Fascism, have you heard of it? It’s certainly been hard not to see it, especially over the last few weeks with images from the United States. The problem is that it’s hard to recognize fascism until it gets to this point, so as people in the U.S. try and figure out how to get out of this mess, many Canadians are trying to stop us from joining them. Where can you begin? There’s a symposium for that!

In 2018, Crawford Killian posted a piece in The Tyee called “Fourteen Steps to Fascism”. Among the steps are many of them will sound familiar and while they may make you think about the fiefdom of Donald Trump and MAGA, be honest, we’ve seen a lot of that up here in Canada too. Nobody wants to call it fascism because people so closely associate that with a war that ended almost a hundred years ago, but as we’re seeing in front of our eyes, fascism is a process.

Seems like a good time to try and educate yourself, so enter an annual appointment in the local activism calendar, the Rebel Knowledge Symposium hosted by the Ontario Public Interest Research Group, or OPIRG. This year marks OPIRG’s 50th birthday, and what better way to celebrate (?) than organizing people on how best to identify fascism at home and abroad and fight it. If you think “Everything sucks right now!” you might be ready for Rebel Knowledge, but how does it all come together?

Illyria Volcansek, the external outreach co-ordinator of this year’s Rebel Knowledge Symposium, joins us on this edition of podcast to talk about how she ended up co-organizing this year’s symposium, and how OPIRG decided to centre the theme on fighting fascism. She will also talk about finding fascistic tendencies in our own backyard, how to push back when people think that describing things as fascist is a bridge too far, and the greatness of OPIRG as a Guelph community institution.

So let’s talk about fight fascism and rebel knowledge on this week’s Guelph Politicast!

The 2026 Rebel Knowledge Symposium, “Here We Go Again: Fighting Fascism Then & Now”, kicks off this Friday February 6 with a live taping of “Sandy and Nora Do Politics” in Peter Clark Hall. The symposium goes all weekend in the University Centre at the University of Guelph with all kinds of talks and workshops and activities – and it’s all free! You can learn more and see the full schedule here. You can also learn more about OPIRG at their main website.

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Image courtesy of OPIRG.