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Colonial Psyops with Lara Sheehi in conversation with Nick Estes

The Red Nation | May 22, 2026



In this special episode Lara Sheehi will return to the platform for a conversation co-hosted by Nick Estes, and co-streamed on The Red Nation podcast. We will talk about some elements of her new book From the Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures. And specifically we will dig into some of the work she does in the book discussing the history of the development of the fields of Psychological Operations and Psychological Warfare and how those fields were shaped by psychoanalysis in the 20th Century. We will get into the current implications for “domestic counterinsurgency,” colonialism, and imperialism, including in the settler colonial contexts on Turtle Island and Occupied Palestine. Pre-order a copy of From the Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures.

Lara Sheehi is a Research Fellow at the University of South Africa’s Institute for Social and Health Sciences, a licensed clinical psychologist, and the host of the Psychic Militancy podcast. Lara’s work focuses on psychoanalysis, the psychic refusals central to liberation struggles and life-making in the Global South, the psychic dimensions of resistance and revolution, and critical Zionism studies. She is co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine which won the Middle East Monitor’s 2022 Palestine Book Award for Best Academic Book. Lara is a member of the founding collective for the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and is on the advisory board for Forensic Architecture.

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Written by The Red Nation

Comments

This post currently has 36 comments.

  1. @2nd3rd1st

    May 22, 2026 at 3:23 pm

    This format would work much better if you structured it not as 10 minute monologues, that are hard to focus on as a viewer and hard to respond to as hosts, but as regular interviews with shorter but focussed answers that also allow for follow-up questions. I found myself getting lost in the words a lot and frustrated when important points made by the speaker were not picked up by the others.

  2. @michaeladdison2609

    May 22, 2026 at 3:23 pm

    3 people saying nothing for an hour and a half is a psychic intrusion. Problem in the US is lack of universal healthcare, car dependent burbs, and factory farming. Laws on the books mandate sprawl and that fosters car dependence and owning a car is expensive. The solution is to organize locally to upzone and eliminate minimum parking requirements. Personally most anyone reading this might choose to stop buying animal ag products (meast/eggs/milk/fish/etc). Because most all animal ag is factory farmed and because factory farming is cruel and contributes to global warming and because factory farms are breeding grounds for pandemics. Animals think and feel and suffer if animal don't matter why should humans matter? What are we fighting for?

  3. @emmaboyd7908

    May 22, 2026 at 3:23 pm

    Great discussion – finally academics joining the dots in a practical way explaining without patronising, exhorting action without expecting miracles… more please 🙏

  4. @camelliajd

    May 22, 2026 at 3:23 pm

    "That these structures own evey possibility not just now but into the future". Distinguishing psy-op with psychic intrusion has really helped me so thank you. And thanks for relating this issue to organizing, which has been a such a struggle with compatable left sucking the energy of any mere revolutionary goal for the past 2 years of organizing.

  5. @JAllanG1

    May 22, 2026 at 3:23 pm

    Love to here how Yurok tribe is buddy buddy with Clinton’s under sex trafficking scandals and freeing a river, or we gonna snuff that under the rug if you’d like I can share the photo

  6. @End_Colonial_Epstein_Regimes

    May 22, 2026 at 3:23 pm

    We have a problem with White Marxism attacking Maori Sovereignty again. Acting like Chosen People. Acting like common, underhanded white power colonials. Are there any examples of particular Psyops and countering them, and creating our own counters for people to recognise these attacks?

  7. @EWooten

    May 22, 2026 at 3:23 pm

    Lara, Nick, Jared, (and Sina!) I'm about halfway through the episode and I'm loving it! I want to plug two psyop-focused podcasts that I started listening to in 2021 and have really held up over the years: (the now discontinued) Programmed to Chill and Subliminal Jihad. I'm surprised that the hosts of Subliminal Jihad haven't made it over into the tankie therapy extended universe, but I imagine it's only a matter of time. In fact, they're connected by the Trillbillies podcast, which regularly has Professor Aviña on, so they're connected in a way. They are a treasure trove of sober analysis and hands-dirty deep research. Much love from occupied Cherokee-Muskogee!

  8. @J.D.Ruybal

    May 22, 2026 at 3:23 pm

    Them things we know that we didn't know we knew
    33:16 1:29:49 Here she describes co-opted environmental efforts. This includes the 'Big Greens' and others, that keep the people negotiating, active, distracted and preoccupied while the power's that be buy politicians who make laws that in-prison them that ​care.
    As revealed​; throughout history: Most REFUSE to see and are comforted by inactive action. Satisfied with the crumbs. 'Domesticated'.
    Related: Counterpunch
    February 13, 2026 MAGA Aesthetics and Fascist Power: Spectacles of White Supremacy ​
    Henry Giroux
    "Under the Trump administration, aesthetics itself becomes a battleground, a weaponized field where power works on desire, memory, bodies, and pleasure to consolidate domination."

  9. @charlenegraham1923

    May 22, 2026 at 3:23 pm

    At one point Laura said "…learning how to track that intrusion" and I misheard track as trap. I like the thought of trapping an intrusion as the immune system traps and encloses intruders, sometimes destroys them and sometimes gives them a tel so that the body recognizes further intruders. Like Laura said, inoculation.

  10. @southpaw786

    May 22, 2026 at 3:23 pm

    The subject of psyops is crucial, not just for people on the left but for us all. Psyops are the bread and butter of the far-right and the white racists in the west, and it has evolved greatly since the days of these racists rolling around in the streets, pouring fake blood on themselves, and shouting ‘look what these brown people did to me.’
    Here in England where I live, psyops are very advanced, where the far-right is embedded within the state and media apparatus on a granular , and societally on neighbourhood levels . Here, the latest of iteration of distorting reality by the far right is the use of street theatre for example. As a case in point, something that ppl can check by simply googling, is where their has been a rash lately, and in various cities throughout the country, of a high profile presence on the high streets of these cities of homeless veterans. These veterans usually are sat in the busiest part of these city and town centres, and usually dressed in full fatigues, some adorned with medals. In tandem with these are newspaper campaigns, where these supposedly homeless veterans are featured, which whose subject is immigration and specifically immigrant housing at the expense of the indigenous population.
    That’s just one example, and like I said people can look into this for themselves. The far-right have been faking, hoaxing and false-flagging for decades now, and it thus that we’ve arrived at the broken world we’re in….because none of their devious psyops devices have truly been correctly interrogated because left intelligentsia are fearful of being called conspiracy theorists, and thus the insanity goes on unchecked.

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