Antifascist Dad Podcast

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...

Norwegian kickboxer Maren Forsberg works as a self-defense trainer focused on building antifascist courage and resilience for women, queer, and trans people. I spoke with her about her path from childhood play-fighting with her jiu-jitsu dad through national-level kickboxing competition, to coaching survivors of violence and trauma.

What is the freeze response? How can martial training recalibrate it? Why is fascist aggress...

In this coda to my conversation with Serena Purdy, I track the layered history of Kensington Market through the metaphor of the palimpsest, the medieval manuscript practice of writing over earlier texts that never fully disappear.

Indigenous territory through colonial land seizure. Victorian working-class housing. Jewish Bundist labour militancy. Successive immigrant waves, encampment clearings, and the CBC sitcom that converted a ...

I sit down with Nikolas Barry-Shaw, researcher and trade and privatization campaigner for the Council of Canadians, to break down how Alberta's Bill 11 is dismantling Canada's public healthcare system, with the help of an insurgent private insurance campaign.

Manulife, Canada Life, and Sun Life control two thirds of Canada's $66 billion private health benefits market. These behemoths helped draft Danielle Smith's signature legislat...

A coda to my conversation with Richard Gilman-Opalsky around Gabriel Rockhill's new book, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism. It's a reflection on what Rockhill's viral success tells us about how leftists manage feelings of loss and betrayal — and why I think his paranoid framework, however emotionally compelling, misreads the material conditions it claims to analyze.

I trace the destruction of internationalist Marxist in...

Serena Purdy is a comparative health policy researcher at the University of Toronto and socialist candidate who ran in the recent 2025 University-Rosedale federal byelection. We talk about what the upcoming three years of Carney austerity means for healthcare and housing, how electoral organizing doubles as political education, the fight to enfranchise unhoused voters, and why Kensington Market — Serena's neighbourhood and sp...

Expanding my IG analysis of Natalie Wynn's appearance on Joshua Citarella's Doomscroll podcast — a 3-hour-and-20-minute conversation that clocked nearly 200,000 views in a week.

Rather than relitigating Wynn's political positions, I'm more interested in what the format itself reveals: two skilled cultural commentators ranging across 15 distinct knowledge domains, from political economy and psychoanalysis to media ecology and ...

Wecoming back my first return guest, philosopher and union activist Richard Gilman-Opalsky, for a deep dive into the viral controversy surrounding Gabriel Rockhill's new book Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?

Rockhill's thesis, in its simplest form, is that the smartest left intellectuals you've heard of were bought by capital to function as controlled opposition. So Richard and I work through the Frankfurt School's origins, ...

A coda to my interview with journalist and media critic Adam Johnson on how the genocide got sold. Here I zoom in on Adam's affect — the rhetorical technique he uses to puncture what I'm calling the habitus of liberal political discourse.

Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's theory of embodied social capital, I analyze two moments where institutional power reasserts itself through laughter and procedure: State Department spokesperson...

This week there's no guest — instead, I'm sharing the dedication and an introduction to Chapter Four of the Antifascist Dad audiobook, now available wherever books are sold!

Chapter Four, "Capitalism Everywhere and in Everyone," is the heart of the book's argument: that understanding capitalism's structural cruelty is foundational to recognizing fascism. I draw on David Graeber's concept of everyday communism and Marx's analy...

Following up on my conversations with Ciarra Jones and Leftie Jane by working through Jodi Dean's concept of communicative capitalism and what it means for those of us doing antifascist political work online.

I start with Marx's distinction between use value and exchange value, using my late mother's hand-knit sweater. Dean's framework pivots on this split between use and exchange, and she ties it to the contradictions of networked...

Adam Johnson is a media analyst and co-host of the podcast Citations Needed. His new book How to Sell a Genocide (Pluto Books, out now) draws on analysis of over 12,000 articles and 5,000 TV segments to document how US center-left legacy media — the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, and others — provided systematic PR cover for the genocide in Gaza.

Johnson and I dig into the quantitative evidence for asymmetric language, the...

On March 29, 2026, Avi Lewis won the federal NDP leadership on the first ballot in Winnipeg, taking 56% of the vote in a field of five candidates. This episode contextualizes this huge win for international listeners — because what just happened in Canada matters to anyone who follows democratic socialist politics anywhere.

I trace the Lewis family's roots from the Jewish Labor Bund  through to the founding of the CCF an...