The Psychedelic Right Wing Pipeline
Search "psychedelics" on YouTube and you're likely to encounter Joe Rogan, Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson—nodes of the now-in-decline Intellectual Dark Web (IDW). Contrary to popular conceptions, psychedelics don't result in more progressive or liberatory values. Plus Three talks about how Psymposia started covering the right wing psychedelic beat.
Links mentioned in the clip:
Increased nature relatedness and decreased authoritarian political views after psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0269881117748902
The Alternative Influence Network by Becca Lewis
https://datasociety.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/DS_Alternative_Influence.pdf
Mr. Victor Berger IV Joe Rogan on Gavin McInnes
https://twitter.com/vicbergeriv/status/1306805724975046659?lang=en
Innuendo Studios, "The Alt-Right Playbook: How to Radicalize a Normie"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P55t6eryY3g
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.
[00:01] So there was a robin carhart harris study at imperial college at london that was doing a number of things with psilocybin and therapy for treatment-resistant depression or depression of some sort major it was a small questionnaire in that study that was seized upon by the media which was that you know it appeared that in their study of 14 participants only seven of whom received psilocybin that there was a reduction in their self-reported authoritarian score it's a questionnaire and this was then touted in the middle of the in the midst of actual white supremacist organizing and the rise of trump and american neo-fascism that like psilocybin was going to be an important tool or in particular
[01:02] Psilocybin therapy for fighting fascism like these are actual headlines you know so that was too much and especially when there are other headlines being published around the same line at the same time like the base you know being caught outside of the second amendment virginia yeah second amendment rally fully automatic weapons and dmt you know so all this is happening at the same time there's just yeah so that was that and then you know mostly like sort of folks on adjacent to the right and participating in the idw people like jordan peterson in particular you know speaking quite eloquently about some of these very same psilocybin experiences meanwhile you know he's a eloquently okay yeah I knew somebody you know like at
[02:02] Least he got his facts straight for once you know when he was talking about the mysticism studies so so yeah I mean that's that was the context in which I first started getting interested in this thread so sure and also it's not you know that was about a year ago that you came out with the lucy piece and I think right after that also you had done the interview with alan piper too who has been on this beat for a while yeah which just dropped on youtube so if you haven't checked it out it's there and you know alan piper had laid some of the groundwork for this and that was really helpful in framing it but then ultimately just seeing it out in the wild and that I guess like led us to the angeli piece and we just talked about this recently but as I said you know earlier just could kind of smell it on him can I before we jump into angeli sure nashay said something yesterday when we
[03:03] Were kind of talking about all this that I thought really pertained to that idw thread you said something I think along the lines of like a lot of these people like jordan peterson alex jones these people are kind of like what a lot of younger males are having an introduction into psychedelics I think pace was talking about that yeah that's okay yeah yeah but it was absolutely true yeah that that's like there a lot of people have heard about dmt for example like because of listening to joe rogan it's like yeah it's a straight-up meme like you know anybody having a conversation with anything joe rogan at a ordering a pizza hey dude if you tried dmt you know and like so look we're talking studies there's a study with lsd that shows an increase in suggestibility with people who have recently taken lsd and I think the authors comment on the fact that this may be part of the mechanism that
[04:04] Makes like psychedelic therapy actually like work you know so you've got your neuroplasticity a little bit open a little bit squishy you're a little bit gullible is the word you know okay and so I mean yeah like other people like becca lewis who I mentioned in lucy in the sky with nazis she's an incredible like digital media scholar she's a phd candidate at the moment wrote an article a report called data in society and or for data in society called the alternative influence network where you know she comments she documents she maps the phenomenon of people getting introduced to say somebody like joe rogan and then it's jordan peterson and then it's sargon of akkad and then it's stefan molyneux and then it's richard spencer you know not so linearly but yeah
[05:08] Dave you want to say something yeah well it ties into two things and there's a really great innuendo studios video called how to radicalize a normie that's really hopefully not you but it sort of walks through you're already pretty rad I'd say so it walks through this process right of sort of normalizing whatever sort of anti-feminist viewpoints or this notion of anti-sjw right this lampooning of the notion of any sort of radical critique or critical discourse and as you look through what these different characters make space for and as you look through the comment section I mean one of the things that I find so fascinating about pushing back against idw and idw adjacent figureheads is like on a recent video I did the number of people in the comments on the video
[06:10] Making apologetic arguments for fascism or for breitbart or saying like oh if you're not willing to give fascists a chance you're pushing them out of the discourse and it's like yes I don't think fascists deserve a platform I think when we look through history we can see what happens and the amount of bloodshed that comes from giving fascists a platform we don't need to have these arguments or debates in the abstract we can talk to the really existing history how can anyone even suggest that after this well but that's the last four years how do you like and this was such an important point I thought in lucy in the sky with nazis where pace pointed to joe rogan as one of these figures right and we've got joe rogan on the record talking about the founder of the proud boys gavin mcginnis as like you know mostly a fun guy victor burger has a great mix of it and it is concerning that you know that that's the take now and I mean I it's not
[07:10] Terribly surprising whether it's milo yiannopoulos or any of the other like sort of extreme alt-right folks that were platformed early in their careers by rogan you know rogan doesn't want to take any he doesn't want to take any flak doesn't even really want to talk about it much in any case just a quick yeah just to end cap on that just the point that you made pushing back against those folks was that like rogan hasn't met a reactionary that he's not willing to make apologetics for that like you wind up you can say he's not this that or the other like oh he doesn't qualify as a fascist himself but like when these are the people that you're introducing your audience to again this is in that process of like radicalization of exposing people of normalizing ideas that are at their core fundamentally anti-social and dangerous to sections yeah I had a conversation a couple years ago a few years ago with one of rogan's friends who I won't name and it was actually it was I was talking to him the night that alex jones was on I might have
[08:11] Been like I think alex jones hadn't been on in a few years or something like that I'm not entirely sure but what I had told them is like what the [expletive] is rogan doing with this like you're putting alex jones to just spout his [expletive] and like introduce like all these young guys to this you know percentage of a percentage of them are going to go that way you know and the answer was like well people are people can make up their own mind or you get a shine sunlight on it and that's how you do it's not how you do it like he shouldn't be on there at all in my opinion sure I mean yeah and this was after you know alex jones had been sort of sending his audience against the bereaved parents of sandy hook which is truly despicable we would be remiss if we didn't note that matt johnson who's at johns hopkins had weighed in this discussion and said
[09:14] You know that that no we don't believe that you know that psychedelics are going to shift your ideology and then it also expressed concerns about clinicians pushing in their personal pet spiritual beliefs into the therapeutic space and yeah I my reply to the second part would just simply be that decriminalization is a real good way to not empower clinicians to become gurus by virtue of their gatekeeping role to the ineffable
