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April 7, 2025 - Conspirituality
04:58
Bonus Sample: Antifascist Woodshed 3.1: The Kids are Alright

Part Two: Matthew remembers the snow job of “The Sound of Music.” Also: more on Sophie Scholl, introducing the Edelweiss Pirates, the “adult gaze”, what trusting kids means, notes from Emma Goldman and Janusz Korczak, and excerpts from a poem by Aku Päiviö, father of Jules, who traveled from Northern Ontario to Spain in 1937 to volunteer in the International Brigade. ____ When fascism rises, and some young people are drawn into its orbit, because everyone from Jordan Peterson to Andrew Tate has figured out how to exploit resentment at the failures of capitalism, we have an opportunity to give our kids a lot more than moralistic calls for a return to normalcy, compliance, warnings about screen time, striving to be better students, doing more sports, and not making too much of a ruckus.  The kind of parenting that limits itself to restoring the status quo for younger people in an age of fascism is not engaged parenting.  It’s not enough to be a good boy or girl. Antifascism takes more than that. Show Notes Op-ed: Try again, President Kumar: Renewing calls for Tufts to adopt March 4 TCU Senate resolutions  Death toll since Israel's aggression on Gaza on October 7 rises to 31,819 (March, 2024)  Austerity Has Always Been a Project to Empower Capital at the Expense of Workers  It's Not Them; It's Us: Thoughts on the Show Adolescence Adolescence is a really well made depiction of misogyny that fails to critique it | by Mallory Moore | Mar, 2025 Netflix’s ‘Adolescence’ Taps Into the Latest Moral Panic    Jonathan Haidt’s Claims On Kids & Tech Crumble Under Scrutiny From Top Expert, Candice Odgers | Techdirt  UK government's own estimate says welfare cuts to push 250,000 into poverty | Reuters Labour’s cuts to PIP will drag a quarter of a million people into absolute poverty, DWP figures show – Disability News Service 55: Games Against Humanity (w/ Thi Nguyen) — Conspirituality 207: Gaming Realities (w/Thi Nguyen) — Conspirituality   Reminder to the media: Research video games before reporting on them  Out of the Ruins:The Emergence of Radical Informal Learning Spaces Anarchist Education and the Modern School: A Francisco Ferrer Reader  The People's Republic of Neverland: The Child versus the State   Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work Teaching Resistance: Radicals, Revolutionaries, and Cultural Subversives in the Classroom TRUST KIDS! Stories on Youth Autonomy and Confronting Adult Supremacy Refusing Complicity: The Bravery of Sophie Scholl - Radical Tea Towel Sophie Scholl and the youth resistance against the Nazis – DW – 02/22/2023 The majority of news influencers are conservative men, study finds  An Unclaimed Country: The Austrian Image in American Film and the Sociopolitics of The Sound of Music  The politics of The Sound of Music | Peter Levine  Edelweiss Pirate Walter Mayer The Edelweiss Pirates: A Story of Freedom, Love and Life Walter Meyer describes his 1943 trial for looting, and the impact of his role in the Edelweiss Pirates on the sentence he received | Holocaust Encyclopedia The Edelweiss Pirates The Child and Its Enemies | The Anarchist Library —Emma Goldman DECLARATION OF CHILDREN'S RIGHTS—Janusz Korczak  The King of Children: A Biography of Janusz Korczak - Betty Jean Lifton Sophie Scholl – The Final Days Remember the Mac-Paps - rabble.ca  The Canadians In The Spanish Civil War  'Gentleman Jules' lived for just causes | Sudbury Star  Poetry – Friends and Veterans Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Time Text
Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
We're on Instagram and threads at ConspiritualityPod, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon, or just the bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
This is a bonus episode called Anti-Fascist Woodshed 3.1.
Now, Patreon subscribers...
We want to thank you again so much for your support and feedback.
And Patreon subscribers, thank you again so much for your support and feedback.
And if you're able, please support the Patreons of all the independent media outlets you value, especially those US outlets currently under threat because they are critical of the US regime.
I've said this before, this is really the time to do it because state repression will only be ramping up.
Edelweiss, Edelweiss, every morning you greet me, small and white, clean and bright, you look happy to meet me.
If you grew up with The Sound of Music, you'll remember this.
This is the voice of a Disney voiceover crooner named Bill Lee, dubbed over a glowing Christopher Plummer playing Captain Von Trapp.
Styled in Bavarian equestrian retired military man chic and gently strumming his guitar, the captain is singing to his children in the drawing room of his manor house, while his fiancée, the Baroness von Schrader, realizes that the former nun, Fraulein Maria, played by Julie Andrews, is her rival.
The rosy von Trapp children sit in their frilly dresses and lederhosen on the oriental carpet, listening in rapt attention.
And in the second verse, the 16-year-old eldest daughter, Liesel, joins in.
Edelweiss, Edelweiss, every morning you greet me.
Small and white, clean and bright.
So I was in this musical as a teenager.
I sang that song hundreds of times.
I wanted to be cast as the captain, but I had to settle for Max, the Von Trapp family friend and scheming Jewish music promoter who eventually helps the Von Trapps escape over the mountains.
Or because it would have meant spending long hours rehearsing with an older girl, I also would have settled for playing Rolf, Liesl's charming but sexist and infantilizing boyfriend.
You're such a baby.
I'm 16.
What's such a baby about that?
You wait, little girl, on an empty stage for fate to turn the light on.
Your life, little girl, is an empty...
played Rolf, I don't think I would have thought much about the backstory and character traits that would predict his transformation into a whole-ass Nazi.
And that's because the difference between the Nazis and the von Trapps in the musical was not about morality.
It was about what flavor of nationalism is most wholesome, most authentic.
He was overly serious.
He was too attracted to marching about.
He was too easily influenced by authority.
He was that teen boy who wanted to be popular and independent, but in the end, he was too much of a conformist to show real moral character.
I was pretty well educated when it came to who the Nazis were and what they did, but not well educated enough to realize that the entire production.
was a snow job on who the Von Trapps and people like them actually were and what they were trying to protect besides their own personal wealth.
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