“Thought leaders” of the Philippine Opposition have been screeching about various imagined crises gripping the Philippines since Day One of the administration of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. While these screeches have grown louder over the last year-and-a-half of Duterte’s presidency, the actual underlying nature and sense behind these quaint cries of “outrage” haven’t really evolved. At the heart of the prolonged outrage fads being sustained by the Philippine Opposition are promises made by Duterte during the campaign that actually won him the vote in 2016.
It seems to escape the Opposition (who continue to be led by the Liberal Party, a.k.a. the Yellowtards) that continuing to harp about character traits of the Duterte government that actually endear it to Filipinos has got losing strategy written all over it. The behaviour President Duterte exhibits today is no different to the behaviour he exhibited during the campaign. So here’s a memo to the Yellowtards…
If Duterte cussed and offended his way to an election win in 2016, guess what: Cussing and offending as president will continue to work for him.
Simple logic, right?
Yet exhibiting “outrage” over Duterte’s cussing and offensive remarks continues to be a cornerstone of the infrastructure of cluelessness that underlies the Yellowtard “cause”. It’s like a “strict parent” who continues judging a daughter for marrying a guy with a nose piercing and a big “Jesus Saves” tattoo adorning the entire acreage of the left side of his neck. Not exactly someone you imagined would be part of photos of family Christmas dinners for years to come, right? But the daughter obviously chose a guy who happens to have a nose piercing and a big “Jesus Saves” image tattooed to his neck to be her life partner. If you were that daughter, there really is no way a mother who constantly attacks your choice will win you over.
The Opposition and the Yellowtards who lead them need to come up with a smarter opposition strategy. Perhaps the easiest step to take towards that goal is to ditch the Yellowtards. The Yellowtards, after all, lost the 2016 elections because Filipinos have grown tired of being gaslighted by these people for the last 30 years. Psychology Today defines gaslighting as “a tactic in which a person or entity, in order to gain more power, makes a victim question their reality.” So for 30 years, the Yellowtards had convinced an entire generation of Filipinos that who they were fit a hybrid mold of Western European (and North American) liberal ideals crossbred with Mandela- and Gandhi-style “non-violent” hocus pocus.
Thus it is common to see Yellowtards lamenting “this is not who we are” when waxing outrage over the latest Duterte remark. This is because these are people who had been led to believe that “who they are” fits a sad caricature fashioned by Hollywood Joe and not by teleserye Juan. The fact is, Filipinos have hardly changed since “independence” in 1946 and though they remain beholden to the earlier, they remain, at heart, more akin to the latter.
It seems that by the time Duterte appeared in the national politics scene and started making inroads into the closed clique of the Imperial Manila Mafia, Filipinos were already in the process of snapping out of 30 years of emotional abuse being perpetrated by the Yellowtards. Gaslighting, after all, is a particularly insidious form of emotional abuse that the Yellowtards had mastered and conscripted the Philippines’ mainstream media into subjecting Filipinos to on a national scale.
Gaslighters are masters at manipulating and finding the people they know will stand by them no matter what—and they use these people against you. They will make comments such as, “This person knows that you’re not right,” or “This person knows you’re useless too.” Keep in mind it does not mean that these people actually said these things. A gaslighter is a constant liar. When the gaslighter uses this tactic it makes you feel like you don’t know who to trust or turn to—and that leads you right back to the gaslighter. And that’s exactly what they want: Isolation gives them more control.
Fortunately, after 30 years of being gaslit by the Yellowtards, Filipinos woke up. Duterte happened to be at the right place at the right time. The true sense of getting “woke”, as it turns out, has more to do with Filipinos who managed to step out of the matrix of lies of Yellowtardism and embrace who they truly are as a people.
This is the more profound psychology that explains the continued popularity of Duterte that baffles the Opposition and their cronies in the Western European and North American media. The Philippine Opposition continue to rely on the strategic direction of the Yellowtards — which is to turn up the gas on the yellow-coloured emotional abuse that once worked on Filipinos. Unfortunately for them, that no longer works. We see it in the sad “activism” of the Yellowtards and their communist allies and how they’ve become mere punchlines. The once-powerful symbols that drew from once-lofty “missions” to “protect freedom” are now as ideologically flaccid as the “thought leaders” who foolishly build their rhetoric around these. Indeed, some of their “thought leaders” have, themselves, become “woke” to this reality and are now advising Yellowtard “activists” to desist from wearing yellow in their rallies!
The Opposition need to get smarter. The first step to achieving this is to be less emotional in formulating a strategy. This is why they need to ditch the Yellowtards — because Yellowtards are intellectually-lazy and wholly gravitate to emotionalism as a means to face challenges that require sound and modern thinking. More importantly, the Opposition will do themselves a favour by reflecting on this timeless piece of wisdom issued by the great Albert Einstein: you cannot solve a problem using the same thinking that created it.
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