I posted a short reflection to TikTok last week, and it landed harder than I expected. It’s about the emotional double-life I believe many of us are living: one foot in the adult world of political vigilance and despair, and one foot in the child-world of curiosity, play, and care.

Today I’m expanding that theme and pairing it with another challenge: how suspicion-driven Left analysis shapes our emotional availability, our social trust, and our parenting. How do we balance vigilance with openness? How do we keep our melancholy from becoming our children’s inheritance? And how do we stop feeling like orphans in a world where radical elders have been scattered, suppressed, or lost?

I’d love to hear your experience with this:

• Best way: send me a voice memo on Signal @antifascistdad.71. Try to keep messages under 2 minutes!
• You can also DM me on Bluesky and Instagram, or join me on Patreon @antifascistdadpodcast where my DMs are open.
• I’m also on TikTok and YouTube @antifascistdad.

Preorder link for Antifascist Dad (North Atlantic Books, April 2026)

Just a coupla antifascist Canadian dads having a chat about stuff.

In this special crossover episode, I join Cory Johnston of the Skeptical Leftist podcast for a conversation about cult dynamics, fascism, antifascist parenting, masculinity, and how to support kids with empathy in a collapsing world.

We talk about parenting in a political emergency, how to avoid overwhelming kids with adult anxieties, and how to build trust-based conversations about power, policing, misinformation, and existential fear. We get into masculinity, emotional repression, the unpaid labor of women, the politics of care, and how becoming a co-parent radicalized me more deeply than any book ever could.

We also spend time on atheist/religious alliances, liberation theology, body-image capitalism, surviving neoliberal time-pressure, and how to nurture political imagination without drowning in guilt or fatalism.

Our interview on YouTube.

Cory's Linktree.

My book to preorder.

• (00:00:07) - The Skeptical Leftist Podcast
• (00:01:07) - Matthew's Short Bio Rant
• (00:05:03) - On Parenting and the Left
• (00:10:13) - What is Anti-Fascism?
• (00:24:37) - Anti-Fascism & Conspirituality
• (00:29:59) - Democracy on Liberation theology
• (00:41:39) - On Becoming a Parent
• (00:49:04) - What Is Healthy Masculinity?
• (00:59:59) - How Do You Raise Your Kids With Empathetic Awareness?
• (01:08:51) - Emotional maturity and the police
• (01:19:45) - White Privilege and the Problem of Personal Responsibility
• (01:25:32) - Time Management
• (01:33:17) - Where Can People Find Antifascist Dad?

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

• (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