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. It goes directly toward keeping this going — and toward that hardware upgrade.

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

☕ Support the show: https://buymeacoffee.com/thelongdebrief

🎙️ Listen anywhere: https://thelongdebrief.riverside.com/

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

☕ Support the show: https://buymeacoffee.com/thelongdebrief

🎙️ Listen anywhere: https://thelongdebrief.riverside.com/