Episode Transcript
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# Antifascist Dad – Episode 4 (Part 2)
**“Courage in Resistance” with Ben Case**
**Host:** Matthew Remski • **Guest:** Ben Case
**Matthew (Host):**
Hey, Patrons—welcome to the temporarily paywalled continuation of Episode Four, *Courage in Resistance*, with Ben Case. I’m grateful for your support. Usually, Part Two opens with a quick review of Part One, then the rest of the conversation, and a brief reflection from me. For this episode, the interview covered the topic well, so I’m saving the final segment for a note on the Graham Platner story.
A quick recap of Part One:
Ben and I discussed how bravery in antifascism means risking yourself for others in many ways—physically, yes, but also with your words and choices. He described courage as embodied, strengthened like a muscle through practice. We talked about the value of martial arts or combat training for protests—learning how your body and mind respond to discomfort, pain, or adrenaline, so you can understand what’s happening if you’re restrained, boxed in, or attacked. Physical preparation helps avoid panic, regulate reactions, and distinguish symbolic from strategic action. What stayed with me was his point that safe, consensual experiences with physical conflict help you stay connected to your values under stress.
We also examined the myth of “polite” protest—how mainstream U.S. liberal culture can naively idealize past nonviolent movements as orderly, while ignoring the disruptive, confrontational tactics that were also essential to those victories.
One more preface before we roll the second half: the work Ben and others do on antifascism is nuanced. Questions like “Is it ever okay to punch Nazis?” or “What about de-arresting a neighbor?” require clear distinctions between violence against people and violence against property. But even describing the historical reality of violence and political change gets you cornered: being descriptive risks being accused of advocacy. If you analyze how violent responses emerge under repression, you can be accused of endorsing or minimizing them. The accusation collapses description into prescription.
We see this constantly in discourse around the genocide in Gaza. If you say the conditions for October 7, 2023 were set decades earlier, you can be accused of moral justification rather than material, sociological, or psychological explanation. “Do you condemn Hamas?” often functions to collapse history into a single moral equation so that any hesitation or nuance can be dismissed.
Kwame Ture wrote in 1969: it’s not a matter of whether killing is right or wrong—killing goes on. The question is who is legally empowered to do it. And when Angela Davis—then in prison on weapons and murder charges of which she was later acquitted—was asked whether she approved of violence in self-defense, she replied that the question betrayed ignorance of what Black people have endured since enslavement. Ture, Davis, and Fanon all expose that violence isn’t a rare eruption into peace; it’s a constant in unequal societies, with moral evaluations tilted toward those in power.
With that framing—here’s Part Two with Ben Case.
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**Matthew:**
One thing about the joy that erupted when Richard Spencer got punched—the viral meme of it—is that it touches something embodied. I remember, as a kid, the rare times I decisively stood up to a bully. I can still feel my fist landing and knowing he’d never bother me again. That feeling was powerful and enduring.
But when I think back, I also realize the risk. I could have seriously injured him. In professional fighting you’ll know this intimately. If a community agrees that punching a fascist street threat like Spencer is an appropriate protective action, what consequences do we have to consider—especially if we want to remain humane toward the person harmed?
**Ben Case:**
First, we have to be aware of likely physical reprisals against our communities—whether the fascists wear uniforms or not. That awareness shouldn’t become an argument for never provoking them; that path leads to capitulation. But it does mean we take responsibility for the full spectrum of consequences. If we engage in that kind of action in an organized way, we also organize legal support, bail funds, and mutual aid. Caring for each other is part of the work.
You also asked about taking responsibility for harm. Hannah Arendt is an intellectual touchstone for me. She wrote that sometimes the most human response is to act in the moment without thinking about the future. Many small-scale confrontations are like that: standing up to a bully because it’s necessary right then. But once you’re out of the moment, you still need to take responsibility for consequences. Your life could have gone very differently if that kid had been grievously injured.
**Matthew:**
Exactly. There was an ecstatic freedom in knowing he wouldn’t hurt me again. But what if I’d paralyzed him? Kids don’t see the branching futures in the moment. When I talk with my own kids, I don’t want to chill necessary self-protection. And I also want them to know they’ll live with the consequences.
**Ben:**
Being in community means accountability in collaboration with others. Responsibility isn’t one-directional. In your example, the bully also bears responsibility for putting you in that position. And we have to look at context: an unsafe school environment, staff who normalize bullying as “toughening up,” systems that aid and abet violence until it explodes. Scale that up, and you get global North capitalism as a pressure cooker. Context doesn’t exonerate us, but it must be part of honest accountability when outcomes are severe.
**Matthew:**
What’s the most important thing you learned about yourself and others through professional fighting?
**Ben:**
That it’s a practice of bravery. You engineer scenarios where you must confront fear in a consensual, bounded environment. You learn the difference between hurt and injury. You discover where you stepped up, where you didn’t, and how to recognize the fork-in-the-road moment when it arrives. That awareness carries into life.
**Matthew:**
I imagine it also clarifies that, politically, some conflicts are absolute. Power rarely surrenders itself; interests collide. There’s a zero-sum quality sometimes that has to be confronted.
**Ben:**
Yes. Liberalism often insists everything can be solved by polite compromise and rule-following. Sometimes that’s false. Combat sports are often described as sublimated warfare; I don’t fully agree, but one-on-one fighting gets close. It shows both the reality of absolute conflict and how even “absolutes” can break down at the brink. In theory, both fighters are equally motivated—but you can push someone to quit. In social conflicts, the same dynamic can apply. You have to be prepared to take it to the limit for human dignity and a flourishing world.
**Matthew:**
That’s the Spencer lesson: at a certain point it cost him too much to keep showing up. Similarly, communities are chasing ICE contingents out of towns. If enough people show up, agents don’t have the numbers or the pay to keep going.
**Ben:**
Those moments are inspiring. People power is the point. Formal protests are theater to remind us we can take real action together. The power hinges on people willing to act when it matters.
**Matthew:**
Last question: if you were leading a self-defense or fighting-sports class for young antifascists, what core values would you teach?
**Ben:**
The classics apply—learn your strengths, stand up for yourself and your community, discover you can do more than you thought. But distilled, it’s Sun Tzu: know yourself and know your adversary. Learn your limits and how to push them, and learn to read the person in front of you—their eyes, their intent—so you can plan accordingly. That training helps you show up—even in your bathrobe and slippers—to tell an ICE agent to get out of your neighborhood, and to do it with judgment and restraint.
**Matthew:**
It brings your physical training and your research on social movements right together.
**Ben:**
I once fought in Thailand against a bigger, scarier favorite. Before the fight I told myself: if you get hurt, stay down—it’s not worth brain damage. He hit me hard and dropped me. I got up without thinking and we went to war. I knocked him out in the fourth, but the real lesson was that the decision happens in the moment, and training prepares you for that. You might stand and still lose or get hurt—the outcome isn’t guaranteed. Acting for dignity sometimes means moving without certainty. Strategy matters, but so does that decisive moment.
**Matthew:**
That’s a powerful place to end. Ben, thanks so much—both for the research and the story.
**Ben:**
Thanks for having me. This was great.
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## Post-Interview Reflection: The Platner Story
**Matthew (Host):**
As promised, I want to flag an ongoing story that knits together several themes.
On one level, it’s about trauma, internet alienation, and wounded/wounding behavior. On another, it’s about how we form impressions of people and their politics through fragments—and how trust is built or lost in the internet age, where it’s common to wonder: “Is that guy secretly a Nazi?” A third level: whether our culture can recognize signs of a lived life and change. Can people who’ve acted harmfully be entrusted with public service? Or do we demand lab-grown leaders who’ve never risked anything? This is a parent–child, family–community issue: how do we tolerate, boundary, or forgive the people we live with?
The story is Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner—his Reddit history and a Nazi Totenkopf tattoo.
Why does this belong on my beat? Much of this podcast examines the effects of internet culture on boys and young men—charismatic influences; anonymous, isolating spaces; the testosterone-soaked petri dishes in which reactionary cultures incubated over the last decade. Upcoming episodes with Cy Canterel, Dale Beran, and Taylor Lorenz dig into this.
Parents often face two impulses. One is quarantine—regulate, clamp down, fear your own sons’ exposure. Understandable, because toxic online culture is real and harmful. The other is root-cause: ask why young men end up in those spaces, how they got there, and whether resources work better than stigma. The risk there is empathizing past the point of accountability for those who cross into concrete fascist politics. Walking that line depends on your social capital with the young person in question.
Back to Platner:
He’s 41, a Marine veteran with four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, now an oyster farmer with a populist stump style. He’s leading the Democratic primary to challenge Republican Susan Collins. He hits Medicare for All, labor support, harsh critiques of Israel and U.S. militarism—Bernie Sanders backs him. He openly discusses PTSD from machine-gunning in Baghdad and Ramadi and anti-piracy operations off Somalia; the VA “saved” him—a key talking point.
Class background is mixed: a lawyer father and restaurateur mother, a modernist-architect grandfather, a stint at an elite boarding school followed by a lower-tuition private school. He enlisted out of idealism and adventure—“maybe too much Hemingway”—and even protested the looming Iraq invasion as a teen.
After leaving the military (2012–2016), he says he spent too much time on Reddit and “shitposted.” The comments mix crass infantry humor with leftist rage—racist and sexist red flags, homophobic slurs, minimizing sexual assault in the military, plus hardline “tankie” vibes (ACAB, rural whites as racist, open communist identification, talk of armed defense against fascism). It reads like depressive, angry leftism shaped by war trauma, occasionally punching down at “identity politics.”
He posted a video on Oct. 17 acknowledging and abhorring his past language, framing it within post-deployment darkness and infantry culture’s crudeness. In literary terms, his star rose—economic-justice messaging plus an accountability arc many progressives hope to see in men.
Then, on Oct. 20, reports surfaced of a Nazi Totenkopf tattoo on his right pec. He said he got it drunk in Croatia in 2007 and didn’t know its meaning. That’s hard to believe for someone with his military background. CNN later reported that as late as 2020, on Reddit, he discussed Nazi insignia use in the U.S. military—suggesting he likely knew. So the initial denial looked like a lie.
Is there a world in which someone like Platner knowingly gets the tattoo both as a marker of ruthlessness and as a personal mark of Cain—a reminder of sins, a symbol of self-loathing attached to imperial violence? Possibly. He sometimes chided “normies” for not grasping the moral complexity of military life. In that light, the tattoo could encode a volatile “black-pilled” self-contempt that can tilt ideologically.
Reactions have hardened:
* “He’s a covert fascist—cut him loose.”
* “He messed up, he’s owning it, and his arc toward socialism matters.”
As of now, he still leads most polls over establishment favorite Janet Mills. Mainers will decide in June whether the reform-and-advocate reading outweighs the disqualifiers.
For parents and caregivers of boys/young men, this is a morality play of Jungian proportions—and a fiction in the sense that only Platner and those close to him know the truth of that tattoo. Voters will decide on a gut level, with an inevitable knowledge gap.
If there’s a lesson here, it’s that real trust is built in small networks where you can actually verify character. The masks of public life will always betray our values. The bulk of our politics should be built in everyday neighborly activity among people whose good work you can’t evaluate by scrolling.
Thanks for listening. Keep each other safe.
