72% of the world is authoritarian.. Here’s 19 books explaining why

posted in Blog on by

19 Books for Decolonization

  • “On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century” by Timothy Snyder
  • “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them” by Jason Stanley
  • “How to Be an Anti-racist” by Ibram X. Kendi
  • “How to Stand Up to a Dictator” by Maria Ressa
  • “Autocracy, Inc.” by Anne Applebaum
  • “The Jakarta Method” by Vincent Bevins
  • “Manufacturing Consent” by Noam Chomsky
  • “Careless People” by Sarah Wyn Williams
  • “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA”
  • “The Color of Law” by Richard Rothstein
  • “The Wretched of the Earth” by Frantz Fanon
  • “Brown Skin, White Minds: Decolonizing the Filipino Psyche”
  • “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed” by Paulo Freire
  • “Capitalist Realism” by Mark Fisher
  • “Secret Teachings of All Ages” by Manly P. Hall
  • “Magus of Strovolos” (works of Daskalos)
  • Gospel of Thomas
  • Gospel of Mary Magdalene
  • Various Nag Hammadi scriptures

Full Transcript

May 30th, 2025 – 1:05 AM

Hey social media, it’s been a while since I’ve made one of these things. It is May 30th, Friday, 1:05 in the morning. A lot of stuff has happened since my last video. Before I wanted to hop into content creation again and heal my relationship to how I create content and just my identity as a creator again. But for the past few months, so many things have happened just in the United States in general. And it’s a lot to process.

It’s been a wild journey just waking up in my political consciousness and understanding current events, understanding where the United States is going, and especially as a brown person in America. Also as a second generation Filipino-American.

I don’t even know how to start this, but I’ve been on a transformational journey just understanding and asking questions. I’m like a five year old. I ask why, why is this, why is this, why is this? Why, why is there racism? Where does racism come from? Why is there hate? Why is there genocide? Why is there fascism? What is fascism? What’s communism? What’s Marxism? What’s capitalism? What are all these different things?

And so I started to want to understand why the current administration is the way it is today. Why do so many people who have a similar skin color as me? Why are we getting detained and deported? Why is there concentration camps being created? What is all of this? I also got a new passport. I had to renew it. Enough worst case comes to shove, I can leave the United States.

On Tyranny and Fascism

So I was questioning all these things and I first started going into like what is fascism? I read a few books. I got a few books. Let me get the books. I’ll get the books… A lot of books.

This one’s “On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century” by Timothy Snyder. “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them” by Jason Stanley. These are two Yale University professors that just fled the United States because America is now a Christian nationalist fascist theocracy oligarchy. These things answered a lot of questions as to what’s happening, gave me more language to understand like what is fascism and is the government today fascist? Yeah, it is. And so that’s been a crazy ride.

Also this video, it’s more for myself like to document just what I’ve done over the past few months. I’ve been heavy on research, understanding history, why is the world the way it is today?

Reading with ADHD

I also started reading some other books on an app called ReadWise. This is how I read with ADHD. It helps me turn any digital book into an audio book. I’m actually pretty deep into it too, so if I don’t understand something I could have it simplify it and really helps me learn a thousand times faster. I read all the time every day now.

I’ve been wanting to understand why is there so much anti-communist rhetoric and what even is that and why and where does that come from? So I’ve been reading “The Jakarta Method” by Vincent Bevins, also “Manufacturing Consent” by Noam Chomsky, “How to Stand Up to a Dictator” by Maria Ressa. I’ve been reading “Autocracy Inc” by Anne Applebaum. “How to Be an Anti-racist.” I also have “Wretched of the Earth” by Frantz Fanon, “Secret Teachings of All Ages” by Manly P. Hall, “Airless People” by Sarah Wynne Williams, who’s a former Facebook executive that basically leaked all the information and behind the scenes of how she brought foreign policy into Facebook and how Facebook basically partnered with authoritarian governments and used its algorithm to influence voting patterns and decisions in different third world countries in Southeast Asia.

Yeah, I’ve been learning a lot of things and then we also have the war in Israel and Palestine. So I started asking why is all this happening?

It all comes down to colonialism

I eventually asked enough questions to get to one of, I think, the most important things in my learning process is colonialism. And then I started asking, what is a Filipino-American during this time? I wanted to start learning about my culture and then I started learning all types of things about just the Philippines and how Philippines was colonized, all of our history and heritage and cultural wisdom was burned in the war in 1945 during the Manila Massacre. Also the Philippine-American War, like there were a lot of things that weren’t taught to us and that weren’t taught to me in terms of what happened to my people.

The Philippine-American War, I think in 1902, Americans genocided over a million Filipinos and we’re not taught this. Changed our history, rewrote our language, miseducated us on who we were, we were taught that we were barbarians and savages when we were actually sophisticated civilization, pre-colonial times. I just learned so many different things.

So I learned about decolonization, especially with the book, “Wretched of the Earth” by Franz Fanon and the sacred journey and process decolonization is. And so that just opened up a whole rabbit-hole of things. Yeah, and I realized that a lot of the reason why the world is today is because of colonialism. That was like one of my biggest epiphanies.

I’ve just been navigating through the sacred rage that Fanon talks about in my internal experience, the grief of understanding what’s happening in my particular country, what’s happened to my people, how do you heal from that and where do we go from there? And not just for Filipino, as a Filipino-American, second generation who had not really any touch with his culture growing up. I used to never really care about being Filipino. I never had Filipino pride or Pinoy pride. And now I’m starting to understand why in a lot of ways.

Decolonizing Everything

But yeah, I started understanding that the root of why a lot of things are the way they are today is one aspect is colonialism. And I was like, okay, what else do I decolonize? So I’m decolonizing my relationship to man and culture. What about Christianity? Because in the name of religion causes a lot of wars. I’m very spiritual, but I want to go deeper into decolonizing Christianity because I had a lot of traumatic experiences with Christianity growing up.

So I’m like, what was pre-colonial Christianity before it was used in the name of war and killing and genocide? So I picked up “Secret Teachings of All Ages.” Started reading “Magus of Strovolos,” the works of Daskalos, like what is esoteric Christianity? Started going into the Nag Hammadi scriptures, Gospel of Thomas, Mary Magdalene. What were the original teachings that were removed from mainstream religion and what was the actual true teachings of Jesus? So I’ve been trying to decolonize my relationship to Christianity and see the true version of what it is. Aside from what it is in the name of colonialism and imperialism.

So I started doing that. Some of the books, “Color of Law,” “The Hate U Give,” “Capitalist Realism.” I’m an entrepreneur, so for the past five years, I’ve learned how to navigate a capitalist society as an entrepreneur, I have an entrepreneurial mindset. And now that I’m decolonizing capitalism, I’m decolonizing economics, I’m decolonizing my culture, I’m decolonizing religion and other spiritual belief systems that were misframed, misinterpreted.

Like right now America is a Christian nationalist state and it’s using quote unquote Christianity to justify dehumanizing entire groups of people, like the LGBTQ community, people of color, trying to bring segregation back in the name of God. You know, so like, I’ve just been in a deep process of dismantling.

Oh, another good book is “Brown Skin, White Minds,” on Decolonizing the Filipino Psyche, “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed” by Paulo Freire, “Legacy of Ashes,” the story of the CIA. “The Jakarta Method” unearths why there’s so much anti-communist rhetoric today and how anti-communist rhetoric was used by the CIA and the United States to justify the mass genocide and killing of over a hundred thousand Indonesians, innocent left center people, were not radical at all. And that was the cause, the beginning of all these words that are used and just thrown around in political discourse today.

My life is changing

I know I’ve been rambling for like 10 minutes now, but I’ve been learning a lot of things and I’ve been processing it in my consciousness and processing it in my body, processing it in my mind, in my intellect, and also now trying to balance that with my heart space and how I show up.

During this time, it’s changed my life, the knowledge that I’m learning, ’cause I never really cared about this aspect of reality before. I’m new to politics, like I just started waking up with the Trump administration and learning all these things is very sad, it’s very depressing, but it’s the work that I’ve been really wanting to do and called to do over the past few months.

I was excited to do YouTube, but when I started waking up to all this stuff, I’m like, man, I don’t even know how I’m gonna create. How can I create during this time? But I think enough of a good portion of the things that I’ve been learning have been kind of integrating and marinating. I’ve gone through a grieving period and I’m starting to come to a place where I’m trying to integrate the wisdom and the knowledge and incorporate that into how I show up as a creator.

I don’t know who’s gonna watch this video and this video is really more for me, but… And that’s what I’ve been up to. I’ve been trying to do things to be like a normal human being, still doing what I gotta do, but with this new knowledge, this new information.

The Blue Pill/Red Pill Reality

My girlfriend, she likes using the analogy of the blue pill and the red pill, Matrix.

When you take the blue pill, you choose to remain in ignorance and I’m someone who continuously takes part in the red pill. I just like to dig and again, ask why I’m like a five year old. Why is this, why is that, why is this, but why is that and why is that?

And the deeper I go, the more I learn, the sadder, not the sadder I get, but just, I mean, it’s devastating, yeah.

But I wanna use what I’m learning to energize the way that I create content and the things that I talk about in whatever way that that looks organically in the moment.

It’s been again, a long time since I’ve turned on the camera and I don’t know what this, I don’t really know the purpose of this video other than to just capture how I am in this moment, in this state. I feel good enough to make a YouTube video right now, I guess.

I’ve also been experimenting with TikTok. I’ve been making a lot of videos on TikTok and I just, I’m almost at 10,000 followers now, so that’s been cool. Yeah, I don’t even know how to talk about this stuff. I don’t even know how to introduce it. I used to be someone who always wanted to avoid politics.

It’s not just depressing, there’s beauty in it too

Yeah, there’s so many beautiful things that I’m learning too.

It’s not just sad and depressing, but there’s beautiful things that I’m learning about my culture that I never really learned or was exposed to before in my life, Filipino culture. Seeing all the wisdom of the indigenous peoples, how it’s trained and taught to feel inferior. I’ve been recording a lot of my therapy sessions too lately. I’m going to therapy and yeah, like just dismantling a lot of things.

Thanks for watching if you did.

This was really just a brain dump for me to look at later on.

As tough of the journey and eye-opening this journey is, like this is the spiritual classroom that I intentionally signed up for.

I’ve created basically my whole course curriculum in political science and sociology and decolonization and psychology and human behavior and persuasion and deconstructing systems of power and racism. Politics, economics, I’ve just been going down the rabbit holes and it’s changing me as a person.

And we’ll see what comes out of it next.

This video is getting really long, but I want to just allow it to be what it is and not try to make it perfect or anything too as I heal as a creator.

Currently again, Friday, May 30th, 2025, 1:26 in the morning. I think it’s time to sleep.

But I’m excited that this information has been integrating in my soul for a little bit to where I feel like I can turn this on and make a YouTube video.

So again, thanks for listening.

I’ll see you in the next one.

About ReadWise: This is how I read with ADHD. It helps me turn any digital book into an audiobook. I’m actually pretty deep into it too, so if I don’t understand something I could have it simplify it and really helps me learn a thousand times faster. I read all the time every day now. You can check it out here