Antifascist Dad Podcast

UNLOCKED 31.1 Kensington Market Palimpsest

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 [https://kmclt.ca/] Friends of Kensington Market [https://friendsofkensingtonmarket.com/] Kensington Market Overdose Prevention Site — St. Stephen's Community House [https://www.sschto.ca/] Gwartzman's Art Supplies — 448 Spadina Avenue [https://gwartzmans.com/] The Beguiling Books & Art [https://www.beguiling.com/] Weekend Characters — design studio, Kensington Market [https://weekendcharacters.com/] Bone and Busk — designer Katerina Mior, Nassau Street [https://boneandbusk.com/] El Trompo — 277 Augusta Avenue [https://www.eltrompo.ca/] King of Kensington — CBC Archives [https://www.cbc.ca/archives/king-of-kensington] Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900 — Harvard University Press [https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674022225] Sigmund Freud, "A Note Upon the 'Mystic Writing Pad'" [https://www.pep-web.org/] General Jewish Labour Bund — YIVO Encyclopedia [https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/bund] Workmen's Circle / Arbeiter Ring — Toronto [https://toronto-workmens-circle.org/] Antifascist Dad Episode 31: Voices of Kensington Will Ring in Ottawa with Serena Purdy [https://www.patreon.com/antifascistdadpodcast] Bluesky: matthewremski.bsky.social [https://bsky.app/profile/matthewremski.bsky.social] Instagram: @matthew_remski [https://www.instagram.com/matthew_remski/] YouTube: @antifascistdad [https://www.youtube.com/@antifascistdad] [TikTok: @antifascistdad] Patreon: antifascistdadpodcast [https://www.patreon.com/antifascistdadpodcast] Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/807656/antifascist-dad-by-matthew-remski/]

32. Smith and Carney May Destroy Socialized Medicine w/ Nikolas Barry-Shaw

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. SOURCES Pandora's Box: Danielle Smith and Insurance Giants Unleash Attack on Healthcare [https://breachmedia.ca/pandoras-box-danielle-smith-and-insurance-giants-unleash-attack-on-healthcare/] Danielle Smith Admitted She Wants to Throw Out Canada's Public Health Care Law [https://breachmedia.ca/danielle-smith-admitted-she-wants-to-throw-out-canadas-public-health-care-law/] Alberta's Bill 11 Breaks Federal Law — Canadian Health Coalition [https://www.healthcoalition.ca/albertas-bill-11-breaks-federal-law/] Bill 11 Analysis — Parkland Institute [https://www.parklandinstitute.ca/] Bill 11 Report — Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives [https://www.policyalternatives.ca/] Council of Canadians — Trade and Privatization [https://canadians.org/] Friends of Medicare Alberta [https://www.friendsofmedicare.org/] Ontario Health Coalition [https://www.ontariohealthcoalition.ca/] Socials * Bluesky: matthewremski.bsky.social [https://bsky.app/profile/matthewremski.bsky.social] * Instagram: @matthew_remski [https://www.instagram.com/matthew_remski/] * YouTube: @antifascistdad [https://www.youtube.com/@antifascistdad] * TikTok: [@antifascistdad] * Patreon: antifascistdadpodcast [https://www.patreon.com/antifascistdadpodcast] * Order Antifascist Dad [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/807656/antifascist-dad-by-matthew-remski/]

UNLOCK 30.1 The Left Didn't Betray Anyone: Material Conditions and the Limits of Rockhill

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 * Gabriel Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism [https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745349916/who-paid-the-pipers/] — Pluto Press  * Dominic Losurdo — Western Marxism: How It Was Born, How It Died, and How It Can Be Reborn [https://www.monthlyreview.org/press/western-marxism-how-it-was-born-how-it-died-and-how-it-can-be-reborn/] — Monthly Review Press * Orlando Letelier — Institute for Policy Studies memorial and biography [https://ips-dc.org/orlando-letelier/] * Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine [https://naomiklein.org/the-shock-doctrine/] — on Pinochet-era Chile  * Dependency theory overview — CEPAL/ECLAC institutional history [https://www.cepal.org/en/about]  * Christian Bök — Eunoia [https://www.coachhousebooks.com/product/eunoia-2/] — Coach House Books; The Xenotext [https://www.coachhousebooks.com/product/the-xenotext/] — Coach House Books * Eric Bennett, Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War [https://www.uipress.uiowa.edu/books/9781609382759/workshops-of-empire] — University of Iowa Press * The Kenyon Review and CIA funding — Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War [https://thenewpress.com/books/cultural-cold-war] — The New Press  * Iowa Writers' Workshop and CIA connections — see Bennett above; also Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America [https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674031760] — Harvard University Press  * Jazz Ambassador program / Louis Armstrong and the Congo — Penny Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War [https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674021761] — Harvard University Press * Melanie Klein — The Selected Melanie Klein [https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/181714/the-selected-melanie-klein-by-klein-melanie/9780140137842] — Penguin * Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" — in Illuminations [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/318036/illuminations-by-walter-benjamin/], trans. Harry Zohn All theme music by the amazing www.kalliemarie.com [https://www.kalliemarie.com/]. Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/807656/antifascist-dad-by-matthew-remski/ [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/807656/antifascist-dad-by-matthew-remski/] Instagram: @matthew_remski [https://www.instagram.com/matthew_remski/?hl=en] TikTok: @antifascistdad [https://www.tiktok.com/@antifascistdad] Bluesky: @matthewremski.bsky.social [https://matthewremski.bsky.social/]  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AntifascistDad [https://www.youtube.com/@AntifascistDad]

31. Voices of Kensington will Ring in Ottawa w/Serena Purdy

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/ [https://serenapurdy.ca/]  Friends of Kensington Market [https://friendsofkensingtonmarket.com/] Kensington Market Community Land Trust [https://kmclt.ca/] Canada Health Act — full text [https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-6/] Parliamentary Budget Office — Canada Infrastructure Bank assessment [https://www.pbo-dpb.ca/] Kensington Market Overdose Prevention Site — St. Stephen's Community House [https://www.sschto.ca/] Bone and Busk — designer Katerina Mior, Nassau Street, Kensington Market [https://boneandbusk.com/] Friends of Medicare Alberta [https://www.friendsofmedicare.org/] Elections Canada — voting without a fixed address [https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=ids&document=index&lang=e] Antifascist Dad Episode 31 coda: Kensington Market Palimpsest — Patreon early access [https://www.patreon.com/antifascistdadpodcast] Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/807656/antifascist-dad-by-matthew-remski/] Bluesky: matthewremski.bsky.social [https://bsky.app/profile/matthewremski.bsky.social] Instagram: @matthew_remski [https://www.instagram.com/matthew_remski/] YouTube: @antifascistdad [https://www.youtube.com/@antifascistdad] [TikTok: @antifascistdad] Patreon: antifascistdadpodcast [https://www.patreon.com/antifascistdadpodcast]

UNLOCK 29.1 Natalie Wynn and Joshua Citarella Cannot Do Everything

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. * Bluesky: matthewremski.bsky.social [https://bsky.app/profile/matthewremski.bsky.social] * Instagram: @matthew_remski [https://www.instagram.com/matthew_remski/] * YouTube: @antifascistdad [https://www.youtube.com/@antifascistdad] * TikTok: [@antifascistdad] * Patreon: antifascistdadpodcast [https://www.patreon.com/antifascistdadpodcast] * Buy Antifascist Dad [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/807656/antifascist-dad-by-matthew-remski/]