Meet Doug Kinnear
My name is Doug Kinnear, and I was raised military in the 1960s to love America and to defend our Constitution. My dad was a Navy fighter pilot turned Admiral (Adm George E.R. Kinnear II), and my Uncle retired as a Sergeant Major in the U.S. Marine Corps (Sgt Maj Neil T. Kinnear, Jr). They were both sure about devoting their lives to the military, but over the years, I came to wonder why we were always at war and why the quality of life for most Americans was in continual decline. I spent many years researching and writing the Handbook of How It Is, covering over 290 topics, but I still did not discover the most important and hidden topic of all: psychopathy (sigh cop ah thee).
Psychopathy is a mental illness born in 1% of people across the social spectrum who become predators with zero empathy, guilt, or shame and are disposed to dominate others, inflict pain, steal wealth, kill, and accumulate power. I believe accomplished, professional psychopaths, over time, have shaped our modern world in their image and represent an existential threat to the future of humanity.
Since we can't fix what we can't see, awakening the masses to the existence and tactics of professional psychopaths is the most important teaching objective there is.
In 1978, I graduated from St. Stephen's Episcopal School for Boys in Alexandria, Virginia, with the son of Dr. Wernher von Braun, one of the 1500+ Nazi scientists and their families imported into the United States after WWII, under Operation Paperclip.
My father was personal friends with Ken Lay, CEO of Enron, one of the largest corporate accounting scandals and bankruptcies in history. Ken Lay was the largest donor to President George W. Bush (Kenny Boy), the son of a Baptist minister and my Uncle Ken growing up.
In 1985, I graduated from Old Dominion University (B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies) and worked in logistics for 688 Class fast attack submarines at Newport News Shipbuilding in Newport News, Virginia, and Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
Then, I worked in training for the Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (Joint STARS) at Grumman Melbourne Systems in Melbourne, Florida. There, I had a PhD coworker who once told me he went sailing and found a cat on board his boat when he was over a mile offshore. While at my house for dinner once, with a smirk on his face, he told me he tossed the cat into the ocean. His doctorate was in Child Psychology.
I then spent four years supervising the Art, Screen, and Ink Departments for Bic Corporation in Clearwater, Florida, where daily, they imparted imprints on millions of pens, lighters, and shavers for the promotional products industry. Newly available Apple Macintosh computer workstations and more artists were used to increase imprint artwork production from 120 custom orders per day to 1120 custom orders per day. When I left Bic, I wrote a book called Understanding Imprint Artwork and did several years of public speaking and training at conferences and companies in the industry.
Leaving corporate America in 1998, I began four years of work for Unity Church of Clearwater, in Clearwater, Florida, as a handyman, organizer, and children's ministry director. I organized their offices, installed a 6.5-acre irrigation system, and wrote 40 positive songs for the kids to sing, 12 of which became the CD; Love Will Carry Over. (Amazon Music, Spotify, Contact for a CD)
I also started listening to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now on the radio, talking with investigative reporter Allan Nairn about American CIA involvement in the governments of Indonesia and East Timor, killing massive numbers of people.
I was in shock as I heard those words, but they inspired my many subsequent years of listening to speeches by Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael Parenti, and other intellectuals, followed by book after book and documentary after documentary, all contributing to my gradual awakening from my lifelong indoctrination.
It was uncomfortable research that made me feel duped and angry, but I had to know the real reason why America was always at war, why the majority of people's lives were getting worse, why our medical and educational systems were so costly, yet so inferior; why corporations had so much power and why it seemed like a few people were superrich and getting richer while the middle class shriveled and the poor and homeless ranks swelled. The America I was born to, believed in, and loved was being destroyed before my eyes, and the population was nearly completely set against itself.
Photo credit: Leah Millis
In 2003, I moved to San Diego and spent many years researching and writing my unpublished book, “The Handbook of How It Is” covering over 290 topics. I had two large file cabinets filled with source documents and used over 400 references to write the book, but I still missed the most important topic of all: understanding why the world is the way it is. As mentioned before, that topic is psychopathy, a mental illness born in 1% of humans, according to numerous experts.
I first heard the concept of psychopathy in the book and documentary called The Corporation, where Dr. Robert Hare stated that corporations exhibited the same characteristics as a psychopath. (I think this is the reason why huge corporations are so important to Psychopathic Acting Leaders (PALs) because they are massive shields from personal responsibility. Corporations can do horrible things or suffer major accidents at the behest of their leaders, but no one is prosecuted because the corporation did it. See Union Carbide and Bhopal for an example.) Reading that list of characteristics attributable to psychopaths and corporations was frightening, but it also made something click in my mind. It suddenly became clear that the mental disease of "psychopathy" could be the prime mover of the world's most horrible realities, both historical and present.
Psychopaths will do ANYTHING to get ahead, they lie as a language, they have a callous disregard for the suffering of others, they believe they are perfect, they are masters of appearances, they are gifted at deceit, and they have no empathy, guilt, or remorse. When psychopaths are kids, they typically kill and/or torture animals or hurt other children with no idea that they are doing anything wrong (this is diagnosed as Conduct Disorder). In one documentary ("The Dangerous Few"), a boy who smashed his grandmother's small dog's head with a brick went with his mom to the airport to pick up grandma and was hanging out the window proudly shouting, "Nani Nani, I killed your dog, I killed your dog."
Psychopaths are born throughout the social strata, and they make it to different levels in life through their resources, contacts, and ambitions. Some become toxic relationships and low-level con artists, and some become accomplished, professional psychopaths and Psychopathic Acting Leaders (PALs) with real power who look just like positive, professional people while harboring hollow souls, willing to do anything, to anybody, to reach their goals; all with a smile.
Too many people hold the idea that psychopaths are essentially killers or convicts. The general public hasn't been educated to see beyond the social stereotypes to understand that psychopaths can be entrepreneurs, politicians, CEOs, and other successful individuals who may never see the inside of a prison.
Robert D. Hare, PhD
The problem with psychopathy is that it took me until I was in my 40s to first hear the term. Then, I had to do my own extensive research to understand the depth of depravity involved with professional psychopathic leaders, including murdering enemies, overthrowing countries, ruining careers, blackmail, torture, fomenting wars, killing foreign leaders, destroying people and medical experimentation; just to name a few.
It became obvious that these monsters operated in plain sight because most people, looking at them, ascribe their own moral values to them, never imagining that they could do anything so evil and callous. Psychopaths are masters of deception and know exactly how to use the caring traits of normal human beings against us. I know this from personal experience because I have been fooled numerous times in my life with multiple encounters with psychopathic acting people and have seen my country fooled by Psychopathic Acting Leaders over and over.
Graduating from high school with the son of Dr. Wernher von Braun, a Nazi rocket scientist, made me curious, so I found out that at the end of WWII, America imported 1500+ Nazi officers, scientists, and their families from Germany and gave them new lives and careers here in America. Clearly, there were psychopaths among them steeped in the ways of Hitler, infecting the U.S. with the spirit of Fascism and the willingness to work to destroy American Democracy from within. And certainly, there were decision makers who had no problem with Nazis and wanted them to flourish here in America with total governmental protection.
Ken Lay, CEO of Enron, the largest bankruptcy in history, was very kind to me and my father when we would visit. My father was going to be one of four character witnesses for Ken Lay during his trial. I once asked Dad about those horrible and illegal things done at Enron, and he said, "Uncle Ken didn't do all those things at Enron, those people he hired did." Ken Lay was very good at fooling those closest to him, concealing what he really was, and the terrible things he was capable of doing.
When I met that PhD working at Grumman, he was a good-looking guy, always well-dressed, charming, always with a smile, and he had a good sense of humor. I had known him for over a year and had no idea that he was capable of throwing a cat overboard into the ocean with nary a thought, nor did I have any idea that he would plagiarize major portions of the training manuals he was supposed to be writing himself.
From 2004 to 2016, I was a member/leader of Del Mar Toastmasters in Del Mar, California, averaging over 80 members. I set up over 500 meetings, mentored over 20 speakers, and served in various leadership roles, as this public speaking club was like family to me. That's what made it so painful to realize that I had fallen for a psychopathic personality when I took a new visitor under my wing. He seemed so earnest, always wore suits, carried a Dale Carnegie book under his arm, and said all the right things.
For a year, I picked him up and dropped him off from the meetings, eventually helping him get a bike and then a moped, so he would have transportation. He was living in his parent's garage after previously being kicked out, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt, and spent much time mentoring him (so I thought) even though his public speaking was subpar, and he never improved. He used his connection with me to get side jobs from others in the club, but he performed poorly, took money, and never finished the work. Then I asked him to drive the Southern California Division Governor to Yuma, and he yelled at his girlfriend most of the way while driving fast and scaring his passengers for over two hours. I felt extreme shame that I had been so blind to this person's dark heart and let myself get played at the expense of my friends and associates.
Whether international in scope or in your own personal experience, virtually all humans have had psychopaths and psychopathic acting people, negatively affecting their lives. Statistically speaking, if you are in the company of a thousand people, ten of them are psychopaths, seeing others as prey and working to affect others in the most deceitful and negative of ways. For emotion-based, caring human beings, detecting these monsters in human skin before they do harm, is a skill requiring practice, experience, and awareness of their existence and techniques. To make matters worse, there is a spectrum of personality disorders going from narcissists to sociopaths to psychopaths who share similar traits and tend to work well together to accomplish their mutual interests.
Credit: www.theladders.com
My life, like most people's, has been negatively affected by narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths, yet it took me many years of research to realize I was dealing with a mental illness and wicked beings who, by their nature, think very differently from me. I continued to get fooled, because it is in my nature to see the best in others, and that trait is recognized and used by devious minds to play caring humans, like me, just like a fiddle. Psychopaths see every human as potential prey, and it is second nature for them to size people up and see what can be used against them most effectively.
In my view, Psychopathic Acting Leaders (PALs) have been the cause of most of the horrible things that have happened to people throughout "civilized" history and are still up to constant no good. They continue to get away with waging war, propagandizing the masses, imprisoning and killing their enemies, looting treasuries, extracting exorbitant taxes, and impoverishing billions of people because most human beings cannot imagine these monsters actually exist and do horrible things for their own amusement and gain.
We can't fix what we can't see, and the more I studied the topic of psychopathy, I realized that the happy future of human beings depends on everyone learning about this subject and working together to identify and keep these human imposters from influencing society. The advantage of learning about psychopathy is knowing there is a definable reason for the extreme ills of the world, which, in turn, means there is genuine hope for remedying these ills. That's what led me to make this website and leads me to believe that mass education about psychopathy, followed by massive corrective actions, is the key to a positive, constructive, and mutually beneficial future for humanity.
The dark, devious, and quietly viscous nature of professional psychopaths is how we, the vast majority of emotion-based human beings, continue to get fooled. They are so devoid of emotion that they could look at a photo of a baby on fire and a rock and have the same response: nothing. Plus, many of them look like Mr. Rogers, an upstanding businessman or a kindly grandfather, and they are experts at using our caring natures and emotions against us. This worldwide mass media fooling, this continuous warring, and this ever-growing extreme economic disparity will continue until we finally see these Psychopathic Acting Leaders (PALs) in front of and behind the scenes. Then, we can investigate them fully and enforce existing laws to put them in jail. Then, and only then, can we have a We The People empowered America and the world and make this a great place for human beings without the influence of the limitless greed and viciousness of those well-heeled monsters among us.