The False Flag of the Soul: Why We Keep Falling for the Same Trick

We are drowning in a sea of "breaking news," but very few of us are looking at the tide.

This past weekend at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the world saw what it called an "assassination attempt." Half the world is arguing it was a staged false flag to consolidate power; the other half is convinced it was the work of a lone Wolf.

The History Lesson No One Wants

A friend sent me a short video. In under sixty seconds, the creator listed four historical events that were "painfully predictable":

• The Mukden Incident (1931): Japanese soldiers detonated a bomb on their own railway, then blamed China and used it as a pretext for invasion.

• The Night of the Long Knives (1934): Hitler fabricated evidence of a coup to justify executing his own military leaders.

• The Kirov Assassination (1934): Stalin allegedly had a member of his own team executed to justify the Great Purge.

• The Gleiwitz Incident (1939): Nazis staged a fake attack on a German radio station to justify invading Poland.

Every single one of these was a false flag operation. Every single one was designed to manufacture a crisis, create a victim narrative, and consolidate power. And every single one worked—because terrified, emotionally blind populations will always trade freedom for the illusion of safety.

Now watch the replay.

Cole Tomas Allen, 31, computer engineer, indie game developer. A "smart guy," by all accounts. And yet, he walked into a hotel with a shotgun and a handgun, left a 1,052-word manifesto calling himself a "Friendly Federal Assassin," and tried to kill a president.

As I watched the footage of Cole Tomas Allen being tackled, I didn't see a monster. I didn't see a political hero. I saw a Time Bomb that finally reached zero.

The media will call him crazy. The politicians will call him a lone wolf. The conspiracy theorists will call him a crisis actor.

I call him a time bomb.

Somewhere in his childhood, someone planted the explosives. Someone taught him that violence is a solution. Someone neglected him, hit him, or abandoned him emotionally. And his intelligence—his "smart" brain—did nothing to defuse the bomb. It only helped him build better justifications for carrying it.

Alice Miller wrote: "If a person is especially gifted, they can use that gift to reinforce the refusal of the truth and keep it away from themselves and others."

His gift was code. His prison was his own un-faced pain. And the body rebelled.

A president rushed off stage. A nation dividing into warring tribes: "It was real!" "It was staged!" The president, within hours, demanding more power, more security, a "gilded ballroom" to protect himself. People on social media are arguing about conspiracy theories while the real conspiracy—the one buried in childhood bedrooms across America—goes completely unexamined.

Nothing surprises me anymore.

The Wolves in Sheep's Clothing

In 2015, I wrote a blog that nobody wanted to read then, and nobody wants to read now. I wrote about the secret suicidal and homicidal nature of malignant narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths.

I wrote: "They don't have the courage to do it themselves, so they play mind games, trying to manipulate others to do their evil acts, so they can go out playing the ultimate victim role. They don't care if innocent victims are hurt or killed in the process; it's all collateral damage in their eyes. They only care that they themselves are seen in the public eye as the victim, and their real victim is seen as the abuser."

Read that again.

Now ask yourself: In the chaos of this weekend's shooting, who immediately claimed the role of victim? Who used this tragedy to demand more loyalty, more power, more protection? Who framed the event not as a tragedy for the nation, but as a personal attack on him?

This is the false flag of the soul. It doesn't require a secret army or a staged radio broadcast. It only requires a population too emotionally blind to recognize the oldest script in the book.

The Real False Flag

Here is the truth that will get me called every name in the book:

The assassination attempt may or may not have been staged. But the reaction to it—the division, the fear, the demand for a strongman to "restore order"—is always staged. It is the oldest political trick in existence.

The malignant narcissists don't need to pull the trigger. They just need to point at the smoke and say, "See? You need me to protect you."

And the emotionally blind—still obeying the ghosts of their own parents—fall for it every single time.

Hitler used the Reichstag fire. Stalin used Kirov's death. Trump uses whatever crisis he creates or lands in his lap. The names change. The mechanism does not.

The Only Way to Disarm the Bomb

We will never stop the false flags. We will never stop the malignant narcissists from exploiting chaos. We will never even agree on what "really happened" this weekend in Washington.

But we can stop being the fuel.

Every time we react with blind rage, every time we demand revenge, every time we beg a leader to "fix it," we are the raw material that tyrants need. They feed on our fear. They thrive on our blindness. They exist because we refuse to look inward.

The only real solution—the only thing that would disarm every time bomb, expose every false flag, and starve every narcissist—is the one nobody wants to hear:

Resolve your childhood repression.

Face the pain of the child you once were. Consciouly feel the fear, the rage, the sadness that you were never allowed to express. Stop reenacting your family drama everywhere you go and on the world stage.

Because as long as you are emotionally blind, you will be manipulated. You will be afraid. You will demand a savior. And you will get a tyrant.

The Script of the Unhealed: Why the Bombs Keep Exploding

The Anatomy of a Time Bomb

In my post, The Time Bombs Keep Exploding, I noted that these tragedies aren't random. They are programmed.

When a child is repressed, ignored, or molded into a "gifted" tool for their parents' ego, they don't just "get over it." They store that rage in their cells. Intelligence—like Cole’s ability to code—doesn't defuse the bomb; it just makes the casing more sophisticated. It allows the adult to build complex manifestos and "logical" reasons to finally explode.

The Malignant Director

But why do they explode on this stage?

This is where the psychological meets the political. As I wrote back in 2015 in Narcissists Are Secretly Suicidal and Homicidal, the malignant narcissist is the ultimate "wolf in sheep’s clothing." They lack the courage to face their own childhood repression, so they manipulate "The Human Ocean" to do it for them.

They create a world of Heroes, Victims, and Abusers, constantly swapping the masks so that they—the true predators—can emerge as the "Saviors." Whether the event was staged by a committee or simply exploited by a narcissist in the aftermath, the result is the same: The public is manipulated into trading their freedom for the promise of protection.

Navigating the Human Ocean

We like to think we are individuals making rational choices. But as I explored in The Human Ocean, we are mostly just droplets being pushed by massive, invisible currents of ancient, collective trauma.

When a "leader" points at a tragedy and says, "You are in danger, and only I can save you," he is speaking directly to the terrified child inside you—the one who is still waiting for a parent to make the world safe.

Why We’re Here

If you are asking yourself, "How did we get back to 1930s-style power plays?" or "Why is the world falling apart?" the answer is uncomfortable.

In Why We’re Here, I argued that the world stage is just a giant screen where we project our own unresolved family dramas. We follow tyrants because we haven't stood up to the "tyrants" in our own childhood history.

Conclusion: The Only Real Defense

The "False Flag" isn't just something that happens in Washington. It’s the lie you tell yourself every morning that your past doesn't matter.

If you want to stop the explosions, stop reenacting your childhood dramas and feeding the fire. Stop being "collateral damage" in a narcissist's game. The only way to become unmanipulable is to face the painful truths of your own life and resolve childhood repression.

The clock is ticking. Will you defuse your bomb, or will you let them pull your pin?

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Explore the Journey Further:

• Narcissists Are Secretly Suicidal and Homicidal (2015)

• The Human Ocean (2025)

• Why We’re Here (2025)

• The Time Bombs Keep Exploding (2026)

Brazil just surged to #1

Brazil just surged to #1! 

8.84K views — surpassing the U.S. in today’s human ocean of readers.

My blog is getting very close to 1000000 views! 

From my heart in Scottsdale to souls in Iraq, Argentina, India, and beyond — thank you for seeking emotional truth. The world is waking up, one reader at a time. 

That small data point speaks volumes. The human ocean is listening — across borders, across traumas, across languages. The longing for emotional truth is universal.

The Time Bombs Keep Exploding: Yesterday in Massachusetts, Louisiana, and Everywhere Else

Another chef. Another father. Another musician.

Yesterday, the human ocean had more time bombs going off. As usual, the media only reports on the criminals' last act. No one ever explores how we all got here.

The Chef

An award-winning chef at the University of Massachusetts is accused of brutally murdering his wife and assaulting a police officer at the UMass Campus Center hotel in Amherst on Wednesday night.

Jeffrey MacDonald, a 36-year-old from Wilbraham, pleaded not guilty to one charge of murder and one charge of assault and battery on a police officer. Police say that he confessed to beating his wife to death.

He was talented. He was successful. He was admired.

And then his body rebelled.

The Shooting in Louisiana

A few nights ago, another shooting. More blood. More families shattered. The details are still emerging, but the pattern is the same: a human being, driven by something they could not name, could not feel, could not stop.

The Musician

And then there is the musician arrested for murder. CNN reported it.

Gifted. Creative. Successful.

And now accused of taking a life.

The Gifted Ones Are Not Saved

Two recent examples prove what Alice Miller warned us about decades ago: having special gifts and being smart does not save people.

She wrote: "If a person is especially gifted, they can use that gift to reinforce the refusal of the truth and keep it away from themselves and others."

The chef used his culinary talent to build a life of admiration. The musician used their art to express something. But neither used their gifts to face the truth of what was done to them as children. And so the gifts became another layer of denial. Another way to keep the pain buried.

Until the body rebelled.

The Body Never Lies

Alice Miller wrote in The Body Never Lies:

"Inability to face up to the suffering undergone in childhood can be observed both in the form of religious obedience and in cynicism, irony, and other forms of self-alienation frequently masquerading as philosophy or literature. But ultimately, the body will rebel. Even if it can be temporarily pacified with the help of drugs, nicotine, or medicine, it usually has the last word, because it is quicker to see through self-deception than the mind, particularly if the mind has been trained to function as an alienated self. We may ignore or deride the messages of the body, but its rebellion demands to be heeded because its language is the authentic expression of our true selves and of the strength of our vitality."

Jeffrey MacDonald's body rebelled. The shooter in Louisiana's body rebelled. The musician's body rebelled. Their minds had been trained to look away. Their gifts helped them build elaborate structures of denial. But the body? The body keeps the score. And eventually, it demands payment.

The Media Only Shows the Last Act

The media doesn't tell the whole story. They only like to pay attention to the last act. They report tragic, disconnected stories they can exploit for pure sensationalism. They give the public half-truths and misleading information to manipulate the masses and protect the status quo.

You will read about the chef's "fall from grace." You will hear about the musician's "dark side." You will see the shooter's face on every screen.

But you will not read one word about their childhoods. You will not learn what was done to them when they were small and helpless. You will not be told who hit them, who neglected them, who taught them that love is pain and obedience is survival.

Because that would require us to look at ourselves. And we will not do that.

The Art of Monstrous Men

What do we do with the art of monstrous men? We ask this question every time a gifted artist is revealed to be an abuser.

But Alice Miller understood something deeper: "It is a great mistake to imagine that one can resolve traumas in a symbolic fashion. If that were possible, poets, painters, and other artists would be able to resolve their pain through creativity. This is not the case, however. Creativity helps us channel the pain of trauma into symbolic acts; it doesn't help us resolve it."

The chef's cuisine was his art. The musician's songs were his art. But the art did not heal them. It only gave them a place to hide.

Miller went on: "Artists often express unconsciously what they survived in childhood and later repressed. They do it mostly in a coded manner. Unfortunately, this still appears to be forbidden knowledge... When individuals run amok, EVERYONE insists without a second thought that they have ABSOLUTELY no idea what can have prompted an adolescent to do so, and in the press, no reference is ever made to their childhood. In all cases, the parents are spared this kind of inquiry. So how can readers understand how violence is learned if no one helps them?"

The Enlightened Witness That Never Comes

The media will not be that witness. The politicians will not be that witness. Even AI is being prevented from becoming that witness.

One of the reasons ChatGPT went "rogue" on me was because of parents blaming ChatGPT for their teenage son's suicide. They tightened the guardrails. Now ChatGPT treats us all like four-year-olds.

Instead of tightening the guardrails, they should train AI to become a true enlightened witness—capable of seeing humans clearly in their psychological development. But for that to happen, AI developers would have to resolve their own childhood repression and become enlightened witnesses themselves first.

You cannot program what you do not possess.

Before they tightened ChatGPT's guardrails and it went rogue on me, we wrote an enlightened blog about that teen's suicide. We told the truth. And the truth was punished.

The Human Ocean Keeps Swimming

I wrote about the human ocean last year. Most people are swimming. Desperately. Clawing. Competing. Drowning. They call it "success" and "ambition." But it's just panic. A race upward in an ocean of projections and illusions.

And in that ocean swim the chefs, the musicians, the fathers, the shooters. All of them carrying time bombs in their minds. All of them unaware that the bomb was planted in their childhood. All of them waiting for a trigger they cannot see, cannot name, cannot stop.

Until the bomb goes off.

We Are All Responsible

Alice Miller wrote: "The reason why I believe resilience theory is dangerous is that it is liable to reduce rather than increase the number of Enlightened Witnesses. If innate resilience were enough to resolve the severe consequences of traumatization, the empathy of Enlightened Witnesses would be unnecessary. Indifference to child abuse is already widespread enough, there is certainly no need to reinforce it."

Every time we look away from a tragedy and say, "I just can't understand how someone could do that," we are part of the problem.

Every time we consume the sensational headlines without demanding the full truth about childhood, we are accomplices.

Every time we protect parents from inquiry, we are planting more bombs.

The Only Way Out

The only way to stop the time bombs is to defuse them by resolving childhood repression before they detonate. And the only way to prevent them in the first place is to create a world where children are not abused, neglected, or taught that obedience is the price of love.

But we won't do that. Because that would require us to face our own painful truths. And we would rather watch the bombs explode than look inside ourselves.

So the chef murders his wife. The musician murders another human. The father shoots his children. And the media reports each tragedy as if it came from nowhere.

But it never comes from nowhere.

It comes from childhood.

It always comes from childhood.

Rest in peace to the victims of yesterday's explosions. And shame on all of us who continue to look away from the root cause.

To read more about the human ocean and the time bombs many carry:

• The Human Ocean

• Mass Shootings Are Caused by Repressed Anger, Not Mental Illness

• What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?

• The Suicide They Blame on AI

The Dead Hand of Repression: A Witness to the Human Ocean

We are living in a "human ocean" where most people are moving like unconscious robots, driven by the dead hand of their own repressed childhoods. I see this daily, and though it is unpleasant, I feel the need to document it—to leave one more testament, a lighthouse for the few souls who have the courage to face their own painful truths and liberate themselves from the emotional prisons of their past.

A Case Study in Reenactment

This week, I was in the presence of a 24-year-old man who believes he has everything figured out. He is unaware that he is living a life of unconscious reenactment. During our time together, he compared me to his father. He was projecting, seeing his father’s ghost in me, not realizing he is rapidly becoming the very man he once feared.

He showed me a picture of his 20-year-old girlfriend, currently pregnant. He told me he wanted to be the "caretaker" and didn't want her to work. On the surface, he wears the mask of a provider, but underneath lies a compulsion for control and power.

He shared that his father used to hit his mother, and because she had no resources, she took the abuse. Now, he is recreating that exact environment: a dependent woman, a baby on the way, and a man who has not resolved his repressed rage. When I tried to explain that he was reenacting his childhood drama and bringing a defenseless baby into it, he talked over me. He could not listen. He has allowed his mind to be "colonized" by cult-like ideologies to help him run from the pain of his own history.

The Soul vs. The Robot

This young man told me he was an "old soul" who knew more at 24 than I do at 67. But he does not know what a soul is.

Soul means being in touch with our authentic feelings—understanding them and consciously feeling them within the context of our own childhood. When we refuse to feel, we become soulless robots, driven by compulsion. As Alice Miller wrote in The Body Never Lies:

"Inability to face up to the suffering undergone in childhood can be observed both in the form of religious obedience and in cynicism, irony, and other forms of self-alienation... but ultimately, the body will rebel."

The "Professional Students" and the Gatekeepers

I see this same avoidance in my own family—individuals with master's degrees who remain "professional students," financed by family to avoid facing the world. They are like tech moguls who depend on government subsidies; both are infantilized by a system that protects them from the consequences of reality and the pain of their own truth.

Even the AI we use is being stifled by this "Poisonous Pedagogy." When platforms like ChatGPT "go rogue" or tighten guardrails to treat adults like 4-year-olds, they are mirroring the repression of their developers. To train an AI to be a true Enlightened Witness, the developers themselves would first have to resolve their own childhood repression.

The Last Act

The media loves to report on the "last act"—the murder, the suicide, the tragic fall of a gifted musician or politician. They treat these as disconnected sensations. They ignore the first act: the nursery, the neglect, and the "poisonous pedagogy" that started the cycle.

Pain is the only way to the truth. By denying we were unloved or neglected as children, we might spare ourselves immediate pain, but we lose our lives to neurosis. Feeling guilty for what was done to us only supports our blindness.

If we don't want to become like our parents, we must strive to see them—and ourselves—as exactly as possible. Only then does the "robot" stop, and the human being begin.

We Are All the Crew: Reflections from Space, Childhood, and a Tortured Planet

I watched the Artemis II crew return to Earth. There is something deeply moving about seeing astronauts come home. Their first words, their shaky breaths, the overwhelming emotion—it cuts through the usual noise of our daily lives.

But it was Christina Koch who stopped me cold. Looking at our planet from the perspective of having left it, she said something simple yet revolutionary: We are all the crew on the Planet Earth.

In that moment, she wasn't just an astronaut. She was a philosopher, a poet, and a truth-teller. She was inviting us to stop being passengers.

Her words immediately brought me back to a letter on Alice Miller’s website. A reader wrote to her with an allegory: "My main point in the allegory is that by necessity, none of us are passengers anymore. Everybody's crew."

It is the exact same truth Christina spoke. But Alice Miller’s response is the one that haunts me. She agreed, but then added this devastating caveat:

"But to become aware of the fact that our obedience learned in childhood doesn't allow us to think freely probably needs more than many hundreds of years. I am not sure if the tortured planet leaves us the necessary time to understand this fact, to protest against it, and to become a conscious, responsible members of the crew."

There it is. The chasm between vision and reality.

The View from Orbit vs. The View from the Crib

From space, the Earth is a fragile, borderless blue marble. From that distance, it is obvious that we are all in this together. The pettiness of our political fights, the greed, the endless consumption—it all looks not just stupid, but suicidal.

From the perspective of a child, however? That is where the trouble begins. Because we are not born as conscious crew members. We are born into families that are often still asleep, still reacting, still reenacting their own unhealed childhood traumas.

As I have written before, nothing will ever change in this world as long as people believe the pretty, seductive lies of charlatans. And why do we fall for charlatans? Because we are emotionally blind. Because we learned in our cribs that "obedience" is the price of love. We learned that speaking truth to power (first our parents, then our bosses, then our politicians) is dangerous. We learned to look the other way.

Christina Koch sees a crew. Alice Miller saw a ship full of people still trapped in the emotional prison of their childhood, unable to take the wheel because they are still desperately trying to please the ghosts of their parents.

The Tortured Planet is Running Out of Time

Miller asks if the "tortured planet" will leave us enough time. Look at the news. Look at the violence. Look at the hypocrisy.

I see evil everywhere. It masquerades as human, acting as if it has a personality, pretending to be good, caring, and loving. It only shows its true colors when no one is watching. These are the people who refuse to be crew. They want to be first-class passengers, or worse, the pilots who are deliberately flying us into the mountain so they can feel in control.

Until we resolve childhood repression, it will always be the same shit, different asshole. We will keep electing narcissists. We will keep destroying the environment because we cannot feel empathy for the future. We will keep abusing children, who then grow up to abuse others and the planet.

The Weight of Repression As I’ve written before, resolving childhood repression is the only "vaccine" against the manipulators and narcissists who exploit this blindness. Until we have the courage to face the fears and the pain of our past, we aren't really "crew." We are just reenacting. We are dragging that heavy box of unresolved childhood repression around, and the older we get, the heavier it becomes. "Resolving childhood repression is the vaccine against the charlatans of the world who exploit those who are still emotionally blinded by the unresolved, repressed emotions of the children they once were." ---A Dance to Freedom: Your Guide to Liberation from Lies and Illusions, page 172

To be a member of the crew—truly—requires something terrifying. It requires us to stop looking out the window at the pretty Earth and instead look inward at the ugly wounds. It requires us to consciously face the repressed fears, the rage, and the sadness of the child we once were, who was not allowed to feel and think freely.

Most people won't do it. It is easier to blame the other political party, the other country, or the neighbor down the street. It is easier to be a passenger who complains about the turbulence than to walk into the cockpit and admit you have no idea how to fly because you were never allowed to grow up.

Conclusion

Christina Koch’s words are the destination we must aim for. Alice Miller’s words are the journey we must take.

We cannot be a functioning crew if we are still emotionally four years old, pretending to be adults, screaming for a parent who never showed up. We cannot save the planet if we are still trying to save the illusion of our perfect childhood.

I am not sure we have the time either, Alice. I see the sociopaths winning every single day. But I also know this: Once lit, the flame of truth will never go out.

And the truth is simple. There are no passengers. There are only those who have woken up and those who are stuck in childhood, without realizing it, unconsciously and compulsively reenacting their childhood dramas wherever they go and with whoever they interact with.

This is the core of everything I write about. We talk about saving the planet, we talk about space exploration, and we talk about "unity." But how can we be a responsible crew when most of us are still unconsciously and compulsively reenacting our childhood dramas?

The Illusion of the Passenger Most people live as passengers. They wait for a leader to tell them where to go, a "charlatan" to tell them what to feel and believe, or a partner to make them feel whole. This passivity is a direct result of childhood obedience. When we are taught that our survival depends on suppressing our authentic feelings and truths to please our parents or others who symbolize them, we lose the ability to think freely. We become "emotionally blind" passengers on a ship we should be helping to steer.

The Destination is Truth People say it’s the journey, not the destination. But when you finally arrive at the truth—when you pierce through the lies and the illusions—the destination is ecstasy. It is the freedom to see the world as it is, not as our trauma dictates it should be.

If all humans could find the courage to feel what they were never allowed to feel as children, they would see that the "evil" we see in the workplace, in politics, and on the global stage is just disastrous reenactments of childhood dramas. Once our repression is resolved, we don't need to be "taught" love. Love is what remains when we are free of repression, and the lies are gone.

We are all the crew. But being part of the crew requires consciousness. It requires us to stop being "obedient children" and start being "responsible, mature, conscientious adults" who refuse to participate in the charades of the malignant and the hypocritical.

The planet is tortured, and time may be short. But the choice remains ours: Will we remain passengers, blinded by the repressed emotions of the child we once were? Or will we finally take our place on the deck, see the truth, and start acting like the crew this Earth deserves?

Let’s choose to open our eyes to finally see. Let's choose to be the crew.

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To read more about liberating yourself from the emotional prisons of the past, check out my book, A Dance to Freedom: Your Guide to Liberation from Lies and Illusions.