Bruce Dowbiggin
White Out: “Some Ideas Are So Stupid Only Intellectuals Believe Them.”
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“So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.— George Orwell
Say this. It took Christianity three centuries to take over the Roman Empire. The new religion of White Guilt has taken over Western culture in about a generation. Through government, schools and media, this cult has been made religion. And, like so many religions, there is no questioning the leap of faith required to believe.
It’s why so many whites took seriously the absurd claims of actor Jussie Smollett who fabricated a story about white men in MAGA hats assaulting him on a freezing cold Chicago street at 2 AM. Smollett knew that if he was exposed— it took over a week— he only needed to play the race card and still be embraced by guilty white liberals.
As author Pedro Gonzalez notes, social engineering has now “conditioned white people to instantly forgive victimizers with sufficient diversity points… The end of social engineering is that it makes people act in certain ways unwittingly—they don’t know they’re doing it.”
Political conservatives have stood by during this conversion, fearful of being called racists. Thus, minorities are now forgiven their trespasses based on past oppressions. For example, sentencing guidelines in Canada require that indigenous criminals receive lighter sentences or be sent to healing circles because Sir John A. Macdonald something-something.
This produced a Catch-22 dynamic we captured in September 2017:
Progressive: You can’t blame an undocumented young Latino for something his parents did 20 years ago.
Also Progressive: Whites can never make up for things their ancestors did 200 years ago.
Psychologist Sam Vaknin, who studies narcissism, says that in the new dynamic victimhood identity now extends to guilty whites. “Certain people are prone to adopt victimhood as an identity. Victimhood endows their life with meaning. They would seek to be victims even in situations where they would not have been victimized otherwise. When they are not victimized, they push you to become victimized.”
The current zeitgeist in the educated white middle class is now unconscious, fashionable contrition for anything people they don’t know allegedly did to those who came out on the short end of history. Distilled, it says white people have it coming, and they know it.
Typical was the Atlanta murder of an 18-year-old white man who was gunned down by two black youths for no apparent reason in front of his girlfriend. Anger? Elijah DeWitt’s girlfriend saw the gunmen as victims. “You don’t know how those kids were raised. You know, what they were going through,” Bailey Rediling said. Elijah’s father, Craig DeWitt, did the same. “You know, we don’t know the kids. We don’t know their backgrounds. We don’t know their story. They’re forgiven from me.”
Yes, it’s Christian charity to forgive. But what about the individual agency of the shooters? To Woke whites that’s a now distraction. The shooters were victims! And should you think otherwise you’re a racist. Progressives are seemingly one of the few factions who remain in denial about America’s social advancement over the past half-century.
The media campaigns tell the evolution of this transition. In Canada it’s the Rez School graves. In America it’s the tragedy of black slavery. In the UK it’s the subjugation of brown peoples around the world.
Ostensibly this retroactive guilt was to benefit those oppressed in your grandaddy’s day. Equating all social ills with the tainted white race etc. That’s what was advertised in liberal stump speeches for the Great Society when the Left went from the party of Jim Crow to the party of Jussie Smollett.
It did produce some guilt money to current black and indigenous and LGBTQ communities. A literal get-out-of-jail-free card. A liberal media so craven you can shoot them, and they can be sued for stopping your bullets. The political and financial strip-mining of white liberal guilt for fun and profit.
While demonstrating to the Rob Reiner Brigade that sufficient remorse allows them to punish their fellow whites who aren’t in on the hustle. As we wrote in 2017: “The high priests of this guilt told their white adherents they were unworthy to judge, disqualified them from feeling pride in culture. Power was instead ceded to anyone who had a gripe from “micro-aggressions” to occupying too much of a bus seat. Rending your $50K garment at the Oscars became the sanctifying moment of your guilty white existence.”
But the real benefit of the new religion has not been to the “victims” since the Democrats dumped their Dixiecrat past in favour of a more contemporary Massa’. No integration of communities for minorities. No holidays on Hyannisport. No mercy from Planned Parenthood’s eugenic past. The same urban blight.
Vaknin says of blacks, like Smollett, being constantly told they’re victims, “It’s very dangerous, because if you are a perennial victim and this is your identity, you would tend to develop attendant behaviours, for example, you would feel entitled to special treatment, and if you don’t get this special treatment you will become aggressive.”
White liberals don’t care. They can hold two thoughts in mind at the same time. Maintain the gated communities and leafy suburbs as befits their sensitivity. While forcing fellow whites to bear the burdens of the chaos they cause with defunding police, opening the border or robbing citizens of the right to protect themselves.
Ah, the blank canvas of a contented mind. Nowhere is the contrition of guilty whites more exploited than in the sudden representation of mixed-race or gay couples in advertising (as we covered in April). Corporations wedded to ESG present white liberals with the racial version of the West Wing: a progressive nirvana to instruct the white majority in Good Think. Heaven help those who resist.
As Orwell said, “ Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.” He must have had MSNBC/ CBC in mind.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). 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 YearsIn NHL History, , his new book with his son Evan, was voted the eighth best professional hockey book of by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted seventh best, and is available via http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx
Canada awaits the outcome of Canada/ USA Hockey Armageddon II it’s fair to assess just how much a single hockey game has sharpened the focus on the political line brawl between the the nations. The proxies on skates have revealed a few truths about contemporary Canada.
While the Liberal party has suspended reality so that it can pretty-up Mark Carney, Canada’s media instead fawns over conflicting polls showing a Kamala Harris-like ascension of Carney to contender status. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s Canadian rhetoric gets more belligerent as his 30-day tariff reprieve runs out. Finally, Canadian businessman Kevin O’Leary has advised Trump to delay the tariff Apocalypse till Canada can get an election done.
The common denominator in all this is Conservative leader Pierre Polievre. Or, at least, the mystery of Pierre Poliievre. There are several Poilievres in circulation. There is the Liberal/ NDP version of a nasty wolverine who savages innocent reporters and talks down his nose to opponents.; Next, there is the sunset media’s version of an untested slogan-reciting automaton.
And finally there is the Paul Ryan nerd clone who thrives on explaining kitchen-table economics to people awash in debt and despairing of ever getting ahead in DEI land. Which is the real deal? And does Poilievre himself know who he is anymore?
This distinction is important because, barring a charisma implant for Mark Carney, Poilievre will be the next prime minister, likely with a healthy majority. Neither of the first two Poilievre constructs will disappear soon, of course. The comms teams on the Left are determined to ride over Poilievre, however bad the polls. You need only look at the how the vanquished Left in the U.S. still acts as if they, not Trump, won a mandate last November to understand that Liberals are loath to accept any public rebuke.
The best place to answer the question of who is PP does not come from his apple-eating defenestration of the hapless reporter in B.C. While the MAGA right worshipped that moment and other slap-downs of the press— and the Left demonized him for it— it seems that the Poliievre being groomed by his advisors is meant to be softer and more statesmanlike.
His Saturday rally in Ottawa, shortly before the Canada/ USA hockey brawl, was a good place to start. In the face of Trump’s imminent tariff threat gone was the pitiless street fighter and in came the statesman, full of talk about the glories of Canada and why America needs us.
He seemed intent on tying up the Boomer vote with this speech. Oh wait. Boomers still love Liberals and Carney. Why is Poilievre going after that unwinnable demographic? Isn’t that the quicksand every Conservative, save Steven Harper, has floundered in? But there was Poilievre wandering into Liberal Speak, trying to list the benefits of the nation’s past.
Real Canadians– eg those not voting for Carney– know what a great place it can be. They don’t need to be given a Tourism Canada commercial. And as we wrote last week younger Canadians need a reason to reject Trump’s offer of citizenship. Poilievre needed to level with Canadians about what happened the past decade on defence, crime, DEI. He needed to be frank about money laundering, fentanyl production and the penetration of China’s Communists into the fabric of the land.
While his handlers seemingly urged him to go statesman, Canadians were willing to hear the truth, not another Carney eye glazer. He needed to channel Harry “Give ‘Em Hell” Truman (“I tell my opponents the truth and it feels like hell.” ) He needed to say he’ll be pitiless in his treatment of those (media, PSA) who stand in the way of a bright new day. As so often happens it was CPC playing on Liberals turf instead of staking out their own. Canada already has Doug Ford, they’re saying. We don’t need another mushy Tory.
Poilievre concluded with a Churchill barb about how America will always do the right thing— after they’ve exhausted the other possibilities. It was an unnecessary and provocative one liner from a guy who’s try to establish his bonafides as the capable negotiator for Canada O’Leary is promising he’ll be. Did he and his brain trust think the thin-skinned Trump would simply slough off the jibe?
It is performances like these that leave Canadians wondering if they’re voting for Poilievre or simply voting against Trudeau and the thoroughly corrupt Liberal/ NDP coalition. Wobbly performances like this will lead to vote leakage to Liberals and to Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada. Bernier has urged a realistic assessment of Canada’s precarious position vis a vis the USA.
Instead of perpetuating the shopworn homilies to 1970s Canada that have expired, Bernier suggests looking at the opportunities of closer economic— not cultural— cooperation with the Americans. Let Liberal/ NDP moan about collaboration. They’re like the three little pigs expecting their houses of straw and twigs will survive the ongoing attacks of China and international money laundering.
Poilievre has to stop pretending that a heavily indebted and structurally crumbling Canada can withstand the next four years of Trump bombast. He must have an intervention with the Canadian public to bring them to the bracing reality they face. Only when they know which side is up, away from Trudeau, will they start to climb out of this mess.
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. You can see all his books at brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
You wanted a border war? You got a border war. And just like the political conflict this one came down to Canada’s defence. Or lack of same.
After weeks of a phoney war of words between Canada’s abdicated leadership and America’s newly elected Trump administration, the question of Canada’s sovereignty crystallized Saturday on a hockey rink in Montreal. It was a night few will forget. The 3-1 score of Team U.S. over Team Canada being secondary to other outcomes.
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.
Those who’d expected a solidarity moment pregame to counter booing the anthem had been optimistic. “Kinda think it might be more fitting for the US team to go stand shoulder to shoulder with the Canadians, under the circumstances. That, I’d cheer.,” said Andrew Coyne. Wrong again.
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.
But in unprecedented times who could have predicted the outcome? Under-siege Canadians were represented by fans wearing flashing red lights. They’d been urged on by yahoos in the Canadian media to boo everything American they saw, unaware but uncaring if it ruled out Americans playing in a Canadian city when they get the chance.
“It’s also more political than the (1972) Summit Series was,” bawled Toronto Star columnist Bruce Arthur, “because Canada’s existence wasn’t on the line then, and it may be now. You’re damn right Canadians should boo the anthem.”
He got what he asked for. It was as if large segments of Canada had suddenly awoken to their fate in the weeks since incoming POTUS Donald Trump’s tariff threats forced PM Justin Trudeau to resign and prorogue Parliament so his Liberals could stage a succession plan. Or maybe, according to Liberal house leader Karin Gould, postpone the election.
Instead of looking inward to examine what Canada had done to invite trouble the target was instead on Trump, who many believe is supposed to act like a beneficent older brother to Canada. Indignant Canadians are suddenly cancelling winter vacations to the U.S. while boycotting American chain stores like Home Depot and Costco. Even though Canada’s military is a token force following years of Trudeau downsizing and DEI incursions, the sunset media invokes Vimy Ridge and D-Day in their disgust with Trump, who wants Canada (and NATO allies) to actually pay for their defence.
Earlier in the day, presumptive PM Pierre Poilievre echoed the Liberal line with a rally for Canadian unity that would have worked in 1995, not 2025. In a move he may regret he quoted Churchill’s barb that Americans will always do the right thing after every other option has been exhausted. It drew cheap laughs. With luck, Trump’s animus to Trudeau will overshadow this potshot in a critical moment. Or maybe not.
The TV commercials from Canada’s corporate side waved the patriot flag, too. Leading one to wonder had they really missed the Trudeau decade that prompted this? Did they not hear him talking about Canada having no culture now? How it was now postmodern? How it was now 40 million narratives? How he’d lowered the flag for six months in penance for racism and genocide? Apparently not, as they revived narratives from the 1980 Quebec referendum to stir the crowd.
Now, with the symbolic game lost, what’s next? For Team Canada, injured and humbled, there’s an afternoon tilt Monday in Boston against Finland. Only by beating the Finns can they get a revenge game against the American, this time before a hostile Boston crowd. Should they get there would it be Hudson Bay rules again? How will Americans respond? The mind boggles.
Had there not been such a dramatic political overtone, the attention of the media might have dwelt on the fact that this was the first Canada/ U.S. best-on-best contest in 12 years. Excluding the fights it was a monumental display of skill, stamina and, sadly for Canada, goaltending. Why the wait? NHL commissioner Gary Bettman always puts the league’s interests ahead of those who want to see the best players against each other. So expansion and outdoor games took precedence.
Ordinarily the smashing success of the tournament would shame the NHL into more such competitions. And indeed they are conceding to a schedule of Olympics (Italy in 2026) and World Cups in the next decade. As thrilling as any of those contests might be they will likely pale next to Saturday’s drama. In fact, only Game Eight of the 1972 Summit Series can match the explosive political and sports combination of Feb. 16, 2025.
Guesses are now being accepted over just what Canada and Canada’s hockey team’s program might look like by the end of the 2020’s. Once certainty— if the game Saturday is any indication fraternal friendship between the U.S. and Canada will be on hold for a while.
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. You can see all his books at brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
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