328: Canadaland Platforms Antivax Grifter

Conspirituality

The episode examines the professional evolution of journalist Jesse Brown, tracing his journey from a respected media critic at Canadaland to a platformer for

Key takeaways

• Jesse Brown's Canadaland transitioned from a media criticism outlet to a platform for science-denying narratives.
• The 'Allison Inquiry' utilized official-looking government settings to lend unearned legitimacy to unofficial vaccine injury claims.

Main topics

• Jesse Brown and Canadaland's evolution
• Dr. Peter McCullough's medical misinformation tactics

Notable quotes

He was the doctor who almost got Joe Rogan cancelled.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a warning about how the erosion of journalistic

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Hi, I'm Alex Goldman. You may know me as the host of Reply All, but I'm done with that. I'm doing something else now. I've started a new podcast called Hyperfixed. On every episode of Hyperfixed, listeners write in with their problems and I try to solve them. Some massive and life-altering, and some so minuscule it'll boggle your mind. No matter the problem, no matter the size, I'm here for you. That's Hyperfixed, the new podcast from Radiotopia. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts or at hyperfixedpod.com. Speaker 4 (0:48) where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism. I'm Derek Barris. I'm Matthew Remsky. I'm Julian Walker. You can find us collectively on Instagram at ConspiratualityPod. You can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon at patreon.com slash conspiratuality. You can also grab our Monday bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions. As independent media creators, we really appreciate your support. Speaker 5 (1:29) Conspirituality 328, Canada Land, Platforms, Antivax, Grifter. In 2013, businessman-turned-independent journalist Jesse Brown launched Canada Land as a podcast focused on media criticism. He grew up the business to include many other podcasts, creating his own small media empire. Then, October 7th happened, and things took a turn. Recently, he hosted anti-vax contrarian Dr. Peter McCullough in what he claims was a focus on media, but which really turned into a science-denying shitshow. We've covered McCullough for years, especially since becoming chief medical officer of Supplement Grifters, the wellness company. There's a lot to understand about his media tactics, which we're going to dive into in segments two and three. But first, Matthew fills us in on the rise and stumble. of his fellow Canadians' media journey. Speaker 6 (2:29) Okay, Jesse Brown. Jesse is a Toronto guy like me. He's about five years younger. I was aware of him as a media personality in the mid-2000s when he was on a show on the CBC called The Contrarian, so put a pin in that about the CBC. Just as I was aware of Avi Lewis also working at the CBC at the same time doing a show called The Big Picture, put a pin in that as well. And for me, these two were both center-left, affable guys who helped generate a kind of plucky, you know, we're Gen X and we're starting to adult vibe in national broadcasting at the time. I didn't know that he had journalism potential and then chops until he became the CBC's nemesis, breaking the story in 2014. about CBC anchor Peter Mansbridge. So for the Americans in the audience, you can think of a Canadian Dan Rather, something like that. Mansbridge got paid to speak at a 2012 conference of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. And so Brown broke that story. And that was a big sort of climate change colluding with national media corruption story that led to the CBC tightening its rules on paid speaking. But later that year, his star really shot up after spending months investigating sexual assault allegations against CBC radio host and former pop star Gian Gomeschi and allegations that the Crown Corporation knew about Gomeschi's predatory behavior for years and, you know, covered things up, ran cover for him, looked the other way, that sort of thing. Brown co-published that story with Kevin Donovan at the National Daily Paper, the Toronto Star. But in a book that Brown published in 2016 about the investigation, Donovan wrote this about a conversation that he had with the newspaper's lawyer, Burt Bruiser. Quote, Jesse Brown was eager to publish a story, but I was not. How's it going with Brown? Bruiser asked. It's not a seamless partnership, but I suppose they never are. He's a sentence finisher, for one thing. A what? You know, when you ask someone a question and they're struggling for an answer and you know that that struggle will bring gold so you keep your mouth shut, Jesse's one of those guys who finishes the sentence and cuts off the thought. Speaker 4 (4:54) That's really interesting because he does that with McCullough, what I clipped. Like, I just noticed that he kind of preempted McCullough a few times and I was kind of annoyed by that. characteristic. That's really fascinating. Speaker 6 (5:08) Yeah. So we'll hear those clips. Did it go in the direction of, well, Brown is trying to guide him somewhere or he's trying to guess at what the end of the sentence is or? Speaker 4 (5:18) Brown, as you'll hear, he didn't just let McCullough roll over him. He pushed back, but he kept being like, you're my guest and I trust you. And so whenever McCullough started biting back a bit. Brown would jump in and say, no, no, no, that's not what I, you know, that sort of vibe. And that's how he was finishing. But McCullough would start to say something and he would be like, no, no, no, the lab leak. I agree with that. That sort of attitude. Oh, Speaker 6 (5:44) instead of just letting him air it out. Yes. Right. And I mean, this is a really important comment about a series of sexual assault allegations, right? Because, you know, they're talking to people who. had traumatic experiences and are trying to recover the memories and are trying to figure out who to trust and talking about it. And occasionally, you know, and I have this experience from my own reporting in that milieu, occasionally, um, you can actually, you know, almost, um, gain a certain amount of unearned trust by helping a person tell their story. In a way that may not be accurate. And Donovan's sort of like pause, like, you know, I'm going to let this person just say exactly what they're going to say and it's going to unfold in the moment. That older school form of journalism, or I guess just good school of journalism, is it actually leaves, can leave people vulnerable. It can leave people out to dry. You know, the journalist is not giving away what their actual sort of, you know, allegiance is or whether they have one at all. Speaker 4 (6:49) Yeah, that's how I was trained. And I, I sometimes to a fault when I do interviews, I let people drone on too long at times. But I truly feel like if they're mid-thought, I want them to complete it. And I know I have more editing on the back end and that's fine. But that is how I train. Leading someone is just, it can lead to a lot of dangerous territory. Speaker 6 (7:12) Yeah. You know what you do do, Derek, is that if you do let somebody go on, what I've noticed, and I think this is very effective, is that you have a subject change or turn or pivot ready, right? So you can, you know, it's like you're ready to help people move on. So yeah, there's many ways of doing it, but I thought this was an interesting comment. Okay. So in the midst of all of this, his emerging sort of independent journalism career, Brown is also getting his own independent platform off the ground. It's called Canada Land, and it starts out as a media criticism outlet, which, you know, there's nothing really like that in Canada at the time. But eventually he grows it to a listener and ad funded operation with a unionized staff by 2020 and a masthead count of 28 people at its peak in 2024. And he used that firepower for a lot of good things, including producing a series called Thunder Bay. which was on the deaths of First Nations youth in Northern Ontario and how police and prosecutors failed their families. The Atlantic named it one of the best 50 podcasts of 2018 and Crave adapted it as a documentary series in 2023. Speaker 5 (8:23) So Matthew, I'm just becoming aware of this guy through you and it seems like his career has been pretty patchy, but he has his moments where he's kind of acclaimed as doing some good work and then these other moments where there's... maybe more behind the scenes stuff of like, well, he's not a great interviewer and he maybe has some of these tendencies, but I'm also hearing like, of course, because of what we cover, this gradual sort of move further and further into independent contrarianism. Yeah. Speaker 6 (8:51) Yeah. And I would say too, that, that this, I don't think a lot of people are aware of this comment from Donovan. And for the most part, his early career was dominated by this public perception of, oh, this is a. This is a good independent source, right? And we're going to trust him, especially on the progressive side of things. Well, then October the 7th hits. And in the immediate aftermath, Jesse Brown focused on sharing coverage of some anti-Semitic attacks. So these are things like a rabbi in Montreal reported receiving a threatening phone call from an anti-Zionist. And there was an attempted nighttime firebombing at a synagogue also in Montreal. But then in November, so this is a month on from October the 7th, anti-genocide protesters vandalized the flagship store of the Indigo Books Corporation down on Bloor Street West. It's right in the middle of downtown. They were protesting CEO Heather Reisman, who co-founded something called the Hesseg Foundation for Lone Soldiers. And this gives post-secondary scholarships to IDF veterans who don't have family support in Israel. But Brown's tweet was, Jewish-owned bookstore vandalized. And that set off a wave of these inflammatory comparisons between anti-genocide protests and things like Kristallnacht. So Speaker 5 (10:15) there's two interesting details that I'm curious about here, Matthew. One is... Yeah, it seems like that foundation actually gives scholarships to people who are not born in Israel who volunteer to go and be in the IDF. And that's why they don't then have, you know, family support in Israel and then want to go to university. So it's kind of incentivizing people saying, hey, that's like the GI Bill if you go. And fighting the IDF, you'll get a scholarship. Speaker 6 (10:39) People will say it's like a recruitment corporation for the IDF that is operating in our country. Yeah. Speaker 5 (10:47) And then the other is, you know, we are just about a month out from October 7th. There are some anti-Semitic, you know, attacks and incidents going on in Canada. And by all accounts, those have increased dramatically over the last few years. And they particularly spiked at the end of 2023, right after. Those attacks. And so it's, you know, it's tender territory for a lot of Jews. And the Kristallnacht comparison is because the vandalizing of that store actually happens on the anniversary of Kristallnacht. So that's maybe just unfortunate timing for those protesters, right? Speaker 6 (11:21) So, yeah, very complicated origins of the claims and counterclaims. And then they accelerate, right? Because there are dozens of similar and, you know, as I said, accelerating instances that follow. And I'll post in the show notes the journalism that tracks how Brown sort of navigated this. But the upshot is that he really became one of the leading pro-Israel, anti-Zionism is a hate movement voices in the country. In September, and it cost his business too, because in September of 2024, his fellow hosts, so there's a roster of hosts, one of them was Justin Ling, who invited tech reporter Paris Marks onto an episode. And Marks noted that Canada shared responsibility for Palestinian deaths through arms sales to Israel. This is a very defensible position. The arms sales are a fact. And he used the word genocide. And then Brown in post cut the remarks, and that triggered a real exodus of staff. But Brown is undeterred. He platformed Israeli Ambassador Ido Moed without pushing back on any of the common Israeli talking points. The union had already publicly rebuked Brown in December of 23 over claims of bias. But then after the Moed interview, there was two staffers, one of them the union president, who published a rebuttal on Canada's own site. And Brown says that he lost 9 % of his supporters after he began this focus. And then by mid-2025, the Canada land masthead was down to 14. And he's continued on the same track. The kind of person who's like fueled by the blowback and also perhaps a little bit paranoid because now there are allegations of him tracking and phishing rival journalists. And, you know, as he goes on, he never misses an opportunity to frame any, you know, anti-genocide or pro-Palestine statement or action as being anti-Semitic or potentially anti-Semitic. And then, you know, this comes to a head very recently because he attacks his former CBC contemporary and federal NDP leader and fellow Jew, Avi Lewis, husband of Naomi Klein, for this Yom Kippur statement in which... Lewis wrote, for Jewish people, the personal has always been political and the political has always been personal. This year, I'm reflecting on the fact that we failed to do our part to stop an ongoing genocide committed in our name. Now, Brown amplified a kind of wave of attacks on this tweet by saying, Avi Lewis is targeting Canadian Jews as a collective for blame, hate, and violence, and he's exploiting the holiest day of the Jewish year to do so. So, the sort of intensity of all of this really increases. And, you know, apparently he's running, you know, an independent journalism outlet at the same time. And that I think is really difficult to sustain. There's a paradox there. In my zone of the internet, Brown has achieved, you know, almost full pariah status. His quote tweet of Lewis just lines up with the most right wing and reactionary figures in Canadian media. You know, people like Ezra Levant, who gave Jordan Peterson his biggest, earliest boost. But the question is, like, how does any of this rhyme with or predict this welcoming stance he displays towards a public health contrarian like McCullough? And I can't quite figure it out except to ping that Brown has a penchant for contrarianism, for being the guy who's going to report the facts that the mainstream won't. But the political stakes are rising because an attack on somebody like Lewis. intersects with Brown boosting this fear-mongering over public health when Lewis's NDP at this point is the only political voice standing against the accelerating dismantling of universal health care under Carney. And, you know, on the local level, Brown's also making his mark on the Toronto mayoral race because he was tapped by the Jewish lawyers of Canada to moderate a candidate's debate on rising anti-Semitism. But the problem is... that Brown was proposed to be the moderator, but he'd already been on social media accusing the incumbent mayor, Olivia Chow, she's also an old-time NDP member, of letting Toronto become, quote, a global capital of anti-Semitism, unquote, which is absurd in my view and, you know, makes me wonder why she declined to appear. But the stakes here are that Chow's main rival, This is Brad Bradford, who's my former counselor, is aligned with the conservative premier, Doug Ford, who was pretty good on COVID during the height of the pandemic, even though he has an anti-vax constituency or part of it is. But in the larger picture, he's charging ahead on health care privatization and anti-public health measures like closing down safe injection sites for people with substance disabilities, many of whom are unhoused. So there's this intersection of things going on here that I think is a little bit volatile. And in the brown sphere of influence, you know, I'm seeing like this new potential coalition between hardline war hawks, Zionists, and the anti-woke conservative politics that are either dismantling health provisions or letting them fail. Speaker 6 (16:49) are willing to mobilize the grievances of pseudosciences and also a contempt for the poor to do it. Speaker 4 (17:00) The framework for this episode and also the title of the podcast episode between Brown and McCullough we're going to get to, it was something called the Allison Inquiry. And this was an unofficial four-day hearing held on Parliament Hill in Ottawa from September 8th to 11th this year. In total, roughly 50 Canadians described injuries and deaths that they attribute to COVID-19 vaccines. It was chaired by Conservative MP Dean Allison of Niagara West. Importantly, the event was not sanctioned by the federal government or any government at all, and Health Canada declined to take part. That's going to be a big part of McCullough and Brown's pushback. Before we get into that, I am not aware of who Dean Allison is. Matthew, do you know who he is or why he would chair such a hearing? Speaker 6 (17:54) I wasn't that aware of him either, except by name. So I had to look him up a little bit. And I just want to say that, you know, you described the hearing, the inquiry as an unofficial four-day hearing and unofficial in the sense that as a house member, he is allowed to sign out rooms, you know, and pay a rental fee or raise a rental fee and then host things in them and use the facilities and, you know, hire the workers who do all of that stuff. And then, you know,