Applying video analysis to the science of nonverbal communication makes it easier to understand Elon Musk

I grew up in the household of a man so much like him. Only my father was an alcoholic, not a ketamine addict.

There are a number of “tells” about Elon’s addiction to ketamine. But there is one that’s so easy to see, thanks to the eagle-eye vision of @Dr. Jack Brown who shared this video today on Substack. Just watch Elon’s eyes. There’s nothing “normal” about that eye movement. You can follow the links in replies to Jack Brown’s post to read a list of side effects of ketamine.

One big one is “holding onto false beliefs which cannot be changed by fact.”

Along with the rest of the people calling themselves “Republicans,” Musk has been entranced by power due to his own childhood trauma. Added to the trauma at the hands of his rejecting, violent father are the effects of ketamine addiction and then being elevated to eldership in the Church of Project 2025. At this point, Elon is clearly imagining himself as “The Good Father” he never had.

Why else would a grown man carrying his son around on his shoulders everywhere he goes — most especially in front of cameras in the White House?

He’s entranced and addicted to a hallucinogenic drug that helps him, as he says, deal with “persistent depression.” Meanwhile, he’s enacting a fantasy as he destroys our government.

We have to stop him. He’s not going to stop himself. And neither are the others in the Church of Project 2025. It’s up to us.

Now, if you don’t believe me, please just look for yourself.

It’s true: I’m an old lady who can’t help but see nonverbal communication because I spent 50 years photographing powerful men and, 16 years before that, perfecting my hiding skills when I could feel the violence about to erupt from my father.

My father was a man who, like Elon, like Trump, believed himself to be superior to most human beings and saw himself as “saving” America from itself. Eisenhower appointed him Chief of Clinical Psychology for the Veterans Administration after WWII. He and his colleagues in 1950’s DC created the standards and certification programs for Clinical Psychology to become a credentialed profession because the US didn’t have enough psychiatrists to serve the mental health needs of all the broken soldiers after WWII. So they created a new profession. My father behaved so much like Elon Musk it’s absolutely eerie for me watching Musk.

My father didn’t save anyone, most especially not me or my little brother. He couldn’t keep his private parts in his pants but he didn’t like or want children. My brother and I were bad accidents as far as he was concerned. He used us, nevertheless, as props for his “Good Father” persona when his colleagues from NIH and the VA and the military gathered around the dinner table at our house in Chevy Chase to drink and hammer out the qualifications for all the “mental illnesses” that became the first DSM. My brother and I served as silent decorations at those dinner tables for his persona as “Father,” directed to be seen and never heard.

When I spoke up, one time, at the drunken request of one of the men at the table who asked what I thought (at age 8), I said I didn’t understand why they were always only talking about what was “wrong” with people and why they didn’t talk about what was “right” with them. Boom!

His colleagues laughed out loud and one said, “Well, Max, out of the mouth of babes, eh?”

The look in my father’s eyes atop his pinched lips told me I had upstaged him and he was going to hurt me for it. Later. He just snorted.

After the guests left, my father came up to my bedroom and beat the living Jesus out of me screaming, “DON’T YOU EVER TALK LIKE THAT AGAIN! DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?!!!”

I didn’t speak up at those dinners anymore. But I spent my life watching and studying what made people act like my father so I could steer clear of them … and take care of myself.

It’s been horrifying to see video clips of Elon’s son, X, staring down Musk and DJT in the White House because I remember moments like that in my childhood when I stepped out of my role as a prop and acted like a human child.

We have no idea what little “X” is experiencing behind the events staged for the cameras, but it’s easy to read about the humiliation that Vivian, Elon’s trans-daughter has suffered. Elon says she’s “dead to him.”

It’s okay if you find yourself shaking your head at this — or not believing me. I wouldn’t believe me either if I hadn’t lived through the truth of this. But, honestly, you just can’t make this stuff up. I’ve been told by therapists throughout my life that I should write a memoir about it. But why spend more than another brief moment - like this - on recollecting my traumas, much less entertaining others with them? Nobody needs that. Thank God I finally found a trauma therapist who has helped me heal.

I’m telling this story for a purpose — hoping to help wake some folks up to the child abuse of “X” and the cruel insanity of the media going along with Elon’s “Good Father” charade.

It’s enough to have spent decades first burying — and then digging up — a mountain of unprocessed grief for having my human life reduced to being used as a prop for my parents’ professional personas. Schooled to write (and then called crazy for what I wrote), my primary strategy became using cameras to capture my direct human experience. Witnessing, documenting, and then studying still images of human behaviors I captured with cameras in fractions of seconds, I came slowly to see that I wasn’t crazy. I saw just what was going on in front of me.

There have always been sound reasons for the feelings I experience in the company of crazy people pretending to be human beings. But, it wasn’t until I got a Masters in Communication in my mid-30’s that I learned there was a whole profession of people who had been studying nonverbal communication as a science - instead of just a survival strategy.

We have to stop these mad men, friends. They’re not going to stop until they die.

My father certainly didn’t. And neither did my mother. They died early in their alcohol-soaked fantasies.

I’m still here. And, if you’re reading this, you’re still here, too.

Let’s get together and stop the crazies … so we can get on with making HUMANITY great again.