A STATE OF SUBMISSION?
The Real Address of the Nation, 2025
They called it the State of the Nation Address. But for those paying attention—not just to the president’s script, but to the silence it tried to bury—it was something else entirely. A stage-managed spectacle. A consolidation of ruling-class interests. A well-rehearsed pageant for the cameras.
And like so many SONAs before it, the 2025 address wasn’t a mirror of the people’s struggle, but a performance for those who already know which side of the table they sit on.
Inside the carpeted halls of Congress, the president spoke with certainty—his voice steady, his gestures measured. He rattled off figures, projected confidence, and promised progress. But step outside that fortified perimeter, and a different reality takes shape: breadlines growing longer, workers laid off in silence, indigenous lands razed under “infrastructure,” and a nation gripped not by reform, but by repression wrapped in PR.
What played out wasn’t just a report—it was a warning disguised as ceremony.
Governance by Illusion
Like the past addresses, this one was about image over substance. It was governance by illusion. The applause was thunderous, but it came from lawmakers long since converted into rubber stamps. What should’ve been a chamber of debate had become an echo chamber of executive will, its members more concerned with loyalty than truth.
Each solon in attendance played their part well, falling into formation behind the president’s “agenda”—a vague umbrella of buzzwords like “order,” “resilience,” and “unity.” But the unity they speak of is a fragile, imposed one. It demands silence. It criminalizes critique.
In May 2024, the Philippine Supreme Court ruled that red-tagging—branding activists as insurgents or terrorists—“threatens a person’s right to life, liberty, or security.” But the ruling has done little to slow the crackdown. That same month, young activists across campuses reported coordinated harassment campaigns on social media, often linked to state-aligned digital units.
The state drags activists and students into hearings, red-tags teachers and farmers, and brands whistleblowers as “enemies of the state.” This is not just political theater—it is a theater of submission.
The Cost of Truth
The real state of the nation isn’t found in those padded seats or golden podiums—it’s in the daily stories of struggle: in the sweat of the contractual worker, the empty stomach of the jeepney driver, the classroom without books, the hospital without medicine, the community organizer dodging trumped-up charges, and the mother whose child never came home after a police “operation.”
Human rights watchdogs recorded over 330 extrajudicial killings in 2024 alone—half of them involving police or military actors. Fourteen cases of enforced disappearance have been reported under Marcos’ watch, echoing dark chapters of the past.
The story of environmental activists Jonila Castro and Jhed Tamano, abducted in 2023 and paraded in a press conference falsely claiming their surrender, still reverberates. In 2024, the Supreme Court finally recognized their case as an enforced disappearance and granted protection. Yet, hundreds more remain unaccounted for.
In June 2025, trans rights advocate Ali Macalintal was assassinated in General Santos after repeated threats by military-linked units—an execution that shocked civil society, but barely registered in government media.
The Issue Beneath “Insurgency”
The right to land remains an issue, the right to sovereignty remains a matter, and the right for social justice remains a topic. As an observer, even in a time when the so-called “Unity” under the Marcos-Duterte tandem has already fractured due to competing ambitions and betrayals, these decades-old questions still persist unresolved. No wonder then why what they call “insurgency” continues to surface—not as a relic, but as a consequence.
Behind the rhetoric of “anti-terrorism” lies a failure to address these roots. Containment, rollback, suppression—these Cold War-era responses are being recycled to handle what is, at its core, a social question. Reforms have been promised, even branded in PowerPoint-ready acronyms, but they remain performative when the foundational injustices are left untouched.
Until landlessness is confronted, until economic exclusion is reversed, until ancestral domains are respected, and until justice ceases to be selective, the so-called insurgency will remain less a problem of rebellion and more a symptom of neglect.
A State Maintained by Fear
And yet, the administration and its so-called orderists—functionaries of the elite, prodded by corporate boardrooms and foreign embassies—pretend they are steering a nation forward. What they’re really doing is maintaining a system that punishes the poor for being poor and rewards silence with proximity to power. Their version of governance is surveillance dressed as stability. It is development that displaces. It is peace that comes with the barrel of a gun.
It is a rotten order, dressed up for prime-time news.
The 2025 midterm elections, far from revitalizing democracy, were marred by repression. An international observer mission condemned them as neither free nor fair. At least 227 activists were charged with terrorism-related offenses in the lead-up to the vote. Civil society groups, from indigenous networks to disaster response NGOs, were smeared, surveilled, or banned outright.
Even during the 2024 SONA, protesters in Davao, Baguio, and Cebu raised placards condemning the violence. In Davao, they handed Marcos a symbolic “failing grade” for human rights, citing the very abuses his script refused to mention.
The SONA wasn’t delivered to the nation—it was delivered on behalf of a nation long held hostage: by unjust treaties, foreign military footprints, landlord dynasties, and a bureaucracy where “technocrats” speak of efficiency as communities burn.
A People That Refuses to Forget
Even the attacks came on cue. Those who dared raise critical voices were met with familiar tactics: red-tagging, online smears, anonymous threats, subpoenas, and surveillance. This is not the open society promised to us—it is a state that demands complicity, where the cost of truth is exile or worse.
But this script is not new. People seen this playbook before—in the time of power outages and press shutdowns, in the disappearances of unionists, in the student walkouts that birthed whole movements. The ghosts of resistance past whisper to us now: This is not new. Everybody knows about this. And everyone knows what to do.
Because what they cannot suppress is memory. What they cannot erase is the resilience of a people who have endured worse—and who, despite it all, still believe in a different tomorrow.
The Real State of the Nation
If the people are to speak honestly about the state of the nation, then we must name it fully:
- A state of fear, disguised as order.
- A state of control, disguised as leadership.
- A state of erasure, disguised as progress.
- A state of siege, disguised as peace.
- A state of performance, disguised as truth.
- A state of submission, disguised as democracy.
And yet—the people are not without hope. Because in the streets, in the unions, in the classrooms, in the barricades, in the whispered poems and shouted chants—the real nation lives. It breathes in every act of courage. It fights in every truth that refuses to be buried. It grows in every community that dares to organize, even under threat.
In the end, history will not remember the applause inside that hall. It will remember those who refused to clap. Those who walked out. Those who wrote. Those who resisted.
Because when the state forgets its people, the people remember how to rise.
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References:
Amnesty International. (2024, May). Philippines: Supreme Court ruling a victory against red-tagging. Retrieved from https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa35/8574/2024/en/
Human Rights Watch. (2025). World Report 2025: Philippines. Retrieved from https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2025/country-chapters/philippines
Wikipedia contributors. (2025). Abduction of Jonila Castro and Jhed Tamano. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abduction_of_Jonila_Castro_and_Jhed_Tamano
Wikipedia contributors. (2025). Ali Macalintal. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Macalintal
CIVICUS Monitor. (2025, May). Activists face red-tagging and arrests around midterm elections. Retrieved from https://monitor.civicus.org/explore/philippines-activists-face-red-tagging-arbitrary-arrests-and-financing-terrorism-charges-around-mid-term-elections/
MindaNews. (2024, July 25). Davao activists give Marcos Jr. failing grade in SONA protest rally. Retrieved from https://mindanews.com/top-stories/2024/07/davao-activists-give-marcos-jr-failing-grade-in-sona-protest-rally/
Amnesty International Philippines. (2025, May). Repression of activism, climate crisis, multiple burden persists for human rights in the Visayas. Retrieved from https://www.amnesty.org.ph/2025/05/repression-of-activism-climate-crisis-multiple-burden-persists-for-human-rights-in-the-visayas/