Antifascist Dad Podcast

In this coda to my conversation with Serena Purdy, I track the layered history of Kensington Market through the metaphor of the palimpsest, the medieval manuscript practice of writing over earlier texts that never fully disappear.

Indigenous territory through colonial land seizure. Victorian working-class housing. Jewish Bundist labour militancy. Successive immigrant waves, encampment clearings, and the CBC sitcom that converted a neighbourhood's socialist politics into warm liberal vibes...

Kensington's history is all still readable in its brickwork, its cracked plaster, and storefront signs painted over and over again. On walks through the Market with our 13-year-old, I wonder: when the political energy has faded but the cultural vibrancy remains, what are we inheriting, and what are we waiting for?

SOURCES

Kensington Market Community Land Trust

Friends of Kensington Market

Kensington Market Overdose Prevention Site — St. Stephen's Community House

Gwartzman's Art Supplies — 448 Spadina Avenue

The Beguiling Books & Art

Weekend Characters — design studio, Kensington Market

Bone and Busk — designer Katerina Mior, Nassau Street

El Trompo — 277 Augusta Avenue

King of Kensington — CBC Archives

Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900 — Harvard University Press

Sigmund Freud, "A Note Upon the 'Mystic Writing Pad'"

General Jewish Labour Bund — YIVO Encyclopedia

Workmen's Circle / Arbeiter Ring — Toronto

Antifascist Dad Episode 31: Voices of Kensington Will Ring in Ottawa with Serena Purdy

Bluesky: matthewremski.bsky.social

Instagram: @matthew_remski

YouTube: @antifascistdad [TikTok: @antifascistdad]

Patreon: antifascistdadpodcast

Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times

I sit down with Nikolas Barry-Shaw, researcher and trade and privatization campaigner for the Council of Canadians, to break down how Alberta's Bill 11 is dismantling Canada's public healthcare system, with the help of an insurgent private insurance campaign.

Manulife, Canada Life, and Sun Life control two thirds of Canada's $66 billion private health benefits market. These behemoths helped draft Danielle Smith's signature legislation through covert government working groups. Meanwhile, doctors, unions, and the public were excluded.

Bill 11 creates a two-tier fast lane for the privately insured and opens the door to privatizing any part of the system by administrative fiat. So far, the Carney government is refusing to enforce the Canada Health Act, and Saskatchewan and Ontario watching that closely, ready to pounce.

Barry-Shaw argues this moment poses an existential threat to Medicare, from coast to coast. As Tommy Douglas warned forty years ago: the system must move forward or it will be crushed by capital.

Pandora's Box: Danielle Smith and Insurance Giants Unleash Attack on Healthcare

Danielle Smith Admitted She Wants to Throw Out Canada's Public Health Care Law

Alberta's Bill 11 Breaks Federal Law — Canadian Health Coalition

Bill 11 Analysis — Parkland Institute

Bill 11 Report — Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives

Council of Canadians — Trade and Privatization

Friends of Medicare Alberta

Ontario Health Coalition

Socials

A coda to my conversation with Richard Gilman-Opalsky around Gabriel Rockhill's new book, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism. It's a reflection on what Rockhill's viral success tells us about how leftists manage feelings of loss and betrayal — and why I think his paranoid framework, however emotionally compelling, misreads the material conditions it claims to analyze.

I trace the destruction of internationalist Marxist intellectual networks through CIA-backed coups in Chile, Brazil, Indonesia, and Argentina, and argue that the "fallow period" Rockhill mourns was shaped less by ideological capture than by survivorship and repression.

I also bring in some personal intellectual biography, the history of New Criticism, and Melanie Klein's theory of paranoid splitting to ask: what does it mean to grieve a political tradition honestly, without turning loss into conspiracy?

SOURCE LIST

All theme music by the amazing www.kalliemarie.com.

Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/807656/antifascist-dad-by-matthew-remski/

Instagram: @matthew_remski

TikTok: @antifascistdad

Bluesky: @matthewremski.bsky.social 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AntifascistDad 

Serena Purdy is a comparative health policy researcher at the University of Toronto and socialist candidate who ran in the recent 2025 University-Rosedale federal byelection. We talk about what the upcoming three years of Carney austerity means for healthcare and housing, how electoral organizing doubles as political education, the fight to enfranchise unhoused voters, and why Kensington Market — Serena's neighbourhood and spiritual home — is both microcosm and proof of concept for the kind of city we could build. From the Canada Health Act's gutted enforcement to Carney's mysterious sovereign wealth fund, we examine the stakes of federal power for working-class communities, and talk about refusing to go down without a fight.

SOURCES 

https://serenapurdy.ca/ 

Friends of Kensington Market

Kensington Market Community Land Trust

Canada Health Act — full text

Parliamentary Budget Office — Canada Infrastructure Bank assessment

Kensington Market Overdose Prevention Site — St. Stephen's Community House

Bone and Busk — designer Katerina Mior, Nassau Street, Kensington Market

Friends of Medicare Alberta

Elections Canada — voting without a fixed address

Antifascist Dad Episode 31 coda: Kensington Market Palimpsest — Patreon early access

Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times

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

Expanding my IG analysis of Natalie Wynn's appearance on Joshua Citarella's Doomscroll podcast — a 3-hour-and-20-minute conversation that clocked nearly 200,000 views in a week.

Rather than relitigating Wynn's political positions, I'm more interested in what the format itself reveals: two skilled cultural commentators ranging across 15 distinct knowledge domains, from political economy and psychoanalysis to media ecology and feminist theory—all without the expertise, research teams, or fact-checking any of those domains actually requires.

Applying Jodi Dean's communicative capitalism framework, I argue that the episode's viral energy — and its 4,000-plus comment thread — functions less as political participation than as pro bono content for platform circulation. The real beguiling thing here isn't the politics, but the aesthetic: a sunlit loft, elite conversation, the fantasy of having something interesting to say about everything.

Wecoming back my first return guest, philosopher and union activist Richard Gilman-Opalsky, for a deep dive into the viral controversy surrounding Gabriel Rockhill's new book Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?

Rockhill's thesis, in its simplest form, is that the smartest left intellectuals you've heard of were bought by capital to function as controlled opposition. So Richard and I work through the Frankfurt School's origins, French theory's disillusionment with actually existing socialism, Herbert Marcuse's gifts and compromises, and Richard's core challenge to Rockhill: the concept of the enemy. Who are we actually fighting? The ruling class, or each other?

SOURCES 

Institute for Social Research, Goethe University Frankfurt

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment — Stanford University Press

Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry — Routledge

Gabriel Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?

Richard Gilman-Opalsky, review of Rockhill — Marx and Philosophy Review of Books

Richard Gilman-Opalsky, The Communism of Love — AK Press

Herbert Marcuse papers — UC San Diego Library

Angela Y. Davis official site

Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism — Verso Books

Vladimir Lenin, "Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder" — Marxists Internet Archive

Alexandra Kollontai Archive — Marxists Internet Archive

Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia — Marxists Internet Archive

University of Illinois faculty union strike coverage — Chicago Tribune

Find Matthew on Bluesky at matthewremski.bsky.social, on Instagram at @matthew_remski, on YouTube and TikTok at @antifascistdad. Support the show and get early access to part two episodes at Patreon. Pick up Antifascist Dad from Penguin Random House — also available as audiobook and ebook.

A coda to my interview with journalist and media critic Adam Johnson on how the genocide got sold. Here I zoom in on Adam's affect — the rhetorical technique he uses to puncture what I'm calling the habitus of liberal political discourse.

Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's theory of embodied social capital, I analyze two moments where institutional power reasserts itself through laughter and procedure: State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller deflecting AP reporter Matt Lee's questions about Gaza with schoolboy metaphors, and Mark Carney laughing off a Grassy Narrows First Nation grandmother demanding justice for decades of mercury poisoning.

I contrast this with Adam Johnson's use of bathos and polysyndeton — visceral, low-register language that breaks the spell. 

UNRWA — Gaza child amputees statement, December 2025

OHCHR — Gaza disabilities report, August 2025

Institute for Palestine Studies — Blinken/Austin letter full text

Al Majalla — Blinken/Austin letter full text

Times of Israel — Miller/Lee briefing context, November 5, 2024

American Academy of Diplomacy — Matt Lee bio

CBC News — Carney / Isaacs / Etobicoke press conference

APTN News — Isaacs accepts Carney's challenge

APTN News — Western University / Dryden Mill study, 2024

National Observer — Western University study, May 2024

CBC News — ISC budget cuts, July 2025

CBC News — Indigenous budget 2025, November 2025

Marxists.org — Junius Pamphlet

DigitalCommons@UNL — Goodman & Silverstein, Bourdieu in Algeria

This week there's no guest — instead, I'm sharing the dedication and an introduction to Chapter Four of the Antifascist Dad audiobook, now available wherever books are sold!

Chapter Four, "Capitalism Everywhere and in Everyone," is the heart of the book's argument: that understanding capitalism's structural cruelty is foundational to recognizing fascism. I draw on David Graeber's concept of everyday communism and Marx's analysis of surplus labor value to make these ideas genuinely accessible to young readers and their families. The chapter moves from the warmth of domestic life through the cold logic of exploitation, metabolic rift, and capitalist realism — and asks what it would take to build worlds centered on care rather than theft.

The Patreon coda this week applies Jodi Dean's communicative capitalism framework to Natalie Wynn's three-and-a-half-hour appearance on the Doomscroll podcast, asking what it means to perform political analysis, and whether leftist discourse can be helped by punching left.

Following up on my conversations with Ciarra Jones and Leftie Jane by working through Jodi Dean's concept of communicative capitalism and what it means for those of us doing antifascist political work online.

I start with Marx's distinction between use value and exchange value, using my late mother's hand-knit sweater. Dean's framework pivots on this split between use and exchange, and she ties it to the contradictions of networked media: the contribution trap, reflexive communication, the fantasy of participation, and the way followership mimics solidarity without producing it. 

And... what about my own Instagram account, which has grown from 3,000 to 50,000 followers since January? I ask: what that growth actually means, what it conceals, and what ethical questions I need to keep asking myself to avoid becoming part of the infrastructure. 

Adam Johnson is a media analyst and co-host of the podcast Citations Needed. His new book How to Sell a Genocide (Pluto Books, out now) draws on analysis of over 12,000 articles and 5,000 TV segments to document how US center-left legacy media — the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, and others — provided systematic PR cover for the genocide in Gaza.

Johnson and I dig into the quantitative evidence for asymmetric language, the invention of the "Hamas-run health ministry" pejorative, the three masks of helpless/fuming/umpire Biden, and the "moats of rationalization" that allowed liberal audiences to intellectually and emotionally distance themselves from industrial-scale slaughter live-streamed into their phones. All royalties from Adam's book go to the Middle East Children's Alliance.

LINKS