Antifascist Dad Podcast

Artist and journalist Molly Crabapple has given more interviews about Here Where We Live Is Our Country than anyone can count. I wanted this one to drill down on the many meanings of the book's core concept: doikayt, or "hereness." This was the Jewish Labor Bund's commitment to fighting for dignity and equality where Jews already lived, as a lived practice and a counter to fascist fantasies of esc...

On the same day I spoke with João Biondi about Lula's WhatsApp army, I talked with Belgrade writer and curator Lav Mrenović about a slower revolution. On October 25, the Student List defeated Aleksandar Vučić's Serbian Progressive Party with about 52.5 percent of the vote, ending fourteen years of his bullshit rule. The Student List is a leaderless movement that grew out of the student blockades t...

In the months following Lula's second-place finish in the first round of Brazil's 2026 presidential election, a WhatsApp channel run by André Janones grew from about 50,000 followers to more than 10 million, and Lula came back to beat Flávio Bolsonaro. I talk with João Biondi, a Brasília-based writer, content creator and storytelling specialist, about what the Exército do Lula felt like from the i...

This week's Patreon coda applies Lara Sheehi's model of psychic intrusion — confusion, fear, exhaustion, and despair — to both the CASE report and the lived experience in the U of T Gaza encampment. I look at Émile Durkheim's "social effervescence," Ben Case's "contentious effervescence," Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth , and Carla Bergman and Nick Montgomery's Joyful Militancy , while tr...

Next week, from November 6 to 8, the Marxist-Leninist Alliance of Workers and Students is hosting Seeds Beneath the Snow , a three-day anti-imperialist symposium in Toronto, with an opening keynote by Ajamu Baraka. Today I sit down with AWAS founding members Sabine Fernandez, a former migrant care worker and PhD candidate in Critical Disability Studies at York University, Talia, a Master’s student...

Max Haiven's The Player and the Played: From Gamed Capitalism to 21st-Century Fascism  argues that financialization has trickled down into our personal lives, turning each of us into a speculative player in a maze of unwinnable games: education, housing, fitness, relationships. When we realize the game is rigged, we can lose our minds, but our rage can be redirected away from the ruling class and...

Michael Löwy is a veteran Marxist sociologist and ecosocialist, and a long-time scholar of revolutionary movements. I spoke with him on October 15, two days before the October 17 national mobilization in France. I asked Michael how the high school uprising compares with May 1968, and he described a mass movement that began from concrete material conditions: missing teachers, schools without furnit...

On September 18, students at a suburban Paris high school went on strike against deplorable conditions and in solidarity with their underpaid teachers. Within weeks, high school students across France were blockading their schools over faculty shortages, crumbling buildings, overloaded classes and Parcoursup, the algorithmic placement system that chooses professional pathways for them at 15. By Oc...

Another TO election episode, gearing up for October 26! Diana Yoon is running for Toronto City Council in University-Rosedale. Yoon came to tenant organizing through climate work, helping ACORN secure a climate grant to survey tenants before and after energy retrofits, and later joined the board of the Federation of Metro Tenants’ Associations. Her professional work is in co-op housing policy, inc...

Many cities on Turtle Island are hoping Mamdani fever comes to town. But Toronto is seriously considering rolling out the red carpet for a right wing populist climbing in the polls. I'm joined by Inori Roy, Features Editor at The Local, to discuss her in-depth profile of Toronto mayoral candidate Brad Bradford, published just 2 weeks before the October 26 election. We discuss her data-first method...

On September 20th, Yom Kippur, Canadian Army veteran Sean Ward opened fire outside the Sons of Jacob Synagogue in Belleville, Ontario. An hour later, and before the first news report, NDP leader Avi Lewis posted a personal prayer of atonement, reflecting on how antizionist Jews had failed to stop a genocide committed in the name of Jewish safety. I trace how pro-Israel commentators, Liberal MPs an...

My guest today is Jennie Worden, running a fantastic socialist campaign for Toronto City Council in my very own Ward 19, Beaches–East York. On the agenda: what choral music teaches about community. What tenant organizing teaches about shared struggle. Why Brad Bradford, our former councillor now running for mayor, is such a heel (my word not Jennie's), and what we have to do to repair the damage o...

With Toronto's municipal election set for October 26, I'm spending the next few weeks with local socialist candidates! First is Chiara Padovani: social worker, food bank worker, co-founder of the York South-Weston Tenant Union, and candidate in Ward 5, where she came within 94 votes of unseating Frances Nunziata in 2022. Chiara describes growing up in Mount Dennis, a social assistance system that...

I sit down with Kevin Skerrett, a pension researcher who spent thirty years as a Senior Research Officer for CUPE and co-edited The Contradictions of Pension Fund Capitalism . We trace how Canadian pension funds went from holding government bonds to becoming some of the world's most aggressive private-market investors. We start with the nineteenth-century labour movement's demand for a universal,...

Part two of my conversation with Dr. Lara Sheehi about her outstanding book From the Clinic to the Streets, focusing on how the "psychic intrusions" of confusion, fear, despair, and exhaustion function as tools of imperial and state power that  disconnect people from movements. We review a 1970  interview with Ghassan Kanafani, whose refusal to accept "dialogue" as a neutral premise models what Sh...

Since October 7th, young people who have joined antifascist and anti-genocide organizing on campus have faced one of the most disorienting accusations available: that their solidarity with Palestinians is antisemitic. This week I talk with Daniel Sailofsky, a University of Toronto prof and member of the non-Zionist Jewish Faculty Network, about what it was actually like inside the U of T encampmen...

Part two of my conversation with Ayman Makarem picks up where we left off: with Lebanon and Israel as co-developed colonial entities. We trace how the 1943 National Pact locked in a sectarian power-sharing system that functions as elite class rule dressed up as pluralism. The contradictions led to both the 1975 civil war and the 2019 uprising. We discuss Moshe Dayan, whose own words lay out, decad...

My guest today is militant Lebanese Arab clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, Dr. Lara Sheehi, here to unpack her book From the Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures . Following Frantz Fanon's decolonial legacy, Sheehi argues mainstream psychology's fixation on the nuclear family as the origin of the psyche obscures how white supremacy, settler colonialism, and capita...

Lebanon is once again on the front line of Israel's regional war, and a lot of leftist coverage, where there is any, flattens a hundred years of colonial history into campist slogans. In this episode I sit down with Ayman Makarem of Politically Depressed on YouTube— Lebanese, Druze, queer, and anti-authoritarian leftist — to slow down and build a picture of a nation where easy explanations go to d...

An excerpt from the audiobook of Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times — Chapter Eight, Friendship Is Not Easy. I'm putting this out as a companion to my interview with Carsie Blanton because she models in her touring life exactly what I'm trying to articulate in this chapter: solidarity as the antidote to the individualism capitalism enforces on artists, activis...

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. N...

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 dialectic...

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...

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 cultu...

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 (stepmoth...