Republican polls here. DeSantis is trailing a guy who put children in cages and regularly sends love letters to the Proud Boys and assorted insurrectionists. DeSantis isn't behind because his white supremacist trolling isn’t working — he’s trailing for the same reason RC Cola lags behind Coke. Someone else did it first and did it better.

All the same, Pierre Poilievre might want to be careful. A few more Belleville-type incidents and the Conservative leader will be getting a reminder that Justin Trudeau was born on Christmas Day. The gifts will just keep on coming.