12 Months Of Misery: Annus Horribilis 2020 in 18 Easy Pieces

Ronald Reagan famously said that any government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you’ve got. The power of George Orwell’s 1984’s totalitarian state was the theme of 2020 as governments suspended civil rights, Big Tech censored free speech and the results of the presidential election showed clear evidence of electoral shenanigans.

Here’s how Usual Suspects covered a pivotal year in Canada and the U.S. 

January: Prince Harry flew to visit the Queen to propose a new model of Royal outreach. It did not go well and raised questions about whither the Crown when the Queen is no more. “He’s coming home with a nearly empty kit bag, having been told that, if he wants to be the freelance Prince, he’s not welcome to his Royal titles, palaces, incomes, privileges and other fussy perks of the job. In short, Meghan’s bright idea about a new monarchy went over like the latest Cats movie.

February: In an age when reporting has became a conformist exercise, Christie Blatchford took orders from no one. Her death marked the end of the feisty independence that reporters once displayed at MSM papers. “When I began in journalism there were many who thought like Blatchford. She wasn’t the story. Neither were they. They knew that you never get pushback on a mediocre story. So when the hacks mount their woke protests you know you’re over the target. The kind of verbal garbage hurled at her and similar reporters only served as a medal for a job well done.”

March:   With Covid-19 closing borders the concept of unregulated access to immigration was shown for the fraud it has been. People who worship open borders were suddenly screaming for borders to close against those who might carry Covid-19. “Hotel Canada is now quarantined. Its occupants are laid off, fired, short shifted. Others have lost their businesses or sources of income. They have squared the Diversity® circle. Reality has come knocking for M. Trudeau.”

April: Indications that there would be two-tiered media coverage of the 2020 election got an early workout in April when the Media Party buried a sexual allegation from Tara Reade against Joe Biden, the prospective Democrat nominee for president. This after it had staged a show trial against SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh on 35-year-old, unsubstantiated rape allegations.

“The most dangerous place to be in Washington was between the Democrats hit squad and the gibbet they’d fashioned for Kavanaugh. That’s how alleged feminist Elizabeth Warren could excoriate Biden’s sexual past last September then endorse him for the presidency this week, saying “one thing I appreciate about Joe Biden is he will always tell you where he stands”. But the media? Their eager participation in the ugly SCOTUS spectacle ought to have removed any shred of credibility that those who promoted the murder of Kavanaugh’s reputation were even-handed.”

April:  “Flatten The Curve” was the rallying cry of the health establishment in April. Just lock down even the healthy people for six weeks to save the healthcare system. It worked with empty hospitals and laid-off health workers. Except many took that to mean they’d fattened the virus— which wasn’t about to happen. 

“Put simply, despite endless media briefings, our media handlers still don’t seem to understand what flattening the curve actually means. If you watch news programs on CNN or FOX or CBC, the chattering class seems to think flattening the curve means flattening the virus. Crushing it. Nobody dying.  Nothing to do with unused beds.  For this reason Wolf Blizter and Adrienne Arsenault will berate you about staying indoors, touching no one and, if you’re Mark Zuckerberg, never protesting on Facebook that the media is demented.”

May:  When Flatten The Curve lost its ability to subdue a restless population it was determined that mask wearing was the new compliance vehicle. (A strategy still in full force as 2021 arrives)

“Suddenly, they became the symbol of the fight against the wily virus. Forget disease control. This was virtue masking. Dr. Anthony Fauci, member of the Trump task force, began wearing them to the president’s Royal Media Rumbles. You had Cuomo, the blue check’s blue check, urging for the love all that’s human, stitch up a piece of cotton over your yap to prove you don’t want to kill Nonnas.”

June:  Our most-read column— by a mile— concerned my former CBC colleague Wendy Mesley, whose career was destroyed by a member of her show. The crime? Using Richard Pryor’s favourite word in the context of an upcoming story. We called this person a rat. Modern Journalism 101: Crusades, not critical thinking.

“No doubt the fellow employee doesn’t feel like the rat that they are. They probably see themselves as a hero for outing Mesley’s use of a word used commonly by black comics such as Richard Pryor, Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock to prompt laughter from mortified liberal whites. That Mesley used the word in a warning about a black guest to her staff of eager young things— it’s almost exclusively female and under 30— was irrelevant. There was a scalp for the taking. And some SJW snitch who stains the name of journalism was not going to pass up a prize like that to brag about within their peer group. “

June: Mesley’s defrocking was followed shortly after by a similar story. In another closely-read column, frothy gossip monger Ben Mulroney and his wife were garroted by colleagues for— wait it for it— white privilege. “Like a downmarket Wendy Mesley, Ben was caught on the wrong side of the current O tempora, o mores!  Worse, his downfall wasn’t due to any of the slavish pandering and fashionista frothing he’s performed over the years. It was that the SJW types he’d coddled finally made a fuss over what everyone had know for years. Mulroney, like his doppelgänger Justin Trudeau, is white privilege incarnate.”

July:  As summer arrived,  Critical Race Theory— the trendy race engine behind BLM— became a thing as it leapt from colleges to the masinstream. CRT says the most successful society in history is built upon a bedrock of slavery, exploitation and rapacious sexism. Using Trump Derangement Syndrome as their inversion point, white liberals now drown in guilt for sins of the past.

“CRT doesn’t believe in MLK’s equal opportunity. It doesn’t believes in equal outcomes. It believes in superior outcomes guaranteed by the state. Having constructed a sympathetic societal response to address MLK’s goals in minority communities, liberals like my colleague now find out that they’ve wasted their time. They were the bad guys all along, says CRT. There is no possible response from whites, other than surrender, that will satisfy.” 

July: In 2020, Justin Trudeau went through ethics violations the way Liberace went through sequins. In mid-summer it was revealed that the WE Charity was just a little too close to the PM, his family and the cabinet. As usual there were no repercussions for Skippy, leaving many to wonder whether they’d elected a King, not a PM. “The reaction to the Trudeau ethics mess is that people feel played by their elites. Cancel culture has vaulted snitches, political commissars and “church ladies” to positions of moral authority.  No one feels safe from being doxxed or outed for a 30-year-old half-remembered quote.”

August:  The CPC leadership race brought a shock as Leslyn Lewis— a black conservative woman— took down favourite Peter McKay and almost overtook Erin O’Toole. It was all a mystery to the Canadian media class— including so-called conservatives— when the silent voters exercised their voice.

“They couldn’t give a flip what the At Issue panel thinks— if they watch them at all. They didn’t care if the think-tank experts and consultant class believe that pro-life is a loser. With their money and their votes they reminded people that they are out there— your neighbours and colleagues. They didn’t care that CBC had swooned over Westmount High product Kamala— the proper kind of black woman— instead of the pro-life conservative.

August:   In a year for acquiescence to radical chic, even traditional bastions such as pro sports cratered. The case of sexual abuser Jacob Brown— shot and paralyzed by cops after he defied a restraining order and tried to abscond with his kids in a stolen car— was adopted fully by leagues who plastered his name on uniforms, helmets and signs to advertise their wokeness. 

“As of this writing none of the leagues that spent last week wallowing in Blake worship has acknowledged his real story. They’re locked in. But the public (outside the looters) is saying “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”  Having contrary opinions in private life is something fans can grudgingly accept. Portraying fans as white supremacists and murderers— and expecting them to buy tickets and merchandise— is an entirely different item.” 

September:  The death of feminist icon and SCOTUS legend Ruth Bader Ginsberg was a chance for feminists to celebrate their idol. But feminism today—with its grievance narrative—  now takes a backseat to other “isms” in the Left’s pecking order. “Having joined Team Victim, women have discovered that while they may gain equality with men, they have been placed miles behind other grievance groups in the Woke hit parade. While a women must, in Hillary Clinton’s words, always be believed in any “he said/ she said”, this blanket exemption does not apply when a white women is in conflict with many other political flavours of the day. In the wrong equation even devoted feminists can find themselves accused of white privilege or cultural appropriation. 

October:  When U.S. president Donald Trump emerged from his own Covid-19 hiatus to declare "Be careful," but "don't let it dominate you”, an army of fear purveyors descended saying that his comments insult the Americans who are reported dead from the virus. Because fear is the new currency. “But admitting that the worst is over would blow the game. And why waste such a great weapon? Covid-19 is the engine; fear is the fuel. Fear is power. In Canada fear phobia (phobophobia) has been raised to an art form since Dr. Theresa Tam (and her #WHO pals) flipped the narrative 180 degrees from “no big whoop” to “say goodbye to your loved ones”. 

November: The U.S. presidential election saw the Left finally defeat Donald Trump. How they did it is open to debate. One thing not in doubt is the effect of four years of #OrangeManBad on the impartiality of the legacy press. “In the public mind Big Media has given up on balanced and fair. They either couldn’t or wouldn’t find the Shy Trump vote in their polling. How these firms justify themselves in the future is a mystery. But you know they'll re-invent themselves under a different flag, especially under a Swampy Biden government. Denial is more than a river in Egypt for the consultant class.”

November:  The chaos after the U.S. election— with its machines and mail-in votes— was in stark contest to Canada’s simple pencil and paper process. But multiple claims of malfeasance showed that America has broken the voting process. “What do these examples prove? Only that when you have 50 states with conflicting voting protocols mated with pollsters who were either incompetent or pulling for Biden added to the Electoral College— you’ve created your own monster. Both candidates can now make a credible argument for having won the election— or for how he’ll motivate his crestfallen followers after inauguration.”

November:  There seems little doubt that Big Tech favoured Joe Biden in the election. But did they sway the vote? “If you believe post-election research by Dr. Robert Epstein, a Democrat who has been following the influence of big tech on American politics for decades, the treatment by social media and the legacy press did sway the election. Last year, Epstein had predicted that big tech companies like Google could shift up to 15 million votes.  Now, his research concludes that Google search engines were strongly biased in favour of Democrats. Epstein estimates that, at minimum, six million votes could easily have been sent to Biden by Google’s multiple manipulation. ‘The maximum (number of votes)? We haven’t even begun to estimate, because we have so much data’."

December:  One of the more startling developments of the pandemic has been the public veneration of the various Health authorities on both sides of the border. “What’s most interesting about this college of Covid cardinals is that they have managed to get almost all the major calls wrong. Not once. Not twice. But at virtually all the moments of crisis they went left when they should have gone right. And then flipped those earlier commandments 180 degrees without batting an eye. The phoney death projections, flattening the curve, border closing, masks, lockdowns, the threat to children, the ability to have a vaccine in nine months. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Tragically wrong. “

Thanks for reading through this awful year of 2020. Year over year, Not The Public Broadcaster has enjoyed 103 percent increase in unique visitors, 138 percent growth in visits and 96 percent in page views. Please tell your friends about us and keep reading in 2021. We’ll try to make it worth your while.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his new book Personal Account with Tony Comper is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx