Episode Transcript
Episode 20, Part 2: Fascist Pipeline, Evangelical Pipeline
Host: Matthew Remski
Guest: Brad Onishi
Matthew Remski:
Hello, Patreons. Welcome to Antifascist Dad, Episode 20, Part 2: The Fascist Pipeline and the Evangelical Pipeline with Brad Onishi.
I’m really grateful for your support. I hope this project brings some joy and hope and utility to your ears, work, and days.
You can find me, as always, on Bluesky and Instagram under my name. I’m on YouTube and TikTok as antifascistdad.
And once again, in the show notes, you’ll find a link to my almost-out book, Antifascist Dad. It comes out April 26, but preorders really help visibility, I’m told.
Now, if you’re not on Patreon and you didn’t catch Part One of my interview with Brad Onishi, you can scroll back and find it.
Brad and I compared and contrasted evangelical conversion with fascist recruitment, noting how both exploit teenage anxieties with the need for pseudo-certainty. We talked about how the extremist spell broke for him through new social contacts and solidarities, and also about the power of multicultural communities and traditions that embrace mystery and emotional range in resisting authoritarianism.
Brad Onishi:
So we’ll pick it up there.
Matthew Remski:
And for a coda, I’ve got a few notes for you about why I keep coming back to these religious themes in my exploration of antifascism. There are personal reasons, of course. There’s also the influence of working on Conspirituality for six years. But I’m also seeing a more strategic reason at this point, and I’ll tell you about that.
Brad Onishi:
I want to pick up on this last thing that you said, which is that by reaching out to other people or at least immersing yourself in community, it reminds me of what another guest—and somebody I rely on as well—Craig Johnson says. I think you interviewed him too about his book How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism.
He says one of the main things is that a multicultural and multiethnic community is a fantastic kind of inoculating social structure against fascism.
And now maybe this is where we bring up the fact that you were born into a Japanese American family, and a lot of them are in Hawaii, and that’s part of your background too. Was that part of what was reignited for you when you traveled to England?
Brad Onishi:
Yeah, thank you for asking that, and thank you for just knowing that it was so.
I grew up in Orange County, and almost every weekend we would drive the hour down the highway to Los Angeles. And in Los Angeles is my Japanese American family. This is where my dad first landed when he came from Maui.
And when I say family—if anyone listening is part of an Asian American family or has roots in Hawaii—when I say family, that means a loose-knit group of people who are not all blood-related.
And it means like 50 or 60 of them. Okay.
Matthew Remski:
Yeah. On the beach.
Brad Onishi:
And it might be 60 or 85 the next time you meet.
And as soon as you come and you hang out, you’re a cousin. And the next time you come, you’re like, “Oh, that’s my cousin.” “Oh, okay. Yeah, right. Okay.”
And so we would go there so often. And that family is, to this day, 30 years later, a family that is multicultural, as you just said.
I mean, I’m Japanese American, but I have family members who are Chinese and Hawaiian and Mexican and Korean.
And it is a family that is built around tradition and the inheritance of food and language and history.
And it’s also just one that is full of love. To this day, the group text is still alive and well, and we text about all the things happening in the family.
Waking up one day in my early twenties and realizing I’m not sure that side of my family is as bad as I was told either.
Yeah, they’re not Christian. Yeah, some of them are Buddhists. Some of them are just not religious. Some of them drink too much beer when we get together and use swear words.
And they’re actually just amazing.
And that was like a reservoir of rediscovery, right? Like going back to a part of my identity that was a rebirth of things that I had tried to cut off because I was told that they were outside the fold of what God wanted.
Matthew Remski:
And all that was very negotiated and syncretic, right?
Like you’re talking about lots of people figuring out how to live with each other and love each other across a bunch of cultural, language, and ethnic boundaries, and probably combining all of their foods together in weird ways that become totally creative.
Brad Onishi:
The best ways.
My wife married into our family, and her favorite days now are when we go to the little house in Gardena near L.A., and there are like 20 people at the gathering, and somehow there’s food for 60.
And that food comes from Japan, Hawaii, China, Mexico, the American South, and everywhere else.
Matthew Remski:
So is there a real masala quality to that as well? Because I’m thinking of Filipino cuisine, where they’ll bring out some chicken that was braised in Coca-Cola or something like that, and that happened because there was an American base there set up in the ’50s or something. Does that happen too?
Brad Onishi:
Yes.
And it’s the best. And it’s something you have to explain to outsiders. You have to tell people why you eat Spam and why it’s actually really good.
And when I look back on that, Matthew, I think to myself: any community that could have convinced me to shelter myself away from this family that I was given is not a healthy one.
Because those are people and that is a place of celebration and love and history and memory that I honestly can’t put into words.
And if I talk about it too long, I’ll start crying because it’s too rich.
And I will do everything in my power to make sure my kids grow up around that as long as we can and as often as we can.
But again, the community I converted into tried to convince me that actually you don’t need that. You should probably not invest in that. It’s probably not a good influence on you. It’s probably not a godly place to learn about who you should be.
Matthew Remski:
You know, it makes me a little bit emotional too, because I don’t have that, coming from a very white family background in North America.
And I think perhaps that has driven me toward seeking out the religions of South Asia in my twenties.
That meant traveling to India many times and figuring out how to cook with ghee and figure out masalas and things like that.
And I wonder—just going on Craig Johnson’s thesis a little bit—I wonder whether some white folks become fascists because they have terrible food and they’re really upset about it and they want something better for themselves.
Like, I don’t know. There’s a meaninglessness to a kind of homogeneous culture or a culture that people want you to homogenize or direct in a particular linear fashion.
Brad Onishi:
For the record, I don’t want to confuse whiteness with fascism.
But what I do want to say is that the category of whiteness, to me, is one that represents the obliteration of difference.
And what I mean by that is to be white—if you think of the examples of the United States at the turn of the twentieth century—the Irish person and the Italian person are sometimes not considered white because they’re Catholic, or the person from Poland.
And it shows you what whiteness really is.
Whiteness is the obliteration of your roots and your tradition and your history so that you can be in this sort of supposed or proposed category that is the standard, universal, normal one that has all the power.
And what I’ve always seen there is that once you start looking around for cultural resources of community and memory and tradition, if they have been obliterated through the processes of becoming white, then you’re going to have to go find them somewhere else.
And that can take on many different forms. One of them can be an invitation into a fascist or otherwise authoritarian or supremacist worldview that is grasping at some way to create an identity.
Matthew Remski:
You certainly don’t get training wheels when you go searching for a history.
I think one of the big challenges with Northern European culture and its neopagan movements is that for folks who really try to pursue their Scandinavian roots or their roots in Celtic music, if they start from a perspective of “I have been deracinated from my heritage because of capitalism,” then they might find or construct a neopagan movement that has some kind of wholesomeness to it.
But if they don’t start out with that basis, they might just find people who are singing the old songs so they can boost their genetic virility or whatever.
Brad Onishi:
Yeah, agreed. It’s a complex puzzle.
I’ve thought a lot about this because of my mixed heritage and the ways that one side of my family tries to hold on to a sense of—my mom is always talking about being Irish.
And I don’t pick the fight often, but every once in a while I’m like, “Mom, really? Okay, so tell me about being Irish.”
And I can tell that that’s a reaction to her having had children whose father is Japanese and participates in this incredibly multidimensional family that I just discussed.
It’s her trying to look at herself and say, “Well, I have something too.”
And I’m not making fun of that. That’s hard.
It’s hard to go find yourself, your identity. Who am I? Where did I come from? What is my story? What is the story I’m participating in?
And I think that’s part of what invites people into fascist spaces.
We will give you a story right now.
You’re a random 14-year-old boy and you don’t feel like you have a lot of friends. You don’t feel like girls want to talk to you at school. You don’t know who you are. You’re not the best at basketball. You’re not the best at whatever. You’re not going to go to Yale.
We’ll give you a story. You want one? Come here. I’ll tell you where you came from. I’ll tell you where you’re going. And I’ll tell you who’s going to try to stop you from getting there.
Matthew Remski:
I had the benefit of growing up in a leftist union family with very supportive parents. But still, when I think about growing up in suburban Toronto and being 14 and having this feeling of the entire world being paved over by capitalism and commercialism, and also being sort of overwhelmed by wave after wave of pop culture that didn’t really come from anywhere and didn’t really make sense or tell me anything about myself—
I think I felt alienated in a way that I wasn’t able to share with most of the kids around me.
A lot of people in that situation who feel that way become bookish or get into music or things like that. They can find their friends sometimes.
But I also think it provides a really blank slate for that bad actor who can come into the sphere of my 14-year-old self and say, “Hey, you know what? You used to have a culture, and this is what it could be like again.”
And I think that seems to be a real vulnerability.
Brad Onishi:
What a powerful way to explain that. And what a powerful way to explain being 14.
Because no matter who you are, regardless of your circumstance, there’s a large propensity to say, “I’m 14. No one understands me. No one gets it. No one ever will. They don’t understand what I’ve been through.”
And talking to Craig Johnson—just to go back to that—he made the point when I spoke to him that if you are 14 today, you are facing things that legitimately could be understood as unprecedented, like the climate crisis, like AI, like the rise of fascist tech.
So I do want to sympathize with people trying to grow up today.
I look at my little kids, who are not teenagers yet, and think, God knows what terrible things you’re going to have to face and the uncertainty you’re going to have about the world you live in.
What kinds of futures are available to humans?
What is the point of learning?
What is the point of writing?
What is the point of art?
What is the point of music in a world dominated by AI?
So I totally want to sympathize with 14-year-old you and 14-year-old whoever today and say: it’s terrible.
It’s hard.
Matthew Remski:
But we’re not going to end there, by the way, because I’ve got a question about the things that you’re hopeful about.
Brad Onishi:
Sure.
Matthew Remski:
We know each other because we research how religious movements have played a role in the rise of Trump.
And I think we’ve made in this conversation a good set of connections between the structural pathway that the person evangelized takes and the person indoctrinated into a right-wing movement.
There are similarities. There are tie-ins.
However, as a religious studies scholar, you’ve told me in a previous interview that you consider yourself to be a secular person of faith.
And I think some of that comes from knowing a lot about how religious communities, in various ways, can resist oppression or resist injustice and even fascism.
So I wanted to get you to talk a little bit about what your favorite examples are for that.
Because I think there are going to be a lot of young people who come into contact with spiritual or religious ideas, and that can go in a lot of different directions.
But I wanted to get a sense of what the healthy direction is, according to what you’ve learned.
Brad Onishi:
I tend to think of these things in two broad categories. And if folks think this is reductionistic, I’m open to that and happy to get the email that says, “Don’t do this anymore.”
But I think there are religious worldviews and ideologies that invite you into a system that will provide you a final answer to the most fundamental questions of the human condition by reducing the world and ordering it according to us and them, in or out, here or there.
That is an invitation into reduction in service of order in order to neatly and finally answer the most fundamental questions of being human.
One hundred percent certainty.
I know who I am.
I know the answer.
I know what will happen at the end of the world.
I know that I am saved.
I know that God loves me.
I know my mission in life.
I’m good.
Or the 14-year-old being invited into fascism saying, “Oh, I know. I know who the bad people are. I know why we got here. I know why I’m one of the superior folks.”
And then there’s an invitation to complexity and mystery that says: here is a chance to explore the fundamental questions of being human and everything related to those.
And here are some trusted pathways.
You might get into those pathways in very specific traditions.
You might be invited into the Quaker tradition and the ways that Quakers from Penn to Fox to others have thought long and hard about these fundamental questions.
You might be invited into a reformed Jewish tradition.
You might be invited into some of the South Asian traditions you just mentioned.
But if the invitation is to say: here’s a tradition of people who have walked these pathways, they have hiked into the woods, and you can follow their path. You might go farther than them eventually. You might take paths that most people didn’t.
But it’s an invitation not to reduce, not to order according to us and them, and not to finally answer, but to say there are some things that are of the utmost importance, and life is best when we spend our time attending to them.
Thinking.
Reading books.
Writing books.
Writing in our journals.
Playing music.
Creating art.
Creating poetry.
Being in community with those trying to fight for those things.
And so if the tradition is inviting you into a set of pathways that attend to those questions in the awe and wonder and reverence that they instill, that seems to me much more healthy and much more suited to human flourishing than the other way I described.
And I think an example—just I’ll be quiet here, I promise—
If you think about the Black church in the United States and the ways that you can say, when you talk to a lot of Black Christians in the United States and you compare them to the white evangelicals I just talked about for 45 minutes, theologically they often look similar.
On surveys and what they think about the Bible, they often look very similar.
And then you start to ask about politics and hope.
You start to ask about the future and what God is like in lived religion on the ground.
And you get a wholly different picture.
You get a faith that invites you into an unfinished road toward justice.
Toward peace.
Toward care.
And it’s one that says: we’ve never been there, but maybe if we work hard enough together, we might get there someday.
And that’s going to look like the smallest everyday kindness to the biggest movement you can imagine.
To me, as an American, if you don’t look to that religious tradition as one that has been resisting fascism for centuries, then you’re overlooking one of the best American resources available for understanding how to do exactly what you’re saying.
Matthew Remski:
That’s beautifully put.
And it makes me think about the aesthetic quality of some of those traditions. The emotional range.
Because when you describe the Black church, I think about gospel music. I think about blues. I think about the full range of grief and joy and rage and hope that gets expressed.
And that seems really important in contrast to the reductionist systems you described earlier.
In some of the Sanskrit aesthetic theory I studied, there’s the idea of navarasa—the nine emotional flavors. A work of art is considered full when it contains the full spectrum: love, humor, wonder, disgust, fear, anger, compassion, heroism, tranquility.
And it seems like healthy religion invites the full spectrum of emotional experience rather than narrowing it.
Brad Onishi:
Yes, absolutely.
And if you think about some evangelical spaces or fascist spaces, masculinity in particular gets restricted to anger.
Anger becomes the primary and sometimes the only acceptable emotion.
And anger doesn’t even count as emotion in those spaces. It’s just what men are. It’s what strength is.
And that is profoundly unhealthy.
If you encounter a culture that restricts men to anger, that’s an authoritarian environment.
Teaching boys to express sadness, vulnerability, joy, empathy—that’s crucial.
A narrow emotional register makes you fragile.
Matthew Remski:
Yes.
Brad Onishi:
And that fragility is dangerous because it can only sustain itself through domination.
If the only way you know how to feel powerful is through anger, then you have to keep finding targets.
You have to keep escalating.
And that’s unsustainable for individuals and for societies.
Matthew Remski:
Before we close, I want to circle back to something you mentioned earlier about Marx.
Brad Onishi:
Sure.
Matthew Remski:
You brought up the famous line about religion being the opium of the people, but you emphasized the part that often gets ignored.
Brad Onishi:
Right.
Marx says religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.
That’s profound.
It recognizes that religion emerges from suffering.
It recognizes that people reach for transcendence and meaning because their material conditions are crushing.
And so the answer isn’t simply to mock religion or to prescribe a different ideology.
The answer is to give people real resources—community, art, music, philosophy, solidarity—so they don’t have to bury their heart and soul.
Because if they don’t find those resources in healthy places, they will find them somewhere.
And sometimes that somewhere is Andrew Tate or Patriot Front or some other fascist formation.
Matthew Remski:
That’s a sobering way to put it.
Brad Onishi:
It is.
And I think that’s why this conversation matters.
Because when we talk about deradicalization or inoculation, we’re not just talking about argument.
We’re talking about belonging.
We’re talking about emotional literacy.
We’re talking about giving young people a story that doesn’t require enemies in order to function.
Matthew Remski:
Brad Onishi, thank you so much for this conversation.
Brad Onishi:
Thank you. And thanks for the work you’re doing. It matters.
Matthew Remski:
Before we wrap, I want to add a few notes about why I keep returning to religious themes in this exploration of antifascism.
There are personal reasons, of course. There’s the six years of working on Conspirituality. But I’m also seeing a strategic dimension.
Fascism often signifies the end of rational politics. It mobilizes elemental forces—fear, rage, grievance—that religion has long grappled with.
To the extent that religious practice contemplates infinitude and impossible futures, it can function as a generative mirror in these times.
On the morning of the Trump 2 election, all I had to offer my stressed-out kid was a hug and some self-regulation tools I’ve practiced for 30 years through yoga and Buddhism.
Those tools can be commodified. Wellness culture can sell common sense and then upsell complications.
But there are models of spiritual practice in antifascist history that conserve energy and joy for struggle—Rosa Parks, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis.
I see two zones of spiritual function in antifascist life: self-regulation, and the capacity to imagine what doesn’t yet exist.
And lately I’ve been thinking about a third.
Michael Parenti writes about morale in Soviet systems. When basic needs are guaranteed, expectations shift. People compare themselves to Western abundance.
An East German official reportedly said, “We thought creating good material conditions would create good people. We were wrong.”
I remember Polish kids in Toronto describing shortages under Soviet rule—one kind of cookie, no jeans, waiting lists for televisions.
What I didn’t understand at the time were the geopolitical pressures, blockades, embargoes.
I once spoke with someone from Albania who described a town with a single sofa factory. Everyone worked there. Everyone had the same sofa.
Between generations who had known scarcity and those who expected variety, dissatisfaction grew.
Religious practice, at its best, nurtures wonder and gratitude for simple things.
Yes, religion has been used to pacify the oppressed.
But it also contains traditions of voluntary simplicity.
Jesus points to lilies surpassing Solomon’s robes.
Buddhism teaches that craving generates suffering—wanting what we don’t have, fearing losing what we do, grieving when it’s gone.
I once lived in a humble religious commune—shared meals, dormitory lodging. No one needed much.
Every tradition has had its ascetics.
“You can’t take it with you.”
The Russian Revolution accelerated history. Serfs were thrust into industrial modernity.
There was little time for internal preparation.
So I wonder whether part of antifascist work involves cultivating joy in frugality, teaching impermanence, recognizing that accumulation serves capitalism more than it serves us.
I’m not claiming spiritual practice is necessary for social change.
But Rosa Luxemburg and Gramsci both wrote about cultural and emotional transformation alongside revolution.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s movement embodied faith in action.
I want to explore whether antifascist traditions have spoken about inner renewal as preparation for a post-capitalist world.
There may be fewer treats.
There may be more lines.
Redistribution will be messy.
We won’t always get what we want.
And that might not be a bad thing.
Thanks for listening.
Take care of each other.
