The Memes of Production: Is The Old Model Finished?

U.S. secretary of commerce Howard Lutnick told a WEF audience in Davos that America is through buying fatalist EU tropes like NetZero “Why would Europe agree to Net Zero when they don’t even make a battery?” That’s the truth globalists can’t answer. Green agendas without industry. Climate pledges without sovereignty. Moral posturing while outsourcing power to Beijing.  Lutnick made it crystal clear: The old model is finished. The globalist experiment embraced by climate frauds and immigration phoneys has failed.  The future belongs to nations that put their people first.

If you haven’t been paying attention lately, Canada’s ruling class doesn’t like being mocked. In their minds they are the hip ones— hey, Mike Meyers! Your Trump Derangement Syndrome speaks to your impeccable wit. Anyone disputing this— we’re looking at you, Alberta— is an uncouth brute.

So it came as a shock when Team Trump began mocking their neighbours to the North in the midst of the Border Trade War. The kickoff was Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent snarking Canada’s military might. "I mean, we're not at war with Canada. How are we going to be at war with Canada?" he said. "What, are they going to take their two submarines from the Edmonton Mall and sic them on us?” https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/u-s-treasury-secretary-taunts-canadian-navys-lack-of-firepower-two-submarines-from-the-edmonton-mall

Snap! That led to Canada’s bespoke PM reacting.“When Americans stop doing memes, stop throwing shade, stop trying to be tough… we can have those (trade) discussions.” https://x.com/truckdriverpleb/status/2094851453966057572?s=20 

Big mistake. Cue a flood of memes featuring Carney as a clown or worse. Followed by the dour fact checkers on the Canadian media payroll rushing to disprove Bessent’s jab (result: there are 3 subs). We haven’t seen such an earnest hissy fit like this since Trump’s “51st state” razzing of a gormless Justin Trudeau. The country that spawned SCTV has become the penitent pew for humourless empathy. 

The memes might warrant even more hilarity if the war of words between Team Canada versus the current American administration weren’t serious already (see our previous column https://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.ca/blog/i-marcus-canadians-discover-the-trade-walkaway-was-about-him-not-them) . But the bun fight that started with a mysterious last-minute retreat by Canada from a new CUSMA has devolved into a global battle between Fortress America and China/ EU suits over Canada’s sovereignty. 

Dairy? French language? Automobiles? That is so last week. What has emerged from the tit-for-tat is a showdown at the upcoming G20 over who will win the West. Political analyst Barbara Boyd previews the meeting as “a clash between an agenda centred on physical economic growth—advanced by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent—and what she calls the G20/EU’s long-running Malthusian, ‘Green’ framework that followed the 2008 financial collapse, bank bailouts, and a shift toward climate policies.”

In short, the vibrant future of a mercantile nation versus the doomers who think they’re going over the cliff of climate disaster. The EU president supplied a taste of their goals now that the U.S. has cut off USAID and other slush funds. Ursula von der Leyen says that people's savings accounts are “lazy”. and that she must put this money "to the service of European companies" She says her plan is to "securitize them" and "supervise them" (Borrowing private savings was an earmark of the Nazis and Uncle Joe Stalin.) Most of which involve Climate panic as their agenda. 

Naturally, the carbon-obsessed Carney government is all-in on subsuming Canada into the EU's Duchy of Debt, offering China a warm place to pause on its road to owning North America. The TDS efforts in Canada’s media are bearing fruit in Carney's quest. One in four respondents to a recent poll thought it would be a good idea for Canada to formally join the economic and political bloc of European nations. 

A further 58 per cent indicated it was a proposal worth exploring further, while the remainder felt it was a bad idea. Meanwhile the Globe and Mail has labelled the premiers of Alberta and Saskatchewan as “traitors” for not offering up the energy industries to save the crumbling industrial eastern provinces. 

U.S. secretary of commerce Howard Lutnick told a WEF audience in Davos that America is through buying fatalist EU tropes like NetZero “Why would Europe agree to Net Zero when they don’t even make a battery?” That’s the truth globalists can’t answer. Green agendas without industry. Climate pledges without sovereignty. Moral posturing while outsourcing power to Beijing. 

“America First isn’t isolation. It’s independence”. Lutnick made it crystal clear: The old model is finished. The globalist experiment embraced by climate frauds and immigration phoneys has failed.  The future belongs to nations that put their people first. Davos just heard the obituary — live.

 It’s a message still lost on Team Carney. How deluded is Elbows Up about their new friend in China? They pitched a fit over Trump requiring Canada not do deals with their geopolitical rivals. Even when its was pointed out that Canada has already ceded this demand in previous agreements. (CUSMA/USMCA Article 32.10 non-market economies (China): notify 3 months before talks, share the text, and the U.S. can terminate the whole agreement on 6 months’ notice and go bilateral.)

Do this mind exercise. Switch to the Cuban Missle Crisis in 1962. Would Canada be pitching a fit against JFK telling Castro who Cuba can do deals with? Of course not. Canada backed JFK in keeping America free from USSR rockets 90 miles away.  But now the same people think Canada should let rival China squat on the Northern border— to exploit Canada’s progressive Liberals— without complaints from Trump.

The petty Liberal comebacks make people on Saltspring Island happy. But, as the British say, that's weak beer. Even as Carney whinged about being punked, Bessent was back for more wakeup time. ”We’ve had a free-rider problem with Canada. And PM Carney, after getting a verbal beatdown from myself and Hegseth, said: 'Stop throwing shade to get negotiations?' Well, he’s the one who said WE'RE AT WAR!"

"Canada had a great military. They were right there at the forefront on the beaches of D-Day, and what the Canadian government has done to the Canadian Armed Forces, if you look at the ranks of NATO spending, they are near the very BOTTOM, like they're cellar dwellers around with Spain in terms of their military spending to GDP!"

"And why is that? Because they were free riding.” Trudeau bringing six beers to the party but drinking nine. Wow. Glad Trump & Co. haven’t discovered Canada’s banking system. Then there’d be some real… what? He’s now talking banks with Bessent? Oh, oh. Here comes the American Royal Bank of Commerce. 

I, Marcus: Canadians Discover The Trade Walkaway Was About Him, Not Them

To Trump, it’s Kennedy telling the Cubans that having a hostile nation at their doorstep is a no-go. He has a continental plan to build a golden dome missile shield over the Western hemisphere and protect their hegemony. They want Canada pulling on the oars with them. But Captain Canada, whose investments are 90 percent in U.S., has different ideas.

“At tonite’s Blue Jays game, there is ample justification for 

a) fans to remain seated for the U-S anthem

b) the Jays to make that unnecessary by beginning the evening with the playing and singing of O Canada ONLY.” davehodge20

Well I’m glad you’re not taking this trade thing personally. As the details (or lack of detail from Canada) over the collapsed CUSMA talks became apparent Monday, Canadians vied with how much vitriol to spill over PMMC taking his ball and going home.

Dave did his pencil flip over the anthem. A grim-face Andrew Coyne cited the Vimy Ridge example. “We have to show that we have the stomach for the fight, that we're willing to endure pain in this fight in a way that Americans really aren't. Nobody signed up for this in the US, whereas everybody has signed up for this in this country.”

A Tissue stalwart Chantal Hébert notes “polls that show 75 percent of people backing Mark Carney are quite extraordinary. But the opposite is not true in the U.S. That is not happening to President Trump and his crew. No one is saying, 'Good for you. Please stand up to Canada and hit them more’.”

As usual Doug Ford brought the thoughtful take: “… Trump is a loser… I have more courage and brains in my baby toe than he has in his whole body… He's going soon if Dems win the midterms. Kick this bully out of office.”

We’re coming to believe that Canadians like Ford and Chantal are expecting the U.S Congress to do the heavy lifting for them. The “wait till the midterms” theme was given away by former deputy PM Chrystia Freeland, now a grey figure working as Carney’s factotum in Ukraine. She announced plans to partner with the U.S. Democrats , "to wage psychological warfare on Americans, perceptional warfare, make them misperceive reality " before the November midterms.

You won’t hear this tasty psyop morsel in the subsidized Canadian media. The breakdown in talks is strictly the fault of Trump. Here's a sample. of the canned Carney content. “While we can’t control the storm blowing in from the United States, we can chart a new course – building Canada strong at home and diversifying our trading relationships abroad.” Hint, hint. Beijing is lovely this time of year. 

The Brave Sir Robins like Coyne and Hébert breathlessly recited Carney's claims about the U.S. shutting down Québec as the reason Team Liberal theatrically absented the room at a minute to midnight. Trump wants to end French in Quebec, they alleged -- a claim denied by the bilingual American chief negotiator Scott Greer. Side note. Why are only the Americans talking about the issues behind the breakdown?

The Ottawa chattering class also cited Trump dictating who Canada can do deals with. (read China) To Trump, it’s like Kennedy telling the Cubans in 1962 that having a hostile nation with nukes at their doorstep is a no-go. He has a continental plan to build a golden dome missile shield over the Western hemisphere and protect their hegemony. The Americans want Canada pulling on the oars with them. The Americans, in the words of NFL coach Dennis Green,“are who they said they’d be”.

That's out of the question for Carney who is pursuing his globalist plans to lead the world's "middle powers" in a squeeze play against Russia. And, by extension, preventing Trump from getting a peace treaty before Carney and Co. can lock in their NetZero investments in Canada. It's all in his book "Mein Climat". Sorry, "Value(s)", a dismal dirge about making Al Gore happy.

To get there he has to prolong the Ukraine money-laundering machine ($4.3 B from Canada in 2026) to protect the Euro armaments industry now propping up their pallid economies. Why is this in Canada's interests when it has a $1.7T national debt? Impertinence! Captain Canada, whose investments are 90 percent in U.S., does not explain himself. Suddenly he hired a Democratic Party strategist Maiya Johnson as his COO to coordinate with Freeland in Kiev, the Euros in Brussels and frustrate Trump in the midterms.

@HaveWeAllGoneM1 “Carney isn’t defending Canada ... he’s using it as collateral in a globalist campaign against Trump. Plus he gets the bonus of riling up Canadians against Trump to boost his numbers before the by-elections.” Appeasement is most definitely not what Carney is thinking as he acts as the pious  forward firing base for China and the NetZero crowd. 

All of this rending of garments and gnashing of teeth should remind us,  “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” Purchased TDS media and Elbows Up devotees embracing the narrative on the CUSMA collapse have curiously neglected this wisdom in their zeal to become cheerleaders, not neutral reporters.

Remember, the Liberals telling you to trust them on trade are the same people whose Covid narrative was a tissue of lies and obfuscations that killed thousands. Carney’s the same guy who assured voters that the Gordie Howe Bridge was a triumph for his negotiating skills. Oops. He’d told a national TV audience he’d have a trade deal with Trump within six months. Sorry.

Then there was the Libs’ Truckers Convoy response, portraying vaccine protesters as anti-science misoginist Nazis. https://x.com/cbcwatcher/status/2013297342087123353?s=20 The government lost millions in court defending the indefensible destruction of citizens’ rights. (Which unrepentant Liberals and NDP will be happy to trample again.)

All of this is now memory-holed by the bubble boys and girls in Boomerland who want tunas with good taste, not tunas that taste good. Leaving Americans like CNBC’s Joe Kernen puzzled, reminding CDN top negotiator Dominic LeBlanc of some stark economic realities . "Minister LeBlanc, this is the last thing Canada needs… The OECD projects that Canada out of 38 OECD members will rank 38 dead last in GDP per capita growth through 2060. And I'm trying to figure out why... I looked to see, and I do find one thing it says here. Tax and regulatory competitiveness.”

Ho, hum. This gullibility is why Canada is such a convenient beard for Carney’s globalist pals. To please them he’s using Canadian pension funds to entice Brookfield and others while major firms go bankrupt or leave the country. leave the country .

For more on Carney's capers watch the excellent Barbara Boyd at Promethean Action https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-BB3bptPlc

As Texas senator Ted Cruz notes of Carney: “Chest-beating on Canadian TV is not a strategy. It’s a show. Our economy lives on that border. We need a deal. Not a performance." Gee, who'd have thought as the CDN fainting goats hit the floor last week that the deal was about someone other than themselves?

It Took 18 Months Of Prevaricating But PMMC Dumps Elbows Up

When they come to foreclose on Canada— and PM Mark Carney seeks exile in Switzerland— historians looking to explain this moment will show this video of former PM Skippy Trudeau wielding a toilet plunger to his nepo son’s music to explain what happened to a formerly thoughtful country that brought this all on themselves.

"Canada has expressed a commitment to REMOVE the discriminations or unreasonable and unequal impositions at issue (for dairy, autos, alcohol)” THEREFORE, I, DONALD J. TRUMP change the effective date to “August 22, 2026"

When they come to foreclose on Canada— and PM Mark Carney seeks exile in Switzerland— historians looking to explain this moment will show this video of former PM Skippy Trudeau wielding a toilet plunger to his nepo son’s music to explain what happened to a formerly thoughtful country that brought this all on themselves.  https://x.com/dowbboy/status/2089502645140738363?s=20

And why Canadians are the last serious nation on earth still adhering to the climate change dogma of its past two PMs. In the final days before President Trump’s deadline for a new trade agreement with Canada, Mexico and America PM Mark Carney was in Italy, taking orders from his globalist friends about how to keep the Climate hustle going. While Skippy was playing The Voice with gal pal Katy Perry in a hardware department. 

Sure, the Elbows Up slappies think CUSMA is all about oil, milk and automobiles. That’s why he’s been roaming the world touting the spanking new postmodern deal he guaranteed with Trump 18 months ago. That’s what the subsidized CDN media has been telling them. Canada’s tough. Don’t fuck with Carney. We won’t drink your bourbon. 

But Trump’s bumptious strategy is lost on Elbows Up. PMMC and his fanatical green wife won’t be telling you any of that. @saskridergal Trump’s 50% tariff just exposed what Carbon Carney is really protecting. It’s not you. It’s not jobs. It’s carbon. It’s carbon taxes. That’s what’s happening behind the scenes right now. “

They’ve said tough stuff like “Canada has the technology to become completely energy independent from the United States — and energy sovereignty means political sovereignty.” Except that Canada is faux down to its leotards. Carney proclaimed over a year ago that Canada would get an even better deal with the United States by waiting. People believed this guy and voted for him. 

They talked tough like Michael Spinks before his 1990 title fight with Mike Tyson. Who ran his mouth so much that Tyson told his trainer Kevin Rooney, “I’m gong to kill that guy.” Spinks lasted 90 seconds before it was lights out on the canvas. So it will be if Canada plays the Spinks card in negotiations with the U.S. they have Scott Bessent. Canada counters with Louis-Phillipe Champagne. America has Marco Rubio. Canada has Melanie Joly. America has David Sacks. Canada has Evan Solomon. 

Some of the Brave Sir Robins online, now sensing a similar Tyson triumph, have been backing off on the bravado while Carney sashays in the EU fun house. They know Americans heard that stuff about China as a new partner and Europe as our spiritual home. They know payback is coming.

“@LauraBabcock· “This is a moment Canada! We need to continue the boycott regardless of what PM Carney comes back with on Wednesday. US is trying to mess with Canada so they can take our country! We all need to dig deep and realize that we’re Canadians first above all else.”

While Elbows Up pretended that America gave a damn about them Trump postponed Round 1 for three days to give Carney a chance to re-open the Keystone pipeline, necessitating more “dirty” oil from Canada. Orange Man bad knows that for average CDNs climate is about No.10 on their list of real concerns— beneath cost of living, indigenous people claiming land and nagging rectal itch. 

Ask the average voter how climate affects them and they have to quote nightmare stories from the purchased Media Party. Because it doesn’t affect them in their own backyard. It’s just weather.

But Trump also knows that Carney and his wife have decarbonization on the brain . That's because they’re hawking net zero funds (again) that will make him a billionaire. Listen to Carney spin the little darlings in his support group. "We're living through the consequences of a world that collectively hasn't taken climate change seriously enough. Canada will do our part, not with promises and pronouncements, but with bold actions and major investment.”

“Bold actions and major investment” with foreigners looking to score cheap and fast using Canadian pensions as backstop. That’s why Trump threw in that Keystone “may be awoken from the grave!”  It’s the same reason he kvetched about the smoke from Canada’s forest fires last month. He knows that the Inconvenient Boyfriend will rise to the climate change bait to justify spending a gajillion dollars on plans that he knows don’t work.

And Canada will go broke paying for NetZero 2050. “The stock response from climate activists (like Carney) —that the only real fix is decarbonization—fails elementary arithmetic,” explains Bjorn Lomborg, one of the few sane climate scholars. “Even if the entire wealthy world went net-zero by 2050, an astoundingly expensive policy, temperatures of the globe would increase 0.05 fahrenheit by the end of the century, with near-zero effect on fire risks.

“The main culprits of the bad fire seasons Canada suffered in 2023 and 2025 are homegrown… Canada has all but abandoned prescribed burning—deliberate, controlled fires that clear out the deadwood and undergrowth that turn ordinary fires into monsters. By one measure, the area in Canada treated with prescribed burns annually collapsed from more than 35,000 hectares in 1990 to 182 hectares in 2023, a 99.5 percent decline.”

“Adaptation is what makes the difference. Modelling shows that … prescribed burns, mechanical thinning, fire-resistant building codes and smarter zoning—could make that Los Angeles’s Palisades fire about 15.4 percent less severe in 2050 than it was in 2025, at a tiny fraction of the cost massive decarbonization poses.” Somehow Cafney's Liberals did all this and manged to get thr media to blame Trump and Pierre Poilievre. Go figure.

So while the world laughs at the Carbon Colony domestically it will be more “Canada must show the way! The more painful the better! Blame Pierre Poilievre!” Enjoy dodgingntrees that look like smores.

It's Time Canada Heard The Truth From Tam About Covid Failure

Even when it was long evident that Covid was a disease of the elderly and infirmed Canada's so-called experts extended the lockdowns and vaccines on everyone. There were no more severe respiratory illnesses than usual. Corona victims came in, the flu victims disappeared. Mortality only rose starting in 2021, shortly after the deployment of vaccines began.

“They are extremists who don’t believe in science. They’re often misogynists and often racists. It’s a small group that muscles in, and we have to make a choice, in terms of leaders, in terms of the country… Do we tolerate these people?” Science expert Justin Trudeau demonizes (in French) the Convoy people he hid from in 2021.

The recent discovery of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s diary and business phone used during Covid has revived the questions about the rollout of Covid policy and introduction of vaccines from 2020-2024. While we now know that much of the Fauci doctrine (“I am the Science”) had minimal positive impact it is now obvious that voters in America were deceived about the real nature of the virus and who was vulnerable.

Just when it looked as though scofflaws like Fauci had dodged responsibility for their refusal to admit to their misrepresentations Fauci’s Fifth Amendment performance before a Congressional committee has revived demands for accountability from those scientists and their-political friends who locked down America while dining at five-star resorts..

Hobbling the attempts to bring Fauci to account now is the immunity granted him by Joe Biden (or the people moving his lips) as he left the White House. But the admissions in Fauci’s diary about , in one example, saying one thing to the public and another to the insiders in the virus community about bthe impact on pregnant mothers taking the vacciine have strengthened the resolve to have him charged or face civil prosecution.

These recent revelations did little to staunch the enthusiasm of Fauci Fans who claim he’s a heroic victim of Trumpers. Forget that 99.98 percent of Americans under 70 were unaffected by the virus but were locked down nonetheless and forced to get vaccines all the same. That closing schools was destructive for children.

Fauci remains a God to the anti-Trump Left. Stefano Bertuzzi, CEO of the American Society for Microbiology, gushed "His career was built on evidence, intellectual rigour and an unwavering commitment to improving people's lives. That record is documented in the scientific literature, reflected in countless advances in medicine and public health and measured in millions of lives saved.”

Here’s comedian Jim Breuer with a furious, funny summary of living through Fauci’s baffling blizzard of Covid rules and regulations. https://x.com/JimFergusonUK/status/2084609062692409626?s=20 But at least there is active journalism in social media and X trying to pry the facts out of Fauci and Friends.

Were that so in Canada where Elbows Up slappies in bucket hats are still acting as if nothing happened, cutting vapid videos of themselves singing Proclaimers’ songs about getting out the Liberal vote in Victoria.  https://x.com/TristinHopper/status/2086857415514058814?s=20 

Canada’s answer to Fauci was Teresa Tam, Trudeau’s Chief Public Health Officer. She was abetted by her provincial counterparts. There was little space between them and their wholehearted acceptance of the World Health Organization propaganda about the realities of Covid. Canadian reporters rarely if ever pushed her when conflicts— distancing, hand washing, masks— cropped up.

A glaring difference between the approaches of the two nations was that, for all the heavy-handed measures in the U.S., they never declared a national emergency to quash their critics (a move later declared illegal by the CDN courts). Deceived by a subsidized media, the Canadian public eagerly embraced Tam and her colleagues justifying the harshest civil policies since the 1970 FLQ Crisis. 

Her silence gave oxygen to future PM Mark Carney who, like Trudeau,  raged against the Truckers Convoy. “…No one should have any doubt. This is sedition. That’s a word I never thought I’d use in Canada. It means ‘incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority… By now anyone sending money to the convoy should be in no doubt: You are funding sedition.” It's a charge Carney conceals these days.

Upon her escape from  her disastrous performance on viruses, vaccines and ventilators Tam did admit that she and the government had “failed the most vulnerable”— something a proper federal inquiry (translation: not the Liberals/ NDP) should be tasked at uncovering now that the reality of the rollout is clear. 

Questions that need an open televised airing:

1. Even when it was long evident that Covid was a disease of the elderly and infirmed you insisted on extending lockdowns and vaccines on everyone. There were no more severe respiratory illnesses than usual. Corona victims came in, the flu victims disappeared. Mortality only rose starting in 2021, shortly after the deployment of vaccines began. But you and your political handlers offered no alternative research on the virus.

2. You dismissed the role of natural immunity which we now know had spread into the general public well before you employed lockdowns and vaccines to "stop the spread". The Barrington Group of doctors  insisted that immunity generated from an infection was found to be at least as high, if not higher than that provided by two doses of an mRNA vaccine. You and the WHO knew this, yet you stayed quiet, insisting on shutting down society to slow the spread before natural immunity could end the crisis..

3. Even when the reality of the virus was exposed in 2021 you supplied deceptive “new positives” reporting each day to the gullible media. Dr. Stefan Homburg cites the problem. “The notion of a pandemic arose exclusively from new forms of mass testing... [which] led the public to believe that there were more illnesses and deaths than usual, which was not the case.” You knew about 80 percent of those positive results could not make anyone sick nor be transmitted to another. Why did you cnot orrect the hysterical media mis-reporting of those tests?

4. Even though American experts like Deborah Birx confessed that six-foot distancing, hand washing, outdoor masking results were fabricated you allowed them to continue as gospel for years. Why?

5. Why did you pretend you didn’t know in 2021 that the virus came from a lab in Wuhan, perpetuating the fake “bat soup” sourcing? Who pressured you into adopting the deception?

6. Why did you suggest healthy children were at grave risk from the virus? Why did you keep recommending shutdown of schools long after the EU had lifted its restrictions on healthy children? Why did you not advise media using the universal-threat narrative?

7. Why did you not explain that the early vaccines had a very short shelf life and should have been approved for the public with their failure rate in testing? Why did you not contradict Trudeau and Biden on their deliberate lies about the efficacy of the vaccines and their risks?

8. Why did you and BC’s health officer Bonnie Henry declare the vaccines were safe for pregnant mothers to take?

9. Why did Canada allow two Chinese infectious-disease specialists working in a Winnipeg lab to skip the country along with their viral samples before there discovery of the virus in there general population?

10. Five years ago Bill Gates told the world that people had “no choice” avoiding the COVID shot, claiming the unvaxxed would “endanger their grandparents” & the vaxxed were 100% protected. Every single claim was false but you did not correct him. Were your political leaders so indebted to Gates they kept you shut up?

11. The measures like masks and distancing to prevent infections did not work as you described. Were they employed by you and the Liberals  to overcome resistance to the government’s radical agendas in the 2021 election? 

Anyone dreaming that the Liberals bringing you draconian lockdowns will ever have this debate is negligible. Our friend  @Stack1975 sums up the experience of being Canadians in a time of panic. “You are definitely lucky to live in a country where nothing is questioned and your evil doers can just do carte blanche.”

Film Study: The 70s Movies That Turned Boomers Left

For those whose frame of reference stretches back to the cradle of the Boomers, there is a direct link between today's perpetually indignant blue hairs and the movies they were fed in their formative years.

The current controversy over Woke insertions into Ridley Scott's The Odyssey is a reminder of how far Hollywood will go to promote its radical orthodoxy. From the ahistoric black Helen of Troy who launched a thousand scripts to Elliot Page as a warrior to Matt Damon clunking around in sandals it's a veritable cornucopia of radical new think.

What's interesting is not that younger people absorb all this without blinking — their frame of reference being 15 minutes ago — but that the lobotomized Boomers of Elbows Up and The View are ingesting the meal without complaint. Age is supposed to bring wisdom, but in this generation it brings surrender — especially to the Jane Fonda fainting goats.

For those whose frame of reference stretches back to the cradle of the Boomers, there is a direct link between the perpetually indignant blue hairs and the movies they were fed in their formative years. 1970s progressive themes and cultural guilt are not recent phenomenons. They remain as motivational as ever. Here are some of the famous films that changed the dialogue.

M*A*S*H — 1970

"Attention. Tonight's movie has been M*A*S*H. Follow the zany antics of our combat surgeons as they cut and stitch their way along the front lines, operating as bombs and bullets burst around them; snatching laughs and love between amputations and penicillin."

Robert Altman's 1970 war epic in the context of a faded WWII generation and the Flower Power hippies shocked audiences with its brutality. Technically this black comedy was remarkable. It modernized how we hear dialogue in films. It introduced new stars. It was both amusing and shocking, cutting paths into the portrayal of medicine, war and sex.

For our demo it was must-see for the spurting blood and the classic football game. Everyone wanted to be cool Elliot Gould and Donald Sutherland shagging nurses and defying authority. War was an abomination that simple kids fought and the privileged looked down upon.

In retrospect the movie had a corrosive mean streak that we laughed at in 1970.

From the perch of 2026, the treatment of people of faith and the callous treatment of Hot Lips Houlihan are crude and obvious. But they were marching orders for today's DSA generation shedding traditional religion and embracing sexual liberation. Today's Boomers maintain much of the NIMBY insouciance of the film. Their smug superiority is reflected in unrepentant modern actors like Mark Ruffalo, Robert DeNiro, Julia Roberts and Richard Gere.

Little Big Man — 1970

"Jack Crabb: Well, why do you want to die, grandfather?

Old Lodge Skins: Because there is no other way to deal with the White Man, my son. Whatever else you can say about them, it must be admitted: you cannot get rid of them.

Jack Crabb: No, I suppose not, grandfather.

Old Lodge Skins: There is an endless supply of White Man. But there always has been a limited number of Human Beings."

What Altman was to modern war and manners, director Arthur Penn was to the politicization of American Indians. Before Little Big Man they were portrayed as wallpaper in westerns. Either docile sidekicks like Tonto or bloodthirsty savages. Director John Ford was considered a rebel for casting real natives not Italians or Lebanese actors.

Little Big Man flipped the script, telling the story from inside the Indian perspective as Dustin Hoffman's character alternates between the white world of the 1870s and the Indians scrabbling to survive. While the whites — including General Custer — are caricatures, Canadian Chief Dan George and the Indians are seen as funny, loving, touching and doomed.

For the generation that took its attitude to war from MASH, Little Big Man supplied "colonizers" to the same people. Three years later, Marlon Brando rejected his Godfather Oscar, choosing native activist Sacheen Littlefeather to accept it. The colonizer mania reached its peak with Justin Trudeau grandstanding in a Kamloops cemetery in 2022. The placement of a teddy bear on the alleged graves of Rez school children spawned the UN calling Canada genocidal.

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest — 1975

"McMurphy: I can't take it no more. I gotta get outta here.

Chief Bromden: I can't. I just can't.

McMurphy: It's easier than you think, Chief."

Ken Kesey's novel was already a counterculture touchstone when Miloš Forman brought it to the screen with Jack Nicholson as Randle McMurphy, the rebel committed to a mental institution who wages war against the authoritarian Nurse Ratched. It swept the Big Five Oscars — the first film to do so since It Happened One Night in 1934.

For Boomers it was a manifesto. The institution was The Man. McMurphy was every kid who'd been told to sit down and shut up by a teacher, a parent, a priest. Nurse Ratched — Louise Fletcher's chilling performance — became the face of institutional control, the bureaucrat who crushes the human spirit in the name of order.

The film's legacy is the permanent suspicion of authority, expertise and institutions that defines the Boomer left. Every government health mandate, every school board diktat, every HR department edict is Nurse Ratched with a clipboard. Except now the Boomers are Nurse Ratched — and they don't see the irony.

Chinatown — 1974

"Jake Gittes: You may think you know what you're dealing with, but believe me, you don't.

Noah Cross: Of course. That's what the Department of Water and Power would like you to think."

Roman Polanski's neo-noir masterpiece starring Jack Nicholson as private detective Jake Gittes uncovering corruption in 1930s Los Angeles water politics. It ends badly — famously, irredeemably badly. No redemption. No justice. The bad guys win.

That nihilism was the point. Post-Watergate, post-Vietnam, the idea that the system was irredeemably corrupt and the powerful always prevailed was catnip for a generation losing faith in institutions. Chinatown told them they were right to be cynical.

The film's DNA runs through every conspiracy theory, every "follow the money" instinct, every assumption that behind every civic project lurks a Noah Cross getting richer. It is the founding text of the Boomer suspicion that power is always malevolent — a suspicion that has curdled, in 2026, into the reflexive anti-Americanism of the Elbows Up crowd.

The Deer Hunter — 1978

"Nick: No more. No more."

Michael Cimino's Vietnam epic was the most visceral anti-war statement of the decade. Three friends from a Pennsylvania steel town go to Vietnam; what comes back is broken. The Russian roulette sequences remain among the most harrowing ever filmed.

For the Boomer generation it completed the arc that MASH began. War wasn't just absurd — it was a machine that destroyed working-class men for the benefit of people who would never fight. The steel town, the church, the union hall — all the institutions that gave these men meaning — were powerless against the state's appetite for cannon fodder.

The film's politics were complicated — it was attacked by the left for its portrayal of Vietnamese villains — but its emotional argument was simple: the people who send boys to war are not the people who fight it. That argument, absorbed by a generation, explains much of the reflexive anti-militarism that still defines progressive Boomer politics in 2026.