I’m joined by Rev. Angela Denker, Lutheran minister, journalist, and mom in Minneapolis, as the city groans under intensified ICE activity. We discuss realities on the ground for families and schools, how she talks with her own kids about fear and safety, and why she believes clear, steady adult context matters in a fragmented media world.

As a minister, Denker's visitation and public theology assignments weave pastoral care and sacramental life into public resilience. As a journalist, the core revelation of her book Disciples of White: The Radicalization of American Boyhood, revolves around her framework of “White Jesus” as a cultural product that sanctifies hierarchy, masculinity, and domination. We talk about how that distortion links to the wider ecosystem of white Christian nationalism.

Part 2 now up on Patreon, explores misogyny in the church, antifascist readings of parables, and hard questions about force, nonviolence, and witness.

Notes:

Disciples of White Jesus: The Radicalization of American Boyhood | Broadleaf Books

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

Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times (North Atlantic Books, April 2026).
Preorder: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/807656/antifascist-dad-by-matthew-remski/

Instagram: @matthew_remski

TikTok: @antifascistdad

Bluesky: @matthewremski.bsky.social (Bluesky Social)

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

• (00:00:05) - Mother and Minister in Minneapolis
• (00:15:06) - Lutheran and Catholic clergy: an ecumenical conversation
• (00:18:23) - What Does a Visitation Pastor Do?
• (00:25:15) - White Jesus: The Story of Christian Nationalism
• (00:32:42) - White Jesus and the Right

I sit down with historian of fascism Craig Johnson to talk about one of the hardest and most urgent questions facing parents right now: how do we talk to our sons about fascism in a world where so much political socialization happens online, fast, and without supervision?

I open the episode in the shadow of the killing of Renee Nicole Good by ICE—and how disorienting it feels to say what we plainly saw while powerful institutions deny it. As a parent of two sons, I think out loud about what it means to slow things down, to regulate myself first, and to create a space where fear, grief, anger, and dignity can all be held without panic or cynicism.

Johnson argues that fascist movements have always relied on young men to do their dirty work, and traditional Western masculinity—organized around power, domination, speed, and violence—creates a gateway. Boys aren't inherently fascist, but gendered expectations are easily exploited.

We talk about how platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Discord are dense ecosystems where irony, transgressive humor, and memes function as social signals. Racist or sexist jokes are designed to pull kids in quietly, and how adult outrage can sometimes backfire by confirming the fascist story that these ideas are “forbidden.”

When a kid brings a meme to you, that moment is a crossroads. Punishment and shutdown don’t work. Curiosity, care, and asking a child to explain the joke can slow everything down and open space for honesty.

Picking it back up with historian of fascism Craig Johnson with the question of why fascism can feel cool—especially online—and how we might interrupt that appeal without fighting on fascism’s terms. But fascism isn't just pretending to be cool: it’s popular, aesthetic, and subcultural, and it sells itself through speed, power, transgression, and a sense of newness.

There's a tactical dilemma: how to puncture influencers like Andrew Tate or Nick Fuentes without reinforcing their own status metrics (looks, dominance, sexual access). Craig feels, for instance, that jawline mockery backfires, and why we have to keep the critique on what actually matters: cruelty, exploitation, and fascist politics.

No one organizes alone: tactics are collective, context-dependent, and always strategic. We close on coalition-building and why real, lived diversity makes fascist lies harder to sell.

I end with a brief coda on talking with my kids about the attack on Caracas.

• (00:04:20) - How to Talk to My Son About the Renee Good
• (00:09:55) - Why Fascism Targets Boys
• (00:12:36) - Are Boys Particularly Vulnerable to Fascism?
• (00:14:39) - Are These Political Spaces Safe for Kids?
• (00:23:15) - How to Talk to Your Child About Social Media
• (00:28:10) - Hacking Virality

What makes art politically dangerous to fascism—and why does empathy now count as transgression?

Today I'm joined by art historian, educator, and curator Sarah Jaffray for a wide-ranging conversation about modern art, fascism, and the politics of perception. Starting from the Nazis’ infamous “Degenerate Art” campaign, Sarah traces how artists in the aftermath of World War I deliberately abandoned realism, narrative, and institutional aesthetics in order to resist authoritarian power.

We explore why fascist movements obsess over image control, why abstraction and disorientation can be politically subversive, and how artists make the invisible visible—in part by slowing us down and drawing out deeper levels of attention. We discuss Dada, Surrealism, New Objectivity, Otto Dix, and George Grosz alongside contemporary struggles over AI-generated art and outcome-driven creativity.

We talk a lot about time: the time art requires, the time empathy needs, and the way authoritarian systems try to eliminate both. Sarah argues for art as witness, process, and lived testimony in the face of political dehumanization.

Part Two of this conversation, available now on Patreon, continues into practical guidance on aesthetic freedom and creative survival under pressure.

Antifascist Dad is out on April 26! You can preorder here.

About — Sarah Jaffray

Barron, Stephanie, ed. “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991.
https://www.getty.edu/publications/virtuallibrary/0892362651.html

Bauhaus-Archiv Museum für Gestaltung. “Bauhaus History 1919–1933.”
https://www.bauhaus.de/en/das_bauhaus/21_history/

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” 1935.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm

Dixon, Paul. “Uncanny Valley.” Encyclopaedia Britannica.
https://www.britannica.com/science/uncanny-valley

Dix, Otto. “War (Der Krieg), 1929–1932.” Dresden State Art Collections.
https://skd-online-collection.skd.museum/Details/Index/334771

Evans, Richard J. The Coming of the Third Reich. New York: Penguin, 2003.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/297974/the-coming-of-the-third-reich-by-richard-j-evans/

Gross, George. “Background and Biography.” Tate.
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/george-grosz-1188

Harrison, Charles, Francis Frascina, and Gill Perry. Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction: The Early Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300055191/primitivism-cubism-abstraction/

Hitler, Adolf. Speech at the opening of the Entartete Kunst exhibition, Munich, July 19, 1937.
English excerpts reproduced at:
https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/entart.htm

Holbein, Hans (the Younger). “The Ambassadors...

• (00:02:03) - Vanity Fair's Anti-Fascist Portraits
• (00:07:17) - Interview
• (00:08:22) - What Makes Transgressive Art Impactful?
• (00:11:04) - In the Elevator With Art That's Transgressive
• (00:12:59) - Art in the Age of AI
• (00:18:34) - Art and the Uncanny Valley
• (00:22:51) - The Shift in Modern Art History
• (00:30:12) - The Degenerate Art Exhibition

Happy New Year, everyon! This is Part 2 of my conversation with Richard Gilman-Opalsky on the “Communism of Love."

Love isn’t something to trade, measure, or deserve, and this makes it incompatible with capitalism, and how it gets distorted into obligation, sacrifice, and unpaid, gendered domestic labor.

We talk about improvisation in music, parenting, and politics. Suppressing improvisation is rooted in an obsession with control, predictability, and rigid developmental maps—hallmarks of fascist thinking. Against that are openness, uncertainty, and experiment as conditions of human flourishing.

We talk family and education, where communistic relations already exist in partial, uneven ways. What would it mean to de-privatize care—while recognizing, as bell hooks warned, that family is not a reliable site of love for everyone?

Richard Gilman-Opalsky at UIS

Support the show on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/antifascistdadpodcast
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@antifascistdad
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@antifascistdad
Matthew on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/matthewremski.bsky.social
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/matthew_remski
Preorder Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times

• (00:03:01) - Piano Lessons & Improvisation
• (00:04:23) - Jazz against the Fascists
• (00:07:58) - Anti-Fascism and Humanism
• (00:13:56) - The Right to Not Control Love
• (00:23:44) - The Right to Deprivatize Love
• (00:31:00) - The Communism of Christmas

Happy Solstice, Holiday, Christmas, Deep Winter, Chanukkah, Kwanzaa to you all. A familiar short story today, this time ending in revolution—not sentimentality.

H.C. Andersen : The Little Match Girl (Hersholt translation)

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AntifascistDadPodcast

TikTok and YouTube: @antifascistdad

You can still pre-order my book and as a gift, and let them know in a card!

• (00:00:00) - Intro
• (00:06:42) - Little Match Girl: a Rewrite

In Part 2 of my conversation with Dr. Sarah Stein Lubrano, we move from the critique of debate and “critical thinking” into the deeper question: what actually radicalizes us?

Sarah talks about the moments that changed her politics—teaching in prisons, supporting a student after sexual violence—and why no amount of abstract knowledge could have done the same work. I share how parenting an autistic kid has transformed my sense of who the world is designed for, and what it means to resist capitalist norms around productivity, learning, and success.

Also: why televised debates and “reasoning as warfare” formats (ahem, Jubilee) are great entertainment but terrible tools for social change, how the marketplace-of-ideas myth functions as liberal ideology, and why protest rarely changes governments or “the public” directly, but can permanently change the protesters themselves.

For Lubrano, good politics looks a lot like good friendship: long-term, non-transactional, joyful where possible. She offers advice to a hypothetical 15-year-old on how to enter political life without burning out: learn to be a good friend, find a broken part of the world you care about, and commit to fixing it together.

I close with an in-person story about meeting my previous guest, Sarah Rose Kaplan, and watching her improv a small act of mutual aid with three hungry kids in a Toronto restaurant—a live illustration of Lubrano’s thesis that new social experiences can change lives.

Dr. Sarah Stein Lubrano is a political theorist and organizer with a background in feminist mutual aid, local grassroots work, and teaching in prisons. She holds a PhD from Oxford and a master’s degree from Cambridge, and works with the Sense and Solidarity Initiative and the Future Narratives Lab. Her first book is Don’t Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st-Century Minds (Bloomsbury).

– Website: https://www.sarahsteinlubrano.com
– Substack: https://sarahsteinlubrano.substack.com
– X (Twitter): https://x.com/SSteinLubrano
– Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sarahsteinlubrano/
– Sense and Solidarity Initiative: https://senseandsolidarity.org
– Sense & Solidarity podcast (Spotify): https://open.spotify.com/show/2dcKkTCJNZM2j2CLKJZS3W

Buy Don’t Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st-Century Minds
– Publisher (Bloomsbury – main hub):
https://www.bloomsbury.com/ca/dont-talk-about-politics-9781399413923/

– Support the pod on Patreon!
– Preorder: Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times (out April 26, 2026).
– TikTok: @AntiFascistDad
– If you have an antifascism story to share—especially about relationships, generations, or parenting—leave me a voice message on Signal at username: antifascistdad71.

• (00:03:05) - What Really Changes Our Minds?
• (00:06:47) - Criticism of Argument as Warfare
• (00:12:35) - Liberal's Biggest Mistake
• (00:18:08) - The Long Term Strategy of Occupy
• (00:21:46) - What Would You Tell the 15 Year Old About Political Life?
• (00:25:06) - I Met Friend of the Pod Sara Rose Kaplan IRL!

I asked communist philosopher and jazz drummer Richard Gilman-Opalsky a deceptively simple question: What do we actually mean when we say “love”?

Richard’s "Communism of Love," insists that love is an active, non-exchange relation that contradicts the logic of capitalism. You can’t measure or spreadsheet it, or cost it out.

Unfortunately, this fact can also curdle into an excuse for sidelining and ignoring the vast amount of unpaid, often gendered, domestic labor—the "secret workshop" described by feminist marxists—where the concept of love is abused and "weaponized" to justify working for free, claiming that love is its own reward.

We talk about how real caregiving love requires parents to actively participate in their children's becoming—what they are not yet. That means getting over the anxiety of control and the tendency to treat children as emotional/financial investments. Parenting, like revolutionary politics and improvisational jazz, requires a constant, collective improvisation and a love for possibilities over rigid predetermined structures.

In “Fascist, Squish, and Antifascist News of the Week” I focus on Ontario Premier Doug Ford responding to reporting about a Canadian armored vehicle manufacturer supplying ICE.

Part Two is up now on Patreon, where Richard and I go deeper into improvisation, music, and why fascist control hates the freedom required for human flourishing.

Richard Gilman-Opalsky at UIS

Support the show and hear Part Two on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/antifascistdadpodcast

Canadian Defence Review. “Roman Shimonov: 2025 Defence Executive of the Year.” Canadian Defence Review, 2025.
https://canadiandefencereview.com/roman-shimonov-2025-defence-executive-of-the-year/

Canadian Press. “ICE Ordering Fleet of 20 Armoured Vehicles from Canadian Firm.” CityNews Halifax, December 2, 2025.
https://halifax.citynews.ca/2025/12/02/ice-ordering-fleet-of-20-armoured-vehicles-from-canadian-firm/

Canadian Press. “ICE Says Armoured Vehicles Ordered from Roshel Produced in U.S.” CityNews Toronto, December 4, 2025.
https://toronto.citynews.ca/2025/12/04/ice-says-armoured-vehicles-ordered-from-roshel-produced-in-u-s/

Canadian Press. “Sale of Canadian Armoured Vehicles to ICE Agency ‘Deeply Troubling’: Kwan.” CityNews Toronto, December 3, 2025.
https://toronto.citynews.ca/2025/12/03/sale-of-canadian-armoured-vehicles-to-ice-agency-deeply-troubling-kwan/

CPAC. “NDP MP Jenny Kwan Discusses Arms Exports Bill (C-233).” Headline Politics, September 19, 2025.
https://www.cpac.ca/headline-politics/episode/ndp-mp-jenny-kwan-discusses-arms-exports-bill--september-19-2025?id=755fc44b-a0b7-4bb1-b972-855c673ec354

Duggan, Kyle. “Anita Anand Won’t Say Whether Canada Would Block Export of Armoured Vehicles for Use by ICE.” The Globe and Mail, December 2025.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/pol...

• (00:00:00) - The Communism of Love with Richard Gilman Opalski
• (00:01:47) - Canadian Arms to Fascists
• (00:12:34) - Interview
• (00:15:16) - Antifascist Dad: Love and the Right
• (00:16:16) - Defining Love in the Culture
• (00:20:51) - The Capitalist Theory of Love
• (00:30:12) - Uncertainty and Parenting