Norwegian kickboxer Maren Forsberg works as a self-defense trainer focused on building antifascist courage and resilience for women, queer, and trans people. I spoke with her about her path from childhood play-fighting with her jiu-jitsu dad through national-level kickboxing competition, to coaching survivors of violence and trauma.

What is the freeze response? How can martial training recalibrate it? Why is fascist aggression fragile, and dependent on an audience? Why are physical training and nervous system training different things? And why might queer and trans people carry a secret weapon into the self-defense practice?

Follow Maren Forsberg on Instagram!.

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• Antifascist Dad — Penguin Random House

In this coda to my conversation with Serena Purdy, I track the layered history of Kensington Market through the metaphor of the palimpsest, the medieval manuscript practice of writing over earlier texts that never fully disappear.

Indigenous territory through colonial land seizure. Victorian working-class housing. Jewish Bundist labour militancy. Successive immigrant waves, encampment clearings, and the CBC sitcom that converted a neighbourhood's socialist politics into warm liberal vibes...

Kensington's history is all still readable in its brickwork, its cracked plaster, and storefront signs painted over and over again. On walks through the Market with our 13-year-old, I wonder: when the political energy has faded but the cultural vibrancy remains, what are we inheriting, and what are we waiting for?

SOURCES

Kensington Market Community Land Trust

Friends of Kensington Market

Kensington Market Overdose Prevention Site — St. Stephen's Community House

Gwartzman's Art Supplies — 448 Spadina Avenue

The Beguiling Books & Art

Weekend Characters — design studio, Kensington Market

Bone and Busk — designer Katerina Mior, Nassau Street

El Trompo — 277 Augusta Avenue

King of Kensington — CBC Archives

Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900 — Harvard University Press

Sigmund Freud, "A Note Upon the 'Mystic Writing Pad'"

General Jewish Labour Bund — YIVO Encyclopedia

Workmen's Circle / Arbeiter Ring — Toronto

Antifascist Dad Episode 31: Voices of Kensington Will Ring in Ottawa with Serena Purdy

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Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times

I sit down with Nikolas Barry-Shaw, researcher and trade and privatization campaigner for the Council of Canadians, to break down how Alberta's Bill 11 is dismantling Canada's public healthcare system, with the help of an insurgent private insurance campaign.

Manulife, Canada Life, and Sun Life control two thirds of Canada's $66 billion private health benefits market. These behemoths helped draft Danielle Smith's signature legislation through covert government working groups. Meanwhile, doctors, unions, and the public were excluded.

Bill 11 creates a two-tier fast lane for the privately insured and opens the door to privatizing any part of the system by administrative fiat. So far, the Carney government is refusing to enforce the Canada Health Act, and Saskatchewan and Ontario watching that closely, ready to pounce.

Barry-Shaw argues this moment poses an existential threat to Medicare, from coast to coast. As Tommy Douglas warned forty years ago: the system must move forward or it will be crushed by capital.

Pandora's Box: Danielle Smith and Insurance Giants Unleash Attack on Healthcare

Danielle Smith Admitted She Wants to Throw Out Canada's Public Health Care Law

Alberta's Bill 11 Breaks Federal Law — Canadian Health Coalition

Bill 11 Analysis — Parkland Institute

Bill 11 Report — Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives

Council of Canadians — Trade and Privatization

Friends of Medicare Alberta

Ontario Health Coalition

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