6. A Dare Wrapped in a Joke Wrapped in a Void w/ Cy Canterel

Antifascist Dad Podcast – Episode 6 “A Dare Wrapped in a Joke Wrapped in a Void” Guest: Cy Canterel Matthew Remski: How many memes does it take to really explain the nuance of online radicalizing subcultures? Six? Seven? I’m Matthew Remski. That was an antifascist dad joke. Welcome to Episode Six, “A Dare Wrapped in a Joke Wrapped in a Void,” with my guest, self-described feral and autistic scholar of internet systems and culture, TikTok master Cy Canterel. Cy Canterel: If you’re looking at a swirl of cryptic memes and trying to reverse-engineer a motive, you’re going to misread the story. What looks like politics is often subculture. What looks like a manifesto is sometimes a dare wrapped in a joke wrapped in a void. Matthew: That’s Canterel, coining this episode’s title. She’s here to open what will be an ongoing conversation about perhaps the strangest and most opaque space in this era of rising fascism — the memosphere, manosphere, whatever you’d like to call it. Future guests in this zone will include Dale Baran, author of “It Came from Something Awful,” and tech and social-media journalist Taylor Lorenz. Unidentified voice: It’s like — I don’t know how you can go out and protest the structure of the entire economic system if you can’t keep your room organized. Matthew: Right. Housekeeping. You can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name, Matthew Remski, and on YouTube and TikTok as antifascistdad. I try to post three to four mini-essays a week. Lately I’ve been covering Scott Galloway’s new book and his media blitz — pulling clips from Morning Joe, CNN, The View — and offering commentary on the gap between what’s in the book and how he pushes his themes more aggressively on television. Patreon is @AntifascistADpodcast. This is a temporary paywall for what I want to be broadly accessible educational content. Today you’ll hear the first half of my interview with Cy; the second half is on Patreon. As always, show notes include the preorder link for the book behind this podcast, “Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times,” out April 26, 2026. Fascist / Squish / Antifascist News of the Week This segment has blurrier boundaries than usual because I’m recording in the glow of Zohran Mamdani winning the mayoral election in New York City. I’m not alone in having followed him obsessively since the spring, when he was polling in single digits. My kids picked up on him from my own interest — we’ve shared his speeches and TikToks and talked about the towering obstacles of Islamophobia and capitalist realism he’s faced. On election night he didn’t pull punches regarding the national and international significance of his win. Zohran Mamdani: “Together, we will usher in a generation of change. And if we embrace this brave new course rather than flee from it, we can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears — not the appeasement it craves. If anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him. And if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power. This is how we stop Trump — and the next one. So, Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you: Turn the volume up.” Matthew: Before bed, my 13-year-old asked the same question he asked the morning after Trump’s second electoral win: “What’s going to happen?” I realized there’s a tension between hope and reality, and I didn’t want to guide him too far into either eddy. I said: For now, good people will soak up a rare ray of sunshine in a bad time. They’ll feel thrilled at the accomplishment of an outsider. They’ll study how the campaign mobilized 90,000 volunteers, how Mamdani turned his run into a social and educational movement, how he gave lessons in New York City radical history from behind a formal desk on social media, and how he never backed down from core values — even holding one of his final events in a huge gay nightclub. Mamdani’s win makes it clear that fascism in the U.S. is not unopposed. But his ability to enact even modest progressive policy — on rent, housing, transport, childcare — will be a bloody trench war. Not only because the Trumpian superstructure will punish the city through funding cuts, stalled building projects, and street-level violence through ICE, but also because he’ll be obstructed by the squishes: layers of liberal bureaucracy that reinforce the capitalist status quo. This is why the reactionary leadership of the Democratic Party — from Schumer and Jeffries to Pete Buttigieg and Hillary Clinton — couldn’t bring themselves to endorse him, even after Andrew Cuomo was smashed in the primary, and despite Cuomo also being a known sex assaulter. There’s another layer of squishiness: billionaire Bill Ackman, who backed Cuomo and helped strategize against Mamdani. The night Mamdani won, Ackman tweeted: “Congrats on the win. If I can help New York City, let me know what I can do.” That’s a remarkably fast flip, and a sign of what Mamdani faces: billionaires who can bankroll a washout like Cuomo and then offer their help to the socialist insurgent. So we have to ask soberly what would happen if Mamdani opened his administration to someone like Ackman. Later, it’ll be important to think through the fact that for some folks, Mamdani already is squishy. Some in the Palestinian liberation movement are concerned about concessions he’s made to pro-Israel interests to broaden support: disavowing “Globalize the Intifada,” promising to include Zionists in his administration, agreeing Palestinians should lay down arms, and pledging to retain Police Commissioner Tish — the one who oversaw brutal crackdowns on encampments and who comes from a billionaire family. Some were also taken aback when, amidst Trump murdering civilians off the Venezuelan coast — forty at the most recent count — Mamdani echoed the White House line about Maduro being an abusive dictator, bolstering Trump’s push toward illegal invasion. Every young person should study Mamdani carefully. There’s so much to love — his rhetoric, humor, grace, polyglot swagger, even his drip. He puts a charming face on the possibility of a new politics. But if he struggles or stalls, that charm won’t help him; it might cue feelings of betrayal. As one anarchist put it: charismatic, well-behaved leftists within parliamentary boundaries absorb discontent that might otherwise flow into direct action, mutual aid, and organizing. Interview: Cy Canterel Matthew: Cy Canterel studies and writes about the internet with interdisciplinary nuance. In a time when many of us are anxious about the radicalizing nature of online isolation and competition — and the reactionary content spun up by influencers — I find her work really helpful. There’s also an acute context: when we talk about young people, especially young men, who represent the worst outcomes of online radicalization, we’re talking about mass shooters and assassins like Tyler Robinson, the alleged killer of Charlie Kirk. Robinson allegedly left signs at the scene — bullet casings engraved with references pointing in multiple directions. “Bella Ciao” appeared on one casing — an antifascist song, but also used by right-wing fringe groups including followers of Kirk rival Nick Fuentes. There was also a quote from Helldivers 2, where players ironically cosplay as fascist soldiers. The quote — “Catch fascist” — might refer to Kirk, but it’s unclear. And in trying to suss this all out, Canterel made a video that went viral, arguing that these references may not amount to a manifesto — and maybe we don’t even get manifestos anymore. A manifesto requires a shared consensus reality — a stable world to write against, and a readership with attention span. Young outsider men aren’t sitting down to write full political visions. Instead, they dare each other to find or create meaning. They joke with each other to feel relief or save face. They do this over the chasm we all brace ourselves against — the void. Canterel’s insight into the fluidity of online identities shows that a dare wrapped in a joke wrapped in a void doesn’t condemn anonymous shitposters to never change. These aren’t stable political commitments — they’re moods or affects that can be interrupted or redirected. This is part of the emerging story of Graham Platner, which we discuss in this episode. Parents and caregivers already practice this interruption and redirection daily. When it comes to the internet, Canterel suggests the first thing to remember is ambivalence. For some, the internet is a right-wing pipeline. For others it’s a lifeline. In her view, online culture mirrors human social dynamics; it’s not inherently warped. The internet isn’t broken — it’s a neutral tool captured by broken incentives. Its architecture could foster creativity, community, and pluralism, but profit-driven platforms reward outrage, irony, and despair. The result is a global subcultural ecosystem where people experiment with identity and belief, often unconsciously, through memes, humor, and performance. Online extremism, irony, and nihilism are predictable byproducts of alienation — symptoms of societies that give people few stable roles, narratives, or futures. For Canterel, the internet is a vast laboratory for human pattern-making. It shows in real time how people construct and defend stories about who they are — and how easily those stories slide from creativity and play into anxiety and polarization. This perspective lifts me out of catastrophizing about what’s appearing on our household screens. Online content isn’t entering a hollow vessel — it’s entering a space where relationships are vital. From Canterel’s bio: “I’m a feral scholar working outside traditional academic boundaries to investigate how infrastructures shape the human condition. I’m interested in architectures that structure collective sense-making — the technologies, institutions, and psychologies that organize how meaning moves and who gets to make it. My practice is rooted in what my mentor Bob Stein once told me: the world desperately needs talented generalists who can trace systemic patterns across domains. I studied at RISD and the New School, was a visiting scholar at NYU, and co-received a 2016 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award. Now I write and consult to help people decode systems of power and meaning, see the infrastructure underneath, and find new ways to comprehend and create.” Matthew: Cy Canterel — welcome to Antifascist Dad. Cy: Thank you, Matthew. I’m so excited to be here. Matthew: For ceremonial purposes, can we dub you “antifascist internet auntie”? Cy: Of course. Matthew: You’ve been very open about being autistic. As listeners get to know you and your analytical style — are we seeing a kind of special-interest, hyper-focus research engine at work? Cy: Definitely. I’m an elder millennial. When I was born in the early 80s, women weren’t diagnosed with autism — many didn’t think women could have autism. I was hyperlexic as a child. My mother tells a story: when I was two, walking in the garden, I looked up at her and said, “Mom, why is God dead?” She asked what I meant, and I said: “Well, dead people go to heaven, and God is in heaven, so God must be dead.” That was the transitive property at work. That’s continued throughout my life. When I look at problems, I instinctively step back to see them systemically. It helps with anxiety — understanding dynamics makes things feel less chaotic. My special interests have always centered on psychology, complex systems, and how humans react in extremis. I worked in airline safety for a while — human factors — where we study how people aggravate or ameliorate crises in uncontrollable environments. Matthew: Zooming out to see patterns seems connected to lived experiences of social difficulty or exclusion. Is that fair? Cy: Yes. I’m adopted, and attachment-wise, emotional attunement wasn’t something I had in my family of origin. When you’re different and your caregivers can’t empathize with that lived experience, they often default to control instead of collaboration. That leads to hypervigilance — constantly analyzing people’s social responses, worrying you’ve offended, masking. It’s heightened for women because we’re socialized to be compliant. I went to a small private school in the Deep South — graduating class of fifty — and in the junior class photo I’m the lone goth on the bleachers. I experienced a lot of exclusion. Matthew: It sounds like that combination — pattern-seeing plus attunement to exclusion — might be especially suited to sussing out fascism. Cy: It’s not only fascism. It’s any group-identity dynamic. I’ve always been attuned to how people feel like they belong — or don’t — and how groups organize those feelings. Even in junior high: why are some people popular? Why am I an outsider? What does that mean? Then you assume adults have outgrown that. But you go through adulthood and realize: nobody knows what they’re doing, and nobody grows out of those dynamics. Matthew: There’s a lot of diagnosing of young men right now because of their outsized impact on online culture and therefore politics. But figuring out what’s going on inside someone’s head is complicated, especially regarding insider/outsider status. I first encountered your work in your video on the ambiguous politics of Tyler Robinson. A line from that video should be on every misinformation reporter’s laptop: what looks like politics is often subculture. What looks like a manifesto is sometimes a dare wrapped in a joke wrapped in a void. Let’s unpack that. What does it mean for politics to look like subculture? Cy: We use words like subculture to refer to fringe social groups, but dominant culture has the same dynamics. Politics, even at world-stage levels, is full of in-groups and out-groups. People seek the same sense of belonging that subcultures offer. This isn’t always malicious. Subcultural intersections help cultures grow. If you don’t feel you belong — even within mainstream culture — you feel antagonistic toward it. That’s a big component of the alt-right pipeline: right-wing influencers tap into shared identity as a form of belonging. But all political identities have this us-versus-them dynamic; it’s not unique to fringe groups. Matthew: And what about the dare, joke, void structure — the joke whose audience we can’t access? Cy: The line referred to the engravings on the bullet casings. There was a rush to decode every reference. But that’s like dissecting a punchline. These references aren’t meant to resolve into a defined ideology — they’re signals meant to land within a subculture. The message is a dark, nihilistic joke: look at the normies trying to make sense of this. If you miss the fact that it’s a joke, the technocratic unpacking of each symbol will always miss the point. The audience is the key. Manifestos are public documents. Jokes are not. Matthew: Is this connected to irony poisoning? Craig Johnson argues that humor is a conscious recruitment tool for right-wing actors. Cy: Yes and no. I’m not sure there’s a conscious playbook. It’s more subconscious: once you drift unconsciously toward a part of the spectrum, you’re primed for more content from that direction. It’s like magnetism. Platforms like Nick Fuentes’s America First become pooling places where people either drift further in or drift back out. But I don’t think anyone controls the initial recruitment in a deliberate, linear way. It’s messier. Matthew: Another complication: common political categories — left, right — get scrambled in this ecosystem. Cy: Exactly. Fringe groups adopt adversarial or rejected postures from mainstream culture and combine them in seemingly contradictory ways. This forges tighter identity. It becomes a show of ideological purity to adopt stances that puzzle outsiders. That’s how you get neo-Nazi trans folks. The contradictions mark the boundary between insiders and normies. Matthew: Let’s turn to Graham Platner, an important black box right now. Given what you know, how hard is it to reverse-engineer how he wound up shitposting on Reddit with a Nazi tattoo on his chest? Cy: Controversial maybe, but I don’t think he’s an outlier. He grew up in Maine in a self-sufficient, rugged-individualist family environment, around guns. His parents divorced; his father was a lawyer, his mother a small-business owner. His path is analogous to J. D. Vance in some ways. Both drifted in and out of elite institutions and the military, navigating unstable identities through the lens of white male privilege in 21st-century America. Both wrestled with anger, grief, and meaninglessness. You floated the idea that Platner’s tattoo is a kind of self-styled mark of Cain — externalizing pain. I think that’s possible, but also: nihilism plays a role. Matthew: Platner has become a Rorschach test for liberals and leftists navigating anxieties you study closely. What do men become vulnerable to in isolation, particularly online? Cy: I’m not a man, so caveats. But I think men in isolation become vulnerable to the same forces everyone does: meaninglessness, despair, grief, rage. For men specifically, I see a sense that there’s no place for them, no future worth investing in. You see this in the incel-linked acronym NEET: not in education, employment, or training. It becomes an ideological stance — resistance to hegemonic capitalist norms of productivity and meaning. That could be a creative space, but without structure for meaning-making — and surrounded by consumerist ideals — it becomes a vulnerability to nihilism. Without connection, nihilism reinforces itself. Matthew: It seems there’s a relationship between the loss of real-life spaces for identity and the rise of toxic mimicry online — anonymous identities producing affect rather than taking action. Cy: I think that’s true, but I also don’t think the internet is broken. The people who run it are broken. Technology is a tool. Early internet culture saved my life — it showed possibilities I wouldn’t have seen in rural Deep South isolation. The problem is we’ve shifted from using these tools to build new worlds to using them in eddies of misery and doomscrolling. That’s not young people’s fault — it’s platform economics designed for profit. Closing Matthew: In Part Two, I continue with Cy on Platner, narrative, and shifting identities. Now for Fascist Dad of the Week: Dick Cheney — really the fascist corpse of the week. He knew the WMD pretense for invading Iraq in 2003 was false. A million Iraqis died. He died on the same day Mamdani was elected. I can only hope his version of hell is being trapped as a ghost busboy in a packed election-night bar. I’m Matthew. That’s it for this week. I’ll see you on Patreon for Cy Canterel Part Two, or next week for an interview with liberation-theology Jesuit ICE protester David Inczauskis. Take care of each other.