Repeat After Them: 'Happy Warrior'

And: Psychedelics & Spirituality; Why Riots?; Kareem, Vicki, & The Balloon

Hubert Humphrey, the original Minnesota ‘Happy Warrior’, in 1968

Because most of you, I gather, have actual lives, it falls to Very Online people like me to keep an eye on the media to see how they report the news. And I have to tell you that it’s hard to recall a time when the media was so overwhelmingly in the tank for a political candidate as now. Maybe I don’t remember enough about the Hillary-Trump race in 2016, but man, I’m telling you, political coverage since the Kamala Harris coup has been off the charts unbalanced.

Here is a typical headline; this tops a CNN analysis:

“Happy Warrior” refers to the legendary Minnesota Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey. But this is apparently a theme that has either gone out to journalists, or they have happened onto: that Harris and Walz are avatars of happiness, of “joy”. It’s everywhere now, if you spend any time surveying the coverage and commentary in the mainstream. Look, I don’t mind positive coverage of these two — it’s an important part of the story — but you look in vain in the mainstream for skepticism. You might recall my telling about a conversation I once had with a liberal major-media journalist who conceded that the newsroom in which they worked decided, after Trump’s election, that if holding fairness up as a professional standard produced a world in which Donald Trump becomes president, then to hell with that standard.

That mentality is everywhere now. It really is. Naturally it infuriates conservatives, but it is also setting up liberals for the possibility of shock and failure. If you were a liberal reading the papers (and, I guess, watching the news; I don’t see US broadcast news), you would assume that the world had been caught up in the euphoria of the Harris-Walz candidacy, and the prospect that the government will pass into their hands. And you know, maybe this will happen. But the media seem to be full on into the apocryphal Pauline Kael Fallacy. She’s the New Yorker critic who supposedly said, “I don’t know how Nixon won. I don’t know a single person who voted for him.”

Look at this clip:

Well, he’s factually wrong about that one. America still has a First Amendment, thank God. Yet it’s striking that a politician as senior as Tim Walz, a man who is now vying to be the US vice president, believes this — and, naturally, the MSNBC host did not challenge him on this fundamental free-speech truth.

(This, by the way, is emerging as a hugely important theme, not only in the US. In riot-torn Britain, where a police officer was recorded advising Muslim demonstrators to discard their weapons in a mosque, the state and the establishment (including the media, who have the Narrative firmly in place), are now pushing to punish Elon Musk and X, alleging that they are at fault for the riots. There is serious talk at the governmental level of pursuing charges against people who spread “misinformation” on social media, and even of extraditing Elon Musk. As one of this newsletter’s UK readers wrote me, “If we lose X, it’s over.”)

And look at this one. You need to watch the clip to hear the voice of this trans person. Understand that he is praising Walz for signing a bill that allows the State of Minnesota to seize minor children from their parents in other states, and hold them so they can chemically or surgically mutilate their bodies:

This is who Tim Walz is, and what the Harris-Walz administration would mean. Click here for a quick recap of how radical Walz’s politics are, behind that Minnesota Nice mask over his hotdish face.

It’s early in the fall campaign, and I don’t take too seriously things that happen before Labor Day. Most people don’t really start paying attention until then. Still, it is important to be aware of how the Narrative is being shaped now, and what it reveals about the structure of power in our society and culture now. That is the real lesson. Remember how suddenly everyone in the media was calling J.D. Vance “weird”? This is not an accident.

Psychedelics And Christianity

Let me recommend to you a good podcast episode hosted by Justin Brierley, who examines the role enthusiasm for psychedelics is playing in the contemporary search for faith.

Someone on the show is quoted saying that using psychedelics opened them up to “the reality of God’s presence.” Another person, popular podcaster Shawn Ryan, left behind his hard atheism and became a Christian; the catalyst was psychedelics.

As you will know, this was also my experience. From Living In Wonder:

I confess to Jonah that as a college freshman, before I became a Christian, I experimented with LSD and had relatively mild hallucinogenic experiences. Though I regret it, I must admit that it pulled me out of depression and opened my eyes to the fact that God was real. The unorthodox English biologist Rupert Sheldrake has noted that virtually everyone who tries psychedelics returns from their “trip” convinced that what they experienced was not a hallucination, in the sense of an escape from reality, but rather an intensification of reality—the lifting of the veil to reveal what’s really there.[i] This was certainly my experience. Psychedelic use was part of my journey toward religious faith—something I have never wanted to talk about for fear of encouraging others. But it really happened, and I don’t think it serves the truth, or does anybody any good, to pretend that these events are all bad.

In my first year of college, I was in despair over (what else?) a girl who did not love me. One weekend, my new roommate, a fun-loving Jewish hippie from New Orleans, told me he had two tabs of LSD. He had never tried it; would I join him? Why not? Back then, I was so depressed that nothing mattered.

For my roommate, the experience was merely fun. For me, though, it was life changing. The drug chemically alters the brain temporarily, affecting serotonin levels and heightening one’s sensory inputs. It is not an opioid and does not produce euphoria. I did not hallucinate things that were not there, but the world itself was rendered breathtakingly beautiful.

During the twelve hours the trip lasted, I felt as though I were walking out of a dark, damp prison cell into a warm garden drenched with sunshine and filled with brilliant flowers. Like many people who have taken this drug, I had an overwhelming sense of the deep unity of all being, and of God’s presence suffusing it. When the drug wore off, I did not think that I had seen augmented reality; rather, I believed that I had been granted a glimpse of the really real.

My depression was cured in a stroke—and when Monday morning rolled around, I went to the campus bookstore looking for books about God. I found a little book about the philosophy of Kierkegaard, read it in a week, and accepted Christ. It took years of struggle to fully surrender to the Holy Spirit, but as embarrassed as I have long been to have taken the drug as a nineteen-year-old, it would be dishonest to deny that my pilgrimage to faith passed through this unusual place. If critics of psychedelic use fail to recognize that some people appear to benefit from them, both psychologically and spiritually, we will lose credibility.

For as long as it acts, the drug makes the self more porous. This is its spiritual benefit but also its spiritual danger. I told Jonah that I would never repeat that experience, because now, older and wiser, I believe it opens doors in the nous that ought to remain closed, unless opened by God through prescribed prayer and religious practice. When I read about people with no religious preparation consuming psychedelics far more powerful than what I ingested in the 1980s, it fills me with fear for their souls.