Antifascist Dad Podcast

Following up on my conversation with Toronto comedian Nour Hadidi: I'm haunted by one detail from the harassment campaign against her.

It's about how she posted the clip of Al Jazeera bureau chief Wael Al-Dahdouh refusing Christiane Amanpour's question, "Do you wish Hamas had never committed October 7th?" by dismantling its premise entirely.

I look at Adam Johnson's research on the "Do you condemn Hamas" formula as a media disciplining strategy, Frantz Fanon's analysis of the colonized intellectual required to perform Western values before being heard, Charles Cobb's history of the nonviolence demand inside the civil rights movement, and communications scholar Zohar Kampf's empirical study of adversarial ethnopolitical interviews.

Kampf identifies six options for interviewees facing the condemnation ritual, and only one of them doesn't feel like caving. 

Al Jazeera Journalist Wael Al-Dahdouh Slammed CNN — YouTube

Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi — Citations Needed podcast

Noura Erakat — Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine — Stanford University Press

Frantz Fanon — The Wretched of the Earth — Grove Press

Charles Cobb — This Nonviolence Stuff'll Get You Killed — Duke University Press

Zohar Kampf — "Do You Condemn?" chapter in The Discourse of Indirectness — John Benjamins

Edward Said — Covering Islam — Penguin Random House

Ramzy Baroud — My Father Was a Freedom Fighter — Pluto Press

The Onion — Dying Gazans Criticized for Not Using Last Words to Condemn Hamas

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I'm joined today by Dean Dettloff and Matt Bernico, co-hosts of The Magnificast podcast and the authors of a brilliant new book, Enough is Enough: Degrowth, Capitalism, and Liberation Theology, out now from Fortress Press.

We start with some basics: what the Magnificat is and why secular leftists should care about it, what "enough is enough" actually means across its political, economic, and spiritual dimensions, and why working within a contradictory religious tradition might be a lot like keeping one's faith in leftism.

Also: was St. Francis of Assisi a proto-socialist? Was he neurodivergent? And how about the Global South rise and Global North suppression of liberation theology? In this era of Pope Leo: does the church still metabolize radical ideas into liberal poetry? 

Cool stuff for anyone trying to understand the antifascist religious left that JD Vance doesn't want you to know exists.

SOURCES

Enough is Enough: Degrowth, Capitalism, and Liberation Theology — Bernico and Dettloff, Fortress Press
The Magnificast podcast
Christianity on the Spectrum podcast
A Theology of Failure — Marika Rose, Fordham University Press
Vampyroteuthis Infernalis — Vilém Flusser, University of Minnesota Press
The Silencing of Leonardo Boff — Harvey Cox
People of God: The Struggle for World Catholicism — Penny Lernoux
A Theology of Liberation — Gustavo Gutierrez
Laudato Si — Pope Francis

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 branding for capital accumulation. I also examine AI Minister Evan Solomon's performance on CBC Front Burner, where he dodged nine accountability questions in thirty minutes using the word "trust" as a revolving door.

Finally, a look at Dr. Jason Edward Lewis's Indigenous AI epistemology framework and the concept of "data colonization." Because the familiar crime now reanimated against Indigenous communities through AI infrastructure is a template for what is coming for us all.

Canada's National Artificial Intelligence Strategy: AI for All

CBC Front Burner: Minister Defends Canada's New AI Strategy — Transcript

DeSmog: Carney Allowed Gas-powered AI Data Centres After Lobbying From Alberta Energy Company

Project Ploughshares: Setting the Record Straight on Canada's Arms Exports to Israel

CJPME: Canada's Record-Breaking 2023 Military Exports to Israel

APTN News: What's Behind Canada's Sovereign AI Plan?

Intercontinental Cry: Ancestral Intelligence — How Indigenous Knowledge Informs AI and Data Ethics

Policy Options: AI Threatens Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Digital Self-Determination

Assembly of First Nations: Brief to Parliamentary Committee on Bill C-27

Canada's National Observer: Three Quarters of Data Centre Sites Planned in Alberta Are in High Water Stress Areas

The Intercept: Philly Cops Admit They're Tracking First Amendment Activity Critical of AI

Abacus Data: Canadians Split on AI Data Centres

Abundant Intelligences Project — Dr. Jason Edward Lewis, Concordia University

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.

Nour Hadidi — The Noursletter on Substack

Nour Hadidi Podcast on Spotify

Comedians for Palestine on Instagram

Al Jazeera Journalist Wael Al-Dahdouh Slammed CNN — YouTube

Vivian Silver Impact Award — New Israel Fund Canada

Palestinian Youth Movement Toronto — Instagram

Global March to Gaza — Coalition Against Israeli Occupation

Anera — Gaza humanitarian aid

UNRWA — United Nations Relief and Works Agency

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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 challenge in Psychology Today exposed the romanticized and racially selective "golden age" childhood Haidt keeps gesturing toward. A major NBER working paper from Allcott et al. studied over 1,300 US schools using Yondr pouches and found near-zero academic effects. A Dutch study by Vanluydt et al. in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence found that full bans may actually undermine school belonging, especially for girls.

Meanwhile, Pope Leo XIV's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas does what Haidt won't: it plants digital technology inside a structural critique of platform capitalism. That's the conversation I want to have.

Jen Lumanlan, "What Research Really Shows About School Phone Bans," Psychology Today, July 2025

Hunt Allcott, E. Jason Baron, Thomas Dee, Angela L. Duckworth, Matthew Gentzkow, and Brian Jacob, "The Effects of School Phone Bans: National Evidence from Lockable Pouches," NBER Working Paper No. 35132, April 2026

E. Vanluydt, R. van den Eijnden, L. Vonk et al., "Disconnect To Reconnect: How Variations between Types of Smartphone Bans Influence Students' Well-being and Social Connectedness in Dutch Secondary Education," Journal of Youth and Adolescence 55 (2026): 551–569

UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report, "Phone Bans in Schools Are Spreading Worldwide as the Policy Debate Rages On," March 2026

Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (encyclical on artificial intelligence and human dignity), May 2026

Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Penguin Press, 2024)

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, the ethics and limits of physical confrontation, "anarchist calisthenics," and why games are a legitimate form of political education. I close with a passage from my book on Thi Nguyen's theory of games as the art of agency.

Antifascist Tooth Fairy Kickstarter

anteefa.org

Games: Agency as Art — C. Thi Nguyen, Oxford University Press

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 internationalist youth camps under the banner of do'ikayt, the right to belong wherever you are.

Third: the Austromarxist Workers' Olympiad of 1931 in Red Vienna, where 25,000 athletes gathered to demonstrate that the worker athlete and the militant soldier for socialism were one and the same. I close with a passage from my book on bully culture in mainstream phys ed, and what it can feel like to step in and stop violence.

Follow Maren Forsberg on Instagram and find her self-defense workshops through her page.

Mark Roseman, Lives Reclaimed: A Story of Rescue and Resistance in Nazi Germany

Molly Crabapple, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund

Julius Deutsch, Antifascism, Sports, Sobriety: Forging a Militant Working-Class Culture, ed. Gabriel Kuhn (PM Press)

Michael Ondaatje, The Cat's Table

Bread and Puppet Theater

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 can and can't do for the unhoused, and why protest must be disruptive to be effective. She also tells me about being served a lifetime ban from the Ontario legislature, code-switching to write for the Toronto Sun, and what her first mentor Bob Rose taught her about relationship-based community work.

SOURCES

Diana Chan McNally for Ward 4 Parkdale–High Park

The Shift — Housing as a Human Right

National Housing Strategy Act, Canada

City of Toronto Housing Charter

Ontario Bill 6 — Safer Municipalities Act

Waterloo encampment Charter ruling, 2023

Maggie Helwig — Encampment (Toronto Book Award)

St. Stephen-in-the-Fields Anglican Church

Maytree — Diana Chan McNally Fellow

First United Church — Amanda Burrows, Vancouver

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 that Medicare must expand or be destroyed most vividly is in our autistic son's daily experience of exclusion. For me it grounds Robert Chapman's argument that neurodivergence is a class war issue.

Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat

Beatrice Adler-Bolton — Health Communism

Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism — Robert Chapman

PANS/PANDAS — PANDAS Network

Tommy Douglas and the Quest for Medicare in Canada — Gordon Lawson

The Telepathy Tapes — Conspirituality critical analysis

Socials

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 aggression fragile, and dependent on an audience? Why are physical training and nervous system training different things? And why might queer and trans people carry a secret weapon into the self-defense practice? 

Follow Maren Forsberg on Instagram!.