Antifascist Dad Podcast22 Nov 2025

UNLOCK 6.1 A Dare Wrapped in a Joke Wrapped in a Void w/ Cy Canterel Pt 2

In Part 2 of my conversation with Cy Canterel, we keep digging into how people form identity, belief, and belonging inside the swirl of irony, nihilism, and digital performance that defines so much of contemporary life.

We explore the psychology of online radicalization—what actually pulls people toward fascist aesthetics, what ambivalence can teach us about resistance, and how the very same infrastructures that feed alienation can also host creativity, solidarity, and care.

Also: more on the Graham Platner story as a living case study in fluid online identity: how meaning shifts, how people change, and how communities can choose to interrupt cycles of rage instead of reproducing them.

And an epilogue on taking the 13 year-old to the Toronto Anticapitalist Book Fair in the old Tranzac Club, where I used to hang out more than 30 years ago.

Cy's Website

Cy's Substack: Abstract Machines

Chapters

(00:00:07) - A Dare Wrapped In a Joke Wrapped in a Void
(00:02:49) - The Psychology of Extremist Identity
(00:05:30) - Noxious Views in the Online Culture
(00:08:30) - Can You Change Your Own Mind?
(00:09:57) - The Narrative of Who Is Graham Platner
(00:12:53) - Do Narratives Promote or Decrease Ambiguity?
(00:22:40) - The Problem With The Revolutionary Imagination
(00:25:16) - Cy Cantarel on Being Nihilistic at 14
(00:29:43) - Anti-capitalist book fair at the Tranzac Club

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(82)

UNLOCK 42.1 Friendship (is not easy)

An excerpt from the audiobook of Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times — Chapter Eight, Friendship Is Not Easy. I'm putting this out as a companion to my interview w...

9 Aug 43min

UNLOCK: 41.1 The Anti-Vance Would Like a Word Pt 2 w/ Nathan Evans Fox

Part 2 of my convo with Nathan Evans Fox, going deeper into the psychological and theological architecture of what JD Vance is actually doing in his new memoir, and what it costs him and everyone else...

2 Aug 45min

42. Keep the Little Flame Alive w/ Carsie Blanton

I sit down with socialist singer-songwriter Carsie Blanton to explore how unstructured freedom — from schooling, the music industry, and institutional religion — became the soil for her political and ...

29 Jul 1h 1min

UNLOCK 40.1 Episodic and Thematic Thinking and Feeling

Picking up a on thread from my interview with Nora Loreto interview: a coda on the tension between zooming in on the daily news cycle and zooming out to a coherent analytical framework. I draw on Shan...

26 Jul 19min

41. The Anti-Vance Would Like a Word w/ Nathan Evans Fox

JD Vance's Communion presents itself as a spiritual memoir but functions as a rebranding operation: It's the same narcissistic trick he played with Hillbilly Elegy. Who better to sit down with to sort...

22 Jul 52min

UNLOCK 39.1 Epistemic Injustice

Years ago, I failed to understand my autistic son's needs. Instead of fully taking in his distress at school, I projected my own story, values, and experience on him. He'll manage. He'll get used to i...

19 Jul 21min

40: We Live on This Planet to Do Good Work w/ Nora Loreto

Today I sit down with Nora Loreto, a Quebec City-based journalist and labour organizer, to discuss her five-volume Canada in Decline series — a forensic history of the dismantling of Canada's social d...

15 Jul 1h 8min

UNLOCK 38.1 Gramsci’s Wars of Position, Wars of Maneuver

Antonio Gramsci, writing in a fascist prison in the early 1930s, distinguished between wars of position—the slow struggle over culture, values, and consent—and wars of maneuver, or direct confrontatio...

12 Jul 33min