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Joanna AndreassonIn a new online feature, Mike Riggs looks at the decades-long effort to legalize MDMA and other psychedelic drugs for medical use:

In January 1967, roughly 20,000 young people gathered at Golden Gate Park for the Human Be-In, a kind of outdoor conference for hippie counterculture. The event introduced the word "psychedelic" to the American mainstream, and the psychedelic evangelist Timothy Leary to San Francisco.

California and Nevada had banned LSD a year earlier, following New York, which banned it in 1965. Leary, a psychologist who'd recently been canned from his faculty gig at Harvard for sharing psychedelic drugs with undergraduates, believed there was no longer any point in negotiating with the powers that be. His message was blunt: "Drop out of high school, drop out of college, drop out of graduate school."

The Manmostly government, but also society and authority figures of all kindswas attempting to eradicate psychedelic drugs and the liberation they bestowed. That required a proportionately rebellious response: "Turn on, tune in, drop out." Students around the country heard Leary's words, and many did as he exhorted. The Man heard him, too, and doubled down on its efforts to bury the psychedelic drug era under a mound of criminal sanctions and red tape. Within a few years, psychedelic drugs were completely regulated out of recreational settings, then therapeutic settings, and finally research settings.

Fifty years and a few months later, at a Marriott hotel 14 miles from Golden Gate Park, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) hosted nearly 3,000 researchers, students, and enthusiasts for Psychedelic Science 2017, a six-day conference on what's being done to turn illegal psychedelic drugs into legal pharmaceutical products. Once again, the avatars of psychedelic culture had gathered to compare notes, share their experiences, and talk strategy.

This time, the message was different: Stay in school. Apply for research grants. Design clinical trials. Show your work.Evangelize, yes, but with a new audience in mindnot the counterculture, but the Man himself.

"Regulators, governments, health economists, health systems, insurers, health-care professionals, andmost importantlypatients," said George Goldsmith, the former CEO of McKinsey & Company's TomorrowLab, and an advocate for the kind of therapeutic innovation psychedelic researchers are hoping to achieve. "That's the next community that actually needs to be engaged here."

Sitting onstage next to Goldsmith was Thomas Insel, a psychiatrist and former director of the National Institute of Mental Health. Insel, who's spent a lot of time in recent years bemoaning the paucity of effective psychiatric drugs, was blunter still. "I would encourage you to be more Catholic than the Pope. You've got to be more rigorous than the people working in the pharmaceutical industry studying more traditional compounds that aren't controlled [substances]." One adverse patient reaction for which clinical investigators were not prepared, he argued, could "poison the well."

"I know you don't want to hear that," he added. "But it's really easy to mess things up."Today's psychedelic drug community is fiercely committed to avoiding a repeat of the 1960s' culture wars, in no small part because their tie-dyed predecessors lost. Insel and Goldsmith, while not psychedelic researchers themselves, reflect the current movement's willingness to work with more staid actors in the field of medicine.

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New at Reason: Medical Researchers Are Steps From Legalizing Ecstasy. Here's How They Did It. - Reason (blog)

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - A group of Texas business leaders urged state lawmakers on Monday to abandon plans to pass a bill to restrict bathroom access for transgender people, calling such a measure bad for the economy.

The Republican-dominated legislature begins a 30-day special session on Tuesday with 20 items on the agenda, including one of the "bathroom bills" that have been a flashpoint in U.S. culture wars.

Supporter of the legislation have said it is a common-sense measure that protects public safety. Critics call it discriminatory.

Texas, the most powerful Republican-controlled state, could lose about $5.6 billion through 2026 and businesses could find it difficult to recruit top talent if such a measure is enacted, according to the state's leading employer organization.

"The distraction of a bathroom bill pulls us away from being competitive as a state," Jeff Moseley, chief executive of the Texas Association of Business, told a rally outside the Capitol.

"On this discussion, conservatives can disagree with conservatives," said Moseley, whose group has typically aligned itself with the state's Republican leaders.

The legislation restricts access to places like bathrooms and locker rooms based on the gender listed on people's birth certificates and not the gender with which they identify.

A similar law in North Carolina, partially repealed in March, prompted the relocation of sporting events and economic boycotts that was estimated to have cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars.

The stakes are higher in Texas, which has an economy larger than Russia's.

A bill similar to North Carolina's passed the Texas Senate in the regular session and was killed by pro-business Republican leaders in the House, who ran out the clock on the measure.

The bathroom bill's main backer, Republican Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, a social conservative who sets the state Senate's legislative agenda, has said economic losses would be inconsequential.

"(The Texas Republican majority) want to maintain separate restrooms, locker rooms and shower facilities for men and women and boys and girls, and they dont care if the media thinks it is politically incorrect," his political campaign said in a statement on Monday.

Republican House of Representatives Speaker Joe Straus and companies including IBM, American Airlines, Apple and Southwest Airlines have spoken out against the bill.

"On the bathroom bill, there is no real compromise because even the most mild bill is going to be interpreted as discriminatory," said Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University in Houston.

Reporting by Jon Herskovitz; Editing by Peter Cooney

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Texas business leaders call on lawmakers to drop 'bathroom bill' - Reuters

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BY: Micah Meadowcroft July 16, 2017 5:00 am

In Kill All Normies Angela Nagle has done us all a service at what one must imagine is great psychological cost, surveying the dampest and most deranged corners of the internet. It seems self abuse surpassed in scale only by the onanism of her subjects.

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right is a much needed book, though for lack of editing not a particularly good book as such. Nagle is an insightful analyst, and the Irish writer has documented the internet's final breaking of the anglophonic world's brain, beginning with the Arab Spring and Occupy movements. From that "leaderless digital counter-revolution," Nagle traces a meandering history up to the appalling present of life online, the latest theater in a long culture war.

Two of Nagle's topics stand out, the origins of a self-conscious internet right in "Gamergate" and the sterile politics of performative transgression. Both of these, and really all of the intersecting subjects of this book, Nagle demonstrates, are rooted in responses to the sexual revolution.

"Gamergate" describes the Japan-inspired, porn-fueled, anonymous message board 4chan's first major foray into the public consciousness. With a rallying cry calling for "ethics in gaming journalism" young men putrefying in their own filth harassedin a manner too obscene to detail herewomen who had the gall to not only write about video games but to express concerns about misogyny in that community. The threat of feminist influence on gaming and game culture was treated as existential, and was responded to with promises of sexual violence.

"Gamergate brought gamers, rightist chan culture, anti-feminism, and the online far right closer to mainstream discussion and it also politicized a broad group of young people, mostly boys, who organized tactics around the idea of fighting back against the culture war being waged by the political left," Nagle writes.

It was the faceoff that launched a thousand digital ships, including the career of Milo Yiannopoulos. Nagle, who is a remarkably sympathetic and intellectually charitable observer, writes of Gamergate's participants:

"Ultimately, the gamergaters were correct in their perception that a revived feminist movement was trying to change the culture and this was the front, their beloved games, that they chose to fight back on. The battle has since moved on to different issues with increasingly higher stakes, but this was the galvanizing issue that drew up the battle lines of the culture wars for a younger online generation."

While Nagle does not attempt further explanation of Gamergate's causes, contenting herself with accounting for its consequences, the question why young men might indulge in such inhuman extremes is worth a brief examination.

Books such as Putnam's Bowling Alone and Nisbet's The Quest for Community have detailed the advancing loss of the vital intermediary institutions between a citizen and state. Paired with declining male employment and the age of computers, is it any wonder that the decline of these predominantly male social spacesfraternal organizations, clubs, unions, and even bowling leaguesshould lead to men seeking to make spaces for themselves online?

In the uncivilized chaos of contemporary society, video games and online subcultureswhich all have esoteric and enforced bywords and bylawsprovide a sense of order and belonging not found elsewhere. The crisis of masculinity is a civilizational one; many young men cannot fit into the civilization in which they find themselves, and they have retreated to the internet to build a virtual one. In a world where little seems controllable and people feel caught in the current and eddies of economic and social forces, video games and life online are a simulacrum of self-determination and individual responsibility.

Briefly surveying the 60s counterculture and America's culture war as waged by Pat Buchanan, Nagle argues convincingly that the liberal left has ceded Gramscian and critical theory's tactics to the alt-righta term she uses as a bigger tent than Richard Spencer would like it to betrading Marxianism for Judith Butler. She contends, further, that the alt-right's oft-feuding coalition has abandoned conservatism's traditional foundations for the writings of Nietzsche and the Marquis de Sade:

"The Sadean transgressive element of the 60s, condemned by conservatives for decades as the very heart of the destruction of civilization, the degenerate and the nihilistic, is not being challenged by the emergence of this new online right. Instead, the emergence of this new online right is the full coming to fruition of the transgressive anti-moral style, its final detachment from an egalitarian philosophy of the left or Christian morality of the right."

Sex and power are inseparable for both this online left and online right in a strange codependency. For the male-dominated rightist subculturesespecially and explicitly in what is called the "manosphere"the idea of, desire for, and act of sex becomes the primary currency of power and status.

Meanwhile, as Nagle explains, in feminized spaces like Tumblr and the contemporary education system an economy of victimization has been created through intersectional theory. Here, limitless self-defined gender identities (e.g. "Omnigay Genderfluid, with one's attraction to other genders changing with one's gender, so that the individual is always attracted to the same gender) allow bourgeois white kids, who would not normally have currency to spend in such a market, to compete with minorities and the poor through marginalized sexuality.

Nagle observes that contemporary reactionaries are driven to using the trolling tactics of online life by Tumblr-liberalism's victim fetish. For those of this alt-right who claim a modicum of conservatism, trolling is a paradoxical attempt to protect the interior of the Overton Window by smashing its frame. And for all trolls it is a gleeful display of the "if you are going to cry I will give you something to cry about" mindset. Comparative disadvantage, safespaces, trolls, harassment, antifa, and the rest work together to create a vicious cycle of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Nagle, who describes herself as a "French revolution hipster" on Twitter, and would prefer the left focused on economic and material systems, has no patience for this cycle. Writing of Yiannopoulos's much-disrupted college tour:

"When Milo challenged his protesters to argue with him countless times on his tour, he knew that they not only wouldn't, but also that they couldn't. They come from an utterly intellectually shut-down world of Tumblr and trigger warnings, and the purging of dissent in which they have only learned to recite jargon."

As a religious conservative, I appreciate Nagle's observations of the alt-right's abandonment of conservatism's priors. And as just illustrated, she has much to say, and critically, about the left in Kill All Normies, as well as in her essays and interviews. I've enjoyed reading and listening to Nagle since last year, when she began writing for the Baffler and other American leftist publications. Her project is worth paying attention to. It is unfortunate then, that Kill All Normies suffers from whatto be charitable to its authorwe shall call a truly calamitous and utterly woeful lack of editing, which has left it messy, often disjointed, and riddled with typos and formatting errors, and the reader disappointed, often perplexed, and bewildered by how variable the writing is.

Kill All Normies is a short book, howeveronly 120 pagesand with an attentive editor and expansion in light of ongoing developments a fruitful second edition could be produced. This investigation, considering the abuse anonymous wretches are surely subjecting Nagle to, was a courageous one, and I hope it continues.

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After Conservatism, Sadists and Lost Boys - Washington Free Beacon

Americas culture wars have evolved greatly from the central issues of the 1990s and early 2000s, such as legalizing same-sex marriage, or what standards of decency hip-hop artists or cable-television shows should adhere to. Now the very concept of higher education its purpose, how its institutions prepare our countrys young adults, and what exactly is being taught in the classroom has taken center stage.

Americans opinions about the current state of higher education, according to a new Pew poll released earlier this week, reveal a stark partisan divide over whether our nations colleges perform a positive societal function. Fifty-eight percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents now believe Americas institutions of higher learning have a negative effect on the country, whereas 72 percent of Democrats say the effect is positive.

Given the profusion of what now seem like weekly horror stories about the way conservative students and professors (or really anyone who dares to express an independent thought) are treated on campus, its no surprise that so many on the right are beginning to question the impact colleges and universities are having on American society.

For over half a century, conservatives have more or less accepted the fact that leftists control the classrooms. The clich of a son or daughter coming back for the holidays armed with all sorts of ideas collected from a freshman sociology seminar typically ends with a polite smile or headshake from the parents and another tuition check. At least, parents could tell themselves, the kids were learning something. Families tolerated the political biases of college professors and administrators because there was an implicit understanding that students would be challenged and educated, whether directly or indirectly, in areas that would eventually prepare them for life as engaged citizens and productive members of the labor force.

Not anymore.

The college experience seems more and more like a four-year vacation at a country club than a serious intellectual journey. I hesitate even to describe college courses as exercises in brainwashing, because the term implies a sort of rigor. A ritzy liberal-arts college presents something more like a perverse interpretation of Karl Marxs vision of a fully Communist society, where students can indoor rock-climb in the morning, enjoy a freshly prepared vegan meal at lunch, pontificate about gender without referencing the required reading later that afternoon, and still make time to drink heavily and indulge in soft drugs at night.

All of that sounds quite lovely on its face, but its no surprise that so many conservatives are deeply disturbed by how much colleges have changed in their lifetime. Considering how far academic standards have eroded on campuses, its difficult to justify the undergraduate degree as a necessary vehicle to the middle and upper-middle class. Its even harder to justify American colleges and universities as a positive societal force instead of just an extremely expensive four-year ritual required in order for an individual to be rewarded with the keys to cosmopolitan society and all the avocado-toast-filled brunches anyone could ask for.

The common refrain from the left that conservatives reject higher education out of a preference for ignorance or a fear of dangerous ideas couldnt be farther from the truth. Conservatives dont defend the Western canon because they think understanding it will make students believe that lower corporate tax rates are one of the best ways to grow the economy, but because we deem it important to understand the Wests intellectual underpinnings so that we can best defend and (yes) criticize it.

Its disappointing but not necessarily surprising that so many self-identified liberals have few gripes about the direction higher education is taking. In the age of Trump, liberals have adopted a bunker mentality and view college campuses as a steadfast safe space at a time when their own political party seems temporarily impotent against historic GOP gains.

As the student-debt bubble grows, I suspect many liberals will begin to regret their indifference to these changes. While 55 percent of Americans still view colleges and universities positively, this number seems awfully slim considering the prominent role higher education plays in the modern economy and as a class signifier. Moreover, the urbanrural cultural divide will only increase in intensity as more individuals realize that one of the main roots of liberals arrogance their prized education is nothing more than a sham.

In ten or 15 years, when Millennials are still mailing checks to Sallie Mae, it wont just be Republicans who ask: What did I get out of this?

READ MORE: The Next Right-Wing Populist Will Win by Attacking American Higher Education New Englands Hallowed Halls, Crumbling A Big Reason for the Rising Cost and Falling Quality of College

Joe Simonson writes about politics and culture.

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Higher Education: Good or Bad? - National Review

The veneration of Mr. Putin helps explain why revelations about Russias involvement in the election including recent reports that members of Mr. Trumps inner circle set up a meeting at which they expected a representative of the Russian government to give them incriminating information about Hillary Clinton and Mr. Trumps reluctance to acknowledge it, have barely penetrated the consciousness of the presidents conservative base.

Mr. Putin is no arch-villain in this understanding of America-Russian relations. Rather, he personifies many of the qualities and attitudes that conservatives have desired in a president: a respect for traditional Christian values, a swelling nationalist pride and an aggressive posture toward foreign adversaries.

In this view, the Russian president is a brilliant tactician, a slayer of murderous Islamic extremists and not incidentally, a leader who outmaneuvered and emasculated President Barack Obama on the world stage. And because of that, almost any other transgression seems forgivable.

There are conservatives here who maybe read into Russia things they wish were true in the United States, said Angela Stent, director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at Georgetown University. And they imagine Russia and Putin as the kind of strong, traditional conservative leader whom they wish they had in the United States. To these conservatives, she added, Russia is the true defender of Christian values. We are decadent.

Mr. Trumps opponents have tried repeatedly to make an issue of the mutual admiration between him and the Russian president, anticipating that Republicans would not tolerate any whiff of sympathy from one of their own toward the leader of what Ronald Reagan called the evil empire. But Mr. Trump has never had to wait long for conservatives to leap to his defense and often Mr. Putins as well.

My guess is that Trump voters would say: Hey, you know what? I kind of like the fact that Putins endorsed Trump, Rush Limbaugh told his listeners in December 2015. At least Putins killing terrorists. At least Putins made an enemy out of ISIS. We dont seem to be able to do that.

After Mr. Trump was elected and evidence of Russian hacking had started to accumulate, the praise for Mr. Putin from the right continued. Kimberly Guilfoyle, a Fox News host who once said Mr. Trump had considered naming her as his press secretary, said that she wished Mr. Putin could be president of the United States for just 48 hours. That way, as she put it, Americans dont have to worry and wake up in the morning fearful of a group thats murderous and horrific like ISIS.

In dismissing the threat from Russia, Mr. Trump and many conservatives now, ironically, echo Mr. Obama, who in 2012 brushed off the warnings of Mitt Romney, his Republican opponent, that Russia was the United States No. 1 geopolitical foe.

The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back, Mr. Obama scoffed during a debate with Mr. Romney, a quip that some Democrats now regret.

It would be difficult to overstate how large the Soviet Union once loomed in the Republican Partys foreign policy through four decades of the Cold War. Its dissolution softened attitudes toward Russia, but some Republicans are still baffled by Mr. Trumps friendly overtures.

Its like being raised in a church and someone says, Actually, no, youre a Buddhist, said Stuart Stevens, a former adviser to Mr. Romney. The role of the Republican Party has been to tell the truth about what Russia and the Soviet Union was, not what it was pretending to be, he added. Now some conservatives have gotten into the lets give Russia the benefit of the doubt business.

The unflattering comparisons with Mr. Obama became personal in 2014 after Mr. Putin invaded Crimea, an act of aggression that was widely condemned by the United States and its allies but praised as a display of brawn and guts by many on the right.

Sarah Palin, for one, questioned Mr. Obamas potency and added that no one had any such doubts about Mr. Putin. People are looking at Putin as one who wrestles bears and drills for oil, she told Sean Hannity on Fox News.

Hes looking like a real man, Mr. Limbaugh declared approvingly in 2014.

Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters, which has tracked the conservative medias depiction of the Russian president, described Mr. Putin as taking on a Paul Bunyan-esque persona among this audience.

Mr. Putins mystique for conservatives resembles in many ways the image that Mr. Trump has cultivated for himself.

Both are go-it-alone nationalists who value strength and decisiveness over thoughtful deliberation. Both have dedicated themselves to defending Christians and their faith Mr. Trump through his religious freedom initiatives and Mr. Putin through his strengthening of ties to the Russian Orthodox Church. Both have condemned Christian persecution in the Middle East. Both have taken a more forgiving view of human rights abuses.

This is consistent with a nationalist, populist, authoritarian point of view, said William Kristol, the editor at large of the conservative Weekly Standard. That view, he added, would ridicule the promotion of human rights and democracy as globalism, or criticize occasionally deferring to allies when you want to keep them on board as weak, or mock worrying about public opinion in allied nations as nave.

The admiration of Putin is part of that story, Mr. Kristol said.

Beyond foreign policy, some conservatives saw Mr. Putin as a committed warrior in the culture wars they were losing at home. In Russia Mr. Putin led a crackdown on gay rights by taking such steps as criminalizing behavior that could be seen as promoting anything other than heterosexual relationships. This has earned him praise from leaders of the Christian right like Franklin Graham, who said in 2014 that Russia was doing more than the United States to protect its children.

Writing in 2013, Pat Buchanan, the commentator whose anti-establishment, conservative presidential campaigns in the 1990s emphasized such social issues, described Mr. Putin as a natural ally.

In the culture war for mankinds future, is he one of us? Mr. Buchanan wrote, quickly answering his own question. He is seeking to redefine the Us vs. Them world conflict of the future as one in which conservatives, traditionalists and nationalists of all continents and countries stand up against the cultural and ideological imperialism of what he sees as a decadent West.

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Reverence for Putin on the Right Buys Trump Cover - New York Times