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A journalist friend of mine recently attended his four-year-old daughter’s year-end dance recital here in Toronto. “Every dance was in some way about Canada,” he told me. “My daughter’s dance was Canada Geese. Another was Aurora Borealis. One dance was Our Aboriginal Peoples. And I’m like, ‘Oh, God, no.’”

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“It’s one of the youngest classes — very basic. No real theme, just introductory dance moves. The costumes are evocative of animal skins. The hair buns have little feathers. The theme was ‘Honouring the first people of North America.’ And I was freaked out. It was objectively innocent, benign, cute and even touching — and it was absolutely well-intended. But I’ve spent so much time in Stupid Twitter-Land that I expected the parents to stand up and start booing and hissing and calling for the studio owner’s head.”

“No one did that, of course,” my friend added. “Normal people don’t do those things.”

In a 1945 essay, Notes on Nationalism, George Orwell described a rumour among leftists that the real reason American troops had been brought to Europe was to suppress English communism, not fight the Nazis.

“One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that,” Orwell famously noted. “No ordinary man could be such a fool.” Even by Orwell’s high standards, those words have aged extremely well. Tell an ordinary Canadian schlub that white people aren’t allowed to quote Beyoncé, and he will be smart enough to laugh in your face. Dress down a superbly intelligent Peace and Conflict Studies PhD candidate for the same act, and she will fall over herself with apologies.

I refer here, of course, to federal NDP leadership candidate Niki Ashton, who back in March tweeted “Like Beyoncé says, to the left. Time for an unapologetic left turn for the #NDP, for social, racial, enviro and economic justice.” The Vancouver chapter of Black Lives Matter tweeted a demand that Ashton retract her appropriation of Beyoncé. And she complied, meekly replying: “Not our intention to appropriate. We’re committed to a platform of racial justice + would appreciate ur feedback.”