Welcome to The Colonial Condition — a space where analysis meets accountability. This Substack is where I unpack the psychological, cultural, and political legacies of colonialism that continue to shape American life. Here, I’ll be writing about power and performance, propaganda and perception, and the ways we normalize oppression while pretending it’s patriotism.
This first essay isn’t behind a paywall because it’s meant as an invitation — to think deeper, to feel uncomfortable, and to begin unlearning together. The goal of The Colonial Condition is not simply to critique empire but to expose how empire still lives within us.
The Return of “No Kings”
The No Kings protests erupted again this weekend with record-breaking turnouts across the country. The slogan — No Thrones. No Crowns. No Kings — carries a double meaning: a rejection of authoritarian leadership and a reclamation of democracy as shared power, not inherited dominance.
Crowds filled streets in dozens of cities, chanting against tyranny, theocratic governance, and the creeping normalization of political violence. From handmade signs to community marches, the message was unmistakable: there are no kings in a democracy.
But online, the backlash was swift and familiar. MAGA loyalists flooded feeds and comment sections with mockery and denial, insisting the protests were “staged,” “anti-American,” or “funded by elites.” To them, dissent is treason and critique is chaos. What we are witnessing is not confusion — it’s defense. Denial has become a national reflex.
The Psychology of Denial
Denial isn’t ignorance; it’s a coping mechanism. It’s how individuals and societies protect themselves from cognitive dissonance — that unbearable gap between who they believe themselves to be and what their actions reveal.
Throughout history, authoritarian movements have thrived on denial. It allows followers to maintain moral superiority even as they enable violence and exclusion. Denial reframes cruelty as virtue, oppression as protection, and domination as divine order.
Many describe the MAGA movement as a cult, but I interpret it through a different lens — not brainwashing, but vindication. The people chanting “Make America Great Again” are not confused about their beliefs; they feel affirmed in them. For decades, their biases — racism, xenophobia, Christian nationalism — simmered beneath the surface, socially unacceptable but privately alive. What this era has provided is permission.
They are not following blindly. They are celebrating openly.
That distinction matters, because it tells us this moment is not about manipulation — it’s about revelation. The quiet part has simply been said aloud.
The Colonial Mindset, Political Identity, and the Struggle for Narrative
In my academic work, I developed two frameworks that help unpack the contradictions of this moment: Colonial Stockholm Syndrome (CSS) and the broader Colonial Psychological Complex (CPC).
CSS describes how colonized or marginalized groups form psychological attachments to their oppressors. It’s not affection; it’s survival. Over time, that survival mechanism evolves into loyalty, creating emotional dependence on the very structures that produce harm.
The Colonial Psychological Complex (CPC) extends this concept into a wider system — a psychocultural architecture that explains how colonial logic persists long after formal empire. It is a framework for understanding the interconnected dynamics of:
Colonial Stockholm Syndrome (CSS) – emotional attachment to oppressive systems as a form of survival.
Colonial Savior Complex (CSC) – the moralized impulse of those in power to “save” the oppressed while maintaining their own dominance.
Colonial Narcissism Syndrome (CNS) – the pathological centering of the colonizer’s worldview as universal, superior, and inevitable.
Colonial Social Conditioning (COSOC) – the institutional and behavioral programming that normalizes hierarchy through media, law, education, and religion.
These dynamics can intertwine in what I term Colonial Syndrome Entanglement (CSE) — when multiple colonial pathologies operate simultaneously within individuals or societies — or fragment into Colonial Syndrome Fragmentation (CSF), where one form of colonial conditioning dominates while others lie dormant yet active beneath the surface.
The cognitive outcome of these forces is Oppressive Cognition: the psychological state produced when individuals must navigate multiple systems of oppression simultaneously while being acutely aware of them. It is not merely about experiencing oppression but about the constant negotiation of it — anticipating consequences, adjusting behavior, and calculating survival in every interaction.
Together, these dynamics form the emotional and ideological infrastructure of empire. The CPC reveals how the colonized may seek safety through compliance, while the colonizer defends power through moralization. It explains why societies built on hierarchy confuse equality with chaos and why movements for justice often trigger existential fear rather than reflection.
The CPC in Motion: The No Kings Protests and the MAGA Reaction
The No Kings movement — now echoed in the slogan No Thrones. No Crowns. No Kings. — represents a collective act of psychic refusal. It challenges not only authoritarianism as a political system but also the deeper colonial psychology that sustains it: the belief that power is sacred, hierarchical, and divine.
By contrast, the intense backlash from segments of the MAGA movement illustrates the CPC’s inverse: how those invested in inherited dominance experience equality as disorder. The protests threaten not their safety, but their narrative. Within the colonial framework, social order depends on obedience to hierarchy — racial, gendered, religious, and economic. A call to dismantle those thrones, literally and symbolically, is perceived as heresy against the mythology of American exceptionalism.
From an academic lens, this confrontation reflects a classic CSE scenario — multiple colonial pathologies operating simultaneously across society. For the protesters, Oppressive Cognition manifests as exhaustion, vigilance, and a moral drive to resist inherited injustice. For those reacting defensively, the same psychological field activates CNS (the centering of one’s own worldview) and CSC (the belief that maintaining authority is a benevolent duty).
This dynamic is not about political affiliation but about psychological investment in hierarchy. The MAGA reaction exemplifies Colonial Social Conditioning (COSOC) — the learned instinct to equate power with virtue, obedience with morality, and dissent with disorder. The movement’s rhetoric — calling for a return to a mythic “greatness” — operates as an appeal to colonial nostalgia: a time when hierarchy was clear, when whiteness equaled stability, and when domination could still pass as order.
The No Kings protests, conversely, disrupt that conditioning by rejecting inherited legitimacy. They refuse the notion that authority is divine, that leadership must be singular, and that democracy must rely on deference. This is decolonial psychology in action — the unraveling of internalized obedience.
The confrontation between No Kings and the MAGA reaction is not a simple binary of left and right, good and evil. It is a struggle between two psychological orders: one trying to maintain the illusion of permanence, and one exposing its impermanence.
Through the lens of the Colonial Psychological Complex, both are products of the same historical wound — one side clinging to the myth of inherited supremacy, the other laboring to heal from it. The difference lies in awareness: whether one sees hierarchy as safety or as sickness.
The Myth of the “Good” Past
What we call “greatness” in America has always been selective memory. The nostalgia that fuels modern authoritarianism isn’t about prosperity — it’s about control. It’s a longing for a time when certain people didn’t have to share space, power, or humanity.
Authoritarianism, as history teaches us, rarely announces itself with a coup. It creeps in through sentimentality. It whispers that progress is chaos and that obedience is order. It thrives on the comfort of myths — myths that justify inequality as the natural rhythm of civilization.
In this way, America’s current political crisis isn’t a departure from its founding; it’s a fulfillment of it. The fear of losing power is the echo of a colonial script written centuries ago, one that equated freedom with conquest and belonging with dominance.
The Reckoning We Keep Postponing
The United States has long mistaken dominance for stability. But as Baldwin reminds us, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
The No Kings protests represent that confrontation — a refusal to keep pretending that democracy and domination can coexist. They are not acts of outrage; they are acts of clarity.
When privilege masquerades as birthright, equality feels like persecution.
But it isn’t oppression — it’s the reckoning this nation has long postponed.
The belief that America can outrun the moral debt of its colonial inheritance is passed to every generation that tries to defer payment, but history always collects.
And so, The Colonial Condition begins here: with an acknowledgment that the sickness was never foreign. It was always homegrown. What we are seeing now is not America losing itself — it’s America revealing itself.
The question is not whether we will face that truth, but whether we will survive it.
About The Colonial Condition
This Substack explores how colonial logic continues to shape modern life — through politics, art, media, psychology, and culture. Future essays will unpack topics like:
The Colonial Psychological Complex and American Exceptionalism
Propaganda, Disinformation, and the D.R.I.P. Cycle
Decolonial Art as Resistance and Ritual
Why “Objectivity” in Media Is a Colonial Invention