Radical Relationships and Martial Arts w/ Butch (Uncut + Transcript) (Patreon)

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Butch, a long-time organizer, care worker, and martial arts movement facilitator, shares their journey from the Stop Cop City movement to the Liberation Martial Arts movement approach. It's a journey that spans the deep work of unlearning, care work, grief, healing, conflict resolution, de-escalation, building meaningful relationships, and understanding "community" as more than one thing.

Transcript

[Note: Transcripts are autogenerated and may contain errors.]

Today on Southpaw, we have a special guest, Butch.

Hi, Sam. Thanks for having me.

Butch, like some of our recent guests, probably has two ways they can introduce themselves to our listeners. One is about their political identity, and the other is as a physical movement practitioner, facilitator, and martial arts enthusiast. So with that in mind, Butch, can you give us your introductions? Well,

I've started with martial arts around the same time I started being politically active in the late 90s. I started with Aikido and also in what was called the anti-globalization movement. I had been somewhat interested in martial arts previously and like stopped and started a couple classes here and

there and similarly with politics i went to a couple protests here or there but uh it was really the late 90s where i kind of started reading a lot in earnest about kind of the politics and theory around anti-globalization and got really interested in um You know,

what I saw at the time is this really beautiful practice called the Art of Peace, Aikido, and it was in Burlington, Vermont. So I was in kind of an environment where there was like a lot of progressive politics in the air. And we were also... close to Quebec,

where one of the large demonstrations in North America during anti-globalization took place. So I participated in that, and it had a really profound and inspiring impact on me.

Now, I know you've done various martial arts in your life more than even the ones you've mentioned. But the broader thing I noticed about you is you love to move. You love dance classes, movement classes based around healing. Even some of the martial arts you've done, they're all about fluid and free movements.

I also know you're a care worker. Is there some connection? What draws you to care work, political work, and movement?

Yeah, I do think, I think there is a real connection between the two, I think. You know, I wouldn't have framed it this way back then, but I've come to this understanding that there is a lot of trauma and struggle and there's a lot of trauma that we're all dealing with and that...

this model of connecting movement to breath and to the kind of focus that's involved in a martial art, I think. And then additionally, I'd say I was really drawn to movement and martial arts that have partner practice or group practice. For me, that's a thing that I find...

really rewarding and so it's like a way of relating to one another and a way of communicating with with one another that's maybe different than um i i do spend a lot of time and i'm also interested in philosophy so i spend a lot of time in the

realm of abstract reasoning and that kind of thing and uh movement classes and and These kinds of things where we breathe as a group, we move as a group, we flow and connect as a group, I think are a real nice antidote to spending a lot of time in that abstract realm.

And I think there's a lot of healing potential there. I certainly experienced a lot of healing there. I think early on, I was just out of my teens or whatever, so early on I had these ideas about, you know, you have a little bit of a power fantasy when you're younger and I'm going to

become this really effective person and this really disciplined person and that sort of thing. And honestly, I think I've outgrown some of those ideas around what I'm trying to get out of martial arts. I think that the anti-globalization movement was... A lot of the ideas, I think, were kind of shocking.

If you just go to an American high school and drink the liberal Kool-Aid You start thinking about like, how is Al Gore going to help us save the planet from global warming or whatever? And seeing just like masses of ordinary people who are like,

what can we do around like me and a group of people that I trust using creative ideas and then connecting those to lots of other little pods of people that are doing similar things? What happens when we all combine our power together to try and do something big?

I guess I just want to talk about that from the very exciting end. We could spend an entire podcast critiquing, saying what went wrong or how we could have done it better.

Can you give us a brief explanation of what the anti-globalization movement is?

Sure. So... Well, to get it out of the way, it doesn't mean that we don't think that people should be like communicating around the world or traveling or even trading goods around the world, which the people that impugned the movement were often saying like, oh, they just want to go back to the dark ages.

Not the case at all. In fact, part of how we did the anti-globalization movement was It was the young internet before the existence of Facebook or even any of that, things like that. There was indie media. And through that, we were in contact with people in Canada, in Mexico and Latin America, in Europe.

There were these big trade deals that were happening, and the big beef that we had with them was they established extra-governmental bodies. So decision-making bodies that were accountable to no one, that would make determinations... Where, say, an American company that was dealing in Mexico, if Mexico had an environmental regulation that the American company didn't like,

there might be decision-making that would be punitive towards Mexico by a body that wasn't accountable to any voters. Where, like, the voters in Mexico were like, we want this environmental protection and... this extra governmental body would be like, well, if you do that, we're going to punish you.

And usually the punishment came in terms of like these big financial institutions would like, you know, they wouldn't give them favorable terms on say loans or like there'd be trade repercussions. It all gets like pretty kind of technical and boring and that kind of thing. But like the big picture idea is that

a body of powerful people that nobody voted for could punish supposedly sovereign countries for like protecting their citizens or protecting their environment on the altar of like, what's, you know, quote unquote free trade. Um, and so, and you know, we're, we're living in that world now, uh, to a certain extent where, um,

It caused this thing that we call the race to the bottom, where it was like whatever country that could offer the cheapest labor, which often meant also the worst working conditions, would be where goods were manufactured. And so... It was basically this global... We were fighting against a global movement to...

What we saw was a global war on the environment and a global war on workers. And so in the case of what I mentioned earlier, there was a large summit for the free trade area of the Americas, which was going to be an agreement similar...

to nafta which we had already seen the devastating consequences of nafta and so the the leaders of canada the united states and mexico were all at a conference center in quebec city and there was a huge convergence of activists and you know long story short it was pretty powerful direct action um canadian authorities uh

were pretty heavy-handed in their repression of the activists. They ended up using an ungodly amount of tear gas, and they were using helicopters to push tear gas into the crowd. That tear gas went into the intake in the conference center, and the story goes that the leaders of the so-called free world had to be evacuated

because they were choking on their own tear gas. So... On some levels, we can call it a success. Again, like I said, we can talk about the critiques of that movement in another podcast. But that was a really energizing experience for me to be part of the lead-up and then participating in something like that, like seeing...

seeing people power in action where we were really challenging the most powerful forces in the world and at least having some impact on it. It stoked my imagination forever, really. And at that same time, I was getting into martial arts and beginning to train every single day.

and feeling the impact that that had on my life of being part of a martial arts community. One that was, to a certain extent, social justice oriented and had this idea about pathways to healing the world and ourselves and that kind of thing.

And now, more recently, you've started some liberation martial arts-inspired classes. How did that get started, and how is it going? Are people showing up?

People are showing up, yeah. We just had a really exciting class on Tuesday. Honestly, how it started was I was part of the movement to stop Cop City in Atlanta. And I knew personally Tortugita, the activist that was martyred for the cause, murdered in a public park during the day for supposedly trespassing.

Tortugita had asked me to come out to the forest occupation to teach martial arts, which I did during the occupation. And I sort of After the occupation was kind of scattered to the wind by the state forces, I kind of kept up the practice of having little martial arts gatherings here and there.

And somewhere along the course of that, someone actually introduced me to your Instagram account. It was, you know, it's hard to forget when someone is like, you should check out this account. They sound a lot like you. So I'm like, oh, okay.

And sure enough, you know, I kind of joined the Patreon and was following along for a while. And then at a certain point, I was like, I got to get out there. For me, like, the human connection, the like, like you know get in the same room and like we're gonna like do martial arts

together just felt like an imperative so i flew out to la and spent uh it's funny because it it seemed like kind of epic but it was really just like four days right um i came back from la totally inspired and like kind of reworked how i do everything

And a local church that has been involved in the struggle gave me a spot to teach classes. Although now that the weather's nice, we're training in a park near that church. And basically, I've been putting the word out. And it's primarily the classes, queer and trans people,

that are politically aligned with the Top Top City movement, the pro-Palestinian movement here. I participate in a trans basketball league, and so a number of the students come from the trans basketball league. They're really interested. I think one of the features of it is that a lot of the folks that are coming are already interested in

You know how the liberation martial arts style, well, it already... I don't need to teach them a lot about some of, say, the politics, or even when I lay out some of the philosophy to how LMA works, the response isn't like, oh, whoa, I never thought about it that way. The response is usually like, yeah, that's right.

So... There's kind of a self-selecting crew that this is really appealing to. So there's already an interest in, say, things like de-escalation, nonviolent conflict resolution. There's already an interest in somatic work. There's already an interest in mind-body connection. That sort of stuff is all...

stuff a lot of the people have considered or explored on some level before but then also because of who the community is it's interesting i i at the beginning of a class the other day i i was like hey i just want to check in again about like why

is everybody here what are your goals what do you want to get out of this because um i want to adjust what i'm doing here based on that right this is for you not for Me, or it's for all of us, I should say, not just what I want to get out of it.

And some of the people were like, I'm just having a lot of fun. I'm here for the community. I don't really ever see myself being somebody who's going to throw hands in a combat situation, but this is a lot of fun. Some folks were like, I'm specifically here because I want to be harder to kill.

I'm a trans woman and I am in danger. It's a danger has never been more real. And like, in fact, this one student who said to me a couple of weeks ago, I'm here because I want to be harder to kill. Just the other day, I was like, you know, I want to revise what I said.

I don't just want to be harder to kill. I actually want to be able to put a Nazi on their ass. And I was like, okay. That's been a long time. There's an august tradition of martial artists who have also shared that goal. So we can work with any of these goals.

You've been teaching movement and martial arts for a while, long before we connected and you came to LA to learn liberation martial arts hands-on. You could have easily been like, I've been doing this a long time. What does this guy know? And you've seen a lot of ways martial arts has been taught, whether through commercial spaces,

radical spaces, or just from your own trial and error. So what was new about LMA for you What did you get from it so far? Why did you decide to change everything?

In part, there is this appeal that I saw of you really trying to build something from the ground up consistent with some values that I think that we share and that I think probably listeners of this podcast are familiar with. Especially since teaching in the forest and sort of really rethinking

you know what am i doing here that felt like something that i wanted to do and uh then i'm like oh wait here's somebody who's already done it so i thought that was going to be my job but like now it doesn't need to be my job because i've got a lot

going on in the world you know activism and organizer world um where I'm trying to bring a lot of different pieces together and make a lot of different things happen and, uh, figuring out that like, I wouldn't have to be reinventing the wheel because somebody else was already doing it. You know, you know, there,

there was a little bit of like, I'm just going to jump in feet first and see what happens here. I'm going to, I'm going to like, I'm going to like go with it. So there's a lot of individual little things that you were doing and like,

a lot to the approach that was appealing it wasn't just like oh that's great I'm going to jump in the pool although there was a little bit of that like oh that's great I'm just going to jump in the pool but I think a real concrete example that I

can point to is like I don't think I had the confidence to like do a purely play based system and to like like this goes hand in hand is like really start leaving behind a lot of the things that that kind of felt fundamental to me about how i would

teach a martial arts class um those two things like kind of uh There was a lot of letting go that I think coming out to LA and training with you allowed me to do. The other day, I had a class where just based on where we were training and who was in the class

and what people wanted out of it, I just was making stuff up the whole time. which is not something I would have allowed myself to do in the past. And checking in with people at the end of class, everybody had like these huge smiles on their face.

And we talked about like, what did you get out of it? Like all the responses that I got were really satisfying to me, but like, I was nervous. I was like, I'm just kind of making this up along, which isn't, I'm making this up as I go along, which isn't kind of the, the,

that's not my comfort zone. Um, but I was like having a little faith in myself that the stuff that I'm doing is, is still grounded in martial arts tradition. And, you know, this thing that I keep bringing to the students, uh, is something that, you know,

I think you've had more than one post about say on your Insta account that a lot of people are starting martial arts say this year in particular, because they're afraid. And then I think about one of the reasons why people start a new endeavor at the beginning of every year or something is like, uh, you know,

maybe you're like ashamed that you're too sedentary or like not disciplined enough or something like that. But like fear and shame are not sustainable fuels and like fun is right. Like people want to keep showing up because they're having fun. Like, people don't show up to the basketball league because basketball is a grind.

People show up to basketball because it's fun. And so coming up with quirky new games and just fun ways to develop these direct martial arts skills, you know, it was something like I kind of needed to give myself permission to just do and be like yeah i'm somebody that can do this and also like uh you know

something you said to me in la was like uh you know for instance if i were to teach an aikido class i can say you know i have such and such certification i'm such and such degree black belt um this thing that i'm teaching you is part of this lineage that's like this is authentic

this is an authentic traditional martial art and I'm the teacher and you're the student and you do what I'm showing you. Whereas when we're doing the liberation martial arts at this class, I'm able to make it really clear, hey, I'm a co-learner here. I kind of don't know what I'm doing.

I'm also trying to get what you're trying to get. We're all doing this together. And I was a little insecure about how people would respond But the reality is that it's been great. It's been a great response.

One of the things I've been thinking about a lot for LMA, and it's something you've already naturally brought up, is relationships. Because for me to invite someone to action, I need to know them, and they need to know me. Otherwise, it's a big ask, and it's awkward. And relationships are built around familiarity and trust.

you can apply this to political work as well. When you ask strangers to do stuff without getting to know them, it's off-putting. I know you've given me examples of that where you felt off-put could just show up and all of a sudden somebody's like giving you some kind of chore to do and you're like, wait a minute,

I don't even know you, you don't even know me. So when strangers get together to do things and the stakes are high, there can arise mistrust and bad faith because there's a lack of relationship. Even starting without relationship just seems off. So all of this, this lack of trust, lack of relationship building, being strangers, stakes being high,

it ends up worsening burnout and other toxic behaviors. A lot of toxic behaviors can arise from a mistrust. So relationships are important all the way around, whenever you invite people to action, whether physical or political. With facilitators who start their own radical martial arts group, The difficulty they have is they're asking strangers to show up,

be around other strangers, and move in front of them. That's a tall order. But I think why your practice is different is that you naturally start with relationship. You invited a community that already knows you to come and check something out you're doing.

Like I'm more likely to go to something a friend is doing or at least someone I am acquainted with or people I know around me know than a stranger, even if that stranger is a radical. There's some kind of social trust already around this person, even if it's not coming from me directly.

So I wanted to talk to you about relationships. Now, are relationships something you even name or think about? Or is relationship building something you do intuitively and without deliberately thinking, hey, this is something I ought to do before I start making suggestions?

I would say it's a little bit of both. Especially when you're talking about high stakes and then there's also the matter of urgency. So we want to build relationships. relationships might naturally build because like you and i live on the same island

and we spend the next 40 years together and we see each other like twice a year and after a while we start to feel like old friends or something like that and like that's a very different context than the context that i'm working in where we have

like political stakes we have political repression we're in a little bit of a pressure cooker we have political goals that are going to take collective action and a thing to do with strangers maybe who share those goals but like you said we haven't necessarily

built trust we haven't had those years together to see how we move in different kinds of situations how reliable is somebody how are they in conflict um Will they show up for me when I'm in a sticky situation? Those kinds of things. And so I would say on some level for me, yes, it is intuitive.

On others, I have to put some thought into what it takes.

And when the stakes are high, you also want to be able to anticipate the decision somebody you know would make, right? So that saves a lot of time. That helps cohesion if you know them that well.

Yeah, and I don't even know, for me, I'm not sure even if it's like anticipate because like hopefully, you know, you have a diversity of people. People might actually make surprising decisions because they're imaginative and they've come up with something you wouldn't have expected. But can I trust them?

Like, for instance, have I built a kind of relationship with you where if you were doing something that I don't understand, or maybe I don't even agree with, but like, I have enough trust in you that you're maybe taking a risk because you understand. Um, I have enough trust in you as a comrade that I'm,

I'm not immediately going to like question or be put off by it because we've established some kind of a relationship, uh, where I understand where you're coming from. And that's why I think discussions about values, talking about beliefs, I think are pretty central to building the kinds of relationships that we're talking about building.

I want to be spending a lot of my time doing action you know whether it's political action or physical movement action martial arts and dance and time out in nature that kind of thing uh but i do also think that um one of the merits of like studying theory is that then we have this

like thing that we can reference so like if I understand your relation to the state there's plenty of right wingers that hate cops for instance but just because you hate cops doesn't mean that I'm going to trust you right away whereas if you explain your analysis about like the problem

with policing in America and the theoretical basis for it and like That seems to also be consistent with your motivations for why you're doing some of the political action that you're doing. That seems like a basis to generate some trust from. So how would you define relationship? You know,

I think that any kind of sustained interaction with a person over time or a community over time is a relationship. You might also say... your interaction with the land as well as a relationship. So a kind of a mentor to me in conflict resolution one time said, for the purposes of what we're doing,

let's give a provisional definition of community. And that provisional relationship was anybody you can't avoid. is your community. And so it might be your best friend, but it also might be your annoying and nosy neighbor. Whether you like it or not, they're part of your community.

And there's a certain sense too in which I can't avoid the patrolman on my street or something like that. So like it or not, that person's part of community in a certain sense and similarly i have similarly i have relationships with all those people whether i like it or not i have a relationship with you know

the the mayor of this city as well as like maybe an intimate partner or or um the people that i train with i just have for various reasons um interactions over time so i i i think it's useful to not like put value on the put

like a negative or positive value on just the idea of a relationship um but then we want to talk about like what kind of relationships are we trying to build here for the kind of like revolutionary goals that we have

Actually, this segues nicely into another question, because if community is also those people you can't avoid, right? How can we maintain a healthy community so that it flourishes? Because there's a lot of constraints, right? There's some things we can't control. So what are the things we can't control?

You know, I think that we need to look at this greater community, like the people we can't avoid one. I don't think it's that useful to just silo off and say, I'm just going to have this highly curated group of friends and that's going to be my community.

I think that we should, to the best of our ability, kind of expand our relationships with our community and think about how we interact with them. But I do really, when, when we have political goals and especially in these times of great urgency, like right now, I do think it makes sense to,

to create intentional communities with people that we share like kind of desired outcomes with. And so, That's what I see part of what I'm trying to do with the liberation martial arts here in Atlanta is to create an intentional community of people who want to be doing this kind of work.

I think that's an important differentiation that there's not just one kind of community, right? You could be part of some kind of community and it's not great. And there could be an intentional community that really lines up with you. I think community, we use it as if there's some kind of consensus for what it is,

but you're saying it's not any one thing. There's all kinds of communities that you could feel differently about.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think... there's a lot of starry-eyed talk about the beauty of community. And I think that there's a lot of isolated people, queer people that are in communities that are not friendly to queer people, immigrants or racial minorities that are in majority white areas that are not friendly to them.

I don't think you just go... I don't think it's always the safest thing to just be like, okay, well, this is the community I have, so I'm going to make the best of it. I think for a lot of people, finding and having intention in community is really important.

Then I think a thing that happens is then people are looking for perfection and... The reality is that when you create an intentional community of like-minded people, they and you are bringing all of your baggage with you into it, and so there's still going to be conflict and messiness and different kinds of harm

and that sort of thing. That's inescapable. But if you have shared values that you can use as a reference point, then you have the staging to be able to improve your community and to resolve conflict and to build and grow a more supportive community. Which is something I've really seen here over the last several years around the

broader left community in Atlanta. A lot of growth, and that growth only came through a lot of messiness, a lot of hurt feelings. But then also like a lot of support systems built up, maybe not despite of, but maybe because of the pain of the messiness and the harm and that sort of thing

that we do to one another.

It's interesting how even in talking about these difficult topics that are hard to put into words, right? What are the words we're searching for? And there's often these words that we use that are related around perception, right? Like being starry-eyed or they're looking for something that isn't there, right? This perfect community.

Actually, that's one of the reasons why in LMA, we spend so much time with perception because our eyes aren't always so clear and we just assume they are. And we might be looking for something that is like a unicorn or we're not looking at the environment before us and we're not in the moment of now,

but we're thinking in the future or using our imagination or looking up at the stars. None of those things are necessarily bad. But I think we're good at a lot of those things already. Living in the past, pre-living the future, using our imagination, being starry-eyed or doomer or looking for things that aren't there. But perceiving now,

perceiving the reality in front of us and perceiving the reality in front of us as it's taking shape as well. These are all things that are, I think, no longer intuitive. So... That is why it's so worthwhile to think about perception and spend time on our perception and be in our bodies and actually think about physical perception,

how we're perceiving what our senses, not just what our eyes. Something else I wanted to ask you about, and I guess it is related to perception, is because of how you approach things, perceive things, take things. But in our many conversations, you don't spend a lot of time telling me about the people you don't like.

And you instead tell me about the people you do like. And I wish that was the norm, but it's really normal to also just fixate your radicalism on everything you hate, all the people you don't like, all the burned bridges. You know, instead of radicalism built around relationship building, it's the opposite.

It's all about radicalism built around your enemies or the bridges you burn or the people you silo and so forth, the people you want to take down. So... What do you think are some keys to maintaining relationships, even with people you don't line up with one for one ideologically?

One of the things we can think of, again, from conflict resolution and from de-escalation is like, we want to try and problematize systems and not people. Unpack that for us. So I think some of that comes from some real fundaments of abolitionist work, right? Like we look at how people are warehoused in the American prison system.

We've got more prisoners than anywhere else on Earth. And I think part of the propaganda issue that helps maintain that system is like these people in there are bad people and bad people need to be segregated from society. And I think the abolitionist way of looking at it is like, hey,

there are these systems that create poverty and what society calls crime is bound to happen in the kind of violent society that we have that's driven by poverty and wealth inequality unprecedented wealth inequality um and so we just need to be looking at this from a different lens right like that each of these individual people that in

are in prison are not the problem but rather it's the system that's a problem And we can kind of look at that on an individual basis with members of our community. So often conflicts arise when, for instance, someone isn't getting something that they need, right?

And then so often someone isn't getting what they need because of some kind of systemic failure, not because of a personal failure. failure on on their behalf so you know i think we do have to act in some way you know you know for instance um we don't want to tolerate among say say we have like

leftist uh meetings we're not we're not going to tolerate abuse we're not going to tolerate transphobia we're not going to tolerate anti-semitism or anti-arab sentiment we don't want to tolerate anti-black sentiment that that sort of thing that's a different thing than... Those things spring from greater systemic problems and then they're being expressed through an individual.

So that doesn't mean that we tolerate the individual expressing those things. But if we do really want to get at managing... and creating a better world where those abusive or antisocial behaviors aren't coming up, then I think looking at it as like, well, this is just a bad individual who's acting this way.

Over the long term, I don't think we're going to make very much progress. And so generally, there gets to be a lot of like, I mean, you know, The online beef between anarchists and Marxists, right? Like, you know, one side calls one the other tanky or delusional.

Both sides have a lot of good points about the other side acting in an immature way or blah, blah, blah. In the real world, when I've seen things get done in leftist spaces, there just isn't an awful lot of that kind of beef happening. And I think it's because, like, people come together around a common...

goal and people who want to get stuff done and figure out how to cooperate despite like ideological differences that they might have they're seeing the same goal they're seeing the same goal and for me it's like i don't want to get too caught up

in a lot of like beefing around like ideological differences or that kind of thing because the reality is is that like if you were raised in this country i mean i think it's a different thing for like immigrants or like some people that are raised in certain pockets of this country

but like on a majority like if you graduated from high school or college in this country then like You are indoctrinated as a liberal. Your conditioning is as a liberal. And you might call yourself an anarchist or you might call yourself a Marxist-Leninist or something like that. But really what you are is a recovering liberal.

We all have that in common. Maybe people know that unconsciously, so that's why they're so defensive. Yeah. It's got to be something like that.

But... The anarchist answer to Donald Trump versus the Marxist-Leninist answer to Donald Trump, I have nothing smart to say about that, just that it's not that compelling to me. That's not the level of organization that we're at right now. In this city that we're in right now, where I live, they're building a militarized police training facility.

The police here have a working relationship with Israeli police and they train in Israel and we're going to have cops from around the world and around the country coming here to train in our militarized police facility. We don't know what's going to work yet.

So if somebody thinks that they have the ideological answer to how we're going to fight back against this, I... I think we don't have enough data yet. And so I think we've got to learn to get along with one another. And I think that we have mostly been conditioned by the society that we grew up in

by our parents to not be very good at getting along with each other. So I think like, while we don't want to tolerate abuse, and I think like an important thing for different intentional communities to do is to try to agree on what we think abuse is.

I think we want to like cut each other a lot of slack too. Take it easy on each other. Give each other some grace. Give each other some grace.

Yeah, which is hard if you don't know each other, right? So it goes back to relationships. Right. If I know you, even if you're doing something I don't understand, I'm going to give you the grace to be like, well, I know that person. I know their intention. So there's something more to this.

That's right.

I was thinking about something that happened to me recently where I was talking to somebody about something and they brought something up which reminded me of something. And this person is somebody I know well. And then they took something I said in a way where they were like, I was implying something about them.

And then I responded with, I hope you know me well enough where you know I wouldn't do something petty like that. And they thought about it and they're like, oh yeah. I know you well enough. You wouldn't mean it that way. But even though this person knows me so well, I think maybe because of the internet,

even if it's somebody we know because it was happening over text, instead of thinking about me, the person, we just see words via text as social media posts. And I do this too. We react to it as if it's just words on the internet instead of thinking of it coming from the mouth of somebody we know.

So I think there is also a conditioning that non-face-to-face interactions have conditioned into us. where even if we're having a non-face-to-face interaction with somebody we know, we forget we know them, we forget all the trust we've built, sometimes momentarily, and we don't give them that grace. So I think we also have to be aware of how much,

not just the propaganda of, like you talked about, the educational system and the society, but also now the bombardment and how we're being conditioned by social media networks.

The algo.

The algo and the internet. When we see words through texts on our phone, we're like, even if it's coming from a friend, there's a part of us who's just ready to fight. Right,

like that algorithm at its core is designed for engagement because engagement is what makes the money and reactive, like conditioning to be reactive Like hate clicking or... Rage. Rage bait, assuming the worst. Grace does not benefit those companies very much.

Diago does not like grace. Especially in techno capitalism, right? Yeah, yes.

Although I don't feel like giving them grace.

No, no, no, no. Well, because we know them so well too, right?

They don't deserve any grace, but our comrades certainly do.

And also we have to give people a chance so we can get to know them as well. And then decide.

Yeah.

We all know activism and political organizing work is important, especially listeners of the show. But do you think the work we do as far as movement practitioners is also important?

Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, here's the thing that I've been thinking about quite a lot because, you know, in Atlanta here, we lost a beloved comrade. And, you know, despite our best efforts, we greatly delayed the building of Cop City and at great expense to our opponents. It cost them a lot of money to...

do what they did, which was bring the full force of the state down upon us. That kind of repression is expensive. Recently, there was a very small kind of... benefit party that was held for some of the... for political prisoners. And the Atlanta Police Department sent a helicopter and like seven patrol cars. I mean, that cost them...

My understanding is that every time they send that helicopter up, it cost them like $10,000. So they spent over $10,000 to harass. They didn't arrest anyone or even say why they were there. It was just an intimidation tactic. But they spent a huge amount of money just to intimidate us.

So they obviously think that we have some kind of power or something. But the reality is that a large part of the forest got cut down, those buildings are mostly completed. And so the community, I think, is facing an enormous amount of grief from the loss of our comrade,

an enormous amount of grief from the loss of the forest, and what looks like the loss of a very, very hard-fought campaign. And the Venn diagram looks like a circle of... you know, people that were opponents of Cop City and pro-Palestinian organizers. And so people are experiencing a tremendous amount of grief around the loss of so

many Palestinian comrades and children and the destruction that's happening there in Congo, in Sudan. Greece is a palpable entity. in all of our gatherings and with all of our comrades and i don't think that grief is a thing that we can truly um process intellectually and and so having a movement

practice having a body mind practice where we can you know work with moving energy through our bodies and in a group and with one another, I think it's like this pathway that has untapped potential. Because when I talk to Palestinian activists, or if I talk to veteran activists that are a generation older than me,

some black liberation struggle, any number of different kinds of you know, kind of our warrior comrades who are fighting this fight, they are very in touch with their grief. They know how to mourn and they know how, I've heard of grief called a kind of love. You know, my heart is filled with love.

My heart is filled with grief. And I think that these explorations of body movements, of connecting it to breath, and then the learning and the healing and the the camaraderie with others and the feeling of developing a relationship with your physical body i think we spend an awful lot of

time you know in a in various states of dissociation whether we're in like a scroll hole on on the phone or you know we're watching we're just on a Netflix binge or something like that we totally lose connection to our body and our feelings are in our body so like we're not really fully feeling

our feelings either and so our like physical vocabulary is expanded by doing these movement practices and our ability to process our grief and our ability to to move and feel together i think is just greatly enhanced it's greatly expressed in these kinds of like um movement practice gatherings or classes that that we do

and it it has all these like practical applications just for building say like you know, kind of like teamwork or that kind of thing, right? Which sounds, you know, okay, well, corporate America is all about that too, right? But they're not, you know, like I think about Silicon Valley and how they've adapted all these different Zen

practices because like mindfulness will help you manage the stress of working in that hellhole and become more productive or something like that. But I don't think we have the same sort of cynical goal there because like our goal is My goal when I'm facilitating an LMA class is for us to, like, get to be human. Right? And,

like, I think that's part of, like, the goal just of, like, a liberation movement, generally. Like, the Stop Cop City movement is, like, The state repression, the world that they seem to be building for us doesn't allow us to be human. And we insist on it. We insist on being human. Something came to mind.

I was at a noise demonstration at a jail on Valentine's Day where we came and played music and chanted and that sort of thing. And a child gave me a little Valentine that had a quote from David, David Graber on it that said, uh, play is the ultimate expression of freedom for its own sake. And so,

especially when we're gathering together to practice movement and, and it's play base and we're trying to like, create the conditions so that we like feel this kind of like freedom for its own sake you know we might have these lofty goals like we're going to create a cadre of

martial artists that's going to become powerful and like change the world that's fantastic as a secondary goal but like you were saying about like experiencing now now what are we doing is just like together creating the conditions to be fully human I mean, take an hour out of our busy schedules where I have to like,

I don't know, work in a kitchen or do whatever dehumanizing thing I have to do to survive. I get to take a break from that and just play and express experience freedom for its own sake in a deeply repressive world.

You've been moving and grooving for a long time. Is it still fun?

Yeah. Yeah. I would say it's getting funner.

So instead of less fun, it's getting more fun. It's getting more fun, I would say. Yeah. I think a lot of people think when you're doing something, it gets less fun over time. But I think with your practice, your experience... And what I'm experiencing with my own practice here as well, it's like, no,

like things actually can get more fun over time. Because sometimes like things are fun at the beginning because it's new, but then the practice gets rigid or repetitive, so forth, and it's no longer fun. But I think going back to something you felt awkward about, which is like organizing movement on the fly, right? Coming up with stuff.

It's the fact that you're having to do new stuff and constantly be creative and allowing the practice to keep evolving, right? And it stays new and fresh and you're getting people who are also into that and they're having fun. There's a synergy where it gets more fun over time. Despite us getting older, right?

We're having more fun than ever. Yeah. Yeah.

And there is something to that LMA approach because if I was maybe doing a more traditional martial arts approach where it's like, okay, well this is the day that I grind out this particular thing because I'm working towards perfecting this particular technique. Yes. But like my back is killing me, but I got to do it. Yeah.

Like that's not fun. Yeah. Um, and I think now I, now, you know, now I know, I think there's questionable value to that at all. Yeah. Whereas if I show up, um, although, you know, Generally, my back is killing me a lot less than it was a year ago. Oh, nice.

But if I do show up to facilitate a class and my back is killing me, I have the freedom to organize the class around that. And none of the people that show up are going to be like, oh, what a ripoff. Because we're all in this together.

And part of the idea of not creating kind of a false hierarchy between a coach or a sensei or a master or whatever and then students like there is some kind of hierarchy because the facilitator kind of has the skills to facilitate and

people are like coming to look for that right but it's a very weak or very like shallow hierarchy as opposed to this like pyramid shaped structure with pyramid shaped structure with the leader on top and everyone else kind of at the bottom it's more like you're

doing a service than being this martial arts master that's you know I have the say so about what this ancient wisdom is and that's exactly what it is and you need to you're going to be subjected to my cookie cutter we've left that behind and it turns out to be a lot healthier for me.

You know, what's interesting is I've had people who've come from other radical martial arts or movement practices and their answer to that hierarchy is like, Skillshare or like have people take turns leading. Right. But then they just default to the hierarchical instructor led teaching system. So the approach is still the same.

So basically it's people taking turns being the dictator. Right. Right. you know, you're taught to believe because of ideology or whatever your political tendency is. It's like, oh yeah, that means democracy. That means like it's horizontal. And you compare that to maybe it's just like you organizing movement or it's me. but we have a different approach.

It's like a completely different approach than what they're doing. Yeah, it might be just me facilitating, but that still feels a lot more democratic, self-directed, and horizontal than people taking turns being the past master, being the corrections officer of movement. And that's what you're experiencing too. So I think people like have, I don't know,

decided a long time ago that must be the right way and never thought to update that. What I'm saying is a lot of people have thought about how that power is going to be distributed rather than the approach to power.

Yeah, I think in the late 90s, the style of Aikido that I did was very, very top-down. There was one person who said what was right and wrong, and then all of the teachers below him, tried to emulate that style. And it was like a real compliment if you went to a seminar or something where there

were people from different teachers, if they were like, oh, you look... I can tell this is your teacher because you look just like them. And with Aikido, there was another dojo in town where they were kind of trying to explore some other... I think that they saw some of the inherent problems in those really,

really steep hierarchies and cleaving to tradition so much where it stops being a living art. And so they tried to maintain it as an Aikido dojo and keep some of the traditions and that sort of thing. But they tried to really open up you know,

kind of like anybody who walked through the door could kind of contribute to what the idea of Aikido was. And what ended up happening is like there was often this feeling of like a very watered down Aikido. And so I'm still kind of grappling with what all that means is and what my relationship to Aikido was,

because I think the style that I practice, you know, for these exact reasons we're talking about, was deeply flawed because of, like, cleaving to traditions and the rigidity, the hierarchy. It stopped being a living thing, and it's like you're just trying to preserve this fossil. But, I mean, it is gorgeous.

You know, there's a lot of beauty to the practice and a lot to learn within it. And when you just take something like that and kind of just, like, water it down, it actually doesn't seem... as appealing to me. Whereas like with what is happening here with LMA, it's like this very living thing.

There's no katas or drills that are trying to codify the right way to do things and freeze them in time that you're trying to get away from.

Oh, there's a bunch of LMA kata that now we're just trying to get away with and reform to make it like more horizontal, right? Like there's these ways the human body can move in a fight, like the kicks and punches and blocks or parries, dodges, things like that.

Like one martial art or another might have something to say about what's the right way to block this or the right way to parry this or the right way to step backward or the right way to step forward. And what LMA has done is said, Well,

stepping backward or stepping forward or stepping to the side is going to be a thing that you're going to do in a fight. And your body has a way that it's going to express that most fully. So here's an opportunity. We're going to facilitate an opportunity for you to figure out the efficient way

for you to step back or for you to do a front kick. Because... we're going to sidestep the whole or avoid the whole argument about whether a front kick from Muay Thai or a front kick from Taekwondo or a front kick from karate is like the ultimate front kick.

Because like the front kick that works for you is the right front kick. And then figuring that out, not through like learning all the different kicks and then like selecting what the best one is, but through like games where you would just start like kicking a lot right away,

but in a way that's not going to hurt your body. Like what's a healthy, safe way that we can just start doing a lot of fun kicks?

And games are just a way to help people figure stuff out, right? The games aren't so important as just a means to get people to explore in ways they may not have and then figure more stuff out that they didn't figure out before. Right. Actually, this conversation about that and letting people self-direct reminded me of another

story where somebody was leading a martial arts and self-defense class and they wanted to be really horizontal, right? And they're doing the LMA approach, but they wanted to allow other people who are experienced in teaching come and teach stuff too. So this person's working with people and giving them some conditions so they could

kind of self-direct and figure stuff out for themselves, like giving them a chance to learn. But then other people who felt like, hey, I have experience too, then they were also allowed to go around and teach. So one of those teachers was taking some people and teaching them too, but it was so rigid, right?

Even though this person was also a radical, right? They were just defaulting to what they knew and how to teach. And so gave the learners no room to figure anything out on their own and just basically told them what to do, right? Being a taskmaster, being the authoritarian, right?

Even though their politics is anti-authoritarian, they're doing that, right? And so what is that, right? That's something to unpack and really reflect on because in your pursuit of horizontalism, something anti-horizontal and something more authoritarian happened. Whereas, yeah, power was not centralized around you, but it actually became more hierarchical, right? More top-down. Versus if that person,

that facilitator was just doing an approach where everybody was allowed to figure stuff out and self-direct their own learning and you were just kind of helping to facilitate that because you're the one who knows the approach best or the only one who knows the approach. Yeah,

then I guess there is some kind of power being centralized with that person, but it's a different kind of power. But yeah, that person is the one telling people what the rules are. But the experience of that would have been much more horizontal and your experience of like how to

project your own power, power to direct your own movements. That's much more actualized in that way. What I'm basically saying is sometimes if one person is leading it, despite it being one person leading the whole thing, you can still have an experience and really live something that is much more

horizontal than having a bunch of people lead things, but they're all doing it in an approach that is very instructor-led and treats the learner like they are incapable of learning. And so basically you have a bunch of drill sergeants telling the grunts exactly what to do, right?

So just because you have a whole bunch of little drill sergeants versus one guide, the bunch of drill sergeants are not more horizontal than the one guide. And I think that's kind of the stereotype people are conditioned with within the left because the left conditions you too, right? And you're like, bada bing, bada boom. It's so simple.

You're like, you just make everything black and white. And it's like one person, authoritarian, bunch of people, anti-authoritarian, what's there to know, right? It's automatic. The answer is always the same. And it's like, no, context matters. Right. It's not all set it and forget it.

It's not like I learned this once and the answer is always going to be the same. The answers can change based on how it's approached. I don't want 10 people micromanaging me. I'd rather have one person who lets me do what I want rather than 10 micromanagers. Right. Right.

This is also why you can't mix and match LMA with other approaches because they're incompatible. It's like mixing and matching a science based around the world being round with science that believes the earth is flat. They're incompatible.

Right. We're talking about trying to create conditions. Like as a facilitator, you're trying to create conditions. Yes. And so... There is a certain kind of power or authority that is invested in you because you're trying to create conditions, but that seems an awful lot more like a power with than a power over.

Whereas every time you throw a punch, I make sure that you know how you did it wrong. That seems a little bit more like a power over than a power with, even if you think you're doing an important service.

Explain power with.

Well, I think that it doesn't make sense for us all to do the same role. And there's going to be different roles. And in the case of... It sounds like you and I have been doing martial arts for more or less the same amount of time. But your experience has been vastly different than mine.

A totally different world. And so... you know, for, for me, when I came out to, to train with you, the intention wasn't like, you know, you might be under the impression that like, say power with would be like, I'm going to come out and you're going to tell me a little bit about what you know.

And I'll tell, you know, it would be a horizontal thing. If it's an exchange where like, I'm going to teach you my thing and you're going to teach me your thing. But the reality is, is like, we already had this agreement about like, through a couple of discussions, it sounded like we had a common vision.

And there was like a way of facilitating that to me seems consistent with our common vision that I hadn't experienced yet. And I felt like the best way for me to experience is like, can you set up the conditions for me to experience that facilitation? And so we're both like, building power there.

For me, I didn't feel subordinated. I felt like, oh, this is expanding my understanding of even what martial arts is or how we could do it. And so we were building power together. So even though you were facilitating and I was the learner, you didn't have power over me. We were building power together.

Co-creating.

co-creating yeah and so so like in in political terms that might look like well you know we have a sham democracy where we have an autocratic ruler right now uh that is clearly wielding power over millions of people and really a big chunk of the

world so billions of people um and you might look at say uh uh Say I had some friends that owned a cooperative print shop where they, together, they owned a printing press and various printers and computers and that sort of thing. And so they were actually, they printed quite a lot of materials, zines and newspapers,

and they were able to generate some revenue from different organizer groups throughout the country. And those organizer groups, they were able to give very favorable prices to you because of the structure of their cooperative. And so together, they built a form of power. They were able to publish materials. They were able to pay their bills.

They were able to put some money aside to save because it was so successful. And so they certainly didn't eschew power. in and of itself because they actually built power but they weren't building power over anyone they were building power together so I would say that's like you know

these two clear examples of power over versus power together being in activist circles I run into a number of people who think it's politically expedient to eschew all power and you start to talk about building power and and they get a little itchy under the collar or something,

and they don't feel comfortable with it because they think that... Correctly, I think that the idea that power corrupts, but I think it's the power over kind of power that corrupts. I think that there's a certain kind of powerlessness that doesn't do anybody any good. A community coming together...

to manage a small piece of land to grow food for themselves is a kind of power. They've liberated themselves from larger networks of exploitation and the vicissitudes of grocery market pricing and all that sort of thing to eat healthy organic vegetables that they've grown together. That's power. You create a...

cycling organization to lobby your city to put more bike lanes down on the street and at a certain point it's large enough and influential enough that you bully the city into doing it you've never engaged in electoral politics once and you've still exerted your will on the city that's a kind of power together you might say well

hold on butch didn't you just say you have power over over the city Well, I don't know. We can still talk that out. But I think that is the idea about how we want to be treating each other in this sort of power together scenario.

Yeah. Give each other grace, build power with each other. Now, going back to movement as care work, moving with people is a way to directly engage and relate with them. You iterated this earlier. And direct engagement, as far as social relationships are concerned, is not something we get often, even with politically like-minded people. In fact,

you even told me about how you were moving and dancing with someone who you know you might not get along with one for one politically. But as movers, directly engaging and relating and moving with each other, you got along great and had fun.

Is there something about movement, physical movement, that can cut through a lot of the muck?

Well, I think especially when it's an expression of joy, if it can be, I think that that can get us into... An expression of joy is something that can really get us into the moment and maybe get some perspective on things about that maybe our small differences or our different beasts, you know,

maybe it helps create those conditions to expand our capacity for grace to do a callback to something we were talking about earlier. I think that oftentimes, you know, this is maybe a little woo-woo, but... through like group movement experiences. Sometimes you can kind of like see someone's true nature or see their essence or something like that.

I don't really talk that way that much, but that being said, I think I do kind of experience it sometimes in these movement situations. Well, you know, one of the experiences of the forest offenders is that we had a cultural exchange with Muskogee people who are the original inhabitants of the land here where Atlanta is.

And they do a thing called the stop dance. And it's a dance that can go on for, you know, it can go on all night long. It can go on for 12 hours. The whole, the entire community participates. And it's a, it's a slow rhythmic dance. Um,

that they call ceremony you know and so people they process in a circle in a rhythmic way and there's different kind of like chants and sounds that go along with it it's a sacred practice and There's Muskogee people, as they testify, who have all kinds of different political views. And they've been together for a lifetime.

So there's people who have all kinds of various beefs and various histories with each other, different kinds of conflicts or disagreements or that kind of thing. But they all come together as a people for this cultural movement practice. to enter into really a different state of being,

this ceremonial state that's sacred and sort of transcends ideology or religion even. It transcends even religion. And they often use that state that they achieve of consciousness. From what I'm told, I haven't... I've seen it performed. I haven't actually participated. So everything I'm saying is like secondhand knowledge of what practitioners have told me. But for instance,

I've been told that a thing that does happen is like you sort of achieve this ceremonial state where maybe someone who you couldn't even talk to because of a disagreement, suddenly we're sitting down next to each other while we're taking a little break. And we go, hey,

maybe it's time to start building a bridge where there wasn't one before and healing some past harms or that kind of thing. They've entered into a ceremonial place where that kind of mending wasn't possible before. And it became possible not because of some elaborate reasoning,

but because of a physical movement practice that this whole group of people did together in this way that they consider sacred. And so I think part of the appeal of like what you talked about, one of our first conversations about LMA that we talked about was kind of

reclaiming the folk nature or the folk tradition of martial arts. like how different martial arts as we know them from movies or maybe like classes at the strip mall that we went to or whatever are often associated with a national project or like military and police or different things like that when the reality

of martial arts for like most of history is that it's been a a folk practice like something that's done around harvest time something that's done uh kind of like organically springing up from the grassroots not top down from from experts and that it might be this pathway uh you know i'm i i don't have a

tradition like a like a muskogee creek stomp dance and i don't think it's appropriate for me to just kind of borrow that whole cloth and try to recreate it. But what I know is like a big amalgamation of a lot of different fine body practices, dance and, and, and movement practices. And I really wonder, can we, uh,

through these kinds of like movement arts that we, uh, take a hold of and say like, okay, I honor all the traditions that these things are coming from, but I'm doing something new that's in line with these values of this community that we're intentionally creating.

And can we use this practice that we're creating to achieve a similar kind of like ceremonial mind state or something where we maybe would be able to like build some of those bridges or mend some of those farms like creating a different kind of

special or like sacred like condition that some of this stuff can move through us that's part of why I was talking about grief so much before it's like I think that like you know when's a time even just like your enemy if you see them grieving because

their parent was killed it's like it's hard not to feel a kind of like connection with their humanity at that time and so i think like um you know, we can use this practice as a way to, like, connect our humanity. And, like, so again, you know, we don't want to be like, oh,

maybe we can do this practice with fascists and then we'll see eye to eye or something like that. I'm not under any impression that that's going to ever happen. But, like, we have an awful lot of, like, inciting and, like, There's a whole Baroque system of parsing all of the harm and the need for repair

and the minutia of arguments and pains that we cause one another. And I don't think that we're going to rationalize our way out of this. I think that while our rational thought and discourse is... very important. It's not a thing that I want to end. But there's other ways of being human other than that.

And I think that healing the emotional connection that we need to build, getting past some of the paralytic infighting and the circular firing squad thing that the left does, the atomization that happens on the left. I have a lot of faith that these movement practices, if we can come together,

they're really a pathway towards resolving some of that.

If I could just add onto that, some of the things you're describing, even going back to the woman you were dancing with, when you're in sync and connecting and moving together in the moment, it's not just about the joy, I think actually joy is a part of it, but what happens is you put your guard down.

It's like disarming in some way, right? It's interesting how like, especially martial arts movements are about arming you, right? Making you more powerful, but in a way it actually makes you feel more vulnerable and helps you disarm yourself. It helps you disarm somebody else. And when both your guards are down,

you could have these kinds of conversations you can't normally have. I think there's a natural built-in relationship building. Not all the time, but it can be there because as you move with somebody, you have a sense of knowingness that's ineffable. And also,

if you're moving with them and they're not making fun of you and you can be open with them and you can try things, and if you're doing martial arts stuff, they're not hurting you and they're gentle, then there's a trust that builds from that, right? Yes. And so then you could also have these kind of conversations and

I think there is definitely something to it that I think you and I and other people on this journey are exploring right now and trying to figure out some of its healing potentials. And I think a lot of it does just come from that knowingness, the trust that comes with it.

And ultimately, I think the most important thing is just putting your guards down because It's actually a good idea, right, in this world to constantly have your guard up. It's useful, right? Because we live in a world that tries to do us harm.

But then we get so used to it, we don't know how to put their guard down. So a lot of that bad faith that we're talking about, that mistrust comes from having our guard up. It's a way to protect ourself. If I don't trust somebody, I'm not going to put them in a position to harm me anyway.

And so movement sometimes just... makes people, even if they're meaning to keep their guard up, sometimes it just still puts them in a state or for some people allows them to put their guard down. And once people put their guards back up, they almost feel like a different person because when you were moving with this person,

dancing with this person, they had their guard down. So you saw what they were like with their guard down, right? So there's something you're like, oh, there's something to work with here. So I think there's a lot of I don't know, magic to movement that hasn't been fully explored. And I think there's a lot of...

important stuff there that we have yet to figure out, yet to put into words. But I think the points that you were making, I think, reminds me that there is some disarming effect if you're really into it. And I don't think you can have that same disarming effect when you go in there with the goal. Like,

I'm only going to do this for self-defense, that I'm only going to learn things that could help me be the world's biggest badass or whatever. I'm going to learn to do this to you and do that to you and do that. Then it's very mechanistic.

And so then you're not going to be able to get into these states. But when it's more goalless and free-flowing and it's just about fun, Fun makes people put their guards down. And so thinking only about like self-defense, the knife defense, that how to do this to my attacker and all that stuff. Yeah,

that's a form of movement, but it exists in a different world than the type of movement you and I are talking about where it's this free-flowing movement that helps us put our guard down. I would argue that other type of movement just keeps your guard up. And so then, yeah, you're never in that healing space.

Yeah, you create a very different kind of condition if you're just like, okay, all I want to do is realistic knife defense. Some people might argue that there is no such thing. You might get down into this real technical thing, and it's pretty easy to get hurt, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of... Well,

I've even noticed that... you know, some like right wing coded stuff will say like the same thing, right? Like that, that a kickboxer that plays a game because, because of like, because it's fun and because you can practice it at very high level of intensity is

actually going to be better at fighting anyway than somebody who's just like, I'm only doing self-defense. It's not as fun. You can't practice it. You can only eye gouge your partner once. If I'm doing a blinding strike, you can only blind somebody one time. Whereas if you put on your productive gear,

you can spar indefinitely if you're careful not to injure each other. I think you get a lot better at fighting that way. Like I said, even right wingers are conceding that point. But you know, you and I have said before, like, I think, I think we, we, we gotta, we gotta do better than them. Yes.

It means that we,

We've really got to put some thought into how we do this. I mean, if you're eye-gousing your partner, even in a radical space for some training or whatever, then you are the attacker. You are the one who just assaulted them, right?

Yeah, yeah.

So there's a lot of self-reflection that needs to happen. And yeah, in some ways, right-wingers who are saying that, not all of them say that, but the ones who are saying the things you're talking about are outflanking a lot of radicals and martial arts to the left of them. Right. So we need to get our act together.

I think this is like definitively changed, at least in my world, the last year. But it was wild to even like say all the way up to around like 2020, 2022, like how many people I heard were like into Krav Maga,

like because like because it's so effective. And why is it effective? Right. Because, hey, they used it as Israel. Right. They used it to defend themselves. Right.

Yeah. Yeah.

Like the whole reason why people thought it was effective was because who they supposedly tested it on, right? Who were these attackers? So there's no way to buy into Krav Maga without also buying into the propaganda about Israel. It just might not be like on a conscious level, but that's what's

lurking behind the surface of why you think it even works. And I'm not even the first one to say this. There's like scholars who have talked about this, that you cannot do Krav Maga and buy into it without buying into some kind of aspect that, oh,

they're the masters of self-defense because they're always testing it out on their attackers who happen to be Palestinians, right?

Right.

Otherwise, if you actually thought that Palestinians were the ones being harmed or whatever, then you would think this whole martial art is a sham and just propaganda.

Right.

So, yeah, to your point, a lot of leftist radicals and people in the self-defense space bought into that. In the radical self-defense space bought into that. And actually, to be honest, a lot still to this day buy into it.

Yeah, but I'm quoting you and I'm saying like you can't just take something like that and slap a left wing detail on it.

Doesn't work for us. The left, they train because of why they need to train, right? But what I'm trying to argue for is you should actually think about how you're training, right? That matters probably even more in my opinion, right? How you do it, right? Because if you're doing it in a way that replicates the same systems,

then you're causing more harm than good.

Yeah, yeah. No, and I think the way that you really tease out the difference between self-defense and martial arts speaks to that because like, Not that we're not doing some kind of self-defense here, but the self-defense part really is like the community building part.

Martial arts is maybe a tactic that could be part of a broader understanding of self-defense. But like, you know, we just had this very dramatic example of like a very important part of self-defense, which is like... the kind of de-escalation and conflict resolution and community building that happened among Palestinians where the resistance, you know,

I think so many people still have so much propaganda and indoctrination about what Hamas is or what Hamas does. But like, even if you were going to like, like just take a neutral stance, you know, I don't support Hamas, I don't condemn Hamas, but I'm just trying to look at this objectively.

They're doing something right when it comes to conflict resolution because they have created this coalition and some of the coalition members were shooting at each other not very long ago and they are not shooting at each other. And when they're under more than a year of just an absolute pressure cooker and the resistance hasn't practiced,

They understand something about self-defense and about coalition building and conflict resolution. I'm wondering what the secret is over there. That Fatah and the PLFP and Hamas are all able to cooperate with these are three very different orgs with very different histories and different agendas and different histories of conflict with one another.

Um, and, and they're able to keep it together. I don't think it's just because they have a common enemy because that's been the case for all of their existence. Yes. There's some other thing that they've figured out. And, um, that thing is how to build a self-defense coalition. And I, I think that, uh,

it will benefit all of us to look at that.

Or at least think about that too.

Think about that, yeah.

Because a lot of people have not mentioned what you just mentioned, that for that to work, there must have been some kind of coalition building, right?

Had to be, yeah.

So we need to think about that as well.

People had to come together and sit in a circle and talk some things out, dialogue over time in order to sort that out.

And put their guard down.

And put their guard down, right, right.

All right, Butch. Thank you so much for your time and knowledge. I personally got a lot out of this conversation. Is there a way for people to find out more about your training? Do you have an online presence or is it all word of mouth?

It's all word of mouth right now.

Well, if you're in the Atlanta area and you're connected and you ask around, somebody will know you and then they could get connected.

For sure. Yeah, that's right.

Especially if they go to those trans basketball games, they could definitely connect with you.

That's right.

Great, great, great. Thank you so much, Bush.

All right. Thanks, Sam. Talk to you soon.