Antifascist Dad Podcast

A close reading of "Elbows Up" — the hockey slogan Mark Carney skated on to sell his Trump response policies over the past year. It began on March 1, 2025. Mike Myers mouthed the phrase on SNL, inspiring former NDP MP Charlie Angus to publish a galvanizing Substack two days later tracing it to Gordie Howe. The slogan conscripts the legacy of a working-class Saskatchewan kid who was underpaid for d...

I first came across Ciarra Jones on TikTok as @thegardeningtheologian , and I was moved by her eloquent, queer, and plant-based antifascism. She grew up in the Assemblies of God Pentecostal Church, but through her studies at UC Berkeley and Harvard Divinity School she developed a public theology grounded embodiment. We talk about what public theologians actually do, how dying-to-the-flesh theology...

In part two of my conversation with Mona Haydar, we move from the theological architecture of Islamic mutual aid into the lived political pressure of Muslim identity in America. We dig into the good Muslim/bad Muslim trap that Mahmood Mamdani diagnosed: the demand to perform as secular, unthreatening, and patriotic. Mona holds to the view that the post-9/11 reckoning ultimately drove communities t...

I sit down with Brent Patterson, a veteran anti-militarism organizer whose four decades of work span prison abolition, Indigenous solidarity, and campaigns against state violence. We examine the Carney government's remilitarization agenda. It is not a response to genuine security threats, but as a coherent economic strategy dressed in the language of sovereignty and national pride. We look at the...

In part two of my conversation with Jasmine Peardon, we trace her path from UBC to federal public policy to a master's at Concordia, and the radicalization that travel through the Global South and October 7 accelerated. We share a moment of recognition about India: how white spiritual tourists and white activists alike can move through a country absorbing deference without understanding colonialis...

I've wanted to understand the radical flank of Islam for a long time, and I feel a little ashamed it took me this long. In this episode I talk with Mona Haydar — rapper, poet, chaplain, and Muslim activist — about the theological architecture of Islamic mutual aid: zakat, the mandatory redistribution of wealth; sadaqa, voluntary charity rooted in truthfulness; and taqwa, the reverence and permeati...

In Toronto, the morning after US strikes ignited oil depots across Tehran. I reach for Michael Parenti. His core insistence is that fascism is not madness or mob psychology but a calculated counter-revolution: deployed when socialist and labour movements threaten property relations, used to crush unions, criminalize minorities, and restore profitability through repression. It puts the irrational b...

Canada's proto-fascist scorecard is racking up big numbers. Jasmine Peardon — organizer, policy researcher, and New Democratic Party Socialist Caucus candidate for party president — joins me to discuss this critical turning point. We look at Mark Carney's Davos speech as a case study in political dishonesty. We trace the NDP's founding compromise: born in 1961 as a merger with the anti-capitalist...

What does it mean to hold both clear-eyed despair and committed action at the same time? I trace the antifascist axiom "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will" through my own life — my late mother's instinctive class consciousness, my writing teacher Luciano's daily creative discipline, and my early Buddhist practice of contemplating impermanence. I unpack Eve Sedgwick's concept of paran...

Sitting down today with racial equity educator and spiritual director Michelle Cassandra Johnson about what she calls the “hierarchy of bodies” — the long-standing social logic that determines whose lives are protected, valued, and believed. Against mainstream claims that rising authoritarianism is shocking or unprecedented, Michelle argues that today’s crises reflect very old patterns of dominati...

Back with Michelle, and pivoting from diagnosis to practice. We get a powerful story from her anti-racism work about calling someone into accountability without shaming or discarding them — and what real healing can look like in the room. We explore how multiracial, multicultural communities of care are built on the ground through shared language, listening, and repair. Why is the backlash against...

Back for Pt 2 of my conversation with Blair Hodges—Salt Lake City journalist, former Mormon insider, and dad to a trans kid—by digging into Mormon masculinity. Blair explains how Mormon emotional vulnerability descends from early charismatic revival culture, but also how a rising alt-right strain inside the church is pushing toward a more punitive “muscular” Christianity. On parenting: why childre...

Welcoming friend and colleague and fellow dad Brad Onishi (Straight White American Jesus, Preparing for War), to explore the parallels between evangelical conversion and fascist recruitment. Brad was a convert to evangelicalism at 14 and shares how teenage anxiety, alienation, and the search for belonging made him vulnerable to a worldview that offered refuge, certainty, and an enemy to fight. Bot...

Part 2 with Brad Onishi. What interrupts extremist pipelines? Brad dishes on his Japanese American family and how multicultural, multiethnic community might inoculate against fascist identity formation. I discuss the flip side: whiteness as the erasure of roots, the vulnerability of deracinated teens searching for story What are the healthier forms of religion—traditions that invite complexity, my...

What happens when a person we admire is implicated in networks of abuse? How can kids navigate guilt by association without sliding into cynicism or spectacle? Using Deepak Chopra’s Epstein emails to Jeffrey Epstein, we can see what charisma offers people in pain, what red flags look like, and how media culture trains us to confuse popularity with truth. Finally: how much apocalyptic evidence do w...

I’m joined by my friend Blair Hodges—Salt Lake City journalist, nonprofit comms pro, and dad to a trans kid—for a conversation that starts with his powerful public testimony opposing Utah’s anti–gender-affirming-care bills. Blair unpacks what it’s like raising a trans child in a “blue dot” city under a hostile state supermajority, and how the so-called “Utah Way” pairs polite PR with targeted crue...

I'm back with Part 2 of my conversation with Dale Beran, turning to what happened to the people he followed while reporting on early 4chan, and what it means to grow out of a life shaped by anonymous online worlds.  Some were able to step away as their offline lives improved, but others remained tied to screens in cycles of  addiction. I also share how Dale’s work has helped me talk with my own ki...

An audio essay on how to talk with young people about the Epstein files from an antifascist perspective. How to hold questions without amplifying sensationalism. How to name harms amidst the absence of accountability. Also: fragmented Epstein File discourse could trigger a QAnon-style wave on the left, unless adults provide steadier sources, context, and care. Notes:  Occult Features of Anarchism...

As he laid it out at Davos, Carney’s prescription for avoiding fascist chaos is more of the same conservative capitalism that accelerates fascism: tax cuts, deregulation, fast-tracked investment in oil, AI, and minerals, and new trading blocs with the more stable “middle powers.” He’s not talking about or taking action domestically to support labour unions, redistribution, social safety nets, or a...

Writer Dale Beran visits to discuss the far-right online subcultures he documented in his excellent 2019 book, It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office . I ask whether the cohort of alienated, terminally online young men still exists and whether it lost power after gaining it. TLDR? The specific 4chan generation has aged or splintered, but th...

I'm back with Rev. Angela Denker, discussing antifascist faith under pressure. Angela names the misogyny threaded through white Christian nationalism—from “submission” theology to the contempt aimed at women who refuse it—and explains why the killing of Renee Good landed as specifically gendered terror. We talk about the double-bind of ministry: how churches can be both sites of harassment and, in...

Carney’s recent speech at Davos really is as important as everyone’s saying it is. But in my view, it’s not important for the obvious truth we just heard him confess, but for the lessons it provides about the deep contradictions and hypocrisies of liberal politics, and how when it pretends to stand up to fascism it’s really asking that the capital order return to an era of better optics. Carney to...

Picking it back up with historian of fascism Craig Johnson with the question of why fascism can feel cool—especially online—and how we might interrupt that appeal without fighting on fascism’s terms. But fascism isn't just pretending to be cool: it’s popular, aesthetic, and subcultural, and it sells itself through speed, power, transgression, and a sense of newness. There's a tactical dilemma: how...

I’m joined by Rev. Angela Denker,  Lutheran minister, journalist, and mom in Minneapolis, as the city groans under intensified ICE activity. We discuss realities on the ground for families and schools, how she talks with her own kids about fear and safety, and why she believes clear, steady adult context matters in a fragmented media world. As a minister, Denker's visitation and public theology as...

I'm back with Sarah Jaffray to probe the aesthetics of fascism and the politics of cultural memory. We talk about how fascist movements rely on a triumphalist victim complex that cannot tolerate vulnerability or disability, and how this connects to the Nazi impulse to purify society through the language of degeneracy and the “enemy within.” Of course we also ping Hitler’s own frustrated artistic a...