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Bruce Dowbiggin

The Low Art Of Selling The Great Reset

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A-B-C. A-Always, B-Be, C-Closing. Always be closing, always be closing.” —Glengarry Glen Ross

Remember back in the Don Draper past when commercials actually talked about the product they were selling? Soap that cleaned clothes better. Cars that used less fuel. Toothpaste that whitened better. The idea was for you to buy the product based on its merits.

Yeah. Those days are done. Instead of hawking mattresses or dishwashers the current advertisements are progressive parables on the Great Reset from craven corporations. A passing review of the commercials now on TV or online seems more like a symposium on white privilege or gender insensitivity beloved by Canada’s prime minister and his Stepford cabinet.

Even when they dabble in the product they’re supposed to be selling, the commercials’ overarching message is how enlightened the advertiser is and how  base you— white middle-class consumer— are. If you also intuit that there’s a product behind the sales pitch, so much the better for the advertiser. But it’s no longer the salient point. They’re enlightened. You’re not.

A perfect illustration of the Woke makeover is the sudden enthusiasm in commercials for mixed-race or gay couples. Those living in a real world had seen and accepted mixed-race couplings for some time. Gay couples have been common in society for over a decade. Millennials and younger cohorts see it as normal. No big whoop.

But until about two years ago advertisers still viewed these unions as verboten in their product advertising. It was a third rail. Mom and Pop must be seen as heteronormative.

Then, as if a memo had suddenly been issued (or Joe Biden elected), the dynamic changed for every advertiser. Virtually every couple portrayed by corporate outfits suddenly represented the new nuclear equation of biracial, gay or bisexual. Whether selling bank services or car floor mats, mixed-race couples now represent a disproportionate percentage of the couples pictured in the commercials.

Likewise, white characters in commercials or culture are now universally portrayed as dullards and foils for the new professional class to sneer at. They stumble, they bumble, they can’t match the intellectual power of the new anointed class.  White men are the new punchline, saturated by colonial guilt. Why now? Because it can be weaponized against The Other.

If it all weren’t so obvious it might be amusing to see corporate culture pretzel itself in the service of the praetorian guard of Wokeness. As it is, it’s simply insulting to believe that their customers would not view such sudden transparent virtue signalling as cynical or go unnoticed in the market.

By the same standard, transcendent visible minorities are also suddenly chic in comedies/ dramas churned out by Hollywood. For just one example, historic white character Ruth Lockwood— a PBS producer in the new HBO series The French Chef about Julia Child— was made black so the show’s progressive producers could highlight racial prejudice in the 1960s. That’s half a century ago.

A gay James Beard also takes Child on an invented visit to a San Francisco drag bar for more moralizing about cisgendered LGBTQI tyranny. “It could have happened, but we don’t know if it necessarily did,” says Julia creator and writer Daniel Goldfarb.

Don’t forget the tortured attempts at progressive racial re-balancing in recent productions such as Bridgerton or Great Expectations that re-arrange the racial deck chairs of the 18th century. If Alec Guinness playing an Arab sheik in Lawrence of Arabia was insulting then why is Golda Ruchevel playing Queen Charlotte in Bridgerton not just as insulting to history?

Barack Obama insisted that equal representation in society should be a goal: but that would mean just 12 percent black actors or presenters (the true percentage of blacks in America) or 3 percent of LGBTQ characters (their U.S. census figure) or 0.1 percent of trans people represented. Yet a visiting Martian would conclude from today’s commercial output that each group had a far greater slice of the population pile in North America.

When questioned on this enforced shape-shifting of history and culture the Left insists that anyone pointing out the obvious is a Qanon agent or a Jim Crow recidivist. The Taylor Lorenz pep squad then buries the offending questioner on social media. How dare they diverge from the script? Don’t you know queer and non-binary now represent the majority in young people?

Rich Hollywood elites’ next virtue display is headed into Green Think on screens. Agitprop groups have told producers they are not pumping out enough global-warming propaganda. “Researchers checked for references to 36 key words and phrases including “climate change,” “fracking” and “global warming” in TV episodes and movies released in the U.S. market… Only a sliver of screen fiction, 2.8 perhaps, refers to climate change-related words, according to a study of 37,453 film and TV scripts from 2016-20 that is the basis for the climate guide, AP reports.”

So they created a “playbook” for how to embed global warming themes and messages in films and commercials.

Sadly for progressive casting departments, the radical executives at Disney blew any chance at the new representation being called organic. In a recent video chat corporate president Karey Burke supported having “many, many, many LGBTQIA characters in our stories” and wanting a minimum of 50 percent of characters to be LGBTQIA and racial minorities.

Disney executive producer Latoya Raveneau bragged about her “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” and gushed that “where ever I could I was adding queerness… no one would try to stop me.” Until they bumped into Ron DeSantis they didn’t.

So brace yourself for Gaia signalling as the next frontier when the 2024 electric car models roll out. The Woke movement understands that they don’t need you to like them. They only need to convince you that the present system is dysfunctional. The rest, as the ads show, is theatre.

 

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author was nominated for the BBN Business Book award of 2020 for Personal Account with Tony Comper. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book with his son Evan Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx

BRUCE DOWBIGGIN Award-winning Author and Broadcaster Bruce Dowbiggin's career is unmatched in Canada for its diversity and breadth of experience . He is currently the editor and publisher of Not The Public Broadcaster website and is also a contributor to SiriusXM Canada Talks. His new book Cap In Hand was released in the fall of 2018. Bruce's career has included successful stints in television, radio and print. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster for his work with CBC-TV, Mr. Dowbiggin is also the best-selling author of "Money Players" (finalist for the 2004 National Business Book Award) and two new books-- Ice Storm: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Vancouver Canucks Team Ever for Greystone Press and Grant Fuhr: Portrait of a Champion for Random House. His ground-breaking investigations into the life and times of Alan Eagleson led to his selection as the winner of the Gemini for Canada's top sportscaster in 1993 and again in 1996. This work earned him the reputation as one of Canada's top investigative journalists in any field. He was a featured columnist for the Calgary Herald (1998-2009) and the Globe & Mail (2009-2013) where his incisive style and wit on sports media and business won him many readers.

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Bruce Dowbiggin

Hunting Poilievre Covers For Upcoming Demographic Collapse After Boomers

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For those not familiar with hunting seasons in Canada it may come as a surprise that the nation has a year-round hunting season. That would be the targeting of Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre by the massed army of Liberals, their bots and the richly endowed media pack. Forget he’s never held power. He’s to blame for the ills in Canadian society.

It has been a good hunt. After floor-crossing by dissident CPC, the Liberals are one seat from the majority that Canadian voters denied them in the spring. (They’ll likely get the majority soon.) MPs who a day earlier were at Conservative Xmas parties suddenly sang the praises of Carney. MPs in ridings targeted by the Chinese suddenly joined Team Elbow Up.

All the while the media corps landed blows from their perch. Robert Benzie: “I know that Premier [Danielle] Smith is very unhappy privately with Pierre Poilievre because she thinks that [MOU motion] is undermining this [pipeline] project.” The nadir of the media dog pile was formerly eminent scribe Robert Fife who sniped, “Conservatives persist with cute legislative tricks, while the government tries to run a country.” Run a country. That’s rich.

From his lips to Liberal brains, however. “.@CBCNews and @AlJazeeraWorld viewers consider themselves uniquely informed, says @ElectionsCan_E report. The two TV networks were named by self-described “informed” voters when asked where they got their news.

It is, seemingly, a great time to be a Liberal. Or not. While Operation Poilievre was gathering steam for Xmas polling revealed that Liberals and Conservatives remain locked in a tie, and Canadians continue to express ambivalence about the country’s direction, mixed feelings about their leaders, and sharp divides by generation, region, and policy concern. These generational discrepancies continue to be buried.

As was the case in the spring, the Liberals are supported only by the Boomer generation that swallowed Elbows Up nostalgia like a fat man on a donut. The under 60s demo at every level shows the current Carney agenda is a loser for them. In the segment of house-rich Boomers the Libs lead 50-31 over CPC. But in every other category it’s “how can I get out of here faster?”

The 45-59 demo it’s 46-36 Conservatives; 30-44 it’s a whopping 48-31 CPC; 18-29 it’s 40-39 CPC. A healthy chunk of Liberal supporting from the collapse of NDP vote. Where they used to poll in the 20s, the highest demo shows 11 percent support. Otherwise Poilievere would be PM.

Meanwhile, research now finds that 54 percent of Canadians say the growing number of newcomers to the country threatens our traditional customs and values— an increase of sixteen points since 2020. Over the same period, the share of Canadians who say immigration strengthens our society fell thirteen points to 35%

In short, the Carney Circus of marrying Canada to China and the EU is a card trick that will be exposed shortly. But where do we see the Ottawa press corps attention to this impending demographic snow plow? As we wrote in March  “It’s not hard to see the (under 60s)  looking at the Mike Myers obsession with a long-gone Canada and saying let’s get out of here. 

Recently former TVOntario host Steve Pakin attended two convocations. The first at the former Ryerson University, (switched to Toronto Metropolitan University in a fit of settler colonizer guilt.) The second at Queens University, traditionally one of the elite schools in the nation. Here’s what he saw.

“At the end of the (TMU) convocation, when Charles Falzon, on his final day as dean of TMU’s Creative School, asked students to stand and sing the national anthem, many refused. They remained seated. Then, when the singing began, it was abundantly noticeable that almost none of the students sang along. And it wasn’t because they didn’t know the words, which were projected on a big screen. The unhappy looks on their faces clearly indicated a different, more political, explanation.

I asked some of the TMU staff about it after the ceremony was over, and they confirmed what I saw happens all the time at convocations. Then I texted the president of another Ontario university who agreed: this is a common phenomenon among this generation at post-secondary institutions.” 

At Queens, where Canadian flags were almost non-existent, O Canada was sung, but the message of unrest was clear: “Convocation sends a message of social stability,” Queen’s principal Patrick Deane  began in his speech.  “It is a ceremony shaped in history. You should value your connection to the past, but question that inheritance. Focus on the kind of society you’d like to inhabit.”

You can bet Deane is not telling them to question climate change and trans rights. As Paikin observes, “if we fail to create a more perfect union, we shouldn’t be surprised when a vast swath of young people don’t sing our anthem the way so many of the rest of us do.” So why are the best and brightest so reluctant to see as future in becoming the new professional class that runs society?

In the Free Press River Page searched the source of their discontent. “If the Great Recession, Covid-19, and the spectre of an artificial intelligence-assisted ‘white collar bloodbath’ has taught the professional class anything, it is that their credentials cannot save them. This insecurity, compounded by the outrageous cost of living in many large cities, has pushed the PMC’s anxieties to the breaking point. 

“Add that to the triumph of identity politics in professional class institutions like universities, corporate C-suites, non-governmental organizations, and media—itself a byproduct of inter-elite competition as many have observed—and what you have is the modern left.

“… they’ve already come to the baffling conclusion that there’s no difference between class struggle and child sex changes. More to the point, the socialist mantra “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” has only ever stood the test of time in Anabaptist sects. It requires a religious devotion to self-sacrifice that is not characteristic of this anxious and hyper-competitive class—as many actual socialists have spent the last decade warning.”

The tsunami over immigration has caused severe dislocations— as PM Steven Harper predicted in the 2015 election debate. He was shouted down by the dopey dauphin Justin Trudeau who opened the sluice gates to every kind of progressive nonsense. Which is now evident.

Like all people addicted, CDN Boomers don’t want the truth. They want performance theatre, T-shirts and hockey games. They blame Trump for their predicament, caught between grim realities. Will they take the 12 steps? Or will their kids have to tell them the facts as they escort them to the home?” We’re now seeing the likely answer to that question everywhere in Canadian society.

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 2025 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 new poetry collection In Other Words is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca and on Kindle books

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Bruce Dowbiggin

NFL Ice Bowls Turn Down The Thermostat on Climate Change Hysteria

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Oh, the weather outside was frightful. But the football was so delightful. Week 15 of the NFL season was a cryogenic success of snow and sub-zero temperatures. Here were the temperatures at game time this weekend.

Chicago: -11 degrees C.

Cincinnati: -12 degrees F.

Kansas City: -8 degrees C.

New England: -2 C (with an 87 percent chance of snow).

Philadelphia: -2 degrees C.

New York -1 degree C.

Pittsburgh: -7 degrees C.

For fans of NFL football none of this seemed out of character with late-season football. There are legendary games played in arctic conditions. The windchill for the 1967 Dallas/ Green Bay NFC championship was -25 C.

Chargers at Bengals: Jan. 10, 1982 (-24 C, feels like -39 C).

Seahawks at Vikings in NFC wild-card matchup Jan 10, 2016. -21 C with wind chill -25C

Dolphins at Chiefs: Jan. 13, 2024 (-4 degrees, feels like -27 degrees)

As recently as last week’s Bills win over the Bengals games are often played with drifts of snow on the field and the mercury bottoming out. While Canada’s Grey Cup game is played at the end of November it’s still had some brutal weather history of its own.

The point of this meteorology meandering is that, according to our good King Charles III and many other doomsday cultists the concept of snow and cold was supposed to be a figment of the past by now. For almost half a century Michael Mann and the climate prophets of IPCC have been predicting the end of snow and the onset of warmist floods and burning forests. They gambled trillions of the public’s dollars on the certainty that the public would buy computer modelling and data-distortion predicting doom.

For decades it has worked. The careers of people like critic Mark Steyn have been ruined, heretics declared and fortunes dissipated by the trust-fund fanatics who bankroll wackadoodles like Stephen Guilbeault, the convicted felon who Trudeau made Minister of the Environment. No matter how absurd or devious the source, it was a gospel that the fiery inferno was coming next Tuesday. But the weather has remained stubbornly resistant to Elizabeth May’s catechism of climate.

Yet, some dedicated climate advocates and their followers are finally changing their tune in the face of their own observation of lying liars like Al Gore and Greta Thunberg. The share of Americans who say climate scientists understand very well whether climate change is occurring decreased from 37 percent in 2021 to 32 percent this year. A similar October study from the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute found that “belief in human-driven climate change declined overall” since 2017.

Reports the uber-liberal L.A. Times: “The unraveling of climate catastrophism got another jolt recently with the formal retraction of a high-profile 2024 study published in the journal Nature. That study — which had predicted a calamitous 62% decline in global economic output by 2100 if carbon emissions were not sufficiently reduced — was widely cited by transnational bodies and progressive political activists alike as justification for the pursuit of aggressive decarbonization. 

But the authors withdrew the paper after peer reviewers discovered that flawed data had skewed the result. Without that data, the projected decline in output collapses to around 23%. Oops.”

Even stalwart media apologists for climate hysteria like the Times are starting to have doubts. Under the headline “The left’s climate panic is finally calming down” they describes “Erstwhile ardent climate-change evangelist Bill Gates published a remarkable blog post addressing climate leaders at the then-upcoming COP30 summit. Gates unloaded a blistering critique of what he called ‘the doomsday view of climate change,’ which he said is simply “wrong.”

Trump-besotted American Democrats seeking to soften their Woke image before the 2026 midterms are likewise carving out more moderate positions on climate “that could well deprive Republicans of a winning political issue with which to batter out-of-touch, climate-change-besotted Democrats. But for the sake of good governance, sound public policy and the prosperity of the median American citizen, it would be the best thing to happen in a decade.”

Sadly Canada under Mark Carney remains a staunch climate warrior. The removal of Guilbeault as federal Environmental Minister may have seemed a step toward sanity, but there is no hint that the billions of dollars from hidden money spigots will be closed down any time soon. The B.C. government’s acquiescence to the climate propaganda of Indigenous bands shows no sign of abating. Indeed, it is just ramping up in the land claims that threaten to make home ownership a thing of the past.

PM Mark Carney is a dedicated temperature fabulist going back to his days as governor of the Bank of England. His first fights in Canada were over taxing carbon and hobbling her energy industry. As we wrote in this November 2024 column, the certainty in which the Canadian Left revels is actually dividing, not uniting citizens.

So perhaps if enough citizens spend an afternoon shivering in the stands of a wintertime football game we might achieve a small piece of sanity and learn that that , while climate is always changing, it’s not worth the price we’ve paid this century.

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 2025 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 new poetry collection In Other Words is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca and on Kindle books.

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