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Does the word protestor conjure a masked figure in black clothing smashing windows and lighting fires or a weekend liberal ineffectually following rules while sipping on a creamy latte along the state-permitted protest route?

A popular media narrative is that peaceful protest works best, but has the power of nonviolent resistance been debunked? 

Julian responds to Matthew’s interview with political sociologist, Benjamin Case.

In the context of anarchist activism, Case points out that successful “nonviolent protest movements” have always featured property damage, street-fighting, and window smashing. His ethnographic research shows that rioting can also be personally transformative and empowering, as the participant experiences “contentious effervescence.”

His interview (and book, Street Rebellion) included a pointed critique of celebrated nonviolence advocate and academic, Erica Chenoweth, and their towering predecessor, Gene Sharp—who, inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, practically created the field of nonviolent resistance studies. Case has some excellent points, especially about how often Chenoweth’s work is misinterpreted.

But was Gene Sharp really a tool of American imperialism? Is Erica Chenoweth a willing lapdog to status quo liberalism and capitalist power? What kinds of protest strategy might serve us best in our terrifying authoritarian moment?

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Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad claim they're going to open the "black box" at the FDA, an agency they're now both employed at. So they started a podcast. It's not the first official FDA podcast, but it certainly fits into the contrarian ethos both men have cultivated since 2020. Derek and Julian listen in to see how much of that box is actually being opened.

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We’ve been talking about RFK Jr for years, and even dedicated an entire chapter to him in our 2023 book—and we’re going to keep covering him. Since his power and influence has only grown, and since he’s now in charge of America’s entire health apparatus, there’s no way to avoid it.

This week we catch up on the last few months of MAHA. Derek looks into why he believes Kennedy’s apparatus, despite claims of being about health, is really a cover for Project 2025’s deregulatory agenda. Julian discusses a recent paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine by Covid contrarians Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad, who now both work under Kennedy. Finally, Matthew will contemplate Kennedy’s crude remarks on autism through the lens of disability politics.

Show Notes

What Has All This Restaurant Food Done to My Gut?

Function Health is Another Theranosesque Scam

MAHA’s Goal Is Not Health: Robert Kennedy’s movement promises more privatization

RFK Jr. meets with health tech startups, most backed by Andreessen Horowitz

COVID infection no longer gives lasting immunity

Hybrid Immunity May Be the Key to Developing Better Vaccines

Makary, Bhattacharya in New England Journal of Medicine

Consequences of Work Requirements in Arkansas: Two-Year Impacts on Coverage, Employment, and Affordability of Care 

Concerns About ABA-Based Intervention: An Evaluation and Recommendations - PMC 

Adler-Bolton, Beatrice, and Artie Vierkant. 2022. Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto. Verso Books.

SURPLUS. Adler-Bolton, The New Inquiry. October 18, 2022. 

Extractive Abandonment - Stimpunks Foundation 

Social and medical models of disability and mental health: evolution and renewal - PMC

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Calley Means is one of RFK Jr’s top advisors. Alongside Tucker Carlson, Means has claimed responsibility for shepherding Kennedy into Trump’s camp. Does this former business school graduate Heritage Foundation intern and business school graduate really care about the nation’s health? Derek listens to a recent interview with Politico and finds the deregulatory ethos that underlies all of Project 2025 is alive and well in MAHA.

Show Notes

Full interview with Calley Means | POLITICO Health Care Summit 2025

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After being confirmed as Secretary of HHS, RFK Jr started installing his cabal of wellness influencers and contrarian doctors across the government's many public health agencies. And that means they have to apologize for their boss. Derek and Julian listen in on some of the most outrageous takes so far.

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The most annoying convert TradCath in the world, JD Vance, whose cherubic face belies all his bootlicking aggression, gets his moment with Pope Bob. Usha stands behind him in a black mantilla. He hands the pontiff an oversized envelope: an invitation from Donald and Melania to a White House dinner. Bob smiles guardedly as he takes it and without looking at it, setting it on his desk. “I’ll read that at some point,” Vance sputters, “of course, of course.” 

The scene is set for the Church-State tension of whatever phase of global fascism we’re now entering. These ghouls who jail students, disappear immigrants, and lobby for the Trump Gaza resort, shuffle into the Vatican with hats in hand to meet a fellow American who is nothing like their boss, asking for pats on the head, wondering what kind of alliance they can forge, perhaps through anti-wokeness discourse.

The enigmatic response from Pope Bob sums up where we all are as we read the incense swirls for whether he’s going to keep steering the world’s 1.4B Catholics against the tides of late-stage capitalism and environmental disaster, Francis-style. 

Show Notes

Michelle Remembers | Satanic Panic Patreon Collection 

Brief: Deep Church Conspiracy (w/David Lafferty) 

Brief: The CPAC Pope and the Icicle Babies (w/ Brad Onishi)

183: Woke Pope Cancels America's Bishop (w/Mike Lewis)

Sisters of the Little Way

Vatican’s financial watchdog reports decrease in suspicious activities reports in 2024

Why the next Pope faces major money challenges

Pope warns the Vatican pension fund needs urgent reform as employees demand transparency

Cardinal convicted of embezzlement won't participate in conclave for Pope Francis's successor

A cardinal is convicted of embezzlement and sentenced to 5 1/2 years in Vatican trial 

Church defends Indigenous peoples: ‘Doctrine of Discovery’ was never Catholic

Vatican Denounces ‘International Law of Colonization’

Reparations for empire: What the new pope owes to Africa | Slavery

Catholic Order Pledges $100 Million to Atone for Slave Labor and Sales

The Dark History of How the Catholic Church Built Its Massive Wealth

The Vatican—Bulwark of Imperialism

Indigenous leaders hope Vatican's repudiation of oppressive colonial concepts leads to real change

The Man Who Took On Pope Francis: The Story Behind the Viganò Letter

The Excommunication of Archbishop Viganò - Crisis 

Bishop Strickland removed from diocese after accusing pope of backing 'attack on the sacred'

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Matthew is back today for more with Ben Case: profiling Gene Sharp and the (non)politics of strategic nonviolence, plus his strange funding sources. Also: why did Erica Chenoweth speak out against antifascist Trump protesters in January of 2017, and suggest their research proved that property damage and scuffles with the police would ruin any opposition movement to Trump? Also: where does the funding come from for all this bad research? Gene Sharp worked for the Department of Defense, and today, Bill Ackerman is a top funder of strategic nonviolence research. 

Case is a retired professional Muaythai fighter, an organizer, educator, and writer. He is a researcher at the Center for Work and Democracy and a fellow at the Resistance Studies Initiative. 

Show Notes

Street Rebellion: Resistance Beyond Violence and Nonviolence | Case

Why Civil Resistance Works | Columbia University Press 

Why Not Riot? Interview with Author Ben Case - CounterPunch.org  

Change Agent: Gene Sharp’s Neoliberal Nonviolence (Part One) – Nonsite.org 

Have Repertoire, Will Travel: Nonviolence as Global Contentious Performance 

Violence Will Only Hurt the Trump Resistance | The New Republic

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You may have grown up with the term “nonviolence” shining like a pole star over every discussion of how we accomplish socio-political change. But what does it really mean? And who defines violence for that matter—beyond the police, the courts, and others in power?

Today, the theory of non-violence has grown beyond its Gandhian, spiritual aspiration roots, while retaining an irrational faith and offering a distorted view of resistance history. It is now a think-tank-approved, purportedly evidence-based method that guarantees movement success. 

That reasoning comes from the pioneering scholarship of the pacifist Gene Sharp in the 1960s, and his inheritors in strategic nonviolence discourse, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan. They argue that Gandhi’s sacred ideal of satyagraha also happens to be the only successful pathway to lasting change—and they have the data to prove it. 

But do they? Nope. Matthew’s guest today persuasively shows that the movements we think of as “nonviolent” never really are. Why don’t we know this? Through a tangle of academic malpractice, spiritual bypassing, liberal wish fulfillment, and erasing anticolonial voices. Oh, and Gene Sharp also got a lot of funding from the Department of Defense.

Benjamin S. Case is a retired professional Muaythai fighter, an organizer, educator, and writer. He is a researcher at the Center for Work and Democracy and a fellow at the Resistance Studies Initiative. 

P.S.: During our conversation, Ben mentioned that there are antifascist fighting clubs out there. Here are a few to look into:

Haymaker in Chicago.

SKN Muay Thai in Pittsburgh, PA.

Balagoon Boxing Club in Philly, PA.

Show Notes

Street Rebellion: Resistance Beyond Violence and Nonviolence | Case

Why Civil Resistance Works | Columbia University Press 

Why Not Riot? Interview with Author Ben Case - CounterPunch.org  

Change Agent: Gene Sharp’s Neoliberal Nonviolence (Part One) – Nonsite.org 

Have Repertoire, Will Travel: Nonviolence as Global Contentious Performance 

Violence Will Only Hurt the Trump Resistance | The New Republic

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The chat bot flashes its elipsis at the bottom of the screen. What is it thinking, what does it want from you, what do you want from it? Beneath those pixels lies a sea of mined data and lightning storms of electricity heating up servers in barren deserts. What will it find for you in the past labor of the generations?

According to a stunning new article in Rolling Stone, it will find whatever the fuck makes you feel like a god—incuding all the NewAge pablum it has scarfed down—because oops, ChatGPT released a model that is just too sycophantic.

But as we break down today, the AI nonsensient flattery machine is designed to hook you into the regurgitative process of self-seduction. Is this a new spiritual delusion, or more of the same? And what does that kind and agreeable bot conceal?

Show Notes

People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies

Chatgpt induced psychosis

ChatGPT And Generative AI Innovations Are Creating Sustainability Havoc 

LLM Can Be A Dangerous Persuader

You'll Be Astonished How Much Power It Takes to Generate a Single AI Image 

A bottle of water per email: the hidden environmental costs of using AI chatbots

Intelligent Computing: The Latest Advances, Challenges, and Future 

AI Data Centers Pose Regulatory Challenge, Jeopardizing Climate Goals

AI, Climate, and Regulation: From Data Centers to the AI Act 

AI could impact 40 per cent of jobs worldwide in the next decade, UN agency warns

The Future of Jobs Report 2025

History’s Magic Mirror: America’s Economic Crisis and the Weimar Republic of Pre-Nazi Germany

The Great Filter: A possible solution to the Fermi Paradox 

Academic Publisher Sells Authors’ Work to Microsoft for AI Training

Address of the Holy Father to the College of Cardinals (10 May 2025) | LEO XIV 

Capitalism's Fascistic Tendencies — McGowan 

McGowan, Todd. 2016. Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets. Columbia University Press.

Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. 1997. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Verso.

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It begins with a failed human sacrifice in Detroit in 1932. Some would say it actually starts with an evil god-scientist who created the first white people—white devils, really—some 6,000 years ago. Either way, the Nation of Islam has had an important cultural and political presence for almost a century in America.

Today’s installment of Julian’s Roots of Conspirituality series covers the incredible real world history of this extremist new religious movement, as well as its outlandish sci-fi mythological theology.

Show Notes

UAP in Nation of Islam?

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