Shock To The System: Mr. Smith Comes To Washington

Who knew that if you told people not to have Christmas with loved ones, to wear a diaper on their faces and then conduct a Venezuelan election that the public might get a bit testy? 

Apparently not the panjandrums of Washington, who freaked out when the people most affected by their fiats paid a noisy visit Wednesday. After a collective shrug (“peaceful protests”) to Antifa and BLM rioters looting and burning down Portland, Minneapolis, Seattle etc. all summer, the ruling class and their media party had a little piddle in their pants when surrounded by real citizens.

Tyranny. Sedition. The end of democracy. But enough about the politicians trapped in Congress. What was getting those protesters so angry? According to AOC, “The whole point of protesting is to make ppl uncomfortable. Activists take that discomfort w/ the status quo & advocate for concrete policy changes. Popular support often starts small & grows. To folks who complain protest demands make others uncomfortable... that’s the point.”

Unless it’s right-wing acitivists, of course. (Historical note: 20 points to anyone guessing the cause of Wat Tyler’s Peasants Revolt in 1381? If you said the mishandling of a Plague give yourself a prize.) 

Exasperation with authority will do that. In the 1960s and 70s— the heyday of Boomer consciousness— resistance to authority was the watchword. Question everything. Don’t take the easy answer. Watch Five Easy Pieces or Easy Rider or The Parallax View to get the taste of the times. 

Now? The same people are all-in for Crossfire Hurricane, the Mueller Investigation, the Kavanaugh show trial and the impeachment farce. Forget resistance to The Man, they’re now fans of reinforcing the Bureaucratic Swamp and the censorship of Big Tech. 

Having them applaud Twitter muting America’s fourth-largest newspaper for exposing Joe Biden’s shakedown scam is a transformation that defies irony. The people who used to get the joke have become the joke. A bad one where everyone should have an opinion so long as it’s the same opinion (see: masks). 

As Michael Lind writes in Tablet, “Once mainstream progressives, adopting the toxic language of the campus left, began absurdly vilifying old-stock white Americans as ‘settlers,’ it was only a matter of time before young white male right-wing radicals began wearing cowboy hats or buckskins in response. The striking photo of a young bare-chested and tattooed male rioter standing in the well of the vacated House, looking like a Germanic barbarian in the ruins of Rome with an animal fur on his head, is the logical result of the escalation of the post-patriotic iconography wars.”

I get this blowback when I criticize my media colleagues. They think anyone who sees fault in them must mean you love Trump. It’s a deflection. This failure to process is why conventional media has suffered an extinction event. One that no one seems to acknowledge.

For all the talk about following your passion and being an individual my Boomer colleagues have brought up their kids to be conformists. Young people I know are considerate, lovely and kind. They’re also obsessed with conformity. They’re easy meat for Critical Race Theory or whatever brainwave progressives have jammed through the schools. The social media generation doxxes colleagues who don’t get in lockstep.

It’s part of a process. When I was young we moved a lot. From Montreal to Edmonton to Sherbrooke to Montreal again to Burlington to Toronto. I went to about ten different schools growing up. Which meant a lot of arriving in pre-existing cultures and trying to not get  beat up at recess. 

Being thrown into new surroundings gave me an outsider’s perspective on belonging, groupthink and fear of outsiders. This guided me in my media career. When no one else would expose Alan Eagleson as an embezzler and fraudster— at the expense of NHL greats— I followed the evidence. It didn’t make me friends. But I wasn’t in it to make friends. It was the same on other investigative stories of popular people. 

Today, Woke media is a team sport. My side, right or wrong. Orange Man Bad one last time. 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.

Wednesday in Washington was the culmination of his rude attempts to dry up the swamp that spied on him, impeached him and vilified him for four years as being outside their Wokeness. His last thumb in the media’s eye.  The Left is celebrating bringing him to ground. But they also must see the capital they expended in demonizing him has driven a stake through the nation. Half of the country no longer buys into the narrative. Hope it was worth it. 

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