Do Not Adjust Your Set: Adjust Your Privilege
The Christmas/ New Year’s break was the perfect time for sports aficionados to sit on the sofa and absorb endless hours of football and hockey. Two weeks of bliss. While the Herald Angels sang, the shepherds watching their flocks by night yelled at TVs over dropped passes and goalies whiffing on shots.
This prolonged solstice of sport also afforded the opportunity to be pelted with the latest commercial inventories interrupting the flow of games. While everyone complains about the new gambling ads they’re a very small proportion of the sales pitch happening as 2025 dawns. It’s a small window into how DEI sees Canada.
In one 2:30 break during an NFL game on Canadian TV we saw
A Bell ad featuring a gravel-voiced trans-sexual lecturing two black people about art.
A Wayfair ad showing a flamboyant gay man in pastel jump suit showing two other gay men how to play musical chairs.
A BMO ad in which a black man at a desk in a bowling alley sells a black man and a latino-looking woman on investment advice.
Air B&B ad showing two lesbian couples by the pool in different holiday scenarios.
McDonald’s ad showing a black couple sharing French fries at a stop light.
That was just one block. In others there was a Quaker Oats ad showing how a latino man bonds with his family over decades using porridge— ending with a black grandson. Scotiabank kept up with BMO, using their own black client advisor on their services. Dominion Lending also employed a black couple. Etc.
These are buttressed by Government of Canada ads for their Climate Plan (two men holding the hand of a little girl). If there’s a white person in any of this Woke avalanche it is as a comic foil or a figure of pity. (Ironically locals ads for cars, plumbing or home services companies do not do the DEI checklist.) These are not exceptions. They were almost the entire inventory of the 2024 commercials.
Now, on the surface, most people have no problem with the goals of interracial marriage, gay people, blacks in the financial business or drag queens. They do have a problem with DEI being jammed down their throat during football or hockey games by governments and corporations. As we said in the past the progress of Woke social engineering is 1) Acceptance. 2) Compliance. 3) Silence. The commercials show a culture morphing from 2) into 3). From "you must celebrate approved blue-check groups” to “shut up and be happy we are giving you football games”.
What also annoys viewers was the alacrity with which corporations and advertisers swerved to reflect this new diktat. Almost overnight they went from reflecting the boring consumer habits of taxpayers to a commercial La Cage Aux Folles. Suddenly consumers discovered that minority causes reflecting tiny parts of society justified their presence in 60, 70, 80 percent of commercials.
In the recent past this would have been disastrous. In 2019 razor-blade maker Gillette dropped its “The best a man can get” campaign in favour of introspection about #MeToo. Seven months later, Gillette’s parent company Procter & Gamble was forced to take an $8 billion write-down for the increasingly “toxic” brand.
No more. Before we destroy corporations that have moved from sober stewards of society to deck hands on The Love Boat, it’s instructive to note that this swing to radicalism is a survival mechanism. As we wrote in April of 2023 “Before anyone ponders this too deeply it’s best to remember that petrified corporations don’t advertise products anymore. Nor do they fixate on shareholder value. That’s so last week. Guided by their armies of high-priced gender and race consultants they now advertise attitudes and empathies.They promote virtue and inclusion. Sturm und Drag.”
So when Budweiser locks labels with trans activist Dylan Mulvaney it’s not in the desire to boost sales in the tiny trans community (0.04 percent of U.S. population). It’s just the cost of doing business with DEI governments infatuated with Maoist social reform. If you chose to steer clear of the wrath of Trudeau or Biden (both now exiting stage left) you played the game of 1) Acceptance. 2) Compliance. 3) Silence.
There was no alternative. But the top-down effects of government’s DEI/ ESG interference in the market have now transcended a third level. Those suppliers wishing to do business with major corporations are finding they, too, must play the gender/ climate charade. For instance, one Toronto company that services many of the top brands in the hospitality industry has adopted draconian climate audits of its operation to stay onside with these big fish.
That incudes using companies that record the carbon footprint of its plant, the travel footprint of its employees going to work and the impact of their product on the environment. Million of dollars and thousands of hours of accounting are required to satisfy their “integrity” to the three layers of government preying upon them. The grim inevitability of promoting virtue is now a sunk cost.
However, watching the grim progress of such social engineering has been a wake-up call to the public. The disgust with mass DEI indoctrination via the marketplace is one of the factors that propelled Trump back to the White House and has led to Justin Trudeau’s engineered exit from the PMO. Governments led by Trump and Pierre Poilievre will be expected to reverse the DEI folly.
This should encourage advertisers besotted by DEI to back off on virtue lectures that belong in houses of worship. Who knows? By 2025 holiday season football session they could just go back to advertising their products. Not their DEI bonafides. Imagine that.
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.