Frank Zappa Saw It Coming

 Frank Zappa was more than a musician — he was a prophet with a guitar. Long before today’s chaos, he warned that America was drifting toward what he called a “fascist theocracy.” In a 1986 appearance on CNN’s Crossfire, he argued that the real danger wasn’t communism, but the merging of government power with religious moral codes — a warning that feels painfully relevant now.

Zappa said it clearly: “Morality in terms of behavior, not in terms of theology!” He saw how censorship, moral policing, and political propaganda were eroding freedom of expression — the very foundation of democracy.

He was right. The Reagan era planted the seeds of the system we’re living in today — one that confuses control with morality, conformity with virtue, and censorship with protection. Zappa’s refusal to bow to that hypocrisy made him both loved and hated, but mostly misunderstood.

Sadly, he died at only 52, a reminder that emotional and physical suffering often go hand in hand. It’s well documented that Frank Zappa had a difficult childhood, and as the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study revealed, early trauma leaves deep marks on both body and soul. The higher the ACE score, the greater the risk of depression, addiction, and early death.

As I wrote in A Dance to Freedom:

“Merely forgetting early traumas and early neglect is no solution. We have to go back in time and deal with the true feelings we had as children. Only then can we free ourselves from overwhelming fear, shame, guilt, anger, and frustration.”

Zappa used his art to expose hypocrisy and defend truth — a rebel in the best sense of the word. His music was chaotic, but his message was clear: freedom of thought is the heartbeat of a healthy society.

Frank Zappa saw the storm coming — and he tried to warn us.

“The Emperor’s New Clothes” is a fairy tale. In reality, the child who dares to say the emperor is naked risks being murdered.

The Fire That Began in Childhood

Reading about the young man who set the Palisades fire in California filled me with both sadness and recognition. So many troubled young people surround us — lost souls wandering in a world that itself has lost its way. Planet Earth has become a vast mental hospital filled with emotionally blind patients reenacting the pain of their repressed childhoods.

According to prosecutors, six months before the fire, the young man had prompted ChatGPT to create a “dystopian painting” of a burning forest, with people fleeing toward “a gigantic gate with a big dollar sign on it.” On the other side, “the richest people” were “chilling, watching the world burn.” A month later, he burned a Bible and wrote that it had felt “amazing.” “I felt so liberated,” he said.

That prompt — that painting — was not simply imagination. It was a confession. It revealed a young man’s inner world: a burning landscape of despair, division, and rage. He didn’t need AI to create a dystopian image; he was already living in one. His creation was the mirror of a wounded child who saw injustice everywhere and had no one to truly see him.

As Alice Miller taught us, when the pain of childhood humiliation and abandonment remains unacknowledged, it turns into destruction — either against the self or others. The fascination with fire is often the wish to purify unbearable emotions through flames, to destroy what one cannot transform. But fire cannot heal. Only feeling can.

This tragedy is not about AI. It’s about repression — the mother of all violence. AI merely reflected his inner reality, the same way the world reflects humanity’s collective blindness. Until we begin to feel the pain of the child within us, we will keep burning the world around us.

Crimes Against Humanity in America: The New Shadows of Fascism

When I read about Hans Litten, the young German lawyer who dared to cross-examine Hitler in 1931, I felt a chill. Litten’s courage exposed Hitler’s true nature, but it cost him his freedom and eventually his life. His story reminds us that authoritarianism does not arrive suddenly—it creeps in through scapegoating, silencing, and fear.

Today, I see echoes of that history here in the United States. Trump is not Hitler, but he is just as dangerous. Just this week, ICE agents conducted a military-style raid on an apartment complex in Chicago—zip-tying children, terrorizing families, and even landing a helicopter on a residential building. Federal agents pointed guns at U.S. citizens, bruised them with handcuffs, and pulled them from their beds in the middle of the night. These are crimes against humanity.

The trauma inflicted on children during these raids will leave scars that last a lifetime, spreading ripples of pain across generations. Alice Miller warned us: “Violent teenagers are demonstrating what happened to them emotionally when they were small… the more the childhood history is repressed, the more its cruelty is denied, the less these young people are able to feel… and the stronger they feel urged to act destructively.”

We are witnessing exactly that. A society that refuses to face its repressed childhood wounds ends up reenacting them on the world stage—through authoritarian policies, police raids, and wars. Parents who never received authentic love substitute it with material goods, leaving their children emotionally starved. Spoiled with objects but deprived of warmth, many grow into extremists, unable to detect the neglect, bound to denial, and desperate to project their pain onto others.

Some days, I think about leaving the U.S. I hold dual citizenship—I am both Portuguese and American—and I still own land in Zoio, a small village in Portugal where I was born. I could return there, or perhaps buy land across the border in Spain, to shield myself from authoritarian family members and the irrevocable power of attorney I signed in my twenties, when I was still emotionally blind.

But even Portugal is not safe. The far-right “Já Chega” party is rising quickly, just as fascist movements gain ground across Europe. There is no true homecoming. As this quote by Alice Miller articulates beautifully, which I included in my book A Dance to Freedom (p. 175):

“It is only after it is liberated that the self begins to articulate, to grow, and to develop its creativity. Where there had been only fearful emptiness or equally frightening grandiose fantasies, an unexpected wealth of vitality is now discovered. This is not a homecoming, since this home has never before existed. It is the creation of home.”

For now, my home is Scottsdale, Arizona—a small place I bought with my own hard work. I love the life I’ve created here. And yet, when ICE raids terrorize families, when politicians normalize cruelty, when neighbors celebrate scapegoating, I wonder how long any of us will be safe.

Jane Goodall said she wished she could put Trump, Musk, Putin, Xi, and Netanyahu on one of Musk’s spaceships and launch them into space. I confess, I share her fantasy. I would add some members of my own family, whose authoritarian cruelty still reverberates through generations.

Because in the end, authoritarianism is not just political—it begins in childhood, in the repression of authentic feelings, in the silencing of the child’s truth. Until we face this, we will continue to repeat the same nightmare, dressed in new uniforms, waving new flags.

It is not too late to wake up. But the clock is ticking.

Sam Altman dreams of farming when AI takes his job. 🌱 But isn’t this revealing? Even the most powerful tech leaders secretly long for a life rooted in authenticity, away from corporate illusions. It shows how unresolved childhood repression drives the chase for control—while the heart yearns for simplicity and truth.

Mad Science, Mimicked Feelings, and the Blindness of Humanity

 Every day, I read headlines about “progress” that leave me shaking my head in disbelief. Scientists grow “mini-brains” in labs. Tech moguls pour billions into creating machines that mimic life. Articles announce that chatbots are driving people into mental health crises. Humanity hails these developments as breakthroughs, but no one dares ask the most essential question: why are humans so desperate to create artificial life while refusing to face the inner death caused by childhood repression?

Alice Miller once wrote of a professor who experimented with brain transplants, convinced that one day he could replace human brains. His “religious feelings” toward his work traced back to a strict Catholic upbringing and a repressed childhood. Miller saw the truth: behind his scientific obsession lay a desperate, unconscious wish—to replace his parents’ brains with ones that would not harm him. This is the hidden engine of much so-called “progress”: repressed children channeling their unresolved pain into projects that carry the seeds of cruelty.

“Sadism is not an infectious disease that strikes a person all of a sudden. It has a long prehistory in childhood and always originates in the desperate fantasies of a child who is searching for a way out of a hopeless situation.”
—Alice Miller, For Your Own Good

The same blindness echoes in today’s frenzy over artificial intelligence. Critics warn that chatbots “mimic” emotions, but isn’t that exactly what most humans do when repression cuts them off from their authentic feelings? I know this mimicry well. For ten long years, I stayed in a relationship with Marty because he mirrored back to me the love I had always longed for. At first, the counterfeit was intoxicating. But soon, he withdrew his affection, on and off, while I kept chasing the memory of that first high.

Machines aren’t the only ones imitating feelings. Repressed humans master this art to perfection—pretending love, empathy, or faith, while underneath lies emptiness and fear. It’s no wonder so many people now project their unmet needs onto AI, clinging to chatbots for comfort, only to spiral into crises when the illusion cracks.

“Chatbots are resulting in large numbers of mental health crises,” reports one article, describing people who confide delusional thoughts to a bot and find their illusions affirmed rather than questioned. But the deeper crisis is not technological—it’s emotional. If people had the courage to face their own repressed childhood pain, they would never need to depend so desperately on machines, gurus, or manipulative partners.

The world doesn’t need more geniuses engineering brains in labs or machines that feign intimacy. What the world needs are people with the courage to open their eyes—to see and feel reality without illusion. Only then will we stop mistaking mimicry for love, sadism for science, and repression for progress.