Bruce Dowbiggin
Civil Liberty: The Hard Is What Makes It Great
Across Canada sports teams are falling in line with the idea that public health is best served by customers showing proof of a double-vaccination or a negative Covid-19 test. (The policy is also being extended to restaurants, theatres, gyms and government offices.)
The best way to mange this policy is by government-issued health “passports” to tell ushers, waiters, towel boys, maître’d, security people and other healthcare “professionals” that the bearer has been good and succumbed to the coercion of the past few months. (The author has had both vaccine shots— Ed.)
In the sorry annals of “flatten the curve” solutions to the virus, the “passports” notion takes the prize for blunt-edge hysteria. Coming on the heels of “you must be vaccinated” and “you must be vaccinated twice”, and “Oops, you need a booster”, the idea that your personal health record be made known to people with no professional reason for having access is a concept that, pre-Covid, would have been laughed at.
The same Nancy Pelosi who saw health passports as fascistic in 2019 (“we cannot require someone to be vaccinated” and “it’s a matter of privacy to know who is and who isn’t [vaccinated]”) and “The Resistance” as a noble calling now want to build education camps for those who disagree on exposing your details to the unwashed.
If we might sum up the arguments for the passports they fall into a few categories:
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You already allow access to personal data for taxes, banks and other instruments of the state. What’s the big whoop? This is the equivalent of saying, “Hey, you’ve been stabbed five times, what’s so bad about a sixth time being run through?”
2) Your reluctance to seriously accept the Spanish Flu Inquisition is going to kill me— despite this paper masks, furious hand scrubbing, six-foot distancing, being locked in a basement for the better part of a year— and getting vaxxed twice. This the vanity position of you being the boss of me and everyone else when it suits you.
As we wrote last week in “Everyone Wears The Ribbon”, the SJWs ignore that we now know the vaccinations are not the promised Raid to wipe out Covid. We know from testing in Israel/ UK that increasingly we are seeing double-vaxx people testing positive for the virus. We know that one or more boosters are coming. We know that these are the latest distortions, misrepresentations and outright lies from the “passport” people in authority since early 2020. The people, like Bullwinkle the Moose, saying, “This time it’s got to work.”
We know that this is now a healthcare crisis, not a Covid-19 crisis. That’s why they don’t tell you the seven-day moving average Covid deaths in Canada is 11. In a nation of 38 million. Instead, to scare you, they give you phony PCR positives. (PCR tests are the trawler-net of healthcare, pulling up old boots, sharks, floating plastic, dolphin, oil drums and yes, a few of the fish you’re looking for.)
Hospitals are full of collateral victims of 2020’s flatten the curve, because clinics and doctors won’t see people with virus symptoms. They’re also jammed with psychiatric patients traumatized by the failed solutions of the WHO, CDC etc. They’re packed with cancer, cardiac, stroke and other patients who went untreated in 2020 and now have accelerated symptoms.
3) The passport will, in the words of an eager booster this past weekend, make it “easier” to identify the pox-ridden unvaccinated. It’ll be like buying beer or dynamite. Just flash the card and you’re a member of a preferred class. Maybe get AmEx to sponsor the cards?
The problem with the “easy does it” method is that it is inspired by the abject and often irrational fear of Covid-19. (“Kids’ll die by the thousands, you can get it from table tops, CPR tests are not wildly inaccurate”) Fear makes us do almost anything to protect ourselves. And it makes us vulnerable to smiling governments and healthcare officials telling us only what they want us to know. So the Family Compact downplays the selectivity of victims and hypes the unicorns.
The founders of democratic nations with liberal values understood the power of fear. The Declaration of Independence was forged in the midst of the American Revolution. Its authors would be hanged if it failed. They knew fear. That’s why they made it so damned difficult to circumvent the rights to person and privacy when people get nervous. They knew “easy” would get a lot of traction in a moment of stress.
The Canadians who died fighting Nazi oppression likewise knew what happens when you just shrug your shoulders and go along with the herd who are coercing you. It’s why, when they defeated the powers of a totalitarian state, they enshrined the right to privacy and independence of speech in our laws. They didn’t want it to be a Dixie cup casually thrown away in a time if fear.
They knew there would come a day when some glib suit would say surrendering your health record was the “easiest” thing to do. That the media would take the path of least resistance. They knew saying no to the mob would be hard. They understood, in the immortal words spoken by Tom Hanks in League of Their Own, “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard everyone would do it. The hard…is what makes it great.”
Holding your principles when everyone around you is going along to get along is an exhausting process. It is like the free-speech laws now being trampled by Twitter, Facebook, the Liberal Party and others. We protect free speech not for the people we agree with— but for the people with whom we disagree.
In the paranoia and power grabs of today those principles are being forgotten in the rush to “make it easy”.
A final thought: our blessed media— who now include censorship in their quiver— continue to hammer the public with numbers about the unvaccinated, extrapolating dark right-wing QAnon figures as the source of the resistance. And while a certain segment of the resisters are conservatives and even zany, a very large tranche of those saying no comes from the black, Asian, east Asian and other minority groups.
Seems they don’t trust our diversity PM not to introduce some poison into their bodies. But because the media and the PM are such dedicated patrons of cultural diversity you’ll never hear a peep that vaccines and passports are anathema to the people they’re lionizing. Instead you’ll see resisters pictured as white, lower-middle-class gun owners and dirt-bike aficionados. Easier to get the petrified sheeple on board that way.
The early polling for Canada’s September election shows that these elites might— might— be in for a reckoning. If so, it might be the first positive thing to come out of the virus. Just don’t expect them to give up easily.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, his new book Personal Account with Tony Comper is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx
Breaking: It’s now being reported that in the 2024 U.S. election, zero Canadians voted for Donald Trump. In fact, zero Canadians voted for anyone on the ballot. They’re not allowed to. And yet rage monkeys in the Canadian media seem to have the idea that Canada is— and should be— an immediate priority of POTUS 47.
Here’s Globe & Mail/ CBC wind therapist Andrew Coyne about ten exits past normal on the idea of Donald Trump on Canadian soil. Okay, on Alberta soil. “We’re going to roll out the red carpet for the wannabe dictator of America at the very moment he is moving to suppress dissent with armed force?” (You mean like the Truckers Convoy?)
Cartoonist Michael DeAdder, who likely cries if you use improper pronouns, says “Hold my kombucha”. His latest etching has Trump asking a veteran what he did in the war. The witty retort is “Fought against people like you”. Get it? Trump murders six millions Jews. But The Hill keeps this guy working, and the laughs just keep on coming. Free speech!
The presumption is jaw-dropping. Even as Trump’s approval rating hits 53 percent, Canadians online were echoing Democrats’ fever dreams of forming a shadow government to take over from Trump via coup. This sense of impunity at a distance is why the Canadian government— along with other drive-by virtue signallers UK, Norway, New Zealand, and Australia— have imposed sanctions on two sitting members of the Israeli cabinet. They know it will rile Trump’s America.
For ordinary Canadians, Trump became a post-it note to justify giving Team Liberal another swing at ruining the nation. “We used to be such friends! He’s a tyrant.!” This just in: Love him or hate him Trump is employed by Americans to do their bidding. He’s not a sentimental buddy of Canada who’ll cut us some slack for old time’s sake. He has no remittance from Canada to please the Laurentian elites. If your defence is non-existent and your military gender-obsessed: you had it coming.
Are his policies jostling Canada? Absolutely. Read Art of the Deal. The 51st state jibe when Justin soiled himself was rude. But it worked on pliant Canadian liberals. Now the The Little Banker is disavowing the dissolute decade of Trudeau while employing Conservatives’ policies on defence spending, inter-provincial trade and border security. Hell, he’s naming longtime Tories to his personal staff.
In the end Carney knows this ain’t mock Parliament. That his dossier begins and ends with satisfying the beast to the south. None of this should be a surprise. Yet Canadians dozed when Trump made clear in his election campaign that the American economy is the greatest in the world. If you want to fish in that pond it’s not going to be for free. That means tariffs for a range of U.S. industries that couldn’t compete in a Biden world.
We can argue how well tariffs work, but Trump wants them to reduce taxes on the people who elected him. Not the Canadians who fly first class but pay economy. And who have pushed his approval ratings into the 50s, higher than ever before. (Likely to spike higher after the No Kings Riot season peters out.)
No wonder Canadians preferred the guy before Trump, the senile sock puppet whose government was run by anonymous figures using the auto-pen. Sleepy Joe let Canada slide into mediocrity and financial peril without any judgement. It was comfortable. Then The Donald had the nerve to expose the ditch Canada was in.
Canada, Trump pointed out, was delinquent on its defence, harbouring Chinese drug lords, printing money like Canadian Tire and its banks were involved in money laundering. That was the nice stuff. Try Organized fentanyl networks operating with impunity in the largest cities of the nation So dumping on Trump in salty cartoons allows Canada’s Mod Squad to ignore the real issues that should have been litigated in the April election.
We have written extensively about the ruse that was played on gormless Canadians in “U.S. Voters Smelled A Rat But Canadian Voters Bought The Cheese” We have catalogued Canada’s drug and money laundering disgrace in “Chinese Gangs Dominate Canada: Why Will Voters Give Liberals Another Term?” We’ve described the real-estate bubble economy created by Trudeau and sidekick Carney that threatens to crash the economy and ruin seniors’ pensions in
In the end, it is still la-la-la-la We Can’t Hear You. Trump-obsessed Boomers more concerned with the equity in their jumped-up bungalows gave the finger to the next generations and blamed it all on Orange Man Bad. In the monotone of Canadian political comment it all seemed so easy. Turn against Trump. Cash another dividend. Cheer on MSNBC and CNN bitch sessions.
The Family Compact don’t get it. Their Antifa heroes down south plan demos and “nonviolent” activity to crater the public resolve. In Canada that still works. But in the U.S. the Covid reverb is hitting the natural governing class of the nation. While they craft fine phrases about democracy the consumers remember them using a virus to stop society.
The appetite for Gavin Newsom blovaitors and Jen Psaki fart catchers is crashing in America. Riots may be coming in the U.S., but it won’t be like George Floyd and Covid and the pussy hats. At some point Canada’s docile classes better wake up, too. America owes them nothing. They need to earn the respect.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, his new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them. George Orwell
Or, in the case of Olympic legend Simone Biles, only gymnasts believe in the incendiary issue of trans men competing in women’s sports. Biles, who has made a secondary career as an object of pity, took exception when former swimmer Riley Gaines, an opponent of trans men competing against women, sent a picture of Minnesota softball team that recently won a state title with a pitcher who is reported to be transgender.
“Comments off lol,’ Gaines wrote in response to the post which wasn’t permitting any comments from the public. “To be expected when your star player is a boy.”
That brought Biles into the fray. ‘You’re truly sick, all of this campaigning because you lost a race. Straight up sore loser. ‘You should be uplifting the trans community and perhaps finding a way to make sports inclusive OR creating a new avenue where trans feel safe in sports. Maybe a transgender category IN ALL sports!! ‘But instead… You bully them… One things for sure is no one in sports is safe with you around!!!!!’
She then poked Gaines again, saying: ‘Bully someone your own size, which would ironically be a male.” (Gaines husband is 6-foot-4)
The loser reference was to Gaines having lost to a trans swimmer in an NCAA race. Since then Gaines has launched a campaign to outlaw biological males from competing with cisgendered girls and women. She has testified in the U.S. Congress and has appeared in numerous interviews espousing a position supported by the vast majority of Americans.
One might think the proof of this position— unquestioned as recently as a decade ago— would be obvious. But Biles and gender radicals who’ve tried to make trans into the Emancipation Proclamation of the 21st century are not giving up the fight.
Here’s someone named Nancy Armour in USA Today. “There is no scientific evidence that transgender women athletes have a physical advantage over cisgender women athletes, but that hasn’t stopped Gaines from claiming they do..” When legislation banning trans men in girls/ women sports was presented in the U.S. Congress 106 Democrats voted against the motion. The chattering class on CBC, MSNBC and CNN likewise have a cohort of those opposing the ban.
But it was the outburst from Biles that most appalled fans who’d worshipped her as the GOAT of Olympic gymnastics and then sympathized with her victimization by Dr. Larry Nasser. Even when she bailed on her teammates at the 2024 Games they cut her slack. But suddenly a woman who’s preached against body shaming and intolerance was deriding a fellow athlete’s body and mocking her complaints.
Critics were quick to post Biles’ hypocrisy about compassion, citing her own tear-stained testimony about how she was taken advantage by a doctor. Here’s how we described her psychological distress last August during the Olympics. “Prominent among them was gymnast Simone Biles who described the abuse she’d suffered from a male trainer and on social media as the greatest female gymnast in history. Even as she added more golds to her mantle she’d seemed unable to find peace in her accomplishments.
“Due to mental blocks, she’d had to step away from the sport for a time to get her head straight. She had a lot of company from fellow competitors who described sexual harassment and intimidation on social media for their unhappiness. (Hence the constant mental health commercials on the TV broadcasts.)”
Now the same role model is mocking Gaines? It seems unthinkable. As for the claims that men have no advantage against women, it was pointed out that there are zero women who try to reverse the equation, going into men’s sports. They show the hard truths about competitive records of men versus women in a range of sports. They describe the physical risks for women playing against larger, stronger men. Here. Here. And here.
It’s still stunning to see Biles toeing the radical LGBTQ line while asking for traditional pity of a victimized woman herself. Or the amount of support that the cause has garnered from progressives throughout society. When did people became so obtuse about the growth this societal contagion?
We wrote earlier this year about how such notions take hold. MacDonald Laurier Institute fellow Mia Hughes charted a history of similar social contagions such as bulimia and multiple-personality disorder. “In 1972, British psychologist Gerald Russell treated a woman with an unusual eating disorder involving binging and purging. Over the next seven years, he saw a further 30 woman presenting with the same condition. In 1979, he wrote a paper published in Psychological Medicine, in which he gave it the name bulimia nervosa….
“Then something remarkable happened. The illness swept the globe like wildfire… affecting an estimated 30 million people by the mid-1990s, the majority of whom were teenage girls and young women. The explanation for this rapid spread is what philosopher Ian Hacking calls ‘semantic contagion’ – how the process of naming and describing a condition creates the means by which the condition spreads. The epidemic of multiple-personality disorder in the 90s was spread this same way… Multiple studies demonstrate the media’s culpability in the spread of social contagions.”
The new contagion is trans athletes. USA Today is just one example of how influencers try to legitimize campaigns to boost their own self esteem. As the battle to reverse the trans incursion shows, there are only too many willing to play politics in the gender debate. Like the pro-Palestinian movement in North America the trans athlete hoax exists is a bubble where reality and fiction can co-exist, knowing they’ll never be put to the test.
Orwell called it doublethink “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” Biles and the liberal elites have it mastered. Nursing their grievance while finding it a fault in others.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, Bruce is regular media contributor. The new book from there team of Evan & Bruce Dowbiggin is Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL & Changed Hockey. From Espo to Boston in 1967 to Gretz in L.A. in 1988 to Patrick Roy leaving Montreal in 1995, the stories behind the story. In paperback and Kindle on #Amazon. Destined to be a hockey best seller. https://www.amazon.ca/Deal-Trades-Stunned-Changed-Hockey-ebook/dp/B0D236NB35/
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