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 killer in a track suit, presenting it as “evidence” that Kirk’s murderer was a Groyper.
But when the 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.
Beautifully expressed Eden. Thank you for your courage and willingness to say what many of us are thinking but are afraid to say in public spaces.
Well said. There are certain perceptions regarding Trump's policies and the 2020 election I would challenge, but that's a discussion for another time... What I absolutely agreed with you is this mirror needs be held up for those in the occult/witch community as well. What you said about the psychedelic community is what I have wanted to say about the witch community for so long, except you've done it much more eloquently than I could/would. So thank you for putting my sentiment into words.
There is never enough emphasis on the need to watch out for propaganda and misinformation from both sides. And yes by having real open-minded discussions and willingness to hear the other side out would be one way to fight the purposeful division by the covert elite.