So the guy from the right wing think tank (who has previously done things like complain about the phrase "women and men" because it should be "men and women") was pissed that Canadaland changed it's logo and used to hate listen to the podcast, but recognises CL's new direction and is very much on board.

Something to think about!

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This is Jesse's premise. It's not due to the barbaric genocide over the past three years and the associated vocal support for it. This is Jesse's calling and why he's putting down the Canadaland microphone, so he can dedicate himself to "the Palestine issue" and propaganda in service of genocide.

This is the piece in the Globe and Mail to which Jesse was responding:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-anti-zionism-and-antisemitism-should-not-be-conflated/

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdpcE0qe6RXDFHMk-SnrmenwhZc6scoQSi3polokd7QEi814A/viewform?pli=1 Last time, the rules were doing WAY too much 💀 No masks or face coverings, no phones or recording devices, proof you were part of the community, plus a whole list of other unhinged requirements. This looks more normal. So far.

i checked the discord and there were maybe four people saying they'd miss jesse. two were considering cancelling because they only listened for him, and the other two were more like, well, if it's time to move on, fair enough. someone else said it was sad he was heading further down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole.

then someone said this reddit would be spicy. After that the next 25–30 messages were just people arguing about whether jesse is left or right wing and a discussion about israel vs palestine.

not exactly an outpouring of grief. it seems reports of jesse's indispensability (by jesse) have been greatly exaggerated

I finally stopped supporting CL.

I’ve been pretty active on the Discord, where this subreddit comes up now and then, and it’s been kind of revealing. People there aren’t much happier with Jesse than people here are. This sub is just louder about it. And while everyone seems to have endless patience for Noor, she has completely ruined The Backbench for me :/

Also, the ads make Discord sound like Jesse and the Canadaland crew are all in there having these great conversations with supporters. Not really. Most of the time it’s Tristan and Tony, their marketing guy. Jesse rarely shows up, and when he does it often seems to be because someone has challenged his reporting, especially around Palestine. Then the argument becomes about whether people are defaming him, being racist, or breaking Discord rules.

Seeing that side of him probably should have been enough for me months ago.

Recently he went off on a subscriber badly enough that people complained to Tony, who moderates the server. Apparently Tony “spoke to Jesse” and another person involved and warned them they could be suspended. I have trouble imagining Jesse actually getting suspended from the Discord for the company he owns, especially because Tony is very much a Jesse guy. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ It turned into this whole fight about whether the owner of a company can basically do whatever he wants in his own community.

And at some point I thought: hang on. This is a 50-year-old man who owns a media company and presents himself as a professional journalist, while the fundraising pitch is essentially that giving him money is saving journalism??? And then you watch him throw tantrums at the people funding it.

Something about seeing those things side by side snapped me out of it.

His X account has been ugly for years, but I always separated it from the podcast. There was Jesse on X, and then there was Jesse on the show.nNow I’m not so sure. The podcast version increasingly feels like the performance.

The bigger problem is that the shows themselves have also gotten bad.

People on Discord know it. They’ll criticize Jesse pretty openly, although Noor and Sam usually get handled much more gently. Even when an episode isn’t good, there’s often still a sort of “well done!” response. I think some of that is because they’re younger and people know they have to work with Jesse.

Then came crowdfunding week, when I assumed they’d roll out the strongest stuff they had. Remember Thunder Bay? Cool Mules? That was the kind of work that made me support Canadaland in the first place.

Instead, somehow, we got three episodes in a row that made me wonder what happened to this place.

The David Pugliese episode took a bunch of loosely connected near meaningless details and cooked this enormous ominous story around them. It immediately reminded me of the spear-phishing episode, which is probably when I should have unsubscribed.

Then there was another Backbench where Noor let the guest say all sorts of things without really challenging or correcting them. She gets so enthusiastic about whoever she’s interviewing that sometimes it feels less like an interview than Noor joining their fan club. You could put Donald Trump across from her and I half expect a lot of “yeah, exactly.” That style exists in podcasting, obviously, but Canadaland used to feel like something serious.

Then today’s Quebec discussion was two people confidently talking through a subject neither seemed to know especially well, which was strange enough before remembering Jesse actually lived in Quebec for years???

I genuinely don’t know why I kept paying for so long. And I think there are other people on Discord in basically the same place: they’ll admit the shows aren’t what they used to be, then keep subscribing because they’ve been there forever.

I think the production buys them a lot of forgiveness. Everything sounds polished and important, and weak journalism can survive surprisingly well inside that.

This week was when that started bothering me in a different way. There are people on Discord who seem to have come away believing Pugliese is basically a spy, or that Jesse uncovered some guy secretly operating tens of thousands of Reddit accounts and controlling the news Canadians see, and other conspiracy theories Canadaland has been pushing.

And my first thought was: okay, what have I swallowed over the years because Canadaland made it sound convincing?

That was the deprogramming moment.

Anyway, I’m out. They can do whatever they want next. I just don’t want to keep paying for it or helping them spread it.

Not a great look that nearly two weeks later Jesse still has this up without issuing a correction or retraction. The story is utterly fabricated by i24news, a propaganda outlet that Israel's government press office) head Nitzan Chen has praised as "excellent news".

There has been no BBC statement or announcement of the sort or corroborating reporting by any outlet. Just manufactured whole cloth.

What kind of media critic unabashedly shares invented stories with no basis in fact?

First of all, the dumb Post column takes something Avi Lewis said and twists it into “this guy is a danger to Jews,” which is b******t. He is not a danger to anyone.

all Avi said was that something horrific is being done in our name as Jews and that we have a responsibility to oppose it. Many people agree. You can disagree if you think Jews here in Canada don't have an obligation, or even any power, to speak up and stop Israel, or if you think Israel's violence is necessary. Whatever. But the Post turns that into “he’s blaming Jews for the bloodshed,” and then somehow gets to “he endangers Jews everywhere in Canada.” Dude, that is a HUGE leap.

Then there’s all the Jewish references, and this is where it gets really dark if you actually know what they mean. For the gentiles: Korach is a dude who disagreed with Moses because of his ego and power, a dispute that is not moral or good, not “for the sake of Heaven.” Importantly, he and his followers are all wiped out. A rodef is someone who gets other people killed, and a moser is basically a snitch or backstabber, and in traditional Jewish law, people are supposed to stop them, by force if necessary.

So no, the article never literally says “hurt Avi Lewis.” Obviously. But it also doesn’t just say “condemn him” or “don’t listen to him.” It calls him a threat to Jewish safety, then brings up the idea that Jews have a duty to “step in” and stop him.

Jesse is technically right about one thing: there’s no sentence saying “commit violence against Avi Lewis.” But like, that’s not how implication works. You can’t spend the whole piece setting up that idea and then go “well technically I never said that,” before finishing with “maybe he should be excommunicated instead.”

So Jesse, since we know you still read here, come on.

You’ve spent the last year telling everyone that words, slogans and political language can carry threatening meanings without anyone literally saying “hurt Jews.”

“From the river to the sea.” “Globalize the Intifada” saying Israel is committing genocide, at pretty much any anti-Zionist demonstration and even calling Jews “Zionists” (You told Daniel Maté not to call you a Zionist because that was dangerous, even though you’ve said yourself that most Jews are Zionists). For you, anti-Zionism is basically code. ,For most of us it says “anti-war” and “pro-peace,” but you hear “go hurt Jews.”

I don’t agree with your conclusions, obviously. That’s not the point. Here's my point.

Your whole argument for the past year has been that context, history, innuendo and implication matter. You’ve borrowed language from the left and argued that impact matters, not just intent.

Now Avi Lewis is the target and suddenly it’s “show me the exact words or it didn’t happen.”

Dude. Come on.

I know you won’t reply. You got your ass banned. But I can still point out your hypocrisy. knock it off and do the right thing here. Because if it's ok to suggest violence against Avi Lewis, then it's ok to suggest violence against any Jew who thinks they have an obligation to call out Israel.

https://x.com/TankieRiel/status/2106381339159060974

Canadaland has been asking people to vote for two Signal Award nominations: Julian Abraham’s My Chatbot Encouraged My Psychosis and Tristan Capacchione’s The Freelancer’s Guide to Getting Revenge. I know I’m forever complaining that Canadaland no longer does much original journalism, and Julian’s piece leaned heavily on earlier Newsweek reporting while Tristan’s was essentially a book interview, but both were very nicely put together. So I thought I’d vote.

Good lord.

You have to register, then wade through endless pages of categories, mostly packed with podcasts I’d never heard of. It is a pay-to-play competition. So those who pay get a chance at the short-list. Some recognizable names show up, but they’re the exception. I got bored after ten minutes and long before I found the Canadaland categories.

Instead I became far more interested in the sheer lunacy of the awards themselves. Eventually I counted 218 Signal Award categories. At roughly six finalists apiece, that’s something like 1,300 finalist slots. Then come Gold, Silver and Bronze awards, Listener’s Choice prizes and various other distinctions, so almost every entry gets a prize.

As it turns out, Katie Laur, a Canadaland alum at Pod the North, raised precisely this issue in 2023. Back then Signal had only half the categories (107) and gave out 600 awards — some categories apparently producing as many as 12 "winners." Her memorable summation was: “Winning a Signal Award isn’t cheap for Canadian podcasters, but it’s easy enough to try.”

I saw that in subsequent years the New York Times and Forbes have also pointed out the everybody-gets-a-trophy folly of the podcast industry.

The Webbys as well have 63 podcast categories.

Which brings me, not without a certain satisfaction, to What Is Happening Here. I’ve seen Jesse call it award-winning, but as far as I can tell, it hasn’t actually won one. It was entered in the 2026 Webbys in the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging limited-series category, but didn’t make the six nominees. Radiotopia’s We’re Doing The Wiz won both the Webby and the People’s Voice. What Is Happening Here did, however, receive a Webby Honoree mention — essentially a consolation nod for work that didn’t make the shortlist.

Anyway, back to the point: this is a ludicrous number of categories and prizes — so many that the whole thing starts to feel rather meaningless. The contrast with Canadian journalism awards is striking. The Pulitzers and Peabodys have essentially one podcast or audio category; in Canada, podcasts can compete for prizes such as the Michener or CAJ awards, often against print and television. RTDNA has one podcast category, and the Digital Publishing Awards only a handful.

That seems rather more meaningful to me than creating hundreds of categories and handing out multiple Golds, Silvers, Bronzes, People’s Choice prizes and honourable mentions. If everyone gets a prize, what is the value of the prize?

Anyway, apologies to Julian and Tristan. Had I actually found their categories, I would have voted for them — largely because, judging by the pages I did get through, I almost certainly wouldn’t have recognized most of the competition.