Jay Michaelson, an author, journalist and rabbi whose books include The Heresy of Jacob Frank and who serves as field scholar at the Emory Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality, talks with Pinchbeck about what a second Trump administration might mean for psychedelics. Michaelson, whose Substack piece on the subject anticipated a coming pivot, notes that figures around Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are hostile to FDA regulation and have flagged the rejected MDMA application for expedited review. He warns that compounds now in the pipeline are not attached to therapeutic modalities, which could open the door to off-label prescribing of the kind already routine for ketamine and Abilify. He points to rising emergency room visits in Oregon and Colorado and New York's cannabis rollout as cautionary cases. The conversation later turns to Israel and Gaza.
Guest: Jay Michaelson
In brief
- Michaelson argues that psychedelics could be fast-tracked or deregulated under Trump because influential figures in the coalition oppose FDA regulation.
- He notes that the FDA rejection concerned MDMA-assisted therapy specifically, whereas newer applications in the pipeline detach the compounds from any therapeutic container.
- Michaelson warns that off-label prescribing, already common for drugs such as ketamine and Abilify, could push psychedelic use far past approved indications.
- He says Oregon and Colorado are already tracking a rise in emergency room visits following decriminalization.
- Michaelson cites New York's cannabis rollout, which produced a gray market of unlicensed shops and failed the communities it was written to repair, as a model of how legalization goes wrong.
- He says he can no longer defend Israel's continuing actions in Gaza and the West Bank, which he argues have no remaining military justification.
Full text
hey everybody today I'm here with uh author and journalist and uh Mystic uh Buddhist Jewish rabbi scholar uh political uh what do they say mck Breer uh Jay Michaelson and of course as always if you enjoy this content please uh like Please Subscribe join the channel uh we're growing slowly slowly someday hopefully we jump we jump we make a make a Quantum Leap and we grow faster faster but uh anything you can yeah if you can if you can describe that very helpful so Jay yeah I ran into you at at a subet gathering I remembered that I published actually one of your books years ago through my uh imprint at evolver editions and um yeah as we were speaking it just seemed like we had a lot of um you know interests that are that are very similar and and approaches that are maybe in some cases different in some cases similar how are you uh feeling these days how anything else you want to add how you know how do you describe yourself Define yourself in relationship to the what we're facing right now you know yeah I mean I like that um list of Appalachians at the beginning it's always fun to see which Jay Michaelson gets introduced at uh in podcasts so thanks for introducing several of them um yeah I you know I think it's a weird moment where a lot of my work is at the intersection of spirituality and politics so how the human mind influences our political decisions and and lives and also conversely how our inner lives are shaped by our our surroundings and our conditions and you know we're recording this in December 2024 so that's um front and center I think and uh also you know we we talked a lot about this for the last three four years I've been working in the Psychedelic space and you know you've been here longer than I have uh so that was that was a fun conversation as well in a very crowded room yeah I mean um yeah I mean you know um well let's start with that one of the things that got interested me immediately when we were speaking uh was the um question of what the Trump uh kind of uh situation may mean for psychedelics and actually there's a chance that they may get uh you know kind of fast-tracked or deregulated uh so and then you also had you know as I would have some concerns about that so maybe we can talk about that a little bit yeah just I just did an article on that uh you mentioned um on suback my own my own newsletter um which I called the coming coming pivot in psychedelics and psychedelic science and I think we might be you know it's still as of our conversation moment right now it's always tricky we don't know which faction of the Trump Coalition will prevail in any particular area or in any particular decision right now you know some of the key people making decisions in this area include Elon Musk are RFK and and a whole host of less well-known figures who are very friendly to psychedelics and who are unfriendly to government regulation and the FDA decision on MDMA was specifically called out by one of these guys I'm trying to remember which one as something to be reviewed you know in an expedited way and you know it's not who knows right but it's foreseeable conceivably that if other psychedelic medicines including quote unquote pillon psychedelics right so listeners of this podcast probably know the MDMA application from the fdm FDA was actually for MDMA assisted therapy right so it's for MDMA in the context of therapy which was part of what led to it getting rejected um it just was a little bit complicated and then we could we could go down that rabbit hole if you want but there are in the pipeline uh just psychedelic medicines that are not being attached to therapeutic modalities necessarily and we could see kind of off-label use of psychedelics in a pretty pretty short order it's not like totally a prediction but it is possible and I would just say maybe people aren't aware you know the a large percentage of legal medication that is consumed in the United States is prescribed quote unquote off label which means it's approved for one thing but used for something else ketamine is one example um but also one of the leading um medications prescribed for depression Abilify was for a while only approved for schizophrenia it's an antis psychotic it's a very powerful pharmaceutical but for years now it is approved for depression and for other uses but for years it was being prescribed quote unquote off label and so that could that's what I see as you know if if psychedelics medicines were only prescribed for their specific conditions for which they've been approved that's one thing but that's not how it works well what are we seeing because there's a few cities where psychedelics have been decriminalized are we seeing problems like emergency room visits like anything going on with that we are I mean I think you know there's yeah if if you look at at the um certainly in Oregon where it's being tracked carefully also in Colorado yeah we're seeing a rise in ER visits and we're seeing you know if you look I think it might be instructive to look at cannabis um where obviously decriminalization and legalization is pretty far ahead I would think we would agree that cannabis in general is less harmful uh potentially harmful uh than misuse of psychedelics and yet there again you know we're seeing a kind of just in cannabis a kind of gigantic cluster um in New York for example New York state passed a pretty Progressive kind of awesome uh decriminalization uh bill but then completely bungled the rollout so the what one of the provisions of the bill was that people you know this was supposed to help communities that had been harmed by the drug work primarily communities of color in in New York state and it has not really played out that way because the the roll out was so bad that now if you walk down the streets everyone knows this if you walk down the streets in New York City there's kind of every block has a sort of gray Market mostly illegal weed shop um and the cops are just playing whack-a-mole trying to shut these things down and so there's just a lot of I would say it's kind of a wild west moment and if we imagine it probably won't be similar exactly like that with psychedelics but if we imagine something similar you know it's really scary and it could also parenthetically I don't think this is the main thing but it could also lead to a backlash you know if we do really see an increase in in people having extremely difficult experiences that aren't held properly if we're seeing therapists or other practitioners who who aren't you know up to Snuff we see cases of abuse obviously we've already seen those and it's just you know I think you and I share a respect and a reverence for these compounds and their capacities and that doesn't mean we would just want to hand them out on the street right reverence implies respect and also a caution we may also have slightly different um views I mean I've become more and more um concerned about the Psychedelic movement um on a on you know on a level that you know might you might actually think a little bit weird or I mean like um you know so I mean yeah I mean I mean I mean you know there's a question of um you know even doing it in therapeutic contexts you know I don't know if you saw this a lot of people have been talking about the emerald podcast their recent uh was it Joshua Shri the recent thing on on guardianship no I actually just listened to his episode on fire but I hadn't listened to the one on guardianship yeah and it was somebody I had a piece where I was talking about some of my uneasiness and a number of people um you know directed me to this piece I kind of struggle with like the sort of over prod produced quality of of his podcast a little bit a little too much for me but um you know I can see that that you know that it is impacting people and so on but yeah I mean um you know all these indigenous cultures around the world who you know use different medicines or not even medicines have an understanding of all these different layers of like Spirits you know like middle World underworlds overworlds and as we've absorbed these things into our modern kind of like psychological context you we've kind of taken that away uh it's all evidence-based you know and you know I saw this happening with like maps and Horizons uh over years uh and I remember like um one of my I don't know if you ever read William Oren Thompson did you ever get into him the name yeah yeah fantastic writer his book called coming into being one of the essays there he talks about how um this was you know years back maybe the 90s or something how like um the you know the sort of unprotected use of psychedelics by larger and larger groups of people and also certain impacts of kind of the um you know social Technologies and the internet were actually eroding the boundaries between the psychic and the physical worlds and they allowing for more leakage more more entities to um to enter into the uh the physical world and I don't know that's like um it's kind of a weird level to be like you know maybe we need a little bit of of a pullback um on this because uh maybe we don't really know what we're doing which is kind of what Shri talks about in The Guardian piece also yeah no I you know my um cosmology theology Etc is maybe more um don't noish I don't want to say agnostic because I don't mean it in the sort of strict sense of people who say they're agnostic but in the literal sense of I don't have the nosis um but it's certainly the case that yeah I mean we're messing around with things we don't understand and we are we you know Western privileged folks are are stepping into a system or expropriating from a system of that you know has many thousands of years of development we're just kind of like well let's go and try this and move fast and break things and see what happens and you know I think anyone who wants to defend a purely rationalistic metaphysics of this moment would really struggle to explain the last several years um in the way that human history has has has evolved and devolved and so at the very least like my my my agnosis is serious like it's not a it's not a closeted denial or skepticism and I also think look I it's really I think when people have some other worldly experiences on psychedelics it becomes harder and harder to maintain that kind of flatland metaphysics and you know luckily for me I mean I I kind of have more Affinity with non-dual views of being which but that doesn't account for let's what you've just discussed right entities malevolent entities unknown entities other dimensions it kind of Skips to the end and and skips over some important chapters so I'm aware of of that and and yet you know my own experiences uh particularly on iasco but on other on other things as well do not comp do not uh comport with anything that doesn't have room for entities and other intelligences wait wait that was a roundabout answer but hopefully it was was that mean would say say that again I mean I I feel like I just remember my first my first I experiences were in 2007 I think I'd read your book and I you know we mentioned maybe I'll just mention it uh because it's a good frame um your F you know in breaking up in the head there's a moment Midway through the book where you you kind of do what um um What Jeffrey kpel calls the flip where you flip out of let's call it flat land materialism into something else um and it was uh that was an amonita mushroom right I think it was it was that experience where they what was the never took amonita okay it was something else so there was some time where you went to your kitchen and the mushrooms were standing in the kitchen and they asked why that wasn't me actually that was a story I counted from somebody else that wasn't you this was a formative myth in my Consciousness anyway that was a a shaman I met I think from Massachusetts there's a moment where there's like in the book there's like just just so you can understand reader I I think that's what was happening like I don't think that this was an imaginary thing and this was a projection of the of the subconscious of the unconscious no I mean I think you this was how I misremembered you yeah the the voice in the in the book says you know no I think this actually happened that there was some Consciousness in the mushrooms that was speaking wor was speaking wor the anote from Richard the Garder right so that you know I mean I that was in my brain already so it was in this it was in the mindset that already went into to iasa but certainly those experiences of interacting with consciousnesses and intelligences that if my mind was was was creating those even with some chemicals involved that's pretty impressive but that's definitely not what the phenomenology of the experience was I just was on um a different podcast I was on 10% happier which is Dan Harris who's much more skeptical I think than I am and uh you he was taken aack when I I told my own iasa stories and I said well I'm just I'm just telling you about the phenomenology like I don't know I can't make I'm not making an ontological claim yet as to what as William man Thompson also talks about how like having a rational material skeptical worldview as the predominant one is like could be fantastic if there are malevolent spirits and archons that are trying to like infiltrate our reality like having everybody not believe that that's even right best way best opportunity right that's a great tactic right the best thing the devil did was convincing the world who didn't exist right and then you have I've been going to burning men for many years and you know not only do hippies obviously go there but the tech Elite and also the you know qu of all the U you know people from massive financial backgrounds like the you know Rockefellers and the Roth Childs and um uh and all all the everybody you know there has been exploring these kind of psychedelic um experiences and all well and even on a even on purely I don't know simplistic level right stra described psychedelics as a non-specific amplifier of Consciousness right non-specific right so sure if a bunch of like peace and love types you know take a psychedelic and it reveals or enhances or amplifies that aspect of their Consciousness you might be mistakenly of the belief that psychedelics always lead to peace and love outcomes but that's not that's definitely not what what's the case in indigenous Traditions again like to me I look at these indigenous Traditions as the empirical record dating back for a very long period of time the same thing was my Approach with meditation and Buddhism right it's like well here are the people who've done this for hundreds thousands of years this is the data bank right this is like this is the you know I don't want to like make it too Tech sounding I mean this is the repository of wisdom by the people who actually did the things right this is the empirical evidence and so if the empirical evidence stating back is that there there are these malevolent forces as well right that psychedelics are used for you know in brara as well like it's not just for healing in the sort of conventional sense but can also be used for sinister motives that feels like pretty relevant empirical data for me and we can translate that into some other metaphysics but certainly that it has that capacity and when I look at some of the I would say weird right-wing stuff that's happening in the Psychedelic space yeah I mean it it it it's that seems to be the case like there are people going in with a a sort of dark quasi transhumanist but also elitist transhumanist worldview and they come out believing that in a Messianic way Elon Musk and potentially an addiction to camine um yeah and and you know his that whole um Circle right I mean it's not just Elon not just Peter teal it's not it's this it's sort of a right it's within you know some of the folks who are bringing some of the medicine out also have that kind of view and and yeah I don't so whether it's um demons with a capital D or just some some questionably ethical or unethical actors or people with very different values for mine you know that's it's a non-specific amplifier I just come back to that as almost like a touchstone right when whenever I get to carried away because I do still have a view that the releasing of these compounds first can bring a lot of healing in a sort of ordinary sense right it's they clearly work for people with PTSD and and with other conditions great so and not to minimize that that is great but also I do have some psychedelic messianism still in me that there is they do on balance have a capacity to open the mind in ways that almost no other intervention does and we need that yeah well let's talk about uh before turned on the recorder uh we had had a little bit of a uh discussion around um kind of the uh in a way I had a you know 2012 uh which my book from 2006 had a sort of U Messianic um kind of uh you know perspective in a way uh based on these sort of you know prophecies from different cultures we were talking about your work on um uh Frank what was his first name the uh Jacob Jacob Frank yeah Jacob Frank who um you know sort of inherited the sabbatia I guess Messianic tradition I'm not I'm not super well versed in all this stuff but um yeah I was surprised that um you were kind of open to that dialogue in a way I had you pegged as a more rationalist kind of a person maybe you've made some shifts but um yeah I mean um uh how are you you know what what what are you feeling me yeah as you say there's things about the situation now which are hard to completely just parse from a purely rational like uh perspective like a sort of rational liberal humanist perspective it feels a little bit like we've pitched into something else would you say yeah I mean at at the very least the jury is out so I'll just you know maybe back up a little bit and talk a little bit about what we just talked about before the microphones were on um and um you know so Jacob Frank was an 18th century Jewish heretic part of a Messianic movement that had been going on for about a hundred years uh as you mentioned and whether he declared himself the Messiah or not is maybe unclear but he was certainly a millennialist thinker and I think millennialism is more helpful than messianism because it's broader millennialism for as Scholars use the term just refers to any kind of end times or transformational moment thinking so some Scholars have millennialism think of some versions of of socialism as millennialist because it's kind of positing a radical change to a very different future from the present right obviously in most versions of socialism that's not super natural right but it does it it fits the kind of grammar of millennialism that there'll be some pretty intense period of transformation uh after which we will be living in a very different reality but certainly millennialism includes all of the kind of apocalyptic Cults UFO Cults false Messiah true Messiahs um and c and 2012 as well so there is like as a scholar as I have a Ph D in religion and and from a scholarly point of view like it's always been 5 Minutes to Midnight um I'm teaching I'm going to be a visiting Professor next year at Harvard Law School actually and teaching partly on psychedelics law but also teaching on antinomianism which is the belief that it's proper to disobey the law for one reason or another or that you're released from the confines of the law and that view is very frequently coupled with apocalyptic worldviews or end times World Views and it's just really I was doing research for it literally yesterday I mean I've spent 15 years on this subject and I was discovering new end times heresies that I hadn't actually heard of that dated back to some of the earliest centuries of the of the Christian era and it's just all this is a part of human nature right we're all going to die um the world is always seems very different from how it was when we grew up and we have idealized visions of what it was when we were children and so it feels like things are always getting worse or at least more complicated and people have always felt this way way so that's like the skeptical side and on the yet on the other on the other side it does feel like the changes that we've witnessed in our lifetimes seem to be I would even say objectively measurable as an order of magnitude larger uh than the changes that someone even someone who spent let's say 1880 to 1950 right so they grew up at a time where there were you know very few cars and there were you certainly no airplanes let alone telephones and I mean that was a pretty radical 75 years but it still feels and we might just be getting started obviously with AI uh and you know there who knows what the future brings with climate catastrophe who knows what the future brings even what we've seen in the last few years between covid and and the rise in nationalism and just the rise of the internet over the last you know 40 years May pale in comparison to what's coming in the next 40 years so it does feel like we're at and I've written this before in my my own books like it feels like we're in some kind of chicken game of chicken between some forces some aspects of being that promote more wisdom and others that really don't and that are driving us into a kind of suicide packed as a species and so I don't know I I yeah I'm not yet on your team exactly but I still am in I'm definitely not dismissive either was it's good an explanation of anything and we were joking beforehand you know I think you took some Flack for 2012 but maybe it was actually just a few minute a few years late I mean if we look 20 2008 to the present just the convulsions that not only the United States but really around the around the world that we've endured and the ones that seem to be coming there definitely does seem to have been a pivot at some point yeah and also I always tried to leave you know room for skepticism I mean I I was never being like dogmatic I hope um about you know I mean we made a documentary in 2010 called 2012 time for change where we were looking at uh you know not like a rapid apath apotheosis but more like an opportunity to kind of um reconnect with indigenous practices and kind of like um shift the direction of our society uh towards things that are more regenerative and um likely to be sustainable for for human beings um and yet at the same time as that's happening this is what that like game of chick feels like right so at the same time as that's clearly happening among some segment of the population we're also entering this new phase of American History where to whatever extent we've had a democracy you know that that democracy is under threat that it's really never seen before and the aggregation of wealth on the top 0.1% and the you know we're now I mean I think to me I see the whole Luigi benion moment you know and the shooting of the United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson as like another little data point on your spreadsheet right that we're at this moment where there is a do there is a clear awareness among a lot of people especially young people that the systems the unjust systems that in that are in place are are apparently like unchangeable like nothing seems to change them politics doesn't change them and so I'm not here to justify you know the murder of a human being but I am here to understand the truth behind some of what he what the Assassins said right that there just doesn't seem to be and climate is the same way and I think some of the extreme actions let's say of Extinction and rebellion and others who are taking I just call them provocative actions I guess around around the climate crisis comes from a similar place that nothing seems to dislodge this headlong rush into if not species wide suicide then certainly a radical transformation for the worse for for the planet and so I'm you know I'm also a parent and kind of holding that not as an abstract thing that I talk about in a cafe but in a very realworld question for my own daughter you know that's why it feels like this game of chicken totally yeah I mean it's a it's a pretty terrifying in reality uh for yeah I mean obviously you know there's so many things we could talk about I wanted to get into you know this area a little bit um yeah I mean I mean one question is you know I mean you write about you know from a sort of you know in a way liberal perspective for Rolling Stone you know is that even going to be possible in a few years you know because um uh we could already see that you know theyve teed up against ABC the media capitulated almost you know without even you know them it's it's like are our our our society has so little moral backbone it feels like you know these institutions will just immediately capitulate um rather than try to stand up to uh you know um kind of despotic approaches you know well I remember you know in the last 20 30 years when there was the sort of corporatization of big media right ABC's owned by Disney for now MSNBC you know is on by Comcast but you know there's like there for the moment and we sort of said probably this isn't going to turn out that well you know having these gigantic media Mega corporations own journalism and sure enough I mean I I can't really disagree with Disney's decision as a purely Financial matter to settle that lawsuit with Trump right and in case listeners you know Trump had actually sued ABC news for something that George Stephanopoulos said which is absolutely Preposterous and has no merit whatsoever but for Trump's whole career you know for now 50 years he's used slap suits right so what is it strategic litigation something something basically harassing lawsuits to get his way and he's now got not only his own resources but also the doj at his soon to be at his disposal so as a purely Financial matter if I'm the CEO of Disney only concerned about maximizing shareholder value definitely take the $15 million write off rather than risk a confrontation with the new authoritarian president so it's almost like again it's system stuff right as we know they've been studying Hungary uh and Orban who basically took over the media there uh and that Playbook is um you know kind of well well defined I mean it is interesting in that Hungary is a you know small country of 10 million and this is a very large and very diverse country of of 300 million so um you know it's hard to say how those same type of tactics will work over time there's some pretty good analyses too you know so for the last since the Civil Rights Movement federalism has really been the friend of the right because it's been conservative States you know refusing to go along first with the Civil Rights Movement then with any other number of somewhat Progressive things that happen on the federal level so now it's reversed right and I am I don't want to sound optimistic or polanish especially because so many people are clearly about to suffer in such profound ways especially migrants and but you know I'm I'm open to the argument that because of the Federalist system and because of the concentration of some you know more Progressive elements in some states that it just be hard to implement orbon authoritarian ISM let alone you know fullon fascism in a country this large then again you know Putin's done a pretty good job and Soviet Union was pretty large also you know and and just the Russia's sphere of influence and China's done a pretty good job and they're much larger uh than the United States but China still doesn't have the kind of federalist structures and that you know it takes time to dismantle the court system which is certainly what Trump tried the F did do the first time and will now do more but it that takes I don't know I have a little bit of Hope in some of our institutions but I can say personally just on the journalism side I had a weird thing happen after the election which was two days after that I was doing a segment on CNN where I sometimes appear and of all I don't really focus on trans issues that much but it's came up in the conversation and and one of my co-panelists referred to trans girls as boys playing girl Sports and we can have a lot we can have a whole conversation about whether trans girls should be playing girls Athletics or not but to deny the reality of trans existence I mean I have plenty of trans friends it's just it's it's kind of an outrage and So I responded and that moment went viral on the right uh which you know you know what it's like when the internet hates you it's not a pleasant moment and so that happened to me but the level of vitriol and threat was definitely new to me and it did feel like there's this really emboldened kind of brown shirt style Elon Musk intimidate everybody thing happening on the right and so even even the so there on the top let's say where it's Comcast or uh Disney or or Amazon Jeff Bezos capitulating that's happening but then here on the bottom as well you know among individual journalists the price just gets higher and higher to do this work and you be to my partner was saying to me the other day like you begin to get some sympathy for the quote unquote good Germans you know who allowed fascism in the Holocaust to happen because these were the good Germans were also in part scared Germans and they were being threatened with being sent off to a concentration camp themselves and so I'm not defending cowardice exactly but I'm just sort of now that we're in it you know gets pretty real in a in a way that's different from commenting on it from afar yeah I've been thinking a lot about um I mean I watched that that that clip and um you know yeah I mean it was that was a difficult moment for you I think um in that uh you know even I who am completely for Trans rights and sympathetic you know although against I guess children getting tode you know gender reassignment surgery felt like the sports thing is kind of like ridiculous like you should not have you know you know bi biologically born men uh who convert to you know go through a trans operation then being able to convert in in sports with women just because they have more you know physical capacity and you Judith Butler I think is was you know somebody who argues against that like for me that was like it's just it's just not not not a not a workable argument you know it just yeah I mean two things on that just not to get down the rabbit hole I mean the first there have been now pretty good data first of all we're talking about like a few hundred kids in the country right because we're never we're almost never talking about trans boys right we're we're generally only talking about trans girls and the ones who want to play athletics it's not a big group so just to say like any air time you know it's one thing on a podcast like this but when CNN decides to devote air time to that issue that's already playing into a pretty calculated strategy on the right which is to make this instead about trans reality and trans lives and actual trans people about this like kind of myth or this like scary thing and that's so and then second actually there have been there's been some good data now on is it is it a is are there inborn advantages um to to be let's let's just call someone an XY chromosome person who then identifies as trans girl or a transom and actually there isn't it turns out there's much more variation in bone structure and so on among women cisgender women than there is between cisgender women and trans women so it's actually even your reasonable Point ends up falling apart you know it's fny like Michael Phelps is a pretty good example like another problem let me just so like just the variation that exists like Michael Phelps is a like freak of nature right the the Olympic swimmer right and there are women who are like that too right and so the variation just within the gender setting aside trans people is actually much greater like we have like an image of like oh some like big you know big boned football player than playing girls sports or something but anyway I don't want to go down the rabbit hole exactly I think that's that's one of those sometimes you have to let certain battles just uh yeah yeah yeah it's not it but just yeah I mean even making that the conversation the way it was that of course in that moment was so frustrating and I will say as a footnote one thing that happened was um when the uh there's a the transports case went before The Supreme Court um a couple of weeks ago and For the First Time the show that I was I usually am on had trans people on the panel which at least if you think about it we would never have like a civil rights conversation you know without someone a person of color on the panel we would never have like a conversation about abortion without a woman on the panel so if there's any upside it was like the people being talked about can just talk for themselves but anyway my point back to our main themes was just the level you know you it doesn't have to be official stuff coming from the Trump doj right culture change happens in lots and lots of small ways and if you get you know and Elon did it himself he picked out a couple of random government bureaucrats who he said we should fire these people and these are just completely random people there's also musk's use of Bot armies you know which he used apparently to inflate Tesla stock and I didn't know that that's wild trial run for that and then he used them to swarm people along with Russia obviously to swarm people negative comments um and then turned a lot of them off right after the election no I I you know I was wondering if some of my social comments were they I were bot generated back in 2012 right 2012 no back in 2016 uh when Trump was running for the first time um I got a wave of anti-Semitic stuff on on Twitter like just all the time hundreds of comments with you know very graphic pictures and stuff like that and and so I was pretty freaked out I think like a year or two later we we understood this was you know a long time ago that this these were all Bots or or sort of if not actual Bots then people sitting in you know Serbia or someplace just you know not actually just training these things out and yeah I mean I wish I'd known that at the time I guess I would have felt less unsafe back in 2016 but I definitely have experienced and I you know what I've had is nothing compared to what a lot of people get all the time online and it just the cost of doing this work goes higher and higher yeah I mean it's just I don't know what I'm going to do like I haven't made up my own decision as to how how I want to keep doing that work um so yeah I wanted to talk a little bit about uh I do follow I know you follow Jules Evans I see you write about him a lot mixed feelings about his perspective uh I enjoyed a lot of his work um but um do you also follow Alexander uh the bigger picture I think so uh he's he's a become one of my favorite he to be part of Rebel wisdom uh he has an excellent piece out uh just came out about um the response to the um shooting uh and uh you know he he references a book called end times Elites counter Elites in the path of political disintegration by Peter turchin which I'm actually finding very interesting he's a historian who has a sort of mathematical and cyclical model for why these you know what we're experiencing now was almost inevitable um you know outside of like you know Trump or whatever but it's um yeah so you have this you know situation where you know wealthy people reach a certain level of um you know kind of um success in a society they start to just aggregate more and more of the of the society's wealth you know for for a smaller and smaller group then you have two you know kind of correlators of that is Elite overproduction where you have too many people who are part of the you know the elites who want to be in the power positions and you have workingclass am miseration and this ultimately leads to you know irreconcilable tensions in the society that um either lead to Revolution Civil War or like fascist takeover you know uh so it's kind of interesting to see it very mathematically explained and he talks about how you know the um or maybe talks about this how in these situations the normal kind of people who become you know kind of like revolutionaries you know uh are similar in status to Luigi Manion they're from like the topper echelons but not like tiptop you know not the 100 million plus category but the know 10 to 20 million or one to 20 million category so somebody like AMA bin ladin or he had whole list of there so yeah it's almost like uh yeah it's very fascinating I we're very much an archetypal thing but the other thing so what what berer talks about which I also found very powerful was uh the the sort of um the the fact that it ultimately comes down to embodiment like we live in this very disembodied and abstracted reality where we can't really put our finger on you know who's causing all this evil you know who's causing you know the extraction of wealth to this small group it just seems like it's very you know but ultimately it does reside in bodies and those bodies can be reached uh so you this is also what happened in you know with the you know 1890s you know anarchism first world war and so on um and there's an interesting article in Jacobin um where she talks about um culturally uh okay we should not we cannot and should not ignore the libidol dimension of this cultural event which is the shooting I mean how everybody has been so fascinated with manon's you know chiseled body and handsomeness and you know he's handsome but he's not like that exceptionally handsome like people have something about it there's like an excess there of Desire well here in the gay world we think he's exceptionally handsome no he's very handsome but I mean he's made the rounds uh he was also by apparently we now know uh you know so we we can't should not ignore theal dimension of this cultural event uh when was the last time a criminal so attractive that the New York Times refused to visually reproduce them culturally liberalism is that true they're like not they wouldn't run the the ABS piot cultur liberalism has been lacking in anything that would satisfy people's deepest drives while people have been uniting around the right and hatred for liberals for wokeness and much more disturbingly for migrants and minorities the center left has offered dry policy half measures and tepid scolding they have responded the same way to Luigi mania this won't work this is from Lisa Liza Featherstone so I saw you you mention a few similar kind of things around um yeah how sort of like tragically wonkish the uh the Liberals and the Democrats are and meanwhile it's like like you know the the lefts and you know the Counter Culture used to have the sort of libidinal world kind of kind of in its in its hand and even comedy is a form of libidinal release like I was thinking the Black Panthers right who were like so sexy right both male and female yeah right and and used it and dressed that way like there wasn't like by accident right it was using that Charisma and that physical Beauty as part of the as as a weapon right in in in the radical work that's really interesting I mean I I do think it's fine the one I think the one thing I'm noticing around the question of embodiment is you know the United Health Care is not the same as as Louis the Louis the 14th or 15th right or 16th right which is to say so Brian Thompson's been replaced right the system I mean I know the new guy wrote an upad but basically the system is UN is unchanged and it feels like like some of these acts of like I forget the exact phrase that you quoted was like bodies are reachable the bodies are reachable but they're also very replaceable right it's just whacka right I mean you'd have to get to the level of like a trump or an Elon or something for an individual body to be significant I think in in the systemic in the system just in the in the way that the system operates right so like a CEO except in very rare cases is totally replaceable um and I've always thought actually by the way that some of the ways that I don't know the Occupy and post-occupy left like talks about CEOs in particular also misses the point I mean it's not it's the CEOs sure but it's the shareholders it's the boards it's the you know it's the it's the entire apparatus that enables these and it is also the legal apparatus that's been captured that enables these huge corporations to exist and to aggregate power the way that they do and I know I sound like I sound like the dumb um leftist on South Park right now but there is some truth there is some truth to that and it's interesting I feel like the left has a lot of the left is understood let's say systemic racism for example and that it's not I would try to make a distinction because I don't consider like the Progressive Democrats left uh I consider them they were like they would have been conservatives back in the 70s you know buil well I was I mean I think the left left when people talking about reparations I don't think that's Progressive Democrats that's the left there so so that's that wing of the of wherever the left we want to call it understand systems you know and I think the sort of socialist Marxist left understands systems but I wonder you know if what I would call The Bernie left does and it it just you know we we are we're creatures of narrative and of myth right I'm thinking of Josh Ry again and the emerald like it's we don't really have myths of of like systemic right like Predator capitalism right which is what what um manion's real Target was right it wasn't really some dude Who's name nobody knew and which is even now hard to remember right it was like it was this outrageous system of which there you know there are millions of people responsible and I don't know it it's just easier I mean you see why demagogues have a better time blaming immigrants since you know since Bernie I haven't seen anyone in within the Democratic party you know sphere who articulates the kind of Rage that Trump captures right and and it's not surprising that we're Bernie to Trump voters right because these are people angry at the system and it's not left right for them it's top bottom and they see that they're at the bottom and obviously it's ridiculous that because Trump's populism is a lie right all of his policies will just enrich the top top but he speaks the lie so authentically right and Elites do really hate him and so he can be anti Elite because even though he's a Senti millionaire or whatever he is now you know he he can kind of he sounds like us and and it's that struggle that I don't know who that next Bernie is right who who was the I don't know I don't see that figure Who can capture and some of it's racialized is it white working class rage I don't know but who can CL capture some of that that rage I don't know so it is an emotional it is AIT it is like that's I'm totally on board with that analysis right and it's like like what would that figure look like obviously the first person we would think of is AOC right but for a like that's not it's not her vibe right that's not what she does and there's also sexism built into it so like if she were to be that angry it would be hard you know you could imagine the criticisms that would be leveled at her that weren't leveled at Bernie and it it just like it's just a real struggle like that there are you know there right-wing authoritarians who can fully lie about their Pro their their actual programs but tell the truth emotionally and I wrote about this a bunch in my you know that in a way Trump is a very truthful person right he's obviously an unprecedented pathological liar but on an emotional level he conveys a truth that certainly kamla Harris didn't convey but hardly any Democrat conveys yeah um yeah and I I guess another you know question around the whole psychedelic thing is um you know psychedelics back when always seem to be Associated more with like you know the counterculture left with you know kind of anarchist Bohemian daian kind of like transformation you know potential and now that also seems to no longer be the case they seem like they have been kind of you know ultimately kind of yeah depoliticized and maybe even they're getting inter ated into this kind of you know kind of pseudo libertarian um philosophy oh sure I mean even I don't know if you still read the New York Times but they just did a piece on CEOs doing psychedelics to to be more efficient and there was actually a really interesting I'm forgetting which it was uh I think it was Swan bagaria who's a psychedelic scholar focuses on Hinduism um and and is very rooted in in India and had a really interesting take on kind of how nonwestern or certainly non-american cultures are interacting with psychedelics in different ways like in China there actually is a decent amount of psychedelic penetration but it's almost entirely about improving efficiency and productivity and stuff like that and the you know and and there's sort of a romanticization obviously an orientalist Western romanticization of India but actually there in in India there's a lot of Suspicion of some of these things and there's already some of the distinctions that psychedelics question so let's say between spiritual healing and bodily physical healing already don't apply as much in the Indian context so it's kind of like well what's what's new here like of course we we have a spiritual integrated spiritual physical health uh response to health conditions like of course we do that already it was really interesting piece kind of problematizing even the association that we had had with a certain kind of person like a countercultural kind a person um what I saw the same thing happened with meditation and mindfulness too though right I mean meditation mindfulness in the 70s and even into the 80s was like just the granola people right and now obviously it's part of HR plans and I I at the time I think I still think this was good because I I still don't hate me too much for saying this but I'm still I think an incrementalist in most areas of the change I want to see in the world and I I've long felt that kind of mcmindfulness could be a good gateway drug into the more transformative capacities of meditation I've written a lot about that and I've talked about it I'm I'm out of the closet as having that sort of secret agenda um for for meditation and I guess there's be more skepticism around that when it comes to psychedelics like would let's say medicalized psychedelics be a gateway drug for some people to maybe literally to then have kind of spiritual opening maybe I don't know but first of first like there has to be some more honesty about that right I mean we're we're creating thousands of accidental Mystics right now right it would be the context I mean um you know in uh I mean we've seen it already so like um the the healing hearts project working with veterans with PTSD who then I'm not I'm saying that actually you would have to give people um if it was an initiatory thing it it would also be about um Society not just part of the problem is that um we're in a hyper individualist Society so we look at everything just the lens of the of the individual um you know whereas that's not how indigenous cultures were using psychedelics you lot varies you know among indigen I mean it depends which cultures and which psychedelics I mean there is definitely a fair amount of iasa use that was relatively I mean the Iowa Scara would be designated to do work on behalf of the community or the place but individuals would also do the work for individual I don't know I think it varies but I just I do think we do have some data now that people who encounter psychedelics in a therapeutic context some percentage have what what scientists call cert experiences which stands for Spiritual existential religious or theological I think uh experiences and the greater those C experiences in the experience the the better result on sort of normal mental health interventions so we're already seeing people go in for uh an intervention for depression let's say or for post-traumatic stress or for anxi acute anxiety and come out with some progress on that and also um something that they understand as spiritual or existential or religious and It's tricky to think about how to be honest about that right we obviously want to we want to make sure and where I so I'm a Emory Center for psychedelics and spirituality and one of that Center's main areas of focus is on spiritual care for people who are experiencing psychedelics in one or another context so we certainly want there to be at least really good spiritual care for those people and we but we also I think don't want it to be a bait and switch where I'm going to give you MDMA you know to deal with post-traumatic stress but secretly it's because I want you know what RI Rick doblin called the spiritualization of humanity right there needs to be like a little bit more transparency like it's funny to imagine almost as a joke like a warning label on you know like a psilocybin pill like warning this pill may give you a depersonalized mystical experience you know that may cause new neural connections to form that change the way you understand yourself but something like that not literally that that's the joke version but there there needs I think and people have been saying this in meditation too wiby Britain and her lab at Brown you know she's focused on the harms that meditation can cause intensive meditation and there again like there's no warning label a lot of the times like you go off on a on a 7-Day Retreat and things happen and not as radically and as quickly in psychedelics but it's interesting one of my colleagues at Emory a scientist named Roman pitz is translating from that meditation harm world and science of which there's now a decent amount of data into the Psychedelic science and harm reduction world so I still there's like a tempered optimism that these kind of spiritual experiences can lead to for more profound openings that can transform people's communities and there's a desire to be really upfront about that because psychedelics are so much more powerful than meditation yeah I still feel like there's something I'm trying to convey that I haven't that I sort of failed to convey um let me try again with a little story um apparently there was a group of Australian Aboriginal uh Community tribe uh and the documentary filmmaker wanted to make a documentary of that Community uh so but instead of just making the film they decided that they would actually I actually saw some of the films it did happen uh that they would ask them first like well how do you guys want to be represented you know how do you think of yourselves like what would be the proper way after after after they showed them a bunch of different documentaries they said well actually we want the whole the whole tribe to be in every shot we don't want to be any close-ups so they ended up uh shooting it uh with a wide angle and in every shot the whole the whole the whole tribe is present um so where you know in everything that you just expressed about your view about the Psychedelic thing it's always like we're still just hyperfocused on this um individual uh and um you know what I guess uh even in terms of the the menion thing in Alex spiner's essay which I definitely recommend he he opens up talking about how there's been studies I think it's like friends walls and so on how like mammals have an inherent sense of like fairness and and social justice in a weird way like um you know if if one mammal gets rewarded or an ape gets rewarded with a cubic cumber another one gets a grape they'll be upset you know if they if it was for the same thing they'll be like how how dare they So like um in a weird way like men I think he somebody I read he had millions of dollars that you know that he was going to inherit or whatever or had or whatever so like you know what happened like in in a weird way it's almost like this oh another thing interesting about him by the way psychedelics were a big thing for him like mushrooms and apparently he did I waska and those Also may have had impacts but he um he went into a obviously he went into a mode where self-interest was over over completely overridden by this felt need that there was like a bigger thing that had to happen that he could be kind of like the um uh the uh kind of uh agent you know of this transformation you know I mean yes and no though right because the precipitating event for you know for for his making that decision was that intense back pain that he had and then you know he couldn't get get treatment for it couldn't get coverage for it and then his outrage you know is a little bit like the Michael Douglas film falling down which maybe we should all rewatch actually I wonder how well it's aged or not you but is that even the case because apparently he was you know he had a millionaire background and his parents yeah yeah no he had the money right but like he didn't have I mean he couldn't access the healthc care he was trying to access I don't know why I don't want to like speak out a turn because I don't know why like he didn't just pay for it right like just pay for all the healthcare but I do know from having read about this particular case that it was his personal interaction with the up Health Care system that created this much rage and also pain right he so he wasn't able to like move the way he you know he did have that cut body right but he couldn't exercise he couldn't have sex he couldn't like like the things that were bringing him Joy because of this injury which you know he couldn't actually do so there was a personal I don't want to like take away from your main point which is the collective rather than individual I just so I don't stands because apparently he he was quite wealthy so he could have figed out yeah no he had the money but again I think it's when you encounter the healthare system in all of its upness as as I certainly have and I assume you have as well you know there's like I think the the non-specific rage at his health condition merged with his rage at the way that the Health Care system was not treating it so even if he had the resources to go to a private doctor to do you know to get whatever care um feel it's like I don't think you can I don't think it was purely an altruistic well I think I think honestly it pretty much was I mean you wouldn't do that otherwise I mean I mean yeah well I mean we can disagree about that I mean I guess you know even if it was altruistic into to some extent it was motivated by personal pain physical actual pain sure I mean that of course is always going to be if you don't have a personal experience of something then you're not going to care about it generally I mean it's too abstract yeah I mean I think that the you know he's obviously a smart guy I mean I think there's a certain kind of nihilism in that rage I don't know nihilism that's that's seems like unfair but like there's certainly an understanding that like his life as he knows it was going to be over uh whether he would be killed or whe or whatever he he surely knew going in so anyway but I I think I think on the back on the communal piece first I think yeah I think it does vary from indigen from culture to culture uh on the on the way in which the collective is centered in the in the altered state experience whether it's psychedelic or otherwise but second you know I don't I mean my theory of change has always been kind of two or multi-sided right the kind of collective it does feel as though the kind of collective change that we want Even if we disagree about exactly what that is um relies on a kind of transformation seems to seems to require kind of transformation that takes place on a Consciousness level and I'm on board that that can be Collective as well as individual and certainly that's my experience in some psychedelics some psychedelic experiences that it's collect it's not me and it's not what's happening in between these ears and yet that experience seems to be at the at present is administered in a person by person form a c qu and crisp a great queer icon of 20th century said that people get stupid wholesale but they get wise retail I think that's probably right I think you know we get stupid wholesale through our culture brainwashing us into stupidity but we all have to take some kind of a retail Journey like in you know on a on a one by oneish even as we do it in in community there's still like that work I don't I don't I don't feel like I'm a prisoner of Western individualism to say that it feels to me consonant with a lot of spiritual Traditions that you need to go on that journey and yeah it's like it's still ultimately hopefully for the bodhisatwa vow right you go on the journey not just to liberate yourself but to liberate all sensient beings and there's no way around that Journey well I'd say you know yes and no obviously we have we have examples like we can look at Tibetan Buddhism you know Indo Tibetan Buddism like not everybody is going to be an enlightened person but the culture was kind of oriented towards that you know pursuit in a way you know and and um you know there you know there there is a sense that you know media and culture is um indoctrination mechanism right that like tells people how to live and what to be and what they can be and what's good to be and you know the culture that we have now um you know really in our in our society is really only telling people a very bad story right like you know you have to have wealth you know you don't matter um you know you have to have Bitcoin you know you're going you're going to be you know oh man don't tell me about I should have had Bitcoin earlier I is that true though I feel like I don't so first of all yes and well look at like just ultimately like how has that culture change like I I think it look at the values of all the shows and movies on like a place like Netflix I mean you know Netflix was um the CEO turns out he was the I think nephew of Edgar Ed Edward bernes Edgar bernes uh who's the founder of modern public relations uh the one who coined the term engineering consent um you know so you know what is something like Netflix is actually an indoctrination platform you know or even you know how the comment system on Facebook uh keeps you from being able to actually have like deep and intelligent uh conversations with people I was trying to be clever because I just pulled up Netflix to like see if I could disagree with you but then I Iz my Netflix is obviously algorithm customized for what I want yeah so yeah like it's it's pushing Amelia Perez which is a you know supposed to be a great movie about a like a a trans person in Mexico and will and Harper it's supp pushing a lot of queer content for me yeah so I can't actually disagree with you because the algorithm has made it impossible for me to see what Netflix is really recommending to normal people no it's not all bad obviously but um yeah I think I still have I mean I I I I I feel like this part of the culture change is going to happen with small communities and even individuals and I do I have a certain amount of guarded optimism that you know the the mainstream has always sucked right I mean I grew up in the 80s right and I think we we're about the same age and you know like I just remember as a very privileged suburbanite you know I just hated everything about the Reagan mainstream whether it was this is your brain on drugs to like every single goddamn TV show to like all of the lies that they were telling on on a constant basis in in politics and you know there was a change that came later you know it was not the change we wanted and it was a change to like something like the center not really the left but I do think culturally if you look at where we are now compared to where we were in 1984 it's pretty different and I I I don't know I feel like that does come come about I feel like that change does happen um I don't know I don't want to sound optimistic because I'm really not uh cool we've been uh yapping for about uh an hourish now um yeah like what do you um you know we talked a little bit about um you know maybe the Democratic Progressive world needs a sort of Li liberal upgrade uh I'm kind of curious uh um you know what what what are your what are your thoughts about what do people do right now like it feels like um yeah we're all just like witnessing this like uh uh train wreck in away well yeah my my next subse SEC piece which actually was funny I was going to publish this week but I had to write on the drones because I live in New Jersey and I'm finding this phenomenon fascinating about how we interpret this this mysterious well by the way I read your piece on that I mean the the best the best I mean I don't think it's it can't you know I don't think it's total nothing Burger but probably has to do with um you know detecting some kind of dirty bomb or radiation yeah I don't buy it I don't buy it maybe I mean I don't know it's like is like that's I don't know it's definitely definitely not aliens definitely not no yeah I'm still I'm still agnostic on that too I I don't I mean I guess it's possible that that my orcus just went on TV and just lied because he's covering up a government program to detect the dirty BMS I don't know I think it's I think it's small aircraft um there's like a lot of because of this this area there's like Teterboro and there's a lot of like small aircraft um there's one in Caldwell uh because there's yeah I mean you know you you and David Pacman agree on was that his name he he also had thing oh it's all just you know everyone's just looking at like you know Venus I just think it's pattern recognition man I don't know I'm willing to be proved proven wrong anyway my the piece I was going to run was like the like this weird Lial period we're in right now which reminds me of the movie Misery when like um you know the author is strapped to the bed and Kathy Bates has like hit one of his his ankles and broken his ankle but hasn't done the other one yet so he has this like 30 seconds of waiting that's where I feel like we're at right now because we don't actually know you know to quote someone cancelled you know Woody Allen once said that um life is divided into two parts the horrible and the miserable like we don't know if the next four years will be horrible or merely miserable they'll definitely be horrible for some people and they'll be horrible if you're a caribou in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge but will they be horrible for everybody will they just be miserable and so it's hard to say what should we do that was your question because it's like we don't yet know you know what we're facing um I don't even you know a lot of people are doing things like deleting their their messages and you know emails and stuff and yeah but I I I don't know how permanent that ever is anyway I mean it's not a bad digital hygiene practice um to to go censor yourself for 20 years of past posts uh so they can't be used against you um but that doesn't feel like it I I think where I've really landed you know I went I I had a rough November partly because that that stuff after the CNN thing and I think when I saw you I was just coming out of it um I think you know there are people who have suffered a lot more than I have who have made some of the best art and history right people who lived through slavery and Jim Crow and created you know Jazz and gospel and Hip Hop and you know if they can do it we can do it I I feel like it's finding and it's true in my Jewish tradition as well right I mean these are people who are incredibly marginalized poor bad life expectancy bad health conditions and they created joyous works of art and music and and so I think it's for me a little bit about finding that capacity of human nature I'm not really wired that way um and so for me it's it's taken a little work and a little like lowl psychedelic use has helped you know even recreational psychedelic use I went to a thing called ambient Church uh in New York which is wonderful and just a simple lowd do you know evening with beautiful visual art and and Trippy Music was really healing so I think it's finding that maybe it connects to the libidinal piece right who's was it Davis if if I don't want to be part of your Revolution if I can't dance to it you know there is like that's not just a statement of like Revolution should be fun right which I think is how it's sometimes interpreted no it goes to what what you were just talking about like the lionization like this has to be this has to connect like this kind of we have to connect to all these different parts of ourselves for anything to be sustainable you know God help me I hope never to go to a trump rally but things are definitely a revolution that people are dancing to right they're literally dancing to YMCA of all ridiculous things nice documentary just so called homegrown where they followed some of the cow Boys around for four years and then you realize like you know they're really just looking they're lost people whose lives kind of suck they're looking for Community you know this you know this gives them something to do you know they're you know it's it's normal normal human stuff you know I yeah I I don't feel like people like you and me are going to sit around just in one about this for for four years I feel like here is a little bit of optimism like I've met a lot of the young people in like the sunrise movement and places like that there are a lot of younger people who do kind of get it on these different levels you know and they have like a pretty intense but also pragmatic political program but they also know that like it needs to be the revolution they can dance to it me needs to be like embodied in a libidinal Ser real way not just like fun but like for real I don't know I have I do feel like look I mean you know Trump one created for better for worse Trump trump one not just created the sort of uprisings of 2020 and like the the the newer version of black lives matter that evolved in that time also created like a lot of smaller communities so I I would be surprised if three years from now we're still wondering like where are these voices on the on the left you know that really get it I just think those are going to actually emerge wow I sound really positive you sound positive I'm gonna ask you one more question I might might plunge you back into okay good I want make sure to end on a downer uh Israel we didn't talk about Israel and Palestine oh good where I didn't really for my quick cursory glance I didn't see a lot of writing from you on on that topic uh where are you landing on that right now I mean uh I I went through my own trajectory where after October 7th and I you know I've you know read a lot about you know Arab fanaticism and so on and I I felt kind of uh and I'm also Jewish to my mother's side you know I felt like a a lot of Sympathy for the the Israelis and their situation and their reaction and then over time I feel less and less sympathy and having looked at it from different lenses I now feel that um this is uh catastrophic and how it's being done you know yeah here this was the perfect last question because not only is it a total Downer but we agree um yeah I think I think right after October 7th I was one of those liberal American Jews who were pretty shocked actually at the like total lack of response to the massacres of October 7th and justifica immediately going to justification or immediately going to like you know what Israel should do in response and of all the weird things actually was officiating a wedding on that day on October 7th and so that I stayed out of the news but um because I knew I had to do this wedding and I knew something horrible had happened but I you so October 8th I remember just in full-on grief and Trauma mode you know full-on Doom scrolling and and just absolutely went into a pit you know and it did feel like a lot of the people who were my community didn't get it or or really just I don't know yeah did not get it and then I think the tenor of some of the anti-israel stuff early on you know was pretty intense and so early in that period I was kind of like let's like take a take a breath here for a minute and just see what's happened but just like you said I I mean I think I I actually think some response was absolutely necessary and Justified but that's not what's happened right I mean in the last 12 months now I'd say yeah around you know this has escalated into something that whether I I don't know about you know whether we kind of Dicker on the word genocide or not but it's certainly like brutal ethnic cleansing awful Collective punishment and what's happening in the West Bank is actually outside of the headlines is is equally bad in a way not in terms of dead headcount like number of dead people but in terms of taking over territory and and again a program of ethnic cleansing and so now I'm yeah you know I don't I no longer think I I really do I was joking not joking that this is a downer it's hard to see as someone who did really love I'm not a fullon anti- Zionist I think there was a version of left-wing Progressive Zionism that was relatively just two states for two people you know with real Justice for you know not just but actual you know make real Justice and ton and a lot of material support for the Palestinian people and self-determination and I was living in Israel in in uh when Oslo happened in 1993 so I I remember what that moment of opportunity felt like but that is gone and the Jewish Israeli public is voting for the right all the time and maybe the center right if if we're lucky they might vote for the center right but the the like really the parts of Israel that I still love which are social and cultural have nothing to do with the politics are quickly disappearing as those people physically leave the country I mean it's an interesting model for what might happen here you know they're just people are the liberal people are leaving they they have lost this battle and they're aware of it and you know it feels to me like the country is a is again on a kind of like you know with Trump's Victory I thought they were on a march to kind of um isolation from the rest of the world now they won't be isolated from the rest of the world but they so they have a blank check to continue ethnic cleansing I expect that they will anex Annex the West Bank within the next year or two they will have to Institute actual legal apartheid not just like partied but actual there's no way to like you have to you can't give all those Palestinians full civil rights because then Israel is barely a majority Jewish state so they're going to they're going to not have civil rights so that is a paride and it just um it really hurts because I feel like there was a moment where it could there was a decade where it could have been different um and that decade is a long time ago yeah um kind of like yeah I mean I mean many things felt like they could have been diff different in the 1990s and in a way maybe um yeah from a prophetic lens um you know we were we were holding on to hopes that um in reality were not um plausible uh whereas you know for yeah China was going to liberalize and we would have the victory Russia too the end of history and the nation state and um yeah um yeah looks like and it's F you know a lot of what the kind of more radical left but also radical right was saying in the 90s around globalization NAFTA there was a lot there were canaries in the coal mine who were like this is going to suck this is not the way to do it right like this is going to this is going to eviscerate the American working class and you know that was kind of like pushed to the side right that was like Clinton time you know and neoliberalism in the ascent and it was like oh stop worrying about all that stuff that'll work itself out because the economy will be so awesome that the rising tide will lift all boats you know it really didn't obviously we didn't really see I remember being against sft way back when yeah no I I mean I remember it I I I didn't have a view like I was wasn't Pro but I wasn't anti but it but I remember like that you were one of the canaries in the coal mine and and it was the case and in Israel you know I don't know if if you know Robin hadn't been assassinated you know he was the figure who could have brought who could have sold peace to the Israeli public I don't know if Yas RF was ever that figure for the Palestinian public but probably was and you know there was just no one like him you know when he was cut down because he had he had this this credibility with the center of of Israel and he made the security case for peace which is obviously still true it's still the only I mean who knows now what's going to happen but the it just but I can't defend and won't defend uh any of Israel's continued actions in Gaza or the West Bank and and it's just you know I I I wrote a lot about it early on and and I just don't have anything more to say about it I it's just a tragedy that feels personal because there was a version of Israel that I did used to love yeah and um that place it sort of exists still as a shadow of itself because friends of mine are there and like they go to the same cafes and it you know there's still a lot of loveliness in that in that culture but it's it's very quickly disappearing and it's predicated on turning away from a gigantic human rights cat catastrophe that continues to unfold that should have ended n months ago at the or even 12 months ago there's no military justification what's for what's still happening there and it's absolutely the only way to like quote unquote enjoy what I used to love about Israel is to willfully be blind to the murder and the occupation that's happening cool yes so you got it we ended on a downer end with some agreement done it was good to it was good to get some time to chat with you felt like there was a lot of affinities you know worldviews actually and let's let's let's stay more in touch and do more things I look forward to that have a great day thanks for listening please like subscribe and all that stuff
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.