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March 17, 2025 - Conspirituality
04:59
Bonus Sample: Antifascist Woodshed 2.1 (Punching Nazis?)

Click here to hear the full episode on Patreon. Second of Matthew’s two-part examination of why the hell questions of force, non-violent resistance with and without force, unarmed violence and property damage, and armed violence are so incredibly hard to talk about in a culture thick with spiritual and political bypassing. Are we capable of understanding the difference between morality and strategy? Part 1 focused on philosophy and psychology while today the focus will be on definitions and tactics. Together, both parts will push back on conspiracism about the identities, motives, and methods  of antifascists. Both will present slices of the rich discourse on violence and non-violence from antifascist history, including clarifying definitions of key terms. Both will open a space to think carefully about what intensities of self and community defense are both useful and tolerable in the fight against fascism.  Today we’ll get into the very thick weeds of how the “strategic nonviolence” research of Gene Sharp, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan is framed as empirical, but may be way more about idealizing Gandhi than about facts on the ground. Huge list of references for each! Show Notes Stopping the Press: The Threats to the Media Posed by the Second Trump Term | The New Yorker What the FBI Has Done, and Kash Patel Could Do - Columbia Journalism Review  Hakeem Jeffries cracks down on Trump speech disruptions  Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer Got Punched—You Can Thank the Black Bloc | The Nation  Aamer Rahman: Is it really ok to punch nazis?  $16.5M settlement reached in class-action lawsuit over mass arrests during 2010 G20 summit | CBC News  Meditations at the ringed fence around G20 Toronto - rabble.ca  Remaining Human: A Buddhist Perspective on Occupy Wall Street - Michael Stone  Brief: The Outside Agitator Conspiracy Trope (w/Dr. Peniel Joseph) — Conspirituality  Anti-fascists linked to zero murders in the US in 25 years | Donald Trump | The Guardian  40 Ways to Fight Fascists: Sunshine  rules for radicals | saul d. alinsky  198 METHODS OF NONVIOLENT ACTION | — Gene Sharp She Interrupted a Town-Hall Meeting and Was Dragged Out by Private Security - The New York Times  Martin Luther King Jr. had a much more radical message than a dream of racial brotherhood  The Enigma of Frantz Fanon | The Nation Frantz Fanon and the struggle against colonisation | MR Online Frantz Fanon and the Paradox of Anticolonial Violence – Solidarity Frantz Fanon—a vital defence of violence by the oppressed - Socialist Worker Land and Freedom (1995 Ken Loach) [ENG Sub] (starting at the collectivization debate scene)  Full Spectrum Resistance — McBay  The Failure of Nonviolence | The Anarchist Library  Beyond Violence and Nonviolence | ROAR Magazine  Debunking the myths around nonviolent resistance | ROAR Magazine  Social movements and the (mis)use of research: Extinction Rebellion and the 3.5% rule  Responding to Domestic Terrorism: A Crisis of Legitimacy - Harvard Law Review  Domestic Terrorism: Definitions, Terminology, and Methodology — FBI  676 | United States Sentencing Commission Activists use 'Tesla Takedown' protests to fight job cuts by Musk and Trump | Reuters Tesla vehicles destroyed, vandalized since Musk began role at White House, authorities say - ABC News Anti-DOGE protests at Tesla stores target Elon Musk's bottom line | AP News Tyre Extinguishers: A Night Out with the Climate Activists Sabotaging SUVs Leaflet | Tyre Extinguishers  Tesla Stocks Tumble as Elon Musk’s Political Role Grows More Divisive - The New York Times Internal Memos: Senior USAID Leaders Warned Trump Appointees of Hundreds of Thousands of Deaths From Closing Agency  Beyond Violence and Nonviolence | ROAR Magazine  Violence Will Only Hurt the Trump Resistance | The New Republic  Why Not Riot? Interview with Author Ben Case - CounterPunch.org 10 Lessons on Filmmaking from Director Ken Loach BBC Taster - How to Make a Ken Loach Film Land and Freedom (1995 Ken Loach) [ENG Sub] 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 are 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 our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
So this is a bonus episode.
It's called Anti-Fascist Woodshed 2.1, Punching Nazis with a question mark.
So hey, Patreon subscribers, thank you so much for your support and your feedback.
So if you haven't listened to part one, it dropped here on Patreon and on the main feed this past Saturday, and I encourage you to scroll back and listen to that first.
It focuses on clearing out the philosophical and psychological cobwebs that turn every discussion about how to resist fascism into a discussion about manners and decorum and spirituality.
And one focus was on a short episode in the life of my late friend, the Buddhist teacher Michael Stone, in which I tried to illustrate how the morality of nonviolence through a reductive reading of Gandhi can promote an unrealistic idealism among those who
aren't really thinking about the strategic goals of direct action.
And I invoked the notion of political bypass.
So in this episode, and on that note, I'm going to lean into the work of political scientist Ben Case.
To talk about how the psychological confusion over violence and nonviolence is rooted in a false binary of poorly defined terms that has been retrenched by an empirical claim from within the strategic nonviolence discourse that gained popularity in 2011.
Political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Steffen essentially claim to have validated that version of Indian history that imagined that independence was secured through pure nonviolence.
Case shows that they
could only make that argument by ignoring a huge range of forceful or violent actions within resistance movements like rioting that fall below the definitional thresholds of their data set.
Case troubles the commitments of Chenoweth and Stephan and their main forebear, Gene Sharp, by showing how their arguments are generally stripped clean of political direction and that a lot of the research has actually been funded by the Department of Defense or U.S. foreign policy think tanks.
But I'm not going to end the episode on intrigue.
I'm going to end by dipping back into the positive social psychology of resistance by looking at how anti-fascists Above all, have valued working together.
And I'll do that by talking about two very cool movies.
New ad for an unexpected site for people taking 490 West this morning in downtown Rochester.
Take a look at this graffiti with the words, Who will kill Elon?
Likely in reference to Elon Musk.
It's on the 490 East off-ramp bridge to Howell Street.
We've reached out to New York State Police, the Department of Transportation, and the FBI since Musk is a federal employee.
We're waiting on a response, and we'll update you once we learn more.
So maybe you remember my opening last time with comedian Peyton Vanist saying, I'm not saying somebody should do it.
Well, this graffiti really finishes the thought, and it's popped up in a lot of places.
Coinciding with a growing number of protests at Tesla dealerships from small events in Decatur, Georgia to hundreds showing up at a Manhattan showroom resulting in six arrests.
Portland is a predictable hotbed with marches of a hundred but also one showroom targeted by gunfire that damaged three vehicles and shattered windows.
Lucy Grace Nelson allegedly attacked a dealership in Loveland, Colorado several times using Molotov cocktails and spray-painting Nazi cars on the building.
People have firebombed or sabotaged charging stations in Massachusetts and South Carolina.
And overall, there's been an uptick in reports on attacks on cyber trucks.
Predictably, reporters are regularly using violence and vandalism interchangeably, often neglecting to note that in all of the direct actions so far that I've mentioned, there
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