“Don’t You Know Who I Am?” How Privilege Fuels Hate In Politics

“Don’t you know who I am?” It’s the coveted badge of the privileged class. And the definitive putdown of entitled dolts in private jets and valet parking. It’s also the dividing line between today’s solitudes of hate. 

In Canada the schism was in full display on Budget Day as the governing Liberals asserted their claim to the privilege of governing forever. It was not so much an exercise in budgeting as a statement that, yes, we may be profligate statists but have you seen the other guy? 

To prep the electorate for Mark Carney’s opus dei the Libs social media squibs used a creeping barrage to destroy CPC leader Pierre Poilievre. Remember, PP’s hands have not touched power.  He’s led no party, no government. But to judge from the Liberal bots one might guess that the smouldering wreckage of the bankrupt, Chinese infected nation is to be laid at Poilievre’s door. Because Trump.

Sample: “He’s full of shit. Poilievre has never cared about the poor - show me a vote he’s taken to help poor people in the last 20 years.” And “Poilievre is out of his league. He has zero concept of how to run a government. He has no idea how trade deals work… He is a dunderhead.”  And this. “Female voters despise Poilievre and you know it. What has Poilievre done to try to win over female voters? Nothing.”

From his kitchen-sink priorities listed ad nauseum in the election campaign— which Carney appropriated— to his apple-munching destruction of a biased BC journo, blaming Poilievre is the distraction from Justin and Carney’s clown car. The hate is real— and strategic.  

The real point of the exercise, however, is class. To emphasize that Polievre is not of their class. Can’t aspire to be. He’s an adopted kid with gay parents, a mixed-race marriage, was brought up in Alberta and he didn’t go to the right schools. He’ll never be able to say, ““Don’t you know who I am?” like Justin does and expect to be served.

Which is perfect for 2025 where class excuses every faceplant. . Pitching cultural hate is the Left’s new party game. “The key to hate is to decouple it entirely from reason and reality,” writes law professor Jonathan Turley. “’The key is to get voters to hate your opponent so much that they forget how much they dislike you. Only then can you hate completely without restraint or regret.”

That old Democrat street fighter Nancy Pelosi understands the new rules. In a CNN interview on eve of her likely retirement announcement, the 82-year-old Pelosi called President Trump "such a vile creature -- the worst thing on the face of the earth.”  And those are the nice things they’re saying. 

Turley’s new book The Indispensable Right: Free Speech In An Age Of Rage” gives away the little secret about hate. “What few today want to admit is that they like it. They like the freedom that it affords, the ability to hate and harass without a sense of responsibility… Rage is addictive, and it is contagious. What rage-addicts cannot tolerate are those who cling to residual impulses of decency or humanity.”

As uber-Woke actress Jamie Lee Curtis discovered when she exposed her residual impulses of decency in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination “I believe he was a man of faith, and I hope in that moment when he died, that he felt connected to his faith, even though his ideas were abhorrent to me.”

Cue the attack hounds. Curtis, who checks every Woke box, was besieged by the Brentwood Fashionables. Faster than you can say Barack Obama she claimed foul on her quote. “An excerpt of it mistranslated what I was saying as I wished him well, like I was talking about him in a very positive way, which I wasn’t. I was simply talking about his faith in God,” she told Variety.  

Digging a deeper hole, Curtis added, “You get vilified for having a mind that says, ‘I can hold both those thoughts. I can be contradictory in that way.’” To emphasize her perks she posted a photo of herself grinning with her trans child. Anything to protect her privilege to lecture Americans.

Others are trying keep the faith while also getting Trump ticket buyers . A-list actress Jennifer Lawrence lamented that while she has been raving about politics no one is listening. “We've learned election after election, celebrities do not make a difference whatsoever on who people vote for," she said. "And so then what am I doing?”  (Has she talked to the foaming Robert DeNiro?)

But then Lawrence allowed that her bigger issue might be pissing off half of American ticket buyers. “A lot of my movies coming out from my production company are expressions of the political landscape," she said. "That's how I feel like I can be helpful.” Funny things about capitalism. Makes you love people you’re told to hate.

The sneering class of Lawrence and Curtis are in too deep to recant now, however. Dumping on Trump is too easy. Like Canada’s Woke contingent they’re embracing the outlook of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. Canadians witnessed the Carney government kissing up to China as a solution to the endless debt wheel they’ve mounted.  Americans saw a radical Islamist socialist elected on Tuesday as mayor of New York City.

As the hip kids say IYKYK. Trump has become the receptacle for every frustration the Left has with modern society. He mocks them endlessly. He refuses to worship their false idols. He flaunts his successes. He jests about doing an FDR, going for a third term. (FDR stretched his mandate to his death in a fourth term in 1945.)

He’s loyal to his base. (Name one thing he’s done that he did not run on? Okay the new East Wing of White House. What else? Um… give us a second.) Loyalty is a foreign language to the Left. Their leaders dictate. Their bloc obligingly follows along. Most of all he’s not impressed when they ask, “Don’t you know who I am?”

And that is the cardinal sin of the age.

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 . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.