“After Dragged Through the Streets: The Riot the Elites Ignored”

 “After Dragged Through the Streets: The Riot the Elites Ignored”

In the aftermath of the Mendiola clash, a deeper truth emerged. The state and its surrogates had painted the detained protesters as “paid actors” or “used pawns,” stripped of agency, dismissed as expendable. The police swept through the smoke-choked streets like a merciless tide, dragging protesters into vans as onlookers whispered and pointed fingers. The riot was over before the world could catch its breath, yet none of the so-called organizers, none of the social media saviors, lifted a finger to help. 

It was not their supposed “users” who came to the rescue. But instead, were activist-lawyers—quiet, fearless, stubborn—someone who had spent years fighting for human rights. Risking reputation and security, these lawyers cut through red tape and fear, saving one rioter from the maw of the state. In that moment, politics, loyalty, and ideology meant nothing. What mattered was principle: no one deserved to be abandoned to a corrupt system. 

The irony was brutal. The detainee might have been a supporter of Duterte or some "gangster", someone easily dismissed by liberal opinion-makers and Marcos Loyalists, heck, even Duterte Supporters  as a pawn or a troublemaker, even a "communist". But in that moment, politics, party loyalty, and ideology meant nothing. Principle alone mattered: no one deserved to be abandoned to a corrupt system. 

No one should be surprised. The events at EDSA was filled with the well-off, the respectable crowd, the ones who still say “just stick to the topic” while sipping coffee and scrolling their feeds. But Luneta and Mendiola were different. These weren’t polite rallies with themed shirts and photogenic sound bites. These were the angry, the dispossessed, the ones who want to tear out the roots of the system — and its ringleaders, whether they sit on the throne or rant about their own relevance in leadership.

Corruption and injustice here aren’t subtle. They’re blatant, like neon on a rainy night. And in the smoke and stones of the street, irony and provocation become weapons. What Limonov once called outrageousness and detachment isn’t just theater anymore — it’s a survival tactic, a way to puncture the liberal-conservative establishment and its ritual hypocrisies

Meanwhile, the liberal elites were fast to proclaim: “We weren’t there. We were at EDSA!” And they were right. The posh activists, the boardroom radicals, the "armchair revolutionaries", had indeed stayed far from the mud and blood of Mendiola. The class divide was glaring. They refused the poor. They refused the “uneducated,” the “non-tax-payers,” the “squammies” and “addicts.” They feared the force the poor could become, a force capable of shattering the very order the elites cherished—the gated villages, the polished boardrooms, the matcha lattes and the self-proclaimed "civil society".  Their comforts and privileges are built on the broken backs of the poorest Filipinos. That is why they fear the poor—and why the poor will one day sweep them aside. 

To be fair, it’s easy to see why the critics play it safe. It’s their discretion, their livelihood, their families. But to downplay the riots is cringe. These are not just “paid pawns” or “supporters of Duterte” being ferried to jail; they are human beings risking arrest and death in full view of a state that does not blink. The question of who funds them or what they believe becomes secondary when batons swing and bullets fly. 

Some even seem to be daring the state to finish them — a kind of reckless courage echoing Jakarta or in Kathmandu. In Mendiola, among the banners and makeshift shields, a few waved Straw Hat Pirates flags as if declaring, in the open, “yes to death.” It was gallows humor and defiance at once, a performance that made their point clearer than any speech: they would not beg for legitimacy from the people who had already stolen their future.

The legal rescue of a single rioter also exposes a deeper hypocrisy. Corruption is not only theft of public funds. It is the corrosion of public morality: the manipulation of citizens for political theater, the calculated abandonment of those very citizens once cameras are off. Saving even one life in such a system is a quiet rebellion, a refusal to participate in the politics of disposal. 

Such moments pry open the question of legitimacy. If the supposed defenders of the people are absent, and the critics of the regime still show up for the vulnerable, the familiar binaries of left/right, pro/anti, Duterte vs. opposition no longer hold- but rather the people against the system, the society against the order. And the act of defense on the side of the oppressed becomes a moral challenge to the architecture of the system itself. The riot’s story shifts—it stops being about disorder and becomes about disclosure. It reveals that corruption is a totalizing system that weaponizes loyalty, breeds cynicism, and discards lives. Their privileges were built on the backs of the broken, and they knew it. That is why they feared the poor. That is why the poor would, one day, sweep them aside. 

The act of saving one life was more than legal maneuvering. It was a spotlight on the rot beneath the surface. Corruption was not just stolen funds; it was stolen morality, the manipulation of citizens for political theater, the abandonment of those same citizens when the cameras turned away. 

In the end, the riot’s story shifted. It was no longer only about chaos. It became a mirror. It reflected the failures of a system that uses human beings as props, discards them at will, and counts on the silence of the privileged. If even one person could be saved amid the carnage, it begged the question: who truly defends the people, and who only plays at it? 

The answer was simple, sharp, and unmistakable: not the elites. Not the ones with safe EDSA protests. Not the ones sipping lattes in climate-controlled offices. The defense came from those who dared to speak truth to power—and, when the time came, to stand in the gap.