My mother continually labeled me “evil” from the age of three until I was a young adult. I spent the better part of my life trying to overcome the belief that she was right.

Obviously, labeling a small child “evil” is a little much. It’s not as if I was nailing the neighborhood pets to trees. But I could be pretty insufferable. My mother described her childhood self in the following ways: obedient, responsible, and affectionate, and I believe her. My childhood self was the opposite: I was bossy, obstinate, and I thought I knew everything. I regularly argued with her and with all kinds of authority figures. I give myself a migraine from cringing when I recall some of the things I challenged adults on.

Like the time in high school when my teacher was discussing which of Shakespeare’s plays include plays as part of the plot. The Taming of the Shrew did not have a play-within-a-play, I argued. But my confidence was quickly shattered when the teacher started reading from the play and the entire class watched me get corrected. It never crossed my mind that someone who had spent her career studying the Bard might know more than I did.

Or the time I argued with the choir teacher about the location of a concert he was attending. He told me the venue, but I was convinced I had heard on the radio that it was being held somewhere else. I kept arguing anyway until he finally offered to retrieve his tickets from his office to prove me wrong. He was right, of course. It’s still not clear to me why I chose that hill. I ran into him a few years after graduation, at which point he felt free to tell me what a pain in the ass I was.

At home, I’d turn simple requests into courtroom dramas. When my mom asked me to vacuum before company arrived, I argued that I’d already done it days earlier. She insisted; I kept debating as if my freedom depended on it, until she finally screamed.

I struggled hard with attention and slacked on most of my studies, even though I harbored grand ambitions of becoming a serious scholar and doing something important with my mind. I didn’t sneak out or party. I just undermined her authority at nearly every turn. And she was raising me alone.

As I wrote about recently, my father showed me love, but he was mostly absent, happy to handle the fun parts of parenting while leaving the hard work to her. He wasn’t there to enforce “shut up and listen to your mother.”

It wasn’t just my private mutiny that soured my mother on me. When I felt she was being unfair, I could be outright cruel. A handful of times I told her I hated her, and a few times I called her a bitch. I had become the angry-defiant-child-with-an-absent-father cliché. It was a stereotype I was aware of even then, but I didn’t know how to stop becoming when my emotions boiled over. The shame hit me hard after every time. I always apologized, but the damage was done.

The famed psychologist Jordan Peterson has a rule: do not let your children become people you do not like. My mom did not have the support needed to shape me into someone she liked. She told me she did not like me often. “I love you but I don’t like you” were her exact words. She loved me despite myself.

Again, extreme, but for my mom, my behavior wasn’t just adolescent rebellion. To her, each act felt like a personal betrayal. Each undone chore or messy room was proof I didn’t love her. Talking back confirmed I was an evil ingrate.

Her general negative view of me meant that even neutral or positive moments could be reinterpreted as something sinister. At eleven, as she got ready for a date with the man who would become my stepdad, I told her she looked nice. She accused me of lying to sabotage her happiness. I denied it, but there was no convincing her otherwise. For years after, I questioned my own intentions and even my sanity around that moment.

That pattern continued with similar accusations. I must be guilty of something, and the only acceptable resolution was a full confession. The last accusation, in my twenties, was that I wanted custody of my younger brother only for the Social Security money.

It was a devastating accusation on its own, but also because by that point I had done real work to outgrow my childhood patterns. The accusation made it painfully clear: in her eyes, I would never be good enough. I was fixed as morally suspect.

She saw the world through a lens that interpreted even benign or generous actions as potentially malicious. She was never diagnosed, but her behavior conforms to some personality disorders.

When I consider her life, it is not difficult to see how she arrived there. She was abandoned by her father as an infant, denied affection and treated as a servant by her alcoholic mother, sexually abused by her stepfather, raped by her first boyfriend, and later emotionally abandoned by my father. Every relationship in her life had confirmed that people were not safe.

And then I showed up. A strong-willed, ungrateful child who pushed against her constantly and adored the father who had abandoned us. Something she could not reconcile.

My mom is someone who never had a safe place. She had too much thrown at her from every angle, for too long, until she shut down and all she could do was sort the world into simple categories. Safe or unsafe. Good or evil. Even her own child.

My mother is an extreme case, but the mechanism behind what happened to her isn’t rare at all. When someone grows up without safety, through abandonment, abuse, or neglect, the mind adapts. It stops trying to hold complexity because complexity is a luxury. Psychologists actually have a name for it. It’s called splitting. Everything gets sorted fast into safe or unsafe, good or evil. It becomes a protective shield, but it blocks the bad and the good.

And I think we are seeing this same pattern on a societal level. We live in a world that throws more information and conflict at us than any human brain evolved to handle. When we feel overwhelmed, many of us reach for the same survival strategy my mother used. We rarely call people “evil” outright anymore, but we achieve the same effect with other labels. On one side, terms like “Nazi,” “fascist,” or “white supremacist” are used in ways that can turn opponents into something morally monstrous and dangerous. On the other side, people do the same thing by reducing those they disagree with to crude stereotypes, mocking their intelligence (e.g., “libtard”), their appearance (e.g., “septum ring theory”), or implying they are inherently inferior because of who they are or what they believe.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting we stop naming things. There are real cases of authoritarian behavior, genuine hatred, and actual harm that need to be identified and called out. The problem is how casually and imprecisely we assign these labels. We apply them with limited context, often relying on secondhand information or the consensus of the side we identify with, rather than taking the time to understand.

I see it play out constantly. Someone expresses a view that falls outside the accepted line, and for others, sitting with anything more nuanced feels exhausting or threatening. So they are quickly assigned a label that carries far more weight than the moment calls for. What should be a tool for moral clarity becomes a weapon that is used to signal allegiance to a tribe.

And we don’t just criticize what someone did or said. We turn it into who they are. A single action or belief becomes the whole person. And once someone is reduced to a label, the conversation most often ends. Empathy is over. It dehumanizes, and in some cases, it even gets used to justify violence.

Nuance disappears. The other person stops being a complicated human and becomes a symbol of everything that is wrong.

When I finally got some distance from my mom, I was able to look at myself with more nuance. I realized my childhood defiance wasn’t proof I was rotten. The truly cruel things I said to her mattered, and I had to own them, but they didn’t get to be the whole story of who I was. First of all, I was a child. And I wasn’t some special brand of evil or uniquely bad. I was regular bad, just delivered at maximum volume and full commitment. And I was capable of changing once I learned how to channel it.

Before I got there, I looked for salvation for my sins everywhere. Jesus and a stint at Bible college. It turns out that being constantly reminded of what a sinner I was, and how Jesus loved me despite myself, felt a little too familiar. I sought healing elsewhere.

I turned to relationships where I subconsciously recreated the exact dynamic I had with my mother as a child: desperately trying to win the affection of people who were hard to please and slow to forgive. It was basically love disguised as a 24/7 struggle session, now with work and bills to boot.

And I threw myself into demanding volunteer roles, hoping that if I performed enough charity, someone, anyone, would finally tell me I was good. I found some satisfaction in being of service, but it couldn’t fully redeem the wretch within.

Finally, I turned to psychedelic journeys and reparenting work. In one session, I sat with my younger self, that loud, defiant, know-it-all girl, and delighted in her. Not in spite of her intensity, but because of it. She was not a problem. She was a passionate and sensitive kid with a very unstable foundation, trying to make sense of the world.

I also realized that many of the traits I was taught to see as flaws are context dependent. My strong will and questioning nature became strengths when paired with discipline and humility. Left unchecked, they made me insufferable, but directed properly, they have become some of my best qualities.

And then I sat with my mother too. Not the exhausted, hardened woman who called me evil, but the innocent little girl she once was, before life broke her trust over and over again. I understood why she couldn’t love me better. That shift didn’t erase the pain, but it freed me to carry the story differently.

We all have that same choice. We are living in an era of rigid moral categories, where ambiguity feels intolerable. When we feel overwhelmed, it becomes easier to label than to make sense of things. Without building our capacity to sit with discomfort, to pause when the impulse to sort people into simple boxes of us versus them surges, we will keep repeating the same pattern: judge first, cause unnecessary harm, and see clearly later, if at all.

Or we can interrupt the pattern. Notice the overwhelm. Resist the reduction. And choose, instead, to understand.

My dad died on New Year’s Eve. I’ve been struggling to figure out how to write about him, because he was never someone I knew how to make sense of.

He neglected my siblings and me. He couldn’t be serious and wasn’t there for us emotionally. He totally dropped the ball on my mom. When my dad lost my brother’s mom when he was just a baby, he began a spiral into depression and addiction and became homeless, leaving me as my brother’s full-time parent shortly after I graduated high school. My brother became like a son to me. He is the light of my life. But taking on that role so early forever altered the course of my life and left my brother with scars he is still recovering from. That is the hardest thing to grapple with. I felt bitter anger toward my dad for years because of it.

And at the same time, in the moments when he was present, my dad made me feel more loved than anyone else in my life ever did. He told me often how much he loved me and how special I was. He dressed up with me every year on Halloween, his and my favorite holiday. He took us camping on the Oregon Coast every summer and played with us the way only a true puer aeternus could. He made me believe in dreams. He had these Aquarian, humanitarian, convention-breaking ideals that totally moved and inspired me. He could talk to anyone. So many people who knew him loved him. He was always telling us to spread love.

Some people in my family wanted me to cut off contact with my dad, and some of them did. They wouldn’t let me say anything positive about him without reminding me of everything he’d done wrong, and I understand why. But I couldn’t do that. I knew if I had, I would have lost something deeply important to me.

Losing my dad and trying to write about him made me think about something I learned years ago about adult children of alcoholics. It was the tendency of people who've experienced deep traumas to engage in black-and-white thinking. That really struck me because I had already noticed it in myself and my siblings.

When something threatens a child’s survival, and not getting the care you need from a parent absolutely qualifies, it puts you in survival mode. There is no room for nuance in that state. People are either safe or not safe, good or bad. And if you are a kid when this happens, before you have had the chance to understand how complicated the world actually is, that pattern can become how you see everything.

Today, it often feels like the world is in a kind of collective trauma response. Social media throws us so much complexity that no one can really hold it all, so a lot of people shut down nuance and go into survival mode. Everything becomes black or white. Everyone is either a hero or a monster, with no in-between allowed. I watched that happen with my dad, within my family. And I think refusing to do that, choosing to hold the full, complicated truth of someone, might be one of the hardest and most important things any of us can do right now.

My dad was neither a hero or monster. He was a real, broken person who hurt people, me included, and who also gave me irreplaceable gifts. I am still learning how to carry both truths at the same time. I think that is the work right now, for me and maybe for a lot of us.

Rest easy, Dad. I love you.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll definitely say it many more times than anyone cares to hear it: even ten years later, I am still floored by the power psilocybin mushrooms had to profoundly change my life. The experience dissolved old traumas I had carried for years and opened the door to healing in ways that nothing else ever had. Like so many with similar experiences, I began to wonder what could happen if more people had access to the same kind of healing.

For the better part of a century now, people moved by the power of psychedelics have suggested that widespread access to them could help heal division. Recent books like How Psychedelics Can Help Save the World (2022) argue that boundary-dissolving experiences make people more eco-conscious, compassionate, and less dogmatic.

It’s become a cliché: if only politicians would drink ayahuasca, they’d return transformed. Late last year, a viral video used AI-generated imagery to play out that fantasy with Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk.

A Blind Spot in the Movement

However, it seems the power of psychedelics to transform depends on something else entirely. Psychedelics had the power to change me because I was already willing to admit when I was wrong and open to being changed by new information. As most of us know all too well, not everyone is like that.

I don’t say this to toot my own horn. For me, humility and openness were tied to insecurity. A shaky foundation in childhood left me unsure of my place and doubtful of my worth. Some people are naturally open, and I think I was too, but my self-doubt made me skeptical of almost everything while also keeping me searching for answers. In short, I never took what I thought I knew for granted.

For others, insecurity does the opposite. Instead of curiosity, it hardens into defensiveness, often rooted in fear of being judged or losing control. As Gabor Maté shares in the film The Wisdom of Trauma, these patterns are not weaknesses but survival techniques. Closing off has been a way to endure harsh conditions where vulnerability was not allowed. Seen this way, defensiveness is less stubbornness than it is a protective measure that once served a vital purpose.

This matters when we talk about psychedelics. Many psychonauts agree that psychedelics act as non-specific amplifiers. They magnify what's already there. If you go into the experience closed off, you might reject anything that doesn't already fit your worldview. If you go in curious and humble, psychedelics can open doors. But they don’t guarantee openness.

Take Aldous Huxley. Nearly a decade before he ever tried mescaline, he had already described in Time Must Have a Stop (1944) the kind of shift in awareness people now associate with psychedelics.

As Laura Archera Huxley later wrote in This Timeless Moment (1968):

The most amazing fact is that Aldous had written Time Must Have a Stop some ten years before he had taken mescaline, yet in the passage describing the transit between two states of consciousness the same preternatural quality of certain aspects of the psychedelic experience is conveyed. The door which later opened wide was already ajar.

In other words, Huxley didn’t need the drug to glimpse those states; he had the openness and imagination already.

What some psychedelic advocates, especially those convinced psychedelics can change the world for the better, often overlook is the role of nature and education in shaping how people experience and integrate their trips. Even those who return proclaiming “we are all one” may treat that oneness as conditional.

You can dissolve into cosmic unity on Saturday night and still wake up Sunday morning ready to shun your neighbor with the "wrong" yard sign.

Echo Chambers, Old and New

Social media has supercharged our echo chambers, feeding us outrage and division daily. Even in psychedelic spaces, which pride themselves on openness, intolerance toward certain viewpoints is common.

I’ve experienced this firsthand and go over it in part 1: Authoritarianism in Psychedelic Spaces: A Mirror the Left Won’t Face.

The ethnobotanist and psychedelic philosopher Terence McKenna often warned that "culture is not your friend." By that he meant that the systems we live in, political, economic, even subcultural, are designed to shape and control us, not necessarily to free us. Psychedelics don’t erase the authoritarian impulse. The urge to silence or punish those who think differently is ancient, and it exists in every political tribe. I don’t think this is the archaic revival McKenna had in mind.

My experiences in the psychedelic subculture have made it clear that the rights we take for granted are never guaranteed. Free speech is never permanently won. It must be constantly taught and defended. The authoritarian instinct does not vanish just because someone has taken mushrooms. Bummer.

The utopian dream of the 1960s counterculture reminds us of this. For all its peace-and-love rhetoric, that generation didn't escape intolerance. Communes and collectives collapsed under the weight of charismatic leaders, and a refusal to tolerate differences. And many of our hippie boomer brethren who railed against the corruption of the establishment in their youth are today glued to mainstream media to inform their opinion. Outrage and activism culture have been co-opted by corporations, especially since the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which Vivek Ramaswamy documents in his book Woke Inc. He explains how the elite, recognizing the power of Occupy to unite people across race and gender around class solidarity, redirected the struggle from class to identity.

It's left me wondering for years now: If those of us who claim to have "seen beyond the veil" can't see the scam, what chance does the rest of society have? Shouldn’t psychedelic insights offer at least some safeguard against the same traps of conformity and resentment that so many fall into without them?

Of course, being aware of the cosmic "ultimate reality" doesn't erase the very real harms people face Earthside, no matter how illusory it all may be (what many refer to as spiritual bypassing). Aldous Huxley put it well: “We must not live thoughtlessly, taking our illusion for the complete reality, but at the same time we must not live too thoughtfully in the sense of trying to escape from the dream state. We must be continuously on our watch for ways in which we may enlarge our consciousness.”

Put another way; to live fully, we must keep one foot in each realm. We become the bridge, holding both the dream and the reality, both the transcendent and the practical, without abandoning either.

As above, so below, and all that.

So, What Now?

I’ve been properly disabused of any naive notion about the power of psychedelics to heal the world, mighty as they be. If we want to truly expand our minds, we need to prime them to feel unthreatened to receive new insights, and we need to learn to share insights in ways that diffuse fear and defensiveness in others.

How do we do this? I started writing this article intending to promote bridge-building organizations and techniques as a starting point. These groups are making a difference, and I have learned many invaluable tools from them. However, something that should have been obvious occurred to me recently: people hate bridge builders. They see us as fence-sitters and filthy centrists, and respect us even less than the people they oppose. If someone is not open to considering other viewpoints, they will not attend a bridge-building session. Or they will attend, walk away, and label the organization as problematic as soon as they’re confronted with opinions that make them uncomfortable. I wanted to try to reach these people, but after some of the harsh responses to my last article, the friends I lost for defending Charlie Kirk’s right to hold his beliefs without being killed for them, and the overwhelming support for political violence from the Left that the tragedy revealed, I no longer believe these people can be reached. At least, not as they are now. Some people simply do not have the disposition for it.

Philosopher and co-author of How to Have Impossible Conversations argued on a recent appearance of Last Meal with Tom Nash that what people need in order to consider new viewpoints is to acquire a specific mindset: “Good, clear thinking is… about an attitudinal disposition… It’s very, very difficult for people who don’t possess the attitudinal disposition to somehow acquire it.” Cultivating this disposition and asking ourselves, “How could I be wrong about that?” opens the door to genuine understanding, but it’s a tough habit to form when people cling to beliefs for belonging.

Boghossian further explains: “Virtually nobody formulates their beliefs on the basis of evidence… We want to belong, we want to be loved… that’s one of the few things we want more than to be right.” The need for love and belonging is a fundamental human trait. So fundamental that it slips under the radar and we are mostly unaware of how much it controls us. Although the threat of losing one’s career and livelihood for speaking against dominant narratives is a legitimate concern, supported by numerous documented cases, most people no longer live in social structures where group ostracization equates to a literal threat to survival. But we may as well be. Our hard wiring is the same. It’s ancient mechanics that we have to become aware of and work with. Otherwise, we stay clinging to groups where we can’t really be ourselves, no matter the cost elsewise. What many aren’t aware of is the liberation that exists once they speak out and their exile begins.

I was “canceled” as a child by my parents as the family scapegoat and never felt accepted by my peers for who I was. Today, I know the freedom that exists on the other side of that, and what it feels like to be loved by people for who I am and what I believe in. Many others describe being canceled as the catalyst that opened their eyes and led them to deeper connections with people who genuinely know and value them. Once the loss of belonging becomes real, the pressure to conform lifts, and with nothing left to lose, people can finally be themselves.

Boghossian captures the power of this authenticity: “If you live your life and you lie, or you’re not completely transparent in your life, the consequence of that is that… nobody will really know who you are… You’ll never develop an authentic relationship with anybody.”

It’s not a new idea that truth is the foundation of connection. We’ve all heard some version of be honest, be real, be yourself. But I think we underestimate just how literal and uncompromising this is. Without truth, the relationships we build aren’t really ours. They’re built on a version of us we curated to avoid discomfort or rejection. If you want real connection, you have to tell the truth. If you lie, the connections you create might not be real at all.

And we have to show love to the people who go against the grain, understanding that it’s almost always easier to simply go along with the group, and acknowledge the courage it takes to do otherwise. Maybe they have something crucial to teach us. Groups that do not allow critique or dissenting voices often alienate people to the point of losing them, or they fail because they ignore valuable input. From a practical standpoint alone, rejecting disagreement is simply bad for business.

Of course, some have made being contrary for the sake of it a virtue, a la Nick Fuentes and his outspoken admiration of Hitler, amongst other things. But we’re going for authenticity here, not reactive cries for attention.

Many suggest that Fuentes’ rise to prominence is a response to the intolerance and the preponderance of baseless accusations from the Left. Someone being falsely labeled a Nazi too many times has nothing to lose and a ton of resentment and perhaps figures they may as well become a Nazi. Nick Fuentes spoke to a generation of young men who were told they were inherently toxic, rejected for who they were, and given neither support nor direction, and who in response became something worse. If people are allowed to speak freely without having the worst assumed of them, and if critique is delivered with care rather than condemnation, the edgelords lose their edge. We give people a reason to improve when we make it okay to be wrong, and when we hold the possibility that we might be wrong too. If we sit upon a throne of righteousness that others can never ascend, there is no incentive to grow.

What Being Psychedelic Really Means

In the early days of my psychedelic inquiry, I treaded very carefully. I spent years reading about psychedelics before ever trying them. Part of what made me feel comfortable eventually exploring them was the humility I saw in Terence McKenna’s approach. He carried a striking modesty in how he spoke about his psychedelic insights.

He often reminded his listeners to stay skeptical of psychedelic phenomenology or theories, once saying, “I don’t believe this stuff. I entertain ideas, but I don’t give belief over,” and warning that “you have to be careful not to believe your own line.” And a personal favorite of McKenna’s: “Part of what being psychedelic means, I think, is living relentlessly with unanswered questions.” That willingness to admit his ideas could be mistaken and his comfort with ambiguity made me take his position more seriously.

The real magic of psychedelics only happens when we meet them with openness and humility. Without it, nothing shifts. We cannot expect those who thrive on rigid certainty to be fundamentally changed by mushrooms.

But we can choose differently. Those who are willing to be humbled, to admit “I could be wrong,” are the ones who can be transformed. And if enough of us take that seriously, I think the collective tide could begin to turn. That’s how we make the shift: not by waiting for politicians to have revelations, but by ordinary people embracing humility and openness to new insights until leaders have no choice but to follow.

McKenna also famously quoted Walt Whitman: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” Psychedelic thinking encourages us to embrace that kind of complexity, to see that reality is far richer than our instinct to collapse it into something simple, and to consider that this truth might be far more exciting than frightening.

Another sentiment I think is worth remembering comes from Timothy Leary: “You are only as young as the last time you changed your mind.”

The Refuge We Need

I think the real promise of psychedelics isn't in creating a particular political outcome, but in building a cultural refuge where freedom of thought and expression are truly honored.

Right now, many psychedelic communities claim to value openness, but in practice they only allow the "right" kinds of expression.

I know this sounds like a basic concept, but it still needs saying: If psychedelics are going to play any role in healing polarization, it won’t be by forcing one worldview on everyone. It will come from creating spaces where difficult conversations and diverse perspectives are met with curiosity and an understanding of our shared humanity rather than condemnation.

I want to be part of a psychedelic movement that embraces the wisdom that Huxley and McKenna arrived at in their later years. For all their waxing poetic and psychedelic philosophizing, to me the most profound of their messages are also the most simple;

Aldous Huxley admitted at the end of his life:

"It is a little embarrassing that, after forty-five years of research and study, the best advice I can give to people is to be a little kinder to each other."

Terence McKenna said in his final months:

“At the end of the day, it is really about love. That is the only thing that matters, the only thing we take with us.”

If psychedelics reveal that we are all connected, that means accepting that others may be unaware of it, express it differently, or reject it entirely. And still, we are called to love.

Our task now, in my humble opinion, is to create spaces where we can embody this kind of love. Spaces where people can wrestle with complexity, engage with challenging ideas, and treat disagreement as an opportunity for growth. Even if no consensus is reached, we leave with a deeper understanding of how another drop in the cosmic ocean thinks and feels, and that alone is worth the price of admission.

Before sharing my experiences in psychedelic spaces, I want to be clear: my critique of the Left is not an endorsement of the Right. I turned to Leftist spaces out of disillusionment with the Right’s shadows, and those shadows still trouble me deeply. My aim is not to fuel division but to call for honest self-reflection. If we hope to end intolerance, each of us must be willing to examine how we contribute to it.

I want to acknowledge that not everyone in these spaces acted as I describe. Many did not, and I witnessed genuine moments of compassion and openness. Yet the intolerance I encountered became so pervasive that it eclipsed the good, leaving me unable to see a way forward. My aim is not to dismiss the positive, but to speak honestly about what dominated my experience in psychedelic communities, which are overwhelmingly leftist. The Left often stresses the importance of honoring lived experience. This is mine.

DARVO and the Authoritarian Instinct

On September 13th, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, a Facebook friend prominent in psychedelic education wrote: “There is no militant Left. It is infighting within the Right.”

He even posted a photo of the alleged killer in a track suit, presenting it as “evidence” that Kirk’s murderer was a Groyper.

But when the alleged killer’s story came out, did my friend retract the claim or admit the mistake? Nope. He went silent. Others on the Left simply moved the goalposts: “So it wasn’t what we thought? Who cares. Kirk’s words were so hateful you cannot blame people for lashing out.”

That kind of response is not just dishonest. For those unfamiliar, psychologists call it DARVO: Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. It’s a tactic where wrongdoers deny responsibility, attack those who call them out, and flip the narrative to make the victim into the aggressor.

The progression goes like this: “I did not do that. And if I did, it was not that bad. And if it was, it was not my fault. And if it was, then you deserved it.”

DARVO is more than dishonesty. It reveals an authoritarian instinct: refuse to admit fault, punish dissent, and justify harm so long as it serves the “right” cause.

When I Believed Authoritarianism Was Only a Right-Wing Problem

For most of my life, I associated authoritarianism almost entirely with the political Right.

As a child, I watched President Reagan’s full-scale drug prohibition deny people the right to cognitive liberty.

As a young adult, I saw George W. Bush expand government power through the Patriot Act, sweeping surveillance, and torture at Guantanamo Bay.

Today, Trump openly flaunts authoritarian acts and impulses, louder and more blatant than ever. He mused about sending American citizens who commit crimes to the infamous El Salvadoran prison, CE COT. He tried to criminalize flag burning even though the Supreme Court has ruled for decades that it is protected speech. He fueled his supporters with false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, setting the stage for the unrest that followed.

For years, I believed authoritarianism was a Right-wing disease. What shocked me was when I saw the same patterns emerge in psychedelic spaces, the very places I thought would be least likely to adopt them.

What I Saw in Psychedelic Spaces

In 2017 I co-founded Psanctum in Portland, Oregon, a psychedelic education nonprofit that hosted conferences, integration circles, community resiliency workshops, and a weekly open mic. Later, I launched Psanctum Thrift Store to fund legal psychedelic therapies. Since 2017, we held more than 400 events.

I believed most of the people drawn to our events and thrift shop would embody compassion, tolerance, and free expression. Often they did, in ways that moved me deeply. But just as often, I saw something else: compassion applied selectively, intolerance toward certain viewpoints, and a culture where conformity was demanded.

Here are just a few examples:

• During planning for a conference, we were harshly criticized for not having enough non-white speakers, even though we had not yet confirmed anyone. My business partner had mentioned to this individual that we were in communication with Graham Hancock and Dennis McKenna as potential keynotes. This was seen as “racist.”

• Later, when a flight delay forced us to shift the schedule at that conference, someone accused us of racism for bumping her slot, even though everyone’s slot had been moved.

• A friend and respected scholar with five published books on psychedelics was denied a speaking slot at a conference. When he asked why, the organizer told him, “There’s no bias, you’re just a white guy.”

• At the psychedelic society where I first volunteered, I was accused of “white fragility” for questioning the validity of the Implicit Association Test, a tool later discredited by its own creators. I was later denied a table at their conference unless I took racial sensitivity training.

• At our open mic, we were once accused of harboring white supremacy because we allow free speech. In reality, no one had ever expressed anything remotely supremacist at our events. What we did hear, often without challenge, were negative comments about “white culture”—whatever that means.

• During another one of our open mics, a disruptive participant we asked to leave responded by accusing us of racism.

• Another open mic attendee screamed at my business partner for an accidental misgendering.

• Several times, women in the community expressed resentful, sexist views toward men, and those comments went unchallenged.

Politics in the Thrift Store

Our thrift store required volunteers to function, but volunteers often brought their politics with them.

One threw away a Ted Nugent t-shirt, calling him racist. Another suggested I not sell a film soundtrack, saying it was “Zionist propaganda.” One volunteer even refused coffee from me because the coffee shop owner was married to a cop.

Customers often vented their rage at conservatives, assuming we shared their hatred, and suggested that anyone who didn’t was ignorant or backward.

Coalition Building or Collapse

Even in a community resiliency group, where we had agreed that coalition building meant setting aside differences for a shared goal, someone admitted they had been ostracized simply for questioning aspects of the trans debate.

What followed was not dialogue but insults and accusations. The very behavior we were trying to resist ended up taking over the room.

I could keep going.

Not Isolated, but a Pattern

These were not isolated flare-ups. They were symptoms of a culture repeating itself again and again, in different contexts but always with the same undertone: fall in line with the Leftist narrative or be cast out.

And it was not just us.

The Wider World Mirrors the Same Pattern

• Women’s rights activist Keen has spoken out against the legal recognition of transgender people’s gender identity, arguing that laws allowing self-identification erode protections for women. She has twice been doused with soup at protests and has faced threats of violence for seven years, including one that described her daughter’s bedroom.

• Doctors such as a whistle blower on sex change surgeries and puberty blockers for minors, was intimidated and sued for his actions. The case was later dismissed.

• Former Evergreen State College Professors Brett Weinstein and were harassed and threatened for refusing to comply with a race-based initiative that required them to stay home because of their skin color. They later won a lawsuit, but only after leaving Evergreen, as the threats and hostile climate made it unsafe for them to continue their academic careers there.

These are just a few of the high-profile cases. Thousands more have been branded as bigots or traitors, with many losing their jobs or facing threats of violence for questioning the status quo.

The Campus Double Standard

Look at college campuses. What happened to Charlie Kirk should have been no surprise to anyone paying attention. For years now, leftist speakers deliver their talks without disruption. Invite a conservative, and suddenly there are mobs, smashed windows, threats, and sometimes outright violence.

It is not that conservatives find Leftist ideas harmless. Far from it. To many on the Right, Leftist views erode the very values they hold most dear. The difference is that conservatives generally still recognize the Left’s right to hold those views.

Facing the Mirror

This is what I have seen again and again in Leftist circles, and it is why I feel compelled to hold up a mirror. The Left does not deny its authoritarian streak. It condemns it on the Right while embracing it in itself, convinced that its moral framework justifies control, punishment, exclusion, and even physical harm. From that vantage point, the usual rules no longer apply. Anything becomes permissible if it advances their vision of a better world. What they fail to see is that this mindset is the same one that has fueled every tyrannical regime in history.

Why I Stayed So Long

So why did I stay in my community for so long? Because I hoped that love, persistence, and psychedelics could shift the tide. I believed that if I kept showing up, others would eventually join me in creating a space rooted in curiosity and free expression. That hope sustained me for years, but in the end it was too fragile to withstand the constant pressure of intolerance, even though many people were genuinely open and supportive. For some, our community became a place of connection and healing. For others, it seemed only to reinforce their intolerance.

The Final Straw

This is not to say my business partner and I always handled things perfectly. We did not. There were times when dialogue broke down and frustrations boiled over. It usually started when we shared a view that challenged the Leftist perspective, and someone interpreted our position in the least charitable way possible. In turn, we sometimes took the bait and responded with divisive rhetoric of our own, only deepening the divide. That does not erase the intolerance we faced, but we remain responsible for our own actions.

In June, my business partner spoke out online against aspects of the trans and non-binary movement. His comments led some people to boycott our store. Fair enough. People are free to vote with their dollars, and that is part of the risk of being a business owner who makes their politics known.

What is not acceptable are the accusations of transphobia for his disagreements and comments like, “hope his shop has 🔥 insurance.”

That moment was the final straw. On top of the daily challenges of running a nonprofit, I was demoralized and tired of being afraid, worn down by the constant strain of trying to hold space in a community where we were clearly not welcome.

When our landlord put the building up for sale, I knew I did not have the strength to uproot the business and start again.

What Comes Next

Since closing the business in July, I already feel tremendous relief. I can raise questions and share concerns without fear of being boycotted … or firebombed.

I’ve spent this time writing about what I experienced, reflecting on how we got here, and training to moderate discussions with a bridge-building organization.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk, and the attempt to silence his voice through violence, has laid bare the urgent need for spaces where constructive dialogue can thrive. The case itself is steeped in suspicious details. Many have pointed out that the texts between Tyler Robinson and his boyfriend sound utterly contrived. Emerging information challenges the media’s narrative, and while it doesn’t disprove the story, it’s a convenient setup to paint the killer as a Leftist dating a trans person. I’m not certain either way. It’s a poorly kept secret that a covert elite manipulates the media to sow division, fueling chaos and instability to entrench their control. We must reject this trap and rise above partisan divides. Truth belongs to no political party.

We need more spaces to rediscover our shared humanity, recognizing we have more in common with those we disagree with than the wealthy elites orchestrating division behind the scenes. The usual debate formats too often collapse into people talking past one another, accusations of bad faith, and shouting matches. What we need instead are new structures with clear rules of engagement that safeguard against these pitfalls. Fortunately, there are people and organizations working on such models. For example, ’s Spectrum Street Epistemology, rooted in the Socratic Method, guides people through respectful questioning to uncover why they hold certain views and how open they are to revising them. Similarly, Stephanie Lepp of is developing an ‘anti-debate,’ a new format designed to incentivize steel-manning and the integration of different perspectives.

To reiterate, this isn’t about downplaying the authoritarianism from the Right, which I could easily spend countless words dissecting. What I am saying is that we cannot credibly resist authoritarianism on one side while excusing it on the other. The refusal to do so, and the willingness to justify or even celebrate political violence, has disturbed many people and pushed thousands on the Left rightwards. If those on the Left want their values to be taken seriously, they must hold themselves to a higher standard.

For me, that begins with understanding my own triggers and how to handle them, learning non-violent communication, and continuing my involvement in bridge building organizations. My focus now is on fostering dialogue that is structured, fair, and grounded. I want to help create environments where people of all perspectives can show up fully, be heard, and remain civil even when the conversation becomes uncomfortable.

It is not about Left versus Right, but about whether we can resist the instinct to otherize and dehumanize. If we cannot, acts of violence like the assassination of Charlie Kirk will shift from rare exceptions to a regular part of our future, affecting us all.

This reflection is the first part of a larger conversation. In my next essay, I turn from my personal experiences in plant medicine spaces to the deeper philosophical question: can plant medicines really help heal division, or do they risk amplifying the very authoritarian impulses they are supposed to dissolve? If you’ve made it this far, I hope you’ll stay with me for Part 2.