Gang Weed Conservatism IV: Elon Musk, Grass Toucher
Gang Weed Conservatism IV: Elon Musk, Grass Toucher
You've never debated someone like me before.
So we agree that drugs can be very profitable.
We agree that there’s a strangely bipartisan legal effort to make them legal and give them to the troops.
But there’s another angle we should consider:
Drugs are, like, totally rad man. Lots of really cool guys do drugs, like Joe Rogan, man! And lots of really smart guys do drugs, like Moldbug, man! And lots of really cool, really smart guys do drugs, like Elon Musk, man!
In fact, like, you know what Elon Musk says, man?
Woah. So, like, dude. You know how one in six Americans are on antidepressants, and something like 1 in 30 teenagers are on SSRIs?
We should put them on Ketamine instead!
And you know how one in thirteen high school seniors uses the amphetamine Adderall, whether prescribed or not?
I think those high school seniors would be better off taking Ecstasy!
Now, Elon could be onto something here. As somebody who has never been prescribed Adderall, antidepressants, or for that matter any other psychoactive drug in my entire life, I’m pretty soundly convinced that Americans, especially American teenagers, are ridiculously over-medicated in order to adjust to the sadistic clown show that is the public school system. I’m also willing to accept, in theory, that SSRIs and Adderall are so deleterious to the developing mind that some of these kids, maybe even most of them, would be better off doing shrooms with their friends after school.
But see, me? I’m a bit of a weirdo.
I take that as more of an indictment of unnecessarily over-medicating children than an opportunity to find different psychoactives to give them.
We are right now in a situation where body building, fad dieting, and magic mushrooms are all signs of far right politics. There is a huge subculture on the right that pitches psychoactive, and particularly psychedelic drugs not as a palliative, but as a cognitive performance enhancer. They call it “microdosing”, which is a subcategory of “biohacking”. And “biohacking” is a subcategory of “transhumanism.”1
And Elon Musk is a big fan of all of it, as are all of the biggest podcasters.
Let’s start with Russel Brand.2 In the run up to to the release of his 2014 book Revolution, he guest edited an issue of The New Statesman, and was interviewed on BBC’s Newsnight. The interview was boilerplate GenX political nihilism: Don’t vote. The system’s corrupt. Everything’s corrupt. We’re destroying the planet. We need a change on consciousness. We need a revolution. What kind of revolution? Wealth redistribution. Raising taxes on corporations. Profit is bad. You know the drill. And of course midwits everywhere ate it all up. I remember hearing my classmates talking about it.
“Hang on, Marcel. Isn’t this article series about the right?” Russel Brand was against COVID lockdowns and vaccine mandates, apparently never receiving a leftist firmware upgrade on his prior pharmaskepticism. Thus, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his words trickle to right wing ears.
Today, Russel Brand runs a podcast called “Under the Skin” where he continues to complain about the Elites. Oh, and push magic mushrooms.3
I encourage you to listen to this whole video, ideally at 2x speed so you don’t waste too much time. He starts with an article referencing a clinical trial that purports to show magic mushrooms are four times as effective as antidepressants, but quickly wanders afield.
It’s no coincidence that those drugs were at the center of a counter culture because they affect the way that you perceive reality. I’ve had some experience with psychedelics and though I would never publicly endorse any illegal activity at all, my personal recollection of using those controlled substances is it altered the way that I saw myself and my ego. Now, obviously I took it in a rather reckless and untutored and unguided way. But I can see and recall, even now as a man in recovery from drug addiction, that those kind of experiences under the correct tutelage could be used to guide me away from certain patterns of behaviors. And microdosing, which is what is suggested might have a positive impact on depression and anxiety, could alter the way that you see reality. And the way that you see reality, for your personal and empirical purposes, is reality.
Does that sound any different from what Jordan Peterson was saying to Dave Rubin and Ben Shapiro?
Moving on, to the topic of the video, why does Brand think these substances were banned?
Isn’t it interesting to watch even the transition it's interesting to watch even the transition between, like, that famous Woodstock looking footage of people lounging around all happy and dopey and the prejudices and cultural baggage that carries over to these heavily emblematic icons.4 “US Justice Department” and the strips of information here on the news. We're dealing with how to curate and corral cultural space, how reality operates. My belief is that these substances have been controlled precisely because they alter the way that people see reality. The only way that you can control a society, and make no mistake the word government is a synonym for control, is if you manage people’s perceptions. If you start introducing agents that mean that people see reality differently, have different priorities, have personal epiphanies about the nature of love, family, their willingness to subjugate their personal selves to an economic system that may not necessarily reward them, then it’s very difficult to govern and manage a society.
Yes. Someone is curating and corralling cultural space.
Yes. Someone is controlling society by managing people’s perceptions.
I don’t suppose Russel can be convinced that the call is coming from inside the house on that one.
Russel himself, like the other people we’ve been discussing and will continue to discuss in this series, are astroturfed fake dissidents who say nothing of any political utility whatsoever, and push their audiences to waste their time taking psychedelic drugs. You can tell that Russel Brand is a fake dissident because he’s never been harassed by the FBI or MI5 or whatever. He has a YouTube account with more than 6 million subscribers. He gets interviewed by the BBC. His books get published by Random House Publishing, and he is allowed to “guest edit” mainstream political magazines in order to promote his upcoming books.
It’s no coincidence that wisdom traditions have long cherished plant medicines as a potential portal to other realms and dimensions of reality. And remember if you think that language sounds a bit wacky and crazy, “other dimensions of reality,” the alternative is yet more preposterous: that you and I as individual human beings have the exact amount of senses to the exact degree that they can ever be used and the exact amount of intelligence and consciousness to encompass all potential realities. That’s more absurd.
“Wisdom traditions.” Again, people, there is no reason to humor this. I want to remind what I said in the first article in his series: There is no such thing as an “entheogenic culture” anywhere at any time, and there never has been. There are not, nor have there ever been, any “organic shamanic experiences” because everything these shamans were doing was fake, none of their practices were valid, everyone who believed them was deluded, and every last one of them were either liars or lunatics.
And note the deranged false dichotomy here. Either you believe that magic mushrooms and South American tree sap are portals to other dimensions of reality, or you believe that unaided human beings are at the apex of our perception and cognition. This is nonsensical. Even if you did believe in many worlds theory, there is not a single good reason to believe that party drugs give you even a whiff of access to those worlds. And there is no reason to concede to many worlds theory or anything like it, certainly not based on experiences some other person had while they were on drugs.
“Everything you can see everything you can measure and touch that’s all there is.” What, so it’s not possible that in the limitlessness of space there are sensory instruments that could detect levels of reality that are inaccessible to us now? And even more significantly, beyond the sensory and the material worlds, there are layers of reality that are too subtle for us to even detect? We know already that different animals have a different experience of reality to us. We know that there are subtler forms of energy at play. And it’s likely that psilocybin and other psychedelics allow us to access experiences, frequencies, vibrations, realities that are otherwise inaccessible. And the fact that that has a positive effect on our mental health is hardly surprising.
The different senses that animals have are material phenomena. Certain birds can detect magnetic fields. Other birds can distinguish more colors, along a slightly wider spectrum of light. Certain fish can detect electricity. Bats can see in infrared. Humans can invent things like oscilloscopes that can detect the currents running through wires. In the limitlessness of space, there are sensory instruments that we have never seen, or haven’t yet invented.
But all of those sensory instruments will be used to detect particles, energies, forces, and waves. And those will particles, energies, forces, and waves, will be definitionally part of this layer of reality, because they will be interacting with the particles, energies, forces, and waves that we are normally touching, for example, the particles of the measuring device. In this way, they will be just like the sensory instruments weve already seen and invented, and none of them will ever validate any of the delusions and hallucinations of people on psychedelic drugs.
And as for layers of reality beyond the “sensory and material worlds,” those are not significant. Those are the opposite of significant. They do not exist. By the definition of the word, if they do not interact with reality, do not interact with our senses, do not interact with anything that interacts with our senses, then they do not exist.
They are not “too subtle to even detect.” They aren’t real.
We already have a device that can detect where these experiences, frequencies, vibrations, and realities are coming from when you take psilocybin and other psychedelics. Far from being out in the vastness of space, it was actually invented pretty close to my hometown in the 1970s. It’s called an Magnetic Resonance Imaging machine. You lay down in it, and we can look inside your brain, watching it light up like a christmas tree as the chemical you injested links up with the chemical receptors in your prefrontal cortex in a way that is actually quite predictable.
As for whether all that has a “positive effect on your mental health,” I’ll leave that to the reader’s judgement for now.
What follows next is another three minutes of word salad that I won’t waste your time tearing into this week. He briefly does begin to talk about depression, which you’ll notice the previous minutes were less focused on than they were about seeing into alternate dimensions.
Russel Brand then goes into more detail on the work of Robin Carhartt-Harris, a previous guest on his podcast, who we will discuss in significantly more detail next week. But what’s important to remember is that it’s not just Russel Brand who talks like this. They all talk like this.
Tim Pool pushes psychedelics.
Pod Save America also pushes psychedelics. Here they are interviewing Rick Doblin. You remember him from last week, right? He runs MAPS, the group using veterans as the thin edge of the wedge on mass adoption of these drugs.
Two weeks ago, we discussed Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson. Jordan Peterson said the same things Russel Brand did about wisdom traditions and higher phases of knowledge and all of it.
Lex Fridman also pushes psychedelics. Here is interviewing John Vervaeke on them. John Vervaeke is “an award-winning professor of psychology, cognitive science, and Buddhist psychology at the University of Toronto.” He’s also a close friend of Jordan Peterson. Before Peterson got into politics, these studies on consciousness were their main join interest.
Tim Ferris is also an interesting character. Originally making his money off of an online nutritional supplements business called BrainQUICKEN, Ferris is also a major donor (over $2M) to the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as well as for the Center for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London. The clinical study that Russel Brand touched on earlier? Tim Ferris paid for that study.
And Robin Carhartt-Harris? Well, he’s the head of the Center for Psychadelic Research at Imperial College London, so Tim Ferriss pays him, too.
Here’s Jordan Peterson interviewing Carhartt-Harris.
Here’s a video from Tim Ferris on how to get into psychedelics. Tim Ferris has also interviewed Jordan Peterson on Psychedelics and the Bible. He’s interviewed Sam Harriss on the same. Scroll through his channel, see who else.
Some people may object that bringing an academic on to discuss their research does not amount to endorsing potentially irresponsible interpretations of their work. OK. Why didn’t I see anybody bringing on Dr. Richard Lynn to “discuss his research” on eugenics? How of them have had Dr. Kevin MacDonald on their shows for twenty minutes to an hour to “discuss his research” on Jews? Having an academic on doesn’t amount to endorsement of their views, much less any irresponsible reinterpretations? Well, what would anyone say to having Dr. Charles Murray on to “discuss his research” on Black IQ?
And there is no daylight between the “irresponsible” views of Russel Brand and the “responsible” views of Jordan Peterson. They both believe the same thing: Responsible use of magic mushrooms lets you touch other dimensions, and you can’t explain that you dumb materialist!
And last but obviously not least: Joe Rogan, do I even need to say anything? No discussion of these pied pipers would be complete without a mention of this groomer, who again has an audience of disaffected youth who watch him encourage nearly every single guest he has to do some kind of psychoactive substance. Let’s not forget the time he had Elon Musk on, smoking weed with him live on the show. Writing this article was the first time I’ve ever listened to a JRE episode, #1734 interviewing Ron White, who spends the first half hour talking about his lifechanging ayahuasca retreat.
If someone says that they become better at concentrating, writing, coding, or other such cognitive tasks including certain kinds of reading by microdosing specific drugs, I’m willing to believe them. But when I was telling a libertarian acquaintance of mine about my idea for this article, he told me that some people benefit from Ayahuasca because it helps them learn about themselves.
Gentlemen, that’s a load of shit.
Psychedelic drugs do not make you better at learning. I don’t need a study for that. Learning is about assimilating correct information from the outside world, or even from your own thoughts. And psychedelic drugs inherently work by not just blunting, not just obscuring, but actively subverting your ability to perceive reality.
For the duration of time in which under the influence of psychedelic drugs, you are literally mentally r-slurred. Mushrooms and LSD undermine reality in a way that tobacco and meth do not.
I’m not morally offended by the idea of people doing drugs. I drink alcohol. Alcohol r-slurs my thoughts and reflexes while I’m under its influence. I understand that alcohol does this, and I enjoy the feeling.
You must understand that psychoactive drugs serve no purpose but to make you dumb, and more importantly, they make you annoying to those not on the same drugs as you at that moment.
The human brain didn’t evolve over the past hundred thousand years to need psychedelics. Humans are actually self aware all the time, starting by the time they are three years old. When you do psychoactive drugs, your mind isn’t opened up to anything.
You are high.
There are no worthwhile insights into life to be gained while high. Your insights from your acid trips are about as significant as your insights from your dreams.
Nancy Reagan was right. Life can be great, but not when you can’t see it.
“People do LSD to reach insights about themselves.” Well, nobody can describe any of these insights without sounding like a crazy person. And make no mistake, when you talk like this, you sound like a crazy person.
Because these conversations on these shows? They aren’t real life. These people are allowed to regurgitate dangerous nonsense completely unchallenged, because all of them are part of a network of fake dissidents. They all interview and are interviewed by the same people. They all color inside the lines set for them by the likes of Peter Thiel and Eric Weinstein. They aren’t paid to promote these drugs, rather they are brought into a club, and a condition of membership is that you have the right opinions on a few key topics. One of those topics, quite obviously, is psychedelic drugs. These people don’t lose an ounce of credibility for amplifying this garbage, any more than Max Boot or Bill Kristol will lose credibility for constantly amplifying deranged lies about foreign countries that lead to failed military adventures that leave thousands of corpses in their wake.
But you’re not like them. If you go down the path they are laying out for you, you are spending whatever credibility you’ve built up so that people will humor your delusions.
Yes, they are delusions.
If you are a cancer patient and you stop fearing death, you are delusional.
If you have a “biomaterial connection with the transcendental and metaphsyical” you are delusional.
The only question is whether those around you have the strength of conviction to resolutely maintain this fact even in the face of your inane ramblings, and the patience and interest in you to make sure you know it, too.
I defy any of the Drug Right to give me a single articulate example of these deep insights that drugs gave them. To tell me something I don’t know.
“The system is corrupt.”
“Elites don’t care about you.”
“Wash your balls and change your bedsheets.”
Wow thank you.
And of course these people have a platform. In Musk’s case, he owns the platform, but even before then, the same ~woke mob~ that ruthlessly deplatformed, debanked, and depersoned anyone to the right of Bush Jr for wrongthink, happily tolerated these very same people encouraging developing minds to take drugs that literally made them think wrong. Not one of these so-called dissident right wing figures fears even the slightest hint of personal, professional, or legal consequence when they go out and contribute to the delinquency of tens of thousands of minors by encouraging them week after week to expand their minds with Schedule I controlled substances.
How did this happen to us?
How did people like this become our thought leaders?
Is there no demand on the marketplace of ideas for serious people?
Or did they all get permabanned years ago?
This is the fourth 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 Christian Angermayer and some other people in some other places doing interesting research, can be found here:
This series will be free for all to read, and I encourage you to share this post and all others in the series.
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I should take the time to note that I am also in favor of Transhumanism and Biohacking. I’m not in favor of psychedelics. I’m more of a cyborg implant kind of guy, which Elon Musk also supports.
You might say that on this I’m a Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, and Elon is a Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.
As I typed this section, I realized that I couldn’t remember what it was that Russel Brand was originally famous for. If you’re reading this, you’re probably not sure either. Before 2013, he was a British comedian of whom very few Americans had heard, aside from his role as a voice actor in Despicable Me as Gru’s main henchman, Dr. Nefario.
Even before I watched the video, I took psychic damage reading the description:
“Elites are taking over! Our only hope is to form our own. To learn more join my cartel here https://www.russellbrand.com/join and get weekly bulletins too incendiary for anything but your private inbox.”
“Elites are taking over.”
This is a meaningless statement. It’s easy to simply roll your eyes and chuckle, but these are the kinds of empty nonsense platitudes that form the backbone of most of the stupid conspiracy theories that people believe and repeat today.
And you’ll never get in trouble for repeating it. Elites are taking over. Say it as much as you want. Say it at work, say it to a news reporter, say it on Facebook or Twitter. Nobody will stop you. Elites are taking over.
Calling something a “heavily emblematic icon” is like calling something “very wet water” or a “very luminous photon”