Episode Transcript
Antifascist Dad Podcast — Episode 45.1: Psychic Militancy in the Encampment
(Patreon coda to Episode 45, with Daniel Sailofsky)
Matthew Remski: Hello, Patreon supporters and everyone else. My name is Matthew Remski, this is Antifascist Dad Podcast, and it's episode 45.1: Psychic Militancy in the Encampment.
I'm really grateful for your support. I hope this project brings some joy and hope and utility to your works and days. For housekeeping: you can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name, and I'm on YouTube and TikTok as Antifascist Dad, and the Patreon for this show, which, if you're listening to this on the day it's dropped, you'll know it's antifascistdadpodcast — and subscribers get early access to every second part of the main feed episodes, or a second episode every week.
This one is a coda in which I look at exhaustion, confusion, fear, and despair — or how the psychic intrusions model of Lara Sheehi, who was my episode 44 guest, applies to the CASE report incident that I discussed with Daniel Sailofsky in episode 45, and the general position that anti-Zionists now find themselves in as they are bombarded with this accusation of antisemitism.
So I didn't visit the anti-genocide encampment protesters on the U of T campus in the spring of 2024. I just couldn't. It was at an arc in our family's disability care cycle that I just couldn't have taken the time away.
If it were to come together today, things would be a little bit different, because, you know, even now our crew has a little bit more bandwidth, and I've been able to show up for a few in-person socialist electoral campaign events here in the neighborhood. All of which is to say that when I apply Lara Sheehi's model of psychic intrusion versus psychic militancy to the student protests of 2024, I'm doing so as an observer. I'm doing so in retrospect.
But I think I'm a close observer, because during those months I took in everything I could about the various encampments throughout the Global North. I watched interviews. I listened to the podcasts that were recorded in the camps. I followed the daily press statements and responses from administrators. I wrote to my representatives to urge them to stand against police intervention. And in episode 2 of this podcast, I interviewed organizer Sara Rasikh about the encampment experience and culture, and what I was most moved by was her account of how it changed her life and the lives of her friends, and how they'd felt exhilarated by the risk they took in solidarity, and how they learned so much about what they were capable of under immense pressure.
And soaking all of this in reminded me of something in old-timey sociology. Émile Durkheim talked about a contagious type of social effervescence that emerges in political, artistic, or religious contexts when otherwise isolated individuals gather for a unified purpose. He described it as a profound, supernatural exhilaration arising mechanically and kinetically.
And I came across this idea again — I'd heard of it before, I think, but it came up in the book Street Rebellion, by a friend of the podcast, Ben Case, who, in studying protest actions that become militant, developed this concept into something that he calls contentious effervescence.
Durkheim's view was that crowd hypnosis erased personal discernment and autonomy. And Case says that militant direct action in the face of state power — the cops — can give a heightened collective experience where individuals not only retain their distinct selfhood, but strengthen their bonds with the collective.
And then he backed all this up with fieldwork on how people experience this empowering and magical feeling, specifically in confrontational actions, as opposed to conventional protests — you know, like the No Kings deal. He and his informants describe this as a breakthrough experience that creates a new political subject.
Now, with the encampments, and Ben Case's interviews among South African student activists who were protesting exclusionary fee structures, we're talking about protest actions — attempts to persuade the public and pressure power into showing itself, to confess what it's doing, to ultimately offer concession. And it's organized, but it's not to the level and peril of arms.
Another example of this recently comes from the Global Sumud Flotilla. And when I interviewed Carsie Blanton about it, her report followed this theme: it was the right thing to do. Terrifying and exhilarating, no matter the outcome.
[Audio clip]: Well, I know we didn't beat him, but I'm proud of what we did. Hello, comrade.
Matthew Remski: So there's another source I'd like to direct you to — a book called Joyful Militancy, by Carla Bergman and Nick Montgomery. Now, I've been in contact with Carla for an interview here — hopefully we'll work that out soon, because this book is really, really great. It says that in our conventional lives, the most these systems can offer us is happiness, which often involves some kind of capitulation to capitalist realism, some deal-striking of "I've got mine." I'm watching our kids struggling with this one now, with a lot of integrity, because the world is full of treats, and they can start to see what satisfies and what doesn't.
Carla and Nick talk instead about joy, and they do this by drawing from Spinoza's 17th-century ecstatic Jewish philosophy, positing that joy is not an emotion at all, but an increase in one's power to affect and be affected. So Baruch Spinoza uses joy to name this material process through which bodies become capable of new things together. In capitalism, Carla and Nick argue, happiness is framed as a kind of individual duty and responsibility, as a consumer product as well, and it offers this placid contentment that functions as a tool of subjection, a kind of numbing anesthetic that induces dependence.
But the joy of Spinoza is an unfixing and intensification of life itself. It breaks dependence on dominant structures by expanding people's capacity to act and feel and organize collectively. They also reference the scholarship of Jackie Wang on anti-Blackness and carceral logic. Wang uses Frantz Fanon to describe militancy as the transformative capacity to fundamentally alter people by emboldening them, removing passivity, cleansing them of the core of despair that's crystallized in their bodies.
The root for so much of this is Fanon, who isn't talking about encampments or direct protest, but about what follows those things — when those things don't work, and when the people have run out of time and resources and must fight back. And when they do, it's not only to recapture resources and autonomy, but to recover a lost dignity.
In his famous essay on violence, the psychoanalyst and revolutionary describes how colonial rule systematically dehumanizes people. And their restoration isn't going to come through legalism or therapy or abstract moralizing or other tools of bourgeois compromise. It's going to come through fighting back. He says that violence can purge the colonized subject of inferiority, passivity, and despair. In fighting back, the colonized person discovers that the colonizer's life is worth no more than their own. And through this confrontation, the colonized subject ceases to be an object of history and transforms into the creator of their own pathway, their own destiny. He talked about the restoration of self-confidence, and how the group itself begins to feel the responsibility of leadership.
And as you might remember from my conversation with Lara Sheehi, this idea from Fanon is at the center of her deconstruction of mainstream psychological professions. But the political context she works within runs the gamut from considering the psychosocial realities of Palestinian and Lebanese, and now Ansar Allah, militants, to understanding what happens in protests, psychology conferences, and even therapy sessions. So there's something for everyone on this continuum of: what does it feel like to be under the boot? And how are those feelings reversed?
If you listen to my discussion with Daniel Sailofsky in the first part of this episode, you heard him describe the U of T encampment as one of the most beautiful experiences of his life. He brought coffee, he brought supplies, he ferried donated goods to shelters when the camp was dismantled under injunction. He helped host multifaith Shabbat services that had challah and prayers in Hebrew and English and Arabic, and children. I remember Sara Rasikh talking about how the aunties showed up with all kinds of food all the time.
But Daniel also talked about the Jewish Defense League agitators who would infiltrate and record and provoke the campers into meme-worthy reactions, if they could. And they mostly ignored them — he said the organizers were very clear that ignoring them was essential to maintaining strict messaging discipline. But Daniel also stressed the gap between his lived reality of solidarity and community and how it was portrayed in the media as a "hate encampment." Baffling.
All of which brings me to Lara Sheehi's first psychic intrusion: confusion.
So I'm going to go through each of these four and apply them to Daniel's account of the CASE report, and then also the encampment experience. Because the war against anti-genocide, anti-Zionist, and antifascist organizing operates simultaneously on two distinct fronts: the top-down paper operations — these state-backed task force reports — but then also the bottom-up direct repression, the suppression of the camps.
I think confusion is the dominant intrusion mobilized by the CASE report. Here's a non-specialist group of academics and PR people who cobble together ahistorical definitions of Zionism, anti-Zionism, and antisemitism, sourced from terrible sources — a magazine article, a Senate hearing — and the definitions systematically conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism. They say that anti-Zionism is a libel that advocates for the doomsday annihilation of Israel. The report conveys this distorted narrative that can only serve to disorient people. And then, to safeguard the confusion, the report's authors buried their own secondary finding that 92% of non-Zionist Jewish participants reported experiencing no antisemitism on campus at all.
So this institutional boy-who-cried-wolf dynamic makes it increasingly difficult for observers to parse genuine bigotry from state propaganda. And so the Jewish Faculty Network, which Daniel is part of, drafts a response to dispel confusion. Outside of online surveys and careful paper responses, the U of T campers built a vibrant interfaith community in which their rituals exposed the distortions of the press.
And it reminds me of how, in The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon calls these agents "confusion mongers." In capitalist societies, education — whether secular or religious, the teaching of moral reflexes handed down from father to son, the exemplary integrity of workers decorated after fifty years of loyal and faithful service, the fostering of love for harmony and wisdom, those aesthetic forms of respect for the status quo — instill in the exploited a mood of submission and inhibition which considerably eases the task of the agents of law and order in capitalist countries. A multitude of sermonizers, counselors, and confusion mongers intervene between the exploited and the authorities.
Sheehi calls this confusion-mongering dynamic "settler colonial reality bending," driven by state-sanctioned confusion mongers. Confusion induces this sense of going insane by making activists question their own senses. And so the activists, the campers, they must learn to practice militant clarity by repeatedly stating material facts out loud. And that's what they did. That's what they tried to do.
So how about fear? Do you remember that night the UCLA encampment was surrounded and assaulted by Zionist counter-protesters while the LAPD watched? Do you recall the reports of suspensions, or faculty getting fired over tweets, college administrators hauled before Senate hearings? Who was scared? Who was afraid? The protesters, or the counter-protesters?
The CASE report exists to describe the fear of those who thought the encampments were an assault on their sense of themselves. And it was published shortly after the passage of federal hate speech legislation, Bill C-9 — you can find my episode with Leftie Jane for more on that. And together, the point was to manufacture consent for quelling free speech and suppressing anti-colonial dissent. But to do that, the report has to elevate community panic, which creates a chilling effect that drives communities into insularity.
Lara Sheehi says that fear, which is often depoliticized in clinical jargon as "stress," is weaponized to enforce carceral discipline, self-policing, and respectability. The psychic militancy of the encampment activists involved resisting this fear through strict messaging discipline, through safety measures, monitors, through deliberately ignoring agitators rather than falling into bad-faith debates.
Now, one thing that stuck out for me — I'll get to exhaustion here — in my conversation with Sara Rasikh, was her memory that they didn't get much sleep. They're downtown, to start with — it's noisy, the tent walls are thin, people are coming and going at all hours. Sometimes counter-protesters would show up with portable DJ setups and blast music at the tents at 2am. So there's physical exhaustion, but that's compounded by the psychological and ideological exhaustion.
Daniel talked about the relentless Jewish testing around whether anti-Zionism disqualified you from being a Jew. He talked about being called capos — you know, these are Holocaust collaborators, which included guys at the end who shoved bodies into the crematoria — really disgusting name to call somebody. So he described this stripping and reduction of religious identity, this attempt to exile anti-Zionists from communal life. And then the CASE report forces him and his colleagues into more exhausting defensive labor, to debunk garbage data derived from unvetted online surveys — as I said, without student ID verification, sampling from Zionist organizations like B'nai Brith, and these double-barreled survey questions and unverified qualitative claims.
Sheehi says that exhaustion is neither a personal deficit nor is it simple fatigue. It's a structural implant that's meant to siphon off political stamina, atomize organizers, and trap them in isolated loops of self-blame. Activists can overcome this by recognizing exhaustion as a structural alert rather than a personal failure. They can refuse to be trapped in the semantic games. They can refuse to be distracted.
Lastly, despair. Daniel said that one of the saddest aspects of the conflict over Jewish identity and spirituality was seeing the CASE report flatten centuries of Talmudic debate, labor activism, and socialist history into monolithic support for a 75-year-old ethnostate. But encampment organizers actively resisted despair. They sang, they prayed together, they shared food together. On the day the injunction forced the camp to dismantle, activists organized cars to haul away all of the donated stuff, which they gave directly to local shelters, so that movement resources could support unhoused people.
Sheehi says despair is an affect designed to naturalize the sense of defeat, and it frames colonial capitalist dominance as inevitable. And it's only defeated through generative counter-repetition, which turns daily routines of mutual aid, political education, and communal solidarity into the practice of psychic militancy.
So the last thing for this coda is that I just want to reiterate the point Sheehi makes about the resistance of psychic intrusions as a daily practice. I spoke about this in the episode with her, but I want to circle back, because I think it's where Sheehi gives one of her most useful insights — it reverses the main way in which repetition has been framed by mainstream psychology.
Sigmund Freud and his inheritors used the concept of repetition compulsion to pathologize this experience that we often have of finding ourselves in the same toxic situation over and over again — like, why is every relationship like this? Why do I always wind up hurt in the same way? And the answer that the Freudians basically give — and then this seeps into pop psychology — is that, hey, you know what, you're asking for it, you remember this awful thing, and, like a moth attracted to the flame, you just come back and start circling it again until you get burnt. And what you're trying to do — this is the sort of generous interpretation that comes out of that — is you're trying to re-experience a difficult situation so that you can experience perhaps a different outcome, or you can express a kind of dignity or mastery in relation to that difficult situation.
But what Sheehi says is that, actually, no — it's not that you are this repetitive loser. What's actually going on, and what really repeats itself in the world, is power and oppression. And the repetition of the incursions of power and oppression are what trap people into submissive and predetermined loops.
Classical Freudians are describing a kind of internal shame spiral that you have to work on independently, unless you want to keep this stuff happening to you because you're asking for it. But Sheehi is describing a social training that has to be understood and addressed within communities, so that they can fight back. And in both cases — both versions of repetition compulsion — reversing the repetition takes a ton of work, but they belong to different categories. So, you know, the question is: what do you want your daily work to engage? Of course, you probably can discern patterns in your behavior that you want to work on, that you want to shift a little bit — but is that going to be your entire focus? Is it going to be on your response to repeated intrusion or violence, or is it going to be on the repeating violence itself?
Now, I've done all of this journalism and self-help and New Age religions, and I've always had this conviction that, beyond a certain number of baseline fundamentals that you learn from these things — that you recognize behavioral patterns, you learn a little bit of self-regulation — the payoff, the returns, diminish really quickly. And anyone who's trying to upsell the next regimen, because those returns have diminished, is really kind of distracting you from the material conditions that you experience under capitalism.
But what I didn't get until I really understood Sheehi was this much deeper and more institutionalized dynamic: that when structural violence is repeated, mainstream psychology steps in to offer a framework in which whatever is repeated is normalized, universalized, and depoliticized, so as to make colonial or capitalist violence appear inevitable or natural. And no one — according to Sheehi, according to Daniel Sailofsky, according to me — no one has to settle for that.
Thanks for listening, everybody. Take care of each other.
