Bruce Dowbiggin
Yes, Virginia: Taking Aim At The Woke Regency
Tuesday was the night the political zeitgeist may have flipped. Instead of Oz the Powerful there was suddenly a corrupt U.S. political class shouting, “Ignore that man behind the curtain!” The hype and bluster had faded to the apologetic figure of Joe Biden exposed, begging forgiveness.
It’s usually a mistake to read too much into any U.S. gubernatorial election during an electoral off-year. Newly elected presidents typically get a rebuke when the glitter of election night turns into the smeared mascara of governing.
In part, that’s what happened in Virginia, New Jersey and other states holding elections for governor down to school boards. President Biden’s sheen wore off in the failure of his congressional agenda, the border crisis and the humiliation of Afghanistan. The GOP won almost every major office on offer Tuesday— and may yet get the New Jersey governorship.
Hey, it happens.
Except this November night seemed different. Governing in the post-Donald Trump reality has transcended the norms: As seen from the COP26 conference in Glasgow, the anointed fly by private jet to meet other grandees to decide the future of the planet. They don’t care who is offended by their privilege. They’re worth it. It’s free-spending blue-check elites imposing double standards on the governed.
They assume their purity gives them the divine right to negotiate away the rights of the voters (capping emissions on the Alberta energy industry, for instance). They talk of “wars” on climate that are actually wars on people seeking an affordable lifestyle. “We need a vast military-style campaign to marshal the strength of the global private sector,” Prince Charles told the loyalists. “With trillions at its disposal.”
It will come as no surprise that the man with 210 servants thinks a one-world, unelected body to fight climate is the solution. To aid him in this “war” he has the Big Tech oligarchs in Glasgow to censor opposing messages and banish inconvenient facts. “It’s quite stunning to see liberals applauding censorship,” writes a disbelieving Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of the Democrats’ martyred hero, “particularly the muzzling of bullied mothers of injured children, in order to protect pharmaceutical companies from criticism.”
But that’s the hubris of today’s Woke regency. Trust-fund poseurs like Justin Trudeau were born on third base and assume they hit a triple. Their constituency is Bill Gates, Al Gore and the other gladhanders who flew 400 private jets to Scotland to talk about cutting emissions. Their toughest job is masking their disdain for the people whose taxes support their lifestyle.
These lofty presumptions stretched all the way to Virginia, where a former governor and Clinton pal Terry McAuliffe thought he’d cake walk to the governor’s mansion again in a reliably Democratic state.
But something novel happened. Despite influential friends like the Clintons and Obamas the powerful Oz was suddenly alone. The curtain was pulled back. McAuliffe was abandoned as suburban votes poured in for his opponent Glen Youngkin, a Republican business type who rode a wave of school-reform to the job.
His denunciation of CRT and BLM in schools smashed cherished MSNBC/ CNN assumptions of the ruling class and the Media Party that everything be seen through Marxist prisms of privilege and race. And Youngkin won.
While Youngkin was the star attraction of the night, no one epitomized the pushback more than a former Marine named Winsome Sears, who won the Virgina lieutenant governor’s chair, the first black woman to do so.
A self-made success story, her campaign signs featured a picture of a resolved Sears holding an AR15. “I’m telling you that what you are looking at is the American dream,” Sears said during her victory speech. She took immediate aim at the MSNBC/ CNN race hustlers. “There are some who want to divide us, and we must not let that happen. They would like us to believe we are back in 1963 when my father came (from Jamaica)” she explained.
She sketched a different America from the one loathed by limousine liberals in Hollywood and New York. “We can live where we want, we can eat where we want. We own the water fountains … I am living proof. In case you haven’t noticed, I am black, and I have been black all my life, but that’s not what this is about.”
“It’s a historic night, but I didn’t run to make history — I just wanted to leave it better than I found it. Hold on, Virginia, help is on the way — the cavalry has arrived.”
Naturally Sears was savaged by DC pundits who construed a win by a conservative black woman in Virginia as equivalent to racism. Or Donald Trump. Or both. Joy-less Reid of MSNBC hissed, “The Youngkin campaign discovered that this contingent of angry, willfully ignorant white people was the key ingredient needed to elect a GOP governor in Virginia for the first time since 2009.”
CNN’s Van Jones sniffed that it was the “Delta variant of Trumpism… In other words… same disease, but spreads a lot faster and can get a lot more places.” And so on. But the era of tossing racism around like pizza dough seems to have taken a hit.
And the era of Trump is tarnished, too. Youngkin/ Sears won without him. As conservative Kyle Becker tweeted, “No more riding a politician’s coattails who claims to be doing the work for us. It’s lazy and counter-productive. The only people we can depend on are ourselves.”
Watching it from Canada, where smugness about America is endemic, it was hard not to respect the American capacity for re-invention and self reliance. There is now a genuine chance that average Americans will slough off these leeches with their Marxist visions of world government.
Would that Canada find similar courage. Or a Winsome Spears to articulate a vision apart from our grandees sashaying around Europe. (Leslyn Lewis?) But then you realize it has just let the same crew of gormless Trudeau radicals and timeservers have another term of the same old/ same old. Pitting one side of the nation against the other. Races against each other. A “net-zero financial system”. (Doesn’t sound ominous in the least).
And to not concede: This country is as good as lost.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand has been 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 is called InExact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx
After rummaging about for two months to no great effect the NHL has now embarked in its traditional Xmas break. Under the NHL’s collective agreement, no one plays any games from Dec. 24-27. This comes after a roster freeze that forbids trading a player during said holiday season. The annual World Junior champions, too, doesn’t crank it up till Boxing Day.
It’s a throwback to a more tranquil time when most of the Western world went home to eat too much and fall asleep on the sofa for three days. Then go shopping. So props to Gary Bettman’s NHL for keeping to their family stance. In such frenetic times there’s something to be said for pausing to sniff the frozen roses.
But catching your breath in the sports world is now an anachronism, driven by the massive dollars paid by networks and digital providers to sports leagues. In a time when the NFL rakes in $105 B ($2.1 billion a year) from its broadcast partners while the 32 teams collect a tidy $300 million each it’s no wonder the equity in NFL franchises has soared of late.
And that means using every minute of the calendar to schedule games— especially on days like Christmas when hundreds of millions are sitting at home after opening the prezzies, itching for something to watch besides It’s A Wonderful Life. So the Xmas break this year features two games on the day and another on Boxing Day. Followed by a full weekend of games on Saturday, Sunday and Monday.
In doing so it big foots the NCAA CFS’s new 12-team playoff and bowl-game format which also uses every day but Sunday this time of year. On the past Saturday FS games were given a head start before the NFL stole eyeballs with its own games an hour later. Tough luck college boys. It’s unlikely to change as the CFS is eager to expand the playoffs in the future.
The NFL is not the first to exploit this previously virgin calendar break, of course. Th NBA broached the prohibition against Xmas Day in 1947, first placing a single high-profile game that day. Later it expanded to an all-day menu of games. Anything sacred about the family day went bye-bye as folks either went to the TV or the kitchen for the rest of the day.
The reason that pro sports is creating also many windows for their product is the sudden arrival of so many new outlets for games. Where legacy TV/ cable networks had exclusive dibs on buying rights for decades, cable cutting has now exploded the bidders. As GTM expert Rhys Dowbiggin told us in our July 29, 2024 column the model was UFC. Yup. UFC. “ESPN+ (Disney) has been working directly with the UFC for a number of year and packaging their events on the streamer.
And let’s not ignore the monkey in the room: YouTube, which dominates all the streamers for eyeballs – YouTube (Google) has more live sports than any of the other streamers. Just for context, there is a massive amount of money in these deals: the recent NBA media rights deal is going to be 70B+ – split across a number of media partners. All the streamers took a similar GTM strategy – and they’ve led us back to 2001.”
Disgruntled consumers dumping cable/ satellite carriers sought other outlets for their spots viewing for NFL, NBA, NHL and NCAA. Leagues responded so we now have special placement games for YouTube, Amazon Prime, Apple, Disney and Google. And the Xmas season cornucopia of games. Watching whatever you wanted. The strategy was to compete on bidding for original content to bring in the subscribers.
Then a funny thing happened. It was now only some of what you wanted. The expansion of carriers pissed off viewers just as much as the arbitrary cable companies. the magic solution of cable cutting is now the tragic solution. Explains Dowbiggin, “The original product fit for streaming was the promise of all the content you could need was in a single place, on-demand. You only needed Netflix (in a sense) and you never had to wait or choose what to watch. Once the market fragmented into multiple players, the fit evaporated. Half the problem that was solved by streaming was now gone:
Watching whatever you wanted. It was now only some of what you wanted. The streamers GTM strategy was to compete on original content to bring in the subscribers. But creating content and not consolidating content exasperated the issue.”
The latest strategy is to bundle services across outlets to give consumers easier packaging. Says Dowbiggin, “Will bundling partnerships change things? It can’t hurt. But unless it drastically shrinks the numbers of players at the top to 2-3, the problem of ‘watching whatever you want’ won’t be solved, because I’ll still need Disney for my Star Wars.
All I know is, I’ve kept my library card for years, because I always saw this coming. And I don’t plan on getting rid of it anytime soon.”
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.
MLB has seen parity and proclaimed, “We don’t give a damn!” Okay, they didn’t say that. In fact they insist the opposite is true. They’re all about competition and smaller markets getting a shot at a title. But as the 2024 offseason spending shows, believe none of what you hear and half of what you see in MLB.
Here’s the skinny: Juan Soto‘s contract with the NY Mets — 15 years and guaranteeing $765 million, not a penny of which is deferred. Max Fried signed an eight-year, $218 million deal with the New York Yankees. Later, Nathan Eovaldi secured a three-year, $75 million contract to return to the Texas Rangers. Blake Snell (five years, $182 million with the Los Angeles Dodgers) and Matthew Boyd (two years, $29 million with the Chicago Cubs) added to the splurge.
There’s one more thing that stands out. MLB has no trouble with the financial big boys in New York, Los Angles, Texas, Toronto, Atlanta and Chicago shelling out money no small market dare pay. In the MLB cheap seats, Tampa, Pittsburgh and Miami can’t send out quality players fast enough. But MLB is cool with that, too, as those paupers get a healthy slice of TV money.
So yes, they’re all about talking parity with their luxury tax system. But to keep the TV, digital, betting and marketing lucre flowing they have to have large media markets swinging the heaviest bats come postseason. The question is, do MLB fans care the way they used to about parity? It says here they don’t. More want to seed best-on-best more often. Which is brutal but refreshing.
Their sister leagues, married to draconian salary cap systems, are still pushing parity, even as they expand beyond recognition. In our 2004 book Money Players, legendary Boston Bruins coach/ GM Harry Sinden noted, “The problem with teams in the league, is that there were (then) 20 teams who all think they are going to win the Stanley Cup and they all are going to share it. But only one team is going to win it. The rest are chasing a rainbow.”
And that was before the expansion Vegas Golden Knights won a Cup within five years while the third-year Seattle Kraken made a run in those same 2023 playoffs. There are currently 32 teams in the league, each chasing Sinden’s rainbow of a Stanley Cup. That means 31 cranky fan bases every year. And 31 management teams trying to avoid getting fired.
Maybe we’ve reached peak franchise level? Uh, no. Not so long as salary-capped leagues can use the dream of parity to sell more franchises. As we wrote in October of 2023, “If you believe the innuendo coming from commissioner Gary Bettman there is a steady appetite for getting a piece of the NHL operation. “The best answer I can give you is that we have continuous expressions of interest from places like Houston, Atlanta, Quebec City, Salt Lake City, but expansion isn’t on the agenda.” In the next breath Bettman was predicting that any new teams will cost “A lot, a lot.”
Deputy commissioner Bill Daly echoed Bettman’s caution about a sudden expansion but added, ”Having said that, particularly with the success of the Vegas and Seattle expansions, there are more people who want to own professional hockey teams.” Translation: If the NHL can get a billion for a new team, the heck with competitive excellence, the clock might start ticking sooner. After all, small-market Ottawa just went for $950.”
It’s not just the expansion-obsessed NHL talking more teams. MLB is looking to add franchises. Abandoned Montreal is once more getting palpitations over rumours that the league wants to return to the city that lost its Expos in 2005. Recent reports indicate that while MLB might prefer Salt Lake City and Nashville it also feels it must right the wrong left when the Expos moved to Washington DC 19 years ago.
The city needs a new ballpark to replace disastrous Olympic Stadium. They’ll also need more than Tom Brady to fund the franchise fee and operating costs. And Quebec corporate support— always transitory in the Expos years— will need to be strong. But two more MLB franchises within five years is a lock.
While the NBA is mum on going past 30 teams it has not shut the door on expansion after seeing the NHL cashing in. Neither has the cash-generating monster known as the NFL where teams currently sell for over six billion US. The NFL is eyeing Europe for its next moves.
The question that has to be asked in this is, WTF, quality of competition? The more teams in a league the lower the chances of even getting to a semifinal series let alone a championship. Fans in cities starved for a championship— the NFL’s Detroit Lions or Cleveland Browns are entering their seventh decade without a title or the Toronto Maple Leafs title-less since 1967— know how corrosive it can be.
Getting to 34, 36, maybe 40 teams makes for a short-term score for owners, but it could leave leagues with an entire strata of loser teams that no one—least of all networks, carriers and advertisers—wants to see. Generations of fans will be like Canuck supporters, going their entire lives without a championship.
In addition, as we’ve argued in our 2018 book Cap In Hand: How Salary Caps Are Killing Pro Sports and How The Free Market Can Save Them, watering down the product with a lot of teams no one wants to watch nationally or globally seems counter productive. The move away from quality toward quantity serves only the gambling industry. But since when has Gary Bettman Truly cared about quality of the product? So long as he gets to say, “We have a trade to announce” at the Draft, he’s a happy guy.
When we published Cap In Hand we proposed a system like soccer with ranked divisions using promotion and relegation to ensure competition, not parity. Most of the interviewers we spoke to were skeptical of the idea. But as MLB steams closer to economic Darwinism our proposal is looking more credible every day. Play at the level you can afford. Or just watch Ted Lasso. Your choice.
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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