Gang Weed Conservatism II: Peter Thiel and the Narco-Capitalists

From a Key to a G it's all about money. 10 piece for a 10, base pipe comes free.

Last week, we looked into a curious phenomenon of TradCaths and Orthos giving serious consideration to the idea of using LSD and Ayahuasca to cure your nihilism by opening your mind to the spirit dimension.

I’m not the only one who finds this situation trippy. In October, Ross Ellenhorn and Dimitri Mugianis asked the question in The Guardian: “Why is the American right suddenly so interested in psychedelic drugs?” They cite an expansive tradition. Julius Evola. Steve Bannon. Andrew Anglin. Greg Abbot.

Psychedelic therapies are receiving unprecedented financial and political support – and much of it comes from the right. Peter Thiel has invested extensively in the emerging psychedelic therapeutic industry. Jordan Peterson is a psilocybin fan. In 2018, the Mercer Foundation donated $1m to the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (Maps), the leading US psychedelics research organization, for studies of MDMA treatment of PTSD in veterans.

Why is the American right so intrigued by these substances today? The most obvious answer is money. As psychedelics are absorbed into mainstream medicine, they promise to become another American cash cow. Money will come from patents on novel formulations and by patenting and providing the associated treatment techniques.

Then they take a left turn, discussing psychoactive party drugs as if they are insulin.

And, if MDMA is so helpful in the treatment of PTSD, why are veterans given special priority in a society that has traumatized so many people? What about the trauma of racism, of poverty, of police violence and mass incarceration – problems actively increased by rightwing policies supported by people like the Mercers?

Could you imagine deliberately providing MDMA to America’s victims of racism, police violence, and mass incarceration?

Still, we have our first cast members. Peter Thiel. Jordan Peterson. The Mercer Foundation. The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

Seven months earlier, al-Jazeera ran a lengthy piece on “The Legal Psychedelics Industry: Capitalism on Drugs”.

Indeed, capitalism is already tripping over itself to get people tripping on legal psychedelics. The estimated market opportunity of which is orbiting somewhere in the hundreds of billions of dollars, according to [Benzinga Psychedelics Capital Conference] keynote speaker Kevin O’Leary of “Shark Tank” reality television fame. The industry comprises an array of products beyond LSD, including psilocybin – the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms – as well as mescaline, MDMA, and the hallucinogen DMT, found in Amazonian ayahuasca.

Six paragraphs kvetching about natives, racism, and the patriarchy later, we get to a discussion of some of the pharma companies involved, and a familiar name pops up. Peter Thiel is heavily invested in ATAI Life Sciences, founded by a man named Christian Angermayer. We are also reminded that Elon Musk has weighed in on the benefits of Psychedelics.

Peter Thiel. The Mercer Foundation. Elon Musk. Christian Angermayer.

Let’s start with Peter Thiel.

By this point, you should accept that something weird is going on which requires explanation. Let’s start with the most benign explanation. Those libs over at the Guardian and Al Jazeera are right about one thing.

You can make a lot of money selling drugs.

It’s easy to forget this, but all of the drugs we are discussing here are illegal. DMT and Psilocybin are Schedule I, making them, and therefore Ayahuasca and Magic Mushrooms, illegal to use, sell, or possess under federal law. Special exceptions were made for South American cults operating in the US, and a few cities like Seattle and Detroit have effectively decriminalized possession. MDMA (a.k.a. ecstasy) and LSD are also Schedule I on the grounds that they have a high potential for abuse and serve no legitimate medical purpose.

But if they could be shown to have a legitimate medical purpose, each could be downgraded to Schedule II, putting it in the same club as adderall, cocaine, morphine, oxycodone, and fentanyl. Then doctors could prescribe them to patients, or at least administer them in hospitals.

This explains why $730 Million was invested in psychedelics in 2021, but it still doesn’t explain why all of the conservatives seem to be in on this. Growing up, whenever I heard someone explaining why this or that psychoactive drug was actually a form of medicine, they were either a progressive, or a member of the Free State Project.

Enter Peter Thiel. When he isn’t working with the CIA and Israeli intelligence on data mining and cell phone surveillance¹, Thiel is primarily known online as a major patron of what is best called the Thiel Right. In the political world, Thiel’s “clients” include politicians and candidates like Chris Kobach, Josh Hawley, J.D. Vance, Blake Masters, and Ron DeSantis, A New Yorker article concludes by saying that:

There is no obvious party line among the Thielists, but they tend to share a couple of characteristics. They are interested in championing outré ideas and causes, and they are members of an American élite who nevertheless emphasize, in their politics, how awful élites have been for ordinary Americans.

It’s true. The Thiel project represents the union of two distinct subcultures so easily confused that their Wikipedia pages begin by pointing to each other. The Intellectual Dark Web (a.k.a. The Post Left) and the Dark Enlightenment (a.k.a. the Neoreactionary Movement). Speaking of Hat Men, Thiel-described “man of many hats” Eric Weinstein is not only a leading member of the Intellectual Dark Web, he coined the term in the first place. He is also the managing director at Thiel Capital.

The Intellectual Dark Web is primarily composed of liberals, atheists, and neocons who feel that The Woke Left Has Gone Too Far. Their members include Steven Pinker, Sam Harris, Douglas Murray, Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Bret and Eric Weinstein, and of course Jordan Peterson. They’re primarily concerned about “Woke Authoritarianism”, “Identity Politics”, and “Cancel Culture²”.

On the other hand, the Dark Enlightenment is primarily composed of antimodernist post-libertarians, catholic integralists, and assorted “geeks for monarchy” who feel that history took a wrong turn sometime around July 1789. Their members include Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, Bronze Age Pervert, and Yoram Hazony.

For those who have not heard of him, Yoram Hazony is president of the Theodore Herzl Institute in Jerusalem and the Edmund Burke Foundation in the United States. The Herzl Institute’s Vice President, Ofir Haivry, is a member of the Israeli Council for Higher Education and is listed as a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Burke Foundation’s National Conservatism Conference.

The conference’s speakers come from a range of niche, terminally online right wing ideologies including Monarchism, Catholic Integralism, “post-liberalism”, Paleoconservatism, and of course Libertarianism. However, if one examines the Burke Foundation’s actual leadership, one finds a laundry list of Neocon think tank alumni, from Conference Chair Chris Demuth (Hudson Institute, AEI) to president David Brog (Christians United for Israel, Maccabee Task Force³).

Naturally, speakers at the first Washington DC NatCon conference in 2019 included Tucker Carlson, JD Vance, and Peter Thiel himself. Rod Dreher and Douglas Murray would speak at the 2020 conference in Rome alongside then-future Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni as well as Hungarian Prime Minster Viktor Orban. NatCon 2 2021 in DC would see Thiel, Vance, and Dreher return as speakers, joined by Senators Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Marco Rubio, Rich Lowry (selected by William F. Buckley himself to succeed him as editor of National Review), Anti-Islam activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “Future Conservative”⁴ Commentator Dave Rubin, Newsweek Deputy Opinion Editor Batya Ungar-Sargon⁵, Liz Wheeler, Chris Rufo, and Vivek Ramaswamy. Alex Kaschuta and Eva Vlaardingerbroek (the “shieldmaiden of the far right”) spoke at the 2022 Conference in Brussels. NatCon 3 would see Daily Wire and PragerU contributor Michael Knowles and North Korean defector Yeonmi Park take the stage, and Tory MP Suella Braverman was keynote speaker at the 2023 conference in London.⁶

Like the New Yorker said: “There is no obvious party line among the Thielists, but they tend to share a couple of characteristics.” Yeah, I think I can spot a few… Thiel Money and Psychedelic Drug promotion.

By way of example, let’s talk about Canadian Psychiatrist, Daily Wire content creator, leading IDW member, and former benzodiazepine addict Jordan B. Peterson. Jordan Peterson has arguably done more than any other thinker to normalize the idea of psychedelic drug use as a respectable right wing activity.

In April 2017, when Jordan Peterson was in the midst of the university gender pronoun controversy that would launch his current career path, but before he actually lost that job and was still teaching university students, Jordan Peterson was sharing articles from the New Scientist saying that “Psychedelic drugs push the brain to a state never seen before.”

He did it in class, too. And he kept doing it. Here he is on the Jan 31 2018 episode of the Rubin Report talking about how people who have undergone psychedelic experiences are more successful and healthier.

Peterson opens up with some impressive claims.

• Cancer victims stop fearing death. (“You’re just gonna lay that out as being delusional?”)

• 85% success rate in quitting smoking after one psilocybin experience.

• 3 MDMA treatments cure 72% of PTSD patients. (“But they have to have the mystical experience, no one knows how to account for that.”)

Dave Rubin agrees, to a point. “I’ve done a lot of those things you’ve mentioned virtually always had good experiences on them.” He asks Ben Shapiro, who of course is a good boy who has never done any of these drugs, then continues, “I’ve done all of those things, I don’t really do… well, I smoke some weed, but I’m not doing… well, I haven’t done ecstasy in years, and mushrooms I did do about a year ago, and I had a great day, you know? I kind of wandered around. And I thought- I felt some… some things happening. And when I did them in college, I had a couple of those type of transcendent feeling I was just part of something or whatever.”

Say what you want about Dave Rubin. He knows what’s going on when he’s on drugs. He’s having fun. He even self-corrects when he says he was thinking, to say that in fact he was feeling. Ben Shapiro next to him doesn’t partake because he grew up in a conservative home, and he’s skeptical. But there’s Jordan Peterson, going on about his learning experiences.

What a curious overton window in this discussion between a conservative, a “Future Conservative” former Young Turks host, and a self-identified “Classic British Liberal Traditionalist.”

What about Sam Harris? He isn’t considered a man of the right these days, nor has he been considered such for much of his career. But he was a founding member of the Intellectual Dark Web. Maybe it was the atheist rationalism. Maybe it was the defense of Charles Murray. Maybe it was the genocidal hatred of Muslims. In any case:

Recently, Harris hosted lead psilocybin researcher at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Roland Griffiths, on his podcast. This encounter seems to have inspired Harris to embark on a Terence McKenna classic, 5-dried grams of psilocybin mushrooms “heroic dose,” after which Harris reported that he is, “thinking more clearly than ever.” (source)

The idea here is not that Thiel is literally directly paying these people to promote drug use. Though to be clear it is 100% the case that many online right wing fads like movies about human trafficking and country songs about rich men north of Richmond are straight up “messages from sponsors”.

Thiel is a major investor in ATAI Life Sciences, a self-defined “clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company aiming to transform the treatment of mental health disorders.” ATAI is also 20% owner of Compass Pathways, which pioneers directly in research on psilocybin therapy for mental illnesses. Of course, Thiel is a major direct investor in Compass Pathways.

If psychedelics get popular, Thiel will profit from his investments in firms that sell them.

Thiel is an agenda setter for the Thiel Right. If he wants to bring something into the conversation, he can easily do so. If he wants to take something out of the conversation, he can do so.

Thought leaders on the Thiel Right are pushing psychedelic drugs on their audience. None object to it. Even Ben Shapiro keeps his mouth shut when the topic comes up from someone who believes that Moses was on drugs.

And I wish this was the end of it.

But we’re still in Wonderland, and this rabbit hole only goes deeper.

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This is the second in a series of six articles about a disturbing trend of psychedelic drug use being pushed on the American Right.

The next article, which looks at the Mercer Foundation and Psilocybin PTSD research, can be found here:

Gang Weed Conservatism III: Rebekah Mercer and the Pharmacological Warriors

This series will be free for all to read, and I encourage you to share this post and all others in the series as they come.

New releases should come every Saturday morning. If you want to be notified of these articles as soon as they are released, you are encouraged to subscribe to this Substack. Thank you.

1. For those unaware, in the late nineties, Peter Thiel was co-founder of a software company called Confinity. At the time, Elon Musk ran an online financial services website called “X”. In 2000, the two companies merged, creating Paypal, which would later be sold to eBay for $1.5 Billion.

His next big venture, through his “Founder’s Fund”, was a company called Palantir, a “data analytics” company which drew early funding from In-Q-Tel, which can only be described as the CIA’s venture fund. Palantir famously claimed credit for much of the data mining work that would lead to the discovery of Osama bin Laden’s final hideout. Its consultants include Avril Haines, nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institute, former Deputy Director of the CIA and current Director of National Intelligence.

Thiel’s Founder’s Fund is also a major investor in Carbyne911, an Israeli tech company with the stated purpose of developing call-handling and cell phone identification software for emergency responders, but also has links via its key managers and executives to Israel’s “Unit 8200” intelligence service. Former Palantir employee Trae Stephens serves on Carbyne’s board of advisors, alongside former US Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Other major investors to Carbyne911 include(d) Jeffrey Epstein.

2. The hypocrisy at play here leaves one thunderstruck. Several IDW members have attempted on occasion to trigger liberal censorship tripwires against their own enemies. For example, Bari Weiss spent much of her college years as an activist campaigning to ruin the careers of Arab and Muslim professors. Despite having no meaningfully dissident opinions to speak of, Bari Weiss would go on to cancel herself by voluntarily resigning from the New York Times and citing a hostile work environment. Not on any ethnic or civil rights basis, but on the grounds that her coworkers constantly made fun of her writing priorities.

3. I’d never heard of this organization before. Apparently it’s a group founded to combat BDS initiatives on college campuses. The group’s primary financial backer was the late Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson, who owned the pro-Netanyahu Israel HaYom newspaper and was the largest single donor to Trump’s 2016 campaign.

4. Thus, by implication, “Present Liberal”.

5. Formerly the Opinion Editor at The Forward.

6. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that just because a European politician is a member of a right wing party and attends a conference called National Conservatism that they are immigration restrictionists. In practice, the exact opposite has proven to be the case.

Where Poland is a favorite of National Conservative types, Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party has allowed the importation of one hundred and thirty thousand foreign laborers into Poland in 2022, primarily from India, Uzbekistan, and Turkey.

A year after attending the NatCon conference in Rome, Giorgia Meloni was elected Prime Minster of Italy over predicable accusations of being a fascist. A curious sort of fascist indeed, who just last month announced a plan to welcome four hundred and twenty five thousand non-EU workers into Italy before 2025, in order to “compensate for Italy’s demopgraphic decline”.

Hungary, the third most active country in the National Conservative network, has under Viktor Orban vastly expanded its foreign visa program, with the country’s Ministry of Economic Development calling for the importation of half a million additional workers to the country with a population of less than ten million.

Finally, despite dealing the British Labour Party its most humiliating defeat in almost a century by running on a single-issue anti-immigration campaign, the Tories and their home Secretary Suella Braverman have allowed the entry of 1.2 million migrants into the UK in 2022, the highest number in the history of the country.