Hello, everyone. Welcome to Conspiruality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism. I'm Matthew Remski. We are on Instagram and threads at Conspiruality Pod, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our

Monday bonus episodes, of which this is one, on Patreon, or just our bonus episodes via

Apple subscriptions. So this bonus episode is a continuation of the anti-fascist Woodshed series,

and it's also part two of beyond violence and nonviolence

with Muay Thai professional and street rebellion scholar Ben Case, who joined me this past Saturday

to break the spine on this whole mess of defining violence versus nonviolence, both in the public sphere and in the academic literature.

So today we're going to go back into that scholarship to examine how Gandhi's idea of Satya Graha became a secularized, yet still spiritual demand that we imagine resisting colonialism and fascism as a technocratic exercise,

devoid of emotion, devoid of political passion, and devoid of the volatility of one

action leading to another. We'll track the career of Gene Sharp, the patron saint of

strategic nonviolence,

through to the rock star academic status of Erica Chenoweth, who along with Maria Stephan,

claimed to have empirically validated Sharp's instinct that only nonviolence, though he poorly defined it, could work.

They didn't actually validate it,

but now there's a whole civil resistance industry out there that thinks that they did.

And more than that, we'll look at the sources of institutional funding for this work and its

ties to U.S. foreign and domestic policy interests.

Benjamin Case is a retired professional Muay Thai fighter, an organizer, educator, educator, and writer.

He's a researcher at the Center for Work and Democracy, and a fellow at the Resistance Studies Initiative.

Case is based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Here's part two of our conversation, Beyond Violence and Nonviolence.

Ben Case, welcome back to Conspiruality Podcast.

Thanks.

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