Malcolm and Simone Collins dive into a no-holds-barred rant on fascism, modern progressivism, and why the left’s definitions often collapse under scrutiny. We analyze a viral progressive figure (Note Brigade / Nope Brigade) who fled the US for Canada fearing “fascism” — only to complain about Canada’s cost of living, housing crisis, and more. Is fascism just repackaged socialism? Why do rebirth myths, populism, and nationalism scare the left so much? We break down historical myths about the 1950s, black communities, Tulsa, cultural autonomy, and why MAGA isn’t “white Christian nationalism.” Plus: gun rights, trans violence stats, urban monoculture vs. cultural diversity on the right, and why America’s narrative of unity is winning minorities over.

If you would like to explore the Tiktok account referenced in this episode, you can find it here.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to do a deep dive into a few topics. One is to try to understand how progressives see fascism as something other than just progressivism. You can go find our band a video where we talk about that. That nearly got us YouTube because I really wanted to understand that what, what is their perspective on this?

And in that, I ended up doing a deep dive on a figure called Note Brigade who runs a popular. Twitter account and right now is going viral on right wing circles because she fled the United States as a refugee, went to Canada and then immediately realized everything is worse in Canada.

Speaker: My partner, our cat, and our dog fled the United States. We headed north and in Canada, I think it’s actually the, the cost of living crisis is worse here,

Malcolm Collins: she, it’s actually very interesting watching her ‘cause I wanted to understand why did she [00:01:00] think she was in danger, right?

This is somebody who lived in. LA She is a white woman. Okay. Well, she identifies as non-binary or something, but basically a, a white woman who lives in la, she, presumably because of like anti-trans stuff or something, she decided that she needed to flee the United States without a super big plan.

And she then goes and, and I’ll note here because I’ve watched a lot of her videos to try to understand her world perspective.

What’s interesting to me is if you could just break through the wall, she’s actually very Republican in a lot of her views and not even that unreasonable in most of her political views.

I’ll give you an example. She has one video where she says, you leftists cannot tell the difference between what makes you uncomfortable and what makes you safe.

Speaker 4: I’m sorry, but you’re not, and you wanna know why? It’s because you cannot tell the difference between what makes you uncomfortable and what makes you [00:02:00] unsafe. And you are so committed to your own comfort and your own emotional safety. You’re willing to pass up opportunities to build coalition. You literally cannot recognize allies even when they drop into your lap.

Malcolm Collins: That’s a view that I think many right wingers would have about leftist communities, right? Specifically she was complaining about a leftist community she was in, refused to work with a church.

And she’s like, look, this church had colonizers flags everywhere. Progress pride flags as she would’ve called them. You know, they were the wokes of the woke. And many people that lives a group just would not work with them.

Speaker 2: You can’t tell that churches aren’t all the same and you don’t know your own history. You can’t tolerate any nuance . Where do you think the civil rights movement happened?

It’d be so convenient if we could just blanket dismiss whole groups of people as being unworthy of being our allies just because they’re religious. But unfortunately, you actually have to hold nuance

Malcolm Collins: and I was like, that’s a good, and in her video where she goes over what fascism [00:03:00] is in her mind, I think she does explain modern rightist movements very well.

And she even correctly diagnoses why they’re so popular right now and why leftist movements are not popular right now. So there is a degree of sanity to her worldview, and this made it more interesting to me. Right. And, and not only that, when I hear about the, the reasons that she’s like sad to move to Canada you know, one of the first ones she mentions.

And so she won’t be able to bring her guns because she says she doesn’t feel safe without being armed all the time.

Simone Collins: confused.

I recently took down a video I made about being a gun owner and wishing that I could bring my gun with me to Canada because I think it spooked a lot of my Canadian friends.

Malcolm Collins: Like, you sound fairly right wing lady. You like working with churches to do food drives for the poor. That’s a pretty white wing thing to do. Not a very left wing thing to do.

Within the modern political context. You have guns and are afraid to give them up. She gets to Canada. And she [00:04:00] immediately starts complaining about how high the cost of housing is and how high the cost of living is. Pointing out that it’s much higher than it is in the United States. And I’m like. Does this not like Canada’s a way woke country than the, does it not drive through that?

Maybe their policies are leading to this, like presumably Canada’s much worse than the United States for a reason, right? Like does she not think in the United States, in Canada, if I go and I live in a right wing area, the cost of living’s gonna be much better. And by the way, she got herself in super hot water even with progressives.

‘cause she immediately starts begging for money. And people are like, well, you understand It’s

Simone Collins: no.

Malcolm Collins: bad for people who live in Canada too. Like you didn’t need to come here and make the problem worse, right? Like you as an immigrant are driving up the cost of living for everyone else.

Simone Collins: oh,

Malcolm Collins: But I wanna go into her takedown of fascism.

And I will read some parts of it for you, Simone and I will play some parts of it for our [00:05:00] fans so they can see it in her own words. Because again, I, I do not think that she is an INEL speaker. Okay. So she goes,

Speaker: If you call everything you don’t like from Biden to Trump fascism, when fascism arrives at your door, you are caught with your out, which is exactly what’s happened.

Malcolm Collins: so you need to get a clear definition of fascism.

And she talks about how scholars have two definitions of fascism.

One is just like listing, it’s like a listicle of a bunch of traits that fascism has. And I point out that the reason why they do this is to hide from themselves that. Fascism is just leftism like whatever modern progressivism is. And when people are like, nuh like fascists killed gay people, and I’m like, well, historically leftist governments were way more likely to kill gay people than capitalist governments.

And we’ll do a separate episode on that eventually, but yeah, most communist governments. Not all, but most decided to try to genocide their gay populations at one point or another. Same with their Jewish [00:06:00] populations fame. Communists love killing Jews. You know, if you don’t specifically code fascist governments as right wing, if you don’t code because racism.

Racism can’t be like only right wing when it’s directed in one direction. Like anyone will say like, anti-white racism is left wing. What? And then anti-black racism is no racism’s, just racism. Right. You know, you, you had a lot of, socialization of things. You had a lot of big government projects, you had a lot of dividing people into various ethnic groups.

You had a lot of scapegoating of Jews, which to the left has been very big in recently. So I don’t wanna go too big. You can watch our episode on that. It’s on substack.

YouTube doesn’t want you to see it. But, what I found it interesting for her is then she goes into the second definition of fascism that she creates.

And I, the reason I bring that up is because the reason why leftists have to do a listicle definition of fascism, instead of just saying, like, with communism when we’re describing communism, we’re like, oh, it’s just, you know, you distribute every, the, the state collects everything from, from individuals, right?

And then tries to distribute it to everyone. [00:07:00] Right. To try to create some form of like equality within society, right? And then within capital, that’s a very easy to understand explanation. People hear that, and there we go. I know what you’re talking about. And then with capitalism it is, oh, you know, it’s a, it’s a free market economy, right?

Everybody gets that immediately. You don’t need a big listicle. With fascism, if you boil it down in my head, right, like the way I’ve always boiled it down, it’s when the state collects from the people to serve some ideology some often nationalist in flavor, ideological goal. Which sounds a lot like modern socialism or modern progressivism, right?

It’s the state collects from everyone instead of for wealth redistribution, for wealth redistribution to specific ethnic groups for an ideological goal, which is what you see progressives often pushing for with DEI and stuff like this. But what she says fascism is, and she uses the definition by Roger Griffins,

Simone Colli...