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 traces Vance's Catholicism to a pragmatic need to authorize whiteness and hierarchy. We discuss the SSPX schism, the conformist-older-brother archetype in abusive family systems, why buying into whiteness at the expense of solidarity destroys your capacity to grieve, and what imperial theology does when it cannot satisfy itself.

SOURCES

Nathan Evans Fox, "Do Not Read JD Vance's New Book. Read This Review Instead."
Nathan Evans Fox — Heirloom, Free Dirt Records
Anti-Confederate Southern History Reading Club
JD Vance, Communion — HarperCollins
Walter Brueggemann — The Prophetic Imagination
Dietrich Bonhoeffer — The Cost of Discipleship
Ta-Nehisi Coates — Between the World and Me
Marion Massacre — North Carolina labor history
Order Antifascist Dad

SOCIALS

matthewremski.bsky.social
@matthew_remski
@antifascistdad
@antifascistdad
antifascistdadpodcast
Order Antifascist Dad

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 assess risk—when they weren't singing "Little Flame".

NOTE: This is the finale of season 1! I'll be catching up on rest and taking more family time for August but will be back on September 9th. 

carsieblanton.com
YouTube — Carsie Blanton
Instagram @carsieblanton
TikTok @carsieblantonmusic
Spotify
Patreon
The Nation — Rich People and the Music Business
Nina Simone — "To Be Young, Gifted and Black" (official audio)
Ken Burns Jazz (PBS)
Mark Fisher — Capitalist Realism (Zer0 Books)
Elizabeth Gilbert on creative work "choosing" the artist — Big Magic
People's Forum, New York
The Burning Hell (band)
Global Sumud Flotilla — Freedom Flotilla Coalition
Artists Against Apartheid
Adam Phillips on boredom — On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored (Harvard University Press)

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

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 — structurally prevents systemic critique from forming. 

SOURCES

Is Anyone Responsible? How Television Frames Political Issues — Shanto Iyengar
Undoing the Demos — Wendy Brown
Arundhati Roy — "Another World Is Not Only Possible"
Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist — Open Mic podcast
Centre for Inquiry Canada
Order Antifascist Dad

SOCIALS

matthewremski.bsky.social
@matthew_remski -- Insta
@antifascistdad -- YouTube
@antifascistdad -- TikTok
antifascistdadpodcast -- Patreon
Order Antifascist Dad

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 the Trump era.

Nathan and I cover Vance's blogboy Catholicism, his apologetics-disguised-as-memoir, the aesthetic function of tradcath whiteness, and what it means when a hillbilly chooses empire over solidarity.

Plus: Stephen Miller's physiognomy lecture at the Rubio terrorism hoedown, and what antifascist parenting looks like when the street goes quiet.

SOURCES

Nathan Evans Fox, "Do Not Read JD Vance's New Book. Read This Review Instead."
Nathan Evans Fox — Heirloom, Free Dirt Records
New America — Terrorism in America After 9/11
CSIS — Left Wing Terrorism and Political Violence in the United States
ADL — Murder and Extremism in the United States
NSPM 7 — Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence
JD Vance, Communion — HarperCollins
Order Antifascist Dad

SOCIALS

matthewremski.bsky.social
@matthew_remski
@antifascistdad
@antifascistdad
antifascistdadpodcast

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 trial in February as one of the Filton 25), I trace a fault line that runs from parenting failures, to failures to support young people during the encampments of Spring, 2024, through to the courtroom where Justice Johnson ruled that six young people could not tell a jury why they acted, then sentenced them as terrorists under a provision he'd concealed.

Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Miranda Fricker, and Marsha Linehan all describe this injustice: through postcolonial, philosophical, and psychological lenses: how the authority or parent erases a subject's self-account and replaces it with lies.

SOURCES

Free the Filton 25 — campaign site

Support Finn — GoFundMe (Michael Collins)

Re: Rajiv Menon KC — contempt ruling, full text

Edward Said — Culture and Imperialism (1993)

Miranda Fricker — Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2007)

Frantz Fanon — The Wretched of the Earth (1961)

Aimé Césaire — Discourse on Colonialism (1950)

Stuart Hall et al. — Policing the Crisis (1978)

Eqbal Ahmad — Terrorism: Theirs and Ours (2001)

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak — Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988)

Marsha Linehan — Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder (1993)

SOCIALS

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 privatization of Crown corporations and the financialization of housing and care. Volumes 3, on Canadian democracy, 4, on culture, the far right, and religion, and 5, on the security state, are on the way, and might even be out before Canada slides into full fascism.

We were also both pretty shocked to discover some uncanny biographical symmetries: we were both church organists, both our dads were teacher-librarians and our moms were English teachers. Throughout, we discuss how the zoomed-out coherence of a long-form project keeps the fragmentation of daily journalism in meaningful focus. 

SOURCES

Sandy and Nora Talk Politics
Nora Loreto's Substack
The Social Safety Net — Canada in Decline Vol. 1
Corporate Control — Canada in Decline Vol. 2
The Hatchet podcast with Arshy Mann
Is Anyone Responsible? — Shanto Iyengar

SOCIALS

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

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 encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, and worrying that the moral register he's working in — however beautiful — leaves capitalism structurally intact and keeps radical energy locked on position, while fascists run maneuvers at will.

SOURCES

Pope Leo XIV on Twitter/X
Magnifica Humanitas — full text
Mercy Mutemi and the Meta content moderation lawsuit in Kenya
Adrienne Williams, UC Berkeley — ghost work and AI labor
Prairieland ICE detention center protest convictions
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks
Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution, 1899
André Gorz — non-reformist reform
DSA New York primary results 2026
Darializa Avila Chevalier campaign

SOCIALS

matthewremski.bsky.social
@matthew_remski
@antifascistdad
[@antifascistdad on TikTok]
antifascistdadpodcast
Order Antifascist Dad

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. Four have been convicted and sentenced as terrorists, under a provision the judge concealed from the jury.

My guest this week is Lisa Matthews, step mother of Finn Collins, one of 19 defendants still awaiting trial. Finn faces criminal damage and violent disorder charges, with his trial scheduled for February 2027.

Lisa walks me through the retroactive use of counter-terror powers against activists who acted before Palestine Action was proscribed, the judicial rulings that stripped the defendants' right to explain themselves, and what it's like to hold an antifascist family together when one's vision is clear but one's future is uncertain. 

SOURCES

Free the Filton 25 — campaign site and legal timeline

Support Finn — GoFundMe (Michael Collins)

Geoffrey Robertson KC on the Filton Four — Free the Filton 25

Re: Rajiv Menon KC — contempt ruling, full text

Menon KC closing speech, Trial 1 — Real Media

Inside the Palestine Action trial that could redefine protest as terrorism — openDemocracy

Palestine Action activists sentenced as terrorists — Novara Media

Amnesty International and lawyers condemn terrorism sentencing — Peace Brigades International Canada

Gaza toll could exceed 186,000 — Lancet letter, Al Jazeera

Prairieland defendant sentenced to 30 years for moving a box of antifascist zines — The Intercept

SOCIALS

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 cooperation. We close with an urgent question: would the Berrigan brothers be sabotaging data centers today? 

SOURCES

Enough is Enough: Degrowth, Capitalism, and Liberation Theology — Bernico and Dettloff, Fortress Press
The Magnificast podcast
Walter Benjamin, "Capitalism as Religion" — fragment, 1921, available via Verso
Franz Hinkelammert — theology and economics
Pablo Richard — Chilean liberation theologian
Ignacio Ellacuría, "The Crucified People" — in Mysterium Liberationis
Sebastian Kappen — Indian liberation theologian
The Iona Community
A Theology of Liberation — Gustavo Gutierrez
Laudato Si — Pope Francis

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, Kristi Noem advising a BC mining company and American oligarchs buying up 1.2M acres in the interior. Emily also shares a visualization practice for doing this work without burning out that she learned from an ecosocialist movement elder. 

SOURCES

Emily Lowan on Instagram
BC Green Party
Harsha Walia, Border and Rule
National Farmers Union BC
Corporate Mapping Project, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives
Climate Action Network Canada
Stan Kroenke landholdings — investigative background
Wet'suwet'en land defenders and Coastal GasLink resistance
Jewish Faculty Network report on CIJA
Rifflandia Festival
Michelle Remembers — background

matthewremski.bsky.social
@matthew_remski
@antifascistdad
[@antifascistdad on TikTok]
antifascistdadpodcast
Order Antifascist Dad