Bruce Dowbiggin
Cutting Remarks: The Scourge of Hate Speech Censors
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group… in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” Frédéric Bastiat
We take you now to a day in the not-too-distant future. Citizens are lined up at the registry office to renew their license to speak. Since governments weaponized speech and then criminalized words in the mid 2020s, citizens must register their speech the same way they register guns or cars.
For their convenience the government agencies provide a list of words or insinuations that qualify as criminal speech. Here’s a CBC guide to correct speech on climate, giving you the appropriate words to describe weather-as-the-Apocalypse. Don’t forget, every climate faux pas is a micro aggression!
Should you have made it through the previous 12 months without tripping the language laser beam you’ll be permitted to again speak publicly— albeit very carefully. Pretty soon everyone will speak like Uterus Man, also known as cisgendered NDP MLA Brooks Arcand-Paul, who talks as though his mouth was a Woke minefield.
Media outlets, too, will be required to renew their speech licenses or lose the annual slush-fund monies that come with government Good Speak. Here, Trudeau wind therapist Patty Hajdu demonstrates Good Speak, decrying the cyber-violence of Adolph Hitler… er, Pierre Poilievre… over a “reckless use of the pejorative ‘crazy’” to describe her cabinet colleague Stephane Guilbeault. PP’s “slander” was, she assured us, yet another page out of the infamous Donald Trump American playbook that will rule Canada if Patty & Friends lose the next election.
To keep your talk license you’ll need to speak more like Liberal MP Ken Hardie when he says damn the facts, let’s throw a little dirt over a multiple murder on the bad side of Winnipeg: “Might it be the anti-social ‘burn everything down’ far-right attitude we’re seeing creeping in from the U.S.? And the ‘creep’ on the Canadian side? Pierre Poilievre?” (The tone-deaf Liberal has since sorta’ backtracked after being buried on social media.)
If this all sounds absurd, you haven’t been paying attention. In Canada the government of Justin Trudeau is well on its way to creating an apparatus for regulating both public and private speech. The past week it announced that it was extending its grant money though 2029 to failing media outlets, up to about $30,000 per employee. Not to be outdone, Heritage Canada is putting $40,000 per journalist as a target to promote “diversity”. No wonder so many CDN media legends rushed to defend a hapless CP reporter who was verbally upbraided by Poillievre.
Hey, money is money. Who in the collapsed media empires is not going to like that, huh? Sure you’ll have to sing for your supper, but you’ll still have the cottage in the Muskokas or Kawartha Lakes to soothe any qualms about selling out your journalistic birthright.
Here’s former-progressive author and blogger Michael Shellenberger: “Liberal Left governments have sought to use every new crisis as an opportunity to scapegoat their political opponents and, when that stops working, demand censorship, since the legitimacy and continued existence of the liberal Left hegemony in the West comes from control over information.”
Speaking of U.S. politics, where Joe Biden is polling below herpes, his administration is setting up a disinformation bureau to help the average voter divine something as “information” (Biden policy) or “disinformation” (Trump policy). Stubbornly hanging on to un-truths about The Biden Family’s shakedown of foreign governments could land you in a jail next to the Jan. 6 traitors.
To goose public fear, Team Biden has a new series of Adolph Hitler… er, Donald Trump… revenge memes. From Bill Maher (“I’m afraid of him on a personal level” ) to former Obama spokes-bugle Jen Psaki, the ruling class is pumping the accelerator: “There is an old quote that goes, ‘For my friend everything. For my enemies the law.’ That is how Trump has operated and that is how he will continue to operate if ever given the levers of government again.” Irony alert.
Need More? Here . Here And here is a CDN fainting goat. (Clarification: DEMs jailed for political crimes or charged for same during Trump presidency: 0. Non-DEMs jailed for political crimes or accused of same during Biden presidency: more than 600, perhaps as many as a thousand.)
Rioting in Dublin
In Ireland, the recent riots over an immigrant stabbing five adults and children have inspired the EU puppets of Leo Valadkar’s government to suggest similar limits on speech must be codified after UFC star Connor MacGregor suggested that perhaps immigration was behind the anger of protesters. Here’s Taioseach fart catcher Pauline O’Connell: “If your views on other people’s identities go to make their lives unsafe, insecure, and cause them such deep discomfort that they cannot live in peace, then I believe that it is our job as legislators to restrict those freedoms for the common good.”
In Britain, the parsing of language has produced “UK police : We will no longer accept the statement ‘re-housing of illegal immigrants” as a hate crime.” Across the European Union, the “restrict those freedoms for the common good” drumbeat is the same, as quaking bureaucrats and entitled statists seek to silence their critics using hate-language laws that would make even Orwell blush. Result: In Germany, the right-wing AFD party is rising in the polls. In France, Marine Le Pen is more popular than Emmanuel Macron. The recent election of right-wing governments in Italy, the Netherlands and Brexit in Britain has only hastened their panic to punish speech.
Says economist and blogger Tyler Cowen “if your main theory here is ‘racism,’ your contribution to the discourse probably is negative.”
Next speech regulation is silence. Or non-speech. Under the new rules, silence will be no defence when the mob orders you to “wear the ribbon”. UC Berkeley Law Professor Savala Trepczynski gave away the game saying that “White silence is incredibly powerful … It’s not neutral. It acts like a weapon.” Writes legal specialist Jonathan Turley, “In a world where silence is violence and civility is complicity, there is little room for true free speech.”
In this vein nearly 2,000 people signed a petition to fire Marymount Manhattan theatre arts associate professor Patricia Simon after she appeared to fall asleep briefly during an anti-racist Zoom meeting. Complained one colleague, Simon was “ignoring … racist and sizeist actions and words of the vocal coaches under her jurisdiction.”
Just sayin’. Better get your license now. Before it’s too….. (click).
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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, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his new 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 http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx
Now that the annoying Toronto Maple Leafs business (In Toronto The Leafs Always Fall In Spring ) is in the rearview mirror it’s time to turn Canada’s yearning eyes to… the Vancouver Canucks? Okay, the Edmonton Oilers are in the second round, too, playing the Canucks. But it’s the unlikely re-appearance of the Nucks, like some Ogopogo on skates, that commands the curious attention of Canadians.
While Edmonton may even win the Cup this year— should its forward-heavy strategy work better than it did for the Maple Leafs— seeing the team in blue and green re-emerge after eight seasons out of eleven with no playoffs— no postseason since 2020— has some intriguing side stories. It’s been bleak since the owner blew up his team in 2013 for fear of losing a few season-ticket holders.
Vancouver is the only Canadian team to go to Game 7 twice in the Finals since Montreal won the Cup in 1993. In 1994 it was defeat at the hands of Mark Messier and the Rangers. In 2011 it was the bastard, er… Boston Bruins who skated away with the Cup in seven. And, as everyone at HNIC reminds us, Calgary (2004), Edmonton (2006), Ottawa (2007) and Montreal (2021) all fell in the Final, too. But that’s it. Seven spins of the Plinko in 31 years.
With NHL ensuring that only one of the two remaining Canadian clubs will advance after this round, the chances of a Canadian team making it eight Finals in 31 years are slim. So why not the team that plays at 10 PM ET all the time, the team that was predicted to be among the League’s worst this year. Your Vancouver Canucks. After all, it would be so perfect for the team from the home of loony politics to win the Cup.
Primary among them is the symmetry of the Hamas disturbances across the county today that recall the 2011 Canucks riot that followed the Game Seven loss by Alain Vigneault’s team. For those who don’t remember, the bitter loss fused overly refreshed Canucks fans with an element that had nothing to do with hockey on a warm summer night.
As the fans streamed away from the Rogers Centre and the open-air watch parties, the now-familiar masked balaclava-wearing, backpack toting radicals moved among them, whipping up the fans’ monumental disappointment with urges to vandalize and loot. Viewers saw an incongruous picture of these fifth columnists and fans in the team jersey becoming involved in the smashing of windows and setting of fires. Sure, Montreal had seen recent riots after Stanley Cups but there was little element of politics in the drunken behaviour.
Not Vancouver. Not in 2011. Seeing the random anarchists and looters on Granville and Robson Streets the question was, “Why were the cops and elected officials so unprepared?”
It was an unsettling conclusion to a season of so much good feeling in Vancouver, staining the memory of a gifted hockey team that simply ran out of healthy bodies. The most common reaction to the riots was “Who were those non-hockey people in the riot?” There were jokes about the instigators were 257 Daniel Sedins, 319 Henrik Sedins and 195 Roberto Luongos. But they fell flat.
Many were shocked to see so many anarchists, Marxists, radical climate freaks, petty criminals and psychopaths in their midst. Like the reaction to the Palestinian mobs waving Death To Jews and From The River to the Sea, the impact on average Canadians— the kind who watch hockey, not Mao, as a religion— was unsettling. The damages soared into the tens of millions as Vancouver’s looked at a burned-out downtown and asked, “What happened?”
Later investigations revealed a large contingent of the rioters came from as far away as the Pacific Northwest and California. This was an organized event. Again, how did so many people with evil intent get into the country? The answer to most of the questions was very Canadian. People thought it couldn’t happen here.
It’s what most are saying about the Hamas-inspired wave of crime and insubordination now on screens. Canadians have always been so liberal and self effacing. How did they end up branded by homicidal Hamas as supporting the murder of babies? Isn’t there supposed to be some pay-off for being kind and opening the doors to unchecked immigration from countries where terror and instability are the watchwords?
What is just as unnerving about the Palestinian intifada ugliness is the realization that, memories of 2011, the anti-Israel demonstrators represent only a part of the mobs denying entry to Jewish students at schools or blocking traffic or defacing buildings with messages of hate. It’s clear that anti-capitalist nihilists are in equal numbers in the crowds, whipping up hapless coeds, grad-school nimrods and nutty professors with their messages.
Worse, the uniform tents, signs, chants and more across the continent are the products of donors linked to some of the most famous names in finance— Rockefeller, Gates, Soros.
Citizens are right to wonder how the toxic politics of the Middle East has fused with a bottomless pit of money to upend their capitalist society. And to realize that the liberal tenets of toleration and friendliness espoused by feckless politicians have only brought on this crisis.
And to think that most thought it all behind them after they’d cleaned up the broken glass and burned cars in 2011. As they say, do it once, shame on you. Do it twice, shame on me.
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, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Now for pre-order, new from the team of Evan & Bruce Dowbiggin . 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. Launching in paperback and Kindle on #Amazon this week. Destined to be a hockey best seller. https://www.amazon.ca/Deal-Trades-Stunned-Changed-Hockey-ebook/dp/B0D236NB35/
“Take out the papers and the trash, or you don’t get no spending cash.”
Whether you’re in the stock market or real estate the question of when to sell is paramount. When to dump a tanking investment or sell a house in a bad market is an art form. Hence the expression, Timing is everything.
For the incumbent governments in Canada and the U.S. the time has come to make that risky decision of when to fish or when to cut bait with their respective leaders.
In Canada the federal Liberals, still shacked up with the NDP in a common-law embrace, have been doing denial for an extended period since they used the Covid-19 lockdown to sneak out a minority government in 2021. As soon as voters awoke to the lockdown hoax they’d lived through— courtesy of Justin Trudeau— they began to abandon him as a marketable product.
With five years to procrastinate, however, they indulged their radical agenda of climate and culture rather than address how they might be re-elected with Trudeau and his Quebec-dominated cabinet. They blew black holes in Canada’s debt load. There was a PR strategy to label Pierre Poilievre as a mini-Trump. And to buy up the floundering legacy media sources before there 2025 vote.
But for the most part the Liberals still saw Happy Ways where the mainstream saw an intellectual lightweight tilting at every Woke windmill. Since 2021 the polls have shown a steady erosion to the point where they see a Conservative majority— maybe even super-majority— if an election were called today.
Now all governments get tired over time. The biggest complaint about Stephen Harper from the talking classes in 2015 was the sense of fatigue he projected to Canadians who want their PM to be a rock star. But the collapse in Trudeau’s support has come via other very serious underpinnings from corruption (Lavalin, ME Charity, Chinese influence) to entitlement (the Carbon Tax, deficit).
However you see these issues they have led to the point where Liberals, more than half of whom will lose in the next election, must decide if they want to go to Davy Jones locker on the HMCS Skippy. Many of them will qualify for federal pensions if they hold on to the bitter end with Trudeau in October of next year. So he has that assurance of support. But if he is punted by the party he resurrected in 2010, who will succeed him? The taint of Trudeau on his most loyal sycophants will disqualify anyone in cabinet from being taken seriously for the top job.
Outside the immediate junta, names like Mark Carney— former Bank of Canada head— and deposed justice minister Jody Wilson Raybould have been put forward. The problem for anyone aspiring to replace Trudeau is they will have to face his fanatical loyalists in the PMO who’ve slapped down any pretenders so far.
The most recent forlorn hope for Trudeau was that the Federal Budget might calm the waters. Running up the deficit to perilous numbers with a menu of profligate policies to slake the restless NDP was going to force Poilievre on the defensive. So were limp attacks such as this from Trudeau cabinet pal Marc Miller.
For a brief fortnight the polling seemed to stabilize. But now more recent polls show that Trudeau’s popularity bottom was not a bottom at all, just a transfer station en route to the Marianas Trench of politics. Leaving the question of who and when as the only measurables in the equation. How much runway does he deserves and how much his successor gets are the operative problems when Liberals spend the summer in their ridings.
Meanwhile Joe Biden’s faint hope of putting his opponent in jail before the November election has done nothing to move his polling. If anything the prosecution of Donald Trump as he runs against Biden in 2024 is seen as a distinctly underhanded tactic by many outside the MSNBC mouth breathers.
While polls are a mugs’ game, the news that Biden trails Trump in all seven of the swing states he needs to be re-elected has sent shock through Team Obama, which runs the Democratic Party at the moment. There are a lot of sinecures and cushy salaries at risk here. The addition of Robert Kennedy Jr. to the presidential ballot in key states like California is further diluting the DEMs base. While RFK Jr. draws from both parties it’s expected he’ll hurt Biden most.
As if that wasn’t enough the recent pro-Palestine occupations by students and paid agitators is seen as a referendum on Biden’s support for Israel among the fanatical left-wing base of the DEMs. And polls indicate the effect has been disastrous.
Unlike the Liberals who have time to effect a palace coup, the DEMs are up against the clock with their convention coming in July. While he still plays to the Hollywood and Wall Street donors, the general public sees Biden getting more decrepit by the day. His persona as a pleasantly dazed crossing guard has worn thin.
While replacement scenarios have dogged Biden since his election (saved only by the utter dislike for his VP Kamala Harris) the party pros are talking about one last pierce of theatre: letting Biden take the nomination in July, replace Harris with a star candidate like Michelle Obama or Tom Hanks and have Biden then take a knee for health reasons.
Let the untainted replacement take on Trump, who produces a puke-in-your-mouth reaction with half the American electorate. A squishy Obama/ Bill Clinton replacement could rout Trump in a debate and bring single white women and blacks/ latinos back home to the DEMs. Seems like a longshot?
This is the party that orchestrated at least four separate legal assaults on Trump, coincidentally in the year of the election. Don’t under-estimate their chicanery. And while they didn’t pay off the media as Trudeau has done, they don’t need to. They get the love for free.
Give them credit if they do, because doing nothing is a ticket to four years of The Don.
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, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Now for pre-order, new from the team of Evan & Bruce Dowbiggin . 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. Launching in paperback and Kindle on #Amazon this week. Destined to be a hockey best seller. https://www.amazon.ca/Deal-Trades-Stunned-Changed-Hockey-ebook/dp/B0D236NB35/
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