Disclaimer: I’m not an academic or political science-er. I barely graduated high school and never went to college. I’m just a 3rd gen Filipino-American who started asking hard questions about politics. I spent the last few months decolonizing my psyche, economics, politics, capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, entrepreneurship, etc. and its obliterated my entire worldview.
Though this is written for my fellow Filipinos, I hope it also helps non-Filipino readers understand how colonialism warps the psychology of entire civilizations to choose their own oppression.
I’m writing this from grief.
Last week, ICE raids hit Los Angeles. Protests erupted in all 50 states in the US with millions of distraught citizens across the political spectrum, walks of life, and ethnic diaspora.
I went to the one in Las Vegas and witnessed LVMPD shoot into peaceful crowds, and fire rubber bullets and pepper bags at unarmed protesters without ANY warning.
I felt the sacred rage that Fanon talks about.
I got tear gassed for the first time.
It burns the eyes, throat, and nose a bit.
It’s kinda sour. Spicy. Tastes like fascism.
Not the soothing-ist scent you want in your bubble bath.
It happened while I was on a TikTok live stream with 800+ people.. slowly burning my lungs
As I coughed and struggled for my mask and goggles, I also noticed…
barely any Filipinos were there.
Not only that, but for the past few months, as I’ve taken up more space online, using my voice about these topics, the silence of other Asian American voices has been piercingly loud.
While ICE rounds up people who look like us, detaining us, tackling us, locking us up in inhumane conditions, we stay quiet.
My family shares Facebook posts about how immigrants need to “come here legally”. We got here the “right way”.
Not understanding that ICE is trapping people from the offices where immigrants are getting their papers “the right way.”
And today, this dystopian regime has proposed to turn these immigration policies into a Reality TV show..
These same raids happening to other families.. could have happened to ours when our relatives were going through the immigration process.
But because we have amnesia about our own struggle, we don’t see the pattern.
I used to think my family was just conservative..
But then I learned we were the lab rats.
If you’re reading this, you probably know the feeling.
You love your Filipino family.
But you’re watching them support tyranny.
You’re seeing them share anti-immigrant posts while forgetting our own immigration story.
You’re watching while we’re called criminals, and rapists, and murderers.. when over 75% of people placed in ICE custody had no criminal record apart from immigration or minor traffic violations
You’re hearing their beliefs like they came straight from Fox News.
You’re feeling them get more angry, judgmental, maybe a little racist.
And you feel crazy..
Like you’re the only one who sees what’s happening.
I can say this. You’re not crazy.
And you’re definitely not alone.
What I’m about to share might sound overwhelming at first.
It did for me too.
But understanding WHY our families think the way they do, seeing the systems that shaped their beliefs and votes clearly, and realizing how we got here changed everything for me.
Not because I agree with them.
But because it helped me understand them without losing myself.
So where are the Filipino voices?
I see other communities speaking up about what’s happening.
Black families, Latino families, even progressive white families having hard conversations about fascism and democracy.
But Filipino families? We’re mostly silent.
So I did what I usually do when I want to understand something deeper. I started reading. I started asking around my community.
I even used OmeTV to have conversations with strangers in the Philippines to ask them what they thought about current events.
And what I found was.. well. Sad.
I realized that the silence, complicity, or even support for the Trump regime isn’t because our families are evil.
It’s because the political, economic, social, and media systems worked, exactly as designed.
If you’re Asian American; Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean, Cambodian, Chinese, Indian, any of us whose families came here after our countries were touched by American “liberation”, this might help you understand why your parents think the way they do.
Btw, this isn’t about changing their minds.
That’s not my job, and it’s probably not yours either.
This is about understanding the machine that shaped our cultural psyche.
So you can still love them without losing yourself, even if it’s from afar.
So you can see the programming without hating the people caught in it.
Because once you see how this works,
You’ll understand: they’re not the enemy.
They’re proof of how powerful psychological warfare becomes when it takes root in our beliefs.
And maybe, if we understand this together, we can start having different conversations at family dinner.
Colonialism? Yeah I heard of that.
I’m a third-generation Filipino American.
Super “whitewashed”. “Americanized”, even.
And honestly?
I’m grateful for the lessons I’ve learned from western culture.
But I also had no care for my Filipino roots beyond the food and church.
No ”Filipino pride”.
In fact, I’m in my late 20s and I’ve cringed at my own culture all my life,
With the current Trump regime taking office in January 2025 and the rapid-fire executive orders:
- removing women’s rights
- removing diversity protections
- removing public education
- bringing back slavery
- glorifying Confederate white supremacist leaders
- creating concentration camps..
And the rhetoric of the administration amplifying hate and racism.
I asked myself,
“why the fuuuuu* is all this happening?”
Why is there racism?
Why is there hate?
Why are people who look like me getting detained and deported to countries we’re not even from?
So I started digging,, and I found that all of it was part of a larger system of oppression.
I read works like:
- Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon,
- Brown Skin, White Minds. by E.J.R. David,
- Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire
- Decolonizing The Filipino Psyche by Virgilio Enriquez
And I realized this cultural shame wasn’t random.
It was strategically designed.
My parents never taught me about Filipino culture because they were never taught about it either.
I used to think this was normal immigrant stuff.
You assimilate, you move forward, you don’t look back.
And sure there’s wisdom there.
But I’m starting to see a deeper layer.
Colonialism.
For 400+ years we’ve been colonized by Spain, and the United States, and miseducated about our past.
So.. what is colonialism?
Colonialism is when one group takes control of another people’s land, resources, and culture – not just through force, but by convincing the colonized people that the colonizer’s way of life is superior to their own.
It’s why the world is the way it is today.
It’s not just about political control.
It’s psychological warfare.
Colonization doesn’t just steal resources, it steals identity, demeans language, demonizes spirituality, and erases & rewrites historical memory.
This makes the oppressed ashamed of their own culture.
This happens across the Global South and South East Asia from Africa to Indonesia to Latin America and the Philippines. And yes it’s still happening today, just in new, more subtle forms.
Colonialism convinces people that their survival depends on pleasing their oppressors. That resistance is dangerous.
That the best strategy is to keep your head down, work hard, and prove you’re “one of the good ones.” This how our families learned to survive 400+ years of Spanish and American occupation.
What we call “Filipino hospitality” often masks a survival strategy: be so agreeable that maybe they won’t hurt you.
That survival strategy worked for generations.
But now it’s distorted our values.
Because when fascism rises, the “model minority” mindset doesn’t protect us, it makes us complicit in our own oppression and everyone else’s.
In just the last few months, we’ve seen:
- June 21, 2025: Trump bombed Iran without Congressional approval – members of Congress found out from his Twitter posts
- February 2025: Georgia forced a brain-dead woman named Adriana Smith to stay on life support for 4 months to birth her baby, against her family’s wishes
- June 2025: ICE is now arresting 3,000 immigrants per day, and Trump sent 2,000 National Guard troops to stop people protesting in Los Angeles
- April 2025: Trump signed an order making it nearly impossible to prove workplace discrimination – even if a company’s hiring practices clearly hurt people of color, you now have to prove they did it on purpose
- Ongoing 2025: Immigrants can now be deported without seeing a judge or getting a lawyer – ICE just grabs people and sends them away
What This Means for Filipinos:
- Presidents can now start wars without getting congressional approval
- The government can control women’s bodies even after they’re dead
- The military gets sent against people protesting policies that hurt immigrant communities
- It’s now almost impossible to sue for discrimination at work, in housing, or schools
- Filipino families can be separated and deported without any due process
The recent ICE raids have been devastating the immigrant communities across the U.S to top it all off.
They’re kidnapping people off the streets, putting them in vans, taking them to who knows where, and detaining and deporting, many of the time, legal citizens and legal green card holders without due process.
But why aren’t Filipinos or Filipino Americans speaking up?
(And personally, I feel so alone because I feel like I’m the one of the only ones talking about it.)
How did we get here?
Social Media Hypnosis: The Philippines Was The “Petri Dish”
After some digging, here’s what I found.
We were the lab rat nation. As much as it sucks to say it.
In her book, “Careless People”, by Sarah Wynn Williams, a former Facebook executive turned whistleblower, she outlines how Facebook partners with authoritarian governments across Southeast Asia: Myanmar, Sri Lanka, India, and the Philippines to name a few.
They use their algorithms to manufacture consent of the people.
In other words,
Facebook uses its platform to manipulate people’s psychology to vote for corrupt politicians for profit.
She revealed:
“When we start to run into politicians who put up roadblocks to our expansion, the growth team is quick to suggest that we ‘juice’ the algorithm to help them bolster their Facebook presence.”
Williams, Sarah. “Careless People”
Did I mention that Sarah’s book is being actively suppressed by Facebook’s PR team?
..And where did that bring us today?
According to V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) in their 2024 Democracy Report, 71% of the world’s population—about 5.7 billion people—live under authoritarian rule, which is an increase from 48% 10 years ago before Facebooks emergence into foreign policy.
Moving on.
Maria Ressa, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist who documented how Philippine democracy fell under Duterte shares,
“Let me tell you why the rest of the world needs to pay attention to what happens in the Philippines: 2021 was the sixth year in a row that Filipinos—out of all global citizens—spent the most time on the internet and on social media. Despite slow internet speeds, Filipinos uploaded and downloaded the largest number of videos on YouTube in 2013. Four years later, 97 percent of our country’s citizens were on Facebook.
As these numbers show and as Facebook admits, the Philippines is ground zero for the terrible effects that social media can have on a nation’s institutions, its culture, and the minds of its populace.
Every development that happens in my country eventually happens in the rest of the world—if not tomorrow, then a year or two later.
As early as 2015, there were reports of account farms creating social media phone-verified accounts, or PVAs, from the Philippines.
That same year, a report showed that most of Donald Trump’s Facebook likes came from outside the United States and that one in every twenty-seven Trump followers was from the Philippines.“
Ressa, Maria. “How To Stand Up To A Dictator”
For most Filipinos, Facebook IS the internet.
It’s where our family connects with loved ones, gets news, and how they understand the world.
But it’s plagued with all sorts of social media manipulation.
In a 2019 article from Georgetown University student Mihm Henry, he summarizes Ressa’s findings:
Nic Gabunada, Duterte’s social media director, leveraged trolling to maximize the campaign’s resources—Managing a troll farm of 400 to 500 people with a budget of $200,000 or more, Gabunada oversaw numerous troll accounts utilizing classic trolling tactics to flood Facebook feeds with pro-Duterte content—much of which was false. The effort paid off: Duterte went from a marginal candidate to a mainstream figure in national online discourse.
Mihm, Henry. “The Philippines Deserves More From Facebook.”
In other words, political campaigns utilize fake social media accounts to create an illusion of support for its respective candidate.
In a 2023 interview with Democracy Now, Maria said watching the US felt like déjà vu.. the same tactics, same manipulation, just in a different country.
Ressa calls what’s happening in America right now
“the Philippinization of American politics.”
And in a Rappler interview, Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie says:
“The way Cambridge Analytica would make money is they would go into countries with relatively underdeveloped regulatory infrastructure or questionable rule of law, where it was easy to get away with things, and create propaganda, and support politicians who would be willing later to pay back favors.
When you’ve got countries like the Philippines with high Internet penetration and social media use, it’s an ideal target — when the company was looking to experiment with techniques, experiment with AI, experiment with ways of manipulating voter opinion or disseminating propaganda, it would be more difficult to do that in countries like the United States or Britain or Europe, where there’s robust regulatory action.Wiley, Christopher. “PH was Cambria Analytica’s “Petri dish.”
In countries in the global South, where you don’t necessarily have a fair and balanced media setup, where corruption is rife, it creates an ideal petri dish type situation where you can experiment on tactics and techniques — if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter; you won’t get caught. If it does work, then you can figure out how to port that into other countries.
The company worked in a lot of places in Southeast Asia and in Africa, as well as the Caribbean, to play with ideas and to try to develop technologies before it would port it unto the West.”
As you see,
The same social media manipulation tactics that destroyed Philippine democracy are being used on our families Facebook feeds every single day.
And now they’re being used in the USA.
But this isn’t only because of social media manipulation.
Its built on centuries of psychological conditioning from colonialism.
The goal was always the same, not just for the Philippines but for the entirety of the Global South in Southeast Asia: Fracture our natural relational way of being, crush dissent, extract resources, make them economically dependent on the West,
And have you heard of the forgotten genocides of the Philippines?
The Forgotten Genocides Of The Philippines
This cultural amnesia didn’t start with social media. It started with systematic destruction of our historical memory.
I was reading E.J.R. David’s “Brown Skin, White Minds” when I encountered something that made me put the book down and stare at the wall for twenty minutes.
When the United States decided to bomb Manila during World War II, during the Japanese Occupation, they didn’t just kill over 100,000 Filipinos – they destroyed our national archives. I realized I’d spent 29 years not knowing who I was because they literally erased the records.
And it created generations of amnesia.
What they don’t teach us in American schools:
The Philippine-American War
I never learned about it at all in school. It’s also known as the “Forgotten War.”
Here’s what happened:
From 1899 to 1902, the United States government killed over 1 million Filipinos (conservatively), torturing, raping, and murdering Filipinos to crush resistance, extract resources from the land, and strategically position its military.
The Filipino historian Renato Constantino wrote in his essay, “The Miseducation of the Filipino” (1959-1966), about how we were miseducated by colonial institutions to systematically shape our minds to serve colonial interests.
So yeah, we were massacred and then taught to idolize our saviors.
I was never taught this. My family didn’t know this either.
But think about it.
Why are goods made in the Philippines seen as inferior while goods America are praised ?
Why are some of our families seem to be ashamed of our own language, history, & culture..
Why are Filipinos obsessed with whitening their skin with papaya soap?
It’s all over TFC.
The other forgotten mass-murder of Filipinos happened during World War II.
The Manila Massacre of 1945 (also called the Rape of Manila)
In 1945, Japan was occupying the Philippines and committing some of the worst atrocities in human history.
The United States wanted to come in and “liberate” us again.
So they decided to bomb the whole city of Manila, killing 100,000 (conservatively) Filipino civilians, and completely destroying the city.
It’s one of the worst (and forgotten) atrocities in human history, comparable to what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, yet nobody knows about it.
But this didn’t just kill our people.
It destroyed our history.
The bombing destroyed national archives, libraries, museums, and centuries of recorded Filipino civilization. Our literature, our science, our systems of governance burned.
My grandpa doesn’t even have records of his birth certificate.
And in my research, I realized that it’s so hard to find anything on Filipino history.
During the war, silence meant survival.
The United States positioned themselves as our liberators – first from Spain, then from Japan.
But they just became our new colonizers.
The Philippines became one of the most successful examples of colonization, in both land, resources, and the psyche of its population.
I had to stop reading here.
Two genocides I’d never heard of, caused and intentionally pushed under the rug by the country we were taught to be “patriotic” about.
How Anti-Communist Rhetoric Erased Our Values
Before I go deeper, a quick disclaimer.
I literally started learning about political concepts a couple months ago.
For the past five years, I’ve been studying capitalism as an entrepreneur, living it, building businesses with it. And there are real gifts capitalism taught me: systems thinking, problem-solving, creating value.
I wouldn’t think the way I do today without understanding those frameworks.
But I’ve also been learning about capitalism’s harm.. to communities, to the Global South, to the environment, to my own people. I don’t subscribe to any political ideology as dogma.
I view them as lenses to understand and navigate reality.
So when I share what I’m discovering about anti-communist rhetoric, I’m not pushing any particular politics. Nor is it representative of my own beliefs. But what I’m asking is: who does this rhetoric serve, and what did it cost us?
As I’ve been learning about Filipino psychology through researchers like E.J.R. David and Virgilio Enriquez, I discovered three core pillars of our identity:
- kapwa (shared self),
- bayanihan (community)
- utang na loob (a debt of gratitude).
These aren’t just cultural values.
They’re fundamental philosophies baked into the DNA of the Filipino psyche.
More on these in the sections ahead
Before colonization, Filipinos practiced communal living. That was our strength.
Which is why learning about “anti-communist” propaganda techniques hit me so hard.
When you hear terms like “Marxist,” “communist,” or “radical left” today, especially as charged attacks, most people don’t even know what those words actually mean, where it comes from, or how these words led to the genocide of millions of innocent people across the global south.
They just react. With fear, with disgust, with immediate rejection.
But that reaction isn’t natural. It’s programmed.
Here’s what those terms actually refer to:
- Marxism is a theory of how civilizations and societies evolve through class struggle. Feudalism > Capitalism > Socialism > and Communism.
- Communism, is simply a classless stateless moneyless society
- “Radical left” is just a catch-all phrase used to attack anyone who challenges existing power structures in the USA, 2025 today.
This comes from decades of psychological warfare.
After World War II, in the 1960’s, the CIA developed what journalist Vincent Bevins outlined as “The Jakarta Method”, using anti-communist propaganda to justify mass murder and resource extraction across the Global South.
In Jakarta, Indonesia, over 500,000 people were slaughtered using “anti-communist” rhetoric. Most weren’t even political radicals. They were teachers, farmers, workers who wanted basic things: land reform, fair wages, dignity.
They were labeled “communists” and killed.
And the same methods were used in the rest of Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Philippines.
Here’s what Bevins outlines :
“Collectivist values in non-Western cultures were interpreted as “natural” communism, which was used to justify harsh repression and genocide across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.” – Bevins, Vincent. The Jakarta Method
This anti-communist rhetoric didn’t just justify killings. It created a fracture in the Filipino psyche.
An internal war between our natural relational values and imposed hyper-individualism.
Our kapwa, our bayanihan, our sense of community, all of it got rewritten as dangerous, as “communist”, as threats to the American empire being built.
There’s shame around our natural relational way of being.
And it’s not just psychological shame.
Throughout the Cold War, expressing collective values too openly could get you imprisoned, tortured, or killed.
I’ve felt this my whole life.
Being drawn to community and service, but feeling like there’s something wrong with caring too much about others.
Like success means becoming more individualistic and focused on myself.
That’s why so many Filipinos today support conservative politics that prioritize individual success over community wellbeing.
When Trump calls anyone he doesn’t like “radical leftists” or “communists”, when most people can’t even define these words – I see the same psychological warfare that was tested on our people for decades.
On June 25, 2025, 12:10 P.M, shortly after bombing Iran without congressional approval, he posted:
The question is: who benefits when entire populations are conditioned to fear their own relational cultural values?
Who does killing millions of innocent people by calling anyone who doesn’t agree with you a “communist” or “radical leftist” (when they aren’t even radical) serve?
The Science Of Inherited Trauma
But this programming goes even deeper than learned behavior.
There’s research showing that trauma leaves biological “scars” on our genes that get passed down to children and grandchildren.
It’s called epigenetics.
In a 2017 study published in the journal Science, scientists discovered that environmental trauma can be passed down 14 generations.
When researchers exposed organisms to traumatic conditions, not only did those individuals show genetic changes, but the memory of that trauma continued through their offspring for 14 generations, even though none of their descendants experienced the direct trauma themselves.
Studies on Holocaust survivors show similar patterns. Children and grandchildren of trauma survivors demonstrate fear responses to triggers their ancestors experienced, without ever being exposed to those traumas directly.
So yeah,
“Past life trauma” is kind of a real thing.
The fears and survival responses of our ancestors live within our DNA.
Stay quiet.
Stay silent.
Don’t rock the boat.
Because that’s how you survive.
And then we have colonial cultural values like,
Make money.
Look out for yourself.
Be grateful for what you have.
These are values that negate our relational Kapwa consciousness.
400+ years of colonization doesn’t just disappear.
Even if you were born into a healthy, middle-class family, you could still carry trauma responses you or your families aren’t aware of ; rooted in colonial violence that happened to ancestors you’ve never met.
This programming, that conditioning, lives in our bodies.
This is why logical arguments often don’t work with our families.
The fear of anything labeled “communist” or “socialist” isn’t just learned behavior.
It’s biologically embedded, passed down through generations.
When your family reacts to words they can’t even define, when they support dehumanizing policies, they’re not just being stubborn. They’re responding to survival programming written into their cellular memory.
What I’m Realizing About Us
The other day I went to a book signing with Dr. Stacey Litam, author of “Patterns That Remain: A Guide to Healing for Asian Children of Immigrants.” She was speaking about healing diasporic wounds. This was the first time I’d ever done something like this – connecting with the Filipino community around these issues.
Everyone had the same problems.
People came up to me saying:
- “Yeah, my whole family are Trump supporters and I feel so alone.”
- “My dad used to be proud of speaking Tagalog. But something happened in the last few years – now he tells us ‘Don’t speak Tagalog’ and punishes us if we do.”
- “My dad’s side is very connected to Filipino culture. But my mom separated from him and cut herself off from our roots. She never taught me anything about being Filipino.”
This is internalized racism in action.
The shame about our own language.
The hyper-focus on Western values.
The internal fractures within families that make them embrace politics that work against our own interests.
But from my research I’ve realized..
It’s not their fault.
It’s the predictable manufactured result of systematic cultural destruction.
Shadow Kapwa
Here’s how historical erasure becomes present-day complicity.
Filipinos are relational by nature. There’s this concept in Filipino psychology called kapwa – meaning “shared self,” where we naturally see ourselves as connected to others. It’s in our DNA.
It’s one of the core pillars of who we are as a people.
Kapwa is why Filipinos are known for being multi-talented – we want to relate to our community, so we learn what others are doing so we can connect better.
It’s why we’re known for being some of the most hospitable people.
It’s the foundation for bayanihan – our spirit of collective community support.
In its pure form, kapwa is our superpower.
But here’s what colonialism did: it weaponized our kapwa against us.
As researcher E.J.R. David documents:
“Filipino culture and history is often presented in a mythical, distorted, and inferiorizing manner… this leads Filipino Americans toward the conclusion that there is no authentic Filipino culture and identity that one can be proud of.”
When you’re told for 400 years that your culture is inferior, that your way of being is primitive, that your relational nature is weakness – what happens?
Your greatest strength becomes your greatest vulnerability.
The shadow side of kapwa made us master assimilators.
We learned to chameleon ourselves to please whoever held power over us.
We lost our identity in the process.
As David explains:
“For individuals who perceive being Filipino as undesirable, getting rid of the essence and the core of being Filipino – Kapwa – is the most logical strategy.”
We don’t know how to discern our oppressors because they’ve made themselves invisible.
They don’t announce themselves as conquerors anymore.
They come as “helpers,” as “developers,” as “partners.” And our kapwa, our desire for harmony and connection, makes us say yes with a smile.
Maria Ressa observes: “Filipinos are known to be kind, caring, and loyal. Personal loyalty is a key value we enshrined in the phrase utang na loob… But that quality also… sustained our feudalistic society.”
What was once a system for mutual care became a system for avoiding conflict with power.
We still don’t know how to set sacred boundaries. We still don’t know how to be hospitable without being exploitable. We still don’t know how to be community-oriented without being people-pleasers.
Look at our families supporting Trump while ICE targets people who look like us. Look at our silence while policies attack our communities.
We’re still welcoming oppression with a smile because we can’t see it coming.
Why Facebook’s Algorithms Target Filipinos
Our relational nature makes the Filipino psyche perfect targets for social media manipulation.
Algorithms that exploit our need for connection, our desire to belong, our fear of being left out.
Facebook didn’t choose the Philippines as their testing ground by accident, they knew we’d be the ideal lab rats.
Our kapwa gets weaponized against us through screens.
Our relational nature becomes people-pleasing that makes us scared to rock the boat.
Our need for harmony becomes compliance with systems that harm us.
And there’s another layer that’s deeply personal for me.
How Colonial Christianity Made Opression “God’s Will”
Growing up, I associated Filipino culture with religious trauma.
The scents, the foods, the accent..
I connected them all with church, not with a rich cultural heritage that existed long before Christianity arrived.
I didn’t understand then that this association wasn’t accidental. It was by design.
As E.J.R. David documents: “The indigenous culture and spiritual beliefs were replaced by Spanish culture and the Catholic religion. As a matter of fact, the Catholic religion was the primary tool by which the Spanish colonizers were able to convince the indigenous people that the Spanish ways of life were superior to and more civilized than indigenous ways.”
The Catholic Church wasn’t just spreading religion. It was erasing indigenous spirituality & relational values and replacing it with colonial obedience.
For over 300 years, Filipinos were taught that their Indignities babaylan traditions were demonic, that their connection to nature was primitive, that their communal decision-making was dangerous.
They were taught that salvation came through submission to authority, first Spanish priests, then American missionaries, and evangelical pastors.
This is why Filipinos react so strongly to anything that challenges hierarchy or authority.
Christianity in the Philippines wasn’t just a religion. It was a training program that manufactured the consent of the people: to accept oppression as “God’s will.”
As “benevolent assimilation”.
What Rudyard Kipling describes as “The White Man’s Burden”
And today? It’s happening again.
Evangelical Christianity has been weaponized in the United States. The Trump administration’s creation of an “anti-Christian bias task force” uses Christianity to justify removing civil rights, removing diversity programs, bringing back slavery, and restoring white supremacy.
The same colonial Christianity that taught Filipinos to submit to Spanish authority is now teaching Filipino Americans to submit to white Christian nationalism.
Silence and complicity isn’t the fault of our families. They’re responding to 400 years of programming that told them Silence is survival, that collective action is dangerous rebellion against God’s order, that relational values = “communism”.
When I see Filipino and Filipino-American familyes supporting Trump, when I see Filipino communities staying silent during ICE raids, when I see us aligning with evangelical programming that erases our spiritual traditions..
I now realize..
This is generational programming. We haven’t healed this culturally or individually. So it shows up in our everyday choices and behaviors.
To Filipinos and Filipino Americans who feel alone
If your family is caught up in the MAGA wave, remember: they’re not evil.
They’re responding to psychological manipulation that was specifically designed and tested on our people.
Your family’s Trump support isn’t stupidity, it’s psychological warfare.
And colonialism makes it worse. We’ve been conditioned for centuries to distrust our own collective wisdom. The Spanish taught us our bayanihan was primitive. The American Government? taught us our communal decision-making was dangerous “socialism.”
So when Facebook algorithms push anti-communist propaganda, it hits deeper than it would for other communities. It triggers 400 years of programming that says “collective action = dangerous, individual success = virtue.”
But our kapwa is still there. As E.J.R. David writes in “Brown Skin, White Minds,” kapwa is “a shared identity, a shared inner self with others, and the orientation that one cannot ‘be’ if separated from others.”
Even when it’s been turned against us, even when we’re scared into voting for authoritarians, we’re still responding to our deep need for connection and belonging.
The fascists know this, and they’re exploiting it.
Fascism Removes Nuance
Three Yale University professors, Timothy Snyder, Jason Stanley, and Marcy Shore, experts who have dedicated their entire lives to studying fascism authoritarian governments just fled the United States to Canada so they could continue teaching.
They’re not being dramatic.
They’re applying their expertise to their own lived reality and recognizing that America is moving toward fascist dictatorship.
When the people who study authoritarianism for a living start running, maybe it’s time for the rest of us to pay attention.
Fascism removes nuance.
It makes everything black and white, us versus them.
It makes people forget their own history, their own values, their own capacity for nuance and compassion.
This directly attacks Filipino consciousness.
Because we’re relational by nature.
We want to connect with others, and to connect, we want to understand what other people do.
Kapwa is a shared sense of self.
Fascism is us versus them.
On Micro Fascism
But here’s what I think the academic left often misses: fascism isn’t just a political system that happens “out there.”
As philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari documented in Anti-Oedipus, there’s something called “micro-fascism”, the fascist tendencies that operate within individual psychology, regardless of political affiliation.
Michel Foucault, in his preface to their work, called this “the strategic adversary” – “the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.”
As someone who spent 5 years studying human behavioral psychology as a marketer and advertiser, I can tell you: micro-fascistic tendencies show up everywhere.
What I realized is that fascism, from a human behavioral lens, emerges when tradition meets change. It’s that friction between preserving culture and pushing boundaries, and it manifests as groups protecting their identity through the same psychological mechanisms that individual narcissists use.
Fascism is narcissism in a political context.
(And before any academics jump down my throat – I’m not saying dancers are fascists. I’m exploring how the same psychological mechanisms show up across different contexts. If you’re reading this, just do a thought experiment with me. Play with the concept.)
Whether it’s dance, politics, or family dynamics, you’ll always have purists versus innovators. The pattern is identical whether it’s an OG dancer saying “that’s not real hip-hop” or a politician saying “that’s not a real family.”
The mechanisms are the same:
- Binary thinking – Everything becomes good/evil, pure/impure, us/them
- Cult of action without reflection – “Don’t think, just do what you’re told”
- Fear of difference – Anyone who questions the group becomes a threat
- Contempt for weakness – Vulnerability is seen as dangerous
- Obsession with loyalty – Questioning equals betrayal
As Umberto Eco documented in “Ur-Fascism,” “it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.” These patterns can emerge in any ideological framework – left, right, spiritual, secular.
The Philippines as Perfect Testing Ground
Through the social media psychological warfare techniques that Maria Ressa and Sarah Wynn Williams outlined, fascist ideologies have been amplified across the Filipino diasporic psyche. Hyper-individualistic conservatism was conditioned into the Filipino psyche through centuries of colonization and more recently, war, genocide, and intentional miseducation.
As historian Renato Constantino documented in his 1959 essay “The Miseducation of the Filipino,” American colonial authorities created a public school system using English as the medium of instruction and American textbooks, with the intent to promote American values and culture. This educational policy aimed to assimilate the Filipino population and integrate them into the American colonial order, discouraging nationalist sentiments and fostering a colonial mentality.
That same miseducation is happening today through social media algorithms.
Instead of American textbooks, it’s Facebook feeds. Instead of colonial teachers, it’s algorithmic manipulation. Instead of classroom indoctrination, it’s psychological warfare delivered directly to our phones.
The goal remains the same: make colonized people embrace their colonization, vote for their oppressors, and police each other’s resistance.
When Complexity Becomes Impossible
Fascism doesn’t just attack individual thinking – it destroys our capacity for kapwa itself. When everything becomes us versus them, there’s no room for the shared sense of self that makes us who we are.
Our families can’t hold complexity anymore. They can’t see that:
- You can love America AND critique its systems
- You can be grateful for opportunities AND resist oppression
- You can support your family AND oppose harmful policies
- You can be Christian AND question authority
- You can want security AND defend immigrants’ rights
That’s not stupidity. That’s fascist conditioning. That’s what happens when relational people get forced into binary thinking.
When ICE raids happen and our families stay silent, when women’s rights are stripped away and they don’t react, when DEI programs that helped our communities get dismantled and they cheer – they’re not being evil. They’re responding to programming that made complexity impossible.
Theres hope
When you know WHY things are the way they are, you become empowered to operate from curiosity instead of judgment. Understanding instead of despair.
Your Trump-supporting uncle isn’t your enemy.
He’s a victim of the same psychological warfare that was tested on our homeland and imported here. The same colonial programming that taught our grandparents to smile while being exploited is teaching him to vote against his own interests.
The same kapwa that made us vulnerable to manipulation can also be the key to healing, if we can learn to use it consciously.
To lean into it, to be more curious about WHY our families believe the things they do. Maybe we can start having better conversations.
We can’t argue our families out of fascist conditioning with logic.
But we might be able to love them back to their authentic selves through patient, compassionate dialogue that honors their humanity while exposing the systems that programmed them.
That’s the work ahead of us.
The Choice
Now you see the complete picture.
Social media manipulation techniques tested on our homeland and imported here.
The Jakarta Method’s anti-communist rhetoric that made us fear our own relational values.
Christian colonization that programmed us to accept oppression as God’s will; to never question authority.
Epigenetic trauma embedded in our DNA from 400 years of psychological warfare.
Micro-fascistic conditioning that destroys our capacity for nuance and relationality .
Layer upon layer upon layer, all designed to make us complicit in our own oppression.
Your family supporting Trump isn’t a moral failing.
It’s the predictable result of the most sophisticated psychological warfare campaign in human history, designed and tested on our people.
But here’s the thing about understanding these systems: once you see how the machine works, you can choose to step out of it.
We have a choice.
We can continue the cycle: staying silent, people-pleasing, welcoming oppression with a smile.
We can keep our heads down and hope someone else fixes the problems.
We can let the programming run its course through our children and grandchildren.
Or we can do something different.
We can reclaim our kapwa in its sacred form.
We can learn to be relational without being exploitable. We can love our families while refusing to enable their programming.
We can become the ancestors our descendants will thank.
The question isn’t whether you’re Filipino enough, woke enough, educated enough, or brave enough.
The question is: Who do you want to be, knowing what you know now?
What we can do about it
1. Name the Programming
We’ve done this. You now have language for what you’ve been feeling. The confusion, the isolation, the grief – it all makes sense. Your family isn’t evil. They’re responding to documented psychological warfare.
2. Develop Critical Consciousness
Learn more. Read more. But not just to accumulate knowledge – to build frameworks that help you navigate relationships with people still caught in the programming. As Paulo Freire taught us in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, true education is dialogic. We learn WITH people, not AT them.
3. Practice Compassionate Pedagogy
You can’t argue someone out of programming that took centuries to install. But you can love them back to their authentic selves through patient, curiosity-driven conversations.
Ask questions instead of providing answers.
“What do you think about…?”
“Have you noticed…?”
“I’ve been wondering…”
4. Build Community
Find other Filipinos going through similar awakenings. Share resources. Support each other through the isolation that comes with seeing systems clearly. Create spaces where you can practice your reclaimed kapwa with sacred boundaries.
5. Become a Bridge
Use your understanding to help others see the patterns. Not through lectures or confrontation, but through modeling what it looks like to be awake and still loving, conscious and still connected.
The work isn’t to wake everyone up immediately.
The work is to break the cycle in yourself and create conditions for others to wake up when they’re ready.
Resources
Essential Reading for Understanding the Systems:
Decolonization & Filipino Identity:
- Brown Skin, White Minds by E.J.R. David – Understanding colonial mentality and its effects
- Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire – How to have liberating conversations with people caught in oppressive systems
Historical Context:
- How to Stand Up to a Dictator by Maria Ressa – Firsthand account of how social media manipulation works
- Careless People by Sarah Wynn Williams – Facebook executive’s insider view of algorithmic manipulation
- The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins – How anti-communist rhetoric justified mass murder globally
Understanding Fascism:
- How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them by Jason Stanley
- Ur-Fascism by Umberto Eco – The 14 characteristics of eternal fascism
- Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari – Understanding micro-fascism and desire
Psychological Frameworks:
- The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk – How trauma lives in our bodies
- Influence by Robert Cialdini – Understanding the psychology of persuasion and manipulation
For ADHD Readers Like Me:
I do all my reading through Readwise – it helps me capture highlights, connect ideas across books, and actually retain what I read.
They’re offering 60 days free if you want to try it.
The key isn’t reading everything perfectly.
The key is building your understanding the systems, seeing beyond them, while maintaining your relationships and your sanity.
This work is hard.
It’s heartbreaking.
Some days you’ll feel like you’re the only one who sees what’s happening.
Some conversations with family will leave you exhausted and questioning everything.
That’s normal.
That’s part of breaking cycles that have been running for centuries.
But remember: you’re not just healing yourself.
You’re healing the lineage.
You’re becoming the ancestor who broke the pattern, who remembered the sacred aspects of kapwa, who chose love and consciousness over compliance and programming.
Your children and grandchildren – whether biological or chosen – will thank you for doing this work.
Change starts with understanding.
It continues with compassion.
It succeeds through community.
Welcome to the work.