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Bruce Dowbiggin

The Unhinged Plan To Destroy Elon Musk & Twitter

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We know that many of you hate betting content on sports TV. This weekend’s Grey Cup broadcast bristled with wagering talk. Puritans just couldn’t wrap their heads around the presence of lines, sides and parlays on the broadcasts of their favourite CFL teams. And the spares who are pitching it all.

Fair enough. It ain’t your grandfather’s CFL broadcast. But betting is here to stay. If you’re looking for something to blame then stick a pin in Twitter. The “worldwide web” took gambling from barber shops, speak-easys and back alleys to a giant presence across North American sports.

When the gambling dam broke, wagering went from a bad habit to the sports version of day trading. The sexy new thing. And the money rolled in. Casinos and betting sites are spreading that money across social media and broadcasters.

The tide of this money has raised all boats. How high has the revenue river risen? An NFL franchise (Denver) is now worth $4 billion. TV networks and players like Amazon will pay almost anything for a piece of the league’s broadcast/ digital pie. (It’s a similar but less pricey scene in other leagues.) Twitter helped do that.

So it is fascinating to see the debate about cratering Twitter since it was purchased by Elon Musk. A cursory glance at the wildly popular site this weekend showed an alliance of Woke scolds and entertainment industry preeners ready to wreck the world’s largest marketplace of chatter, because they don’t want to hear anything that challenges their world view.

Or contradicts the Church of Rachel Maddow on (choose any) Trump, abortion, climate, Afghanistan, racism, Trump, trans dysphoria, inflation, voting integrity, guns, Trump, Hunter Biden, electric cars, veganism, CO2, Trump, white privilege, SGM, polar bears, FBI, Dreamers, ballot harvesting and… Trump.

Imagine a betting site that banned the contrarian tips of a legendary character. That only allowed discussion of taking overs not unders on sports bets. Or banned teaser talk. That’s today’s Twitter.  @kylenabecker “They demand complete cultural hegemony. Anything that gets in the way of that must be destroyed.”

The progressive scolds who’ve controlled the spread of opinions on Twitter since the Obama administration of social justice now want to abandon the site because Musk had the wacky idea of allowing a former president back on the site. This after conducting an informal poll about reinstating The King of Mara Lago.

Even people you’d thought sane about the new tech have lost their marbles over the prospect of hearing things they find vexing. Here’s NBA owner Mark Cuban  @mcuban The greatest challenge Twitter has is making users feel safe. Safe that they won’t be abused by users on the platform. Safe that tweets won’t lead to action off the platform that hurt people. I think this is the element that @elonmusk is missing that current AI can’t protect.

By safe Mark must mean from the Ayatollahs who promise death to Israel or Nancy Pelosi’s daughter Christine who tweeted “the neighbour was right” after senator Rand Paul was savagely beaten by a neighbour? No? They’re still on Twitter after the Babylon Bee was silenced? Wow.

Here’s another sample of a Madame Defrage as she reaches for her pitchfork. “@shannoncoulter Just emailed the head of safety at Apple and Google respectively to ask if their app stores will continue to carry the Twitter app now that Elon Musk has reinstated Donald Trump.” Because Hitler. Or something. From a church lady who advertises cats on her site.

It’s more than individuals who’ve taken the “safe space” mantra to next lengths. This weekend CBS News— which gleefully printed all the Russiagate lies and fake Ukrainian impeachment hoax—decided it was just too raffiné to dip its toe into the Musk version of Twitter after its entitled staff began quitting in protest.

Reporter Jonathan Vigliotti provided CBCS’ rationale. ”In light of the uncertainty around Twitter, and out of an abundance of caution, CBS News is pausing its activity on the social media site as it continues to monitor the platform.”

An abundance of caution from people who banned the 2020 Hunter Biden laptop story because there was an election in three weeks and his Dad might lose to Trump? Sure. The Walter Cronkite network was ripped for erring on the side of censorship, one writer saying the decision was “so stupid it makes my head hurt”.

Prompting a doubleback on Sunday. “After pausing for much of the weekend to assess the security concerns, CBS News and Stations is resuming its activity on Twitter as we continue to monitor the situation.” Their entitled vanity could choke a mule.

The CBS journalists who have long praised Edward R. Murrow’s 1950s defiance of the McCarthy hearings are now all-in with authority. Says journalist Matt Taibbi, “Americans who once venerated self-reliance are building a church of conformity, whose chief means of worship is destroying heretics”. 

Making the charade even more risible is the new role of Musk as evil incarnate for buying Twitter, turfing a large portion of its useless, self-absorbed employees and restoring a semblance of balance to the site.  From hero of youth culture the Tesla pioneer has become an evil that must be burned at the stake lest he remove the blue-check bias of the site.  Not that he’s intimidated. https://twitter.com/JoshuaPHilll/status/1594512374408810496

What is clear from this convulsion of fear is that the fire of safe spaces— segregated convocations, banning of speakers, crushing of businesses— that took root in academia has now jumped the fire line into the public where it is now burning every corner of free speech.

It bristles with its new power. Says Taibbi: “The math isn’t hard: if the DHS or the NSC can do this to the world’s richest man, they can do it to anyone, making this story into a test case to see what the new censorship regime can get away with.” There’s hope. When you hear Joe Biden say it is “worth looking into” whether Musk is a “national security threat” due to his “cooperations” and “relationships” with other countries, you know that the censors are nervous he’ll succeed.

Let’s give them something to really be nervous about. Keep tweeting. Pay the $8 fee.

Sign up today for Not The Public Broadcaster newsletters. Hot takes/ cool slants on sports and current affairs. Have the latest columns delivered to your mail box. Tell your friends to join, too. Always provocative, always independent.  https://share.hsforms.com/16edbhhC3TTKg6jAaRyP7rActsj5

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

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

Transitory Madness: Woke Goes For Broke

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In the final days of World War I, exhausted Canadian soldiers made a curious discovery when viewing German soldiers captured or killed in a late-1918 confrontation. They noticed the regimental badges of many units of the German army mixed into the unit they’d just confronted.

This told them that the Germans were at the end of their resources, throwing together soldiers from whatever units that still had left. They were desperate to hold back the inevitable defeat. Indeed, the Canadian soldiers were correct. Within weeks the Germans sued for an Armistice, ending the slaughter.

When some future historian gets around to writing the current version of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire will they observe the obsession over trans-rights as being peak hysteria for early 21st century society? Will they ask, “Is that all there was?”

Having gone through victim status for women’s rights, gay rights, indigenous rights, Asian rights, immigrant rights and climate rights the past two decades, radical social engineers now seemingly only have trans-rights left in their chamber with which to create moral panics. While earlier manufactured victim crises could claim 51 percent of the population (women) down to five percent (LGBTQ), trans people represent an estimated 1.6 million people in the U.S. (0.04 percent).

Even allowing that the obsessive spotlight on the issue has boosted numbers in the impressionable 13-17 year old group, we are looking at a rounding-error segment of the population claiming grievance status. But you wouldn’t have any idea of the marginality of this community if you watched the current media cycle. Trans stories dominate the headlines.

The latest cause célèbre being a trans woman murdering children and staff at a Christian Academy in Nashville, Tennessee— all the while the trans lobby claims the shooter as a victim. A tiny community of dysphoric adults has been conflated into apparent martyrs by Woke society.

Which comes as a surprise to most middle-class citizens who haven’t been aware of trans people— or their own hatred for them— until informed by media outlets such as CBC, PBS or the New York Times (which just published an open letter from 1,000 writers, authors, and journalists demanding that The New York Times not report on problems with prescribing gender dysphoric children puberty blockers.)

How hysterical? Here’s career radical poseur Jane Fonda suggesting on The View that Christians who refuse to wear the Trans ribbon should be “murdered”. While her panel pals hasten to suggest she was simply joshing, a glib Fonda shrugs, raises an eyebrow and lets everyone know by her silence exactly what she’s thinking.

Then there’s a Michigan professor who wants murder over mediation. ”I think it is far more admirable to kill a racist, homophobic, or transphobic speaker than it is to shout them down,” said Wayne State endowed chair holder Steve Shepiro. “When right-wing groups invite such speakers to campus, it is precisely because they want to provoke an incident that discredits the left, and gives more publicity and validation to these reprehensible views than they could otherwise attain”.

Look, every movement has its loonies. (Witness TrumpWorld.) But the percentage of progressives who have suddenly gone from “I love RuPaul” to deciding trans rights is a hillside for them to die on is stunning. But such is the nature of modern hysterics. The Salem Witch Trials were generated by Christian fervour, the current fervour is driven by secular liberals casting about for quasi-religious meaning.

Citing new WSJ/ NORC polling showing a cratering of public trust in a number of categories since 2019, author Michael Shellenberger notes, “The evidence is now overwhelming that recent panics around climate, race, and sex — the mass desire to conform to a strict moral (Woke) code — stem from a) the acute need of liberal secular people for purpose, b) rising loneliness, and c) mass anxiety created by social media…

Like many new religions, Wokeism is characterized by intolerance.”  Witness the current disproportionate furore over a tiny number of NHL players refusing to wear Pride jerseys. Or the elite panic that spawned censorship of venerated authors such as Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, and Agatha Christie whose work is now butchered after their deaths.

While Woke media pounds its drum over right-wing indoctrination and its incipient violence, psychology Professor Sam Vaknin says, “The potential for aggression and even violence in victimhood movements is much larger than in the general public.” Witness the @transdayofvengeance “Kill christcucks. Behead christcucks. Roundhouse kick a christcuck into the pavement…” @TNDtracker

That is worrisome in a society where virtually everyone now thinks they belong to a victim group that needs reparations from the rest of that society.

Finally, the Gibbon of this age will likely come to the conclusion that none of these tempests really have anything to do with their putative grievances. Rather they are the useful mechanisms by which totalitarians are trying to remake every aspect of society. Not unlike the effort attempted by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. Like today’s radicals they sought to change human nature. If it took a million dead, it was a price they felt worth paying. Don’t underestimate today’s radicals if given the chance to demonize. If only they could seize the guns.

Or perhaps our historians will identify how a quasi-religious coalition of radical Maoists, declining media outlets and The View’s white progressive women saturated-with-class-guilt pulled back before it became The Killing Fields for dissenters. That a Joseph Welch asked them, Have you no shame?” as they frog-marched cultural figures to a gulag of their making, causing them to relent.

Perhaps. Or maybe the whiff of power will be too strong. With just 38 percent polled by WSJ favourable to patriotism, 30 percent positive about parenthood, 39 percent favourable to religion and 27 percent positive about community involvement they have an open field of despair to exploit for their purposes. What then? As Shellenberger concludes these forces are not the defeated German army of 1918. “It’s hard to see how Western civilization survives these trends.”

Sign up today for Not The Public Broadcaster newsletters. Hot takes/ cool slants on sports and current affairs. Have the latest columns delivered to your mail box. Tell your friends to join, too. Always provocative, always independent.  https://share.hsforms.com/16edbhhC3TTKg6jAaRyP7rActsj5

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

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Bruce Dowbiggin

Hockey Tolerance Is A Two-Way Street, Not A One-Way Road

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The problem with liberal tolerance in Canada is that it’s not particularly liberal and it’s certainly not tolerant. For instance, the “everyone must wear an LGBTQ-2 jersey” controversy we highlighted last week. The reverberations from goalie James Reimer declining to wear a San Jose Sharks rainbow jersey have continued all week.

It seems to have escaped many people’s tolerance that refusing to march in a parade does not mean you hate the people in the parade. It is to say that you have a different opinion. One your employer can’t compel you to abandon. An opinion guaranteed to you by generations of free speech and religious freedom.

It is why we have halal and kosher foods. Live and let live. But the hysteria is not stopping with Reimer. The radical blood hounds have tracked down new targets to mount on their gibbet of 100 percent conformity to Woke causes.

The latest NHLers caught up in this fundamental failure to communicate are the Staal brothers in Florida who followed Reimer’s path to say that they haven’t and won’t wear symbols with which they disagree. Immediately the SJW sports media attacked them. When they said they wouldn’t Pride jerseys it was shown by the gotchas ‘ that they had worn subtle LGBTQ jerseys in the past. As if this makes them hypocrites.

My friend Mark Hebscher asked if the NHL should suspend them. Really? What would Mark say if Edmonton’s Zach Hyman, a Jew, declined to wear Muslim symbols on an Islamic Pride night? Would Mark demand Hyman be suspended?

What would he say if secular players in the league declined to wear the cross on their jersey for a Christian appreciation night? Should they be punished as haters? What if a pro sports team has a Mormon appreciation night. Does refusing to wear an LDS badge make people haters?

Of course these examples are moot. There are no progressive DEI laurels for creating political trip wires over Muslims or secularists to advance Woke influence. The only targets that matter here are conservative whites. Sports teams these days would only entertain the most provocative causes to create “a crisis that shouldn’t go to waste” (in the words of Saul Alinsky in his Rules for Radicals).

So Brian Burke was imported by Rogers Hockey Night in Canada on Saturday to further whip the herd into 100-percent compliance on Pride jerseys— and to push Rogers corporate bonafides as a Woke organization. Burke has become a fervent LGBTQ-2 spokesman since his son Brendan came out (and was tragically killed in a car crash). Good on him as a parent.

But he’s also a high-profile NHL figure, who was, in a major way, responsible for perpetuating the “boys-only” culture in the sport when he handled NHL discipline. He was his usual truculent self on HNIC as he conflated free speech with prejudice. He saw no room for tolerance on anything but the Pride agenda, insisting against all evidence that wearing the Pride jersey isn’t a political statement. “I was born and raised a Catholic, I don’t see any conflict between my religious beliefs and my ability to say to the LGBTQ+ community ‘you’re welcome here.”

That’s not what he’s saying, but play along. Host Ron Maclean— with whom we have had our disagreements in the past— did his job, gamely asking why wasn’t there a middle ground between hating and enforced 100 percent compliance to the cause? Burke shooed him away.

Naturally, radical social-media trolls pounced, asking for Maclean’s scalp for doing his job. There can be no exceptions! Reason is not a long suit for these Maoist shills. They want to be in Pol Pot’s Cambodia while their fellow citizens would prefer to remain in what used to be Canada before Justin Trudeau turned it into a postmodern state that stands for everything— and nothing.

The point that needs debate on HNIC is whether a few rich hockey players, who make so much money that they don’t have to give a flip, are going to make the league more inclusive by wearing a Pride jersey for one night. Likely not.

As we’ve contended over decades, the key to acceptance of gays in hockey will be the coming-out of a prominent NHL star(s). They are out there. It wasn’t high rhetoric from Brooklyn Dodgers GM Branch Rickey that changed the colour line in baseball. It was Jackie Robinson’s forbearance. It wasn’t slogans that slowly changed the skin colour of golf. It was Tiger Woods’ utter dominance.

It was also the hyper-macho world that Brian Burke nurtured through the years before his son came out — not colourful jerseys— that has repressed gay participation in the NHL. The weeding-out of gay youth in the development process comes from the grass roots. (To his credit a penitent Burke now owns some of this.)

While it is commendable that Burke now supports his son’s memory, flailing Christians for refusing to wear Pride jerseys is not the way to achieve understanding. Worshipping symbols is a divisive, not a unifying action that plays into the hands of forces Burke clearly does not acknowledge or understand. Radicals who use terms like white settler and cis-gender-entitlement to baffle the vulnerable. And who will discard him when he’s no longer of use to them.

Those would be the people who applaud the current PM and his caucus for having equal numbers of women in their ranks— the same PM who fired his prominent female/ indigenous justice minister for insubordination when the RCMP dug too deep. And the same “feminist” women MPs who stood by silently as Trudeau publicly destroyed one of their own to save himself from RCMP scrutiny. Those are the cowards who back the destruction of free speech.

Churchill was prescient about appeasing today’s virtue warriors when he long ago said that appeasers “are like people who feed the crocodile in hopes that the crocodile eats them last.”  Chomp.Chomp. Their day is coming.

Sign up today for Not The Public Broadcaster newsletters. Hot takes/ cool slants on sports and current affairs. Have the latest columns delivered to your mail box. Tell your friends to join, too. Always provocative, always independent.  https://share.hsforms.com/16edbhhC3TTKg6jAaRyP7rActsj5

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

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