If you listen really closely, you can probably hear the far right in Canada snicker at what Leslyn Lewis said today in response to Liberal MP and Parliamentary Secretary for Intergovernmental Affairs, Infrastructure and Communities, Jennifer O’Connell.

O’Connell had just rehashed the Christine Anderson incident, the EU parliamentarian who was photographed visiting with Conservative Party MPs, including Lewis. Anderson has been labeled a Nazi by her critics, and O’Connell was attempting to shame Lewis and other MPs by attaching Anderson’s alleged beliefs to Lewis and her colleagues.

Lewis a black woman.

Listen, we live in really complicated, peculiar times. We are manic in how we organize our concerns and beliefs, and we often border on wagering a war over identities rather than ideas and action. For O’Connell to attempt to saddle a black woman with a Nazi enabler tag not only breaches the scope of what it means to be a civil public servant, but also demonstrates that hypocrisy makes people blind to the sins of their own inner circles.

Lewis is the only conservative member who could say what she said, and she nailed it.

“The prime minister has put on blackface so many times. He literally put a banana in his pants, and you have the audacity to stand and look at me, as a black woman, and ask about my meeting with another member of the European Parliament.”

If you think that was a cheap shot, think again.

The Liberal Party was painted into a corner when those photos emerged. At the time, I thought it was the greatest thing to ever happen to a party that made Cancel Culture a sport. I thought maybe because someone in their party, the prime minister no less, had been caught red-handed symbolizing the very ignorance liberals loved to lecture about, that maybe they would back off and stop parroting buzzwords or signaling to us their unreproachable virtues.

.@LeslynLewis just torched the entire Liberal caucus after Liberal MP @JenOConnell_ tried to shame her into apologizing for meeting with Christine Anderson.

MUST WATCH 🔥 pic.twitter.com/UyKUt8dW0Q

— Harrison Faulkner (@Harry__Faulkner) March 28, 2023

And then O’Connell lectured Lewis, as if being in the same room or taking a photo with someone controversial means their sins are automatically downloaded into the souls of all those who dare shake her hand.

“I do not have to approve of everything that another member believes in in order to have the decency to have meetings with other individuals. Your prime minister denigrated black men by putting a banana in his pants. Shame on every member over there that does not chastise him. If this were any other country he would not be leading and he would not have the moral authority to lead.”

You know how you respond to that well said tirade? You don’t.

I know, I know. Theo Fleury posted it. True North folks posted it. Rebel News posted it. So it it must be that Lewis is offside or wrong or dishonest, right?

Nope.

I have news for all my progressive friends out there, and you’re not going to like it. Sometimes the politicians you love are dead wrong, and sometimes the politicians you hate are on the money. Let that marinate. Get all the rage and limb flailing out of your system. There. Feel better? No, of course you don’t.

Absolute shit kicking in the HOC by @LeslynLewis way to stand up to these Liberal assholes who have faced zero consequences for rigging two elections with the help of China. https://t.co/whEFTPcUu2

— Theo Fleury (@TheoFleury14) March 28, 2023

Whether you like it or not, Trudeau in blackface made all subsequent lectures about social justice flat when it comes from the Liberal Party. It just does. In an era where nuance is long forgotten, liberals have always gone out of their way to correctly argue that while what Trudeau did was asinine, it was a mistake that he has owned. I agree with that. But Lewis and her colleagues did not get caught doing something racist and gross. They were photographed with a controversial, German politician. On a scale of 1 to Blackface, it doesn’t even chart. So if you can twist yourself into a pretzel explaining away one of the most symbolic examples of gritty racism, why can’t you muster the fortitude to give the benefit of the doubt to at least Lewis, who probably doesn’t include supporting racist ideas as part of her overall identity.

Moreover, maybe we should also start talking about the treatment of black conservatives. Have you ever known any black conservative women? I have. In fact, I successfully helped a black woman who worked for a high profile conservative in Ontario get lost-in-the-woods has-been Warren Kinsella to scrub his own site after he posted a photo of this woman with her boss’ hands on her head.

Kinsella implied that the politician was sexually harassing her. When she saw his post she was livid, informing me that it was tradition any time her boss had to make a speech. Kinsella took a moment in time, smeared it with a veneer of maliciousness and topped it off with a racist cherry.

My point is being a conservative doesn’t make you a racist, even if people who are clearly racist are posting that Lewis nailed it.

Sorry kids, but Lewis fucking nailed it. You are going to have to start looking at ideas on paper if you can’t separate your bias against individuals from the ideas they share. It’s called adulting.

Most of all, everyone needs to immediately stop the cultural disease of guilt by association. We can spend eternity hanging out solely with our own cliques, blowing sunshine up each-others asses, but unless we learn how to sit across from each other at tables, to at least hear ideas from the mouths who actually think of them, we will never un-polarize ourselves. .