Election 2020

I know that it’s Jonathan Kay but just read the whole thing:

Canadian political neuroses are never more evident than when some political cataclysm unfolds in the United States, such as Wednesday’s mob assault on the Capitol in Washington, D.C. When news first breaks, the initial response on social media typically presents Canada as the respectable teetotaller living upstairs from a pair of boozy rageaholics having their nightly punch-up. But then, like clockwork, there comes a second wave of commentary, this one insisting that we are, in fact, fully complicit in America’s sins. “As Canadians, we shouldn’t be smug,” read one viral Tweet on Wednesday. “What’s happening in the (United States) could easily happen in Ottawa. White supremacy and white supremacists call Canada home, too.” …

Racism is a real problem in all countries — including Canada and the United States. And it will never be completely eradicated because human brains are wired for tribalism. But as anyone who’s actually bothered to look at U.S. voting data knows, the 2020 election actually featured a welcome narrowing of racial voting differences: Despite his often genuinely racist rhetoric, Trump picked up voter share among non-white voters, as compared with 2016, while losing a large portion of his white base. Moreover, as numerous experts have argued convincingly (including Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who I don’t think has yet been cancelled for white supremacy), the Trump phenomenon maps pretty well onto the areas of the United States that have been decimated by outsourcing, automation, income inequality and downward mobility. These root causes don’t excuse racism or mob violence. But it’s worth noting that they’re exactly the sort of issues that leftists (including those at the Star) once used to care about, before they realized they could earn more hand-clap emojis by tracing every spasm of political discontent to this or that Protocol inscribed by the Elders of Whiteness.

What Mr. Kay fails to realise is that Donald Trump is not and never has been a racist in any form sensible people would recognise. Such a slur was used as a cudgel to make him less palatable and we all know it.

Black Americans are not children who need coddling. They voted for Trump for the same reasons any other American would: he was a populist who promised and delivered employment, an issue I’m sure not even Big Tech could de-platform from recent memory.