Antifascist Dad Podcast

UNLOCK 34.1 Looks Like Jonathan Haidt Did a Moral Panic

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. * 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/] SOURCES Jen Lumanlan, "What Research Really Shows About School Phone Bans," Psychology Today, July 2025 [https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/parenting-beyond-power/202507/what-research-really-shows-about-school-phone-bans] 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 [https://www.nber.org/papers/w35132] 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 [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10964-025-02313-6] UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report, "Phone Bans in Schools Are Spreading Worldwide as the Policy Debate Rages On," March 2026 [https://www.unesco.org/gem-report/en/articles/phone-bans-schools-are-spreading-worldwide-policy-debate-rages] Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (encyclical on artificial intelligence and human dignity), May 2026 [https://time.com/article/2026/05/25/pope-leo-encyclical-ai-magnifica-humanitas/] Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Penguin Press, 2024) [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/727131/the-anxious-generation-by-jonathan-haidt/]

35. Antifascist Tooth Fairy w/ E.V. Debs

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. SOURCES Antifascist Tooth Fairy Kickstarter [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/evdebs/antifascist-tooth-fairy] anteefa.org [https://anteefa.org/] Games: Agency as Art — C. Thi Nguyen, Oxford University Press [https://global.oup.com/academic/product/games-agency-as-art-9780190052089] * matthewremski.bsky.social [https://bsky.app/profile/matthewremski.bsky.social] * IG: @matthew_remski [https://www.instagram.com/matthew_remski/] * @antifascistdad on YouTube [https://www.youtube.com/@antifascistdad] * @antifascistdad on TikTok [https://www.tiktok.com/@antifascistdad] * antifascistdadpodcast on Patreon [https://www.patreon.com/antifascistdadpodcast] * Order Antifascist Dad [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/807656/antifascist-dad-by-matthew-remski/]

UNLOCK 33.1 Antifascist Body Culture: A Brief History

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 [https://www.instagram.com/marenforsberg/] and find her self-defense workshops through her page. * 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 [https://www.tiktok.com/@antifascistdad] * Patreon: antifascistdadpodcast [https://www.patreon.com/antifascistdadpodcast] * Antifascist Dad — Penguin Random House [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/807656/antifascist-dad-by-matthew-remski/] Mark Roseman, Lives Reclaimed: A Story of Rescue and Resistance in Nazi Germany [https://www.holt.com/us/title/lives-reclaimed-9781250619587] Molly Crabapple, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/741949/here-where-we-live-is-our-country-by-molly-crabapple/] Julius Deutsch, Antifascism, Sports, Sobriety: Forging a Militant Working-Class Culture, ed. Gabriel Kuhn (PM Press) [https://www.pmpress.org/catalog/product/view/id/878] Michael Ondaatje, The Cat's Table [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/211534/the-cats-table-by-michael-ondaatje/9780771068379] Bread and Puppet Theater [https://breadandpuppet.org/]

34. From the Street to City Hall w/ Diana Chan McNally

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 [https://www.toronto.ca/city-government/council/ward-profiles/ward-4-parkdale-high-park/] The Shift — Housing as a Human Right [https://make-the-shift.org/] National Housing Strategy Act, Canada [https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/N-11.2/page-1.html] City of Toronto Housing Charter [https://www.toronto.ca/community-people/community-partners/toronto-office-of-partnerships/toronto-housing-charter/] Ontario Bill 6 — Safer Municipalities Act [https://www.ola.org/en/legislative-assembly/bills/parliament-43/session-1/bill-6] Waterloo encampment Charter ruling, 2023 [https://www.therecord.com/news/waterloo-region/2023/01/24/ontario-court-rules-waterloo-region-violated-charter-rights-of-homeless-encampment-residents.html] Maggie Helwig — Encampment (Toronto Book Award) [https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/torontobookawards/] St. Stephen-in-the-Fields Anglican Church [https://ststephensinthefield.ca/] Maytree — Diana Chan McNally Fellow [https://maytree.com/our-people/diana-chan-mcnally/] First United Church — Amanda Burrows, Vancouver [https://firstunited.ca/]https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095538715 * 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 32.1 What Tommy Douglas Knew & What We All Know about Socialized Medicine

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. SOURCES Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/julian-walker/conspirituality/9781541602588/] Beatrice Adler-Bolton — Health Communism [https://www.versobooks.com/products/2739-health-communism] Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism — Robert Chapman [https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745347578/empire-of-normality/] PANS/PANDAS — PANDAS Network [https://www.pandasnetwork.org] Tommy Douglas and the Quest for Medicare in Canada — Gordon Lawson [https://www.uap.ualberta.ca/titles/940-9781772126181-tommy-douglas-and-the-quest-for-medicare-in-canada] The Telepathy Tapes — Conspirituality critical analysis [https://www.conspirituality.net/episodes/241-unravelling-the-telepathy-tapes] 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] * Pre-order Antifascist Dad [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/807656/antifascist-dad-by-matthew-remski/]