Antifascist Dad Podcast

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 and the Globe and Mail linked Lewis's prayer to the shooting, even as reporting showed Ward was likely a second-wave QAnon antivax conspiracist who appeared to blame Jews for COVID.

I also look at CBC anchor Neil Herland's twisted account of a protest against Mark Regev, Public Safety Canada's new conflation of antizionism with antisemitism, and Yoni Goldstein's National Post column, which broadcast a thinly-veiled call for vigilante violence against Lewis.

If you're a progressive or leftist and you haven't yet lent a hand (in whatever way you can) to your fellow Palestinians and antizionist Jews, now's the time. Because right now, attacking critics of Israel as antisemitic is becoming indistinguishable from attacking the political alternative to capitalism and imperialism, at this precarious moment for the climate and ourselves.

Sources

Avi Lewis, Yom Kippur post on X
Quinte News, first report of the Belleville shooting, Sept 20, 8:33 pm
Global News, Man wielding shotgun opened fire at officer outside Belleville synagogue: SIU
Global News, Belleville gunman spouted COVID-19 conspiracies while in army
National Post via Yahoo, Belleville suspect "spouted" theory that blamed Jews for COVID
CBC News, Synagogue shooter's online username alluded to killing Jews
Globe and Mail, Belleville synagogue shooting was a "hate-motivated" crime, police say
Ezra Levant post on X
Mia Bloom post on X
Artur Wilczynski post on X
Vivian Bercovici post on X
CIJA post on X
CP24, NDP leader Lewis criticized for saying Jews "failed to do our part"
Robyn Urback, "Avi Lewis's foolish statement on 'Jewish people' should be disqualifying," Globe and Mail
Alex Cosh, "How Pro-Israel Voices Warped The Belleville Shooting Narrative," The Maple
Michael Geist, "The wrong target: why the CBC should be asking about the Yom Kippur protesters"
Public Safety Canada, National Commitments to Combat Antisemitism Progress Report, Summer 2026
Michael Geist, "A Definition That Meets the Moment"
Conspirituality 328: Canadaland Platforms Antivax Grifter
Canadaland, "The Allison Inquiry: Time to Take Vaccine Injuries Seriously"
Canadaland staff, "A response to Canadaland's interview with Israel's ambassador to Canada"
Toronto Star, Olivia Chow opts out of antisemitism debate
Yoni Goldstein, "Jewish law tells us how to deal with Avi Lewis," National Post via Yahoo
Charlie Angus, "National Post Crosses Line on Threat Against Lewis"
Judy Rebick, "I'm familiar with death threats. They show Avi Lewis is having an impact," The Breach
Yves Engler, "Did prominent Zionist really call for NDP leader's death?"
Times of Israel, PM's office says it's "preposterous" to say invoking Amalek was a genocide call 

Dark Mirror: A Torah View of Revenge, and its Reflection in Israeli Media During Operation Iron Swords

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 of 15 years of austerity at City Hall.

On Patreon this week is my summary of the attacks on Avi Lewis that followed his Yom Kippur post. I think it’s a crucial issue because right now, attacking critics of Israel, genocide and neocolonial brutality as antisemitic is the same thing as attacking the political alternative to capitalism and imperialism at the last moment in which we can bring the planet back from the brink.

Sources

Jennie Worden for Beaches–East York: campaign site
Beach Metro: Jennie Worden answers our question (Sept 2026)
Beach Metro: Erskine-Smith on his decision to run for Beaches–East York councillor
Toronto Life: The Good Liar: Meet Toronto's worst landlord
CP24: Owner and director of 500 Dawes Rd. fined for fire safety violations
Mayor Olivia Chow: Update on actions to protect tenants at 500 Dawes
CP24: Ford instructs Attorney General to seek injunction against Al-Quds rally
CBC: Al-Quds Day rally proceeds after judge rules against Ford government's injunction
CP24: NDP leader Lewis criticized over Yom Kippur post
CBC: Lewis says he was "absolutely not" holding all Jews responsible
CBC: Synagogue shooter's online username alluded to killing Jews, friend says
Ricochet: National Post crosses dangerous line with column on NDP leader
The Breach: I'm familiar with death threats. They show Avi Lewis is having an impact

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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 hasn't kept pace with inflation in decades, and political insiders who told her not to knock on apartment doors because tenants don't vote. She walks me through the 16-month rent strike against Dream Unlimited, the sit-in that got a senior tenant back into her home, and Ontario's Bill 60. And Chiara explains why she thinks the tenant movement is where the labour movement was a century ago. 

Bluesky: matthewremski.bsky.social

Instagram: @matthew_remski

YouTube: @antifascistdad

TikTok: @antifascistdad

Patreon: antifascistdadpodcast

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Sources 

Chiara Padovani 2026 campaign platform
Toronto and York Region Labour Council endorsement of Chiara Padovani
Toronto Integrity Commissioner report on Councillor Nunziata, July 2024
Canadian Dimension: Inside Toronto's growing tenant revolt
The Green Line: What is the Toronto Tenant Union
NOW Toronto: Over 300 Toronto tenants still on rent strike
Progressive International: Canada, How Tenants Fought Back
Toronto Tenant Union: Tenants take Barney River to the LTB
CBC News: Ontario tenants accused of arrears must pay half to raise complaints under Bill 60
NYC Mayor's Office: Rental Ripoff Report release
City Limits: 3 Takeaways from the First Rental Ripoff Report
NYC Mayor's Office: Housing Court Fast Track launch
NYC HPD: 2023 Housing and Vacancy Survey, Selected Initial Findings

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, state-provided pension, and follow the mid-century turn toward employer-specific, financialized plans in the US, before tracing the same shift through the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan and the Canada Pension Plan.

Kevin walks me through his own disillusionment negotiating joint union trusteeship in the 1990s, OMERS' role in privatizing Nova Scotia schools, and CPP Investment Board's involvement in privatizing Rio de Janeiro's water system under Bolsonaro. We close on what a $30 billion OTPP surplus could fund if fiduciary law required something other than maximum return.

Up now on Patreon: my interview with Chiara Padovani, running for Toronto City Councillor in Ward 5.

Bluesky: matthewremski.bsky.social
Instagram: @matthew_remski
YouTube: @antifascistdad
TikTok: [@antifascistdad]
Patreon: antifascistdadpodcast
Order Antifascist Dad

Kevin Skerrett, OMERS AC board bio
The Contradictions of Pension Fund Capitalism (Cornell University Press / LERA, 2018)
Kevin Skerrett interview on pension fund capitalism, rabble.ca
Chiara Padovani, 2026 campaign, Toronto & York Region Labour Council

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 Sheehi calls psychic militancy. She also reframes grieving as reality-testing and divestment from power's narrative, contrasting it with Mark Fisher's diagnosis-without-tools "capitalist realism."

Sources

Socials:

Bluesky matthewremski.bsky.social
Instagram @matthew_remski
YouTube @antifascistdad
TikTok [@antifascistdad]
Patreon antifascistdadpodcast

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 encampment — Shabbat services, multifaith prayer, Zionist agitators trying to provoke a reaction — versus how it was covered in the press.

We dig into the federal government's CASE report (Campus Antisemitism and Student Experiences), published in August. Its respondent were recruited through avowedly Zionist organizations, it had no safeguards for verifying identity, and its definitions of anti-Zionism and antisemitism were absolutely melted.

Is this conflation of terms the last rhetorical weapon defenders of a genocide have left?

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, decades in advance, the occupation strategy Israel would go on to execute in South Lebanon.

We discuss Hezbollah's 2023 anti-gay moral panic and its contradictory entanglement in Syria, but how disarming Hezbollah won't end Zionist aggression. Ayman concludes with some concrete advice for listeners in the Global North: solidarity means building socialist power at home.

Israel's Long War on Lebanon: A Joint History of the Zionist and Lebanese Entities
Israel's Long War on Lebanon (video essay)
Free timeline link
Ayman Makarem on Patreon
Ayman Makarem on Bluesky

SOCIALS

Bluesky matthewremski.bsky.social
Instagram @matthew_remski
YouTube @antifascistdad
TikTok [@antifascistdad]
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Order Antifascist Dad/

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 capitalism actually shape our inner lives — turning the family into the site where structural power gets animated and made to feel like love. 

We discuss her critique of "specialization," the hoarding of clinical knowledge to pathologize suffering and enforce adaptation, and its counter, "despecialization" — the process of handing tools like disavowal, identification with the aggressor, and the reality principle back to ordinary people.

Part two continues on Patreon: antifascistdadpodcast.

Source

Socials:

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Instagram @matthew_remski
YouTube @antifascistdad
TikTok [@antifascistdad]
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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 die.

In Part One we talk about how growing up Druze shaped Ayman's comfort with ambiguity, the class dimensions of queerness in Beirut, and about a virulently homophobic Christian militia few Western listeners have heard of. We talk about Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, and the difference between geopolitical abstraction and lived, local knowledge.

Part two, where we get into the Lebanese entity, the Zionist entity, and Hezbollah, is available now for Patreon subscribers, and will post here in a few weeks.

Israel's Long War on Lebanon: A Joint History of the Zionist and Lebanese Entities
Israel's Long War on Lebanon (video essay)
Lebanon timeline link
Ayman Makarem on Patreon
Ayman Makarem on Bluesky

SOCIALS

Bluesky matthewremski.bsky.social
Instagram @matthew_remski
YouTube @antifascistdad
TikTok [@antifascistdad]
Patreon antifascistdadpodcast
Order Antifascist Dad

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, activists, and everyone else.

The chapter draws on D.W. Winnicott's incommunicado core, Aristotle's three types of friendship, and David Graeber's everyday communism to build the case that real, horizontal friendship is already a form of non-capitalist life. 

Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times — Penguin Random House
D.W. Winnicott — The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment — Karnac Books
Aristotle — Nicomachean Ethics, Books VIII–IX (on friendship) — MIT Classics
David Graeber — Debt: The First 5,000 Years — Melville House
David Graeber on everyday communism — Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology — Prickly Paradigm Press
Prefigurative politics — concept overview — SAGE Encyclopedia of Political Theory
Carsie Blanton — official site

Bluesky matthewremski.bsky.social
Instagram @matthew_remski
YouTube @antifascistdad
TikTok [@antifascistdad]
Patreon antifascistdadpodcast
Order Antifascist Dad