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I sold my car in Carvana last night. Well, that's cool. No, you don't understand. It went perfectly. Real offer down to the penny. They're picking it up tomorrow. Nothing went wrong. So what's the problem? That is the problem. Nothing in my life goes as smoothly. I'm waiting for the catch. Maybe there's no catch. That's exactly what a catch would want me to think. Wow. You need to relax. I need to knock on wood. Do we have wood? Is this table wood? I think it's laminate. Okay. Yeah, that's good. That's close enough. Car selling without a catch. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up. Fees may apply. Last night you spent two deciding what to wear to the party this morning. It'll take you two minutes to list it on Depop and make your money back. Just grab your phone, snap a few photos and we'll take care of the rest. The sheer dress and platform heels you'll never wear again. There's a birthday girl searching for them right now. Your one and done look is about to pay for your next night out. Or at least the ride home. Your style can make you cash. Start selling on Depop, where taste recognizes taste. Hey everyone. I'm Matthew Remske. This is Conspirituality, where we investigate the roots and intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience and authoritarian extremism. You can follow myself, Derek and Julian on bluesky. The podcast is on Instagram and threads. You can also support our Patreon and and you can find me personally on YouTube and TikTok as anti fascistdad. This week I'm rolling an excerpt from the audiobook version of my new book, Anti Fascist Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times. You heard an excerpt from Derek's new book well enough a few weeks back. So springtime is clearly book time for us. As I mentioned a few weeks ago on the main feed, this book is both a continuation of and a departure from my work on this podcast podcast. It's basically me saying I've tracked the rise of fascism enough to know at this point that what I need and what I know a lot of parents and caregivers need as well, is a reset and a resource set for anti fascist thought and action. So that's what I wrote to the best of my ability. Here's the introduction to that book. The link is in the show notes. Introduction. What will happen Early Wednesday morning after the election in 2024. I'd been up half the night. I knocked gently on the door of the 12 year old's room and peeked in. He was playing animal crossing. He trundled his little villager into his cottage for a nap and looked up. So, do we know the result? My partner and I had told him the night before there might not be clarity for days or even weeks. If the numbers were against him, Trump wouldn't concede. There would be legal battles, maybe street violence. None of that happened. Harris lost. He stared at me, stunned. Really? Yeah, by a wide margin. Later, in the kitchen, he said, what will happen? I could only hug him. I felt frozen and empty. But after he got off to school, I warmed myself and began to fill the void by writing him a letter detailing the ideas and skills I thought might be useful to him during a resurgence of American and global fascism. I thought of myself at 12 years old, impulsive, wide eyed and tender. I echoed my kid's question about the future with the eternal parental question about the past. What would I have needed most? I began with the notion that as chaos intensifies, self regulation is gold. From there I moved on to media literacy, critical thinking, getting clear on otherness, difference, privilege and bias, and then on to the political world building that tags fascist rage and violence as predictable outcomes of interlocking systems of inequality, wealth hoarding, racism, misogyny, ableism, hatred of queers, and scapegoating as everyday parents, caregivers and kids. And it often seems we can't do a lot about a strong man like Donald Trump directly, but together we can do something every day about the causes that put him in power. Eventually, this letter to my kid became a handbook for you, my fellow antifascist parent. I hope whatever presumption or grandiosity this implies is tempered by healthy doubt and uncertainty and and that its flaws help with its true aim to nurture creative dialogue. I hope it models and supports accessible and informed conversations among parents and caregivers and teachers and mentors and tweens and teenagers about where we find ourselves, what lies ahead, and what organic and historical resources we can call on not only to survive, but to dream. I'm motivated by the conviction that the terror of rising global fascism against the backdrop of climate precarity is a call to reimagine everything alongside those we guide and mentor. I also believe parenting and caregiving speak to our own unmet needs and we teach what we need to learn. I hope this book can be of use to everyone but those who parent and guide boys navigating their global north whiteness amid a flood of garbage manfluence or advice might get the most out of it. This is the zone in which I have some experience in self examination. This is the demographic that still holds an unequal share of the power in our shared future. This is the demographic most vulnerable to fascist recruitment. It's a book that risks asking parents and caregivers to think about and hold a lot of ideas and to be brave in sharing them. It asks us to realize that the kind of love that tries to protect the child from the world is our natural baseline. But we can't stop there. Nurturing kids in a cruel world also means joining with them in changing that world. There's no time to waste. As I'm writing in mid-2025, Trump is gutting essential services to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the sick, the poor, the elderly and veterans. He is executive ordering trans people out of existence, rolling back the economic and reproductive freedom of women, shuttering public health and environmental agencies, promoting eugenics, cranking up stigma against autistic people, defunding universities and erasing the history of civil rights. He's threatened Greenland and Canada with annexation and has thrown the global economy into chaos with a bingo game of bullying tariffs. Financial uncertainty will further suppress civic engagement, especially among the poor and marginalized who most need political relief but may feel too exhausted to fight for it. Trump's goons are snatching anti genocide protesters off the streets to hold them without due process, in detention, far from their families and lawyers. He's arresting legal immigrants without charges and rendering them to a concentration camp in El Salvador, where the justice minister brags that no one will come out alive. Trump flouts the Constitution on a daily basis, ignores the Supreme Court and is arresting federal judges. The nation is no longer governed by law but by a dictatorial regime. By the time this book is in your hands, Trump will have been in power for only a little more than a year. There will be plenty of time for him, or whoever follows to do even more damage. There's hardly a rule or norm he hasn't broken. Recently, he squawked about seeking an illegal third term. They've started selling Trump 2028 hats on his website. If Trump doesn't survive his term, then Vice President J.D. vance is the next in line. He's only 41 years old and has shown nothing but enthusiasm for furthering the fascist agenda. He might ultimately be better at it. If there's any type of functional election in 2028, it will take place under duress. Trump's circle has had an intoxicating taste of power, and nobody in his orbit has indicated any willingness to give that power up if the people so decide to. In these conditions, the only institutions that will grow in strength and longevity will be police state apparatuses, ice, the FBI and the dhs staffed with agents who now know they are free to harass and repress and disappear anyone on a whim. What remains of federal agencies will be run by toadies dedicated to Trump's chaotic vision. So far, there is no vigorous and organized political opposition to the gravity of the Trump era. The liberal centrist status quo is reenacting the mistakes of a century ago when that generation of leaders attempted to ignore, feebly criticize, appease, or even cut deals with fascists. They are crossing their fingers and praying the fever will pass and that the good manners of good capitalists can restore balance to the galaxy. They hope to reestablish a more orderly and familiar exploitation of workers in the planet. Perhaps then they can bury the people's rage in the underground caverns they've emptied of oil. Real opposition to this chaos will have to think and act far outside of the conventional box of liberal centrist platitudes and procedures. We are going to have to strategize, as anti fascists have always done, to create social and material consequences for daring to be hateful, destructive, narcissistic, racist and misogynistic. Without consequences, fascists will not go away and they will not stop. It is a knife at our throats moment in 2025 as I am writing this book. Any kid who is 16 now will be nearing legal age and facing uncharted waters by the time this book is circulating. We have no idea how bleak things will get. I can't see any line in the sand that will stop the current slide except where we draw one, where we bind ourselves together and and echo the anti fascist slogan from long ago in the Spanish Civil War no Pasaran. They shall not pass against manfluencers and regressionists to do that, I believe we need solid connections and resources to push back against the currents of toxic to useless advice bombarding our young people, especially boys. It comes from two connected but different manfluencers and regressionists. Both feed on the panic to restore order to the allegedly chaotic lives of young people. Manfluencers attribute chaos to forces of social change like feminism and anti capitalism. Regressionists attribute chaos to screen time, social media, declines in reading and helicopter parenting. Manfluencers offer straight up fascist answers to stress and chaos. Their aggression and bootlicking insist that the best response to the cruelty of the world is to accept it as natural law. They say that to survive, boys must learn to bend the knee before God given hierarchies, but also boys. Boys must become hardened men, puff themselves up with hollow pride and smack all social competitors. Feminists, anti colonialists, disability rights activists back into their place. Regressionists feebly attempt to redirect attention away from fascist answers, but they offer little resistance. Their approach tends to assume that the nuts and bolts of family and caregiving life are beyond politics. In their worry over kids, they are focused on screens, video games and Instagram, not without reason, but without much analysis and while showing little capacity to imagine that young people can organize and world build in creative ways. Their theme is parental guilt and alienation within a fast changing world, and their medicine is to dream of a time of more disciplined schools and everyone in soccer practice forever. I believe they have a bodily memory of the economic and cultural afterglow of defeating the Nazis in 1945. They want this order and abundance to return, as though the roots of fascism are not watered every day by the capitalist status quo. Most ironically, regressionists pit themselves as saviors against manfluencers in ways that obscure more basic and normalized threats to our kids lives. As sociologist Aaron Winter told historian Craig Johnson for Johnson's excellent book how to Talk to youo Son about fascism, the extreme right wing can be used as a scapegoat and distraction from more normalized threats. Focusing too much on the extreme right, johnson relays from Winter, can keep us from seeing the everyday racism, sexism and classism that the people around us express. And worse, it can distract us from seeing or fighting the much more common ways that our governments and employers prey on exactly the same people that fascists do. I agree young people are led astray and radicalized by manfluencers. But too often the discussion around radicalization creates an alarmist fog around the everyday logic that creates unequal societies. A tiny bit minority of boys wind up trading Nazi memes and 3D printing files for ghost guns, but it's the majority we should worry about, those who wind up swimming in content that keeps them ambivalent to fascism. We need those young people to stand up to the status quo just as much or more as we need to prevent the rare lone wolf from becoming a mass shooter. Who better to help this along than the parent, caregiver, teacher or mentor? The question points to a core driver of this book that the impersonal yet charismatic influence of manfluencers and regressionists communicates ideology but not relationship. Neither can answer the core wound of fascist psychology. We'll wade through some definitions of fascism in a few minutes, but the stereotype is clear in his bones. The fascist wants to dominate and control instead of live with, grow with and learn with. He is the original shitty father and we need to retire him in a world of wannabe patriarchs. We need more everyday antifascist dads and moms and caregivers, people who will cooperate to emphasize and support the inherent goodness of kids lives and instincts and in doing so learn and feel things they did not imagine were possible. One person who showed the way and one of my strongest influences is the late Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, first published in 1968, Freer says that if you think you want to help an oppressed people and in general, I would say children are an oppressed class and further oppressed if they grow up under capitalist pressure. They did not choose. You can't just talk about them. You can't think and theorize about them and make decisions about how they should be from afar. If you do, you'll just make things worse by imposing your will from above while flattering yourself about your virtue and charity. You must lean into their world to learn alongside them. Let them lead you. The idea is to feel your way into solidarity. I don't see any of the top earning right wing manfluencers or regressionists doing that with the boys they say they're so worried about, let alone the marginalized. I'd love to see Jordan Peterson spend a single hour at a shelter for unhoused families or with a child in autistic burnout who can't leave their bedroom. Everyone who wants to give advice and restore dignity must first sit with and love the person with no conditions and no expectations that they conform to a world you should be working to change. A place where the first thing you think about is accommodation instead of compliance. A place where all of the Bootstrap's advice is seen for what it is, a form of coercive control designed to bypass or even inflict suffering instead of growing together through it on not lecturing but also having a plan. One of the recurring mistakes I make with my kids and being a podcaster, everyone else is going into lecture mode. Unfortunately, books are monologues, so this can happen here as well. A book upwards of 10 hours long, no matter how accessible and conversational it's written, can start to feel like a long nag. All I can do is ask you to keep this in mind whether you're reading this on your own or sharing ideas with your kid. Parcel out the content so that it's never too much. I hope all the subtitles and subsections give ample opportunity for breathing space. Questions and objections about the subtitles and subsections Everyone has to make choices on how to link ideas together to see one world clearly and then clearly imagine another. I've chosen to begin chapter one on the topic of self regulation because without it I don't believe anyone can think clearly about things or pay close attention to relationships. Chapter 2 critiques manfluencer advice as a pipeline to accepting or even promoting fascism. Chapter three explores media literacy as a tool for navigating conspiracy theories, misinformation and bullshit. It also looks at inequality and bias as both building blocks for and blinders to fascism. The next four chapters are the wonkiest in the book, a tour through the technical analyses of capitalism and bigotry which I believe are required for a solid anti fascist foundation. Chapter four argues that fascism cannot be understood without contemplating how capitalism normalizes theft and divides people into artificial hierarchies that breed paranoia. The book could have been called Anti Capitalist Dad. Chapter five fleshes out the discussion about capitalism as a gateway to fascism through the merger between the tycoon and the strongman, while chapter six names the scapegoats it targets on the way and why they are convenient to those in power. Chapter 7 bridges politics and relationships through the tinderbox of sexuality, centered on a discussion of gender, consent and agency. The extended reflection on porn doesn't take a sex ed or moralistic or behavioral point of view, but rather unpacks what I see as the core challenge of this ubiquitous commodity how the exploitation of desire can disrupt the relationships needed for solidarity. The rest of the book is the sustainability homestretch. Chapter 8 contemplates the ideals of friendship. Chapter 9 centers on the sticky problems of anti fascist direct action. Chapters 10 and 11 talk about the joys of games and stories and the importance of spiritual relief. My aim in choosing how to order and build this material is to provide a ground level entry point into anti fascist thought accessible to anyone from any background. I think this is important because many book length or online introductions to antifascism throw the reader in at the deep end. A lot of writers writing for adults begin with the assumption that the reader already has a robust critique of capitalism, propaganda, inequality and the nature of fascism. For those of my readers who already have that critique on board. This book will encourage bolder action. For those of you who don't, it will offer what I hope is a persuasive argument for both sets. This book starts at ground zero as it builds a framework for intergenerational anti fascism. My hope is that the book feels like coming slowly out of a solar eclipse. One can never know how much time one has to spend in the shadow to fully appreciate the light, and the first half of this book may feel more grim than it needs to be for some readers. I've worked with my editors and family and friends to figure out the best balance, and I'm sure you'll have your own ideas as well. Getting Clear on Capitalism and Fascism While writing this book, I've engaged in long episodic conversations with our two kids, ages 8 and 12, about capitalism while walking, driving, gaming and hanging out. Our focus can center on the economics of video games, themes of colonization and empire, and stories, the wages of workers, patterns of environmental exploitation, or what the hell they're going to do for work in the shadow of AI. When I use simple examples to lay out the morality of capitalism through ideas like surplus labor, value and Profit, Chapter four and who is Entitled to it, they do not hesitate in answering that of course profit should be shared, and maybe more of it should go to the worker than the shop owner. They are disturbed to learn that under capitalism or all profit is legally appropriated from the worker to the owner who can do whatever he wants with it. But then something strange happens in their self perception. A kind of premature guilt creeps in. I'm not sure where it comes from. It might be other adults who, in considering this problem of capitalism all around us and inside us, will either shrug or nod sadly as if to say that's just the way it is. Worse, they will turn the question around on the kid to say, if you don't want to be a capitalist, you'll have to stop buying things, won't you? What tends to happen with this imprecise confrontation is that the kid begins to believe in their own complicity. Both of my kids have worried aloud that they are becoming capitalists because they want certain things and we buy some of them, and they detect the hollowness of the ritual. It's like they are predicting their own fall from innocence. My gut says that if this is not unpacked, it can prevent a kid from imagining new choices an adult cannot make. The adult has made it seem like we've all chosen this way to live and it's on us to make it work. This is the first assault of what British political theorist Mark Fisher mentioned in chapter five is getting at in his description of capitalist realism, through which we resign ourselves to exploitation being the only way in which humans can organize resources. The birthright of kids is that none of them has chosen this. My approach is twofold, and it starts with choice and agency. First I ask my kids, did you choose a world in which you have to get money for food and housing? Did you choose a world in which the money you have to earn and then pay to be alive makes a few people absurdly rich? Of course they didn't. As far as kids are concerned, they are living like hunter gatherers in their world, picking up and using what they can, what is available, and sometimes even sharing it among themselves. Then I ask, do you currently use any lump sum of money to build factories to exploit people and reap even bigger profits? Of course they don't. Next, if you inherited some money or won the lottery, would it occur to you to buy a factory and hire workers, but pay them as little as possible so that you can take profits and invest in more factories while living in luxury? They hate that idea. So then I say, if you're not appropriating profits from the labor of people you keep subservient to you, and you wouldn't even think of doing that, then you are living in capitalism, but you're not really a capitalist. That means you are free to imagine other ways of finding and creating and sharing resources. But I also say that part of this freedom depends on investigating the problem of our desire and what happens when we get what we want. Why do we want that particular device or experience or piece of clothing or even a particular type of body? What happens when we achieve those things? Do they fulfill us? It is astonishing to realize the answer is always no. This is the outline of capitalism that I'll be running with and expanding on throughout this book. It's important to understand how the puzzle of our own desires sets us on a hamster wheel of unfulfill fulfilling consumption. It's important to become aware of how those consumption habits reflect class and race inequalities and create ecological harm. But it's also important to understand that the system of harm itself precedes any choice any individual can make within it. We did not consent how does capitalism descend into fascism? Standard leftist theory says that it happens through the amplification of conflict within capitalism itself. The boom and bust shocks and wealth inequality that lead to class resentments, paranoia and scapegoating. In this framework, fascism is the last ditch attempt by the dominant socioeconomic order to maintain control over its systems of inequality as they become unsustainable. But don't take it from the leftists. Many of the early fascists themselves said that fascism is ideally expressed through the merging of state, military and corporate powers to ensure order in precarious times. So if at a certain point you cannot tell whether you are being governed by elected officials or controlled by men with more money than God, who can do whatever they want with their thugs while pretending they are restoring a golden age, you are probably living in fascism. There is no more obvious example of this than Donald Trump, whose only pathway to the White House was by scamming his way through the business world with his second term. This alliance of forces was made even more clear as he chose the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, to gut the government like a fish during a time of maximal global inequality. Together, they broke every rule and norm, and everyone seemed powerless to stop them. Anti fascists have no choice but to organize together, learn their history, learn how to take care of themselves and each other. And despite all the stress and cruelty, learn how to have a rewarding time while doing it, because that's what will make it sustainable. So how do historians define fascism? It's a messy and overused term. Anti fascist historian Mark Bray says that this is because it can operate both as a moral insult or as a technical term to describe particular political behavior. So today people meme about fascism and create AI fascism. Irony slopes. It gets messier when Elon Musk can salute Nazism at Trump's inauguration with a Sieg Heil, but also post memes that turn Nazis abusing Jews into a joke. There's a good chance that kids will first run into the term as if it were a joke. This isn't just a brain rot problem. Even historians who spend their lives studying fascism have not come to a consensus, and the question of whether Trumpism meets the fascist minimum will be debated for a long time. One view says that there are too many differences between this period and the interwar conditions that gave rise to 20th century fascism to draw meaningful connections. Historian Jonathan Zaitlin, for example, says that our post Covid economic crises are only superficially reminiscent of post war and post pandemic 1918 conditions, and that Trump's opportunistic resurrection of fascist ideas and language does not meet the Hitler threshold. Meanwhile, some contemporary communists say that Trumpism is not comparable to the movements of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini because it is not mobilizing bourgeois rage against the working class or exterminating political opponents. They define Trump as a right wing populist and suggest this offers a grim note of hope. They say that widespread discontent with economic decline and stagnant wages has had nowhere else to go given the absence of a mass political option on the left. This means, therefore, that the US and the world are ripe once more for revolution. My position is that seeing Trumpism and fascism as the same target is close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades. While Trumpism is unique to this moment, it exhibits a sufficient number of historically resonant fascist elements to merit an anti fascist response. In its struggle against those elements, Anti fascism will fundamentally improve society regardless of what historians ultimately decide about the Trump era. To detail those elements, I'll survey some useful definitions of fascism. The first comes from American historian Robert Paxton, who, as I'm writing, is 93 years old. He was born the year before Hitler became dictator of Germany, so he's got a long view on this. I find his perspective compelling because with all his scholarship on board, he was at first skeptical about whether the Trump era fit the profile of the fascist movements that provoked World War II. But after Trump's mob attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, Paxton basically said, okay, dang, this is a fascist movement. Paxton says fascism is a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood, and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity in which a mass based party of committed nationalist militants working in an easy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues, with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints, goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. Political behavior means we're talking not about the psychological traits of individuals but but about organized group dynamics. This means anti fascism is not about deposing a bad government or leader, but about improving social conditions so that these forces never emerge. Fascism is obsessive in that it moves quickly and anxiously and fixates on narrow themes related to its own shame and victimhood. Make America Great Again is a confession of wounded self esteem that can only be compensated for by cultic group actions that punish outsiders and promise renewal in its hunger for power. Fascism collaborates with every political sector except those committed to anti fascism and will violate every norm and law and view its violent actions as purifying the state. In 2003, historian Roger Griffin defined fascism as palingenetic ultranationalism, a religious rebirth of a nation's founding myth. After a humiliating period of cultural, moral and physical decline. Political philosopher Jason Stanley also emphasizes this drive to restore a fictional golden age by purifying the toxins of change. He goes on to provide a 10 point checklist of fascist tactics including propaganda, anti intellectualism, obsessions with law and order and anxieties about sex. In 2025, Craig Johnson offered a very simple and contemporary definition of fascism aimed at boys and young men today, a nationalist, anti liberal, sexist and violent right wing political movement that aims to remake the world. Foregrounding sexist as a core factor is crucial, as we'll see. If we understand fascism only through the lens of 1930s Europe, we can miss how deeply fascist logic and practices are embedded in histories that long predate Hitler and Mussolini and how they are essential to the American story. In the Black anti fascist tradition Fighting back from anti lynching to abolition, historians Janelle Hope and Bill Mullen argue that the source of European fascism lies in the terror inflicted on black life under colonialism. They ask, along with the Martiniquet psychiatrist and anti colonial writer Frantz Fanon, what is fascism if not colonialism when rooted in a traditionally colonialist country? This book will not ignore that root. Finally, while I emphasized above along with Paxton, that fascism is a political or group behavior, I also want to flag something that I'll flesh out further throughout. I believe that the fascist or controlling impulse can be palpable within the smallest spheres of our lives. I believe there are inner reflexes of impatience, rigidity and disgust to which many of us parents and caregivers are vulnerable via fatigue, trauma, or maybe our own immaturity. I feel it personally when exhaustion or depression or some kernel of meanness makes me dismissive, judgmental, secretive toward or resentful of those I love and am bound to. I feel it when I default to gendered behaviors of coldness or detachment. I feel it when I want to control the life that flows around me. Together, these conditioned and inherited flaws cannot be conflated with the organized violence of mass movement fascism. But they also can't be ignored if we want family life to incubate anti fascist values and a healing spirit. The personal is political, as the feminists have always said. The most intimate way I know of engaging in a lifelong struggle against my own inner authoritarian and his fragility is by practicing a few few tools of self regulation geared towards slowing down and disrupting reactivity. Inner practice can't solve structural problems, but it provides a solid place to start when facing them. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for 15amonth plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com.