Spencer critiques Matthew Remski's "The Boy Who Cried Fascist Pt 2," dismantling claims that Mark Carney's March 2024 "Elbows Up" slogan signals a fascist march. Spencer argues Remski dishonestly links unrelated events like Mike Myers' SNL appearance to Carney's election call, ignoring the April 28th vote occurred within the shortest legal timeframe. The host refutes false connections between Gordie Howe and union-busting, asserting Canada's trade diversification ensures sovereignty rather than U.S. capitulation. Ultimately, Spencer accuses Remski of prioritizing outrage farming over factual defense, exposing how conspiratorial reasoning distorts democratic processes. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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The Fascism Comparison00:12:36
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that is taking the gloves off in the fight against disinformation.
I'm Spencer, your host.
This episode is the second of two parts.
If you're hearing this and you haven't yet listened to the first part, then maybe go back and catch that first part.
This part might not make much sense without it.
In the first part of this episode, I criticized Matthew Renski for.
Disinformation he had put together on episode 25 of his anti fascist dad podcast.
That podcast features two parts of each episode, and so it is that the criticism also appears in two parts.
In this section, Remski reviews Carney's elbows up slogan.
The story laid out for this is done as though everything were happening in a vacuum, as though no one at all in the world were doing anything out of the ordinary, and suddenly.
Carney crashes in with Hey Canada, elbows up, let's get some nationalism happening in here.
The unspoken assumption appears to be that all nationalism leads to fascism.
At least that's the missing dot that would make the collection of ideas in Remski's podcast episode make any sense when taken together.
Remski is very particular about the timeline for Elbows Up.
Here's a supercut of the timeline he lists with all the fluff removed.
And it's an old slogan with a lot of resonance.
The present iteration began back on March 1st of last year when comedian Mike Myers appeared on Saturday Night Live with a Canada is not for sale t shirt.
March 3rd, which is when Angus published his Substack, Kearney won the Liberal leadership on March 9th.
On March 11th, Ontario Premier Doug Ford raised the stakes on the tariff issue by threatening to impose.
A retaliatory 25% surcharge on electricity exported to U.S. customers.
March 12th, first tier U.S. tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum take effect at 25%.
March 13th, Canada files a formal WTO dispute resolution request against the United States.
March 14th, Kearney is officially sworn in as PM.
March 22nd, he drops this public service announcement filmed in a hockey rink with Mike Myers on X.
So, a lot of dates.
Those were the only dates he mentioned.
Remsky seems to really, really like them.
Dates.
He just lists them all.
The narrative appears to be that Kearney is moving very, very quickly and really wants the nationalism at an extremely high level.
And it's all based around this elbows up idea.
Must be doing a fascism or at least some kind of.
A capitalist project that requires a fresh code of nationalism to distract everyone from what's really happening.
Can't be any other explanation.
After all, those were the only dates Remsky mentioned, so that must be the end of that part of the story, right?
There are a few more dates that are relevant there, though.
Remsky doesn't mention them, and I have to imagine he leaves them out because they, again, don't fit the story he's trying to tell here.
And that's fundamentally dishonest.
March 22nd was the air date of the Myers Carney elbows up video, as Matthew Remsky mentions.
March 23rd, the next day, Kearney called the election.
39 days later, the shortest election period allowed, Canada voted on April 28th.
You could criticize Kearney, I guess, for what, campaigning before the bell, I guess?
But I don't think you can honestly list these events and frame them as though they're a lurch toward nationalism on its way to fascism.
When the appropriate additional context is added to make it obvious that this is just an election campaign, Elbows Up was just run of the mill sloganeering.
It deserves all the contempt that such slogans bring to dull our political processes and make them both fake and also something we're meant to pretend is real.
They manufacture ideas for public consumption and often allow people to bypass facts on the way to a more fervent support of a candidate.
Remsky refers to this slogan as propaganda.
It's only propaganda in the way that all political messaging is propaganda, which tends to weigh down the definition of the word into an unusable and overly generic blob.
Also, worth noting while we're on the topic is that most of the hallmarks of fascism aren't happening here.
There isn't any kind of effort to limit or prevent news coverage of the government.
Kearney's government isn't curtailing access to democratic processes.
Long established non partisan institutions aren't getting disrupted or shut down or defunded.
They're also not systematically having their key members replaced with partisan hacks.
The auditors general are still actively working to review government budget expenditures.
The federal government isn't pulling the teeth of intellectuals or trying to reshape the people to How do people access information?
The only things on the fascist checklist so far are nationalism and capitalism.
And those are also the things that nations that oppose fascist neighbors typically experience.
I need to say a little something about nationalism as well here.
Remsky's entire episode seems to have underneath it the assumption that the only reason to increase nationalism is to reach fascism.
Believing that certainly makes every alarm bell he's trying to ring.
Makes sense, but it's simply not true.
Fascism does bring nationalism, but not every moment of nationalism is on the path to fascism.
All lumber came from a tree, but not all trees eventually get used as lumber.
Fascism is an extremely dangerous ideology to the nations that neighbor it.
As an extreme and absolutist ideology, it forces those around it to choose friend or enemy.
As a friend of fascism, your work is never complete.
You must continually give up things to show the fascists that you're compliant, which is at least one reason why going along with a fascist project next door is a remarkably terrible idea.
But to choose the opposite path is also fraught.
Being the enemy of fascism often brings with it the need to justify this opposition.
Some people in your country will inevitably.
Inevitably, say, is it worth it to endure the coming era of uncertainty and potential bloodshed just to not be what they are?
Are they really so bad that we can't just agree to be like them to avoid harm?
Hell, there might even be a profit to be made by doing so.
And so we see how we get the tendrils of fascism pulling at our society, slowly but inexorably weakening the resolve of business people to stand against the fascists.
And with those business people come those whose interests are tied with theirs, employees.
Ordinary people who just want to live their lives and who come to believe, through self delusion or actual enthusiasm for the fascist project, hardly matters, that participation is the better path.
This is the go along to get along from Kearney's Davos speech.
It's the veiled hegemony that Canada has been experiencing for decades now.
Agreeing that the suffering of the people the US has bullied is the unfortunate cost we pay to have a seat at the table where important international affairs are determined and maybe have some moderating influence.
Or that's what we tell ourselves about the nature of our participation.
Which is why it's particularly egregious and fundamentally dishonest for Remski to say these things.
The resilience that Carney is attempting to create is meant to manufacture the ability for Canada to walk away from trade negotiations with the U.S. if needed.
The ability to tell the U.S. that Canada is not, in fact, forced to accept whatever shit deal they deign to offer.
That we have other options available to us.
I would bet that Remsky also wants that, which is what makes his stance here so baffling.
Meanwhile, Remsky inverts the reality by telling an incomplete version of the story to create a Carney is secretly working toward mega fascism in Canada fantasy.
As though the trade deals Carney has been doing with every nation except Russia in the US can be understood to be anything other than a rebuke of the go along to get along approach we previously had.
As though strengthening Canada's international trade relations with as many alternate countries as will have us.
Has only surface level resource extraction as a goal and cannot be viewed in the wider context of an industrial behemoth next door that has made its expansionist intentions explicit.
Willingness to abstain from resource development to contain climate change and maintain the environment is a noble pursuit, but greed exists in Canada just as it does elsewhere.
And as long as there's money to be made by engaging in these activities, And the US has need of those resources, we will be locked into this spiral.
Until the US changes its course, Canada will always need a way to flex its own muscle.
And there's a psychological factor here.
Having the ability to push back militarily means a lot more than mere combat capability.
We live in a democracy.
Knowing that Canada has a highly respected and highly trained military allows individual Canadians to summon the confidence to band together in an elbows up stance, if that's what you want to call it, when threatened with annexation from the US.
If we agreed to complete disarmament, especially in an environment that has all this saber rattling from Washington, Canadians might just decide to capitulate.
Where would all those high minded goals of protecting the climate and the environment be then?
How could we exert any authority over the land we've sworn to protect?
How could we protect the indigenous people from further indignity once we'd laid down our arms and cast our future to a mere hope that the United States, of all countries, is willing to respect our borders and our sovereignty without the possibility of military recourse?
Would the grizzly hesitate to attack the toothless wolverine?
Gordie Howe's Union Stance00:12:29
If you think that, tell me why.
Matthew Remsky casts the elbows up message as a capitulation to capitalism, and that this is the ultimate sin, as though showing Carney's zeal for capitalism and economic growth is sufficient for making the case for fascism.
I ask, Is Matthew Remsky's world really that simple?
Canada's renewed interest in nationalism is more about reminding each other that economic resilience comes with a price and a silent agreement that if we want to remain self determining, then we need to brace ourselves to pay that price.
It's not a slow march to fascism.
Remsky does an extended deep read of the Myers Carney video as though it were a secret coded message that maybe even Carney wasn't aware of when it was made.
Who was aware of it then?
Remsky never says.
This has the air of maybe like a Freudian slip or an unintended reveal of the true nature of some nefarious scheme.
It seems to include a hidden layer of union busting that Remsky hints at repeatedly in his deep dive.
But doesn't explicitly state is the crux of the problem.
But imagining that Remsky doesn't want people to come to that conclusion on their own brings the question why does he include it as part of his analysis at all?
Here's a supercut of the relevant pieces of Remsky's narrative with all the unnecessary fluff chopped away.
Now, today I'm going to go into that panache part by doing a close read on the main slogan that.
That Carney has used to sell his Trump response policies over the past year, elbows up.
This is an old hockey slogan that he skated on as he attempted to sell his cultural resistance project to the country.
Angus traced the slogan back to its source in the country's most famous hockey player, Gordie Howe.
But with regard to Gordie Howe, it missed an important historical contradiction I'll get to and that Carney capitalized on.
But what about Gordie Howe?
The fifth of nine children, Gordie grew up in poverty in Saskatchewan in the 1930s.
Saskatchewan in those days was one of the main incubators for Canadian socialism.
This is where all of that is coming from, but the Howe family didn't connect with that, perhaps because dad was more itinerant as a worker and maybe had less sustained contact with union organizers, maybe because mom was Prairie German and tended toward social credit and not Tommy Douglas's CCF.
And also, by the time Gordy was 16, he was off into professional hockey, which was famously.
Capitalistic and paternalistic.
And he got signed by the Detroit Red Wings under the meanest player coach manager in hockey, the union busting Jack Adams.
And when Ted Lindsey tried to organize a players' union in 1957 amongst the Red Wings, Adams spread shitty rumors about him and traded him to the last place Chicago Blackhawks.
And this sent a message to everyone else do not talk about the money.
So With Kearney pulling on this, there's already some weirdness going on, whether he realizes it or not, whether he even cares about that history.
But he's quoting a folk hero who was tough, but obedient, loyal, and polite, and whose wholesomeness involved never complaining about the boss.
Gordie Howe came out of the Canadian heartland, but not that part of the heartland that produced our social welfare tradition.
Elbows Up was a slogan of grit, but not the grit of people who fight the structure of things, the grit of people who fight to master the structure itself.
So now, to my ears, the phrase elbows up has a folksy and quaint feeling to it.
And what does it turn into, this slogan in Carney's mouth?
I believe it takes Charlie Angus's idealism and longing and Mike Myers's childlike regression to make the public believe that Canadian sovereignty and identity remains unique under a regime that is barreling toward the most destructive neoliberal program in history, arguably.
Better organized, more efficient than Trump's Doge process.
Yeah.
So, that is an extremely circuitous collection of supposedly connected points.
This is verbal juxtaposition.
Remski is placing these facts in close proximity and letting the listener make up their own minds about how these disparate facts are meant to be connected.
The fact that they're all laid out and these are the only pieces being laid out at this time naturally leads people to associate them to each other.
So let me make this tenuous thread connect in the way that Remsky intends it.
Gordie Howe dominates hockey in the 40s and 50s using rough tactics and lots of goals.
He's nicknamed Mr. Elbows, and the phrase elbows up comes to be first associated with him and his style of play.
Gordie Howe plays on the Detroit Wedwings with another player named Ted Lindsay.
Ted Lindsay starts a players union.
Gordie Howe doesn't support it at first.
The owner of the Detroit Red Wings tries to bust the union before it starts by punishing Lindsay.
These two pieces of information, the elbows up bit and the players union, are completely unrelated except for the fact that they both involve Gordie Howe.
To the very best of my knowledge, Gordie Howe. Never employed any elbows up tactics against any teammates or other players that wanted a players union.
He didn't use his elbows to union bust.
Gordie Howe just stayed out of the players' union when it first started.
That's it.
It was only notable because Howe was the biggest star at that time, and a players' union would have happened more easily if he'd gotten involved.
Years later, Howe even remarked that he had made a mistake by not supporting it right away.
So, is this a sufficient and coherent criticism of Carney's lack of support for unions?
Here's the thing.
I have no doubt that Kearney's drive to reach new markets and growth through alternate trade arrangements will come into forceful contact with unions that drive to push worker safety and adequate training.
And when he does, we should criticize Kearney for any missteps he makes.
But he hasn't done that yet.
There haven't been any clashes with unions of any sort.
And when those clashes happen, this argument should not be mentioned in the conversation.
It's spurious logic and leads nowhere.
This tenuous thread linking all of these ideas together is conspiratorial.
Everything is connected logic.
And hearing it from someone who has positioned themselves as one of the leading voices that's supposed to be pushing back against exactly that kind of nonsense is extremely troubling.
This kind of content from a trusted source slowly trains his listeners to begin thinking this same way.
Using these same unsupportable leaps of pseudo logic.
Gordie Howe's history with unions and Kearney's adoption of the elbows up slogan are only related by one thing Gordie Howe.
Which means that these two things are exactly related to each other by the same degree as each of these is to any other thing about Gordie Howe.
Like the fact that not only did Gordie Howe play with a flat stick edge, as all hockey players did at that time.
But that he was fully ambidextrous and could shoot with either hand using the flats, thick edge.
One could say that being ambidextrous leads one to flexible problem solving, and that the elbows up slogan that's connected to an ambidextrous hockey player is a signal that Kearney's economic strategy isn't confined to a limited subset of available plays.
That logic is just as related to Remsky's juxtaposed union busting angle.
There is one final insult to the intelligence of Ramsky's audience that I cannot let go unmentioned.
He ends the first half of his podcast episode with a comment linking the elbows up metaphor to being about just a game.
And therefore, Carney's intentions with respect to it shouldn't be trusted because he's only roughing it up during the game and after the game.
Carney will be chummy with all the people he's been elbowing all during the game, like it's some sort of kayfabe.
Here's a piece of that.
I think that the marketing of Elbows Up is particularly effective because, on one hand, it provides this folksy, very accessible well, we all played hockey.
We know what it's like to get a little bit rough in the corners.
But at the same time, there's also this implicit acknowledgement that it's a game.
In the end, you're all playing the same game.
And it's just a matter of like how kind of tough you're going to be on the ice.
But after the game, you'll all go to Timmy's and you're all on the same side.
But then Remski does the exact same thing at the end of the second half of his episode.
He compares his struggle against Carney's set of policies to a video game.
Let's listen to that.
I see Carney now looming as a final boss.
Of neoliberalism with the most weapons, the highest health bars, you're not sure how many stages of the fight there are.
Right.
So I say that if Remski's comparison regarding elbows up being about just the game makes any sense to him, then that pseudo logical shotgun should also be pointed at Remski when he does the same thing.
Is Remski overtly or perhaps even subconsciously signaling?
That this is all just a game for him.
After this is all done, is he just gonna put down his game controller and go live the rest of his life like nothing of this struggle matters to him?
Is his metaphor here a sign that this is ultimately inconsequential in the grander scheme of life?
Is this just some content?
Is this just some content he needs to create to fill time?
Is it only being created to farm outrage against a currently popular politician so that he can boost listenership and assure his fans that they're on the correct side because he portrays the right feelings, if not exactly solid arguments?
Britain in July 193900:02:48
Think of it this way you're a time traveler and you travel back to July of 1939 in Britain.
World War II won't start yet for a few months.
You pick up a local newspaper and read the opinion column.
Someone is going on and on about whether all these tanks and planes the government wants to build are a good idea or whether they have some nefarious purpose for doing so.
And a lot of spooky questions about why the patriotism is ramping up so sharply.
The end of the opinion piece hints at the possibility that all of this mirrors the actions of governments in Germany, Italy, and Spain, and that maybe this dry, extremely stuffy prime minister named Neville Chamberlain is secretly trying to build a fascist state.
If you went back in time and found someone saying that in Britain in July of 1939, you might well wonder what they were really up to.
Why they were deliberately ignoring the threat of aggressively expansionist countries very close by that absolutely have demonstrated a history of human rights abuses and disrespect for the sovereignty of other nations.
And so it is that I have come to question what it is that Matthew Remski is really up to.
Perhaps he cares not for Canadian sovereignty, knowing that he himself holds dual Canadian American citizenship.
Perhaps to Remsky, the border between our two nations really is an arbitrary line that can be removed just as easily as it was drawn upon the map in the first place.
Perhaps peace at all costs means acceptance of the fascist dictates that reveal the lie of his podcast name.
Perhaps you should rename it to the anti neoliberalist dad podcast.
At least that would fit his current content model.
My final point about Remsky and about everyone on the left who attempts to manufacture very specious arguments in service of a good cause is that.
These efforts do not ultimately serve the purpose very well.
First, when they are transparently false, this gives reason for reasonable people to think that your side is the one that manufactures falsehoods.
Demand Five Star Ratings00:02:08
Second, when they're believable but misguided, they can exhaust the audience's ability to continue the fight or focus effort on the most important parts of the fight.
Dredging up additional fascists in an effort to claim additional targets.
Is not useful when actual honest to goodness fascists are taking away rights every day.
Pulling focus from that effort is not helpful.
Further, teaching your audience to accept low grade and fantastical arguments will not help them see reality when the time comes for them to determine it for themselves.
If anyone has any questions, comments, complaints, or concerns about anything they just heard on this podcast, You can send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
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