The Psychology Behind The January 6th Insurrection
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the explosive revelations that several Republican members of congress held meetings with the insurrections ahead of January 6th, and then they welcome Nick Carmody on the show to offer his unique perspective as a psychiatrist and a "Poli-Psych" analyst.
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It's going to be moving, it's going to be quick, and all I can say is strap in.
The War Room, a posse.
You've made this happen, and tomorrow it's game day.
But I will say that you don't knock over the U.S.
Capitol and wound 140 officers and storm the Capitol and lay state of siege to the Congress without any money being behind it.
This was an expensive operation and lots of money was spent, lots of money was raised, and we do intend to get to the bottom of the financial dimension of this attack on American democracy.
Hey everybody, welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates-Sexton, here as always with Nick Halseman.
We got a special interview today with Nick Carmody, who is talking about the authoritarian mindset, the psychology behind the right wing, and a whole host of other things.
You're going to want to stick around for that.
But before we get to Nick, Nick, we have to talk about a bombshell report that has just come out from Rolling Stone, which By the way, congratulations to Noah Schachtman over at Rolling Stone, who is turning that place around and making it a real hub for news, the former editor of Daily Beast.
But we now have news from a couple of, they're careful with this.
They say it's January 6th, there's an organizer and a planner, which is really interesting.
They're all talking to authorities.
But what has come out now is that a lot of the key figures within the January 6th attempted coup met with major figures among the Republican Party, including elected officials Marjorie Taylor Greene, we've got Gosser, we've got Boebert, Brooks, Cawthorn, Biggs, Gohmert, and Mark Meadows.
They said that they met dozens of times.
It was apparently a very large and expansive plan.
We need to talk about what that means, what probably went down, but first of all, Nick, holy shit.
Holy shit is right.
This is like beautiful mind stuff going on.
I'm putting my red piece of thread up on the wall connecting things because we can't take this piece of reporting by itself.
We have to add it to the things we already found out, already knew.
Now, at the top of the list is the fact that all the people that you listed are hellbent on shutting this investigation down.
Absolutely.
You have to figure out, you have to ask yourself, well, why is that?
I mean, why does anybody ever want an investigation shut down?
So that's the big part of it.
And we certainly have a lot of the tidbits about like these connections between uh Marjorie Taylor Greene and some of the insurrectionists from the day before and and or actually that might be even Boebert or probably both um and uh and like even like with photo evidence of them together and seeing some things so There's a lot of issues here that we need to connect before we can kind of even wrap our head around exactly what this could mean or what it will mean, but it's all bad.
We have to connect the six bullet points that John Eastman put together as part of this insurrection, which we can get into in a minute.
These things are very damning to these people on the right.
Yeah.
A lot of the times, things get pumped up by the media.
This is literally a cinder block being thrown into a bathtub.
I mean, this is really big stuff.
And that doesn't mean, of course, that justice is going to be served.
Like a lot of other people, I'm a little frustrated with the Department of Justice.
But the Mueller report was really well done.
Oh, I just, it's so frustrating all the way around.
But I want to be clear, and this is not an exaggeration.
All of these people should resign today.
If there was any justice in the world, if the shame that you talk about all the time existed within elected politics, these people, Green, Gosser, Boebert, Brooks, Cawthorn, Biggs, and Gohmert, all resign.
In shame.
And then on top of that, probably need to go to jail.
Depending upon what they said, what they coordinated with, how these things went down, they all should probably spend some time behind bars.
You could throw a Tupper Bill in there, on the Senate side, and I'm sure there's at least another couple Senators too.
Oh yeah, no, and that's the thing.
These are just the morons who couldn't even hide their tracks very well.
You know what I mean?
They were the ones that a planner, an organizer of this entire situation called and was like, we're thinking about protesting to overthrow the presidency.
And they're like, yeah, I'll take that meeting.
Yeah, absolutely.
Put that on your calendar.
Just in case the authorities ever come.
These are the people who were too stupid Well, one question is, did they shield Trump well enough?
Because we can already connect Trump to Eastman, and if you want to say that Eastman needed this kind of chaos to institute his plan, this was what they needed to have happen.
And they were hoping, so I think what they were hoping for, I think what's going to come out of all this is, I'm putting on my tinfoil hat, Love it.
They delay the vote for at least a day or two.
That just gave them an extra time to call these three or four states they needed to call.
And by the way, that might have inspired some of these other insurrections at the state houses in these different states.
And that would cause the chaos they need for Pence to say, whoa, I can't accept these electors because look at the chaos that's going on, inspired by the chaos in the Capitol on the 6th.
You know, that wasn't dealt with properly.
And, you know, so all these different little pieces when they put them together again, why was the police response so bad?
And why was it allowed to get to the way it did, knowing all the information they knew ahead of time?
So there's no other way to look at this besides a very, I can't say well executed, but it's certainly well organized or well planned out.
You know what?
Is it well planned out?
Give me the words, Jared.
I think in some cases it was well planned out and in other cases, absolute madness.
So I think like everything that we talk about on the right, there's a lot of different things.
So that Rogue's Gallery that I just read, I have to tell you, Lauren Bovert's intelligence couldn't power a lightbulb.
I mean, like she she wasn't in there calling plays.
You know what I mean?
Louie Gohmert probably chokes on his own tongue at least twice a day.
I mean, these people are not in there.
They're saying you do this, you do that.
Right.
Eastman, of course, is in the White House handing out a six point memo that talks about how to take over the government.
And Eastman, of course, is not only a lawyer, but he's also in a think tank like this is an intelligent person who's trying to manipulate the law on their own behalf.
I think some of these assholes want this to just be a thing, right?
They just want there to be a display that looks like people are pissed off about this thing.
Other people, I think the majority of them, if you pump them full of truth serum and said, what do you think was happening here?
They wanted protesters to be outside of Congress, making noise, making a racket.
And they wanted to either make Republicans or Democrats, for that matter, uncomfortable and afraid of consequences.
And it could possibly move things around or whatever.
But I have to tell you, you start meeting with the chief of staff of the White House.
Mark Meadows is a serious person.
The Chief of Staff of the White House does not take these kinds of meetings.
You also have, of course, Katrina Pearson from the Trump campaign, who is also carrying water for these people.
They're not interested in spectacle.
These are people who have very specific goals.
You know what I mean?
Like, what do we want to happen here?
And we know from Donald Trump, from what he has said, like a mob boss, he always liked to get up near it, right?
And then whatever it is, whether it's the overthrow of the government or undermining of democratic institutions, he wanted the person on the other side of the desk, Mike Pence, right?
And you remember that quote that we talked about in this podcast.
He said to Mike Pence, and Mike Pence said, I don't have authority to overturn the election.
And Trump, of course, gestured at the people outside and he said, what if they think you do?
Right.
So like you can't get implicated on that because you're not saying it explicitly.
There were people involved in this who wanted to overthrow the government.
There were certainly people at the Capitol who wanted to overthrow the government.
Meanwhile, you have a lot of other people with a lot of different other thoughts.
Maybe they hadn't even thought it out.
I doubt Madison Cawthorn had like an actual idea in his head, right?
So if we start looking at this, it's what the problem is with the right, which is they are a large, complicated, amalgamated group of people with different ideas, different motivations.
But if they all get motivated to overthrow the government or spill blood, that's a different horse, that's a horse of a completely different color. - Yeah.
So we won't say it was well planned out, but we could say that they spent a lot of time and energy.
And a lot of money.
There was also a lot of money spent on this.
Now here's the thing about the plan, the insurrection, whatever.
It's legal to them.
Everything they laid out, what Eastman laid out and what the whole plan was going to be, which is pretty clear what Trump needed to have happen, in their minds was legal.
In some weird legal loophole constitutionally, this is okay.
This would happen and you could not dispute it.
That is another problem here, because you cloud what is legal, what is not legal.
You also get cloudy when the people who do ultimately get punished for things, the punitive damages are so little to them, it doesn't matter.
And again, I've said this millions of times, but when they will indict Trump on any of the money stuff, He'll just pay the fine.
You know, if it's a tax thing, he'll pay whatever they think he owes and he won't pay it.
He'll raise it from his people to follow him and they'll move on.
It's the cost of doing business, which is happening across the country for tens of thousands of CEOs or whatever across the country.
They do all this and they don't care about the risk because they know that the punishment is nothing to them.
It's easy off their back.
So that's the thing is we have to understand is that I'm to the right and what was this interaction was was legal.
This is going to be something totally fine.
Well, I mean, if we're not going to hold people accountable.
You know, if you call a Steve Bannon in to testify and he doesn't do it and maybe you hold him in contempt.
But I don't know about you, Nick.
I'm going to check.
Has Mary Garland brought you?
No, no, no, he has not.
No.
Oh, no.
Wait, one more time.
No, no.
Still hasn't done that.
If you do not hold these people accountable, it is simply you might as well usher them in, you know, like so many police who just say, go ahead, good luck.
Because one of the problems here, one of the issues is so they they went into the Capitol, right?
They disrupted the the electoral process.
They went into the Capitol.
Donald Trump eventually, of course, basically had to have a cattle prod up his ass to go out and say, you're all beautiful people.
We love you.
You're very special.
Right.
But we also know that he was watching on TV and was very pumped about this and was very happy that they were doing this.
We would be having a different conversation if Donald Trump would have tweeted out on January 6th.
Don't let go.
Don't leave, right?
You now have the capital.
Don't do it.
Or if Mike Pence would have gone through with the plan that was handed to him.
Like, the problem in this situation is you had a movement that was willing to put people's lives in danger.
And some of them, by the way, were looking at murdering the vice president of the United States of America and members of Congress.
more than willing to do that.
The problem here is exactly what we just talked about.
There's so many disparate people and angles playing out that they were waiting on someone to take charge, right?
And if you, by the way, if you order a coup, if you say it explicitly, guess what?
Your life now has two branches.
There is the branch where the coup works, and you gain the spoils.
There is the branch where the coup doesn't work, and guess what?
There are consequences.
And at this point, we have now shown any aspiring authoritarian, including Donald Trump, by the way, just to make that clear, they now know that this can happen.
And they now know, they're now emboldened, that they might want to take a different branch.
Uh, you know, of history.
What we're looking at now is a perfect recipe for this to happen again and for it to be unfortunately successful.
Yeah.
I mean, you're just echoing what Bill Barr had said on, you know, whatever the interview thing that was about how, you know, the winners write history.
And so if that coup is successful, then they're not traitors.
They don't, they're not put up in the firing line and they're actually in charge.
You're heroes!
If you try and overthrow the government and you do it, you're now a quote-unquote hero because you control history.
And listen, to some people, George Washington is a fucking traitor.
All those guys are.
Those guys should have been put up in a firing line and executed.
That's to a certain section of this world.
Now, it's not new is the other thing.
Look at the guys like Rumsfeld and Cheney who survived the Nixon administration to come back for Bush.
This is all, just like we're going to talk about in this interview with Nick Carmody, is it's all sort of suggestion and psychological impact of like, OK, you know, we've already seen this happen where there wasn't much of a repercussions for some of these guys.
You know, anybody who lived through the Nixon administration, when he did this country, they should be ashamed of themselves if they supported Trump in any way because they've already seen what it did to the country.
And then meanwhile, though, what they all know is, well, look, it doesn't end your career if you're involved in that and being part of that thing.
So here we are.
That's why Trump is going to be able to run again and may or may not win.
You know, barring him being in prison when, you know, the campaign starts.
I don't know.
But this is where we're at as a country.
We didn't clean it up after Nixon.
And, you know, we didn't clean anything up after Reagan, the Iran-Contra.
And this is the direct line to Trump.
I mean, I'm going to read the list again.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, Gosar, Boebert, Brooks, Cawthorn, Biggs, Gohmert, probably others that we haven't even talked about, staffers that we haven't talked about, people within this movement who went in there, battled with police.
You want to talk about the interview with Karamadi?
Like, that's how you gain meaning.
You were there on January 6th, or you helped make it happen.
All of a sudden, guess what?
That's not something to be ashamed of because you're not going to prison for it, right?
You don't have to resign your office.
You're not publicly shamed and disgraced.
At that point, it becomes a heroic moment.
You know what I mean?
All of a sudden, I went there and I did it.
I had the guts to do this.
And you have a shit ton of people, by the way, who were at the Capitol, who have been LARPing, live-action role-playing, that they are the new revolutionary generation, that they're the new founding fathers of an America reborn.
I think that's the purge, but you know, it sticks.
But that becomes their story, and as a result, guess what?
January 6th, at that point, it's not a disgrace It's something that now must be avenged.
Because they locked up some of your brothers, right?
They made a big deal out of it.
Now, all of a sudden, you need to go back and you need to take the damn thing in order to show people who's boss.
It becomes suddenly your heroic journey.
I have to go to Teespring and create a shirt that says, I was at the January 6th insurrection and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.
Like, that will make a million bucks.
I was at the January 6th attempted coup and all I got was this speaker's podium.
Right, there you go.
You know, I tased multiple cops at the January 6th and all I got was, you know, an indictment.
But, you know, there were other versions, by the way, of that video that Trump ultimately released and said, we love you, go, you know, don't.
I think it did say go home right at that point, like hours later.
But I do remember reporting I would hope that maybe those other versions exist and they would end up being subpoenaed by this investigation because I think it also lends to, you know, what you were saying earlier was that he was cheering these people on.
They created it.
They created the environment where they don't need to say, you have to have an insurrection, but they know what's going to happen.
You know, they've stirred it all up.
And again, we'll find out what happens with Kash Patel and all these weirdos they put into the Defense Department.
January 3rd or whatever that was, which made no sense then, and it will probably make a lot more sense if this investigation ever gets around to, you know, doing public testimony and releasing some of these documents.
Because, by the way, I do have hope that Bannon is going to be arrested.
I feel like they're on track to begin that process.
I appreciate your need to have faith in that.
I have no faith in it.
I can't.
I can't.
It's what I told everybody.
The question I kept getting asked in my live streams and when we did Q&A shows, everyone's like, how quick do you think Trump will be indicted?
And I'm not going to believe it until I see him being, you know, perp walked out.
Like I don't.
That's not the way this system works.
Like wealthy, powerful white men really don't get held accountable, particularly when it makes you reconsider what's happening.
And I do have to say, and I want to be on the record about this.
Steve Bannon has spent years fomenting Revolutionary fervor among white supremacists and among the far right wing.
If Steve Bannon is arrested for his role in January 6th, I mean, that's the jar of pickles being opened, is what I'm saying.
That is a situation where in the next few days after that, you just kind of need to look around a little bit.
That's the Obi-Wan Kenobi, if you strike me down, I'll be more powerful than ever.
He'll become this myth.
Arguably, when Osama Bin Laden gets killed and he becomes more of a mythical figure, That ultimately, you know, can spread that ideology as well.
Not to say that we shouldn't have hunted Osama bin Laden down and killed him.
Oh, and by the way, Steve Bannon should be arrested.
Yeah.
Steve Bannon should have been arrested multiple times before this.
Right.
I mean, he has openly called for the overthrow of the government.
He has went around the world trying to overthrow liberal democracy.
And by the way, he's just a crook.
Wait, are you talking about Bannon or are you talking about Bill Barr?
Well, I mean, Bill Barr has his own shit.
That dude had a nice trip around the world, too, looking for how to overthrow democracy.
Old!
So, yeah.
All.
Yeah.
They all.
And so, which is another reason why it was so important that they prosecute all these people that were at the insurrection.
It's in the hundreds, right?
I think ultimately what they've done so far, and they're still trying to track people down.
So that's all good.
And obviously a lot of people, I can remember one of them, they got home and they buried the clothes they're wearing in the backyard or whatever, evidence in the backyard, because that's an acknowledgment that they knew what they did was wrong, right?
At least then.
But you're right, now this movement has grown and so at this point what you're getting are people on the record on the Rolling Stone interview who still support Trump.
They are wearing it on their sleeve.
You're damn right I'm on that wall.
And you're damn right I'm over the Code Red.
They've now gotten to that point where they're more than willing to acknowledge all these things because it's a badge of honor on their sleeves.
But because Trump let them down in some other intrinsic way, they're willing to now testify, whatever.
But it doesn't sound like they're being good citizens or patriots or something to the Constitution.
They're just sort of doing it out of the same kind of hatred and anger that Trump is fomenting anyway.
And by the way, I want to go ahead and I want to pull the camera back on this and we need to make this very clear.
People who don't have meaning in their lives are going to look for meaning in their lives.
And we currently live in an exploitative, cruel nation in which, you know, and I thought Carmody, who we're going to get to here in just a second, had a really good point about this, which is, you know, it's something that we've talked about in the past, too.
The mythology of American exceptionalism means that either something is wrong with everybody else or something is wrong with you when you start falling behind, right?
When things don't feel good.
So as a result, we now have a question.
And it's the same thing with terrorism.
Like, you go around and you kill terrorists, you're inspiring other terrorists.
Right.
Right?
Like, it's not one of those things where you just go out and you crush them and all of a sudden they're just all gone.
It breeds radicalism, right?
Just going around and literally imprisoning all of the people involved in this, like, yeah, they need to be, but that doesn't make the problem go away.
You have to start investing in our society again.
You have to.
And again, radicalization always follows exploitation.
And we need to give people something to believe in.
We need to give people something where they're not looking to be heroes by going out and murdering officials.
But as long as the people that I just read, this this group, and not to mention that, but also the organizers and planners that we're talking about, if these people are allowed to go free and there are no consequences, they're going to do this again, or they'll find another they're going to do this again, or they'll find another avenue to do the same thing and essentially take over the government.
And we just need more people who can act in good faith across the world.
It's not enough.
I mean, in America, it's like, OK, you got to get somebody in there who's going to do just enough where the people are a little less angry at you, you know, and then maybe they won't vote at all.
Like that's sort of where you have to hope to get to at some point.
And then, you know, because you're acting in good enough faith for like, OK, I'm not angry at this person.
I'm just not going to vote.
But then our foreign policy, certainly needs to have a radical overhaul, so we stop fomenting all the hatred against the United States in some very intrinsic ways to convince people that we are serious about our negotiations and about our deals, and that we will honor them when we make them.
And that's just gonna take decades, I'd imagine, I mean, after after what Obama had to do to clean it all up in 08 after W. Bush, you know, there was hope that we could get in that position.
But we but Trump destroyed all that times 10.
It's going to take another, you know, years and years before we can have the kind of trust in other governments and other countries like we would need that make a positive impact in the world.
Yeah, and by the way, neither of us are lawyers, but Representative Gosser, if we could offer you some free legal advice, you might stop talking and you might consult an actual lawyer, because when you start telling possible coup participants that there might be a blanket pardon in it for you, that doesn't look great.
That almost sounds like you're encouraging people to, let me check my legal documents, break the law.
Oh yeah.
By the way, fold Matt Gaetz into that.
I have a feeling he's part of all of this as well.
What, Nick, are you kidding me?
You think that Matt Gaetz might have played a role in some of this?
I think he has too much integrity.
Well, no, he was probably just too busy doing all the other things.
Doing the other things, allegedly.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right, everybody, hang around for a minute.
We're going to bring on Nick Carmody.
Yeah, I think you're really going to enjoy this interview.
Hey everybody, we are really, really lucky to have a guest that we've been looking forward to for a while here.
We have Nick Carmody, JD, MS Psychology, who has an undergraduate degree in Management of Criminal Justice from Concordia University, Wisconsin, a law degree from the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law, and a Master's of Science degree from Tiffin University in Ohio.
Nick has a private practice based in Denver, Colorado, and also works with low-income children who have experienced trauma.
Doing doing great work there.
Nick is currently working on a book about the psychology of American politics during the Trump era as a collection of essays titled Trickle Down Pathology.
Nick, thank you so much for coming on.
Thanks for having me, guys.
Appreciate it.
So one of the reasons we wanted to talk to you is, you know, we spend a lot of time on this podcast talking about not just the historical context of things, but trying to get into the mindset of A lot of the danger that we're facing right now.
For me, my background comes from the fact that I grew up with a lot of Trump supporters, a lot of people who have been radicalized in these moments.
I have a lot of thoughts about what happened with them personally, but I've really been interested in a lot of what you've been talking about.
I know you've been talking about addiction models, you've been talking about trauma, these sort of loops and all of that.
I was hoping that we could start off this conversation, if you could give our listeners a little bit of a summary of how you see the current political moment psychologically.
I think one of the things that we've seen is, or that we struggle with, is how people that we've known for a long time suddenly become unrecognizable.
And, you know, I think a lot of that has come, you know, you've seen research with like Altemeier talks about up to 30% of a given population.
has the psychological profile of an authoritarian follower.
And maybe it's a case, I think a lot of this, it's multi-factors involved.
We're kind of trying to piece together stuff.
But if you take Altamire's work and you take people who have maybe the psychological profile of being an authoritarian follower, then you put somebody like Trump, who has authoritarian impulses and instincts, and he starts speaking to those predispositions, they start to respond that way. and he starts speaking to those predispositions, they start to And I've written, and certain things that I've written, I've talked about how there's been a manipulation and a exploitation of the neuropsychological fear responses, right?
I mean, they will play on these fears.
And, you know, when you get people to be scared, it's almost into a state of hypervigilance that is similar to what we see with like PTSD, where people are seeing, you know, threats everywhere.
They see everyone as a threat, minor threats to status or wealth.
Or culture, or even political power is kind of internalized to the point where people see everything as existential.
And so we start to see that be a part of it.
Another thing, as you mentioned, that I've been writing a lot about is how an addiction model might play into this.
And one of the things that I was observing a few years ago was how People were responding to, or the effect that politics, particularly Trump, was having on personal relationships.
And it was paralleling, very similar to the effect that addiction has on personal relationships.
And we were seeing divorces or befriending and all these situations that were occurring.
And one of the things that I was starting to come across was that people would start to respond to the high conflict information They were almost getting charged up, they were getting almost this high off of it in a way that they would when they were engaging in something that was dopamine related, which is the reward center of the brain.
And so there seemed to be almost this high on this front end of it when they would anticipate or when they would plug into this stuff, they would get this high off of it.
And I started coming across research that talked about dopamine in terms of anticipation.
Not necessarily the act of the behavior, but the anticipation of the behavior.
And it was couched in terms of subjective utility.
And when you think of terms of subjective utility with confirmation bias, what are we doing?
There's a certain subjectivity there that we are confirming through engagement of information sources that are telling us what we want to be true or what we believe to be true.
And so I started to come across other information.
That was showing FMRI scans that were showing that certain areas of the brain that light up when we experience physical pain were also lighting up when we experience social isolation or exclusion.
And so when you think about that in terms of tribalism and just our political affiliations, is that it's possible that when people are experiencing, when people try to pull away from a group from which they see themselves as a member or from which they derive identity from, That social isolation or that exclusion, there may be an area of the brain that's lighting up in that same way.
There may be a physical pain avoidance component to this, similar to other addictions like alcoholism with the DTs, with opioids, with heroin.
When people literally go through a withdrawal process, it is a physically painful experience that often pushes them back into, you know, quote-unquote relapse to avoid that physical discomfort, that pain avoidance.
And so, kind of piecing this together with this hypothesis theory about addiction, on the front end you have people who are chasing that dopamine high, they're chasing that confirmation bias, the subjective utility, the anticipation, and then if they do start to pull away from it, where they can avoid chasing that dopamine rush, then they start to hit that pain avoidance component where the social isolation or the exclusion was causing
You know, literally a painful experience that would then push them back into chasing that high, and it just becomes, you know, rinse and repeat.
And so, you know, for me personally, it's just been trying to, you know, as we all are, just trying to understand what's going on.
It's trying to, you know, piece together the different components, whether it's psychology, whether it's neurobiology, whether it's, you know, authoritarian aspects of it with Altemeier's work, you know, just trying to make sense of the insanity that we've been experiencing.
You know, I've talked about this in the last few months, and I think I kind of want to drill down because you touched upon it just now.
The notion of like even the anti-maskers, for instance, and these scenes that we see on social media of them, you know, I feel like that's what you're talking about.
There's a high, there's a chemical that gets released when they get a chance to defend This notion of freedom behind anti-masking or anti-vaxxing.
So that's what we're kind of talking about, right?
Like there literally is something in the brain that gets triggered that gives them a whole sense of, I mean, can we go further and say self-worth or is it simply just a rush?
Well, I think there's definitely a sense of ego investment and identity investment and the tribalism aspect of it.
You know, I've written about two of the most difficult sentences that people can speak is, I was wrong and I'm sorry.
And the longer that we, you know, we put off admitting error or mistake, the harder it becomes to finally do that because we have to, you know, we've been doubling down and we've been digging in for a much longer period of time.
You know, it becomes a much It's much more of an ego hit.
There's less face to be saved.
And so I think the ego and the identity is a big part of that.
And one of the things that, and I was just kind of thinking about this recently and I haven't written about this, is that we're hearing about, at least as far as the anti-vax stuff, in terms of othering.
And, you know, it's interesting to see You know, for a lot of these people right now who have an issue with othering, they didn't have a whole, you know, a lot of problem with the othering that occurred for the first 245 years of this country.
You know, they have an issue now with the othering because now they feel like they're being othered.
And I think this has been, you know, really, you know, brilliant, you know, and I use quotations around it.
It's been a brilliant marketing campaign with othering because it's basically created a form of identity politics amongst
The right, which is predominantly white, who are obviously the dominant demographic still, even as it's shifting, it's still a dominant demographic, but it's basically put the dominant demographic into a minority mindset through anti-vax othering that creates a, I just lost my train of thought, identity politics component, where the dominant demographic can embrace a minority position
Because even though they're still in the dominant position power-wise, but to act in a way that where they're not.
Now, where this is dangerous is, you know, unlike, you know, minorities in this country, you know, they like to draw this false parallel with like, you know, Black Lives Matter protests and all that stuff.
But the difference here is when a dominant demographic is in a position of power, but they embrace this identity politics or this minority status, they are in a position to act in a way And this is where we see as far as minority rule.
They're still in a position to act in a way or to pass legislation through voting or whatever it was that kind of manipulates or exploits that identity of politics, which generally is perceived to be from minorities.
But in this case, it's being embraced by the majority.
Yeah, and I think what's interesting with that is that so much of what the right wing is obsessed with is having all of the power and capital on their side, but still finding ways to feel victimized.
Right.
Which is one of the I think the animating ideas behind the right wing.
And I have to tell you, as somebody who was raised up by abusive authority figures, one of the things that I've come to understand is that that behavior is so often that that Overcompensation of strength and abuse is actually a reaction to insecurity or personal fear or sort of feeling as if they're out of control themselves.
And, you know, you go through somebody like a Donald Trump, who obviously has patterned so much of this behavior.
I mean, this is a person who claims that, you know, he's tough and all of this, but he is just paper thin.
And even just a momentary criticism or even not enough praise sends him off in one of these abusive cycles that we've had to deal with.
And I have to tell you, and I'd like to hear what you have to say about this, watching what I have seen in my own personal life and upbringing play out now on a political and sociological scale, a mass hysteria, so to speak, on a national level is really disturbing.
I was wondering how it feels to you to be able to piece this stuff together, but to have to watch the country sort of suffer through this on this massive scale.
Yeah, it is frustrating.
One of the analogies I've used, I was just using this yesterday in a conversation, is that because it is traumatizing for people to hear it, and I'll even be accused from people on the right of being a fear monitor myself by analyzing and dissecting the things that I say.
And I've also had people ask, you know, how can you just immerse yourself in this stuff?
How does it not burn you out, or how does it not just become overwhelming?
And I guess the analogy that I would use is that, you know, it's similar to, you know, when I immerse myself into it, it kind of goes into a very, almost an academic or intellectual state where I'm able to kind of dissociate from it.
I, in the same way, I want to have control and an understanding of it.
And the analogy that I use to it, it's similar to like a, you know, an ER surgeon who just dissociates from the blood and from the gore and from, you know, just the physical trauma.
Now, where I, where I have noticed, And just to kind of continue with the analogy or the metaphor, is that when I do get in arguments with people in my personal life who I love and who I care about, but who see things differently than I do and don't always appreciate the shit that I say and write, then it suddenly becomes very difficult for me but who see things differently than I do and don't always appreciate the shit that I say and write, then it suddenly becomes very A coherent conversation because, you know, emotion clouds your judgment, you know, start getting the shakes.
And the way that I would describe it is it's similar to like being, you know, an emergency room surgeon and all of a sudden your kid comes to the door, just got in a car accident, and now you suddenly can't dissociate from it in the same way that you can, you know, when it's, you know, you're kind of, you know, have a distance from it.
And so, you know, on a personal level, it can be very, Destabilizing, I mean it's you know, it's it's a problem as we all you know, I'm sure as you do I'm sure you know Thanksgiving dinners up, you know, it's a challenge, you know, if that's you know your background But you know when I'm able when I'm writing the threads when I'm writing the articles, you know when I'm kind of thinking about it I'm able to kind of you know Detach from it in a way that allows me to look at it objectively and unemotionally, but it's a challenge to do People that we care about
Well, and I do have to say real fast, you know, the people that I've seen, and I'm surrounded in my childhood and community by people who have been radicalized, you know, I watched people in my family who just, they got lost in conspiratorial radicalization.
And what I noticed, and I was hoping you could talk about a little bit, is that there is an absolute parallel line between Their own personal troubles in their lives, their feeling of powerlessness, their feeling of cataclysm, right?
They don't have enough money.
They lose their jobs.
They're getting divorces.
They're not able to make ends meet.
They're not able to buy these things.
But that idea of understanding that, quote unquote, secret knowledge of QAnon or the New World Order conspiracy or any of those things, It gives them a momentary glimpse of power and meaning and self-worth, because now they're a quote-unquote digital soldier, where they have that idea and suddenly they can start to make sense, but it always parallels what I've seen in personal crisis.
Yeah, and one of the things that I've written about is I think there's, you know, a lot of the people who now have, you know, the Make America Great movement or Bad Ends America First movement, A lot of them have, for so long, really clung to American exceptionalism.
But for a lot of them, they've been basically coasting on the reputation of previous generations, as far as American exceptionalism, whether that was the World War II era or whatever it may be.
And I think there's kind of this cognitive dissonance that is occurring with them.
Where they're trying to still embrace this theory, you know, this narrative about American exceptionalism, but they're not really excelling.
And so, you know, what I've written about the QAnon and the conspiracy theories is that I think in some ways conspiracy theories are cognitive dissonance, reconciling narrative that allows them to simultaneously satiate their own narcissism, right?
That I am superior.
That I am smarter than everyone else, that I am in this exclusive club of the knowing, because as you said, I do my own research and I found out all this shit that nobody else knows about or nobody else will talk about, and it allows them to still embrace this perpetual grievance and victimhood because despite all of this grandiosity and amazing abilities, they still have underachieved or that they still haven't lived up to the American exceptionalism that the previous generations have.
I'm kind of curious, you kind of touched upon it before and we, you know, the notion of what it feels like to be in the face of a right wing, hostile opinions and ideas about what they want to say.
So we've mapped the brain to some degree and you were talking about how the dopamine is created and that gives them that sense and that rush.
What happens in the brain when, to the left, like you kind of mentioned, do we understand that and what the chemical components that happen there and the reaction when you are now faced with that and they have to somehow, you know, Well, this is more, I mean, this is universal, right?
I mean, I, I, you know, I paid more attention to the right because I view the current movement as an existential threat to democracy, but it absolutely, I mean, this is just a, this is a human, you know, cognitive processes, human neuroscience, and it does happen.
And I, you know, I just had somebody, I think it was two weeks ago, who was asking about this.
And, you know, you could look at in the same way that we have, you know, we analyze conspiracy theorists and Trump's going back in August and, you know, Bannon or Trump was saying he's going to be going back before, you know, the 20, 2024, 2023.
We've had the same thing.
You know, the left has had the same thing with, you know, if you think about it in terms of, you know, the Mueller report or the first impeachment or the second impeachment or indictments or investigations.
Or, you know, now Carville saying that, you know, he guarantees three things might happen.
One of them is Trump's going to be indicted by the end of the year.
And what that is, it's the same thing.
It's that anticipation.
It's the, oh, this time he's finally going to go down.
You get, you know, you get the rush from it.
You're plugging in.
And so, you know, it absolutely occurs on both sides.
It's just, you know, it's just a different variation of the same process.
You know, it's just that you're plugging into different information and anticipation of what you hope will happen or what theoretical could happen.
In both cases, as I've written about in the addiction model, it's the power of maybe.
Maybe this time Trump is finally going down.
And we just keep buying into it. - Is there a sense that this thing could kind of break along like intelligence level lines or not?
Is it too messy to kind of try and break that up?
I think that that's I think it's that's intellectually lazy to say that it's just dumb people on the right that fall for this shit.
Because, you know, I personally know people, you know, 130 IQ who, you know, who I who I argue with, who are very intelligent.
It's not about intelligence.
You know, I mean, you know, in some ways, I think the intelligent people can be more difficult because they, you know, they have they have an awareness, their cognizant of how intelligent they are.
So it makes them less likely to believe that they could possibly be wrong.
And, you know, we could be guilty of that too.
You know, I mean, we're, you know, we're all three smart, smart guys and we could also be, you know, be guilty of slipping into that same mistake.
So in some ways, you know, I think the, the, you know, one, I absolutely, you know, did not, you know, is there, is there a low IQ?
You know, a lot of the mod, you go to the moderate rallies.
Absolutely.
But you can find the same thing, you know, running through the streets after the George Floyd stuff, you know?
So it's, you know, it's, it's, you know, that, that stuff is, it's all relative.
I wanted to talk briefly because, you know, one of the things I keep finding in my research is that authoritarian societies, and by the way, America has had so many different shades of authoritarianism in its history, you know, oppression, soft oppression, intimidation that makes people sort of fall in line and not speak out.
But authoritarianism, particularly as a movement and fascism as a movement, uses trauma and abuse as a weapon.
Because what's intended to be done is to sort of beat or socialize a population into submission, right?
To get them to the point where they feel powerless, they have to look up to some sort of a great leader or, you know, they start looking around for messiahs and saviors that are suddenly going to put things right.
And as someone who studies trauma, I was wondering if you could talk about what this current era Not only is doing to us, because, you know, we've gone through quite a bit of trauma as a society over the past few years.
What is it doing to us?
And long term, what do people need to do to not only stay healthy themselves, but to stave off this socialization that tamps down the spirit and sort of makes us Eventually cower in a corner, you know in hopes that it won't continue happening.
What are what are this?
What's it doing to us?
And what are the steps that we need to go through to heal for this?
Absolutely has been and this is where I brought up earlier about the hyper vigilance.
I mean it relies on fear I just wrote something a couple days or it was last week where you know as you point out with authoritarianism, you know, it relies on you know on chaos either perception of chaos or actually creating chaos and So that people will vote for, or in extreme cases, will instill a strong man to restore, quote unquote, order.
And so, you know, that's a lot, you know, what goes on when you listen to Tucker Carlson, you know, he likes to say that when they come for you, and they will, right?
I mean, just scares the shit out of people to where, you know, they have locking their, locking their doors, peeking out their blinds at their neighbors because they're just waiting for, you know, people to come at them.
And when you keep people in that heightened state of hypervigilance and fear, You know, the high cortisol levels and the stress levels in our body, it causes physical problems, it causes us, it impairs our judgment when, you know, when we're emotional.
You know, and it's easy to say, especially from people who, you know, are obsessed in this stuff, because that's what we do our work with.
You know, you have to disengage, you have to unplug, and that's, you know, that's tough to do.
You know, I'm really big on exercise.
I had two brain injuries in 2010, eight months apart.
That was a big reason why I went back to grad school for psychology, and with my private clients, I incorporate exercise or physical movement in every therapy session, because I don't think you can be mentally and emotionally and psychologically healthy if you're not physically healthy.
In 2013, there were 270 million prescriptions of antidepressants written for this country.
We've got a country of 330 million people, or whatever it is, and so it's no surprise that as our You know, as our physical health has gone down, we got, you know, 69% of the population is overweight or over-obese.
It also has, you know, anxiety and depression has gone up.
And when you're plugging into, you know, the stuff that the politicians and the demagoguing and all that, you know, the fear and all that stuff, you know, it just has a compounding effect on our health.
And so, you know, one of the things that I, you know, preach, you know, constantly is uh is lifestyle all right and so it's you know there's a there's a role for pharmacology but it should be kind of a progressional force from least invasive to most invasion that should be sleep and diet and exercise and then talk therapy and only you know the fifth line of the fence should be you know some pharmacology for depression something like that but
But those are the things that, you know, that people can really focus on, you know, try to reconnect with people, you know, even when we're, you know, we're not getting along with our family members and that stuff.
But, you know, ultimately the most important things in our lives are our relationships, our personal relationships.
And that's why it's, you know, it's just mind numbing, you know, to see a guy like Trump or to see just politicians in general, to see politics, have such a destructive effect on our personal relationship. - Well, I'm kind of curious, with your ear and your eye, is it easy or have you been able to detect a rigorous and organized psychological manipulation in what they say and how they say it?
And I guess the next question would then be, if that is what's happening, a lot of times with Trump he'll say something three times within 30 seconds.
And there's something, I think, psychological about that.
The question then is, if you are aware of those things, does that make you more impervious to the manipulation they're trying to have over you?
Yeah, I suppose it does, it may be more of a case-by-case basis, but I think that, you know, I think it's easy for us, you know, to turn on Tucker, to turn on Bannon, and to watch that, and we pick up on that shit right away, because we haven't been following the narrative, we're kind of plugging in, we're plugging out, you know, we have a different perspective on things, and it's really easy to see, but when, you know, when you're pointing that, you know, like Bannon's saying, heads on pipes, or, you know, Tucker's saying, when they come for you and they will, or stuff like that,
I mean, it's almost mind-numbing to talk to somebody who watches it every day and say, look, people are going to die because of what's being said here.
And to watch them just kind of dismiss it, well, that's just kind of a historical reference.
It's not meant literally.
So I think for people who watch it every day, maybe it just becomes a very subconscious consumption of that.
But, you know, I think it's just difficult for them to pick up on that stuff because it's just the vernacular.
It's just the course of dealing with how they consume the news.
Yeah, and I think that's right because eventually you just sort of live, you know, in the boiling water and you don't realize that the water was boiled.
And, you know, one of the things that I think about a lot that, you know, I find this really fortunate.
We don't talk about this in our politics.
We don't write about it.
We don't get into this.
There's an entire generation of kids right now that are being raised up in apocalyptic circumstances.
They're being raised up by families who are telling them that they can't possibly wear masks.
It's, you know, the deep state coming for them.
They might be thrown into camps.
They have to.
We're seeing kids who are being taught how to use weapons out on ranges by militia type situations.
And one of the things psychology tells us is if you live in that environment, that hyper vigilance that you were talking about, it has ramifications.
as you get older, right?
And all of a sudden, your relationships, the way you behave, who you become, all of that is affected by it.
So if you, as somebody who's worked with children who have gone through trauma, what can we expect from future right wing generations that are sort of looking at this right now?
Because to me, it seems like there is a clear line towards this thing getting worse before it gets a whole lot better.
Yeah, I don't think if I would even distinguish between the right wing, because you could look at kids who are growing up on the left, and just from a climate change standpoint, I mean, imagine what it's like for those kids who are constantly hearing that in 10, 20, 30 years, the planet's going to be unlivable.
So, I mean, you know, this is happening on both sides.
It just comes down to one side, you know, the left absolutely believes in climate change, the right side is saying, ah, that's bullshit, don't worry about it.
And the right is saying, hey, absolutely, you gotta worry about the other and all this other shit.
And the left is being like, are you crazy?
It has nothing to do with that.
We're just trying to protect public safety.
And so it's happening on both sides.
I think what may be different now is that the identity and the tribalism is being ingrained at so much of an earlier age right now.
I think that maybe in the past, You know, maybe it was early teens or something like that, when kids were becoming a little bit more politically aware and kind of, you know, maybe they would be listening to it, you know, in the background, Fox News or something like that.
But I think right now, you know, especially because it directly affects them, that school with masks and whether or not you're getting vaccinated, all that stuff.
You know, I think that it's occurring at a much earlier age, the tribalism and just the fear aspect of it.
And just kind of, you know, being, you know, being, you know, being, I guess, sordid into into groups, you know, political groups at 5, 6, 7, 8 years old, as opposed to maybe, you know, 14, 15 or maybe even, you know, waiting until college.
And so, you know, obviously that's going to, you know, if you if you think about it in terms of, you know, a reality and an alternate reality, I mean, it's going to be extremely difficult for a kid who grew up believing a certain way, you know, from 5, 6, 7, you know, even if they got to college and they're 20 and they start hanging out with a bunch of liberal kids in college, which happens a lot in college.
How do you kind of detach from what you've known for the previous 12, 15 years to try to change that thinking?
And I think that's going to be really challenging.
I don't know how that happens.
I'm sure it can, but I think it's going to be really difficult as opposed to trying to unlearn maybe four years in your teens of political awareness.
And there's no question, we've talked about this a lot, where, you know, the whole CRT movement and anti-CRT is rooted in that because the Republicans know they can get to the kids early, then it makes it a lot easier to keep them, you know, in that side and denying science and all those things.
It doesn't hurt if you dismantle college, by the way, so that they don't have a place to go and learn that that shit isn't real.
But that's just...
Right.
Because we know what happens on college campuses, Jared.
Now, in MAGA, I'm kind of curious if you see a connection with... I have to imagine when you're on Twitter and you're writing these insightful threads, there is pushbacks.
People on the right are attacking you or trying to disprove what you're saying.
I wonder if you see a parallel to... When I think about MAGA and I think about what they really want to return the country to, oftentimes it's the Eisenhower 50s.
And when you think about that time, Psychology itself was very taboo, right?
Like you couldn't talk about your feelings.
You wouldn't ever go see a shrink, you know, in that kind of era.
And I'm wondering if you're seeing a, if there's a parallel there to the blowback that perhaps you're getting with your analysis on the psychology standpoint with like that notion of how they're trying to go back to this era when that was a taboo subject anyway.
Well, from, you know, from a blowback standpoint, um, You know, one of the problems with social media and the algorithms is that it tends to herd people into, you know, like-minded groups.
But, you know, another aspect of it, especially for somebody, you know, like me, who just started out just writing into, you know, into the void and started getting some traction, was that those algorithms also prevent me from seeing a lot of the attacks and the blowback.
Because I just don't see mentions from people who, you know, the algorithm determines isn't, you know, ideologically aligned with me.
And so I, you know, a lot of that I don't see.
I won't, I won't notice it until somebody who follows me will be defending me or, or attack somebody who attacks me.
And I'll be like, what the hell is that from?
I'll click on their response and then I'll see the person that attacked me.
So a lot of it, I don't see it.
You know, one of the ways that I deal with it personally, especially, you know, since I, you know, I'm not somebody who's been in the public and the brain injuries and the social anxiety and all the shit that came with that.
Was that, you know, I just kind of tell myself, you know, these guys are bots, you know, it makes it more comfortable for me to deal with as their boss or, you know, to, you know, try to selectively take it in.
And, you know, I have people in my personal life who tell me, I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about.
So I don't necessarily need to have, you know, people I don't know telling me that because I can, I can self-scout and self-evaluate that way.
But from, you know, the psychology standpoint, a lot of it, you know, I'll hear it a lot as well, you know, you're preaching to their choir and that's true because You know, for a long time, and I remember Rush Limbaugh specifically saying this, is that they consider psychology psychobabble, right?
And right now, you know, one of the things that, you know, there's a concerted effort to keep people from self-reflecting, because that may cause them to re-evaluate, you know, where they're at at things.
And so, if you can, you know, you can disparage or stigmatize psychology as psychobabble, and to kind of push away from it, or stay away from it, so that you won't self-reflect, well that, you know, that has some utility.
for certain entities.
Which I think that's what MAGA is all about.
I think Trump came along and told people they didn't have to think about themselves and that everybody who told them that they did or they needed to check their privilege or whatever that was coming.
Nick Carmody, thank you so much.
You've been so generous with your time.
Where can the good people find you?
I am at Nick underscore Carmody, C-A-R-M-O-D-Y on Twitter.
And I have a Patreon site that I tried to rewrite most of the threads on there There's no paywall.
I don't want a couple dollar ask keeping people from reading the information because I think this stuff is too important.
And that is patreon.com backslash Nick Carmody.
All right.
Thank you so much, Nick.
Keep up the good work.
All right.
Thanks, guys.
Appreciate it.
So, fantastic insights from Nick Harmony in terms of what we've been talking about for a few weeks now, and it just makes sense to me that there is a chemical reaction in the brain that encourages this behavior.
You can see it.
In fact, I almost feel like it's related to the actual insurrection itself when you're watching that footage, and I think we talked about this.
Either it was heightened by external stimulants or or just you know the dopamine production naturally it wasn't it wasn't natural like you know that energy in the description we've seen and that people who have reported on it is is enough to cause them PTSD just to be around it and and I just feel like you know it's it's sort of it helps us at least understand why this is happening the way it is.
Yeah, you know, when I was reporting from Trump rallies back in 2016, one of the things that I would always see is post-Trump rally, you'd have a lot of young men who were high.
You know what I mean?
They were really high off the rally.
And they would go and they would be high in the rally.
That's, of course, when they would start to intimidate people or even start fights with them.
But they would go outside.
And if there were protesters, Right.
If there was somebody that they didn't trust, you would actually see this sort of pinball effect.
You would see one person start to get really, really aggressive.
And then another person would sort of join in on that.
And you could tell that it felt amazing for them to become bullies and aggressors.
Right.
And we know that that that it's not just testosterone.
Testosterone actually just reacts to those behaviors sometimes.
But there is a rush for people.
I mean, we see this with people who commit crimes.
We see this with people who commit violence.
Like, there is a chemical situation happening in all of this.
And one of the reasons I was excited about the conversation with Nick is we have to start talking about psychology.
We have to.
We have to stop just pretending like all of this stuff just occurs.
You know, when I had Mary Trump on the podcast a while back, we talked about This isn't just a political and social crisis.
It's a psychological crisis.
It's a mental health crisis.
And we have to start actually dealing with those things if we're going to figure any way out of this.
And like we said in the interview, the self-reflection required to lift yourself out of the morass of what the Republican Party has built is non-existent in a lot of people.
And it doesn't matter what your intelligence level is either at that point.
But there are personality traits that people will have that will sort of not allow that.
And if we could somehow figure that out, it would probably make the debates a lot easier, or not a lot easier, but certainly more civil and maybe more productive.
Self-reflection is so hard in general.
You know what I mean?
Even if you're not a right-wing authoritarian, it's hard.
But they've got Trump, they've got media figures who are like, I just saw a shirt today that some woman was wearing.
It was like, I love toxic masculinity.
It's like, oh my god, what are we doing here?
In a large way, it is a portion of our population that is being told by the people who are grifting off of them and are taking their money and taking their votes, and they're telling them, don't listen to anyone around you.
You are perfect.
Everybody else has the problem.
All right, so we're gonna be back.
We'll be back on Friday with the Weekender episode.
If you want to get a hold of that, all you have to do is go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
Just want to say thank you again for all the support.
We were building so much momentum on this podcast, and it is all because of you, and you're what keeps us, again, editorially independent, ad-free, That is patreon.com slash monkrakepodcast for the weekend or on Friday.
If you need us before then, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me SMH.
