A Strange Trip Through the Violence of the Trump Era

After trying DMT, she samples everything she can get her
hands on: ayahuasca, acid, MDMA, magic mushrooms, ketamine. She reads books
about drugs, learns about appropriate dosages and interactions, attends drug
conferences, and goes to Burning Man. (This last one is a two-for-one research
project, as the festival is an oasis known both for tripping and “consent
tents.”) The drugs, at first, aren’t about meeting people, but inevitably she
does. At the first ayahuasca ceremony she goes to in upstate New York, she
meets an attractive guy named Matt who is really into mushrooms and self-help.
She dates him for a couple years despite never really liking him that much, and
their relationship is fading when she meets someone who, for the book’s
purposes, she calls Andrew: a raver who makes music and organizes his life
around partying.

She and Andrew do drugs together and go to parties together.
They fall in love, and he introduces her to a whole new set of ravers who go
out in Brooklyn, upstate, and in Berlin to dance to techno and house DJs. “My
world oriented itself like a compass toward a magnet,” she writes of Andrew.
“Toward his tastes, his friends, the social scene I wanted to inhabit.” But
where the story really starts to gain traction and where the book’s subhed—“a
breakdown”—begins to make sense is when Witt’s work as a journalist moves to
the forefront and the partying fades into the background.

In 2018, she interviews for a job at The New Yorker and is sent to Parkland, Florida to write about the
aftermath of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting. Trump is
president, the culture wars are heating up, and increasingly, she is covering
what can only be described as “the violence beat.” She travels back to her
hometown of Minneapolis, where an anti-Muslim activist interrupts an Ilhan Omar
campaign event with her screams. She attends a Trump rally in Houston where
supporters carry AR-15s and tell her that immigrants are “flooding into America
to loaf, steal, and sell fentanyl.” She goes to Kenosha, where Kyle Rittenhouse
kills two protesters. She becomes immersed in dark stories that would keep any
sane person up at night. Coming back to Andrew and her local joints in Bushwick
allows her to “forget about America and its problems,” if only for a little while.