Executive Director of @Wisdom2Action and @QueerMomentum and unstoppable dynamo @FaeJohnstone joins us to discuss how Sydney Sweeney's breasts fortell the death of wokeness – according to the National Post. In a column that reads like a horny Looney Tunes cartoon, Amy Hamm, who is a nurse apparently, brings the bizarre discourse around the young act…

The Big Shiny Takes Institute has returned to read a real stinker of a column by Rick Bell. Rick, a traditional dumb guy with a column, seems a little upset about how mean people are being to Calgary Chief of Police Mark Neufeld. We dig into this column (a glorified vanity piece about how the police are good, homeless people are super-criminals and…

Polite Conversations host and leading Intellectual Dark Web scholar Eiynah, a/k/a @NiceMangos, joins us to scrape the bottom of the IDW barrel. Gad Saad, who is now a National Post columnist, is a marketing professor who fashions himself as an expert in the defence of Western Civilization. He wrote a piece in the Post about how happy conservatives …

Mount Royal University academic, Al Jazeera columnist and Al Shabaka fellow Muhannad Ayyash joins us to discuss how Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek cancelled Hanukkah. Calgary pundits lost their goddam minds over Gondek's decision to back out of at a totally apolitical menorah lighting ceremony that was billed as an opportunity to demonstrate "SUPPORT F…

Chuka Ejeckam joins us again, this time to discuss the ongoing horror in Gaza and how Canadian pundits have assumed the role of IDF spokespeople. There’s no better example of this trend than Andrew Coyne, who wrote a column boasting of how little he’s learned since 9/11. Plugs and Recs UN Director for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human R…

The Big Shiny Takes Institute has returned after the editor (Eric) spent the last month traveling the world in search of the shiniest takes. It turns out they were all right here in Canada. This week we return to an old favourite, the people's champion Joe Warmington, for a column about remembering police officers who passed away this year. Before …

Jeremy and Marino are joined by The Breach co-ordinating editor Emma Paling (@emmapaling) to discuss a column from Carson Jerema, the National Post's comment editor, who in accordance with Post traditions doesn't seem to do much editing. According to Jerema, Pierre Poilievre's shrieking about the globalistsat the World Economic Forum isn't a conspi…

Things are so good in Canadian media. There's layoffs nearly every week. There's talk of the Toronto Star merging with Postmedia. The Online News Act was passed and as a result Google and Facebook are pulling Canadian news content from their platforms. (The Act isn't great and doesn't help independent media that much to begin with, but Google and F…

What do opinion columnists in this country think about strikes? Nothing worth reading on your own. In this episode the Big Shiny Takes Institute takes a look at an awful column on the PSAC strike that took place near the end of April and extended into May. The conventional wisdom of punditry was that the public would not support a public sector str…

The unthinkable has happened in Canada. A public body has offered new health recommendations and people are overreacting. How will society even function on two drinks a week? According to some, not at all. This week we are joined by author James Wilt (Drinking Up the Revolution, Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars) and co-founder of The Hoser Kevin …

The Big Shiny Takes Institute has returned! This episode, while Jeremy is in his self-imposed book-writing exile, Eric and Marino are joined by Kristen Pue and Kyla Hewson of the Pullback podcast to read a baffling column by Jesse Kline. Jesse spends valuable column space concern-trolling about the Liberal's new luxury tax on vehicles, applicable t…

Our old pal Abdul (@MarxGasol) joins us for a public policy thought experiment courtesy of UBC business lecturer Adam Pankratz in the National Post: Should we destigmatize stigma? Maybe if drug users and unhoused people simply understood that what they were doing is bad and they should feel bad, we'd all be better off! Kidding aside, this perverse …

The last Kino standing, Evan Macdonald, joins us to talk about Dr. Jordan Bernt Peterson's latest made up scandal. The College of Psychiatrists of Ontario is asking him to take social media training, because he sucks at posting. The National Post's opinion page says this the greatest injustice of our day, but do any real people actually care? Tune …

Esteemed Twitter user and Dog Island alum Andrew Neville joins us to mock one of, and I'm not mincing words here, the worst pieces we have read. The culprit? None other than our old pal, Adam Zivo. In this piece (published in the Daily Hive lol) Zivo tries to use statistics to argue that crime is out of control. The problem? It's based on an opinio…

The Big Shiny Takes Institute is back! We're joined by political researcher and new Friend of the Institute Chuka Ejeckam to read a very anti-union piece by the one and only Jesse Kline. Kline, the author of galaxy-brained takes about privatizing parks, is back and trying to frame striking workers as a malignant force threatening your children. To …

Environmental lawyer and former Liberal Party of Alberta leader David Khan joins the Institute to talk about the ongoing rehabilitation of Jason Kenney's image. National Post pundit John Ivison writes that the reason Kenney failed as Alberta premier wasn't because he was a total slimeball who pandered to the far-right but was too much of a coward t…

Luke Savage, author of the new book The Dead Center: Reflections on Liberalism and co-host of the Michael and Us podcast , joins us to read a column from ur-smug centrist and National Observer "lead columnist" Max Fawcett. In this piece, Fawcett outlines how he thinks Pierre Poilievre is attempting to appeal to the far-right (true) and far-left (lo…

The gang invites Megan Linton of the Harbinger Media Network podcast Invisible Institutions to slog through an incredibly lazy piece by Brian Lilley. It's a column that contains much hand-wringing about masks and requirements to have them. It's also basically the same as the column he wrote the week before. Also, a discussion about a certain monarc…

The Big Shiny Takes Institute has returned! This week, Eric, Marino and Jeremy are joined by Fae Johnstone (Executive Director of Wisdom2Action, writer and activist) to read some absolutely horrendous transphobia published in the National Post. The National Post, seemingly taking their cues from the transphobes down in the US and UK (TERF Island) a…

The Big Shiny Takes Institute is reporting live from the frontlines of the climate war (Eric's living room). This episode we are joined by Mitchell Thompson from PressProgress to take apart an incoherent screed written by a senior fellow of the Macdonald Laurier Institute - Jamil Jivani. The column suggests Trudeau's cultish fixation on saving the …

The boys are back with another terrible column! This week they are joined by Alex from Haus of Decline to read another awful piece by Adam Zivo in which he makes the argument to let the police march in the Toronto Pride Parade. I say he makes the argument, but really what he does is list all the very valid reasons people don't want the police there…

The Big Shiny Takes Institute has returned! Joined by Friend of the Institute Gordon Katic the boys read a particularly awful column by Vinay Menon about the aftermath of the horrific school shooting in Uvalde. Instead of having something useful to say, Vinay decided to write a column about Matthew McConaughey's moral obligation to run for presiden…

Jeremy’s Forgotten Corner co-host Scott Schmidt joins BST this week to talk about pensions and starving seniors to buy shitty fighter jets. Plugs and Recs Listen to The Forgotten Corner Go see Peace by Chocolate Jeremy - Canada’s Noxious Conservatives Are Duking It Out for Party Leadership Jared Sexton - The World They Wish To Build If you enjoyed …

If you read the latest IPCC report, you know it's time for the latest episode of Big Shiny Takes. This week, the Big Shiny Takes Institute is joined by columnist and writer David Moscrop to read an insufferably bad column from Conrad Black. Yes, we are aware that doesn't narrow it down. This temper tantrum is directed at the federal NDP and Liberal…

Good news everyone, the pandemic is over because the government said so! Everything is great! Of course, like all responsible adults, we know better than to let ourselves get tired of winning so much so we are punishing ourselves with another insipid Jon Kay column. This one was published in the Wall Street Journal. In this latest instalment of Can…

Do you hear that horrible honking sound? No my friends, that is not the sound of freedom. It's the sound of another episode of Big Shiny Takes! This week, Canadaland Commons host Arshy Mann joined us to talk about the dumbest political action in the entire world: the Trucker Convoy. This convoy, which is not astroturfed at all, is demanding that av…

It's 2022 and things are bad! We're kicking off a new year of reading bad takes with Shama Rangwala. Shama is an Assistant Professor at York University and co-host of Replay, a new podcast on the Harbinger Media Network. The column we read this week is one of the dimmer takes in the National Post's year-end series called The Capitalist Manifesto, a…

Nora Loreto makes her triumphant return to BST and she's got a new book! As the title suggests, Spin Doctors: How Media and Politicians Misdiagnosed the COVID-19 Pandemic deals with how the media created a sea of confusion that obscured the major fault lines of the pandemic. To illustrate Nora's case, we brought an absolutely reprehensible column f…

That is the question asked by a column written by Diane Francis in the Financial Post that talks about the risks Covid-19 and one Vladimir Putin both pose to our beloved economy. Yes that is a stupid question. But this is a very stupid column. Marino, Jeremy and Eric read this column on Russia's involvement in Ukraine written by the impartial obser…

The Big Shiny Takes Institute is back with a great episode with the incredible Aaron Giovannone. We read a lot of terrible columns, but we rarely get to take a deep dive into the psyche of one of the country's more established columnists. Aaron brought an essay Rosie Dimanno wrote in the late 90's about growing up in Little Italy in Toronto. We go …

We are back, and have an episode for you that we recorded in person! Jeremy came back to the very nice and fun city of Toronto, Ontario, Canada for a visit, so instead of hanging out we recorded an all-timer episode. We were joined by the amazing Bronwen Tucker (@bronwentucker) from Climate Justice Edmonton and the incredible Stefan Hostetter (@Ste…

Future Alberta Senator Duncan Kinney (@duncankinney), whom you also may know from fellow Harbinger pod The Progress Report, joins us to talk about the hellish nightmare of Alberta's COVID response. ICUs are overflowing, people are dying, but the Edmonton Journal's David Staples — always with his finger on the pulse — wants to know what this means f…

In case you missed the 12 hour livestream telethon to raise money for Harbinger Media, here's the audio for our part of the event! Big Shiny Takes (minus Eric, he was at a wedding lol) took part in this great event. Our friends from PressProgress Stephen Magusiak and Emily Leedham joined us to read a column arguing for the platforming of fascists i…

It's our opinion at the Big Shiny Takes Institute that billionaires have it too hard. Yeah sure they have unlimited access to resources, are able to shape policy to benefit themselves and have the power of small nation-states – but have you considered how difficult it must be to have someone be mean to you on the internet? Paris Marx (@parismarx), …

Head to patreon.com/bigshinytakes to unlock this and all of our other bonus episodes for as little as $3 a month! Rob Rousseau joins us to read one of the most fun columns we have had the pleasure of reading in this very grim timeline. We go through Josh Freed's column in the Montreal Gazette on why customers should be paid by supermarkets for usin…

This week we've got Rob Rousseau (@robrousseau) on the show to talk about the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan after taking a detour through volunteer scabs, Calgary Herald ace Licia Corbella and who Rob thinks will take home the gold in our Worst Pundit contest. Former British soldier David Mack writes in the Globe and Mail that the U.S. must stay…

Aliya Pabani of the Encampment Support Network, and host of We Are Not the Virus, joins us to talk about Toronto Mayor John Tory's "reasonable, firm, but compassionate" war on homeless encampments in the city. We come by this through a column from newly-minted National Post ghoul Adam Zivo, who writes that the violent displacement of unhoused peopl…

Head to patreon.com/bigshinytakes to unlock this and all of our other bonus episodes for as little as $3 a month! Jeremy, Marino and Eric continue their conversation with Erica Ifill for a hilarious read of Jon Kay's latest anti-diversity screed. Dog Shampoo Boy scolds Sobeys for its "Woke Initiatives," then he gets distracted and starts rambling a…

Erica Ifill (@wickdchiq) of the Bad + Bitchy podcast joins us to talk about ex-CBC host Wendy Mesley's woe-is-me shtick in the Globe and Mail after she got canned for getting caught saying the n-word repeatedly over two years. How many times over her 40-year career did she say it without getting caught? Melsey argues that firing her alone won't sol…

We're back for hopefully the last time reading one of Rex Murphy's ramblings. Literally the day after a Muslim family was murdered by a white supremacist, Rex is here to tell us about the real scourge of our time — anti-white racism. While he denied last year that there was systemic racism in Canada, he appears to have changed his mind. We also tal…

Canadian media does a lot of things poorly. Its cowardice when it comes to talking about Palestine is right at the top of the list. We’re joined by our Palestinian friend Hammam Farah (@HumHum83) and our Israeli friend Eytan Tobin (@RabbiDieHardman) to talk about how Israel, like Canada, is a fake ass genocidal settler state. For those who haven’t …

Abdul Malik (@socialistraptor) makes his triumphant return to the Big Shiny Takes Institute to talk about two simpletons writing in newspapers to let the public know that diversity is bad, actually. One columnist is Intellectual Dark Web C-lister, furry enthusiast and Jon Kay podcast co-host Dr. Debra Soh, who's writing in the Globe and Mail to war…

The Big Shiny Guests keep on coming. This time we’ve got famed musician, podcaster and poster Dan Boeckner, joining us to talk about a little country called China, specifically Canadian pundits’ obsession with it. First up is a piece in the Globe and Mail from Conservative foreign affairs critic Michael Chong, who’s very not mad about China sanctio…

PULL THE EMERGENCY BRAKE, IT'S TIME FOR ANOTHER EPISODE OF BIG SHINY TAKES! Marino, Eric and Jeremy are joined by the great Nora Loreto to review columns by two incredibly talentless hacks: Konrad Yakabuski and Kelly McParland. Yakabuski covers Quebec in a completely addled column which is both infuriating and disorienting. He manages to jam in ref…

John Robson tried to write some lyrics He was so incensed he wouldn't even hear it The issue at hand? Cancel culture of course He shouted so loud that his voice became hoarse "They're coming for Seuss, the woke crowd, the leftists" "These books are such classics, I'm left the bereft-ist" But one simple truth escaped the columnist's glare Nobody wit…

Head to patreon.com/bigshinytakes to unlock this and all of our other bonus episodes for as little as $3 a month! We decided to unlock this bonus episode, because everyone deserves to celebrate Rush Limbaugh's death. Finally, a representative of a modern organization (the Catholic Church) we can trust to cover current events weighs in with a terrib…

The boys are back with two trash columns. One is written by a pretentious hack desperately shoehorning disjointed allusions to ephemera rattling around his decaying brain in yet another unfocused rant ending with him shouting about climate change not being real. The other is written by an unpretentious hack who actually thinks that COVID quarantine…

Our pal Elaine Pauls (@heylaineys) joins us again to talk about Derek Sloan's donation from white supremacist douche Paul Fromm. Former UCP bad boy Derek Fildebrandt, who was kicked out of the party after getting caught renting out his publicly-funded Edmonton apartment on AirBnB, doing a hit-and-run, and illegally hunting, to talk about how Derek …

New year, new theme music, new BST! We've got a couple 2020 in review pieces that suggest maybe the hell year we're all traumatized from wasn't so bad after all. We start off with Never Trumper-turned-Trumper Hugh Hewitt's piece in the Washington Post, which contends that, sure, there was the whole pandemic thing, but there were also some bright sp…

It's a Christmas miracle — a new BST episode right on schedule! We start off with a little apertif in the form of BST favourite Barbara Kay and her review of the Queen's Gambit. It turns out, a fictional show isn't entirely accurate. But Babs says this is because women can't play chess. Then, special guest Clinton Hallahan (@StoicRomance) of Albert…