This is Pride Month, but for segments of the LGBTQ community the enthusiasm for a united front has gone sour. Back in the heady days when the gay movement ruled the Left with its parades and show trials for bakers, it blithely added the Trans designation to its marquee.

But that decision is coming back at the veterans of the Gay movement, and they don’t like it. “@spiralmoney The T has only destroyed the hard won acceptance LGB people fought for. They contribute nothing and wreck everything. The LGB only asked for equality, nothing more.” The protocols of accepting trans athletes as women and radical surgery to assume a different gender have startled longterm members of the Pride movement.

Suddenly, they have become victims of their own victim mentality. Pride parades are cancelled or downplayed to avoid conflicts in the movement.  “FredSargeant  Considering how hard the queer activists have been coming at gays and lesbians to convert into Ts, anyone could have seen this coming.  It turns out that it wasn’t the straights who were coming for us after all.” Yeah. Not happy.

Tennis legend Martina Navratilova is likewise pissed that men are being allowed to beat biological women in sports competitions or having surgery to transform their bodies into women.  And ordinary women don’t want passengers on their float. “Making a mockery of women who really suffer with so many different things, just pisses me off. Be who you want to be. But some should NOT pretend they have these problems, when they can’t.”

As we wrote in May of 2024 there are few better examples of the victim polka than J.K. Rowling, the feminist creator of the immensely successful Harry Potter books and movies. “Normally that would be enough notoriety for one lifetime. But Rowling, a committed Labourite,  has endured a second notoriety, that as critic of trans people gaining admission into the lives of women.

“Let’s just say this iteration has not been as pleasant for her as her Harry Potter success. The forces of the gender jumble have crucified her for saying things such as: “Telling women and girls they must accept increased risk to themselves to appease male feelings is the very definition of the patriarchy you claim to stand against. Vulnerable women are paying the price for a fashionable fallacy that has serious, real world consequences.”

So who’s the victim here? At the heart of the conflict is the progressive cult of victimhood that dictates identity in today’s society. Since the early days of feminism and the LGBTQ movement victimization has defined their space. Sample: “Invasive? You know what is invasive? Having men take from us. Threaten our safe spaces. That’s invasive.”

The latest TV instalment of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian feminist tract The Handmaid’s Tale illustrates the evolution of victimhood from access to contraception in the 1960s to today’s safe spaces. With its gothic premise of women in red gowns being herded like cattle by the patriarchy, Handmaid’s Tale has been Victimhood 101 for impressionable young women since its 1985 publication.

In their sense of victimization secular women— who’ve had every opportunity that their grandmothers wanted— now quake in fear at constructs created for them in universities and colleges. Crisis is used to produce a panic response. Psychiatric (bulimia) and physical (Covid) panics have robbed them of their self esteem and self control.

In this they are exploited by elected officials, bureaucrats and the health industry. They are helpless pawns in a crisis mentality created for them the past 50 years. The culture industry, too, exploits their vulnerabilities by blurring the definitions of women into a maze of pronouns and accepted behaviours.

If you believe the polls the put-upon narrative has isolated young unmarried women. During the recent U.S. election polling in the Washington Examiner suggested 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 were backing Kamala.

And they are fragile. New polling from Nate Silver shows that conservatives are up 31 points among those with self-described excellent mental health, and down 26 among those with poor mental health. Meanwhile the party of neuroses and vulnerability reports that 45 percent of liberals self diagnose themselves as having poor mental health.

Women are hardly alone. The DEI movement— which began as a correction against a lack of opportunity for certain groups— has morphed into a steamroller allowing a marriage of militants and guilty liberals to redefine society.

Nowhere is the unlikely marriage of victimhood more bizarre— and dangerous— than the Hamas infatuation. “Terrorists, criminals, psychopaths, and fantasists from every part of the globe have grafted themselves on to the Palestinian cause, because the most basic laws of nature have been revised to accommodate it,” wrote Lee Smith in Tablet. “The Palestinian cause gives hope to each of these groups—hope that their own nihilistic and murderous ambitions could win world favour as well. And they have.”

Former actor Russell Brand, who’s currently undergoing the J.K. Rowling treatment for adopting God over godlessness, points out the true nature of this vulnerability craze: “… The crisis is always used to legitimize certain solutions, and a docile or terrified public is willing to participate in this. Proposed solutions that usually involve giving up their freedom. We are continually being invited to give up our freedom in exchange for safety or convenience. And it seems that this process is radically escalating.”

Until we run out of victims expect to surrender your freedom.

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/

While the NHL pauses before the start of the final series, let’s catch up on a few issues emerging in the last month.

The re-appearance of the Florida Panthers to defend their Stanley Cup is their third consecutive time as Eastern Conference champions (they lost the Eastern Final in 2022). It also marks the sixth time since 2015 that a team from the state of Florida has made it to the Finals. If the Panthers win it will be four Cups in that period.

Which is amazing to those of us old enough to remember the Panthers and Lightning as the league’s doormats, the punchline to a bad joke about expansion to warm-weather locations. We can remember when the Cats games were events without a parking problem. Postgame, the tourists who made up the bulk of the small crowd would all hit the escape buttons on their rented cars to find them.

The sudden burst of success is, in part, attributable to the NHL’s tanking system in which teams with no hopes of a playoff series tried to get the best draft picks possible. Tampa had more luck earlier than Florida in this regard as a succession of top Panther picks fizzled while the Lightning picking stars like Vincent Lecavalier and Victor Hedman gave them a base on which to build Stanley Cup winners.

But the past decade has seen the Panthers pick up their draft game with franchise players Aleksander Barkov, Aaron Ekblad and Anton Lundell. The success of the Panthers and Lightning also can be traced to great trades such as Florida acquiring Matthew Tkachuk, a trade we deal with in depth in out current book Deal With It . In fact the Panthers have two former Calgary Flames leading them— Tkachuk and Sam Bennett.

But the two Florida teams are also benefitting from the new sports economics in which players making large, sometimes huge, salaries are choosing to play in a state which has no state income tax. The combination of much lower taxes, warm weather and the relative anonymity of being a hockey celebrity in cities that have NFL or NBA teams is proving a huge advantage in attracting or keeping star players. In fact it’s not just Florida but the four other no-tax states with NHL teams (Tennessee, Washington, Texas, Nevada) that are benefitting.

For example, the Nashville Predators handed out $108.5M in contracts to  Brady Skjei, Steven Stamkos and Jonathan Marchessault within the first hour or two of 2024 free agency, while the Lighting outbid the Hurricanes for Jake Guentzel. This year the test case seems to be where Mitch Marner ends up as a UFA if he leaves Toronto. And wither Connor McDavid?

So much so that some are urging the NHL to punish the no-tax states to protect grotesque tax states like California, New York and Illinois and the hopelessly overtaxed Canadian provinces. Yes, there are players who prefer big cities like Toronto, L.A. and NYC. But many players like the combination of low taxes, high returns, anonymity and (sometimes) nicer winter weather.

The NHL did something along these lines earlier this century with its CDN relief scheme that protected the five extant teams against a 63-cent CDN dollar. But it’s hard to see what they can do if liberal governments keep demanding more of earnings. Already those governments are taking taxes from visiting players to balance their books. Much more pandering to overtaxing and the NHL Players Association would be within their rights to object.

Another flash point was the recent decision by Florida’s head coach Paul Maurice to not have coaches and staff involved in the traditional handshakes at the end of a playoff series. Maurice’s decision seemed to surprise Carolina coach Rod Brind’amour as they met beside the benches following the Panthers’ clinching win.

The handshakes are one of the NHL’s signature traditions— none of the other Big Four sports has the same. American announcers cite them as a positive display, and so there was some mystery over the move. “ I don’t believe that the coaches should shake players’ hands at the end,” Maurice said after. “There’s this long list of people in suits and track suits. We had like 400 people on the ice. They’re all really important to our group. But not one of them was in the game.

“When I first got in the league, you would never want to shake the players’ hands. Some coach wanted to get on camera is the only thing I can figure out, right? Maybe they wanted to shake Wayne Gretzky’s hand. I don’t know when it changed, but I don’t think it’s right. … When you think of all the great competitions on the ice, hard, going after each other, and yet they shake hands like that. That’s special. They’re not sending Christmas cards to each other. This is nasty out there. Something very special to it.”

But the sentiment did not extend to the Edmonton/ Dallas handshake line. The usual armies of coaches and support people were on the ice to shake hands. Which leads to the question, what will happen when the Panthers/ Oilers series ends? Will Maurice convince Edmonton coach Khris Knoblauch to forgo the mob scene? Or will Edmonton continue the tradition of full-court clasping?

Probably it will depend on who’s winning the Cup. If it’s Florida they can probably continue their new tradition. If it’s the Oilers it’s a good bet they’ll go whole hog. Which begs the question why do teams from the Western Conference refuse to touch the Campbell Trophy as champs of their conference but then want to touch everyone and everything in site after the game?

Inquiring minds will want to know.

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/