Usual Suspects 2021: The Year of Fear

Nuclear inferno is so out for Doomsday fans. Plague is in. In the second year of the Covid Conflagration flammable object (virus) met accelerant (media fear mongering). In the words of researcher/ author Heather Mac donald? “The media want you to believe that everyone around you is scared out of his mind, and thus you should be, too.”

It worked. Catatonia is king. Usual Suspects monitored the media-generated hysteria in 2021. Here’s what we saw from January to December:

Shock To The System: Mr. Smith Comes To Washington “ I’ve said this before. The Left brought Trump on themselves when they treated anodyne Mitch Romney like an axe murderer in 2012.  It was a turning point for many on the Right to get a candidate who’d fight back against progressives. They’d have accepted any number of GOP figures who’d espouse their cause. Only Trump was willing to talk honestly about immigration, the eternal bureaucracy and captive media. So he got the job by default.”

The Reset Reach: Trudeau Takes Aim At Your Retirement Savings “Shareholder value will be ditched and feel-good activism will take its place as the central force driving society… The end goal of the financial flip is social equity. Not social equality. (That’s yesterday’s leftist love child.) Social equality meant equal opportunity. Social equity means equality of outcome ie. everyone gets a kewpie doll. Former Obama zealot and now Ambassador the the UN, Susan Rice thinks it’s Job One for the new administration.”

The Descent Of Dissent: Why The Chicago 7 Would Be Appalled. “But the Democratic Party of 2021 has morphed from brave to slave, dedicated to intellectual conformity, not contrary opinions. Gone are the civil libertarians like (William) Kunstler. In their place are AOC and her brigades of SJWs purveying hate-speech laws and attacking deniers of the “true climate religion”. First amendment rights have been replaced by cancel-culture indictments. “

The Great Deception: How Health Elites Blame the Public For Their Failures “In short, have we created a nation of Howie Mandels, germaphobes who cannot touch others, who eschew public venues and shared spaces at all costs? Having roused the fear of sickness in these children will we ever be able to put the toothpaste back in the healthcare tube?”

Media To Biden: We've Got Your Back “If you want to know just how insane your world is going to be in five years, enrol in a liberal-arts faculty today. It’s the coming attractions of the authoritarian class looking to ruin your life. Everything from reparations to gender bingo is tried out there first. Just so you won’t be surprised when they target you for re-education.”

Too Cool For School Is No Joking Matter. “Everyone will have their own opinion about the death of humour, but for us, it was probably the decision  by Canadian A&W restaurants— previously best known for root beer—  that a hamburger was no longer a steaming combination of bun, salt and pickle. No, the chain decided that their burgers now constitute a virtue experience. Their commercial brand careened from a goofy comedian cracking jokes with a bear to the same actor interviewing teenagers about hormones in beef.”

From Foaming Beer To QuExit To C10: It's No Longer Your Parents' Canada “Need a single example of how Canada has changed? Observe the “cold one after a run” froth raised by progressive zanies on social media over CPC leader Erin O’Toole’s tweet that his wife gave him beer after a run. Even people as docile as my old media colleague Evan Solomon of CTV wondered aloud about the sexism of this gesture. That was one of the milder outbursts.”

Mesley + 1 Year: The Snitches And Snobs Have Won “Everything is identity politics. Try getting a white male bank president on the Corp or TVO these days. Easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than have an inappropriate political messenger soil the lineup sheet dominated by the downtown Toronto aristocracy. Most alarming is that the Canadian media, culture and government are all located there, imposing their tortured worldview on the nation.”

Breaking Faith: When Liberals Realize They've Been Useful Idiots. “This is not a conspiracy," John Stewart said about the theory that COVID-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. "The disease is the same name as the lab. That’s just a little too weird!… There’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania, what do you think happened? I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel made it with a cocoa bean. Or it’s the fucking chocolate factory!”

The Veneration Of St. Catherine The Martyred By Her Friends In The Press. “The alleged Liberal “feminist” stood mute while her male boss publicly humiliated and fired Wilson Raybould and Jane Philpott from the cabinet. She protected her own jet-setting climate sinecure by biting her tongue on a fellow woman. There were no CBC “barrage of online hate” or  “target of sexist attacks” lick jobs for Raybould. Just female cabinet ministers calling her a grifter for defying Skippy the Wonder PM.'

How Michelle Obama and Corporate HR Turned Wall Street Into Woke Street “Michelle Obama led the HR takeover of corporate America, and no CEO is now willing to oppose that tide. Enjoy your guilt.”

Zero Covid Is Not An Achievable Goal “The Covid fear crowd has no intention of surrendering  easily— or admitting the terrible damage they’ve inflicted by their draconian societal controls.  All because they won’t answer a simple question: How much is too much?”

The PM Who Tells "Made-Up" Stories To The World “All your elders have knowledge of every grave. The Band office has records from the Bishop’s office, the Church board and from cemetery workers who were in charge of digging graves and burials… So please, people, do not make up stories about residential school children being put in unmarked graves. No such thing ever happened.”

The Great Climate Hustle: Covid Crazies' Next Stop “Ultimately, the credibility of climate change will rest with how much the public accepts from “experts” who’ve dramatically revised their estimates since “96 months to save the planet” or Greta Thunberg’s dystopian teenage vision. With predictions pushed back to 2150, 2200 or even later there has been wiggle room to adjust their doom forecasts.  But the public is just now emerging from two years of “experts” operating predictive models in real time. The abject failures of computer modelling and autocratic behaviour on Covid-19 is fresh in their mind as they reassess the climate-change agenda being pushed.”

Covid's Weighty ICU Problem: Why Do Obese Get A Pass? . “ The World Obesity Federation has shown that death rates from COVID-19 have been 10 times higher in countries where more than half of the population is overweight. Yet there is no call from the media and its acolytes to punish the obese for clogging the healthcare system. No demand they be put to the back of the line. Why? Because it doesn’t suit the narrative of right-wing extremism that non-vaxxers do. Too many allies of Woke land— in and out of politics— would be shoved down the line.”

Graven Images: The Greening Of Calgary. “The evolution of Green is a litany of half-baked predictions and salacious slanders. Even as European governments scramble to replace their sacred renewable dreams with the realities of nuclear power or, gasp, Russian natural gas, the pious will still party like it’s 1999— when all things seemed possible. There’s a revolution of purity happening here, folks, and a few inconvenient facts isn’t going to harsh the vibe.”

No News Is Good News: When Facts Don't Matter . “The difference from a decade ago is that media has succumbed to the mission creep of self worship. Where once stories were assembled to create a picture of the day’s news, stories are now assembled to support a preordained picture. One that flatters the cult of journalists with their moral superiority. And so what is that narrative? The new reality is class— a generation of educated whites, many in the knowledge, government or media industries. Their Woke opinions are like the electric cars, private schools, summer cottages, pink pussy hats and other trappings they accumulate to cement their superior status. Talismans of their significance. ”

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author was 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 Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx