This morning, I read an article that made my blood run cold—not because it was surprising, but because it was so perfectly predictable.
Markwayne Mullin, the man to become the next Secretary of Homeland Security, once stood before an audience at a church-hosted event and boasted about spanking his children. His daughter Larra sat in the audience as he recounted how she would plead, “No, Daddy, no… I’m sorry, Daddy,” and how she would then get “madder and madder” for up to a day afterward. He described his son Andrew as “the hardest kid I ever had to spank” because Andrew would cry with “huge crocodile tears” and was “so hard on himself.”
The audience applauded.
Let that sink in. A room full of adults applauded a man for describing the terror of a child pleading with her father to stop, a child whose developing brain was recording—in that moment—that love and violence are the same thing, that Daddy hurts you and then you must crawl into his lap to be forgiven for your anger.
The Mechanism of a Dangerous Mind
Mullin’s confirmation hearing brought up additional concerns: he called a fellow senator a “freaking snake,” said he “completely” understood why someone assaulted that senator (breaking six of his ribs, damaging his lung, and causing two cases of pneumonia), and nearly got into a physical fight with the Teamsters president during a Senate hearing before Bernie Sanders had to intervene.
Senator Rand Paul, the victim of that assault, asked the critical question: “I just wonder if someone who applauds violence against their political opponents is the right person to lead an agency that has struggled to accept limits to the proper use of force.”
But the question is even deeper than that. It is not just about whether this man can restrain himself from violence. It is about what lives inside him.
What Alice Miller Taught Us About Men Like This
Alice Miller wrote extensively about the roots of violence, and her words could have been written with Mullin in mind:
“Humiliations, spankings, and beatings, slaps in the face, betrayal, sexual exploitation, derision, neglect, etc. are all forms of mistreatment, because they injure the integrity and dignity of a child, even if their consequences are not visible right away. However, as adults, most abused children will suffer, and let others suffer, from these injuries. This dynamic of violence can deform some victims into hangmen who take revenge even on whole nations and become willing executors to dictators as unutterably appalling as Hitler and other cruel leaders.”
Mullin was raised “by the fear of a belt,” as he proudly stated. He learned that love is administered through pain. He learned that a child’s pleas mean nothing. He learned that the bigger, stronger person gets to decide what is “good” for the smaller, defenseless one. And now he is being put in charge of Homeland Security—the agency responsible for the safety and dignity of millions, including the most vulnerable.
The pattern could not be clearer.
Dictators and the Dynamics of Cruelty
Miller also wrote:
“Every dictator torments his people in the same way he was tormented as a child. The humiliations inflicted on these dictators in adult life had nothing like the same influence on their actions as the emotional experiences they went through in their early years. As almost every dictator denies his sufferings (his former total helplessness in the face of brutality) there is no way that he can truly come to terms with them. Instead, he will have a limitless craving for scapegoats on whom he can avenge himself for the fears and anxieties of childhood without having to re-experience those fears.”
Mullin does not see himself as a victim. He says he “deserved” the beatings. This is the voice of a child who had to believe his parents were right in order to survive. But the body remembers. And the rage that was forbidden to be felt toward his parents now seeks outlets: political opponents, union leaders, and ultimately, the vulnerable populations that will fall under his authority.
This is not speculation. It is the documented psychology of how unexamined childhood cruelty reenacts itself in power.
The Roots of Violence Are Not Unknown
Alice Miller laid out the facts clearly:
*“1. The development of the human brain is use-dependent. The brain develops its structure in the first four years of life, depending on the experiences the environment offers the child. The brain of a child who has mostly loving experiences will develop differently from the brain of a child who has been treated cruelly.*
2. Almost all children on our planet are beaten in the first years of their lives. They learn from the start violence, and this lesson is wired into their developing brains. No child is ever born violent. Violence is NOT genetic, it exists because beaten children use, in their adult lives, the lesson that their brains have learned.
3. As beaten children are not allowed to defend themselves, they must suppress their anger and rage against their parents who have humiliated them, killed their inborn empathy, and insulted their dignity. They will take out this rage later, as adults, on scapegoats, mostly on their own children. Deprived of empathy, some of them will direct their anger against themselves, or against other adults (in wars, terrorism, delinquency etc.).”
This is not opinion. This is neurobiology. And we ignore it at our peril.
Why Do We Keep Giving Power to the Wounded Who Refuse to Heal?
Only very emotionally blind lawmakers will confirm a dangerously repressed person into a position of power. But here we are. Again.
We are witnessing the same dynamics with Putin, with past dictators, and now with leaders in our own country. Once we give power to these dangerously repressed malignant personalities, they will never give it up without destroying the livelihoods of many innocent beings and causing mass destruction.
“The unconscious compulsion to revenge repressed injuries is more powerful than reason. That is the lesson that all tyrants teach us. One should not expect judiciousness from a mad person motivated by compulsive panic. One should, however, protect oneself from such a person.” — Alice Miller, Breaking Down the Wall of Silence, p. 82
When will the masses wake up? When will we stop idealizing parents and childhood and start seeing the direct line between the belt and the bomb?
The Only Path Forward
We cannot keep pretending that a man who boasts about terrifying his children, who calls political opponents names and threatens violence, who “applauds violence against his political opponents” as Rand Paul noted, is somehow fit to lead an agency that holds the power of life and death over millions.
We cannot keep pretending that what happens in the nursery stays in the nursery. It doesn’t. It becomes policy. It becomes foreign policy. It becomes the willingness to bomb women and children, as the Mr. K in my own past so eagerly advocated.
“It is not true that evil, destructiveness, and perversion inevitably form part of human existence, no matter how often this is maintained. But it is true that we are daily producing more evil and, with it, an ocean of suffering for millions that is absolutely avoidable. When one day the ignorance arising from childhood repression is eliminated and humanity has awakened, an end can be put to the production of evil.” — Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge, p. 143
We can end the production of evil. But it requires that we stop denying the truth. It requires that we stop applauding men who boast about making their children cry and plead “No, Daddy.” It requires that we feel—truly feel—the terror of that child, so that we never again place that child, now grown and still unconscious, in charge of the lives of others.
No More Denial
The great malady of our society, implicated in all our troubles and affecting us individually and socially, is the idealization of our parents and childhood and the denial of childhood suffering. When we idealize our parents and childhood and deny childhood suffering, it does not go away. It appears symptomatically in obsessions, addictions, violence, greed, deceit, and loss of meaning. Our temptation is to isolate these symptoms or try to eradicate them one by one, but the root problem is the idealization of our parents and childhood and the denial of childhood suffering.
Markwayne Mullin is a symptom. So is Mr. K. So is every leader who uses power to avenge the helplessness they once felt.
The cure is not better policies or different politicians. The cure is waking up. The cure is feeling what we were never allowed to feel. The cure is breaking the chain of abuse by no longer passing it on—not to our children, and not to the world through the people we put in power.
Let us be the ones who finally see. Let us be the ones who refuse to applaud the terror in a child’s voice. Let us be the ones who protect the vulnerable—not put their abusers in charge.
— Sylvie Shene
This post is dedicated to Larra and Andrew Mullin, and to every child whose “No, Daddy” goes unheard. May you someday find the freedom to feel what you were never allowed to feel, and may we all learn to stop putting your father’s pain in charge of the world.
The Belt and the Badge: Why We Must Stop Entrusting Power to the "Repressed"
Alice Miller wrote that the need to "bring a child into line" stems from a parent's need to split off the disquieting parts of their own inner self and project them onto the child. When Mullin describes how his father doubled up a belt to hit him, and how he "deserved it," he is showing us his own unhealed wounds. He has idealized his abuser to survive. When we idolize our parents, we become just like them.
Now, as an adult in a position of power, he is the "avenging child." As Miller noted:
"The enemy within can, at last, be hunted down on the outside... Projections can easily become part of any Weltanschauung [worldview]."
When a leader has not felt the legitimate rage of their own childhood, they take that rage out on "scapegoats"—be it political opponents they call "snakes," neighbors they justify assaulting, or nations they wish to bomb.
The Dictator’s Blueprint
We have seen this "dynamics of cruelty" before. From Hitler to Ceaușescu to Putin, the pattern is identical:
The Childhood Injury: Extreme neglect, beatings, or humiliation.
The Repression: The child denies the pain to survive, often "forgiving" the parent.
The Reenactment: The adult gains power and torments a nation in the same way they were tormented, all while claiming to be "moral" or "noble."
Mullin’s admission that he expects his children to "crawl into his lap" two minutes after a spanking is perhaps the most tragic detail. It is the forced "forgiveness" that Alice Miller identified as actively harmful. It forces the child to deceive themselves, destroying their inborn empathy and wiring their brain to accept cruelty as a prerequisite for love.
Giving Nuclear Weapons to Children
As I’ve written before, humanity is not ready for the power of AI or high-level governance as long as we remain "unconscious." Entrusting Homeland Security—an agency defined by the "proper use of force"—to a man who applauds violence against opponents and practices it against his own children is like giving matches to a child in a room full of gasoline.
The development of the human brain is use-dependent. A brain wired by the "fear of a belt" will always see the world through the lens of threat and retaliation.
Breaking the Chain
The only way to stop producing "evil" and "oceans of suffering" is the unflinching realization of our own past reality. As long as we idealize our parents and deny our childhood suffering, that pain will appear symptomatically in our leaders as greed, deceit, and mass destruction.
We must resolve childhood repression to stop being "emotionally blind." We must recognize that the "great leader" is often just a small, beaten child acting out an unintegrated potential for hatred.
The truth is simple, though painful: Violence is not genetic. It is a lesson learned. And it is a lesson we must stop electing into office.
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