Jack Richardson on America's Systemic Psychosis

Why I Wrote *America’s Systemic Psychosis*

Welcome once again to the Conversations, That Matter Podcast, I'm your host, John Harris. We have a guest with us today, who's actually been on the podcast once before, but it was a while ago. We have Jack Richardson.

Welcome, Jack, good to have you. Well, thank you, good to see you again. Well, and you know, people know you now by your blog, bluegrasschronicles .com, and there's a lot there if people wanna go check that out.

And we're gonna talk about your book, of course, which is called America's Systemic Psychosis. It's how our nation lost its mind and how to get it back. You know, that's something I've wondered about.

How do we get back? I feel like people have lost their mind. But I wanna say, I've known you for years now. I don't know how many. I think the first time we met was at a country club that you attend for Enemies Within the Church.

We did a little fundraiser. Oh, that's right, yep. That was 2019, so. That was my first book, Hey Teachers, Leave Those Kids Alone. That's right, and that was, well, and we had you on the podcast to talk about that and the CRT issue.

Yes, that's right. But yeah, I've just kind of known, you know, I'm trying to think, like what, it sort of happened organically. I've just kind of known you. We've talked several times about some of these issues.

You live in Louisville and you're close to one of the biggest or most influential seminaries, certainly the most influential Southern Baptist seminary in the country. And I know that you have connections there and we've talked about some of what's happened in higher education and evangelicalism.

So anyway, it's good to have you on as a friend. Well, thank you. I want to ask you, obviously, the question that most authors like to be asked first, and it's a good question, is why did you write it?

So tell me why you decided, with all the controversy and politics you already have in your life, why you decided to write a book about America's systemic psychosis.

Well, I've been in the political process for a long time, but also as an attorney, you see how the narratives get twisted. And what I'm seeing basically in the country is how narratives are twisted and how particularly the conservatives or Republicans and people, what I would call on the right side of the fence, get the narratives wrong.

They get sucked into these things. And as an attorney, if you try to get by with that, in a court of law, the judge is going to bang the gavel and say, you know, you're out of order or that's irrelevant, Mr. Richardson, let's move on to the issue.

And people don't know how to filter through that. You're trained to do that as an attorney, but we're gas lit by the media, we're gas lit by the press, all the talking heads on TV. And they're so disingenuous and there is an agenda at foot here.

And the whole reason for naming the book, America's systemic psychosis, is psychosis is a detachment from reality. And in the book, I define psychosis. Now, some might think that it's something that grows or comes about organically, but this is not an organic psychosis.

This is a taught and caught psychosis. This is an implemented psychosis. And that's why I call it inorganic. It is intentionally put upon us. You've heard some, like Matt Walsh and others, talk about a mass formation psychosis.

And we saw the people, we ask our questions, ourselves questions a lot of times about, well, how could the people of Germany ever do what they did during the World War II? Well, you had a mass formation psychosis, and this has happened before, but this is what's being implemented upon the public in this country.

And it's really reached a dangerous point, maybe a point of no return. And I value my freedoms as I hope the next person does. And I saw the trajectory of this and having been in politics for 25, 30 years, I know how this game is played, and I just wanted to wake people up.

And the first cure that I have in my book is question everything. Believe nothing you see or hear out of the media or your government or any of the agencies. You have to regain your natural skepticism.

And so that's cure number one. But that's the long answer to why I wrote the book.

Media Narratives, Gaslighting, and the Loss of Skepticism

Well, it's scary when you say things like we may never get it back. I know Trump in the debate with Biden said something that I picked up on. I thought this was the moment of the debate and I didn't see anyone else saying it, but he said that actually, if we get another four years of Biden, we may not have a country left.

And I just thought, wow, contrast that with mourning in America. And really everything I've heard my whole life from Republicans, when they go to the debate stage, they wanna paint a positive message.

America's best days are ahead of her. And Trump did just the opposite. And I think he was tapping into reality. I think we all feel this and know this that things have changed at such a fundamental level.

If this continues, we don't have a country anymore. And maybe we passed that point of no return as you just said. And so I'd like to address or talk about some of the proposed solutions you have to this, but I wanna first talk about how you got to this point of being skeptical, as you say, because you have some stories in here.

You're someone who's been as a lawyer and an attorney, I should say, and someone who's interacted at high levels with high profile people in the political realm and in even the Christian realm. You've been a part of conversations that are private.

You've been in meetings that most of us would, we would never even be able to get past the door, but you're in there and you're sitting there and you tell some of these stories. Tell us maybe some of the big key moments in your life when you were in some of those meetings that you realized something is very wrong, or I had a belief that was very wrong.

And now I realize, now I'm seeing it with full color. Now I see the situation as it really is.

Well, being as close into the issue and the problem, being in the midst of all this, I'm seeing things that a lot of other people don't see. And I think let's go back to the time when I was interning in Washington, DC for a US Senator.

And I would go to some of the meetings, and you remember the horseshoe tables and the big rooms where all the senators were reigned around the table and they would be making inquiry of certain cabinet members.

And I remember watching, I think it was Laird was the defense secretary and questions were being asked of him. And so I'd go back to my apartment at night and I would turn on the news. And what was being shown on the news wasn't anywhere near what I witnessed that day.

And I would call home to my parents. I'd say, well, let me tell you what really happened. And so the public is being gaslighted and it's being lied to. And we're being lied to in such a way today that we're reaching a fever pitch almost to the breaking point, almost to the point of the civil war.

And we've seen what the left has done to Trump. They've demonized him. And there's a term for that. I'm trying to remember, but there is a term, a technical term, a stake hated or terrorism. And that's where you demonize someone or a group of people so much that they are in a state of anxiety and they can only live in a state of anxiety so long before they start acting out.

And that's what Hitler did. He demonized the Jews and used the Jews as a scapegoat. This was what Biden and all the left has done to Trump over eight years. And now all of a sudden, what do they wanna do?

Well, let's play nice now. Let's turn down the tone. Let's get rid of all this rhetoric. Well, no, no, no. You're the one that has had the rhetoric for the last eight years. And you're the one that has taken, you all are the ones that have taken the country to the point of mass insurrection in civil war because you have demonized half the country, making the other half think that we're gonna destroy democracy.

You're a Hitler, you're racist. They're just a bunch of name callers. So the public can only take that so long. And for some of the lower information voters, they get really upset about this and they believe this stuff.

And it's incredible. I wish our libel laws were much stronger and better because there needs to be libel suits all over the place, charging people for these lies and how they have really damaged the country.

So that's another reason for the book is to connect the dots. People aren't connecting the dots. We've lost the understanding of cause and effect. And we keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again.

And we also buy into narratives that are false. So I had, there was that one experience, particularly one of the experiences where I had this, it was a dinner at a DC soiree where political figures and high up people from the Department of Defense that were and had conducted the Vietnam War.

And I was listening to the, I mean, this was a dinner of about maybe 10 or 12 people. And we were sitting around the fireplace and I was talking to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and people of that rank. And I was hearing about what Nixon was trying to do, but they were after Nixon's head.

That is the people on the left were after Nixon's head. Boys were left behind in Vietnam. And I was talking to Monica Jensen-Stevenson who was the, basically the producer of 60 Minutes, award-winning producer.

And the things that I was hearing from these people, such esteemed levels and in the know, I just could not believe. And so I was 20 years old at the time, but it changed my whole concept and made me a skeptic.

But we've lost that skepticism. It's being taught out of us in schools. We're being indoctrinated and not educated. And so all this comes about and there's so many experiences that I've had like this.

I said, you know, it would be a sin for me to keep my mouth shut about this. I need to help people come to an understanding of the truth and what the truth is and how they're being lied to. Once we regain our natural skepticism and we start questioning everything, we're gonna start coming up with answers and finding out that the people that we've elected and put in office are unfit for the job.

And we saw that at the debate and particularly with Joe Biden. And I was there when Joe Biden first took office. And even as a 20-year-old walking the halls with him, I knew that he was there for himself and not for the people.

Conspiracy Theories, the Deep State, and Common Sense

I think the natural question is, if you become skeptical of it, like where does the skepticism end, right? Because right now we just experienced last weekend a horrific situation. And I am seeing so many people online with the wildest theories about what actually happened, who's in on it.

Maybe Trump actually, this was a photo op that Trump planned himself and his people, which is just ridiculous in my mind. But the skepticism, I think a lot of people have been skeptical now since 2020, but they don't know where to go for anything solid.

They don't know who to trust. And so they don't trust anyone and they get ever more into this bunker mentality. So I don't know, do you have a thought on that? I think there are a lot of people that need a healthy dose of skepticism, but many of us do have it.

And maybe we're taking it to lengths that it shouldn't be taken. Well, I mean,.

They made conspiracy theory a bad term. And they wanted to get that off of the lexicon. They wanted to get that off the table. And anytime that you disagreed with the left or people who were trying to tear down this country, if you tried to connect the dots, then you were a conspiracy theorist.

Be quite honest, I don't think at this point and this late stage of the game that you can be skeptical enough. It's amazing the intricate weaving and how we have unelected people running our government, whether it's in the deep state or whether it's the George Soros's or other BlackRock, you name it, you can go down the list.

And these are the people that are running your government. And basically you feel safe in the fact that where you can vote them out of office. Well, guess what? Your votes are even being manipulated and your attitudes and the way you think about things are being manipulated, whether it's by the corrupt corporate America that has emerged or from these NGOs, these non-governmental organizations.

This thing is so complex and so twisted. That's why I wrote the book. I am connecting the dots for people. I'm saying, I don't think that you can be skeptical enough. And so it's definitely gonna be safer for you to be a skeptic at this point.

I go back to the biblical, the beginning of wisdom is the fear of God. Well, people say, well, we shouldn't have to fear God if he's really a loving God. Well, no, if you had your child running toward the road, would you say, Johnny, don't do that?

Or would you scream out and say, Johnny, stop? Well, that's what I'm saying in the book, particularly with regard to skepticism. Stop, start using your common sense and start looking what they're doing to you.

Look at their trajectory of things. And it's in a bad way, but I don't think you can be too skeptical at this point. At least what skepticism does is it raises questions that the bad side, the left side can't answer.

They don't want the questions. They wanna shut down your free speech. They wanna shut down any kind of inquiry. And then they wanna say, do as I say, or shut up.

I think it's important to point out, you're saying be skeptical of the people that you just said are running the country. So, and you attributed that to the left. And I think that that's important to identify because there are, I just see this as my own thought, but there are certain skeptical, I don't even know what they are, communities, but groups online who just, they will go off into some odd places where Trump is a product of the deep state.

You can't, I mean, even our conversation now, they might wonder whether or not we're being paid by the deep state or something. It just gets a little kooky. And then it usually ends up with the only person you can trust is me, right?

And I see a lot of these people building their online profiles where I'm the one with the truth. I have the secret insight. And we don't, obviously we don't wanna get there. I think you just said it common sense.

We wanna use our common sense. And that means the fear of the Lord, which means understanding what the Lord has said about us, how the Lord created us and who he is. And we're fallen and we have fallen interests oftentimes.

And just expect the people running the place to be sinners who are after their own self-interest. That will get you a long way.

Well, the problem with common sense is it's not so common anymore. No. And again, that's been taught out of us through our education department. You can blame Jimmy Carter for the debacle that we have in our education departments because he brought about the department of education and they put their tentacles in every state and they're determining how they're going to basically indoctrinate your kids.

So we have children that are coming out of school today that basically are not prepared for life and the rest of the world is going to clean our clocks. But this has all been implemented. Again, this is a psychosis, a detachment from reality that basically has been implemented upon us.

And we can't do any, we don't exercise deductive reasoning anymore. We don't know how to. And so we're all about transgenderism. We're all about the most inane things, the craziest things that you ever thought would happen 10 years ago are here on our doorstep, but it didn't happen by accident.

There are people in places that are manipulating public opinion. And that's why I say you have to start questioning everything. But there's been some actors in it. You know, I call myself in the book an equal opportunity criticizer.

I've criticized conservatives and Republicans for being so inept and stupid in buying into some of the narratives. I said, the Republican party needs a national psychologist because the Republican party seems to be so much in need of being liked and loved by people who will never like them or love them or agree with them.

And so they're up there to do a job, but they don't do it because they just want to be liked. Well, the Democrats and the left don't care about that. They have an agenda. And so then another problem we have is like in the churches and people, I was dealing with a matter just a few days ago with regards to the Republican platform.

And there were some sanctimonious, overly pious ministers out there that were saying, well, you didn't put in the platform what we wanted with regards to abortion and all that. And I said, I fired back on him.

I said, well, guess what? After 50 years of the Christians failing to get rid of Roe v. Wade, guess what? A Cyrus type president came in and did it. And so I get really apoplectic about it. I'm as Christian as most of these people behind the pulpits, but probably a lot smarter.

And because I've been on both sides of the fence, I've done my stint in seminary as well, even though I'm a lawyer. And I can tell you that if the Christians start acting like, well, we're not gonna vote for Trump because they didn't put this in platform, if the Christians don't shape up and get smart, they will end up with more abortion than we have now.

And I've already seen that trajectory and it's really troubling to me is that the path that they're on, if they keep pushing this and their timeliness is horrible, they're gonna end up with more abortion and worse type abortion than we have now.

I get a little heated on this, but I get really apoplectic, particularly on this particular issue. But we were told by our forefathers, like I said again, what kind of government did you give us? Well, we gave you one that's only fitting for more people.

Well, that's not coming down from the pulpit and the people in the pulpit today cannot apply the gospel to current events and tell them, yeah, transgenderism is sinful. Lying is sinful. Doing the things that they're doing right now in Washington DC is sinful.

And like Albert Mueller said, he said, it's not honoring of God to vote Democrat because when you take a look at the Democrat platform, that platform is not consistent with any major religion in the world.

And so it is so hedonistic. Yeah, no religion comports with the Democrat platform, but we play into the hands of that all the time. And so I attack a lot of different groups and I go after the church for being so stupid and they shouldn't be.

If you're in the pulpit, you need to have something going on up here. And not only just the gospel and the good book, but you need to know what's going on in the world. You need to be self-aware to be able to lead your flock.

We need shepherds and we don't have shepherds. Basically what we've got is we got wolves in shepherd's clothing today.

The Church, Politics, and the Failure of Christian Leadership

Yeah, I hear this from a lot of guys that are more involved in politics as you are. They look at many of the evangelical takes from big names in evangelicalism and just think, you just, you do not get it.

You don't understand how politics works.

John, that's the problem I had when I was chairman for 10 years, I found myself beating myself, my head up against the wall because I started fighting the church. I said, you all have no clue of what's going on and what's coming down the pike.

And you're trying to tell me my job and you don't have any clue what's going on. Right, and just like the body has many parts, well, likewise, the pastor needs to be smart and wise. Wise and wily as a snake.

Yeah, be gentle as a dove, but don't be stupid. Don't get up there and be an F. You've got to be able to lead your flock and they're not doing that.

Yeah, and I can give you many stories. I remember Bruce Ashford. I don't know if you know who he is, but he was a professor. He was actually the provost of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary when I was there and he was a big Kuiper guy, right?

He read a lot of Kuiper and thought Kuiper was the way. And he, of course, that made him a big Richard Mount and Tim Keller fan as well. And he, there was a political, someone told me about this later, but there was a political event that he spoke at.

And he's just so, I just remember him thinking that he was so dazzled with his own mind that he really could transcend these things and speak from on high about what God expected and why the right and the left, they're both just getting it wrong.

And he had the formula and people there who actually do politics, it was extremely embarrassing for them that this guy came and started lecturing. And he just, as soon as he opened his mouth, he didn't know what in the world he was talking about, the realities they were actually dealing with, the fights that they had on a daily basis.

This isn't intellectual stuff that you can just separate from. You're not in an ivory tower figuring this stuff out. This is, the real world of politics is friends and enemies and coalitions and compromises.

And I mean, it's drama, there's danger in it. It is a different world than you sitting in your ivory tower in seminary, thinking about what kinds of laws would be best from God. And like, there's just a disconnect there.

So I'm glad you kind of spotlight that. What's the solution as far as, we're in a psychosis state. You gave for step one, there's more steps though. So bring us out of this, paint us a picture that maybe would be able to bring us to mourning in America once again.

Biblical Foundations, Parallel Structures, and Grassroots Resistance

Well, first of all, you gotta, I think you have to be in a biblically informed, you have to be in a good Bible believing church. You gotta have somebody in the pulpit that knows what they're talking about.

That's gonna be your basis. Remember, this government only works with the moral people. Why moral people? Because the moral people are self-governing. So they can think for themselves, but they're also governed by a transcendent moral code.

But another thing that we need to do, and I go through a list of things. And one of them is that when we're in such a treacherous period of time where we've got these mega billionaires like Soros, that's undermining our country, undermining our constitutional principles, letting the perpetrator off and punishing the victim.

These types of things should be so common sense and why he's not in jail, I do not know. It's amazing. But we've got to create parallel organizations, parallel structures. And that's what they did over in Czechoslovakia.

I think it was Havok, Havol, I'm probably murdering his name, but he was the one that created a bunch of parallel structures at which basically got the truth out. Now, it's not as nice as having an ABC or NBC news to be able to get out there and speak the truth unfiltered like that.

But when you don't have it and you've allowed your means of communication to be controlled by the left, then what you have to do is that you have to create these parallel structures where it's a grassroots type organization where you're getting the truth out to the people.

And eventually, the left, the totalitarian mindset can no longer sustain itself. I mean, it's gonna collapse economically anyway. In the last 100 years, 100 million people have been murdered by these people, by the left, and they've enslaved 2 billion people.

And that's not even taught in the schools. And so, yes, we need grassroots, we need little groups, moms and pops, I don't care whether it's a half a dozen or whether it's 30, you need to be meeting, you need to be getting together.

Look, put the remote control down and get up off the couch because you can't control your freedoms by the remote control. And when it comes to Christianity, I've said to some people's horror is that, yeah, we've got too many people out there with an unopened Bible in one hand and a remote in the other.

And that's the problem with Christianity today. You're not taking your Christianity out into the marketplace or you've been shamed away from it. And so create these little pockets, these cells, if you wanna use a current terminology.

And look, the rule book was already written and the Democrats have been using it for years. The left has been using it for years. It doesn't say that we can't use it too. And if we did, it'd be very effective because the lie can't stand up against the truth.

The two, it defies the laws of non-contradiction. Water and fire cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Light and darkness have nothing in common. You've got the left and the right. You've got freedom lovers and freedom haters.

They cannot coexist. And we've got to come to this realization that no, there are some things that cannot coexist. And so that's why we have to create these parallel structures, go out there and like just grassroots, just go out there and spread so that you can spread the truth.

We have to work around some of these institutions. Particularly we've got what, five institutions that basically control all of our information flow. Well, now it's time we're gonna have to go door to door.

And so that's another item in there that I would suggest that we have to do. And it's proven successful, particularly in Eastern Europe.

Marching Through the Institutions in Reverse

It's interesting you say that because I'm thinking about the way the left infiltrated in the United States to begin with, which it's called the Long March in the institutions. Sometimes that's attributed to Gramsci's ideas by way of Frankfurt School theorists and so forth.

And you're advocating somewhat of a reverse of that. Like do the same kind of thing to be a counter-revolutionary. So we have a revolution and at this point they've taken over the institutions. We can't from a conservative angle, resist them taking those institutions.

So it's time to be a counter-revolutionary. And I think that our big churches and seminaries and Christian institutions are just so ill suited for this because they are built, it seems like for a world.

We just actually saw this after last weekend and many of the pastors who preached on Sunday, they think that they're still in a world where you can have in the congregation, a bunch of Democrats and Republicans sitting next to each other.

And our church can service both of you, your spiritual needs. And we're gonna cater to both of you because of that, which means we're not going to really honestly portray the political realities. And that's obviously not going to be a recipe for success moving into this new paradigm that we're moving into.

I think you're right. I think it is the smaller organizations that are built on commonly shared loves and trust where you can actually vet the people that are there and you don't just see them on a screen so you don't know what their personal lives are like.

That's where trust and I think that answers also the question about the skepticism. I mean, you can trust the person that you've watched grow up their whole life or the person that you've seen in the community more than you can the person who's dictating on the news and it's just a talking head.

Well, it's just like evangelizing.

It's one person at a time. You know, going back to how this disease, this pandemic ideological, it's a pathological ideology that has taken over like Yuri Bezvinov who defected from the KGB back in the seventies told us what was happening, told us that they were marching through the institutions.

And I remember him saying, he says, what's amazing is that we've been three decades without any opposition. Where were we? We were asleep. And so, and another one of our failures is that just after World War II, we did what's called a denazification such that the term Nazi was absolutely anathema.

And we got rid of its language. We got rid of its ideology, everything. What we failed to do in the fifties and sixties and also in 1989 when the Soviet Union fell is that we failed to demarxify and we should have basically worldwide outlawed communism and socialism.

This, it is anti-human what these people do, but yet it's been allowed to thrive. And so again, we're now at, we've tipped over where now we're going to have to grow up from the grassroots as the Marxists did in marching through the institutions.

But we've got to do it with the truth. And again, that gets back to the book, the reason why I'm connecting the dots for people and trying to teach them how to think. And like I've done for so many years in the courtroom, you know, you've got an issue and like you won't pass the bar exam if you don't do this.

What they'll do is that they'll give you about a half a page of irrelevant facts. So you have the issue that has to be solved. You have a bunch of irrelevant facts and you have four answers at the bottom and all those answers are right, except one's more right than the other.

And so you have to be able to sift through all the irrelevant facts that are thrown at you, come to the one fact that's relevant and then you'll find your answer. But that's what people can't do anymore.

And that's where we are. And the media has been complicit in it, the Democrat party and I had some great Democrat friends back in the seventies up there in DC, God fearing people, American loving people, but they allowed their party to be totally absorbed by the left.

There is no diversity of thought in the Democrat party. And that's why anybody that would support the Democrat platform can't be a Christian. If they read it, they can't be a Christian. And I agree with Al Mohler on that one.

And so anyway, I go through the book and I connect the dots on a lot of different points. It's like 16 chapters. My editor said, Jack, you got to stop writing. I said, I'm just starting.

The Democrat Platform, Abortion, and the Duty of Christian Voters

Well, yeah, I mean, I would agree. If you're honest about the Democrat party platform, you understand it's anti-God Christian, it's anti-God ethic and then you continue to support it. And while claiming the name of Christ, there is a serious disconnect going on.

But the book is America's systemic psychosis, how our nation lost its mind and how to get it back. You can go to bluegrasschronicles .com if you want to find out more about the book. I know the book launch you told me before we started recording is coming soon.

And so you're going to be out there speaking, I'm assuming in DC and then around Louisville. Yes. If people want to come out in, I think Florida, you said as well, right?

Yes, and it'll be in the bookstores by the end of the month too.

Okay, so you can go and check that out. I'm assuming your travel schedule is on Bluegrass Chronicles if people want to go meet you.

Yes, yes. Okay, all right, good. I've got my schedule open. I was diverted and I was going down to a conference with Ligonier Ministries down in Orlando. And they said, okay, you're going to have to cut it short because we want you up here in Nashville to meet Harrison Butker.

And what a great gentleman he is. And so I met with him and I met with Candice Owens and Matt Walsh and great people doing, God's work in spreading the truth, bringing light to the world, so to speak.

And so I'll be doing a lot of traveling and speaking and so forth.

Yeah, okay. All right, well, I appreciate it, Jack. As always, God bless you and your endeavors with Bluegrass Chronicles and the book. And I'm sure we'll be talking at some point soon. Absolutely, good seeing you again, John.