Antifascist Dad Podcast

Part 2 of my convo with Nathan Evans Fox, going deeper into the psychological and theological architecture of what JD Vance is actually doing in his new memoir, and what it costs him and everyone else to do it.

Nathan reads Communion as a work of apologetics built on the logic of accumulation: prestige, then money, then virtue, with each step more abstract and less obviously empty than the last. Nothing is enough for this guy.

He t...

I sit down with socialist singer-songwriter Carsie Blanton to explore how unstructured freedom — from schooling, the music industry, and institutional religion — became the soil for her political and artistic radicalization. A stack of jazz records from her grandfather led to countless gigs, poltical organizing, and eventually to the Global Sumud Flotilla, where she and her comrades used dialectical materialism to asses...

Picking up a on thread from my interview with Nora Loreto interview: a coda on the tension between zooming in on the daily news cycle and zooming out to a coherent analytical framework.

I draw on Shanto Iyengar's 1991 research on episodic versus thematic framing in television news, and on Wendy Brown's concept of responsibilism, tracing how mainstream media's default mode — treating each crisis as a disconnected event —...

JD Vance's Communion presents itself as a spiritual memoir but functions as a rebranding operation: It's the same narcissistic trick he played with Hillbilly Elegy.

Who better to sit down with to sort this out than Nathan Evans Fox — country musician, seminary graduate, board-certified hospital chaplain, and actual Appalachian? His review of this gnarly book is one of the sharpest pieces of cultural criticism to emerge from t...

Years ago, I failed to understand my autistic son's needs. Instead of fully taking in his distress at school, I projected my own story, values, and experience on him. He'll manage. He'll get used to it. He'll toughen up.

What does this have to do with a British judge sentencing Palestine Action activists as terrorists? More than I expected.

In this coda to my interview with Lisa Matthews (stepmother of Finn Collins, facing t...

Today I sit down with Nora Loreto, a Quebec City-based journalist and labour organizer, to discuss her five-volume Canada in Decline series — a forensic history of the dismantling of Canada's social democracy by the forces of capital.

We discuss her wide-ranging, independent beat: Volume 1, The Social Safety Net (2024), traces the forty-year erosion of the welfare state. Volume 2, Corporate Control (2025), documents the priva...

Antonio Gramsci, writing in a fascist prison in the early 1930s, distinguished between wars of position—the slow struggle over culture, values, and consent—and wars of maneuver, or direct confrontation with capitalist power.

It's useful for thinking through something I've been sitting with: the contradiction between feeling genuinely nourished by Pope Leo XIV's liberation theology posting on Twitter and his AI encyclica...

In August 2024, six Palestine Action activists breached Elbit Systems UK's newly built facility in Filton, Bristol, and used sledgehammers to sabotage drones, computers, and manufacturing equipment. Elbit is Israel's largest private defence contractor, and supplies armaments to the IDF used in their genocidal attack on Gaza. Twenty-five activists were charged under a "joint enterprise" provision in relation to the direct action. Fo...

Part 2 of my convo with Dean Dettloff and Matt Bernico of the Magnificast podcast, digging into the forensic heart of their great new book, Enough is Enough: Degrowth, Capitalism, and Liberation Theology.

We work through Walter Benjamin's fragmentary essay on capitalism as religion, the liberation theology critique of GDP as a modern idol, what degrowth actually looks like in practice, and the difference between retreat and...

Today I'm sitting down with Emily Lowan, leader of the BC Green Party and the first GenZ leader of a major political party in Canada. Emily was radicalized at 15 during the 2016 US election while on a cross-country school trip. She built a decade of movement work through climate organizing, Wet'suwet'en solidarity, and pipeline fights, then won an insurgent party leadership campaign in two weeks at age 25. We talk about heat domes,...

Following up on my conversation with Toronto comedian Nour Hadidi: I'm haunted by one detail from the harassment campaign against her.

It's about how she posted the clip of Al Jazeera bureau chief Wael Al-Dahdouh refusing Christiane Amanpour's question, "Do you wish Hamas had never committed October 7th?" by dismantling its premise entirely.

I look at Adam Johnson's research on the "Do you condemn Hamas" formula as a...

I'm joined today by Dean Dettloff and Matt Bernico, co-hosts of The Magnificast podcast and the authors of a brilliant new book, Enough is Enough: Degrowth, Capitalism, and Liberation Theology, out now from Fortress Press.

We start with some basics: what the Magnificat is and why secular leftists should care about it, what "enough is enough" actually means across its political, economic, and spiritual dimensions, and w...

Update episode on the Carney government's national AI strategy, "AI for All," released June 4, 2026. The document's most-used word is "sovereignty" — appearing 51 times — while "emissions," "climate," "consent," "Palantir," and "Amazon" appear nada.

I trace the political etymology of "sovereignty" from First Nations liberation discourse through working-class populism to its current deployment by the Davos class as brand...

I sit down with Jordanian-Canadian comedian, writer, and podcaster Nour Hadidi to talk about standup as survival, solidarity with Gaza, and what it means to do political comedy in a liberal industry that wants your watermelon emoji but not your actual politics. We discuss her journey from a finance 9-5 to standup, to standup in a radical register that helped her discover who she was and what her values are. She also tells few jokes...

Jonathan Haidt recently padded his bestselling career by telling worried parents that their kids' anxiety was caused by smartphones and social media — and that the fix was bans.

I always thought the argument was depoliticized, correlational, and suspiciously convenient for parents who'd rather blame a device than interrogate the world they've handed their children. Now the research is catching up.

Psychologist Jen Lumanlan's ...

Joining me today is E.V. Debs (not their real name!) an antifascist community organizer from Seattle to talk about their new tabletop game, Antifascist Tooth Fairy, now getting funded on Kickstarter for a November release.

Throw hands, collect teeth, manage charges, build mutual aid networks. It's a ton of fun as it guides players through the moral, legal, and strategic weeds of community self-defense. We cover the game's origins, ...

I wanted to trace the century-old roots of Maren Forsberg's antifascist self-defense work, so I dug into three overlapping histories.

First: the German Bund's use of Körperbildung — body education through eurythmics — as both a resistance philosophy and a cover for anti-Nazi organizing.

Second: the Jewish Labour Bund's Morgenstern athletic club in interwar Poland, which united boxing, gymnastics, swimming, and internati...

Diana Chan McNally has been unhoused, a teen mother, a museum curator, a college instructor, a harm reduction worker, a frontline homelessness advocate, and a DJ. Now she's running for Toronto City Council in Ward 4 Parkdale–High Park. 

We trace the through-line connecting all of it: organizing, interpreting, and showing up for people. Diana explains why governments allow homelessness to persist and grow, what our laws c...

In a coda to episode 32, I reflect on what socialized medicine means not as culture or sentiment but as raw material security and the basis for working-class solidarity.

I draw on Beatrice Adler-Bolton's analysis of American healthcare as organized abandonment, and personal accounts of a near-fatal DVT and an emergency C-section that would have meant financial ruin for us in the US.

But where I see Tommy Douglas's strategic insight...