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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

Where To Draw The Line: Is Carney’s Daughter Off-Limits to Media?

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Have you heard the latest message-board trope from Team Liberal? As their polls allegedly soar in the wake of Donald Trump and his 51st state comments they are trying to censor social-media posts that PM Mark Carney’s 24-year-old is a gender radical.

Take It Down,” pleads one poster. “It’s his kids, we need to leave family alone, you can attack Carney all day long as hard as you want but please just leave his kids out of it. Carney decided to run, his family isn’t running. This is a mistake on many levels”.

So, using this logic we shouldn’t report on the Hunter Biden scandal? He wasn’t running for anything either. No? Where is the journalistic dividing line? Sasha is a 24-year-old public figure who was long-listed for a CBC poetry prize with some tortured pentameter about baking and dysphoria.  Sasha is a grownup who is not trying to escape the limelight. Quite the opposite. Sasha is pursuing it, and Daddy’s leap to PM is seen as good news back at the gender studies lab.

This Liberal pity party over protecting “the kids” is what happens when social media confuses journalism with safe spaces. To the hush puppies trying to censor this issue on public media, we offer a terse: You’re out of your lane.

There are times in journalism when it’s unethical to cite the children of famous people. When they are not used as props for a photo op in India. When they don’t trade on the family name to get the job as prime minister. When they spend weekends reading instead of calling Canada a genocidal nation. Leave them alone.

Just not this time. There is a compelling cultural story surrounding non-binary Carney, however. Sasha is just one of a dramatic spike of young middle- and upper-class women who are engaged in a mass psychosis over dysphoria. With or without the help of parents they are hacking themselves surgically or castrating themselves chemically. Radicals have taken them up as a cause célèbre.

(Which apparently includes domestic terrorism. Three of the four recent Tesla attacks in the U.S. are reported to be radical transgender groups. And a recent murder of a border patrol agent in Vermont has been attributer to another cell of radical trans activists. Police officials say they are a growing safety menace.)

From the outside this rejection of their birth identity is absurd. As one wit says, 98 percent of us wake up each morning and are unhappy with what we see in the mirror. This is why a fashion industry exists. But the Sasha Army  represents an enormous challenge to traditional society. It is no laughing matter till it blows over— as bulimia appears to have done.

Twenty years ago— when a similar demographic of young women was starving itself with bulimia— the transexual community in the U.S. and Canada counted about 0.01 percent of citizens. Now, bulimia has largely disappeared from public attention while these gender-obsessed young people from ages 6- 26 are counted in staggering numbers. They have a Marxist fanaticism about their unalterable identity decision in Grade One or Two. And a censoring media that bulldogs anyone trying to bring sunlight to little Tinkerbell.

As just one example we spoke to the parents of a recent female graduate of Queens University. She reports that four of the seven young women in her group are having gender re-assignment or becoming non-binary. These are not marginal people making these brutal decisions in a vacuum. They’re often the products of elite schools and loving, stable families. Surrounded by university-educated teachers.

Go ahead and ask your daughters, nieces and other young women their experiences in liberal-arts colleges and faculties. That 57 percent figure is likely consistent with other anecdotal reporting in the demo. Modern Woke women, allegedly freed from their chains by feminism, are struggling with self-image.

Pew Reports says that 80 percent of white liberal women have been diagnosed by a medical professional as having a mental-health condition in the past five years. Over 50 percent of liberal women under 30 of all races have sought help. Older white women account for 58 percent of people who’ve used anti-depressants the past five years.

Polling by the Washington Examiner during the 2024 election highlights the isolation of this demographic. It showed during the 2024 election that married men are 59 percent Republican. Married women are 55 percent Republican. Unmarried men are 52 percent Republican But a whopping 68 percent of unmarried women backed Kamala.

This imbalance is multiplied disproportionately by the Democrats media stenographers using propaganda such as The View to perpetuate the gap. In the words of Robert Tracinski in The Federalist, these women have immunized themselves against hostile messages. “(F)or years, the left has trained itself in the habit of assuming that the only reason anyone disagrees with them is because of racism.

“As a consequence, those who live in this bubble tend to reflexively dismiss anyone who brings them a contrary message from the outside world.”

While minute fluctuations in global climate are parsed intently, this exploding trans community goes largely unreported by the Media Party in Canada and the U.S. If it does get air time it is unfailingly worshipful. Parents, doctors and teachers who object  are faced with social scorn and loss of jobs— not unlike the shaming of Covid skeptics and vaxx deniers. The prospects of a majority of young white women opting out of childbearing will be catastrophic to society.

Much of this gender war can be traced back to the movements to “safe spaces” for young people having trouble coping in colleges and universities. Marxist academics— many of whom fled to Canada to avoid American conservative politics— employed the safe-space mentality to isolate vulnerable groups such as women and visible minorities from contrary messaging.

When they graduated this Red Guard transferred the safe space model to the general public. Factionalism by demography frayed the social contract. This new victimization trope was employed by Barack Obama and later Justin Trudeau to control voting blocs and criminalize Bad Think. For almost a generation they held sway.

With the election of Donald Trump America has finally begun pushing back against radical gender indoctrination.In other countries the reaction is the same. But Canada under dedicated EuroGlobalist Carney shows no sign of relenting on the insanity. If anything Carney would push DEI, LGBTQ+ and ESG ever further.

It’s not an exaggeration that given a Carney government, Canada may be the final nation clinging to this DEI/ LGBTQ construct in the future. As we were told by one dedicated follower of dysfunction, “Someone has to set an example”.  Maybe Sasha Carney can write a poem about it.

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 latest book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon and at http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca. 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.

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Bruce Dowbiggin

The National Freakout Over The 4 Nations Drama Still Resonates

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The recent 4 Nations Tournament Showdown left many people drained. On top of the best-on-best format was laid the bubbling Canada/ United States political drama.  As we wrote in the wake of the round-robin U.S. win over Canada any thoughts of friendship went out the window, Fast. It was a night few will forget. The 3-1 score of Team U.S. over Team Canada being secondary to other outcomes.

“Expecting a guys’ weekend like the concurrent NBA All Star game, the fraternal folks instead got a Pier Six brawl. It was the most stunning beginning to a game most could remember in 50 years. (Not least of all the rabid Canadian fanbase urging patriotism in the home of Quebec separation) Considering this Four Nations event was the NHL’s idea to replace the tame midseason All Star Game where players apologize for bumping into each other during a casual skate, the tumult as referees tried to start the game was shocking.

Despite public calls for mutual respect, the sustained booing of the American national anthem and the Team Canada invocation by MMA legend Georges St. Pierre was answered by the Tkachuck brothers, Matthew and Brady, with a series of fights in the first nine seconds of the game. Three fights to be exact when former Canuck J.T. Miller squared up with Brandon Hagel. (All three U.S. players have either played on or now play for Canadian NHL teams.)

Premeditated and nasty. To say nothing of the vicious mugging of Canada’s legend Sidney Crosby behind the U.S. net moments later by Charlie McEvoy.”

In the rematch for a title created just weeks before by the NHL  the boys stuck to hockey. Anthem booing was restrained. Outside of an ill-advised appearance by Wayne Gretzky— now loathed for his Trump support— the emphasis was on skill. Playing largely without injured Matthew and Brady Tkachuk and McAvoy, the U.S. forced the game to OT where beleaguered goalie Jordan Binnington held Canada in the game until Connor McDavid scored the game winner.

For Canadians invested in debunking Trump it was a delirious moment. For hockey fans starved for best-on-best it was a triumph.

But what about the less-appreciated aftermath of the brief tournament (held without Russians, Czechs or Slovaks)? Perhaps the most public outcome was the now-demonization of Gretzky in Canada. Just as they had with Bobby Orr, another Canadian superstar living in America, Canadians wiped their hands of No. 99 over politics. Despite appeals from Orr, Don Cherry and others, the chance to make Gretzky a Trump proxy was too tempting.

We have been in several arguments on the subject among friends: Does Gretzky owe Canada something after carrying its hockey burden for so long? Could he have worn a Team Canada jersey? Shouldn’t he have made a statement that he backs Canada in its showdown with Trump? For now 99 is 0 in his homeland.

More tangibly it seems that the stars of the Canadian and American teams are suffering from a hangover themselves from the emotional series. Toronto captain Auston Matthews— victimized on the OT goal against Canada— has been sluggish as his Leafs, hoping to avoid the play-in segment of the postseason, are a tepid 5-4-1 in their last ten. By his own admission he and his team have lacked a killer instinct since the 4 Nations.

McDavid and his Edmonton Oilers are sputtering, too. While Leon Draistaitl carries the freight (as a German he was out of 4 Nations), McDavid’s Oilers are an uncomfortable nine points up from missing the playoffs. Heading into a contract run, McDavid seems exhausted some nights as rumours swirl about his next deal. It’s hard to see how the tournament hasn’t taken a toll.

On the U.S. side, Florida has had to battle on with Tkachuk, its emotional leader, out for the regular season after the injury sustained in the 4 Nations. There’s more. As much as fans loved the great drama, NHL owners will be wary of losing their best players to injury in future tournaments. It’s a reason there has been so little best-on-best hockey the past generation.

Perhaps the least-appreciated backlash so far from the 4 Nations turmoil is the effect of Canadians, who have many Americans playing in their nation, booing the Star Spangled Banner. Under the heading of sin in haste/ repent at leisure, the impulsive show of bad sportsmanship may have felt good at the moment. Leftist Toronto Star scribbler Bruce Arthur, said “You’re damn right Canadians should boo the anthem.”

But what repercussions will Arthur’s temper tantrum have on Canadian teams in the NHL, NBA, MLB? Most Canadians we asked dismissed the impact, but imagine you are an American free agent or a player with a no-trade clause contemplating an offer to play in Canada. Having seen your national anthem disrespected will you let bygones be bygones?

It remains to be seen if a Canadian federal election held alongside the NHL playoffs will have any repercussions on the ice. But in the current manic mood of Canadians freaked out by Trump nothing is beyond possibility.

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. 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.

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