Brief: DJ Khaled of Pseudoscience

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

19 Maj 6min

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

17 Maj 47min

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

15 Maj 1h 10min

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? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

12 Maj 5min

In 2022, Oregonians passed Measure 111, which amends the state constitution to declare access to affordable healthcare a right for every citizen. As it happens, this was the first ballot Derek voted on when moving to the state. Now that the long journey to universal healthcare is a reality in Oregon, what does that actually entail? Derek is joined by two members of the nonprofit organization, Health Care for All Oregon: Collin Stackhouse, the Social Media Coordinator, and Rebecca Schoon, an Associate Professor of Public Health at Pacific University, who’s on the board. Together, they map out the journey ahead. Health Care for All Oregon Measure 111 passes, giving Oregonians a constitutional right to access affordable health care Maga’s era of ‘soft eugenics’: let the weak get sick, help the clever breed Show Notes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

10 Maj 33min

Cancer, as physician and author Siddhartha Mukherjee writes, is the emperor of all maladies. The disease—the over 200 different diseases all falling under this umbrella term—has been with us as long as we’ve been us. If anything is truly ancient, it is the cancer cells that are in all of our bodies, just waiting to be turned on if the conditions are right, or if our genes dictate the inevitability. Deep in wellness land, cancer is something entirely different. It’s avoidable if you stop consuming seed oils, stop using 5G, stop thinking negative thoughts, and by god, stop taking those jabs that cause all the turbo cancers going around. And with every wellness warning comes a wellness solution. Today our correspondent, Mallory DeMille, returns for a deep dive into the treacherous depths of one of the more insidious grifts: treating cancer with the power of…water. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

8 Maj 59min

Gen X went from leaning slightly right in 2016 to become, as one analysis puts it, “the bedrock of Trumpism.” Derek meditates on what happened to his generation by reading from four different thought pieces on the topic. Show Notes Wait, What Is Really Up With Gen X’s Politics? Is Gen X a Bunch of Trumpers? Maybe That’s the Wrong Question. How Gen X Became the Trumpiest Generation How Gen X Went from Raging Against the Machine to Swallowing Misinformation While “Doing Their Own Research” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

5 Maj 6min

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner was a little different this year. No president. No comedian. The event featured a mea culpa from an Axios journalist who discussed the media’s complicity in failing to expose Biden’s mental decline. Meanwhile, Substack promoted an alternative parallel event called “Not The White House Correspondents’ Dinner” with an email that announced, “a new media order is emerging.” Legit—or just another conspiracy touting MAGA sham? Julian reports on the proceedings of both events, as well as how the media landscape is shifting in ways that render the definitions of terms like “independent,” “journalism,” and “unbiased” hard to pin down. Digging beneath the surface on Substack, and outlets like The Free Press, and the increasingly mainstreamed far right cult-rag the Epoch Times, all of which claim in some way to represent this emergent new media order, leads him to ask: where is the real home of fact-based independent journalism? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

3 Maj 27min