“The more you learn, the more you realize how much you don’t know.”— George Foreman

For those who thought Donald Trump’s role progression (in WWE terms) from face to heel to face again was remarkable, George Foreman had already written the media book on going from the Baddest Man in the World to Gentle Giant.

It’s hard for those who saw him as the genial Grill Master or the smiling man with  seven sons all named George (he also had seven daughters, each named differently) to conjure up the Foreman of the 1970s. He emerged as a star at the 1968 Olympics, winning the gold medal in heavyweight boxing. His destruction of a veteran Soviet fighter made him a political hero. In an age that already boasted a remarkable heavyweights Foreman was something unique.

Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, Ken Norton, Ron Lyle and Jimmy Ellis were still bankable household names for boxing fans— but on the downside of famous careers. They each had their niche. Foreman was something altogether different. Violent and pitiless in the ring. Unsmiling as he dismantled the boxers he met on his way to the top. He was the ultimate black hat.

With the inimitable Howard Cosell as his background track , he entered the ring  in 1973 against the favoured ex-champ Frazier, coming off his three epic fights with Ali. While everyone gave Foreman a chance it was thought that the indomitable Frazier, possessor of a lethal left hook, would tame the young bull.

Instead, in under two rounds of savagery , Foreman sent Frazier to the canvas  six times. Cosell yelled himself horse crying, “Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier!” This was a whole new level of brutality as the poker-faced Foreman returned to his corner as the most feared boxer on the planet. For good measure Foreman destroyed Norton in 1974.

Fans of Ali quaked when they heard that he would face Foreman’s awesome power in Africa in the summer of 1974. They knew how much the trio of Frazier brawls had taken from him. The prospect of seeing the beloved heavyweight champ lifted off his feet by Foreman’s power left them sick to their stomach. Foreman played up his bad-boy image, wearing black leather, snarling at the press and leading a German shepherd on a leash.

Everyone knows what happened next. We were travelling the time in the era before internet/ cell phones. Anticipating the worst we blinked hard at the headline showing the next day that it was a thoroughly exhausted Foreman who crumbled in the seventh round. The brilliant documentary When We Were Kings is the historical record of that night/ morning in Kinshasa. The cultural clash of Ali, the world’s most famous man, and the brute against the background of music and third-world politics made it an Oscar winner.

But it’s largely about Ali. It doesn’t do justice to the enormity of Foreman’s collapse. Of course the humiliation of that night sent Foreman on a spiritual quest to find himself, a quest that took the prime of his career from him. It wasn’t till 1987 that he re-emerged as a Baptist minister/ boxer. With peace in his soul he climbed the ranks again, defiantly trading blows in the centre of the ring with opponents who finally succumbed to his “old-man” power.

Instead of the dour character who was felled by Ali, this Foreman was transformed in the public’s eye when he captured the heavyweight title in 1994, beating Michael Moore, a man 20 years his junior. He smiled. He teased Cosell and other media types. He fought till he was 48, although he tried to comeback when he was 55 (his wife intervened)

And, yes, for anyone who stayed up late watching TV there was the George Foreman Grill, a pitchman’s delight that earned him more money than his boxing career. HBO boxing commentator Larry Merchant commented that “There was a transformation from a young, hard character who felt a heavyweight champion should carry himself with menace to a very affectionate personality.”

There was a short-lived TV show called George. There was The Masked Singer as “Venus Fly Trap”. And there were the cameos on Home Improvement, King Of The Hill and  Fast ’N Loud, delighting audiences who’d once reviled him. He cracked up Johnny Carson.

Foreman’s rebound story was uniquely American. Where Canadians are enthusiastically damning Bobby Orr and Wayne Gretzky for political reasons, Foreman never became a captive of angry radicals or corporate America. He went his own way, thumping the bible and the grill. Rest easy, big man.

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 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.

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.