The Long Debrief

Moral Exclusion | Ep 5

Who counts as someone whose suffering matters? That question — deceptively simple — sits at the center of one of the most important concepts in social psychology: moral exclusion. In this episode, Adrian unpacks the theoretical architecture behind moral exclusion, from Susan Opotow's foundational framework to Bandura's mechanisms of moral disengagement, and applies it to the current political moment — specifically the MAGA movement's systematic targeting of immigrants and transgender people. This isn't comfortable listening. It's not supposed to be. But it is precise. And once you see the mechanism, you can't unsee it. If this kind of work is useful to you, you can support the show at buymeacoffee.com/thelongdebrief [http://buymeacoffee.com/thelongdebrief]. It goes directly toward keeping this going — and toward that hardware upgrade.

The Feeling Was Real | Ep 3

“That Feeling Was Real”   I was twelve years old, standing in a tent full of folding chairs and summer heat, and the man at the front said: that’s the Holy Spirit. That’s God, present in this place, moving in your heart. Don’t you dare walk away from it.   I didn’t walk away from it. Not for a long time.   Years later — adult, post-war, somewhere in the middle of trying to figure out who I was outside every framework I’d been handed — I felt the exact same feeling in a crowd at a music festival.   Same wave. Same full-body warmth. Same sense of being held by something larger than myself.   And I stood there in the dark and thought: wait.   This episode of The Long Debrief is about a word. Revival. And what happens when the most powerful experience of your life gets named by someone else — and that name comes with a leash attached.   I’m not here to tell you the feeling was fake. I’m not here to tell you that you were stupid for having it. The feeling was real — it is one of the most real things a human body can experience. What I want to talk about is the moment after the feeling. The naming. The part where someone at the front of a room tells you what it means, who it belongs to, and what you now owe in exchange for having felt it.   We walk through the actual conditions that produce these experiences — repetitive music, extended duration, crowd density, sleep and food disruption, social proof, a charismatic figure reading the room. These aren’t supernatural conditions. They’re human ones. They produce collective emotional states at concerts, at political rallies, at sporting events, at protests. What makes revival events different isn’t the neurology. It’s the exclusivity claim — that the feeling only happens here, under this authority, and to walk away from the institution is to walk away from God.   The feeling becomes a leash.   Not because anyone designed it that way with malice. Most of the people running those rooms believe completely in what they’re doing. The mechanism doesn’t require bad actors. It just requires a closed loop: you have an experience, the institution names it, the name creates dependency, the dependency keeps you in the room. And if you start to question — if something starts to feel off — you’re not questioning a human institution with human interests. You’re questioning the realest thing you’ve ever felt.   That’s a very hard loop to break out of. I know. I was in it.   The feeling was real. You are also real. Your questions are real. The thing that’s been nagging at you is real. That’s actually the whole point.     The Long Debrief is a weekly show about psychology, politics, and religion — from someone who operated inside all three and is still working out what he actually believes. No script-reading. No comfortable answers. No staying in service to ideas that don’t hold up.   The debrief takes as long as it takes.   Whatever discharged you — you’re in the right place.   🔗 Watch live: https://youtube.com/@thelongdebrief [https://youtube.com/@thelongdebrief] ☕ Support the show: https://buymeacoffee.com/thelongdebrief [https://buymeacoffee.com/thelongdebrief] 🎙️ Listen anywhere: https://thelongdebrief.riverside.com/ [https://thelongdebrief.riverside.com/]

The Psychopath Next Door | Ep 2

He walked into the office and pulled out a knife. Not to use it. To show it. He held it up, smiling, and explained — calmly, like he was asking a favor — that it was for another inmate. The psychologist on the other side of the desk was twenty-something, brand-new, master’s degree still warm. The emergency button was within reach. He didn’t push it. That small decision — to not report the knife — is the one the inmate had been after the whole time. Within the first five minutes, he had identified a trained professional as someone who could be worked. The psychologist’s name was Robert Hare. He spent the next twenty-five years trying to explain what he’d just met. I’m Adrian. Combat veteran, former law enforcement officer, psychology student, and — this matters for this episode — someone who grew up inside a high-control religious community. Which means I have spent a significant portion of my life sitting across from people who were doing things to other people that didn’t add up. In uniform. In the pew. At the dinner table. I didn’t have the words for what I was seeing. Then I read Without Conscience. This is Episode 2 of The Long Debrief, and it’s a walk through Chapter 1 of Robert Hare’s foundational book on psychopathy. Not the Hollywood version. The real thing — a pattern most of us have already met, and almost none of us had language for. That question — crazy or bad — is the wrong frame. When we can’t explain behavior we reach for one of two buckets: illness or evil. Hare’s career was about building a third category that neither dismisses the person nor demonizes them — one that actually describes what’s happening. As a veteran, I’ve watched people I served with disappear into systems that couldn’t explain them. As a former deputy, I’ve sat across interview tables from people whose behavior fit patterns no one in the room had vocabulary for. And growing up in the church I grew up in, I watched people move through that community causing real damage, and no one could name what they were. This episode is about what happens when you finally get the words. It doesn’t undo the damage. But it changes what you’re willing to tolerate going forward. It changes what you recognize in the first five minutes instead of the first five years. For anyone who’s ever walked away from a relationship, a family member, or a faith community wondering what was that — this one is for you.   About the Show The Long Debrief is a weekly show about psychology, politics, and religion — from someone who operated inside all three and is still working out what he actually believes. No script-reading. No comfortable answers. No staying in service to ideas that don’t hold up.   Links 🔗  Watch live:  https://youtube.com/@thelongdebrief [https://youtube.com/@thelongdebrief] ☕  Support the show:  https://buymeacoffee.com/thelongdebrief [https://buymeacoffee.com/thelongdebrief] 🎙️  Listen anywhere:  https://thelongdebrief.riverside.com/ [https://thelongdebrief.riverside.com/]

Whatever Discharged You | Ep 1

The radio crackled back to life.   “5272, you’re clear. Back in service.”   I was standing in a field. My hands were still shaking. There was a little girl behind me being checked out by paramedics — she was fine, physically fine — and her father was in the back of a cruiser. And the institution was telling me I was back in service.   Like nothing had happened.   That moment — not the standoff, not the field, not what I had to be ready to do — but the drive home afterward, alone, knowing no one was going to ask how I was doing — that’s where this show begins.   Because that’s what institutions do. They process the incident. They file the report. And then they ask you to keep moving.   For a long time, I did.   I’m Adrian. I’m a combat veteran, a former law enforcement officer, and a psychology student. I grew up inside a high-control religious community. I’ve been to war, carried a badge, and spent the last several years taking apart everything I thought I knew — not because I wanted to, but because the gaps between what I was told and what I experienced eventually became too wide to ignore.   This is Episode 1 of The Long Debrief. It’s not a pilot. It’s not a promo. It’s an honest introduction — to who I am, where I’ve been, and why I think the debrief most institutions will never give you is the most important work there is.   In this episode I talk about three different versions of the same conditioning: the military, which teaches you to put the meaning of what you’re doing in a box and close the lid so you can keep functioning; law enforcement, where the threat-sorting mechanism your training builds doesn’t turn off when the shift ends, and the whole world starts to look like a scene you’re working; and evangelical Christianity, where the answer was always already there before you’d finished forming the question — and where doubt wasn’t intellectual honesty, it was spiritual weakness.   These aren’t separate stories. They’re the same story, wearing different uniforms.   I also talk about what deconstruction actually is — not leaving religion, not a political awakening, not a midlife crisis — but the specific experience of building new cognitive tools while continuing to function. Of losing not just your beliefs but the language you used to process reality. And having to build new ones. From scratch.   That’s slow. That’s disorienting. And that’s the show.   The Long Debrief is a weekly show about psychology, politics, and religion — from someone who operated inside all three and is still working out what he actually believes. No script-reading. No comfortable answers. No staying in service to ideas that don’t hold up.   The debrief takes as long as it takes.   Whatever discharged you — you’re in the right place.     Next week — Episode 2: The Psychopath Next Door. A researcher named Robert Hare, a book called Without Conscience, and a type of person I encountered in uniform and in the pew that I didn’t have words for until I found the clinical ones.   🔗 Watch live: https://youtube.com/@thelongdebrief [https://youtube.com/@thelongdebrief] ☕ Support the show: https://buymeacoffee.com/thelongdebrief [https://buymeacoffee.com/thelongdebrief] 🎙️ Listen anywhere you get podcasts: https://thelongdebrief.riverside.com/ [https://thelongdebrief.riverside.com/]

Barrels | Ep 4

She had hands that knew how to work. I can still see them — sorting through donated clothes. This goes. This doesn’t. These children are small. These will fit a grown man. I called her Grandma. She spoke Pennsylvania Dutch, baked in from a lifetime in a Beachy-Amish community in rural Iowa. When she wanted us to help her pack the barrels, she’d say — come schtuff the barrels. My brothers and I would climb up on the cardboard and jump, cramming everything in tight, so more children she’d never meet on an island she’d never see could have something to wear. She did this for decades. She did it after my grandfather died in a farm accident, when she was pregnant with my mother. She was left alone in a tight-knit conservative community in an era when that meant something specific about what your life was going to look like. What she did with the rest of that life was give it away. Through an organization she trusted completely. The organization was Christian Aid Ministries. Today I need to talk about CAM, what they did, what they hid, and what my grandmother’s life was worth to them. Jeriah Mast spent seventeen years as a CAM missionary in Haiti. During that time, he systematically identified and raped vulnerable boys. He has confessed to molesting roughly thirty. Victim advocates believe the actual number could exceed two hundred When the story broke in 2019, CAM’s board called it “a serious failure in judgment.” That phrase is doing a lot of work. It is doing the work of making a deliberate institutional decision to protect a predator sound like an oversight. And then it got worse. CAM identified at least eight Haitian men who said Mast had raped them as children. CAM gave them money. But first, the men signed documents agreeing to desist from all civil and criminal proceedings and uphold strict confidentiality. Non-disclosure agreements. Paid to survivors of child rape. I want you to hold two things at the same time. A woman in rural Iowa with working hands and a Pennsylvania Dutch accent, spending her widowhood stuffing barrels for children she’d never meet. And an organization paying those children — now grown men — to stay quiet about what was done to them. With money that came, at least in part, from women like her. This episode is about how corrupt institutions use genuine faith as a shield. How the real devotion of real people becomes the credibility that protects the rot. My grandmother couldn’t have known. The system was built so she wouldn’t. That’s not her failure. That’s their crime.   About the Show The Long Debrief is a weekly show about psychology, politics, and religion — from someone who operated inside all three and is still working out what he actually believes. No script-reading. No comfortable answers. The debrief takes as long as it takes. Whatever discharged you — you’re in the right place.   If This Reached You If you have information relevant to the federal case involving Jeriah Mast and Christian Aid Ministries, The Roys Report has been covering this story closely. If you grew up in a CAM-adjacent community and this landed somewhere for you — I’d like to hear from you.   Links 🔗  Watch live:  https://youtube.com/@thelongdebrief [https://youtube.com/@thelongdebrief] ☕  Support the show:  https://buymeacoffee.com/thelongdebrief [https://buymeacoffee.com/thelongdebrief] 🎙️  Listen anywhere:  https://thelongdebrief.riverside.com/ [https://thelongdebrief.riverside.com/]