Psychedelic Conversion Therapy, Part 3: A Handshake Away From Trump (w/ Kaleb Graves)
Neşe and Russell speak with Kaleb Graves about his reporting on the growing links between psychedelic therapy and conversion therapy movements. Drawing from his article — "Psychedelic Conversion Therapy: How Christian Nationalism Is Co-Opting a Movement Once Reserved for Hippies" — they discuss how right-wing religious and political ideologies are increasingly intersecting with the psychedelic space.
They discuss figures like Wendi Rees, who is a strong advocate of both transphobic ideologies and psychedelic therapies, and what it means for a movement that claims to center healing. They also explore the broader implications of welcoming conversion therapy and anti-abortion advocates, including Rick Perry, into psychedelic circles.
Chapters:
0:00:00 Intro
0:01:58 Kaleb Graves background
0:05:20 Graves' "Good Faith Media" article, "A Christian's Guide to Psychedelics"
0:08:02 Rick Perry & Bryan Hubbard Promoting Wendi Rees, "Christian's Guide" on Joe Rogan
0:09:44 Wendi Rees background and conversion therapy in her book
0:16:00 Research on psychedelics for identity shift
0:24:55 Wendi Rees's views on homosexuality and dissuading her children from same-sex attraction
0:28:45 Rees believes it is wrong to encourage a "lifestyle of homosexuality"/"a lifestyle of sin"
0:38:40 Rees's claims about "trans age"
0:46:00 Rees wonders "at what point" murderers will stop identifying as "murderers" if trans rights are allowed
0:47:20 Rees expresses hope that she can inflict violence on a trans person in a bathroom
0:51:00 Misguided ideas that psychedelics can "trojan horse" progressive ideology into right-wing spaces
0:54:30 Fundamentalism and homophobia
0:58:00 Graves's experience at a Bicycle Day event with Bryan Hubbard and Wendi Rees
1:04:45 Post-interview updates on Rees's psychedelic retreats and Joe Welker's review of "Christian's Guide to Psychedelics"
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Footnotes:
"Psychedelic Conversion Therapy: How Christian Nationalism is Co-Opting a Movement Once Reserved for Hippies" (Good Faith Media):
Psychedelic Theology podcast:
https://www.psychedelictheology.com/
"Reviewing 'The Christian's Guide to Psychedelics'" (Psychedelic Candor):
https://www.psychedeliccandor.org/p/reviewing-the-christians-guide-to
"A Leftist Primer on the Right-Wing Psychedelic Takeover" (Psymposia):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI2GMUDT-ig&t=1s
Transcript
This transcript was generated automatically from YouTube's captions, then cleaned up by removing filler words, repeated words and background sounds. It may still contain errors.
[00:00] There's an author by the name of Wendy Reese, Res. And she has come to the conclusion that her great gift to give to the world out there is to write this book called A Christian's Guide to Psychedelics. I do have one more clip here that is a final addendum to her takes on transgender rights. Every time I'm at Target with my daughter and I have to go to the bathroom or she has to go to the bathroom, I almost hope that there is some pervert in the bathroom waiting to see if he can get away with doing something when we walk in there because I can promise you that he probably won't come back.
[00:45] There has to be enough righteous anger that we have and are willing to act on for this to stop. This is like legitimately disturbing to listen to me where it's like she's calling upon Christians to assault people over bathroom like you know it's really disturbing in the name of righteous anger. She is one handshake away from major players in politics and major players in the psychedelic landscape. And people I don't think realize the immense danger that she posed and that she's not the only one. that if you are embracing people like Rick Perry as your primary lobbyist for psychedelics, you are embracing all of his friends and all of the people he's willing to bring into your coalition.
[01:38] And that coalition is increasingly going to include people willing to commit violence on queer people merely for existing in public. That is what that that's just the fact. Hey there, welcome to the Psymposia podcast. I'm Russell here with my colleague Nache and our guest Caleb Graves, the host of the Psychedelic Theology Podcast. Thanks a lot for being here, Caleb. Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Yeah, it's a pleasure. We wanted you to come on because you recently wrote a really great article for Good Faith Media that we'll kind of dive into a little bit later in the interview here, but I kind of wanted to start out. You're the host of the Psychedelic Theology podcast.
[02:23] You're a progressive Baptist preacher. Something people might not be so familiar with. Can you tell us a little bit about your background, how you got into preaching, and what got you into psychedelic theology? Yeah, for sure. I was ordained in Arkansas at a cooperative Baptist fellowship church which is moderate to progressive but has a number of LGBTQ affirming and otherwise progressive congregations a part of it. That's where I fall. I'm a Christian. I'm really committed to the Christian faith though I work in a unitarian universalist context for my social justice work right now. But I got involved with psychedelics work while I was in Divinity School at Duke University. And I had my first psychedelic experience and thought that was a funny, interesting, impactful thing that happened to me, but didn't think it would be something I don't put too much of my time into.
[03:17] But I just kept finding the sheer number of ministers who had had experiences, seminarians who had had experiences who were unwilling to talk about it publicly. I can talk about it publicly because I don't have a ton to lose in that regard. So I really dedicated myself to doing psychedelics work, but also far-right extremism prevention, social justice work rooted in the liberation theology traditions. Yeah, that's great. And you said your day job is kind of that far-right prevention, farright extremism prevention. Can you speak a little bit to what your day job looks like there? Yeah. So, right now the big program I have getting put together is Christian nationalism is, you know, a broad term that encompasses a large number of different extremisms, reform, Catholic, evangelical, charismatic, even LDS or orthodox.
[04:09] And of course, I'm not saying obviously these are inherently extremist groups, more that these are the varieties of far-right Christian extremism. And so the program I'm putting together right now is to help religious minorities in North Carolina understand the threat that they're facing from particularly evangelical Protestant sort of Reaganite Christian nationalism where you've seen Christian nationalists like Doug Wilson Pete Hgsth's pastor say that Catholics shouldn't be allowed to have public processions on their holy days. So that's the work that I'm really trying to do right now is educating different minority Christian and non-Christian groups in the state about the state of extremism, especially far-right Christian extremism, and also helping them realize that they're really at risk if they allow this theocracy to take over. that these candidates and these movements might try to talk as if they're putting together one Christian dumb, but they're really putting together a particular evangelical Protestant Christian Christian theocracy
[05:10] That's not going to benefit Latino Catholic immigrant community in the rural South. It's just not. Yeah, absolutely. And so the article that we kind of brought you on to discuss seems to fit sort of right into your education there and your goals which the title of that article really quick in the in good faith media which was psychedelic conversion therapy how Christian nationalism is co-opting a movement once reserved for hippies. Yeah. This caught our eye. It's the conversion therapy element of sort of the possible future of psychedelic therapy led by kind of right-wing endorsements and things like that is something that we've been interested in and sort of disturbed by the potential of. How did you find your way into looking into this subject? Yeah, I mean psychedelics and conversion therapy has been something I've been generally interested in as well since I first was introduced to psychedelics.
[06:06] Of course, you've got Timothy Liry talking in Playboy in the 1960s that LSD is a treatment for homosexuality. It's a great mass master's thesis about Hollywood Hotel, Dr. Andreas Ens I think the name is that talked about a Catholic priest who underwent conversion therapy using LSD. So it's always been something interesting to me. I'm very passionate about LGBTQ rights. I pushed back against conversion therapy at the evangelical undergrad program that I was attending. But particularly when I saw the Christians guide to psychedelics was that Rick Perry and W. Ryan Hubard had endorsed it on the Joe Rogan Experience. Of course, the Joe Rogan Experience getting around 10 million listens for every episode.
[06:52] I knew no matter what was in it, that it was going to be something I needed to read. But I strongly expected that if it's something Rick Perry had written the forward for, himself, a Christian nationalist, that this was not right. So, I quickly read the book, got a copy of it online, and then purchased a used copy of a previous edition just to cross reference them and found what was very clearly conversion therapy for people who knew how to spot it and sort of plausible deniability for if anybody ever called them on it. So that that yeah, it really got me interested right away. That's really interesting. And I actually have the endorsement from Hubard and Perry here we can watch really quick and then I would I want to know how the conversion therapy elements appear in the book.
[07:44] But real quick, I figured we can watch this together just to kind of show the audience how it's being pushed on the Joe Rogan experience here by Perry who's become a really big psychedelic endorser and then Brian Huard who is kind of like one of the leading figures in that right-wing Ibagane movement. There's an author by the name of Wendy Reese. Res and Wendy with an I. W N D I rees. And she not unlike the two twins was sexually assaulted by her own father who's a pastor of church. Joe, I'm telling you, brother, I can't dream up in my worst nightmare a more evil thing than a father that would sexually assault their a preacher father, their daughter.
[08:36] And she dealt with it with Ibagane and has come to the conclusion that her great gift to give to the world out there is to write this book called A Christian's Guide to Psychedelics. Now, if you think that won't catch some people's attention when they're going through the bookstore and they go, "A Christian's Guide to Psychedelic? Holy mackerel." But this is a book about her experience, but it's also a book that I would suggest that every believing Christian go pick it up and read it because it talks about chapter and verse and gives you scripture about where God talks about these compounds about these things that he's given the world.
[09:22] He means them for good. All of them. So yeah, that's Rick Perry kind of promoting the book on Joe Rogan's podcast. He mentions the author Wendy Reese, some of her background. Can you tell us a little bit about Wendy Reese and how she relates to the psychedelic field and then how the conversion therapy elements appear in her book? Sure. So Reese is a an archetype I guess for a lot of people that you'll see in evangelical Protestant circles particularly in the American South which you know I was raised as a fundamentalist Christian and only accepted that I was queer and accepted that you know you're not going to go to hell if you die if you don't go to this particular Baptist church later on in life. So I had some good experience to understand some of the language and social factors that other people might miss.
[10:15] But Reese is a good example if you look through her history as somebody who has been going from thing to thing, a big cause, something that she's passionate about that she puts a lot of her time that gives her life purpose and meaning. And these have switched a couple of times I've seen throughout her adult life after she became a Christian. As Perry described and Hubard described there, she did experience horrific sexual abuse as a child by her pastor father and clearly has continued mental health issues with that as she has admitted herself. The things that I saw leading up to a Christian's guide to psychedelics was that if you read her book, she has gone on multiple psychedelic journeys, particularly with ketamine, MDMA, and EBA gain.
[11:03] And I think psilocybin is mentioned too, but it's not what's given the most attention. And I think it that's very interesting to me because these aren't yours your classical psychedelic compounds. This isn't your LSD, your measculine, your LS, your psilocybin, and DMT. These are some of those these are some of those substances that have only more recently gotten the attention and especially attention on the more right-wing side of the spectrum. Yeah. So, Reese's book when I got a copy, there's actually two editions. There's one that was published in 2025 that I have a physical copy of. This does not have Rick Perry's forward. has a forward from a military veteran. Then April, so about a month ago, was released this new edition that does have Rick Perry's forward in it.
[11:52] And then you have a I guess a secondary forward from this veteran who had done the first one. I ripped through the book. It's large font. It's clearly self-published. It's written it's actually kind of written like you'd see with an evangelical devotional book. So it has particular lessons it wants to get across to the reader. Then you're you write your answers to these questions at the end of the chapter to move the abstract theological claims into being something that's per personally meaningful and emotionally powerful so that it becomes a fully cognitive accepted thing not just something intellectualized. And in one of these chapters on page 67 and 70, Ree is talking about a bunch of different things that can be that she says can be used for good or for evil.
[12:42] And the fact that they can be used for evil doesn't mean that we shouldn't accept them. So alcohol, sex, food, etc. Now, I was very interested in the one about sex because that's where if I was going to find anything overtly homophobic or transphobic, that's obviously going to be the place. And yeah, in this section, Ree talks about God's original plan for marriage, quote unquote, that's found in Genesis and talks about how it's also used in the New Testament. And that if you and explicitly using heterosexual metaphors. So in the Bible in the book of Ephesians and in Matthew, these are books in the New Testament or what Christians would call the New Testament.
[13:28] The metaphor there is a metaphor for a man leaves his parents, a wife, a woman leaves her parents and they become one. And also that Jesus is like a groom who loves his bride, the Christian church. So explicitly heter heterosexual metaphors. Ree uses that as the standard, but she goes a little further to describe all other sexual activity as a distortion of identity or as confusion and that psychedelics can heal wounds around sexuality that brings bringing restoration. This was clear for somebody who has studied and seen the application of conversion therapy against LGBTQ people in evangelical Christian settings.
[14:17] This was a clear red flag to me. You are giving the dog whistle that people who agree with you will instantly pick up on, but giving yourself enough plausible deniability that you never said gay. You've set the standard and you know that the insiders know the standard and then you said everything else is distortion that can be healed that you can find your real identity or something like that. Now I actually emailed her after I read that because I wanted to understand if this was I wanted to make sure I wasn't just reading into this because it's clearly written as a dog whistle. And I got a response on April 9th in which she said, "No, psychedelics can't be used in conversion therapy.
[15:04] What they can be used for, however, is because she believes homosexuality is is a choice or a trauma mechanism, a defense mechanism caused by an internal wound, which of course is is a lot of psycho secular psychoanalysis from the 60s and 70s and before that as well. Because she thinks homosexuality or being transgender is caused by a trauma wound and is a trauma response. That psychedelist can heal the wound and then it can be up to God to help guide somebody back to their real identity. So that's conversion therapy. That's conversion therapy with extra steps. She's she isn't saying take LSD and you'll be straight. Take Eugene and you'll be straight. But she is saying the reason you're gay will go away and then you can give it up to God and pray the gay away.
[15:55] Yeah, thanks for sharing that. I think that's like so interesting and it relates to I wonder nishe if you want to speak to some of your research into like the John's Hopkins studies on identity shift around like cigarette smoking and stuff like that because I think there's an there's interesting parallels in what you found in that research to how it could be applied to what Caleb's talking about here. Yeah. And I'll just say I we had been alarmed about seeing the writing on the wall in terms of the way the field was moving and the interest in the far-right elements of the field in conversion therapy kinds of philosophies and the ways that psychedelic medicine was being developed. Like there was just a lot of parallels.
[16:40] And as you were saying with like close reading the rhetoric, you could see how the two interests were fitting together on the right in this field. So that started a few years ago that we have been watching this and being very concerned about the direction that things were heading. And that's in part connected to this research that I was involved with at Johns Hopkins. It was a qualitative reanalysis of the pilot study for of psilocybin for smoking sessation originally in around 2014, but we published our qualitative analysis in I think 2023. And it was looking at the dosing sessions like the it was looking at the reports that were written in the 24 hours after the dosing sessions. And my colleague Aiden had asked one day when we were trying to figure out what to what angle to take, what to write about, you know, is is it just by chance that so many people are describing their experiences in terms of like, oh, I'm done now.
[17:38] I'm a non-smoker cuz that was like a recurring language. And no matter how you answer that question, it's interesting, right? because it's like either this is just happening completely spontaneously or there might have been some priming happening in the therapeutic context that was leading to those consistent interpretations. And so I asked Matthew Johnson if he still had any of the therapist manual from that study and got sent over a 100page document. And it was saturated with not just on the level of what therapists were saying to patients, but also guided imagery and other forms of information in the therapy manual that were all encouraging people to shift their identity from a smoking identity to a non-smoker identity.
[18:28] And this had never been discussed like you know the trials were the quantitative data was published but the fact that identity was being targeted in this way and the paper is called psychedelic identity shift for this reason that this was something that they were focusing on trying to change through the psilocybin experiences. And what was so interesting and when I was looking into this because my background is not in smoking sensation. I was new to that literature, but I tried to kind of poke around. I was kind of like, where is this coming from? Like why? Because they were using a therapy model that was used in other smoking sensation studies, not with psilocybin. And so I was curious like why is identity such a focus here in the research literature. It turned out that there had been a lot of attempts to find some intervention to help people stay quit to prevent relapse from happening.
[19:20] And one of the only variables that seemed to have a correlative or like protective mechanism was people who had changed their identity to no longer identify as a smoker. And so there was a rationale for it being there. But what was concerning for me as a humanist, you know, someone who thinks about not just this one context, but the implications of this and how psychedelic therapy is being built out because if I mentioned the guided imagery exercises and at the end of the first dosing session, patients, participants were asked to visualize themselves and it was really leaning into disgust and, you know, kind of stigma towards the smoker identity. and like seeing themselves in shadow, dirty, struggling to breathe, you know, something that you didn't want, right?
[20:11] And then it asked you to envision a pure and free friend who is like frolicking in the fields and they're not in shadow. They're liberated and they're free to be themselves. And then they're again at the end of this very powerful psilocybin session, the participants asked to visualize seeing that they're actually parasitized by an external alien force that is the nicotine addiction that is this shadow that's hanging on to them and to exercise to purge that shadow and to be free of it and to return to that non-smoker self that was there behind the trauma behind all of the stuff the whole time. And as I was reading all of this, I was like, right now the sm it's smoking identity that's being pathized, but this methodology that they're building out, you could just swap in any other identity into that methodology.
[21:08] And now that we're entering this era of full kind of fascism in the United States where just recently, you know, protransgender ideology quote unquote is listed on, you know, terrorism watch list. It's all very concerning. Absolutely. I as I haven't actually I'll have to read that that study that you did because what one of the things as I've been working through finishing up my master in psych was how a lot of the language particularly from fellow students in the American South where I am a lot of the language of Christianity evangelical Christianity in particular overlaps with a lot of the imagery of therapeutic change.
[21:54] So that you are going through identity shift. You are going to back before the trauma. Trauma sounds almost like sin sometimes that like if you can just get rid of this you can go back to your totally you can go back to your prefall to use the Christian metaphor garden of Eden state where you are frolicking in a field. And a lot of language of purity attached to that as well. So yeah, I will definitely go back and read that because that what you were saying, I mean, tracks perfectly with why I'm more and more seeing and what I see in Reese's book is a melding of those purity that purity language, identity shift language, return to Eden language that can be part of a pseudo therapeutic context can be used a lot on Tik Tok and is something that's has long-term usage in evangelical Christianity especially around a big
[22:55] Powerful spiritual conversion experience like one might say could happen with psychedelics if that's your way of viewing these substances 100% and that's the exact premise of the MDMA therapy as well the maps you know MDMA assisted therapy model where people are seen as you know it's a different form of being parasitized by the trauma and you know when you're returned to this more natural state of connection to your what they refer to as the inner healing intelligence that allows you to naturally purge out those traumatic imprints. You're again returning to the state of purity where you began before this trauma intervened in your body. Yeah. Yeah, I really wanted to put those two things into conversation there with the in the Sha's study and your reporting because I think they just go so handinand in kind of a scary way especially in like this time where like conversion therapies like apparently not allowed to be banned anymore and stuff like that by
[23:56] Concerningly some of the same people who would be supporting that are some of the same people that are now the biggest endorsers of psychedelic therapy and so I feel like the larger psychedelic field as a whole which is largely opportunistic, doesn't really want to acknowledge that those two things could converge one day and instead is just focused on even the more like liberal side of the psychedelic field is like, "Oh, but we're getting so much attention. We're getting funding. This is good. This is like great, but it's through the whims of a lot of people who are also interested in things like not banning conversion therapy and it's very concerning." Yeah. So, diving a little bit deeper on Reese in specific, you had noted a few particularly concerning aspects of her beliefs on the LGBTQ community from her podcast.
[24:48] I cut some of the clips from her podcast. I thought we could maybe review some of those together and just react to those as we see fit here. The first one I have just and some of this is just going to reinforce things that have already been brought up. So like just really defining what her ideological persuasions are here. U so this is her speaking. I thought this clip on her talking about her children was kind of notable in relation to conversion therapy and things like that. So I'll play that really quick. It's about 50 seconds here. Sameex marriage in its definition is not marriage as in created by God. So there are so many things that we as Christians are being taught to tolerate and taught that love is needs to
[25:51] Triumph. So we just need to not talk about this stuff and we just accept. The problem with that is if one of my children came to me and was struggling with samesex attraction, I would not be loving if I did not warn them of what is going to happen if they choose that that lifestyle she says. And I think that's not an ideology completely limited to her. That's something I've sort of seen in those fundamentalist or Christian nationalist rhetoric before. Is that something that you hear come up like it's loving to warn your children about the dangers of this lifestyle and things like that? Absolutely. It Well, it's interesting because there's a you know talking about the dangers of be of LGBTQ adults against the innocence and naivity of children. Obviously setting up
[26:52] LGBTQ people to be perceived as predators, to be perceived as perverts out to convert your children to being gay. But I mean, this is something I experienced personally as somebody who is queer was at first being treated as, oh, we have to keep this media away from you. If you don't see bad media, if you never see a gay person on TV, then you're going to be fine. And then when I started moving away from my fundamentalist context, people see me as like this lost little sheep that they just have to be really nice to bring back in. But by the time I graduated college, I'm no longer the nice little sheep. I'm the wolf. I'm the one that needs the community needs to be protected against. So there is a fine line in this rhetoric where protecting your children quote unquote very quickly turns into demonization of those same children when they turn 18, 19, 20.
[27:48] So yeah, this language around love is really based in is absolutely based in fear. Fear that you're you will eventually have to treat your child as the predator that you were allegedly protecting them from. And this is something when I now listen to most of Reese's podcast episodes, something you repeatedly see is at the beginning of an episode being much more the rhetoric being much more about love and then the further you go in, I mean, this is classic for fundamentalists period. They want plausible deniability. starting with, "Oh, we love everybody." and then moving a little bit at a time into vile, vile hatred that does not match the rhetoric of love that they start with. Yeah, that was my experience listening and I think the next clip I play might actually get into that here.
[28:39] This is her describing a little bit more this idea of like a lifestyle of sin. So I'll play that real quick. So, one of the main differences is in regards to anger versus a lifestyle of homosexuality. Anger is something that someone might struggle with on a daily basis, but they're not choosing to walk around, you know, hitting people, you know, doing things in anger as a lifestyle versus especially same-sex marriage, which is what is, you know, now part of the Supreme Court ruling and just accept accepted among society.
[29:31] That is not something someone is trying to stop doing. That is in fact something that they are diving deeper into and getting more rooted in. That is why it is a lifestyle of sin. That wasn't exactly the clip I thought I had next, but the I think that speaks to some of the concerns we were just talking about in regards to the potential for conversion therapy there. the discussion of like this is a lifestyle that people are leaning into instead of attempting to remove themselves from or attempting to address. Like she compares it to anger. I could almost see it in the context being referred like the conversion aspect being referred to as like similar like anger management. It's something you're trying to deal with.
[30:16] It's you know Yeah. I mean that that is behind a lot of I mean there there's many different types of conversion therapy. You have the Christian like virtually concentration camp form which is probably the most vile variety where children are just locked away from their parents are subjected to electrical shocks like these were the things that got people when the stories were told to even evangelical Christians largely rejecting conversion therapy you know by the mid-2010s because these stories were so horrific. But there there's a broad spectrum that gets to well you can't choose not to be gay. You are gay but you can choose not to act on it. So that's maybe the two ends of the spectrum there.
[31:04] Reese is somewhere in the middle where she is describing you that being gay is not an immutable trait that you can change that and you can change that by choice. That is yeah that is a I mean even five years ago when I was telling some of my family that like hey I think we're headed back in the direction of truly vile anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and practice. They did not believe that many people actually felt this way. And here it is now being broadcast again as the norm because these people never went away. They just built their own subcultures until the broader national millu made it okay to be homophobic and transphobic again.
[31:53] And in fact what you're saying there about the not an immutable trait is the next clip I have if we want to jump into that really quick unless nay did you have something you wanted to say there. Yeah I was just thinking about like what she was saying in that clip. There is a sense in which like I think people who are not bigoted can understand like in a context about like interest in children like minors like yes it would you know creating a there have been many movements like the maps not the psychedelic maps but the other maps and like Namba organizations that have tried to normalize relationships with minors And I feel like that a lot of the rhetoric that I was hearing about, you know, LGBT identities from her is like people would view that situation where it's like we should not be creating a cultural context that is normalizing something like this.
[32:53] And but there's a profound difference there in the sense obviously [laughter] don't need to explain that to you but just in terms of there's so much research on the fact that like children cannot consent that there's so much like trust in power imbalance between adults and children and there's so much record of like so much harm long lifetime harm that comes from those types of dynamics. And so there's a reason there to be saying we shouldn't create a culture where people are just encouraged to do this, but it's like they're taking what can be reasonable in one context and then jamming it into this other context that actually doesn't have that pattern of harms. But it's the reason I mentioned it is it's like that concept is accessible to people, but it's being misapplied.
[33:44] It's like a category error in this context. But I can understand how, you know, how people can be convinced of it because it does exist in other areas where it makes sense that some things do need to be boundaried on the societal level. And in fact, you'll see in these next couple of clips her specifically make that reach. So I'll play the next clip here and I think it'll speak to almost exactly what you're saying if I'm remembering the context correctly here. That is why it is a lifestyle of sin and I do not believe that and this is debatable and this is not what this is about but my own personal feeling no one is born as a homosexual okay it's not something that is what I have heard called an immutable trait okay so I am a white girl that is immutable.
[34:42] Homosexuality is not an immutable trait. Right now, the narrative is that all that matters is love. And as long as two people love each other, then they should have the same rights as a man and woman to be able to get married and all the rights that that comes with in the world, in the country that you live in. The problem with that is what are you going to do if that principle is received as the norm and then somebody says well I know I'm a 60year-old man but I love this 12year-old boy does that allow them the same argument then applies to them or a father and his daughter does that apply because well they love each other in a sick way.
[35:40] Okay. This is just another step towards pedophilia. You can see she makes the exact jump you're talking about. Yeah. That's so because I hadn't seen that clip so I didn't realize it but when I was hearing her talk I was like I've heard this type of narrative applied in ways that do make sense to people and is accessible to people's like understanding but it's like there there is a distinction there but I if you're not like if you're in a culture in a subculture as you were saying that doesn't emphasize that distinction and doesn't allow for the discernment of how incomparable those contexts are. I can understand how seductive these sorts of confident stories could be among these far-right subcultures.
[36:30] Well, and you can hear her language of ethics that she uses there, her framework for ethics. This is where I, you know, as somebody who grew up in a fundamentalist subculture and continues to work on Christian nationalism as somebody opposing it. It's easy to see these Christian nationalist fundamentalists to try to see them as just like these monolithic boogeymen that just like pop out of the ground and hate people. But they do have they have an ethical framework that you can identify and you have to be able to identify that framework in that organization of power in order to contradict it. And you can hear thinking back to what how she describes sexuality in her book that there is a metaphor in the Bible.
[37:21] There is the norm. anything outside of the norm. It's not wrong because it's abuse. It's not wrong because it harms someone. It's harm because it's not normal. It's sick to use her language. That's that is the framework that a lot of fundamentalists and I and not just fundamentalists of a Christian variety or even a religious variety but fundamentalism in general has a very limited archetypes of what normal is and anything beyond that is wrong because it's not normal. So trying to distinguish between well the sexual abuse of a child is evil for clear reasons that we can articulate and identify. That's not even thinking that they're largely engaging it with.
[38:10] It is just wrong. It is just not normal. And that's that is where it becomes so easy for people to think, oh, it is a slippery slope is the language that's often used from being gay to being a child abuser is that it's just not normal. And the more not normal you are, the easier it is be to become even more of an outlier. The next clip I have here kind of gets more into her specific take on kind of an even deeper take on this like age range issue. And it's a concept that to be honest before she brought this up, I wasn't even familiar with the idea of trans age, which she seems very hung up on in another podcast I was listening to.
[38:57] I'll just play that right now and we can discuss it. Like I said, it's not something even being fairly immersed in like trans communities that I'd ever heard anyone even really talk about before. So I'll just play that here real quick. Also, there is a type of map slashpedophile who are now even trying to glom on to the LGBTQIA++++ group and they are now identifying as trans age. Okay. So here is where now we are entering the danger field of how the LGBTQ t being transgender.
[39:48] These people that think they can just wake up one day a girl and decide to be a boy and wake up the next day and say, "Okay, everyone has to, you know, call me Bob now because, you know, I know I was married yesterday, but now I'm Bob and I'm going to dress like a boy. I'm going to do everything that a boy can do and y'all just have to live with it. Okay. So if we're going to accept that as a society and these crazy people that call themselves scientists, you know, say that that is actually a possibility, then what is to keep a 40-year-old man from identifying as a 14-year-old boy and having sex with a 10year-old girl and then not getting in trouble.
[40:37] I think the what you said earlier, Nishay, speaks to a whole lot of the Rendy Reese content that I listen to, which is category errors. She's like constantly jumping from one like fairly standard thing that most people agree is okay, but she has an issue with to something incredibly deeper and less common. And like I think I brought this to the group like has anyone ever heard of trans age? and Bass was like, I've heard of it in like deep Tumblr forums. Like maybe talk people talking about like Elder Kin or something like but it's not a very it's not like a common concept that's often associated with like the LGBTQ community or anything like that. And she's like focused on it like it's an obvious slippery slope from transgender to trans age and pedophilia.
[41:29] Well, I think it does. You know, it wasn't used in this context, but just with the recent Michael Jackson biopic coming out and a lot of discourse around that, it kind of approximates how a lot of people justify Michael Jackson's preference for young children and having slumber parties and that kind of thing. Is that like, oh, he was a child at heart and he was so pure. I mean, there's kind of like a trans age justification to why people do, at least his fans like say that that's fine despite what I would say is quite extensive evidence that there was substantial abuse amongst a lot of those children that he was engaged with. But you had the category error issue where part of the problem here is that when you're not when you're when you don't have a substantial education and background in critical thinking, it's so easy to fall into these category errors, these kind of this you know starting with something and making a jump into something that's
[42:30] Actually we can distinguish. But you have to be able to hold that nuance and evaluate evidence and think about other topics. And so that's part of the problem here is that we're not just talking about far-right encroachment into psychedelic medicine. We're also talking about this at a time when education and critical thinking are being dismantled that's making people more vulnerable to precisely those leaps and logic. Yes. I think that's exactly on the nose on on how this pipeline gets built from what's would seem to be totally, you know, I deal I my view as a religious person, as a clergy member is is you should take the scientific and historical critical methodologies that we have as far as you can take them and then you can admit where these epistemologies have limits.
[43:20] When people aren't even taught that set epistemologies exist, they can't even use these as tools to approach the world and try to evaluate it. So they end up using they end up using these cosmologies that they're given largely as children or in religious contexts where I've tried to explain to people that when I was growing up the difference between male and female to my context and to a lot of fundamentalist Christians, anti-LGBTQ Christians, male and female are as essential to their cosmology as night and day. So if you were to say the sun is out and it's midnight, they would lose their minds because the very framework that they're basing their whole reality on is the sun isn't out at night, it's night.
[44:10] And in the same way, that's how deeply embedded gender norms are in their view of the world. So I if you do try to shift and power the construction of power around men and patriarchy and all of those things but what then when you try when you tell them oh actually as you can hear in the language that she uses if you do think that it's okay to be gay because it is or if you think people can be transgender because they can but they all they have is this simplistic cosmology. It is as if you're saying the sun can be out at night now. Anything's possible. Now, now that that is how serious this breach of cosmology is for them because of such a deep lack of education, these insular religious groups that don't allow opposing opinions to ever cross their minds.
[45:01] That's really interesting too because I mean I was just thinking of Zara Larson's Midnight Sun song about the you know the some parts of the world the sun does come out at midnight and you know the fact that that is true is explainable by you know the organization of the solar system and geography and positions on the planet and but if you've never if you don't have access to that information you've never traveled to the parts of the world where that's the case it would seem horrifically aberrational and an undermining of the entire premise of how the world operates. It's a great example because it's like just because that is sometimes true for particular reasons and particular places does not mean that anything can be true at all times anywhere and all sense of truth and cohesiveness is undermined like we can both right exactly and I hadn't taken that that far in my analogy before so I appreciate that addition
[46:01] Yeah and this leads straight into the next clip which is sort of just speaking to again the category errors and this idea that if one thing can breach the norm, where could it possibly end up? So, I'll drop that one real quick. So I'm wondering at what point in our society, the more we tolerate, the more we accept, the more we become politically correct, at some point there's going to be someone who kills someone and asks for people to not refer to them as the murderer, but as a murderer. fantasizing person, maybe an MFP.
[46:49] [laughter] So, just again, the leaps in possibility if people are allowed to transition is kind of staggering [laughter] to me. I don't even know if there's much to say to that wand we've already said. [laughter] but I do have one more clip here that just kind of is is a final kind of addendum to her takes on transgender rights and the kind of reality we're in today. So, I'll play that. We can discuss that real quick. And in regards to the Target thing, like for me, every time I'm at Target with my daughter and I have to go to the bathroom or she has to go to the bathroom, I almost hope that there is some pervert in the bathroom waiting to see if he can get away with doing something when we walk in there.
[47:50] Because I can promise you that he probably won't come back if he were to encounter me and my daughter. And I think at some point there has to be enough righteous anger that we have and are willing to act on for this to stop. I think God's grace and God's mercy and God's forgiveness are so focused on in the church and in our circles that people forget about his holiness, his righteousness, and his righteous anger. And Caleb, I think this speaks to what you were saying earlier about like her rhetoric as the podcasts move forward where it moves from this state of love, this these kind of less controversial things into the embrace of righteous anger.
[48:51] Like this is like legitimately disturbing to listen to me where it's like she's calling upon Christians to assault people over bathroom like you know it's really disturbing in the name of righteous anger. Yeah. The that I was not sure if I was going to write an article or not until I came across that quote. It wasn't until I heard that I grew up being told that LGBTQ people should be exterminated. I that's what I was taught growing up at a youth summer camp in New England. And it h that was the moment I stopped being a fundamentalist was when I could not mesh genocide of queer folks with love your enemies. you can't do it.
[49:47] Like that's you can't do it. I'm sitting there reading the sermon on the mount and it's not meshing with genocide. And hearing her reuse some of those language in the context of the bathroom, the inclusive trans-inclusive bathroom and changing rooms and in Target and the controversy in the right-wing that occurred because of that. This is where you see the her repeated overlap between being queer and being a predator, being queer and being a pedophile, being queer and being evil, where these things come to a head where to her if a transgendered person is using a bathroom that her she is using that gives her the right to kill them.
[50:34] That was enough for me that I knew I had to write this article because she is being placed she is one handshake away from Donald Trump. She is one handshake away from major players in politics and major players in the psychedelic landscape. And people I don't think realize the immense danger that she posed and that she's not the only one. that if you are embracing people like Rick Perry as your primary lobbyist for psychedelics, you are embracing all of his friends and all of the people he's willing to bring into your coalition. And that coalition is increasingly going to include people willing to commit violence on queer people merely for existing in public.
[51:26] That is what that that's just the fact. And this actually connects to a certain like dogmatism that exists in the psychedelic field, community, what have you. So just like we were talking about with the sun analogy at midnight, there's an inability to understand that people's own experiences, personal experiences with psychedelics do not universalize to all other people's experiences with psychedelics. And so many people on this liberal side of the psychedelic field, there isn't so much of a psychedelic left, which is where we would identify, but there's a lot of liberals in the space. And many of those people, they think they're getting one up over the Donald Trump administration cuz they're like, "Haha, silly fascists." like they're going to be secretly, you know, spreading this psychedelic medicine that's going to make people suddenly be, you know, loving one another and billionaires wanting to share their resources and
[52:26] It's going to be a positive thing. And so they are fully opening up the gates for the Trojan horse of what the right is actually intending to do with psychedelic medicine. They it's there's an inability to understand that this different context of use where someone like Wendy Reese as we just heard who's had psychedelic experiences is still able to have that much hate and to rally people to encourage them into engaging in this type of violence. This is not going to be cured just by adding psychedelics, more psychedelics into the mix. The Trojan horse narrative is funny because the psychedelic community often thinks that they're Trojan horsing their ideology into the administration and it the reality is kind of the opposite.
[53:16] They're allowing the ideologies that permeate this like Trump administration to permeate their own communities. And I think it's really interesting. Yeah. the what I one of the things that I have a number of people who because I have a very public ministry on psychedelics come to me after particularly damaging new age psychedelic treatment or retreat or guru or whatever language you want to use experiences like truly danger damaging and one of the things that I try to talk to them about because I'm always I'm not a therapist or psychologist so I need to handle the existential questions and send them to a therapist for the mental health questions. But one of the existential spiritual questions I try to say is okay the language that you were given if you can replace it with Jesus God the Bible and it's and you would reject it offhand.
[54:11] You've just been given you've been given doc you've been given dogmatic goop that is being used to reinforce power. So like mother I will never give you more than you can handle. that starts in the Bible where God don't you know God except it's not there that God won't give you more than you can handle or that you know you need you really need to believe in the healing process if it's going to do the most work for you well then you know God helps those who help themselves you have to really believe you have to have real faith the fundamentalism at its core is is a reinforcement of power in a way that its rhetoric can be used in very very different religious contexts very different religious context and still end up in the same sorts of marginalizations, oppressions, and fascisms regardless of the name attached to the constructions of power through their rhetoric.
[55:05] And this is such a clear example for me and it really does it really really disturbs me. I care a lot about psychedelics. I care a I've had wonderful experiences. It's helped my mental health greatly. It's helped others I know greatly. And also in my day job, I really think that Pinocha is coming, Videla is coming, Marcos, Franco, Dwerte, whoever for our particular American context. And I really don't want to hand the Ha psychedelics and make this something that they have control over. And that is exactly what we're doing, even for the Christian nationalists that nobody would get a beer with. But they're willing to be building. they're willing to be building policy with even and anyway.
[55:54] Well, and this also connects to something that I've been concerned about. It's like while we're as a field like we don't have any grasp over the conversion therapy issue, like it's really just a few of us who are even paying attention to this at the moment and this is happening at the same time as there is this tremendous even like coordinated push into psychedelic medicines for children right now. I don't know if you've been seeing this come up, but different research centers, ethsist teams, they're really highlighting the need to develop psychedelic therapy for minor populations. And it's like they're just advancing their ability to extend this sort of approach to fixing people's identity into a very vulnerable and captive audience in the sense that, you know, people are living with their families and very much at their, you know, behest in terms of what's going on
[56:54] With their medical treatment. So, I think this is all very concerning and it's part of why we were really excited to have you on cuz I think this is so urgent right now and not enough people are talking about it. Yeah, I really I appreciate you having me on today and yeah, one of the things that I've thought about a lot in the context of psychedelic conversion therapy as an idea or wherever we're going in this psychedelic landscape, this ecosystem, is is who gets to decide what healed means? Who gets to decide what healing is? and p the power that goes into the structuring of power that determines for us what healing means in many contexts.
[57:41] We know how this can be weaponized so quickly. We've seen the culture shift so quickly on LGBTQ rights on on pushing back against racism on anti-racism in this country. I really do worry about with a culture so obsessed with healing and yet has doesn't have the education to know how the idea of healing is built. I really am concerned about who is going to be in charge of determining what makes us healed and what makes us normal and getting us back to that baseline. In conclusion here, we now know a lot more about Wendy Ree and sort of some of the people that she is associated with and who are promoting her book. Your article wraps up at a bicycle day conference in Asheville, North Carolina in which Wendy Reese was in attendance and Brian Hubard was in attendance.
[58:32] You had some interactions with Brian Hubard around Wendy Reese. I don't know if you want to speak to that and some of the interactions that you had at the conference. Yeah. So, I emailed Mr. Hubard after I had learned what I had about Reese's views on conversion therapy and asked him about his thoughts if he was also anti-LGBTQ and he wrote me back I mean right the day before he's in the executive office with the exe or the Oval Office with the executive order sends me a nice email back explaining no absolutely not I support LGBTQ rights yada I go to this conference I'd just gotten done with leading an anti-Christian nationalism lecture actually that morning at a church and I go to this conference and he's up there speaking.
[59:18] I rush up to him after I shake his hand and he remembered me and my message and he assured me that he does not agree with using conversion therapy. He's pro LGBTQ and that he appreciates my work and that I should keep going. And he gives me a big hug. And I thought, "Wow, maybe I've done some good here." That I've helped like just get one bad actor out of this coalition, out of the many that are part of this coalition until during a lecture on psychedelics and social justice and anti-racism that was part of this conference. Who walks out of this lecture and bumps me in the knee but Wendy Reese. And I was dumbfounded. I was like, at first I was like, this surely can't be her.
[1:00:06] But one, she had the sunglasses on her head that she has in all of her YouTube videos and she was wearing bazzled cowboy boots. That's not really an Asheville thing. But I got confirmation that it was her and that Hubard had brought her to this conference. And so I talked with organizers, explained, you know, that crazy lady I told you about last night, that's her. She's here. And the shock that came with that from the organizers that oh this had not even something I had even conceived of being possible. They really see psychedelics as a progre no matter what more access is a progressive thing. So yeah it was a stunning thing to see Hubard simultaneously denounce Reese's book saying he wouldn't even put his forward on it if he had known these themes. yet simultaneously helping her get access to power in the psychedelic community where you know she's she can talk to Hamilton Morris,
[1:01:07] She can talk to many you know David Nichols is there like people plenty of people who are big names in the community she's hobnobbing with all of them as if she belongs there. So again, the rhetoric might have been willing to kick out, but the construct the structure of power, she was continued to be put in places where she had access to power. That was unbelievably disturbing to me and a what great for the end of my article, horrible for my mental well-being to be in that space and to think I've made it something of a difference only to see that it was just lip service and nothing more. Yeah. I mean, the way that everything came together it with your article and then, you know, just the fact that that day we were recording our leftist primer on the right-wing psychedelic takeover, you know, we where we talked
[1:02:07] About, as you were saying earlier, having been sent that we mentioned this conversion therapy issue that had been in the kind of ether like could see it coming together in terms of the rhetoric that was being circulated. And so then just to have you reach out and share your article and see the confirmation of what we could tell was coming undeniably, this is in the halls of power. This is in the amongst the movers and shakers of the psychedelic field being platformed and connected. It just it made everything so undeniable. And so at least there is that silver lining that at least we have the proof that this is something that we need to be paying more attention to here.
[1:02:57] And I also wanted to mention that, you know, I think it's really interesting how again and again as with the broader society, liberals are always happy to collaborate with fascists and they're, you know, always punching left. So it's like people like us, we get banned from, you know, certain psychedelic conferences, but people like Wendy Ree who is clearly serving a function in the psychedelic ecosystem as it exists today. Those figures are welcomed in, excused, maybe some lift service to explain, you know, to keep good graces going. But I think it does symbolize these broader trends and really emphasizes the need for those of us on the left who do care about, you know, minority groups and standing up to fascism to be more intentionally networking with one another and building out our own conversations, our own platforms to continue these
[1:03:57] Conversations. Yeah, I think that's a super important point and probably a great place to wrap this interview on. Is there anything here at the end that you want to give a shout out to or a plug as we wrap up? Yeah, you can check out my psychedelic theology podcast. I do a lot of political theology and psychedelics that you can check out there. You can also visit my website and contact me there at psychedelic theology.com. Other than that, I'm just really happy that I have this space to share this research that I've done. Yeah. And again, check out Caleb's recent article in Good Faith Media, Psychedelic Conversion Therapy. How Christian nationalism is co-opting a movement once reserved for hippies. I think it's got really important information in it. We discussed most of it today, but go site that article. Go pass it on to people. It's really good.
[1:04:42] Yeah. Thanks for joining us. Absolutely. In the weeks following this recording, Caleb shared with us that Wendy Ree has begun to offer retreats focused around Ibagain and Christianity. The retreat on her website is called 222 retreat. It leads with that she's the number one Amazon bestseller with a forward by Governor Rick Perry. This is the 222 retreat involves Ibagain and costs according to her FAQ somewhere between $7,000 and $8,000 with a $1,500 deposit to hold your spot. Nay, you were talking about where the 222 reference comes from. I was reading Joel Welker's review of The Christians Guide to Psychedelics. And in this essay, Welker critiques Reese's interpretation, Revelation 22:2, which includes what Ree argues is a justification for psychedelic medicine within the Bible.
[1:05:38] The section refers to a plant. It says, "The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations and framing that as psychedelic medicine of some kind." But Welker goes on to point out that Reese's interpretation of that passage is contradicted by other passages in the Bible. Yeah. And he kind of concludes by saying, "I had to stop the chapter inverse rebuttal because I found the book full of stuff like this and it would be impossible to fully rebut." She describes the retreat as utilizing tools for discernment to help you recognize what's true, what's fear, and what's been shaping you. So when we read that kind of a line in the context of everything we know about how this community thinks about you know LGBT identities etc it's easy to see how this is another step to kind of rolling out this orientation to healing.
[1:06:24] Thanks for watching through the series with us and we are definitely going to stay on top of following these developments and we'll likely put out future episodes with any significant new details. And in the meantime, we hope that this information will allow you to begin to have conversations about these topics and to keep an eye on it instead of just accepting some of the propaganda narratives at face value. It is worth mentioning at the end of our series here that there are strains of research happening right now looking into psychedelics for gender affirming care and identity affirmation as opposed to some of these conversion dransition efforts that are being pushed by the right-wing. But if gender- affirming care is successfully criminalized like some of the forces currently in leadership positions want it to be, this kind of research will not be able to continue.
[1:07:15] If you appreciate the work we've done here and the topics that we discuss, you can support our work in a number of ways. We've got a shop with a lot of merch and stickers and buttons and things like that. We've also got a Patreon where you can subscribe at different levels. We appreciate you sitting through all this with us and watching and we know it's a heavy topic and it's not exactly fun to discuss. It's been a lot for us to trudge through as well, but we thought it was really important to bring some of these topics to the surface and into the conversation of the psychedelic industry and the modern psychedelic culture in general.
