Bad Hasbara - The World's Most Moral Podcast - 169: A Jesse Brown Christmas, with Rachel Gilmore

Episode Date: December 23, 2025

Good grief! After 2 years of being begged by our Canadian listeners to talk about the tragic downfall of their favorite (favourite?) podcast Canadaland, we decided to gift you all an extra long episode all about Jesse Brown. Our guest is Canadian journalist Rachel Gilmore, one of the many journalists who Jesse has attacked for reporting on the pro-Israel blinders of the Canadian political and media class.Follow Rachel Gilmore on InstagramSubscribe to Rachel's SubstackFinally, listen to her podcast Bubble Pop with Rachel GilmoreNew Bad Hasbara Merch: https://estoymerchandise.com/collections/bad-hasbara-podcastSubscribe to the Patreon https://www.patreon.com/badhasbaraWhat’s The Spin playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/50JoIqCvlxL3QSNj2BsdURSkad Skasbarska playlist: http://bit.ly/skadskasbarskaSubscribe/listen to Bad Hasbara wherever you get your podcasts.Spotify https://spoti.fi/3HgpxDmApple Podcasts https://apple.co/4kizajtSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/bad-hasbara/donationsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Moshwam hot bitch, A ribbon polka dough We invented the terry tomato And weighs USB drives and behind a goal Israeli salad, oozy stents and jopas orange crows Micro chips is us iPhone cameras us Taco salads us

Podaramos us Olive Garden us White foster us Zabrahamas Hasvara suss Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the welcome, everybody, to Bad Hasbara. The world's most mistletoe festooned podcast. That's right.

My name is Matt Lieb, and I will be your co-ho-ho-ho host for this podcast. And I am Frosty, the co-host. Daniel Matte in the Hizzle. hello everyone hey everyone i hope everyone's having the greatest holiday season of their life um i am very excited for this episode uh and i just uh you know before you even watch it please give us five stars in a review before even seeing or listening to the final product go to wherever you listen a podcast and say hell yeah i loved this because it helps us and it well it only helps us but do it but we're helping you by being here that's true and another thing you can do especially

if you're a fan of like advanced like theoretical mathematics is go to youtube and subscribe to us and notice how no matter how close we get to 50,000 we never reach 50,000 are we still not we're at 49.9 oh you know what would be the greatest gift of all your subscription uh to our YouTube channel. It's free. It's free. You literally just have to press subscribe. We would love to hit 50,000 at some point.

And at this point, we're both starting to believe it's mathematically impossible. So please do so as soon as you can. Santa baby. I really want a YouTube plaque. Yeah. Yack, yack. No, so please do that. And, of course, happy Hanukkah to all, happy Kwanza to all, Merry Christmas to all.

And for this episode, especially, happy boxing day, eh? To all of our Canadian listeners, I feel like a huge portion of them just unsubscribe after that impression of them. But yes, happy boxing day to all of you. Before we get the show on the road, need to first and foremost, shout out producer Adam Levin. and he's back on the ones and twos, let him feel the love. And today's episode is brought to you by United Palestinian Appeal. United Palestinian Appeal has worked in Gaza for 45 years and is currently providing critical pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, and vaccines in the region.

Additionally, they provide farm aid clothing and sleeping bags for families in Gaza. You can right now, this holiday season, do something good with your money by going to U-P-A-Connect.org and donating. Go to U-P-A-C-O-N-E-C-T.org. Donate now. They need your money more than we do. But should you want to listen to bonus episode of this podcast, Patreon.com slash bad as borrow.

Feel free. There's so many. And you're going to want to hear them because they're good. Feel free to upgrade to paid. Feel free to pay. That's what I always say. we're going to change the name of our Patreon to the free press because you you know that we are not actually free.

Free depression. I got that for Christmas. Daniel, we of course have an amazing Canadian-focused episode. So from that vantage point, what is the spin? Well, it's got nothing to do with Canada, Matt. Good guess, but you're wrong. It's Christmas time. Oh, right, yeah.

It's Christmas time. And we're going to be off for a little bit. I think we're taking a little bit of a holiday break. That's right. We'll still be putting out some content for the main feed, which I think people will be excited to receive. But I thought I would leave you guys with some Christmas stuff. I don't have any Hanukkah stuff.

Hanukkah just ended. I don't own any Adam Sandler LPs, so leave me alone, Jews. This is a kind of hefty one, so bear with me. Donald Fagan from Steely Dan has this great box set Which don't ask me how much I paid for it It's very rare called Cheap Exmus And if you see his face It's all of his albums plus some bonus

If you see his face there Looking like quite a happy Jew on Christmas there Well yeah look at Fagan over there And so I'm not going to include the entire box set Oh hell yeah Walter Becker Walter Becker was not but Donald Fagan is Jewish Is Fagan a Jewish name?

What I'm asking is Charles Dickens No, that's fake in with an eye. And I don't think, I don't think he's supposed to be Jewish. I think he's Irish, maybe. Okay, okay, good. Anti-Irish, that's okay. I'm all right with that.

Charles Dickens, you can do anti-Irish racism all you want. But don't you do it, dare do anti-Semitism. But as three famous Jews once said, I got money like Charles Dickens, got the girlies in the coop, like the colonels got the chickens. That's nasty boys. I thought you were going to do the three stooges. No. So, who, who, who, who,

like, anyway, so this is Donald Vagan's album Sunkin Kondo's, one of the albums from that Boggs said, Primus Pork Soda has the song Hail Santa. Hell yeah. Violator by Depeche Mode has your own Personal

Jesus. Jesus. J-Bus. Of course, the motherfucking St. Matthew Passion by J.S. Bach. I guess that's more of an Easter thing, because it's about when he died, by supposed to when he birthed, be birthed, but I don't have Handel's Messiah, so that's what you're getting. J.S. Bach, St. Matthew's Passion, the John Elliott Gardner conducted version.

Judy Sill, wonderful alt-folk record from the late 60s, early 70s with a song called Jesus was a crossmaker. I'm still, I'm sorry, I'm still focused on you having Bach on vinyl. Oh, I got Hella Bach on vinyl. That's great. I got a hellabach. I mean, that's awesome. That's totally fine. It's just funny. Leipzig represent.

Just because I'm thinking about going, like, you go to a record store and, you know, I see your place and it's all these records piled up. And I'm just like, you also got back. Yeah, you got like fucking back to the future records. You got records going back. He said Bach to the future. Sure, sure. Either way, though, it's just wild.

Too many records, man. You know, I mean, I agree with you. No, no, no. Plenty of judgment. To skip the spin, follow the, the, time stamp that that asshole puts every episode in YouTube. The Jesus Lizard.

Okay. Okay. Their album, liar. Okay. This is a great gospel record by the Rance Allen group. Beautiful gospel music. Sounds like an insurance company. The Rans Allen Group, it's true. Hello, thank you for calling the Rance Allen Group.

To whom may I direct your call? Have you been injured in an accident? Rance Allen Group will help you get the settlement you deserve. Well, it includes the song Jesus is the best insurance. There we go. I'm kidding. Tom Waits, Mule Variations, has the song, Chocolate Jesus. Right.

Which is a great thing to eat around the holiday time. Just a couple more folks. Outcast, Southern Playlists at Cadillac Music, their very first album has the song Players Ball, which was originally written for a hip-hop Christmas compilation on LaFace Records. It starts with the line It's beginning to look a lot like what So it's not really a Christmas song

But it's like a It starts out as one I love that fucking album I found this recently Remember when they used to rap Yeah well Big Boy still does He does still rap

That's true The other guy plays the flute He says he's got nothing to rap about At age 50 Look I can't blame Elvis's Christmas album I found recently And I just had to get it

I don't even know what's on it but I had to get it. And finally, of course, come on, guys. We all know. Charlie Brown, baby. Charlie Brown Christmas is... Osborough is here. That's great.

Oh, man. That is the spin. That'll last you into 2026, at least. For all of the Canada land refugees who might be listening slash watching this. Yes, the show starts off with Daniel's record collection. It is part

of the show and it's lovely. Thank you so much for the spin and now we're spinning on down to our guest. I don't know. I did nothing there. We have a wonderful guest. Today we're going to be, of course, talking

this is a full on Canada land episode of Bad Hasbara. We've been waiting to talk about this for a long time. But not quite a crossover. No, no, no. I mean, look, I am not, I'm not fundamentally against a crossover. I would like to talk to more people who are, you know, formerly working, formerly worked for Canada land. And I'm not entirely against maybe, well, never mind. I was going to say talking to Jesse Brown, but I don't think you'll want to talk to us after today.

Um, yeah, we're going to be talking a lot about the, uh, dissent, uh, into irrelevance, into, um, propagandist, uh, you know, we'll see of Jesse Brown of Canada land. This is, um, going to be a full episode about that because there's so much information here that I, uh, just, I was kind of shocked that it had taken this long for us to start, um, talking about it. And literally every week we get Canadian listeners. Yes, yeah, who've been pounding, pounding their hockey sticks on the ice. Yeah, yeah, just saying like, you know, come on, you got to, you know, you got to talk about this guy. Or I can't do the accident. But we, you know, hey, you have. Come on, boys, come on boys.

Let's go hard in the corners. Yeah, move, book, talk about Canada land. Yeah, hey, buddy. Time for you to talk about this podcast. I'm not your buddy guy I'm not your guy friend and I you know for me because I didn't know the background of it

I was just like this feels like it would take too much research too much time maybe at some point but then as the couple of years went on it just more and more became clear that this is somebody who we just had to cover on this podcast and we're going to of course

try to be as fair as possible we're not I don't think we're mean people do you think we're mean? No, I don't think we're mean. I think we're nice. I think we can be sharp sometimes. Well, we have a perspective.

We have a perspective. And I think it's proportional, generally speaking. Yeah, yeah. I think so too. And, you know, in this case, we're going to try to be proportional. And principled. And principled. Yeah, I should say before we get into this, maybe, would you okay to say this before the guest comes on?

Sure, go ahead. Yeah, so I just, I have a personal background with the, subject of this episode. Not a very strong background, but I went to McGill at the same time as Jesse. I was in a cultural studies class with him. I remember him as being asking a lot of questions that sounded really smart that I didn't understand. It was a postmodern cultural studies class and I didn't understand the class anyway because I sort of resented him for that. But that's neither here nor there. He was very good friends with my roommate, who the roommate remained a friend of mine, and he actually does the music for Canada land.

So, you know, friend of a friend, I would say, Jesse. And I used to be a Canada land subscriber and a very big fan of the podcast and real appreciator of how it started out, which we'll get into with our guest. Yeah, it seems to be, that seems to be a recurring theme, you know, regarding Canada Land and Jesse specifically is a lot of people who are now vehemently, I mean, just breaking down our door to get us to talk about this, we're fans of Canada land. A lot of people who I know in the Canadian Lett, this was a media company, a podcast network that they could go to in order to hear real media critique, which is, you know, obviously

makes it a huge bummer that stuff seems to have changed in real media creek and and rather excellent and needed investigative reporting into undercovered very Canadian stories and you know in at least one case that reporting reached a big international audience justifiably yeah we'll talk about that with so we'll get into it but first we're going to be introducing our guest and I'm very excited to have her on the podcast today. She is an independent journalist with bubble pop media. Ladies and gentlemen and everyone else, welcome to the podcast, Rachel Gilmore.

Hey. Hey. Thanks for having me. Thanks for hanging out backstage for two hours. Yeah. I loved it. I liked the rendition of Charlie Brown's Christmas. It sounded great.

Yeah. We have our own Hasbar version of it as we do. A lot of parody songs. on this podcast. Nice, nice. What I, what's, I feel like is going to be interesting and has to be said. When I reached out to the Canada land subreddit, because I, I reached out to them knowing that, you know, we were going to have you on and I wanted to get more research.

And I, I found there was a lot of people who were bad has bar listeners and people who were like, ooh, I can't wait to check that out. And so I need to just say up front right now, this podcast is stupid. This podcast, we cover a lot of, you know, what I consider very important things, like the fact that, you know, there's a genocide going on, and we are focusing more on literally anything else other than that. But if you're used to, I started listening to Canada Land a little bit to get into this. And I was like, I think the listeners of this podcast like a certain aesthetic that I don't know,

I don't know if I'm going to be big in Canada, that's what I'm saying. So that's just fair warning. If you like puns and parody songs, you'll love this podcast. Rachel, you used to listen to Canada Land as well. Is that right? I wouldn't say like super regularly. I just was a fan in general of the fact that he was doing media criticism, saying things that a lot of people weren't saying about the media.

And it was sort of, I got the vibe, it was progressive. He's sort of batted down those assertions and been like, oh, we've never said that we're, you know, leftist or progressive. But just by virtue of the kind of like way he'd report and speak about things, I think people got that impression. And so, yeah, I was a big fan of it in that respect and just like seeing the journalism coming out of there as like a young journalism student, especially when I was in school. I was like, I want to work there one day. That's the kind of place I want to end up. Like there or vice. Those are like the cool places where you want to.

to go and report if you were a cool young journalist, you know, if there is such thing. Like journalism. The Canada land was more straight-laced, I think, than vice, and less subcultural and less of an aesthetic and more of, look, we're trying to create an actual respectable alternative to the legacy media that has really fallen off in terms of its seriousness, you know, and to to critique the decline of Canadian media. And I think you're right that the show was seen as progressive, also because of who the co-hosts were, who the guests were.

A lot of indigenous voices were platformed. And it was generally a podcast where justice and the veneer of, justice was important and the veneer of reconciliation and the veneer of justice having been done in Canada through the truth and reconciliation process was looked at very askance justifiably. And I don't know if we want to get into this yet, Matt,

but their first big delve into investigative reporting was a series called Thunder Bay, which was about the town of Thunder Bay, Ontario. How much do you know about that show, Rachel? I didn't listen to that one, which I'm embarrassed. I'm embarrassed about it because I heard so many people speaking about it and saying how incredible it was. You should never be embarrassed to not listen to a podcast. And that goes for all of you out there.

Yeah. Well, but maybe before I get into that, I don't know if we want to segue out of meeting Rachel just yet. So Rachel, how did you get into journalism? What were your ambitions? And when did you become an anti-Semite? That's right. I think I was born with it. Was it cause and effect?

Like, did journalism cause the anti-Semitism, or did the anti-Semitism make you want to be a journalist? It's a real chicken or egg question, you know? Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I first went into journalism. Actually, I was, like, a young, like, lefty in high school. And I just knew whatever I wanted to do. I wanted to help people, which is very corny.

But I realized, so I ended up applying for journalism school at Carleton, not because, I particularly wanted to be a journalist, but because I, that was the one school in Canada where I had free tuition because my mom was a prof there. So I was like, I'm going to Carlton no matter what. So let me find a good program there that's like somewhat in line with my interest because there's no way in how I'm doing engineering, even though it's a good program there. Like, it's not going to happen. So I applied for journalism school. I got in. I ended up almost switching out to do human rights. And that's when I learned actually a lot about Israel, Palestine and like took classes on that. And yeah, over the course of my journalism degree, I was like, you know what? I think

journalism can really be used as a tool to help people. And I decided to give it a shot. And luckily it worked out. And I worked in mainstream news as a Parliament Hill press gallery reporter. So like for the Americans listening, like it's like reporting on Capitol Hill, reporting on the White House. So I was in our press corps here for like seven years. And then after getting laid off and feeling a little frustrated at the confines of, you know, what I felt I was able to report in the newsroom. I decided not to reapply for mainstream news jobs and kind of forged my own path and now I'm fully independent. But that really came to a head specifically. And I think probably why I ended up labeled and characterized the way I've been by Jesse Brown is because I lived in

Tunisia for two and a half months with journalists for human rights. I did a placement there. And while I was there, the Palestinian-American journalist Shereen Abu Ackla was murdered by the IDF. And I watched how, as the Western world sort of woke up throughout the day, the complete like wall-to-wall outrage that I saw about Shireen's murder kind of dissipated. And I was really disgusted by the lack of outrage because, you know, like, I don't know what the American, like I guess she, to Canadians, like my understanding was she was kind of like their Peter Mansbridge, very Canadian reference. So I don't know what the American equivalent would be.

But like, you know, just like a lot of people in the Mina region would watch Shereen Abu Akla on their nightly news. So this was like a huge outrage. And people just didn't give a shit in North America. And so that made me tweet. I was like, she had better hair than Peter Mansbridge. Oh, many. I mean, most people do, but she had good hair too.

So anyway, long story short, I ended up getting in touch with some people who knew Shereen, um, and including the cameraman who filmed her murder. And I interviewed them. And so I had four sources who knew Shereen personally, including that cameraman. And I wrote that up for global news, which is one of Canada's largest, um, news outlets and it's the one I was working for at the time. And they just basically did death by delay with the story. Um, they kept saying it needed more, you know, uh, two editors, two editors signed off on it and said it was good and ready to go. And then, you know, a higher up editor ended up, stepping in and saying that she needed to look at it.

She was really slow looking at it. Weeks went by, which if you've ever worked in a newsroom is wild. Like that is not a period of time that, you know, at its normally take. And then she ended up telling me among other things that I didn't have enough sources. And that's why they weren't publishing it. And I was like, that is crazy. So anyway, and I ended up once I went solo publishing it myself and former global news colleagues said to me like, why wouldn't they want this published?

because I published it word for word, like what it was with Global. And, yeah, it was pretty nuts. So all that to say, that's sort of my journey in journalism. So now I dip my toe into media criticism. And I try to focus on Canadian issues, which is, again, I think a reason why people are so sad about losing Canada land. Right. Because a lot of the people who talk about Canadian or people who do, like, independent journalism in Canada, especially who do streaming and stuff too, they're awesome. But they mostly end up talking about the states.

So, like, there's a real hunger for people actually talking about Canada. And that's what we're kind of losing with Canada land. So that is kind of the sentiment that I've seen most of all in kind of just, you know, talking to people who were listeners or reading, you know, Redditors. Now, Reddit, of course, is not, you're not going to get, I think, a great, you know, cross-section of people on subreddits for podcasts. Famously, a lot of those subreddits have haters. It's just part of it. We love our subreddit. Oh, yeah.

I mean, I sometimes I'll go on there and I'll be like, man, you guys are still here. Good for you. But, you know, a lot of what I've been seeing is this kind of like, I don't know, it's almost like mourning the loss of something that was almost a staple of, I think, the Canadian left in terms of actually being able to see media criticism that really took it to, you know, took the mainstream or institutional media you have there to task, which, you know, I think there's no more, you know, obvious litmus test, I think, right now for the past two years, you know, especially in United States, I can't say for sure in Canada. I assume it's

true. Oh, yeah. Than Israel Palestine. You really see who the real ones are and who aren't. Now, being not familiar with the Canadian landscape, the way in which... It's mostly tundra. Yeah, it's like tundra. Then, you know, you guys also have trees and shit, right? Oh, yeah. We got all kinds of, you know, it's a big-ass country, so... You got moose.

Yeah, oh, yeah. Yeah. Many, many, many, many, many mees. With death fun. All right, sorry. But, you know, being unfamiliar with it, the way in which Jesse Brown speaks about, I guess, the way that anti-Semitism is covered, it seems, at least from his perspective, he says that essentially that it's not being talked about. It kind of presents himself almost as this lone voice in the Canadian media who is talking about this resurgence of anti-Semitism. Is that the case or is he, you know, like many people in his position, completely delusional?

Yeah, because from what I've seen, all the other people who are screaming about it constantly agree with him that no one's talking about it. Right. From Warren Kinsella to Jonathan K., who used to be one of his prime rivals. yes, you know, to whoever, like, anyway, go ahead. No, it's, it's, yeah. So, first of all, I mean, I would say that some kinds of anti-Semitism here are undercovered. Sure.

But the, the conversation about anti-Semitism or what they call anti-Semitism that is really anti-Israel sentiment, like half of our news, like no one shuts up about it. And there's like a whole, I mean, The National Post, which is one of the biggest papers in Canada, their entire op-ed section is constantly, constantly publishing pro-Israel content. Their legion of columnists who are like vastly majority right wing are constantly posting about it online. They literally had a designated newsletter, I believe, that was about Israel specifically

that they were sending out. Like, I actually, I don't know if you guys are familiar with Sanasai, who's a journalist. We've had her on multiple times. She's great. She was my colleague at AJ Plus. We worked together. Lo-key, one of my favorite guests. Yeah.

She's got a Canadian side to her. She does. Yeah. And she said to me, she actually finds that Canadian media is uniquely bad for its pro-Israel bias in a way that's worse than the Americans. She told me that. And the National Post, by the way, you're right. Primarily conservative. They emerged as a sort of centrist right-wing alternative to the centrist.

liberal Globe and Mail back then. I don't know what the fuck the Globe and Mail is now. Yeah. But they recently had a very fawning interview with Jesse Brown about his his his his struggles. So the national post. The national posted. Oh yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And these same guys though, they'll like like the John Kay's and the you know, they'll make fun of me for covering, I cover neo-Nazis in this country all the time who actually hate Jews and are like actual like viciously anti-Semitic. And then they'll turn around and be like, yeah, you're an anti-Semite, you're, you know, and they'll literally, like, it's like they don't, they can't comprehend that there's forms of anti-Semitism that do exist that are like, it's of the far right. It's the far right that's like really causing so much of this. Yeah, it's a running joke on this podcast that, you know, like if you're the victim of the wrong kind of anti-Semitism, you know, shut up Jew. Right.

Because the only anti-Semitism that matters to the ADL and to Benabrith and to these terribly marginalized fringe voices like John Kay and Warren Kinsella and Jesse Brown is the kind that that is upset about what the self-professed Jewish state is doing in the name of the Jewish people. Yeah. And one thing I'll highlight to you about like that most of the names you just listed there, Like, including the editor-in-chief, Rob Roberts of the National Post, Warren Kinsella, you know, a bunch of these guys. Rob Roberts is the most fucking Canadian name I've ever heard. I know. It's such a stupid name. Like, come on.

You can't think of a second name? Yeah, I mean. Robbie Robertson. Robbie Robertson was also Canadian and that's a much better name. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so these guys, like, they're publicly, there's photographs. Like, I reported on this.

And again, this is the kind of shit that Canada. Land should have been all over. OG Canada land, like all over it. These guys went on paid trips to Israel. And then the organization that paid for them to go or that, you know, sent them there that they disclosed like Brian Lilly, another conservative columnist was there. And he discloses in one of his pieces, I believe, either that or it was Rob Roberts, one of them.

They all wrote op-eds out of this trip, too, and like published them in these papers. And, you know, they said it was paid for by this fund. called the, or foundation called the Exigent Foundation, I believe. And the group, the Exigent Foundation, if you look at the people. The Exigent found, as in the exigent circumstances that justify bombing children? I mean, if you look at who co-founded this, one of the co-founders is a former Canada's former ambassador to Israel, Vivian Berkovici, who it's also, there was a scandal because they found out she worked for Israeli intelligence or an Israeli intelligence agency,

called BlackCube. And if you look at her Twitter and shit, it's like, it's wild. And so like these media people are going on these paid trips by this foundation where they're being brought around to like meet with and hear from IDF soldiers. There's all kinds of shit like that. And then they're coming back and they're doing reporting on the kibbutz that they toured and you know, what they saw there. But it's just like so, it's such an egregious display of journalistic malpractice and like conflict of interest. And this is the kind of shit that Jesse Brown would have been all over. Like he exposed Peter Mansbridge. The guy I was talking about earlier. It was a big figure in Canadian journalism for being doing a paid speech paid for by

the petrol industry. And like that was a huge scandal that changed the way that journalists can accept money from speaking gigs. And now he's like crickets about this kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting, too, because I think that he, from listening to, at this point, countless hours of Jesse Brown speak on this issue in particular, the fact that he is not taking money from, you know, the Israel lobby or from any pro-Israel advocacy group in Canada, for him seems to be his, like, that's enough. He's, I think he's set the, like, that is where the border is for the type of, you know, what is considered bad conduct as a journalist. Do you know who co-produced and co-funded the current what is happening here, six-part podcast series they did on anti-Semitism? If you say Netanyahu, I'm going to lose my mom. No, no, it's the Canadian Jewish news, which traditionally pretty Zionist publication. yeah yeah pretty mainstream traditional sinus publication for this news organization this independent

muckraking news organization to be like we're going to do this special series and we're going to reach out to the establishment jewish community to help us do it yeah and i am just a guy i'm just a journalist this is his whole shtick i don't have a position on this i didn't want to talk about it we'll hear some clips of him saying that or we'll talk about that um and then And then going to, for all I know, I don't know, his parents' synagogue fucking donation list. I mean, that's totally scurrilous on my part. I'm not saying that's true. But at the end of this, at the end of this, of each episode of this podcast, should we play this?

Yeah, let's play. Here it is right here. Any others, we finished making these episodes. But now they need to be heard by many more people. We think that the stories and voices that you heard on this podcast have the power to make people reconsider their words and their actions, to think about how their neighbors are being harmed, and to change the course that we are all currently on. We want what is happening here to reach an audience of younger listeners and not just Jewish ones. We want to take its message to platforms like TikTok and YouTube, where many people are otherwise being served a constant stream of divisive and hateful content. content about Jews.

That's us. Lastly, we want to take this series to universities and colleges across the country for town hall discussions about how to make campuses safe again for Jews. To do any of that, we need financial support. So who do you think he's pitching to? I think he's pitching to, I mean, he just, he, as low key implies, the only people who care about this are Jews. So he's, yeah, yeah, exactly.

So that seems to be his pitch. His pitch is to get more, you know, funding. And, I mean, look, the Jewish community in Canada, I'm sure, you know, even if you were to take the way his framing with a grain of salt, I'm sure is talking about the huge rise in anti-Semitism. There has been a huge rise in anti-Semitism in Canada. And the fact is it may even be worse than it is in the, United States. And we can get into reasons for why that is at some point. I would say it might

always have been worse than the United States, having grown up there. Yeah, possibly. That being said, there seems to be this focus that he has that is sort of obviously changed the way people have viewed his podcast and the way he views the rest of the world. And that's what I think we need to delve into this change in Jesse the way that he maybe at one point was someone who refused to talk about Israel in order to keep his you know from what if you were to listen to what he says is to keep his objectivity his neutrality as a journalist to keep it focused on Canada the and the way he focuses this subject matter in particular post-October seventh as like I'm not someone who's still I'm not someone who talks about the Middle East I don't

like talking about the Middle East here's a thousand reasons why here's a you know an article he put out in like 2014 or a podcast he put out you know in 2023 I've been talking about Israel I've been talking about Israel my entire life I've never had a single conversation that's ever changed anyone's mind yeah it's divisive to what end to what end yeah why would we yeah what do we need more punditry. These are all things that Jesse has said regarding why he won't speak about it. But instead, he kind of backs up to the framing of like, but I do talk about Canada and let me tell you about the anti-Semitism that's going on in Canada. And so that seems to be his entire focus. And focus in a way that throws, it seems, every pro-Palestine journalist under the bus,

every pro-Palestine activist, anyone, every pro-Palestine Jew under the bus. And any Palestinian-Canadian who's experiencing a rise in hatred or who is dealing with the unfathomable stress of the past couple of years. So here's just him going after you. We're going to start with you because you seem to be a particular obsession of his. We had this series of tweets that it's important, I think, to point out the entire context of it is like you were a quote tweeting someone named a robin urbach um she's a columnist for the globe and mail in canada columnist uh for the globe and mail uh op ed section and uh in this tweet

um robin says uh if intention matters for quote globalizing intifata as rachel says does it matter for other speech or behavior if someone wears blackface for halloween but they didn't intend to offend, is it still wrong? And you go on to say, it's moments like these that I genuinely, genuinely wonder if Robin understands anything. Because how the fuck do you see, do you see saying, Globalize the Intifada as having equal possibility for misinterpreted, nonviolent intent as doing blackface? The Globe and Mail op-ed section, folks. And Jesse responded to this with, stop talking over Jews. You wouldn't lecture any other minority about how you understand bigotry against them better than they do. To which I almost

want to say to him, stop over talking, Jews. But I won't. But you won't. You know, I personally love watching someone's response to you, rightfully pointing out that co-opting the, you know, anti-Black racism, or in his case also a lot of times anti-Indigenous racism, like co-opting the experience of that to fit your own particular mold, that's something you should stop doing more so than pointing it out, in my opinion. Like, I almost wanted to be like, yes, stop telling Jews to not co-opt black experience. This exercise of distinguishing Jews from Zionism, this is being imposed upon Jews, much like saying, I'm okay with you being black, but not with you being African.

I don't want to speak for black people, but to me, I see this pattern within Jesse, where he relates everything to anti-black racism, anti-indigenous racism. and almost like his response to the past two years has been I've been doing this work for you people for this long and yet when it happens to us you leave me in the lurch. Yeah, it feels very transactional, you know, like it's not like there's personally when I like do journalism advocating for vulnerable communities, I don't do it because I think that when I deal with. sexism. They're going to turn around and have my back. I do it because I think it matters, you know? Right. Right. And treating, you know, I mean, treating anything like a monolith is always weird, especially treating a group of people that you're like, I had your back, you know, is a strange thing to do out loud. But, you know, he goes on to, you know, continue slandering you. This time not quote tweeting you. But he just wrote, stop demonizing Jews.

He wrote under you saying, nice to see that the Globe and Mail columnist Robin Urbeck is allowed to once again just totally twist my words and falsely smear me as anti-Semitic with zero professional consequences. Take that and immediately demonize you as anti-Semitic again is wild. And I see he has this obsession with you. Can you tell me just a little bit more about that? because it's happened a few times. He's gone after you a bunch.

What is it about you specifically? Yeah. I don't know. And it makes me feel very uncomfy. But, you know, I mean, I think that I, so here's the thing about Jesse Brown. Like, and it's hard for me to, I don't want to say anything I can't substantiate here. Sure. But let's just, I get a vibe from him from things people have said.

over the years that he doesn't default to like the most respect for young women and I think that's sort of a little unconscious bias that maybe he needs to interrogate um which is interesting given that he got his start coming into prominence as the one who broke the Gian Gomeshi sexual assault scandal and in so doing had to um very carefully source that story speaking to a lot of young women and was a real he sort of did an exemplary job carrying that story to prominence which I don't know the first thing about journalism but from what I understand protecting sources building the case rolling it out in the right way is a it's huge it takes it's huge and it takes a lot of it involves a lot of respect for the people

who are putting their asses on the line to expose things that have been hidden. Yeah. And, you know, little things would like leak out. Like I remember a tweet going around years ago where I think one of his former female employees said something about the pay, not being like her feeling. I don't want to get it wrong, but there was just some kind of an issue with her pay relative to her colleagues or something along those lines. And then people were like, oh, maybe this guy needs to work on this, this.

relationship with young women. So I don't know if maybe that's part of it. It's just like he has this default thing. But I also think that maybe it's the fact that like myself and very few others in Canada have the platform in media to be able to counter dominant pro-Israel narratives that otherwise tend to proliferate in coverage of the genocide. Like, I call it a genocide. I, you know, try to listen to Palestinians.

And I talk about, you know, when all of our politicians are saying, we can't believe the foreign affairs minister said Israel would bomb a hospital. They'd never do that. You know, like, oh, maybe we can acknowledge reality here, you know? And so I think that's sort of, it's a two-prong thing where on the one hand, I think he sees me as an evil enemy worthy of taking down because of the fact that I, you know, represent the sort of, I guess, pro-Palestine or even just empathetic for Palestinian journalism that he thinks is so dangerous and, you know, have the platform to be able to do that in a way

that, you know, could make a difference. And I'm also a young woman. Well, and I wonder also if putting the woman's side, the woman part aside for a second, the young part, there was a time when he was the intrepid up-and-comer, who saw that the media landscape was calcified and was out of touch and was not doing its job to the best of its ability. And he marshaled a then relatively young format, the podcast, to create a new media brand that had power and reach and capacities and energy that the big boys couldn't match. And they resented him. And they talked down to him and they dismissed him and whatever.

And they did really good work. And it found an audience on its merits. Well, 10 years go by and he's not so young anymore. And there are new platforms and there are new approaches to reaching an audience. And there are new urgent matters that are on people's minds. And there are people with the energy and the wherewithal and the know-how to marshal today's platforms to do so. I'm just speculating. I don't know.

That's actually a really interesting thesis. If I was him, I might resent you for that. Yeah. Yeah. Because it is true that like I've been one of the, there's really only like a couple of us who have really embraced content creation tools as a way of doing journalism. And like that's something that I've had a lot of success with. And, you know, that definitely could be part of it. He brings it up, or at least it has been brought up before to describe you and to

denigrate you and you as a journalist specifically. There was an incident in which you were fired essentially from a fact-checking gig. I named the media company. C-T-V. C-T-B, yeah. Which I assume stands for Canada TV. yeah does it because I you know what it's because there's also CPAC which is not like your CPAC you guys have a scary CPAC but ours is like a really boring parliament channel it's our C-SPAN

oh okay anyway this is not interesting or important it's just it's just sometimes it's cable and sometimes it's Canada and I always can't I can never remember which is which and I worked for CTV like actually as a producer for a long time so but yeah well this is why I'm thinking it's the Canadian television. That would make sense. Yeah. I'm sure it is. So CTV was offering you essentially a segment that was a fact-checking segment.

During a federal election. During a federal election. Yeah. And, you know, this is the summary of that. But essentially because of your role as someone who's been, you know, calling out, calling out politicians, calling out, I mean, you're a journalist. This is what you do. Yeah.

You were viciously attacked online. Were some of the people attacking you and bombarding ZTV with complaints about you, were some of them doing it because of your pro-Palestine stance? Or was it mostly about sort of your coverage of the right wing? It was mostly the coverage of the right wing. So like one thing, a little bit of super quick background about me is like a lot of the reporting I've done is on this rising white nationalist movement in Canada. And these guys are, you want to talk about obsession.

these guys literally one of them printed my face on a pillow and posted a video of his dog fucking it and he's like one of the leaders of like this like group and you know it's yeah so these guys are like obsessed it's it's so much work and you know what's the craziest part is like I remember I keep an eye on all their chat rooms and I remember at one point he was like I just woke up from a nap and look and his dog's ball sack was on the pillow of my face and I was like that means it's just on your couch you're sleeping on that like that means my face just on your couch like at all times like that's so weird my favorite pillow is covered in dog come exactly like it's crazy let's not shame the dog okay the pimp is the one the one that put that

dog on the pillow and and made it do things for his own clout yeah it's the one who trained it to fuck the pillow yeah but anyway so you get the picture these guys are obsessed freaks and like like the leader of this white nationalist network that are starting active clubs They're basically, they've been compared to Patriot Front in the States. Right. Like their leader put at one point in his Twitter bio that he's my biological father. Okay. So like, you get it.

You get it. So that is where a lot of the hate for me comes from is these guys are constantly attacking me. And then their fans attack me because they do live streams and stuff. And it's a really weird little community. But also I've reported on the conservative politicians who have kind of wink, wink, nudge, some of the stuff these guys believe in. They've ended up in the periphery of these guys. And anyway, so it was the person who really led the charge when CTV announced that I was going to do this little fact-checking segment was the former, like until a week before he posted this, he was actually the main comms guy, but he was still working for the leader of Canada's official opposition, the conservative party of Canada up here, Poliaf.

So it was his guy who was his main communications guy until a week before. And then they all just like, that was like the first big post calling this out. And then they all swarmed all my usual haters like the Jonathan Kay's. I'm sure he posted. I don't remember exactly. But he's always posting about me. It's very weird. And like, yeah, a lot of these guys.

So they all swarmed and CTV called me and I recorded the call and published it because like I, like I leaked it to a news outlet. Because they literally said like, you know, I was saying, you know this is bad faith criticism. They were like, yeah. And they said, but we just don't have the bandwidth to deal with it. So we're just going to call down this segment. And I was like, this is really bad for journalism. Like, how many people are you doing this too who don't have the platform to leak it and have public outrage and response? So, yeah, that was a big thing.

And there was this was covered on Canada land in an episode not hosted by Jesse, but was obviously edited by Jesse, being that it is his network. And I noticed that a big part of the conversation between the two of both the hosts and the guests was the fact, like, are you a journalist or you're more of an influencer? And this is something that you get a lot. Oh, more of an influencer, which seems to be a very, you know, from what I can tell, a very Jesse Pilled type of. Jesse Pilled. I like that. It's a Jesse Pilt type of criticism. When I say that there were somewhat legitimate concerns about Gilmore. She's someone who occupies a very unique space in the media landscape.

She's been what we would call more of a traditional journalist in the past, doing some parliamentary reporting. She's morphed into more of a social media brand. You obviously are a journalist. You, I mean, shit, you went to J-school. Yeah. I mean, to me, I'm like, you know, I know people call themselves journalists because they tweet a lot, you know. So, you know, there is a difference.

Yeah. So, you know, we had that situation. There was also an episode with Jesse hosting in which he speaks about the fact that Dahlia Kurtz was able to get a former guest of this podcast, Eve Engler, arrested for, you know, what she was claiming to be, like, harassment and whatnot. Yeah. Which was, in fact, tweeting about her. Which was, in fact, tweeting about her and just, you know, like, the worst thing you could say about what he was doing was calling her names. Yeah. And, of course, you know, the claim there was like, well, in so doing, it led to a pile on of people who were then, you know, like, harassing her.

And I'm like, you know, it's hard to hold that view at the same time that you hold the view of, like, if enough people harass my company, then I should be able to be fired for being a journalist. Like, you can't, ridiculous to hold those two together. but they just kind of apropos of nothing mentioned you as being someone who is defending Eve Engler and the way that Jesse presented it was essentially you are anti-Semitic for doing so because of your past I guess advocacy for people who have dealt with harassment online and oh what the difference is with Dahlia is she's Jewish. Eve Engler, who relentlessly attacked Dahlia Kurtz, Rachel Gilmour has spoken up and said

that him being charged seems like an attack on his free speech. She took the side of the abuser in this one case where the woman being abused is a Jew. Duly noted. I was blown away that this guy actually was saying that about you to immediately go into, oh, well, clearly she's anti-Semitic. to me, this is, you know, part and parcel of what I see is a pattern with him when it comes to anyone who is doing the kind of media criticism that he used to do.

Yeah. And we need to get into a lot of this stuff because there's just so much, guys. Just to give you the timeline. So after October 7th, I think one of the. more egregious things that he did was he sort of went out of his way to smear a journalist at the Toronto Star. Shri. Yeah.

Shri for Radcar. Yes. For a tweet, which ultimately culminated in her losing her position as like an internal ombudsman person or umbuds person for discrimination and bias, which is interesting regarding, I mean, just given the tweets, here I'm just going to show what went down. So this is Shri's tweet from November 19, 2023. What happened on October 7th in Israel was a profound tragedy. None of us armchair experts are eyewitnesses to who did what. Leave it to independent investigators. And though the issue didn't begin then, we have seen multiple October 7th since.

Surely our focus should be on hashtag ceasefire now. Ah, yes, the classic age-old independent investigator trope. That's right. That's right. You know, back in medieval times, they used to require Jews to two independent investigations. Yeah, and so this tweet, which she later deleted, she said, I deleted a tweet because the way it has been twisted is so shocking. here I am impatient with the dialogue I'm seeing on the show I'm seeing on the left about whether Hamas did this or that I'm saying we don't know focus on ceasefire appears some see it as terrorism denial there's any chance that people I care about read that awful meaning into it I don't want it out there despite the fact that these tweets were deleted or this tweet was deleted Jesse's article going after her is wild because it doesn't just go after her.

It goes after multiple journalists at the Toronto Star. At one point, Shri is also considered an anti-Semite for a retweet. The retweet was not in and of itself anti-Semitic, but the account itself had been tweeted other things that he considered anti-Semitic. He talks about two journalists, Joshua Chong and Ben Cohen, who used quotes attributed to an IG account called Toronto for Palestine, also like being blamed for something that they had previously written. Like there's a lot of guilt by association that's going on in this article.

And you see the entire Toronto Star is essentially being dragged into this conversation. Like, is this newspaper anti-Semitic? I'm not someone who reads the Toronto Star. But is that newspaper anti-Semitic? You tell me. I don't think so. I think if anything, again, like, you know, I was asked to write a column for them once. And it was actually about Taylor Lorenz launching her independent media endeavor.

And they wanted me to write about that shift. And one of the things I mentioned is that there's been a loss of trust in mainstream media post. you know, October 7th because of how we have been reporting on, or I guess you at that point, not me, because I was indefining by them. But anyway, how they've been reporting on Israel Palestine. And the Toronto Star ended up not running the column. And they said it was just a scheduling issue because they were coming up on October 7th. They had a ton of October 7th coverage planned.

And, you know, they didn't say that they killed it. But because of what I was saying about Israel, Palestine, in it. but I will say that initially the editor was on side with me and like helping me add in examples of that and then started cutting them all of a sudden and started like you must be getting used to these these emails and phone calls I listened to the audio of the phone call from CTV firing you and just these sort of you know roundabout hey Rachel you know it's great work on the thing but I just and I hate to do this you must be you must know you must be able to smell it a mile away at this point oh yeah that's why I recorded the

CTV one. I was like, it's going to happen here. Not a good. I'm ready this time. Someone else is to hear this. I mean, I will say, the Toronto Star is a pretty standard Canadian paper with maybe a bit more of a liberal bent historically. It is seen more liberal.

Yeah. And they have at least once since October 7th asked my dad to write an op-ed about Israel-Palestine. You know, he's a pretty prominent Canadian Jew. And it's always controversial when they do. Their readers don't, you know, they don't have a readership

that's like chomping at the bit to hear from anti-Zionist Jews. Yeah. But they have been willing to. So that's, that's as much as you can say about it. I mean, so what, so. I'm sure they've had, they've had a lot of other shit that I would totally object to.

Yeah. For what I'm hearing, you know, this sounds just, um, almost, you know, it's one for one for how it is in the United States with these, you know, uh, this weird sort of inverted reality in which, um, you know, liberal Zionists claim, you know, the media has an anti-Israel bent. Like that is, hearing it all my life. Yeah. And it is, it is so, it is so strange to see it coming from this guy, Jesse Brown, who is, you know, someone who I think would have called this out had it been any other issue.

And I think that is, you know, a part of what makes him mad about this, is that it's not any other issue. It's one in which he is, you know, I guess, deeply biased, unfortunately, for him and for his listeners. He's deeply biased, but let me say this, and I think this will become a running theme. He's deeply biased, and I think he knows he has a certain amount of prejudice, but he's completely, he's ignorant enough about the details of the actual issue to not know... where his prejudice falls short of reality. He's about 25 years, at least in the past, in terms of his a passable progressive analysis of the thing, two-state solution, peace, coexistence.

And he, on the one hand, professes his like, look, I don't, I'm just calling balls and strikes. Right. And I don't know much about this, and I never wanted to talk about it. but now I have to talk about it. But if you never wanted to talk about it and you never bothered to find out about it,

then it would be incumbent upon you to interrogate, okay, well, then what would my bias actually be? Well, my bias growing up in an upper middle class Toronto Jewish environment, probably Jewish day school, I'm guessing, I don't know. But there was a whole class of these upper crust Toronto Jews that I went to McGill with, which as a sort of middle class,

Vancouver Jew, I deeply resented them for intersectional reasons. The old middle class versus upper middle class class war. Exactly. We've all been there. Exactly. Son of a Vancouver General Practitioner versus son of two

Toronto pediatricians. Dentist, be orthodontist. On paper view. The Jewish intra-class war has begun. So, but what I'm saying is to interrogate, okay, given that I grew up in that environment, and given that I've stayed, I've kept my 10-foot Torah pointer out to keep me away from this issue because I'm uncomfortable with it and I don't want to offend people.

Well, now when this big cataclysmic event has had. happened, that as he says at the top of his new podcast series, changed his world, his world fell apart. That's the first line of the anti-Semitism series. On October 7th, two years ago, my world came apart. Two years ago, my world began to come apart. I lost friends. I lost colleagues. I almost lost my business. Sometimes it felt like I was losing my mind. Well, wouldn't it be incumbent on you then if you were a serious journalist to be like, okay, hold on. Let me find out how much I don't know. Let me ask a whole bunch of people, what am I missing? And try to find that out, even as I go and investigate the stories that

call to me, as opposed to, let me start from my unexamined bias. And based on that, in this moment of upset, threat, and heightened activation, just go out and create now a fixed narrow focus on one aspect of a local issue that I'm then going to hyper focus on. And then I'm going to say to anyone who criticizes me for that, what's your problem? Do you have a double standard? And also, how can he divorce the, you know, he keeps saying, I'm not going to talk about Israel. I'm not going to talk about the Middle East. But the whole podcast is predicated on the concept that the protests against what's happening

there are anti-Semitic. So how can you not talk about the conflict and about the genocide and about the things that Israel is claiming to do in the name of Judaism, which is so fucked. Like, I just don't understand how you can divorce that context here. Well, and then he wants to say, Israel can say it's doing it in the name of Judaism, but that doesn't make us responsible. Okay? But then he'll say, well, 94% of Jews are Zionists.

So these as a Jews are not representing anybody. Okay, well, if that's true, could you start to think critically about why people might be fucking fed up of trying to thread this fucking needle? Could you pick up perfect victims by Muhammad al-Kurd and read two pages of it and try to get some insight into what it's like for other people dealing with a people who have an ethno state on the other side of the world that they've never been to, that they have no lineage to except maybe thousands of years ago? And yet they claim that their feelings around it are the goalposts and the playing field markers for what's allowable speech. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, his views specifically on anti-Zionists, anti-Zionist Jews specifically are, they're pretty interesting to me and probably to Daniel as well. as it seems to be beyond it just being a, you know, almost like a statistically zero percent of the Canadian Jewish population.

Beyond that, he also seems to sort of believe that the framing of any Jew as themselves being an anti-Zionist Jew is somehow comes with the accusation that every other Jew is bad. And this is something I see a lot with especially liberal Zionists who, you know, they wouldn't maybe call themselves a liberal Zionist. And I don't believe he's ever referred to himself as a Zionist. But the existence of anti-Zionist Jews seems to be offensive to them because they go, as opposed to what? What does that make me? And it's like, well, you tell us, Jesse. Right. And what he doesn't see is that his Zionism lives in his emotional system, more than his intellect. It's true that he doesn't know so much about it. But he knows how it feels when Israel is talked about. He's identified with the group that has that as its plan B, its backup in case Canada isn't safe. Yeah. And he's threatened by, he's threatened by factual talk about. about what Israel does and the existence of human beings

who want to speak about their experience of what Israel has done to them. And the ways that those people are cared about and have Canadians who stand in solidarity with them who aren't particularly patient anymore with all of the associations you have and your ignorant, your emotions that are mired in a willful, continued, persistently.

Distant ignorance about the topic. Here's a little video from his national post interview talking about, specifically about David Mezzlin, who's an anti-Zionist Jew in Canada, who he interviewed for his podcast. Episode three of what is happening here. Right, which was, of course, named as a Jew, always appreciated. But there was quotes around it, so he was saying, it's not me saying it. So here is Jesse. Palestine.

I don't know. any Jews who say that they're against Palestine. I'm sure there are some. First of all, right off the bat. This idea that, like, you know, I've never heard a Jew say they're against Palestine. It's like, is that required for you to believe someone is against it? What about if they say, yeah, go ahead, keep bombing them? What if they say, I, what if they say release the hostages every time someone shows them

a picture of a dead Palestinian child. And what if Palestinians say, wow, this person's views are identical or completely contiguous with the views and the policies that have destroyed my entire family? Are you allowed then to talk over them? Are you given an exemption, an exemption from your own stop talking over people who have the right to name the bigotries that materially affect them? Yeah. Stop talking over me.

literally that's what it is that is what it is so he continues but that has been claimed by a very specific and very small minority of Jews there's no one Jewish opinion everyone is entitled to take whatever

stand they want and I don't debate he's really entered his Orson- Wells phase hasn't he? I know he's very he's very coded as wah ha the French Champate has always

been celebrated for its excellence there's a California should take. But there are such things as consensus within communities. And we have data on where the Canadian Jewish community stands. There's a lot of variation between whether people call themselves a Zionist or simply say that that Israel is important to them and they feel connected to Israel or just that they think Israel should exist. But you add all of those people up and you've got about 94% of China. By the way, got to add all those up. Very important to add all those up. You add them up. You get 110%. Yeah. Like like

Putting the label of anti-Zionist Jews, self-identified anti-Zionist Jew, against literally the entire Jewish community who has even said, well, yeah, in some ways relate to Israel or hold it as important. That is not, that, you can't do that. That is not the same thing as, oh, 94% of Jews in Canada want Israel to continue the war. or do not want a ceasefire. It's like, he's trying to have it both ways. Yes.

Because if 94% of Jews, if 100% of Jews. Yeah, it could be all. Supported the genocide of Palestinians and never said they support the genitals, never used those words. Yes. But if they supported policies or didn't want to know about policies or would just rather not be bothered with policies, in effect, covertly, tacitly supporting the policies that lead to the extermination of Palestinians, if 100% of Jews did it,

would you then say, well, you know, Jews are a democracy. We're living in a democracy where if a majority of Jews feel a certain way, you can't say shit about it because they're Jews. Right. Yeah. It's so weird as if if 100% of Jews were like, yes, I am, yes, kill them all. All of a sudden it's like, well, well, I guess it's not evil then? Like, that's, I fail to see how that's anybody else's problem but ours.

and it's like that's our internal that's our independent investigation Matt we do independent association into how we feel and it's independent of what how the fuck you feel about it yeah exactly that is you know the independent investigation trope but yeah like we've made this point before but the idea that like 100% of Jews you know even if it was 100% what is what is that what does that change but in this specifically um you know the idea of, I mean, what he's doing essentially is trying to let it be known that these are marginal voices. My voice, Daniel's

voice, any Jew of conscience, any Jew who self claims themselves is to be an anti-Zionist, is basically statistically a non-factor. But the rest of us, the overwhelming majority, are not

responsible for what Israel does. Right, right. We're allowed to just kind of support it, cheer it sweep it under the rug ignore it gaslight about it we're allowed to do that right don't you associate us with it right yeah what are you doing we're not Israel we within our support for the genocide I'm sure we have some very real criticisms of the Israeli government I've criticized the Israeli government yeah it's classic it is classic but what's worse is the is where he goes with it as you know guys I didn't listen to this Canada land or whatnot before

I started doing research for this podcast, but this was your king? This, this man, with what he's saying here, he's essentially, like, I was going to ask you guys, and I'll ask after I play it, if this is the case here. Who think Israel should exist and feel connections to it, inclusive of Zionists. Most Jews call themselves Zionists. David Mislin is one of the 3% who does not, who's an anti-Zionist, which means he does not think Israel should exist. and it means some other things as well. That's fine.

He can think that. What I object to is that these Jews, A, are wildly overrepresented in a way of balancing out media coverage to say, well, we have a Jew here. And this Jew also has these opinions that Israel doesn't have a right to exist. This is a wide distortion of what the community feels. This is your king? This is his critique that anti-Zionis? Jewish are overrepresented in the Canadian media. Is that true?

Is there a lot of coverage to anti-Zionist Jews? No. No. And this is the thing that he keeps chewing. Like, I mainlined his podcast over the weekend and I'm still fucking spinning from it. And like, you know, he does this constantly. He'll just assert something with no evidence to back it up. Like, you know, he talks about how all these, uh,

for example, have left all of these professions, including media, and he doesn't back it up with numbers, with research. And it's the kind of shit that Jesse Brown would have called out current day Jesse Brown for, you know, 10 years ago or whatever. It's pathetic. That's what I'm seeing in that is like this seems like something that needs to be, that would have been called up by, you know, a different version of himself. The idea that he is going to talk about the Because this is something we get a lot too in the United States and people getting mad at the existence of anti-Zionist Jews because if you literally platform one of them on something, immediately it is seen as like, you know, this is an aberration. This person represents it's basically a non-existent viewpoint within the Jewish community. This person's not Jewish or not Jewish enough or, you know, whatever, whatever. but a constant attempt to discredit anti-Zionist Jews and make them not a part of the narrative.

The narrative being all Jews essentially love Israel to one extent or the other, and any disagreements with the government is an internal conversation. And then they simultaneously are just like, you know, we're just walking down the street and someone says, you know, hey, do you support Israel just because I'm Jewish? And I shouldn't have to answer that question. It's like, well, you just said it. How do you know if I'm one of the 98%?

Right. I could be one of the 2%. I mean, fucking Jesse Brown, like, if what you're saying is true, I'm sorry. This maybe is a shitty thing to say. And you're so concerned about the incidents, the rising incidents of hatred, irrational, unprovoked hatred against Jews. You should be fucking glad we're overrepresented. We're not overrepresented. Yeah, you should wish we were.

wish we were. Because to hear Palestinians tell it, Palestinians, you want to get anecdotal? I'll get anecdotal. I can't tell you how many Palestinians and Arab people and also just unaffiliated people have said to me, it's your podcast that's keeping me on an even keel, that's keeping me from tipping to the dark side of starting to wonder about your broader community. And I completely understand it. I wouldn't condone it if they fell into that. I would argue with them, whatever. But I would also, I have a big enough view to see that given the enormous influence, impact, and power of this small little, you could also say Israel, it's the same fucking argument as like Israel is there's such a tiny little country the size of New Jersey. Therefore, what it's doing to millions of people

doesn't matter. It's disproportionate you. It's a tiny, it's a tiny genocide, the size of New Jersey. It's just little. You know, you can't be mad at it. You can't be mad. It's small. It's just a baby. I'm just a baby. There are less small beans in the world. This is a very small beam. So, like, you can't call the baby a baby killer. I'm a baby myself. But Daniel, what you just highlighted is like exactly the problem with his podcast

because you just pointed out that people are coming up to you, saying that, you know, what's saving me from going to the dark side or feeling this way about the Jewish community is like having these even. keel like voices just like speaking honestly about how they feel and you know it's just how can you do a whole podcast about the rise of anti-semitism and not acknowledge that role in it the fact the role of people like jesse brown who are saying every single jew supports the actions of the state well i mean he's not saying the actions but he's basically like one way or another you know he's labeling the existence which means that these actions will continue because that's what the state does while it's

existing. And the other thing is the people who say that to me, Rachel, are not saying, wow, your podcast is really disabusing me of the notion that most Jews feel differently than you. No, they fully well know that we're a minority. They fully well know that. But even the existence of that minority is enough to bust up a stereotype and it implants in their brain. Oh, it's not actually, it's not natural. It's not inherent. It's not innate to this. group, there's actually strong exceptions who are willing to take some hits, take some losses, not just losing, you know, subscribers to your Canada Land podcast, but, you know, people have lost jobs, they've lost family.

And the courage that, I mean, I'm not putting myself in this category, but lots of anti-Zionist Jews have displayed, because I've had very little to lose, coming from an anti-Zionist family myself, has given people, has woken people up out of it. of a kind of understandable human tendency to be like, oh, these fucking people. And also, I'm so sick of hearing about these people's feelings because our feelings are overrepresented in the media. Our fears are overrepresented in the media. For years, our fears that another Holocaust will happen has been overrepresented in the media and that Israel is some kind of rational response to that understandable fear. Anyway, I'm ranting. I think, I think, yeah. But

it's an important aspect because like I don't know when I was in my undergrad and I first started learning about Israel Palestine and about you know Israel's apartheid and like how you know it's control it was controlling and continues to like the vast majority of water for example that goes to Palestinians and you know a lot of them don't have sufficient access to water as a result so like a checkpoints all these things you guys know the whole deal but um I intentionally took a class on the history of Jewish persecution in the world like going back thousands of years because I wanted to understand what fuels that kind of insecurity that then creates this sort of overcompensation. And I think that these are the kinds of questions that if

Jesse wanted to be taken seriously in his interrogation of, you know, the concept of anti-Semitism and what may be fueling its rise, he would be having an honest conversation about how these things have fueled certain notions that, you know, and feelings of insecurity that may not be entirely rational, but that come from initially, perhaps, a fairly a very rational place you know and it's leading to this sort of overcompensation so all they to say it's just i don't know it's really disappointing i'm just like a broken record on that but it's yeah like there there is a real um there are important conversations that and and uh realities that can't in historical context that can't be removed but that um also doesn't excuse the behavior

You know what I mean? Well, there's more disappointment to come right after these messages from, we'll find out. If it's ice, don't join. We'll be right back. And we're back. It's bad as Barra, World's Most Moral Podcast. And we're here with. Rachel Gilmore once again oh that's my baby monitor it is making noise Rachel how you

doing I'm great how you guys do someone should invent a baby mom monitor yeah which keeps tabs on your baby mom it's called my called my wife yes who I was just saying I have a huge crush on everyone like most like most guests on this show every guest loves my wife Francesca Durantini I get it she's harder than me she's better at all the things that I do you guys I just realized something terrible. I got to say this. Given my What's the Spin, I really don't want us to name this episode a very Jesse, or a Jesse Brown Christmas. But I'm worried that we'll have to. We kind of have to. I'm worried that we'll have to and that's terrible. I really feel bad about that. And we'll have to do a little... Canada land land. I have to do a little graphic with a little bald

head with the thing and a striped shirt. All right. Okay. So we're talking about Canada land. We're talking about Jesse Brown. Good grief. Maybe that's a better, more oblique title. Just, you know, this, a lot of the, you know, the last few years, I think, for a lot of people has been hard to watch in terms of, a lot of it was his silence, his not talking about this one. one issue, which is something we've covered a lot on this podcast, the, you know, political influencers of all stripes, whether they be journalists or, you know, TikTokers or whatever. Jews, non-Jews.

Jews, non-Jews, but it's very noticeably not talking about an issue raised a lot of people's hackles, you know. It did for even musicians, Tom York of Radiohead, being suspiciously quiet about something that people thought, well, you'd been political in the past. Can I make a confession? Please. The other night while I was making Lottkas? Don't you say it.

Go ahead. Which song? I listened to a moon-shaped pool, the whole album. It's so good. It's such a good album. It's so good. Listen, I, all right, Peter, a real one. That's the kind of band that went out with a whimper, not a bang, and that's a good thing,

because they're whimpering, it's sort of whimpering. You know, the whimper is kind of their thing, so it all kind of worked out. Anyways, this is, his silence was incredibly noticeable, his silence on the podcast. Now, on the social media sphere, he was actively trying to de-platform or sort of, you know, what he was doing was smearing. He was doing a lot of smearing. He was doing a lot of calling people anti-Semitic. But it wasn't until October 7, 2024, that he, in breaking his silence in some fashion, did the Israel episode of Canada land with his guest, the Israeli ambassador to Canada.

Just obviously, like if you're going to finally break your silence and talk about it and finally sit down to talk to somebody about this issue and have a reasonable conversation, a challenging conversation, one that's really going to really push the limits of your own understanding. Clearly, what you do is you drive to Ottawa on his turf and sit down with the Israeli ambassador to Canada whose entire job is to come here and sell Israel to Canadians to keep Canadian Jews in the pocket ideologically

and to feign as if you're listening to their feedback which he goes on to say in the interview. He can't interview another Jew about this. I mean, listen, listen, it is anti-Semitic for you to not like let him talk to the Canada special envoy to propaganda of Israel. So this is this is this interview. I'm going to play a little, a few clips from it, but this is his first question. I just want to, this is the first question.

He asked Ido Moed, the Israeli ambassador to Canada. Here it is. Hello. Let's talk about the protests here in Canada. ostensibly these began as anti-war protests ceasefire protests peace protests what we hear now hold on hold on hold on hold on he loves to frame everything as anti-war pro peace this is the only terms he seems to understand yes it's just not honest it's just not honest yeah if he was honest if he knew a thing or he wanted to know a thing he'd say initially these were

protests against massive atrocities, crimes against humanity, and a one-sided massacre, a disproportionate response to a cataclysmic event that came on the heels of a 20-year siege and an 80-year occupation. I mean, it's just anti-war. It just started innocently enough as some vague pro-peace, pro-justice. Everyone can get with that, right? Right. He frames it in terms where he's like, I'd have no problem with that.

but that's not what it was and you would have a problem with it prima facie from the fucking start yes and that's the to me that's the entire thing is this you know it initially began with you know antio you did have a problem there has been this entire sort of rewriting of history that's happened since october 7th 2023 in which um everyone now essentially backdates their uh you know being in favor of of a ceasefire where they go like, of course I love a ceasefire. People will say that as if that was what they were saying or in any way telegraphing through their media, you know, empires. You want to talk about consensus? In 2023, yeah. There was a consensus for at least the first five months, four months, three months, I don't know how long.

Oh, at least. But certainly in October. Yeah. That Israel's got to do what Israel's got to do. And now is not the time to dictate to the victims of this. massacre, the worst since the Holocaust, how they work out their rage. You know, just, you know, let them cook children alive. Let them, uh, you know, Jesse Brown's going to clip some of this shit and it's going to be on Twitter and he's going to be like, see, I told you Rachel Gilmore was anti-Semitic.

Do you see she's nodding her head lightly? You're going to get in trouble for what we say. And for that, I apologize. It's okay. Pick on someone your own ethnicity. You know, I'm not supposed to talk over Jews. So if you guys want to make jokes like that, I'm just trying to check myself. Are you kidding me?

We invited you on this podcast to talk over Jews. I love that. No, please. What do I do? Please have that. We're looking for a non-Jude Adomas. Just be like, Jesse, you told me not to talk over Jews. So I just let them say the anti-Semitism.

I'm putting that in my back pocket. I was respecting their agency. Yeah. Yeah, look, I was at a protest on October 8 that wasn't in Toronto. It was in Brooklyn, but one of the things we didn't sing was give peace a chance. Yeah, yeah, 100%. It's just like the framing also, once again, is just like calling a genocidal war and like, what are we, you know, what are we doing here? But he continues on with this question.

Just about every demonstration or March are calls for Palestine to be Arab from water to water. or calls for Jews to go back to Europe or chance that Israel will soon be gone. So this has become, to a wide degree, an eliminationist movement. Okay. So there's a lot there. But the first question to ask the Israeli ambassador is, damn, these protests are kind of anti-Semitic, huh? Is wild to me. That's your first question.

That's what you're going to start with. Calling protests eliminationists. And this seems to be a pattern with him. He's mostly, you know, getting a lot of the shit that he's getting from people is the fact that he's been framing protesters as anti-Semitic this entire time. Not just like, oh, at the beginning it was fine. From the beginning, he was saying this. He's even mentioned, you know, starting October 8th, people were being anti-Semitic. So it is wild.

watch him say that. From water to water, Palestine will be Arab. Something he mentions multiple times. Constantly, as if that's the most commonly heard chant. Yeah, here it is. Here's just a quick mash of. Europe or from water to water Palestine is Arab. There's just

calls for Palestine to be Arab from water to water. From water to water, Palestine is Arab. This is something he has mentioned multiple times on several different podcasts. As if at the majority of these English-speaking protests.

People are chanting the most clunky, awkward, non-rhyming chant in history. That is a literal translation of a chant in Arabic, which does rhyme in Arabic. Yes, yes. I don't know how to say it or pronounce it, so I won't even try. Yeah, I mean, I... But that is not what is heard at these protests by and large. Whatever else he's talking about, what he tends to do is take isolated incidents of whack jobs and nuts and maybe some really extremist racists who piggyback onto these, of course a massive protest is going to draw all kinds

of people. And people have been recorded saying some very objectionable things. The anti-Semitism series that you listen to in full, Rachel, I listen to in part, starts with some very compelling, kind of shocking, upsetting, disturbing audio clips of people at Canadian pro-Palestine protests, if it's not manufactured, if it's not doctored. I have no reason to think it is. Saying some pretty hateful shit about Jews. Yeah. If I was there, I'd be like, yo, dude, what's up fed?

You know? So that stuff has been said, but he's painting it as if by and large, this movement is eliminationist, right? And then this easy, stupid, lazy conflation of Palestine will be free with Palestine will be free of Jews. with all Jews go back to Europe. Yeah, some racists say that. Maybe some Palestinians say that.

I'd understand it if they did. I don't think it's a super, I don't think it's a super slogan. I'd argue with them pretty vociferously. I think it's dumb politically to imagine any future where there are no Jews there. It's also a historical. Jews have been there forever. Right. Just not in a supremacist sense.

But the painting of this picture that that's what these protests are is so dishonest. And he puts this, as you say, Matt, to the Israeli ambassador to Canada, is if that's the most pressing thing. I wonder what the Israeli ambassador to Canada is going to say about this. Yeah. And what's, I think what's wild about it is that, like, he spends, like, the first couple of questions in the interview, he basically is asking him about the PR effort failing in Israel, or the Israel's PR effort in Canada's failing.

And, you know, starts listing, you know, the percentages of Canadians who, have negative views of Israel and of course it is obviously a weird thing to talk about first and foremost the fact that their PR their PR effort is none of your goddamn business like like if anything you want their PR effort to fail all PR efforts should fail you're like sitting down with the president of ESO which is the Canadian version of Exxon yeah being like hmm so I want to ask you some hard quitting questions how do you feel about the fact that your latest ad campaign went over like a lead balloon. Do you want to reconsider your comms approach?

I mean, and I'd only be interested in that conversation if the conversation continued in the direction of like, here is where your PR doesn't meet reality. But instead, he does something in this interview that I actually think is quite interesting and says a lot about kind of where he is and what his view. are. I'm just going to play the interview portion for you because I just, I think it's fascinating. Between Israel and the Israeli government. Nobody accuses those Israelis of being anti-Zionists. They are Zionists against Netanyahu. How long before you see a similar movement around the world? I can't imagine Jews around the world turning their backs on Israel.

this is where our families live it would be like saying that your mother doesn't shouldn't live in her home but support for the Nathan Yeh Depends how my mom got to that home Jesse And also I'm like I'm sorry but this

He does this thing a lot where he's just like I can't imagine that Jews would ever turn on Israel So please don't worry about that ambassador Like So don't like part of me is interested in why he's framing it in this way where he's like it would be like

someone shooting their own they're shooting their own dick off we never do that we've got your back forever yeah but could you make it a little less hard for us to have your back forever unconditionally yes and this is where he goes with it and it's a good portion of the interview is about the fact that Israel is making Jews look bad, which is a point we've made a lot on this podcast and is not, it's not untrue. Fucking Sheila Broflovsky made this point with more conviction and furor. Sure, sure. Wrong word, but, yeah.

I was going to say. Furor. But he does, he does make that point for a good portion of this interview. And I think to him and to maybe a lot of like, uh, more liberal Zionists. this is a tough interview because he's asking him about this but I have some other thoughts let's finish the rest of this government among Jews around the world and among Jews in Canada is demonstrably declining I'm sure the time will come when people will voice the disagreement with the government and say

and some among the Jewish community will say he should go and some will say he should stay you're saying this is an internal conversation for us to have in private it's not our internal private conversations are being dragged out into the open our identities are being dragged out the public square. I think there's a time when Jews in the diaspora did not feel entitled to be as critical about Israeli policy. But when Israeli policy

meeting us at our doorsteps, I think that there's a right to have this conversation out in the open. And I think that to demand solidarity until we get through this, well, I don't know when this ends. All right, pause. Oh, yeah. That's just a big fucking softball. I mean, right over the plate,

the Israeli ambassador, all he has to say is I don't demand solidarity? I don't demand everyone to agree. You can voice your opinion. I'm here. I'm, you know, our lines are open. Yeah. Yeah.

And that's essentially what he does. What's interesting about it to me is, like, I think it's revealing about a lot of also where he's coming from. And it's where a lot of people have come through. A lot of people in the Jewish community have come from, which is like, you know, this has been an internal conversation that we've had. hate having it dragged out into the open it is one of those things where i mean that was a big reason i wouldn't talk about it for a long time because of the fact that i thought it invited more scrutiny um than uh than i thought was like that i'd be able to handle you know i i i had um i was worried

that i was going to be talking to people who were anti-semitic i was going to be agreeing with people who were antisemitic and i was like this is an internal issue my problem is talking to the Israeli ambassador about this, basically going like, so when can we start talking about it? And it's like, Jesse, start talking about it. In fact, your focus on anti-Semitism to me rings completely hollow when you have on the Israeli ambassador and you are admitting to the fact that, yes, it is true, Israel is creating conditions that are where anti-Semitism is flourishing in Canada and flourishing all over. If you care about anti-Semitism and you cared about it from the start, you'd figure your number one target of we must stop spreading

anti-Semitism is Israel from the beginning, from the beginning. And that to me is why I have trouble looking at him talking about anti-Semitism and taking it in good faith. Because if that is your, if that is something you care about, you can't, you can't divorce the context of Israel being the number one exporter of anti-Semitism throughout the world. It may not be fair that, you know, oh, that they are the number one exporter, that people who are ignorant will start, you know, blaming all Jews and doing hate crimes based on the fact that, you know, Israel is telling them, oh, yes, we're doing this for Jews, we're killing babies for Jews, and when we all like it.

Yes, it's unfair for someone to be anti-Semitic. It doesn't excuse that. But if Israel's the one that is doing it, if Israel's the one that is spreading it, it's inevitable. Can't you, right, and you should be focused on that. That should be, you should, if you're doing it, what is happening here, every episode is Israel is creating anti-Semitism.

It is spreading it like fire. And here are some Canadian media personalities who are acting like absolute freaks and ghouls and has barists who are trying to get to Canadians and convince more of them that that's okay. Rachel, you were muted for a while. I know you had some dog noise. Yeah, sorry, my dogs were going crazy. Oh, yeah. For those who are listening, if we weren't talking over her, her dogs were barking a lot.

Yeah. And I was trying not to ruin the edit, you know? But anyway, yeah, no, I mean, it's ludicrous. And this is an overarching issue with his podcast. And his coverage of this issue writ large is just this refusal to acknowledge that aspect, the role that Israel has in fueling and perpetuating some of this stuff, that, you know, it's not fair to the Jewish community that that is then turned on to them whatsoever. But it's, you know, you can't address a problem without accurately naming it. Except it's a little bit fair. I'm sorry it is a little bit. It's not entirely unfair. Because if the entire Jewish community is standing in material support of that

and has all kinds of organizations that funnel money to it, I'm sorry. You can't, you don't get to get off scot-free, all right? That doesn't mean anti-Semites get off scot-free either. Right. But it's not just Israel because Israel exists, it's tendrils exist in, I'm sorry, I didn't say tentacles. Tendrils. I said tendrils, not tentacles.

They sound similar. I don't know what a tendril is. In my mind, I pictured. I'm seeing an octopus. I'm seeing an octopus holding a globe. It's more of a fur. But Daniel, that's where it gets so tricky, right? It's like, I can't say that as someone who's not Jewish, right?

And I don't want to exacerbate, you know, like the other thing that I'm seeing, again, as someone who covers actual neo-Nazis, like, is that they're actually co-opting and using this moment to, like, foment and drive more hatred. There was a really good piece by, I think, Tess Owens, a journalist out of the States on this. They're like using this genocide to make people hate Jews more, like intentionally. And it's just like, I don't know, like this is all stuff that he doesn't mention once in his podcast. He doesn't mention the far right. He doesn't mention Israel's role because, you know, he's not going there.

He's not talking about the Middle East. He's just talking about all the stuff people are protesting or the protests that have to do with the Middle East, but somehow avoiding that topic. And the furthest he goes in this interview, with the Canadian ambassador, it's very interesting, is to cite some warnings that apparently, in isolated reports, the Shinbet, which is Israel's internal security, aka detention and torture service,

and the IDF have sent to the Israeli government saying, we are fomenting a third Intifada through our policies in the West Bank, through our policies in the West Bank, and to which the Israeli ambassador is quick to say, well, you know, 94% of people in the West Bank support Hamas. He doesn't say 94, but it's somewhere like 64 or 46 or something like that, right? He's very quick with a stat.

There are, you know, armed militias in Janine and Tulquharam. But Jesse's saying people are chanting globalize the intifada, and it sounds like the shin bet and the IDF are concerned that you're going to export another intifada. So he's okay with it if the reports have come from reputable sources like the Israeli army which fucking protects the settlers and the shin bet which breaks the bones of people who were beat up by settlers and detains them in the middle of the night, you know, while pretending to be concerned about the excesses of settlers which the Israeli ambassador follows suit and says, yes, we have extremist terrorists in Judean Samaria and we prosecute them regularly. Well, and that's what's always, that's always the line that's drawn to avoid criticism of Israel and of like these more systemic like ingrained aspects of their society that are akin to like their apartheid, you know, like multiple human rights organizations have said this is, you know, like Canada, in our response, we haven't sanctioned Israel, but we've sanctioned the extremist far right ministers, you know, we haven't sanctioned Israelis or Israelis. goods, but we have sanctioned individual settlers in the West Bank who are, you know, fomenting this violence. And it's always this sort of distinction that I think is pushing us further

away from addressing, like, how we got to a point where Israel is committing a fucking genocide, you know? And like, we're not doing anything as an international community about that when all we're doing is sanctioning individual extremists that are the exception. Like, that is just propaganda. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, it's interesting and important to note the amount of pushback that he has gotten from his own listeners is, of course, you know, interesting, but also from his staffers. I mean, his, after this interview, his own staff basically put out a response to it in which

they were doing our job, which was they were going through the answers that. the ambassador said, and doing a Hezbar fact check. And they went light on him, quite honestly. I read it. Yeah. And they, you know, they maybe gave some highlights or some low lights, but you know, anyway, it still was notable that they had that they put this out. Well, think about it. Like, this is the thing that's making me like, I feel crazy when there's these moments where Jesse's like, I'm sitting

down with my journalist. We're having an open discussion about these issues, about, you know, how I miss, you know, their concerns within the newsroom about my reporting here, like, you're their fucking boss. Like, you know, I just, they can't criticize you to the degree. And, like, you have shown yourself to be a thin-skinned little bitch. So, like, they're not going to go that hard on you. They're not going to have a fully transparent and honest discussion because you pay their fucking, like, you pay their bills.

Yes. Like, you are their boss. And then he cops this defiant pose like, no matter what my staff says, I will not stop talking about anti-Semitism. And none of them have said you have to stop talking about anti-Semitism. They've said, stop fucking overusing Twitter and hyper-fixating on this one issue and start doing rigorous journalism and start listening to us and taking input in how you talk about these things.

Stop crashing out. Stop crashing out. Stop crashing out and calling every like brown woman columnist in Canada a fucking anti-Semite. It looks weird, Jesse. It looks weird. And, you know, obviously, to the credit of the Canada land staff, or at least some of them, in different, you know, iterations, obviously over the last two years, many have left. But they were pushing, including several Jews, including most of, if not all of the prominent Jews who were, you know, at high positions at Canada land left the company, which is, funny because he's also like, you know, this anti-Semitism is chasing all the Jews away

from media positions. Like, yeah, dude, you look at your company. Yeah. And I can't claim to know why the reasons why they left. But I imagine it's a mix of, I don't want to be associated with that. And listen, dude, if I stay around here, you know, it's going to look like we're in cahoots doing this. Like, it's self-preservation for the.

most part. If not, you know, I mean, who knows? Who knows why they left? All I know is, like, watching the staff actually push back has been cool, at least in some fashion that they have been pushing back. I didn't get a chance to listen to a good portion of his newest series, but I do want to talk about that. Rachel, I know you've listened to the entire thing. Daniel, you've listened to some as well. Can you guys tell me about it? I mean, I'm a little nervous to listen to it because I just don't know if my brain can handle more Jesse Brown. Because it's been like 72 hours.

Like, does it, does he, as his co-host of that one podcast said, do you surprise me? Does he surprise you at all? No? Does he say something different? Is he changed? No. No. No, he is, it's entirely predictable.

It sucks ass. Like the whole thing is just a piss poor analysis of what it could have been an interesting issue to talk about, which is. It could have been an important series, actually. Yeah, it really could have been. And it could have actually been a bit of a like mea culpa moment for him. Like, he could have, you know, he could have surprised. people and he could have done like this journey but instead he's like you know sitting down with the CEO of indigo heather riceman and like just letting her talk about how you know he regularly

asks his guests this question do you think this would have happened to you if you weren't a Jew yeah um and all of them pretty much say this wouldn't this was because I'm a Jew or this is you know who the most egregious example of that is yeah Selena Robinson the Canadian former minister of post-secondary education or something like that. We've talked about her on the show before. Yeah, she was a BC, yeah. Yeah, no, you can go ahead. In British Columbia, you know, I've had a Twitter flare up with her once.

Me too. She was, she resigned or was fired or whatever after she made the remarks that Palestine before Jewish colonization was a shitty piece of land that no one had ever. A crappy piece of, right. Because that's how she talks. A crappy piece of land that no one did anything with, no industry. Oh, sure, there were a couple of hundred thousand people there, but it was a, it didn't produce anything, right?

Which she had then in a non-apology called an ineligent piece of speech. It didn't produce anything as, I'm sorry, but like, you know, unlike now in which it produces bands like infected mushroom. And it, like. And side trance. Yeah, side trans. and, I don't know, AI chat bots and Pegasus spying. But also, but also just the notion, the classic colonial notion that a place is value and people's connection to it can be measured in terms of what it produces for who, for you.

Yeah, like it's capitalist output, the ability to profit off of it. It's also just a lie. You know, Jaffa oranges were famous and all kinds of things. Anyway, and she had to resign, and then she went on this whole thing about how, you know, I'm, this only happened to be because I'm Jewish. And Jesse asks her that question, do you think this only happened to you because you were Jewish? And she says yes, and she has this most Canadian. I mean, listening to this series, I was triggered not primarily by the liberal Zionism and apologetics, but by all the Canadian accents. I'm sorry, Rachel.

I'm from there, but just... Is mine bleeding through? No, it's okay. It's all right. It's softened a little with the millennial generation. Thank you. But the, I mean, look, on one hand, I love it because it's where I'm from, but listening to, anyway, Sinalina Robinson is like, yeah, you know, the party and the NDP, there's, you know, there's

been a lot of people in government. There's been MPs who have said outright anti-Semitic things in the past and denied the Holocaust, and the government's always accepted their apologies and been very willing to allow that process to happen, except, you know, when the Jew steps in a pile of poop. And I was just like, oh. This is why people say Canada is not a real place. It's not a real place. It's not a real place like that, you know?

It's so embarrassing. When the Jew steps on poo, a children's book. I just stepped in poop, buddy. Yeah. Yeah. No. And she's also like, you know, she's giving, she talked about people apologizing for something. Like she's still getting in Twitter fights, like just engaged in this like genocide. Just like, she's doing all of the continued sort of argumentation on Twitter. I'm trying to choose my words carefully because I don't want to like use, you know, accuse her of something when I don't have an example right in front of me. But she's constantly fighting with pro-Palestine activists with, with. anyone who is, like, condemning the genocide and trying to smear them. It has no notion why her words were not just ineligent, but deeply offensive and racist. Dehumanizing, pre-cursor to genocide.

Like, that's the kind of ideology that makes their, that creates the conditions for genocide. Right. Yes, 100%. And, you know, it's to be completely ignorant of that, even in, you know, the apology, to call it inelegant is such an ignorant way to respond to as if there's like there's a nicer way to say that they didn't deserve to live there like it's crazy i was trying i was trying to do a figure skating routine where i where i i sort of drew the nazi swastika with my skates and i did it inelegantly i was clumsy i fucked that up the whole series look honestly listening to it was uncanny for me

because it brings me back to the thunder bay podcast which is how i came to know and really respect Canada land. I don't know when Canada, when Thunder Bay was eight years ago, seven years ago, I don't remember. Thunder Bay is a town in North, you know, in fact, you know the song Helpless by Neil Young, Matt? I don't. Okay. There is a town in North Ontario is how it starts. That's Thunder Bay. That was Neil Diamond, I'm sorry. Yeah, no, Neil Young. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, on the, on the western tip of Lake Superior. The Big Lake, they call Gichigumi. And it's an incredible series of investigative journalism that Jesse produced and edited.

It was hosted, I forget by who, but an indigenous. Ryan McMahon. Ryan McMahon. Yeah. And he did interviews on the street. He talked to politicians. And it tells a story of the rampant murder and abduction and murder by freezing, by pushing into rivers, by, you know, getting drunk and leaving outside of town,

indigenous youth, indigenous teenagers. And more broadly, the context, the history of northern Ontario than its indigenous population and the white population. And it was interesting and it was dynamic and it told a good story. And it used production values to good effect, music, sound effects, all of that. It told a really good story. Well, here we have this thing. And as all Canada Land episodes do, it starts with one of Jesse's improvised sounding monologues, where he's just kind of hanging out in the studio and talking into the mic.

Now, it's scripted, and it's well scripted, it's well done, and it's got a sort of off-the-cuff thing. And he gets to the end of it, and he introduces the show, and now we start. And now I'm listening to a podcast that's just one note over and over again. And the host is admitting, look, I don't know much about this. And what I do know, I don't like these anti-Zionists, but I'm going to force myself to talk to them. And I'm actually, I'm going to make myself uncomfortable. I'm going to make people uncomfortable.

And, you know, the music throughout is very evocative, written by a guy I used to live with. Good music. It's great music. Even has Fred Wesley, his longtime collaborator, Fred Wesley, who's James Brown's trombonist play on a few of the episodes. It's very evocative, it's very effective. but the effect to which Jesse uses it

is to just hammer home this one emotional point of like the confusion and fear and dread that every Canadian Jew must be living under right now and the bizarre phenomenon of anti-Zionist Jews and to top it off, I didn't get to listen to this episode. I'd love to hear your review, Rachel. But the very last episode features one of our favorites, Matt. That's right.

It's the, what is it? Adam Lewis. Adam Lewis Klein. Everyone's favorite McGill Ph.D. student. How is that episode, Rachel? It was dog shit. I actually found myself, like, some of the stuff he was describing, I was like, that can't be fucking true. And, like, you know, I actually, I wanted to take time to, because it's annoying.

Like, I only listened to that one last night. And I was like, I need to go and Google half the shit that he said. Because it seems like in some ways he's also just confusing the word like Zion with like an ideology of anti-Zion. It's like, I don't know if I'm incorrect about that. His job is, he's getting a Ph.D. in word confusion. Yeah. Like he was saying that like anti- Culinary degree.

He specializes in word salad. Oh. So we got a gourmet tasting platter in that last episode. Yeah, no, it was really bad. And it just like, and it also kind of, I don't know, I mean, there was, it felt like in the beginning when the podcast opened with some anecdotes of real anti-Semitism. And, you know, and it's frustrating. but because of the way that Jesse has left out key details.

And that's why he's an unreliable narrator on this issue, which is really frustrating because there, again, Israel anti-Semitism that is very much happening. But like, you know, when he said that the people splashing red paint on indigo bookstores, because Heather Risman has a charity that creates a financial incentive for lone soldiers to join the IDF because after the fact she gives them a scholarship and like, you know, covers parlority or I don't know if it's all of their education. And he says, well, this was anti-Semitism.

They're targeting a Jewish own business. And he said it was because it was on the same day, I think, as crystal-knocked. Yeah, which I don't think. As if it was planned that way. Yeah. Like, I don't think people knew that if they did. This has happened for the last two years. And it's like, how I know when someone is acting in bad faith, well, they'll be like,

somebody marched in front of my local you know my local temple that I grew up going to merely because they were holding a land sale in Gaza and they did it you know when they did it they did it the day before Tubesh fought and the fact that they would do it before the very well-known tree celebrating day like I have no fucking idea I promise you there's a calendar out there

that has like every single day of the year 365 days, 365 Jewish calamities throughout history, you know, they protested on the day when a pogrom happened. Right. It's just like. And frankly, there's been enough throughout history that you could definitely fill that that calendar. So, you know, but the thing is, is like, so, you know, that initial episode, though, if all

of those anecdotes are presented in good faith. And they include children being bullied to the extent where they get, they have to leave school. I mean, some of them are very disturbing. Yeah. And so, you know, and so like that's how it starts out. And I'm like, okay, like this, maybe this will open my mind to the unimpact that I didn't realize or something. And then, you know, and then it just kind of devolves episode by episode. And then it has this beautiful crescendo at the very end with this dog shit interview where I'm like, you learn nothing. You learn nothing. This is the stupidest shit I've ever heard. We've covered him a lot. But ending it with Adam Lewis fucking Klein is so psychopathic. Here's just. some of his online artwork BDS is apartheid

hilarious considering that you know BDS is a tactic from the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa here is a fucking anti-Zionism he sees it now and it's Neo stopping bullets

here's another one anti-Zionist is Zionism is a hate movement I mean just like the constant And then he has, and they, understand libel vomit. A flood of rage-driven, copy-pasted anti-Zionists, slurs libel, and accusations meant to, not to debate in good faith,

but to abuse, dehumanize and humiliate, quote, Zionists by casting them as monstrous and unworthy of belonging society. Sorry, bombing hospitals is one of the things spewing out of the mouth there. Yeah. Supremacy. So you can't say the things that Israel did. Apartheid. That is libel vomit.

is saying what they did. Yeah, that is libel vomit. And so anyways, and then he has extended text tweets where he coins phrases like the projective anti-Zionist gaze. Yes, yes. And one in which he accused

Francesca Albanese of essentially doing a verbal sexual assault on Israel. Yeah. Because she put out a report called Anatomy of a genocide and he said, The choice of the word anatomy here is not incidental. To anatomize is literally to, you know, cut open and examine the inside of, you know.

That makes me think of the time I got in a fight with Jordan Peterson on Twitter. And I did a breakdown of his, like, claims about, you know, being. You did a breakdown of his breakdown. Yeah, I mean, really. But it was like some bullshit about his professional association here. Anyway, I said strap in. And he was like, he called that an innuendo. Because I said strap in at the beginning.

of a long thread I was like you're just your mind's in the gutter dude like you have horny brain stop making me think of porn that was a good that was a good impression that was the first time I tried it it's not very good impressive I will not strap on young lady listen bucko I only strap on with my wife and some of my young male fans when Dora the Explorer get well soon Jordan get well soon Yeah.

Swiper, no swiping. I'm just thinking of watching Dora. Okay. But yeah, so I mean, listen, I will, I am going to actually listen to that full series. May I say something, though, about the last episode because it's actually not true that he concludes with Adam Lewis Klein. Oh, that's much more canny than that. He's much more clever than that. He knows he can't end.

Oh, you're right. He can't end with Adam Lewis Klein. He ends with a Palestinian. Yeah. In the last half of the episode. I forget the guy's name. He's a Palestinian. who I believe lives

in the West Bank and he believes in a two-state solution and he knows that in order to get to his two-state solution he's going to have to convince quote Jewish hearts and minds and it serves nothing

to demonize people he does mention the occupation the daily humiliations the bombings the massacres he talks about the conditions under which Palestinians are living. But ultimately, the solution, and you know what, Palestinians have every right to decide that a Palestinian state is viable and that the Jewish state of Israel should continue to exist beside it.

And that's the best strategy for getting free. I'm not going to tell anyone how to get free or how to strategize about getting free. But it's what Jesse does with it. I actually have a clip of the outro, if we just listen to it. It's about a minute and a half. Okay, here we go. For the record, Ali believes in a two-state solution achieved through nonviolence. It's a position that seems so impossible right now that people just laugh at it, even more than they used to.

The solution sounds impossible. Then, okay, so what is the alternative? Can you see any alternative approach for us? I mean, yes, but okay. On alternative, possibly, yeah. I can't. I don't see any other solution for the Middle East. I'm sorry, was that musical interlude with just him thinking?

Yeah. Sorry, I talked over it. It's very, very long. You got Fred Wesley's trombone. That was wildly long. But Ali's question assumes that a solution is what the Middle East is looking for. And I don't have a lot of faith in that. because there is an alternative to people.

Come on, Middle East. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, middle East. Yeah. Middle East. You know, everyone. And I thought this was the thing he wasn't going to talk about. And now he's saying what he has faith in when it comes to this region that he's not going to interrogate or talk about or, you know.

I don't have, I don't believe in the Middle East. I only believe in me. John Lennon. Permanent suffering. For everyone involved. It's not a solution. to anything. But for as long as I've been around, that's the option that's been chosen in the Middle East. But I don't live in the Middle East. And so for years, I've just opted out. I didn't think that I could

help the situation by talking about it in Canada. And I didn't want to hurt anyone either. I was terrified of the power this has, just as a conversation topic, to enrage people, to harm people, and to destroy relationships. You say people, but you're talking about you. To enrage you, to harm you. This is who you, this is you. This is not everyone else. You didn't talk about it because it enrages you.

Go ahead. So I put up a wall. Of course, if there's one thing... Well, you're not the first Jew to do that. Wait, wait, wait, I put up on a wall. Well, to be honest, I call it a fence. A security fence. Some people call it a wall.

You know, it's improper to call it a wall. It's a security fence. About this conflict, it's that it is not constrained by walls. No, it's constrained by insecurity fences. That's what I have. I have insecurity. I need a fence there. It's come for us here.

But I'm not going anywhere. And I don't want you to. I don't want you to go anywhere, dude. I really don't. I really don't. And, you know, just, just, you know, I, again, I cannot. judge this podcast yet because I have not fully listened to it. I can only judge from what I have heard so far about this guy in these past two years. And I can only feel empathy for the listeners

of Canada land who have had to deal with this, you know, including you two. And, you know, I feel a little bit for Robert as well because he, Robert, what's his name? Jesse. You know, every Canadian and his name Robert to you, huh? Yeah. I feel for him as well in some sense because, you know, I see a lot of his point of view, you know, surrounds me. I know a lot of people who feel similar to him. And because I didn't, you know, know him enough to be betrayed by him. I feel like I have, I don't know, more of a academic interest in his pivot to this kind of stuff.

That being said, he is the head of this media company. Like, this is his company. He is, you know, at the end of the day, the one man who runs Canada land. And yet he still has these people who work with him, who work for him. he's had these people for the last two years telling him guy you gotta you got to take a step back from this buddy and to him yeah to them he says i am not your guy buddy yeah and they say we're not your buddies friend yeah yeah and well it's also like it's wild that not only did they say that to him but then he turned around bunker down and like fucking

did a six-episode podcast series that he only No, and then he showed it to his staff after it was done you know and so like one of his actual employees presses him on this in that like one interview they probably did discussing it

Her name is yeah Nur Azria Azria I think but I feel for it because you know I she's stuck around and I assume didn't you know who wants to lose a fucking media job

they're few and far between Yeah, and that's always been why I've had empathy for, like, the Canada land employees. Of course. And, you know, the number of them over the months who have reached out to me being like, you know, but anyway. But yeah, no, so she, like, she says this and presses him on it. And he won't disclose. She's like, so who did you ask to be, like, your editor to be your sounding board? And he won't say who it is.

probably because the person he's crediting at the end of each episode is his fucking wife. Yeah. Like that's his sounding board. That is his like editorial guidance, you know? I don't know if there were others, but like, you know, it's just kind of wild to me that you wouldn't disclose that. Like, you know. Yeah. Especially when asked by your own staffer who is already put in a position where you, he has just published this podcast into the feed without anyone approving it or seeing it or edit, you know, being.

an editor of it. It's just, it's, it's wild. Special thanks to my wife who transcribed me talking in my sleep for six weeks and we turned that into the script of this podcast. Yeah. We decided to go with the ramblings of my, my deepest unconscious. Yeah. Yeah. No, and I think, I think in a broad sense, like where he really fucked up, uh, beyond all of the many ways we've already detailed, it's just that it really comes across as you listen to this podcast that he is already going into it with his mind made up. As much as he says, he's going to take a step back and do this critical interrogation, you can tell that he's already got his conclusion, and everything he's doing is just trying to validate and prove his conclusion, which is that these anti-Zionist

protesters are the cause of this surge of anti-Semitism. And the only thing that he acknowledges as having challenged him is, frankly, he basically admits that he is now more concerned about the Muslim community in Canada and the immigration from Syria. which has caused, you know, because they're statistically more likely to harbor anti-Semitic sentiment as one sociologist tells him. And he's like, that's his big thing that he tells Noor that he was like, you know, I had to grapple with this because I don't want to believe that. And I'm like, well. It's so insane because it's just like, no, that's what you. So you got worse? Yeah. That's not good. Yeah. For someone who, for someone who's produced journalism,

the trajectory of which is let's start from the little we know. and try to expand outward to know more so that what we knew before is then held inside of a more holistic and sensible context to be like to start from, let me start from the little I know and kind of just grip it.

Right. And just take it around to people and be like, yeah. Stop trying to take this with me. And just end up with like, I'm still holding this thing, but I'm not going anywhere

and my mindset is not going anywhere either. Matt, you called him an unreliable narrator. I'd call him an unreliable, unreliable narrator. Yeah, I think Rachel called him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, really? I know Matt and I are easily confused, which I hope. It happens a lot. Okay, sorry, sorry. I hope that means that your wife would also like me back, but you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%. Yeah. So, Rachel, you called him an unreliable narrator. It's true, but I think he's an unreliable, unreliable narrator. I think he's trying to play an unreliable narrator in the sense of, look, I'm just a, I'm just a guy who doesn't

know much. I'm not an expert. Let me, you know, and then there's an assumption of good faith. He's going to go and do what Canada land has always done, which is dig for a truer, bigger picture. There's not just one truth, but there's a bigger picture that'll give us a truer sense of the whole thing. And he doesn't do that. It's hard. It's because you're watching, and I think this is one of the things that drives people crazy, is watching someone make a podcast called, what is happening here, you know, looking out into the world when you're like, could you just ask that question to a fucking mirror just one time? Just look at, go, what's happening here? What's happening here? It's important to be able to let go of some of these biases and not try to find

Syrians to be like, well, this is the issue. Yeah. What is happening here in my newsroom? I feel like that's always been Jesse's like Achilles heel. that like he's he's been able to sometimes get to a point where he understands that there's a criticism of him. Like he'll always joke about how I remember like he would joke a lot about being perceived as an asshole. Like, oh yeah, people think I'm an asshole, but you listen anyway. And like, you know, that was like something he would reference a lot. And it just seems like he has this inability to interrogate like if people think this of me, is this something I should consider changing?

Is this something like I should work on within myself? It's like he can get to the point where he can understand that he's getting a certain kind of backlash. or maybe even like joke about it or do it, you know, a pithy, like interview about it or something where I'm like, where he's like, oh, I'm going to talk to my Lebanese co-worker about, you know, how this plays out and like how this dynamic works in our newsroom and, you know, and interrogate these ideas. And I'm going to really like challenge myself. But he never actually gets to the point of challenging himself.

And that is the really sad thing here is that like he could have had something great. He could have really helped the Canadian media ecosystem. And instead, he can't actually criticize himself enough and interrogate himself enough to do that public service. And it's very sad. And now the legacy media stiffs that he used to be the alternative to love him for it. They love this podcast. They're retweeting the shit out of this podcast. Yeah.

So he's found a new niche. And he's also like, you know, one thing that I do. just be remiss if I didn't mention at some point is, as I already highlighted, like, he's not talking about the role of the far right. That's the two big blind spots, if you're going to talk about anti-Semitism, in my mind with his podcast, is that he doesn't interrogate the genocide whatsoever or include that in his analysis. And the fact he doesn't talk about the rise of the far right and, like, increasingly fascistic elements that we're seeing in North America and around the world. And we're having that here in Canada, too.

And beyond that, one of the people... He used to, right? Didn't he used to report on Rebel Media and... He definitely... I feel like he talked about Ezra Levant and stuff. But I'm talking about even... I'm talking about years ago, though. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And but like he literally, uh, gives a shout out at the end of, I think it's episode four to a woman who goes around and films protesters. And like, literally just this week, I got word that she... She was the one who cut a clip of my live stream and sent it to someone who was on a neo-Nazi podcast talking about it. Like, this is, this person has like affiliations. Good help is hard to find, okay? For an oppressed Jew, you got to take the help where you can get. Sometimes you have to have a Shabbas neo-Nazi.

But it's just like, what betrays the blind spots that you have more so than the fact that you're giving this special. thanks to someone who, uh, the Jeremy McKenzie, the leader of Diagallon, which is like part of Canada's largest white nationalist network in the country who, uh, there's video footage of yelling fuck the Jews. Oh, yeah. Jeremy McKenzie thanked this person. She was one of the first people he thanked when he got out of prison for her help. Like I'm just saying that this is, this is not an honest interrogation of anti-Semitism.

If you're turning around and thanking people like that, like you're just, you're doing a total disservice. And, you know, it also makes it disingenuous to, you know, bring up, it's like it's, it's something that they default to a lot, a lot of the, you know, critical of pro-Palestine movement, critical of the less people is, uh, they talk about, you know, oh, you're strange bedfellows. And they constantly are bringing, you know, uh, that up. And I'm like, buddy, you, you look in the goddamn mirror at this, the people that you are inviting, the people who, now you are essentially allies with you know to thine own bed fellow well and there's there's one moment too that I feel like should have been an aha moment for him but he just like continually just

like whiffs it whenever he has like an potential aha moment like he's talking to that sociologist and he's like hey um you know there's no rise in anti-semitic sentiment in Canada in fact anti-semitic sentiment in Canada is one of the lowest in the world but why So why is there this increase in anti-Semitic acts and actions? And I'm like, maybe that is something to interrogate, you know? If people don't actually hate Jewish people, but there's things being interpreted as hateful to the Jewish community that are done, maybe you should interrogate that instead of just being like, that is very interesting. So tell me more about these anti-Semitic acts and what they have to do with these protests against the genocide. And one of the things he's specialized in on Twitter.

since October 7th is adopting the lowest burden of proof for anti-Semitic intent. Yeah. People are protesting in a Jewish neighborhood. Doesn't matter that there was a real estate sale going inside a synagogue. People are smearing blood on the, a Jewish-owned business. Doesn't matter if it's Indigo chapters owned by Heather Reesman, who's org, as Matt said, or as Rachel said. I can't tell the two of your part. I never said anything.

Anyway, maybe we're... Matt's long red hair must be confusing you, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yes. To, to round us up, we do need to conclude as well. And I want to conclude with a shout out to one of the times that he was pushed back on by someone who was on his podcast. He actually had a podcast, I think, in the Canada Land Network. His name is Robert Jago, and he did a podcast called Pretendians, which I don't believe is going to be made.

I don't think they're going to have a second season. And I'm not saying that this, you know, next clip I'm about to play is why. But he went on his podcast, and they were talking about the story about a couple of, quote, cancellations that happened due to, you know, Israelis, essentially, where he said, in Canada, apparently, there were a couple of artists who were Israeli or both had served in the IDF at one point that were canceled by the BDS movement. When we say canceled, we don't mean like everyone hate them now. We mean like events. Events canceled. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Although I do feel like part of it, there's a connection there where he's a little bit complaining that BDS

is cancel culture. And so he has on this guy, Robert Jago, to talk about it. And instead of, I think, you know, I think it's very easy for people to see where someone is coming from with their bias immediately and go like, I'm going to find a way to talk about this without really getting into going up against this person's bias. Yeah, Jesse, Jesse excels in that, actually. That's what he did with the Israeli ambassador. Right, exactly. And to be honest, that's what he's been doing when it comes to this issue from the beginning. I don't want to make people uncomfortable. I don't want to make people mad. If we're being honest about liberal Zionism, a lot of it is I hate that I have to explain to myself why I think this is, you know, Israel needs to exist and that it must be

anti-Semitism. And also, I don't want to lose my job. That's why I'm not fucking people. Anyways, Robert goes on and actually pushes back on him with regards to this issue. And he does so, so beautifully. that I just was like, I have to play this because I'm just so impressed. Robert is First Nations, I believe, right? Is that how you guys say it in Canada? In America, we just say indigenous. I think Indigenous and Canada is also accepted. Yeah, First Nations is if you're not Inuit or Métis,

like you're specifically a member of the First Nations community. I believe Robert is a member of a First Nation, but I'd have to double check that. Yeah, and he hosted the Britannians podcast, and he, he, just he just does and he's a journalist he does a wonderful job i just want to play uh a little bit from this here we go protest what do you think and again he's talking about uh you know is bDS a legitimate bd yes cultural boycotts bdsing someone who is an israeli who uh is anti war or claims to be you know liberal and whatnot and robert's response Well, I mean, first off, I mean, nobody likes indiscriminate attacks on people.

And it's terrible when a precision guided attack hits the wrong person. I guess you're making like an analogy to like if. Like off the bat, I'm like, oh my God, I think I'm in love. Yeah. I think I'm in love. And he goes on to offer this like really, I think just really thoughtful, defense of BDS while at the same time understanding that the issue that you know Jesse is actually pointing out is not you know he said is that you need to have clear BDS policy if you're going to

try to enforce some sort of BDS you know whether it be we're not going to work with this person anymore you need to have good reasons uh solid reasons that apply across the board or else you're going to get picked apart by people like Jesse for every single BDS decision and they have a long conversation about, you know, boycotting people versus boycotting institutions. And Jesse places himself as the person who is like, well, I'm pro people. I'm against, you know, like, if you want to boycott like a company, fine, but not a person. And Robert just does a great job of being like, it's interesting that you say that now. And he makes a great point that I need to play. Here's a couple of clips here really compelling case for people to come out with clear and consistent bDS

policies and if you don't then you could get picked apart like this i also think that's why we're not talking about russians where this is happening because the policies are are very clear i would i would oppose it in exactly the same way were it to happen to russians well you haven't though i mean it's been happening for two years i'm not aware well tell me about the cases where like a russian artist has been kicked off of uh if that new story exists like it certainly did escape my attention this is from the cbc march 8th 2022 montreal symphony so he just starts he starts going through a case in which this has happened and he's just like well the the fact that he jesse himself is like this is this should be his fucking wheelhouse this should be something as a media critic he as

talked about before and Jesse's response to this is fantastic here's a little more a double standard here that's egregious and I think it's disgusting you know I like I think that if we're going to have a consistent and ethical approach to this should also be mindful of the fact that a literal lynch mob just broke out on the streets of Athens trying to find Israeli citizens well I mean that escalated pretty quickly we were talking about culture and others punch bombs no no no Robert we're talking about people we're talking about blaming people for what governments do no we're talking about the cultural boycott I mean if we're talking about people for governments then we could

talk about the the several Palestinians them a shot in the states for just you know wearing a shirt or being in a boy cat the people that have been mowed down on the street by cars all the people that have been beaten by cops do you think that I don't think we should talk about like who's saying that we shouldn't talk about that well you're not talking about it if you're not talking about it then It seems like we shouldn't talk about it. When have I ever talked about any new stories like that out of America? You just talked about something out of Greece.

What I'm saying is that when you extend... That's exactly what I was hoping you'd play from that interview. The ability to clock that he has moved on now from talking about a cultural boycott to like, oh, by the way, you should know this is more important because in Greece, there's lynch mob trying to kill Jews. And he's just like, how are we immediately escalating this into a holistic conversation about, you know, anti-Semitism throughout? We were talking about BDS, a very specific movement that is against the state of Israel. And we have now moved on to generalized sort of anti-Semitism or anti-Israel sentiment in in fucking Greece. I just, I'm so impressed with the

way that he is able to do this and it just i'll leave you guys with one more fucking wonderful clip in which i think robert jaco deserves a medal here we go ban people better exactly you're for the book banning i'm for more books jesse first they came for the russians and you said nothing because you weren't a russian robert if you're asking me if i feel the exact same way about russians i absolutely do then say it where's your show about the russians I just, I, um, God bless this man. I just want to say that much. It's nice to see push back, you know, against, against him. And, you know, I fear we're going to see less and less of that because of the fact that he's now going to start getting acceptance from a lot of these conservative outlets in Canada that are going to see him as a good sort of, I don't know, a good voice to plaid. platform because of what he talks about. And that's the thing. Yeah, but where does he go from here? I mean, what's what's next? He said in his national post interview, I think he said to her that

with that National Post journalist that he lost 50% of Canada land subscribers. Like I've heard a much smaller number said. But that's what he said off the top of that interview. And I was like, what do you do next? Like you have to find a new audience. I mean, he's got his bit moji money or whatever. So, you know, maybe he'll be just fine. But like, oh, yeah. Oh, did you not know that? What? Or bit strips.

It's one of them. He like invented one of those. That's where, that's how he first made his money. He invented a bit, a bit moji? Is that what you're telling me? Let me Google. Hang on. I want to get this right.

I think it might be bit strips, but yeah. You're sure you don't mean Tim bits? I'm positive. Robert bits. No. I'm sorry. That's stupid. Jesse Brown emoji.

Yeah. Co-owner of bits. strips. Wait, it's a company that makes avatars. Yeah. Are you kidding me? Hang on. Let me. No, you're right. Yeah, bit strips, a company that makes avatars. Yeah. Well, golly. I mean, how do you think it, do you know how fucking you, I mean, you do know. It's not easy to start an independent journalism outlet. No, I get it. And it's not profitable. So it helps to have bit strips. To be fair, I had to start my career, like most other journalists, I had to start it by talking about the Sopranos, the Mad Men and the Wire, and before I could really start talking about Israel. I supported myself through podcasting school by bit stripping. I had to gargle at the balls of mainstream media for seven years. And I actually, I learned a lot. but you know

but yeah gargle at the ball I thought you were talking about the dog yeah I mean that too that dog that dog that was easy though

I didn't even have to do shit for that they did that for me right that guy that guy owned himself yeah but yeah you know it's it's it's hard to see

where he goes from here I don't know I think it's it's I feel for you know anyone who's big time I'm listening to that podcast, but at the same time, I'm just like, hey, maybe he can go back to the emoji stuff.

Maybe he can do that. All I know is I will try my best to listen to some of it, in fairness to Jesse Brown. I will try to listen to what is happening. And it'll be interesting. It'll be interesting to see if, as I think in classic Canada land fashion, would be if a podcast like this has such a big backlash. as it's having, he would have a special episode of the regular show where he brings on an actual good faith critic of it

and faces some some tough questions. But we'll see. I'm available. Daniel has made himself available to talk about it and I actually, you know, I think it'll be interesting to see where it goes. I think because

he's Canadian and I'm an American guy, I'm looking at everything through a more optimistic lens because Canada has just compared to the way we Americans are I'm like I don't know you guys are more human beings than we are

you know but I tell people tell me I'm wrong about that yeah that I that I should not have positive feelings towards Canada Google what people are saying about Tim Hortons these days and that's like a center of a racist discourse going on here yeah objects

in mirror maybe more fascist than they appear. That is what I heard. We've exported so many fucking fascists to you guys. I know, you really have. Google them. You find out they've all got Canadian blood, like this Daniel Matei. Like it's a, you know.

Yes, yes. Daniel Matei is. And David Frum before me. I mean, not just fascists, but neo-conservatives. Yeah. David from. David from Canada? David from Canada.

Wow. Son of, son of beloved Canadian media star news anchor, Barbara Frum. Barbar from. Rabbit Zionists, both of them. them yeah look at that but yeah look i uh i i don't who knows where his you know ideology goes i don't care um all i know is watching enough of this guy will uh for sure make you insane and more so if you knew him previously to have integrity uh who knows i could be wrong maybe jesse if you want to yell at me you can uh he has said he would do any podcast that wanted to talk to him about his show

Just for the record. We don't really do adversarial interviews. No, no, we, we, we don't, we're not journalists. We don't do debates. What's that? Jesse told me I'm an anti-Semite, so I kind of assumed this would inherently be an anti, or an adversarial interview. Oh, yeah.

Well, we hate ourselves so, so you fit right in. That's right. I see. That's why we love you. Like I said, we want anti-Semites to dom us constantly put us in our place. Yeah. Would you mind putting on this Nazi armland? It arouses us

Can you watch? Yeah, I'm sorry. Can you brand me with this tot and coffin real quick? Make me come. See, this shit's going to get clipped. I'm so fucked. It better. Someone's got to watch this fucking pod.

All right. Someone's got to end this fucking pot. And I'm going to. This is the longest episode we've ever done. This is, this is your Christmas present. You just had so much fun. Christmas present to you all out there. Thank you and you're welcome.

You're wishing you a brown Christmas. That's right. Rachel Gilmore, thank you for coming on. Where can people find you? I am, just look up Rachel Gilmore. You'll find my link tree in most of my social as I got a podcast called Bubble Pop with Rachel Gilmore. I'm all over TikTok, all over Instagram. Just look me up.

You can hear my dog barking in the background cheering me on. Sure can. Yeah. Thank you for having me, though. This was super fun. Of course. If you ever need more Cancon, you know. Just hit me up.

100%. And thank you all out there for listening. Patreon.com slash baddestbarra at gmail.com for your questions, comments, and concerns. All right, everyone. Thank you for spending your holidays with us. And until next time. Until next year. Until next year, from the river to the sea.

Jew better, Jesse. Jesse stop tweeting about me. It's creepy. Taking Molly us. Michael Jackson us. Yamaha keyboards, us, charge a mix on us, Andor was us, Keith Ledger Joker us, endless bread success, Happy Meals was us, McDonald's was us, Being Happy Us, Bequam Yoga us, eating food, us, breeding air, us, drinking water us. We invented all that shit.

Thank you.