When Regulation Becomes a Tollgate: Thoughts over ad permit rule

When Regulation Becomes a Tollgate:
Thoughts over the proposed advertising permit rule

The controversy over the Department of Trade and Industry’s proposed advertising permit rule should not be dismissed as a simple misunderstanding over paperwork. It revealed something more serious: the old temptation of bureaucracy to convert ordinary economic activity into a privilege granted by the state.

There is, of course, a legitimate place for regulation. No serious observer argues that advertising should be left completely unchecked. False claims, fake discounts, fraudulent promotions, deceptive endorsements, bait-and-switch schemes, and predatory sales tactics must be punished. Consumers deserve protection. Honest businesses also deserve protection from competitors who cheat, mislead, and abuse the public trust.

But the question is not whether advertising should be regulated. The question is how.

There is a great difference between enforcing truthful advertising and requiring every business to seek prior permission before speaking to the market. There is a great difference between punishing fraud and creating a permit system that makes even honest commerce wait at the counter. One is regulation. The other begins to look like rent-seeking.

The DTI draft, as described by critics, appeared to cross that line. It reportedly would have required businesses to secure government permits before publishing advertisements, sponsored posts, digital campaigns, or sales promotions. Applications could have had to be filed up to thirty working days before publication, with permit fees reaching thousands of pesos per advertisement.

For a large corporation, this is an irritation. For a small business, it is a wall.

A major company can absorb fees. It can hire lawyers, compliance officers, advertising agencies, consultants, and liaison staff. It can maintain a department whose only job is to deal with paperwork. It can wait out the delay, pay the charge, and still proceed with its campaign.

The small entrepreneur cannot.

The home baker announcing a weekend promo, the online seller boosting a Facebook post, the neighborhood shop advertising a discount, the young clothing brand testing its first campaign, the provincial reseller trying to reach customers through social media—these are not enterprises with legal departments and compliance budgets. They live on speed, visibility, thrift, and timing. A sale announced too late is no sale at all. A campaign delayed for a month is already dead. A fee that looks modest to a conglomerate may already be punishing to a microbusiness.

This is why the objections raised by Senator Bam Aquino, Carlo Ople, digital creators, and small-business advocates resonated so strongly. They understood that the proposed rule would not merely regulate advertising. It would change the balance of the market. It would make the ordinary act of reaching customers dependent on government clearance, time, fees, and discretion.

Aquino’s opposition was therefore not simply a defense of business convenience. It was a defense of the small enterprise against a system that could bury it under forms. His warning about bureaucracy and prior restraint went to the heart of the matter. A policy that requires permission before an advertisement may be released does not merely supervise commerce after abuse occurs. It places government at the gate before speech enters the marketplace.

Ople’s criticism was just as direct. Such a policy, he argued, would hurt small businesses and favor the big players. That point deserves emphasis, because it exposes the practical effect of many regulations that are written in the language of public protection. A rule may claim to protect the consumer. But if its effect is to make competition more expensive, slower, and more difficult, then it also protects incumbents. It protects those already large enough to survive the burden.

That is the danger of bureaucratic overreach. It often arrives dressed as public service. It speaks of consumer welfare, fairness, discipline, order, and accountability. But when translated into practice, it creates permits, fees, delays, and official discretion. And once ordinary commercial speech must pass through a government office before reaching the public, the system becomes vulnerable to favoritism, lobbying, and quiet extraction.

The beneficiaries are not necessarily the consumers. Often, they are the bigwigs who can afford the process and then pretend that the process exists for the common good.

This is where the controversy touches the older question of protectionism.

Is this protectionism? In one sense, perhaps. But if so, it is protectionism in its most distorted form.

Classically speaking, protectionism was supposed to protect the weaker producer: the farmer, the smallholder, the local shopkeeper, the small manufacturer, the community enterprise, the domestic worker of capital trying not to be crushed by bigger forces. In its older moral claim, protectionism was not merely a favor to business. It was a defense of those without scale, without leverage, without the means to survive an unequal contest.

By that standard, Aquino and Ople were closer to the older protectionist instinct than the bureaucrats drafting new tolls. They spoke for the smallholder of the digital economy: the online seller, the content creator, the micro-entrepreneur, the provincial merchant, the modest shop whose advertisement may be nothing more than a boosted post or a short promo graphic.

To see bigwigs presenting themselves as the “protectors” of the public is therefore a mockery of protection. It is protectionism turned upside down. The powerful claim to protect consumers, while the practical effect is to protect themselves from smaller competitors. They wrap market control in the language of public welfare. They speak as if they are doing the public a favor, when the result is to raise the cost of entry for everyone below them.

This is the oldest trick of protectionism by paperwork. A large company can call compliance a virtue. It can say strict rules are necessary. It can declare itself responsible, disciplined, and transparent. But if those same rules make it harder for small competitors to advertise, then the regulation becomes a shield for incumbents. It becomes a public favor in appearance and private advantage in effect.

No wonder neoliberals, rallying under the banner of “no free lunch” and deregulation, so often cry protectionism whenever the state intervenes. They have seen, or claim to have seen, too many cases in which state intervention does not protect the small but serves the big. In their telling, regulation becomes the mask by which bigwigs control both state and economy, then use that control to pin down the smallholder.

That criticism is not always fair, because not all regulation is bad and not all protection is corrupt. A society that refuses to regulate in the name of market purity merely leaves the weak at the mercy of the strong. But in this case, the neoliberals would find an easy target. A permit-before-advertising system gives them exactly the example they want: a state that claims to protect the public while imposing costs that only the large can comfortably bear.

The deeper tragedy is that such proposals discredit legitimate regulation. When government overreaches, it gives ammunition to those who would dismantle even necessary protections. When consumer protection is confused with permit extraction, the public begins to suspect that all regulation is merely another racket. When bureaucrats treat every business activity as something to be licensed, they weaken the case for real enforcement against fraud, scams, and abuse.

That is why the distinction must be made clearly. Regulation is necessary. Rent-seeking is not.

A serious consumer protection policy would target bad actors. It would punish businesses that lie, deceive, or manipulate. It would establish clear advertising standards. It would simplify complaint mechanisms. It would educate businesses on fair practices. It would give consumers a fast and credible avenue for redress. It would focus on fraudulent promotions, fake endorsements, false discounts, misleading product claims, and predatory campaigns.

What it should not do is require honest small businesses to pay and wait before they can tell the public what they sell.

The DTI has since clarified that the controversial proposal was only an internal draft and would not be finalized or enforced. That clarification was welcome. But it also sounded, to many observers, like a retreat after the public saw what was inside the drawer. The problem was not merely that the draft existed. The problem was that it reflected a certain instinct: the instinct to treat economic life as something to be pre-cleared, monetized, and processed.

That instinct must be watched carefully.

For the small business owner, advertising is not a luxury. It is often the only way to survive. A social media post may be the difference between selling and closing. A promo may be the difference between paying rent and falling behind. A boosted campaign may be the only weapon a small seller has against a mall brand, a franchise chain, or a platform-favored giant.

To place that weapon behind a permit system is to disarm the small in the name of protecting the public.

The irony is severe. Government often praises micro, small, and medium enterprises as the backbone of the economy. It encourages Filipinos to become entrepreneurs. It speaks of digital transformation, inclusive growth, innovation, and local enterprise. But when a proposal like this appears, the rhetoric collapses. The entrepreneur is no longer celebrated. He is processed. The small seller is no longer empowered. She is made to queue.

This is how the permit state expands: not always through sweeping laws, but through circulars, drafts, forms, and fees. One requirement becomes another. One clearance becomes a habit. One fee becomes a precedent. Soon enough, the citizen who merely wishes to sell honestly must first ask permission from an office that claims to know what is best for the market.

And in such a system, the small pay first, the large pass through, and the public is told it was all done in their name.

The backlash against the DTI draft was therefore more than a reaction to an unpopular proposal. It was a reminder that regulation must never become a tollgate. It must never be allowed to become a revenue device disguised as consumer protection. It must never serve as a polite instrument through which big players secure their place while smaller competitors are delayed, taxed, and discouraged.

The real task of government is not to make every advertisement an application. It is to ensure that advertisements are truthful. It is not to make every small business wait for permission. It is to punish those who deceive the public. It is not to convert enterprise into paperwork. It is to create conditions where honest enterprise can compete.

Aquino, Ople, and the small-business advocates who pushed back understood this. They were not defending fraud. They were defending the right of the small to exist without being treated as a revenue opportunity by the state.

That is the lesson of the controversy.

Consumer protection is a duty. Bureaucratic toll collection is not. Regulation should defend the public from deception; it should not defend the powerful from competition. And whenever the language of public welfare is used to justify a system that only the big can easily afford, the public has every reason to ask who is truly being protected.  

Beyond the label of "Terror": When People still calls Dissent and Struggle against the system as justified

Beyond the label of "Terror": When People still calls 

Dissent and Struggle against the system as justified

It has become increasingly convenient for the establishment and its apologists to reduce every expression of dissent, every cry for justice, and every call for structural change into the language of “terrorism.” What was once prosecuted under the old vocabulary of rebellion, sedition, subversion, or illegal possession of firearms is now more easily condemned through a single, frightening label: “terrorist.” 

Such a word is not neutral. It is meant to isolate, to frighten, and to silence. It tells the ordinary citizen not to listen, not to ask questions, not to examine the causes of unrest. It discourages sympathy for the poor, the landless, and the dispossessed by turning their grievances into a security problem rather than a social question. 

By reducing complex social struggles into simplistic security narratives, the deeper causes of resistance are often ignored: landlessness, poverty, exploitation, political exclusion, and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few. Rather than confront these enduring injustices, those in authority often find it easier to portray organized resistance as criminality, and every demand for radical reform as a threat to national stability. 

Yet behind every label lies a history. Behind every accusation lies a countryside marked by hunger, debt, tenancy, displacement, and broken promises. The question, therefore, is not merely what name the state gives to those who resist. The more important question is: what conditions gave rise to resistance in the first place? 

A genuine mass movement does not arise from selfish ambition, nor from a desire to terrorize the people. It is born from principle, conviction, and love of country. Its aims are not hidden. They are rooted in the urgent needs and long-denied aspirations of the Filipino people. 

1. Genuine Land Reform and National Industrialization 

At the very heart of the struggle lies the demand for genuine land reform and national industrialization — a demand written in the sweat, labor, and sacrifice of generations of Filipino farmers, workers, and toiling masses. 

For centuries, those who till the land have remained landless, while powerful landlords rule over vast estates like private kingdoms. The farmer plants, harvests, and feeds the nation, yet too often remains poor, indebted, and dependent on those who own the soil beneath his feet. This is not merely an economic injustice; it is a social wound passed down from one generation to the next. 

The aim of genuine land reform is simple and just: land to those who actually cultivate it. It seeks to break the chain of rural poverty by ending landlord domination and giving farmers the means to live with dignity, security, and independence. Land must cease to be a privilege of birth, inheritance, or political power. It must become the foundation of livelihood for those who make it productive. 

But land reform alone is not enough. A nation of small farmers cannot fully prosper if it remains dependent on imported goods, foreign capital, and raw-material exports. Genuine land reform must be joined with national industrialization — the building of industries owned, directed, and developed for the needs of the Filipino people. 

National industrialization means creating factories, tools, machines, processing plants, transport systems, and technologies that serve national development rather than foreign profit. It means transforming agricultural produce into higher-value goods within the country, creating decent jobs for workers, and ending the cycle in which the Philippines exports raw materials cheaply and imports finished products at great cost. 

Together, land reform and national industrialization form the basis of real economic freedom. Land reform frees the peasantry from feudal bondage; industrialization frees the nation from dependency and underdevelopment. One gives the farmer land and dignity; the other gives the worker employment, skill, and a future. 

Only through these twin pillars can the country build an economy that serves the many rather than enriches the few — an economy rooted in the countryside, strengthened by industry, and directed toward genuine national sovereignty. 

2. Genuine Freedom and National Sovereignty 

The struggle also calls for true national freedom — a country not dictated upon by foreign powers, foreign capital, or foreign military interests. 

The aspiration is for an economy and political order directed by Filipinos and for Filipinos. It rejects a system in which the country’s natural resources, labor, markets, policies, and even its security direction are bent toward the interests of foreign corporations and powerful outside states. 

Amid the current geopolitical setting, Philippine policy remains too often subservient, mendicant, and vassal-like — a condition its apologists prefer to call “interdependence.” Yet interdependence cannot be genuine when one nation merely follows, adjusts, and obeys while stronger powers decide the terms. Whether the pressure comes from the United States, China, or any other dominant power, the lesson remains the same: subservience is still subservience, even when dressed in the language of alliance, investment, aid, or development. 

The effects of such dependency are often downplayed because these powerful countries are presented as “developed,” modern, and benevolent. But no foreign power, however advanced, should be allowed to determine the destiny of the Filipino people. A nation that relies on others to define its economy, defense, diplomacy, and development cannot claim full sovereignty. 

Sovereignty is not merely a flag, an anthem, or a seat in international assemblies. It means control over the nation’s land, wealth, industry, defense, resources, and future. It means that the Filipino people must be the authors of their own destiny — not clients of empire, not pawns of great-power rivalry, and not tenants in their own homeland. 

3. Ending Exploitation and Social Justice 

The struggle likewise seeks to dismantle a system in which a privileged ruling class enjoys the wealth of the nation while the majority remain trapped in hardship and deprivation. 

It challenges the domination of a few over the country’s industries, resources, land, and means of livelihood. It opposes a social order where workers create wealth but receive only survival wages, where farmers feed the nation but cannot own land, where families remain homeless despite vacant estates and idle properties, and where ordinary people are told to sacrifice while the powerful continue to prosper. 

As history attests, exploitation continues to prevail in many forms: landlessness, homelessness, low wages, high costs of living, corruption, disenfranchisement, and the many arrangements that benefit the ruling establishment at the expense of the many. These are not isolated misfortunes, but symptoms of a social order designed to preserve privilege while demanding patience from those who suffer under it. 

To end exploitation is to insist that the wealth of the country must serve the many, not merely enrich the few. It is to demand social justice not as charity, but as a right: decent wages, secure homes, land for the tiller, dignity for labor, and a society where power is no longer used to protect greed against the needs of the people. 

The branding of dissent as “terrorism” often becomes a convenient veil that prevents meaningful discussion of poverty, inequality, and injustice. It reduces political questions into police matters and turns social grievances into criminal accusations. It allows the powerful to evade the harder and more honest task of answering why so many people feel abandoned, dispossessed, and betrayed by the very system that claims to represent them. 

Yet history reminds that many struggles once condemned by the powerful were later understood as movements for justice, dignity, and national liberation. Labels imposed by authority do not settle the truth of history. Fear may delay change, but it cannot erase the conditions that make change necessary. 

No label can extinguish the truth that so long as injustice persists, so long as farmers remain without land of their own, so long as workers remain at the mercy of compradores and exploiters, and so long as the nation itself remains an appendage of an unjust establishment blessed by foreign masters, there will always be those who continue to stand and struggle. 

The fight for national democracy and genuine freedom is, ultimately, the struggle of every Filipino who believes in justice, dignity, sovereignty, and the liberation of the common people. It is the assertion that a nation must belong to its people — not to landlords, not to compradors, not to foreign interests, and not to those who use fear to silence the demand for a more humane and just society. 

When the Men of Order Cry Nationalism: Accountability, Scandal, and the Cracking Center

When the Men of Order Cry Nationalism:

Accountability, Scandal, and the Cracking Center

There are moments when a political class mistakes public patience for public consent. It hears silence and assumes resignation. It sees people going to work, lining up for transport, paying inflated prices, enduring poor services, and surviving another week, and it concludes that the center still holds. But beneath that daily endurance is a different mood. It is not pluralist enthusiasm. It is not a polite request for better representation among competing factions. It is not simply a wish for balance between Marcos and Duterte, or for a calmer arrangement among elite camps. It is a demand for accountability.

That is what makes the present crisis more serious than another episode of dynastic rivalry. The ruling blocs may still imagine that the public is merely choosing between them. They may still think that the country can be sorted into camps: pro-Marcos, pro-Duterte, opposition, loyalist, reformist, radical, undecided. But that reading misses the sharper force growing beneath the surface. Many Filipinos are no longer asking which faction should manage the system. They are asking why the system keeps producing the same burnt record of scandal, impunity, misuse of public funds, corruption allegations, neglected public needs, and political survival dressed up as patriotism.

Sen. Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa’s appeal to his fellow Philippine Military Academy alumni, made under the shadow of an International Criminal Court warrant tied to the Duterte drug war, is important because it exposed the instinct of the men of order when accountability comes near. They do not begin with the dead. They do not begin with the families. They do not begin with command responsibility, public trust, or the limits of state violence. They begin with nation, sovereignty, loyalty, fraternity, and institutional pride. They reach for the hymn, the flag, the oath, the academy, the old sentimental grammar of service, and they ask that these symbols be made to stand between them and consequence.

That is why the backlash from Frank Cimatu, Gary Alejano, and others carried more weight than an ordinary social-media scolding. Their criticism was not merely that Dela Rosa had used the PMA hymn in bad taste. Their deeper charge was that he had tried to convert an institutional song into political armor. An alma mater song, especially one tied to the academy that produces many of the country’s military and police leaders, is not a personal distress signal. It is not a shield for legal exposure. It is not a campaign jingle. It is not a plea for uniformed sympathy. If it stands for courage, integrity, and loyalty, then those values must be measured against accountability, not invoked to avoid it.

The larger scandal is that this maneuver is not new. Philippine politics has long allowed powerful men to borrow the moral capital of institutions they have weakened. They speak in the name of the Constitution after bending public office to factional needs. They speak in the name of the people after neglecting the people’s most basic demands. They speak in the name of sovereignty after failing to make domestic justice credible. They speak in the name of order after presiding over disorder in public finance, public services, and public morality. When pressure arrives, the first instinct is not confession, reform, or submission to process. It is symbolic mobilization.

That is why this cannot be treated as a simple matter of pluralist competition. The point is not that the Marcos camp and the Duterte camp are merely two legitimate poles in a normal democratic marketplace, each representing a different constituency and policy preference. That frame is too soft for the depth of the crisis. The two wings of the present ruling order carry their own burdens of shame. They carry the odor of scandal, impunity, family power, discretionary funds, coercive politics, and selective morality. Their quarrel may be real, but it does not cleanse either side. Their conflict may expose crimes and abuses, but exposure by one compromised faction does not automatically produce justice.

The public demand, therefore, is not simply for alternation. It is for accountability that does not stop at factional convenience. It is for a reckoning that does not merely punish one camp so another camp can inherit the center. It is for a political order in which the law does not move only when elite alliances collapse. It is for a public finance system where funds cannot be hidden behind vague security justifications while schools, hospitals, transport, agriculture, wages, and disaster response remain inadequate. It is for a state that does not remember sovereignty only when the powerful are threatened, and does not remember the poor only during campaigns, relief operations, or police raids.

This is where the phrase “bombard the headquarters” becomes politically meaningful, not as a literal call to violence, but as an old revolutionary metaphor for exposing and challenging the command centers of power. The people’s anger is not satisfied by watching one wing of the elite bombard the other while preserving its own headquarters intact. The demand is wider. It is to bombard the headquarters of impunity itself: the dynastic headquarters, the budgetary headquarters, the police headquarters, the propaganda headquarters, the confidential-fund headquarters, the patronage headquarters, and the ideological headquarters that keeps telling citizens to choose between rival managers of the same decay.

The danger for the ruling center is that many people already understand this. They know the Marcos and Duterte camps are not clean opposites. They know that one side’s corruption charge does not erase the other side’s historical baggage. They know that one side’s invocation of sovereignty does not erase the victims of state violence. They know that one side’s appeal to institutional order does not erase the possibility that institutions are being used selectively. They know that when dynasties fight, the truth may surface, but truth is not the same as justice unless it is followed through without fear or favor.

This is why the current cries of nationalism sound so thin. Nationalism, if serious, should begin with the people’s condition. It should begin with whether citizens can eat, work, study, travel, heal, farm, fish, organize, speak, and live without fear. It should begin with whether public funds are used for public needs. It should begin with whether the law can reach the powerful. It should begin with whether state violence can be investigated honestly. It should begin with whether the poor are treated as citizens rather than as suspects, clients, labor reserves, voters, or scenery.

But the nationalism now being performed by the men of order begins somewhere else. It begins with the predicament of the powerful. It begins when an ally faces arrest, when a patron faces investigation, when a confidential fund is questioned, when a political family faces impeachment, when an international court asks for answers, or when a ruling coalition breaks apart. The nation is invoked not as a community of suffering and entitlement, but as a shield for those already protected by office, wealth, surname, rank, or machinery.

That is not nationalism. It is reaction. It is the old center trying to save itself by dressing up self-preservation as patriotic resistance.

The Duterte wing reacts to accountability by calling it persecution, foreign interference, elite conspiracy, or betrayal. It asks its followers to see legal scrutiny as an attack on the nation. It treats loyalty to Duterte as though it were loyalty to the republic. It treats the drug war not as a field of unresolved deaths and command questions, but as a badge of political authenticity. In that story, Bato is not a former police chief facing grave accusations. He is a symbol of a besieged movement. The warrant becomes a weapon of outsiders. The hymn becomes a call to comrades. Sovereignty becomes the last refuge of those who once demanded obedience from the weak.

The Marcos wing counterreacts by presenting itself as the guardian of institutions, order, and lawful procedure. It wants to look like the adult restoration after Duterte’s disorder. It wants to occupy the center as the camp of stability, diplomacy, and legality. But this posture cannot be accepted without scrutiny. Institutional language does not erase the unresolved moral history attached to the Marcos name. Nor does it erase present questions about public funds, elite privilege, patronage, and selective justice. The camp that claims to defend institutions must prove that it is not merely using institutions to discipline its rival while insulating itself.

Both wings therefore carry the same burnt mark of scandal: the belief that the state can be held as a family asset, a factional weapon, or a protective wall. The forms differ. The rhetoric differs. The enemies differ. But the underlying practice is familiar. Public office becomes a fortress. Public money becomes leverage. Public outrage becomes something to be managed. Public memory becomes something to be manipulated. National language becomes a costume for factional survival.

That is why the people’s demand for accountability must be broader than the immediate legal case against Dela Rosa, broader than the impeachment drama around Sara Duterte, broader than the Marcos-Duterte split, and broader than any one corruption controversy. These are openings, but they are not the whole field. The question is whether the country will use this rupture to interrogate the structure that made such abuses ordinary. The question is whether accountability will climb upward, sideways, and backward, or whether it will stop at the boundary of political usefulness.

A true accountability politics would not ask first whether the accused belongs to one faction or another. It would ask what was done, who authorized it, who benefited, who paid, who died, who was silenced, who received funds, who approved releases, who falsified justifications, who protected the chain, and who now invokes the nation to avoid answering. It would not permit the drug war to be treated as merely a Duterte issue while ignoring the state machinery that carried it out. It would not permit corruption to be treated as merely a Duterte issue or a Marcos issue while ignoring the budgetary culture that makes discretion, secrecy, and patronage normal. It would not permit the security establishment to wrap itself in honor while refusing scrutiny over the uses of force and loyalty.

This is the business significance of the crisis. A country cannot build durable confidence when accountability depends on factional timing. Investors, workers, taxpayers, and citizens all need a predictable state. They need to know that public funds are not political loot. They need to know that law enforcement is not selective. They need to know that courts are not merely instruments in elite conflict. They need to know that national policy is not held hostage by dynastic rivalry. They need to know that the state can survive the fall of any patron because its institutions are stronger than the men occupying them.

When that confidence disappears, the cost is not only moral. It becomes economic. Public projects become suspect. Procurement becomes a site of distrust. Regulatory decisions are read as factional moves. Fiscal priorities are questioned. Reform promises lose force. Citizens become less willing to comply because they no longer believe sacrifice is shared. Businesses price in instability. Public servants lose morale. Social anger becomes harder to contain. The state may still function, but it functions with a legitimacy deficit.

The misuse of public funds is central because it translates elite abuse into daily hardship. A questionable allocation is not just a line item. A confidential fund is not just a bureaucratic phrase. A diverted peso is a classroom not repaired, a medicine not bought, a farmer not supported, a road not built properly, a flood response delayed, a health worker unpaid, a commuter left stranded, a public system weakened. Corruption is not only theft from the treasury. It is theft from the future capacity of the state.

That is why the people are right to be angry. They are not angry in the abstract. They are angry because they experience the consequences of public failure every day. They are asked to understand why budgets are constrained while political offices find money for discretionary spending. They are asked to accept poor services while officials move in convoys. They are asked to trust institutions that move slowly against the powerful and swiftly against the poor. They are asked to believe in nationalism from politicians who remember the nation most loudly when their own camp is endangered.

This anger is not a polite pluralist sentiment. It is not simply a call for more voices around the table. It is an indictment. It is a demand that the headquarters be opened, searched, audited, questioned, and stripped of its sacred immunity. It is the demand that the public be allowed to see what was done in its name and with its money. It is the demand that oaths, hymns, flags, and offices stop being used as curtains.

The PMA hymn episode remains powerful because it dramatizes this curtain. A man facing grave accusations reached for a sacred institutional song and asked it to carry his case into the emotional realm of loyalty. But the public has become less willing to accept such transfers. It has heard too many slogans. It has watched too many officials speak of service while securing privilege. It has watched too many scandals disappear into committees, technicalities, settlements, alliances, and distractions. It has watched too many powerful figures discover law only when they can use it and discover nationalism only when they need cover.

The academy’s ideals, if taken seriously, do not support this evasion. Courage means facing accountability even when it is humiliating. Integrity means not hiding behind fraternity. Loyalty means fidelity to the Constitution and the people, not to a patron. If the PMA hymn is to mean anything, it must not be available as an emergency shelter for alumni in political distress. Its dignity depends on refusing that use.

The same principle applies to the entire state. Congress should not be a shelter. The police should not be a shelter. The military should not be a shelter. The budget should not be a shelter. The courts should not be a shelter. Sovereignty should not be a shelter. The presidency should not be a shelter. The republic should not be turned into a bunker for men and families who have exhausted public trust.

What makes the present moment dangerous for the center is that the old method of containment is losing power. The elite can still mobilize loyalists. It can still dominate media cycles. It can still turn scandal into spectacle. It can still frame every issue as a binary conflict between camps. But the public’s resentment is no longer easily confined inside those binaries. Many Filipinos may dislike Duterte without trusting Marcos. They may distrust Marcos without absolving Duterte. They may support accountability at The Hague while demanding accountability at home. They may reject foreign interference while also rejecting domestic impunity. They may understand that two things can be true: sovereignty matters, and sovereignty has been abused by those who use it to hide from justice.

This complexity is not pluralist softness. It is sharper than partisanship. It is the refusal to let any camp monopolize the language of the people. It is the refusal to let one scandal erase another. It is the refusal to let counterreaction pose as justice. It is the refusal to let reaction pose as nationalism. It is the insistence that both wings of the ruling order answer for what they have done, what they have enabled, and what they have neglected.

The Marcos-Duterte split may therefore become useful only if it breaks open the sealed rooms of power. If it merely rearranges control, it will deepen cynicism. If it exposes wrongdoing only to punish enemies, it will fail. If it produces investigations that stop at political convenience, it will confirm the public’s worst suspicion. But if it widens into a genuine demand for accountability across camps, offices, budgets, police chains, and dynastic networks, then it may become more than an elite rupture. It may become an opening.

The ruling center fears that possibility. It prefers a manageable fight. It prefers Marcos versus Duterte, not people versus impunity. It prefers hearings that wound rivals, not audits that threaten the whole patronage system. It prefers legal action that disciplines one camp, not structural accountability that changes how public power is used. It prefers nationalism as a slogan, not nationalism as the people’s claim over the state.

That is why the language must be corrected. This is not a crisis of civility between political factions. It is not merely a crisis of polarization. It is not simply a problem of institutional balance. It is a crisis of accountability. It is a crisis created by years of public money treated casually, violence justified politically, offices inherited dynastically, institutions used selectively, and citizens told to wait.

The people are not asking merely for better manners among elites. They are asking why the headquarters still stands untouched after so much burning. They are asking why the same wings of power, though now attacking each other, still carry the same smoke of scandal. They are asking why those who neglected public needs now speak as though they alone can save the republic. They are asking why every powerful man becomes the nation when he is threatened, while ordinary citizens remain statistics when they suffer.

In the end, Bato’s use of the PMA hymn will be remembered not because it was the largest scandal, but because it captured the moral posture of a class under pressure. It showed a man of order reaching for nationalism at the moment accountability approached. It showed how quickly fraternity can be summoned when law becomes inconvenient. It showed how institutions are asked to lend dignity to those whose public record demands scrutiny.

But the country’s deeper judgment will not stop with him. It will extend to both wings of the ruling order. It will ask what the Dutertes did with power and violence. It will ask what the Marcoses do with institutions and public funds. It will ask why corruption keeps returning under different names. It will ask why the poor are always told to obey while the powerful are allowed to negotiate consequence. It will ask why the center calls itself stability when, for so many citizens, it has meant only managed decay.

The men of order are crying nationalism because they can hear the demand growing louder. It is not a request for inclusion in their drama. It is not applause for one dynasty against another. It is the demand to bombard the headquarters of impunity, to expose the burnt foundations beneath both wings, and to insist that the republic belongs neither to the family in power nor to the family out of favor.

It belongs to the people who have paid for every scandal.

Come, “Huli Spirit”: The Senate Over Bato, the Warrant from the ICC, and the Loudest Calls for Accountability

Come, “Huli Spirit”: The Senate Over Bato, the Warrant from the ICC, 

and the Loudest Calls for Accountability

There are moments in the life of a republic when public argument becomes confused not because there is no truth available, but because too many actors have an interest in delaying its arrival. The issue is first blurred by procedure, then softened by official language, then scattered across rival claims of sovereignty, legality, privilege, and politics. By the time the ordinary citizen is asked to judge, the original question has already been buried under a mountain of explanations. 

The controversy over Senator Ronald “Bato” Dela Rosa and the arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court has entered precisely that kind of terrain. It is no longer simply a question of whether a document exists. The ICC itself has confirmed that the document circulated in public is a formal ICC document. The warrant, according to the court, was issued confidentially and under seal by Pre-Trial Chamber I on November 6, 2025, and the court has said it is in the process of unsealing it so that an official copy may be circulated to the public. 

“The International Criminal Court confirms that the document published by national authorities of the Republic of the Philippines and circulated in [the] media is indeed a formal ICC document,” the ICC said in a message to reporters. 

That statement matters because it removes the first layer of evasion. The warrant cannot now be dismissed merely as rumor, partisan noise, or invented propaganda. It may still be contested in terms of enforcement, jurisdiction, domestic procedure, or the role of Philippine courts, but its authenticity as an ICC document is no longer the same question. The burden has shifted. The issue is now whether Philippine institutions will respond to the warrant with clarity and seriousness, or whether they will turn procedure into a comfortable fog. 

This is where the matter becomes larger than Dela Rosa himself. It becomes a test of institutional confidence, and in a business opinion sense, it becomes a test of the country’s operating environment. A nation is not judged only by its growth targets, foreign investment pledges, infrastructure ribbon-cuttings, or fiscal projections. It is also judged by the predictability of its rules and the credibility of its institutions. Investors, workers, entrepreneurs, diplomats, and ordinary taxpayers all make decisions based on whether the state can enforce law without fear or favor. When the powerful appear to enjoy a different kind of legal weather from everyone else, the damage is not only moral. It is economic, administrative, and civic. 

Former senator Antonio Trillanes IV brought the ICC arrest warrant to the Senate on Monday, accompanied by personnel from the National Bureau of Investigation. The episode quickly became a national spectacle: an incumbent senator linked to a major international case, a former senator arriving with law enforcement, a chamber suddenly forced into confrontation, and a public already alert to the possibility that the Senate might become a refuge rather than a forum of law. 

Dela Rosa claimed he “wrestled” with those trying to arrest him in order to be set free. That image is politically damaging because it is too vivid. It suggests, whether fairly or not, a powerful man physically resisting the approach of accountability and then retreating into the protective space of the legislature. For many Filipinos, the symbolism is difficult to ignore. Ordinary citizens know what happens when the police come for the poor. There is rarely time for constitutional poetry. There are no grand speeches on institutional privilege. There is no chamber into which they may run. The poor are expected to submit first and argue later. 

That is why the Senate’s response matters so deeply. Newly elected Senate President Alan Peter Cayetano insisted that only warrants issued by Philippine courts would be entertained under his leadership. 

“Under our Constitution, it has to be a Philippine judge issuing a warrant of arrest. So if they come here with a warrant of arrest from a Philippine judge, we will entertain that,” Cayetano said. 

“Usually, it is the senator himself who volunteers or surrenders after exhausting all legal remedies,” he added. 

“But you come to us with an ICC warrant that we haven’t seen… they would chase a senator so he cannot attend session, which is quite unfortunate,” he said. 

There is a serious argument inside Cayetano’s position. No constitutional government can simply surrender its processes to spectacle. A legislature cannot allow any arresting party to enter its premises without legal clarity. No democratic society should normalize arrests by pressure, political performance, or mob approval. Due process is not a decorative phrase. It is one of the foundations of civil order. 

But due process must not become the polite name for delay. Constitutionalism must not become a private umbrella held over the politically connected. Sovereignty must not be invoked only when a powerful official is at risk. The Senate may legitimately ask for a warrant issued by a Philippine judge, but it must also make clear that it will not obstruct lawful proceedings once the proper domestic channels are engaged. Otherwise, the public will conclude that the chamber is not defending the Constitution but sheltering one of its own. 

That distinction is crucial. A Senate that protects due process is honorable. A Senate that protects an accused person from process is compromised. 

The political danger is that the Senate may be seen as swift and aggressive when the subject of inquiry is outside its own circle, but cautious, procedural, and protective when the subject is one of its members. That double standard is corrosive. It weakens public trust more surely than any single scandal. Institutions lose legitimacy not only when they break rules, but when they appear to apply rules selectively. 

This is also why the argument that “there are more important issues” must be handled carefully. It is true that the country faces many urgent problems aside from Bato’s supposed arrest and Sara Duterte’s impeachment. People want sound issues, especially issues of the stomach. They want rice prices addressed. They want wages that can carry a family through the month. They want transport that works, power bills that do not crush households, medicine they can afford, schools that do not bankrupt parents, and jobs that do not treat dignity as a luxury. 

Those demands are valid. They are not secondary. The politics of the stomach is real because hunger is the first referendum on government. A citizen who cannot afford food does not live in an abstract republic; he lives in a kitchen ledger. A parent choosing between medicine and tuition does not measure public policy in slogans; she measures it in sacrifice. 

But it does not follow that accountability must wait until all economic problems are solved. That would be a trap, because economic problems will always exist in some form. If justice must wait for perfect prosperity, justice will never arrive. A serious government must be able to reduce inflation, raise wages, strengthen services, manage debt, and uphold accountability at the same time. The state has departments, courts, agencies, and chambers precisely because governance cannot be a one-issue enterprise. 

The people are not asking to choose between bread and justice. They are asking for both. They understand, perhaps better than politicians do, that impunity itself has economic consequences. When officials are not held accountable, corruption spreads. When law is applied selectively, investment confidence weakens. When police power is abused without consequence, communities become unstable. When institutions are captured by political protection, public resources are diverted, public trust declines, and every reform promise becomes suspect. 

Accountability is not a distraction from the economy. It is part of the infrastructure of the economy. Roads, ports, power plants, and digital systems matter, but so do courts, warrants, enforcement, transparency, and institutional courage. A country cannot build a modern economy on feudal political habits. It cannot ask citizens to pay taxes, follow regulations, comply with permits, and obey the law while allowing the powerful to negotiate their exposure to justice. 

That is why the calls from civil society and the public have carried such force. Akbayan President Rafaela David said the government had an obligation to act. 

“If an arrest warrant has been issued by the ICC, it is the obligation of the government, as a member of Interpol, to arrest Senator Bato Dela Rosa, just as what happened to Rodrigo Duterte. The Senate should not be turned into a refuge for the accused. He must be surrendered to face justice and accountability,” David said in Filipino. 

She later put the warning in even sharper terms. 

“If the ICC issues a warrant of arrest, Philippine authorities must execute it immediately and without hesitation. The Senate has no right to stand above international law or shield those accused of crimes against humanity. Any attempt to protect Senator Dela Rosa from arrest would turn the Senate into a sanctuary for impunity and make its leaders accomplices in the obstruction of justice,” David said. 

The phrase “sanctuary for impunity” is severe, but it captures the central fear. The Senate is not merely an office building. It is one of the highest democratic institutions in the country. If the public begins to see it as a place where an accused official can avoid accountability, then its moral authority suffers. It becomes harder for the Senate to summon witnesses, investigate wrongdoing, lecture agencies, or claim the mantle of public interest. An institution cannot credibly demand accountability from others while appearing reluctant to submit its own members to accountability. 

Former presidential adviser Ronald Llamas expressed the public mood in a shorter and rougher way. 

“ICC just confirmed arrest warrant against Bato,” Llamas wrote on social media. “You’re finished, boy.” 

That line was not a legal analysis. It was a political pulse reading. It showed the impatience of people who have watched powerful figures survive by exhausting the public’s attention. In the Philippines, delay is often a political strategy. Wait long enough and outrage weakens. Change the subject and the public fragments. Invoke technicalities and the matter becomes too complicated for mass anger. Let the news cycle move on and accountability becomes archival. 

Social media users and meme groups then turned the controversy into political satire. Content creator Raquel Solero Zamora linked Dela Rosa’s appearance at the Senate to the leadership change that installed Cayetano. 

“It is fine that Tito Sen was replaced because of Bato’s vote, since Bato was forced to appear. That makes it easier for authorities to catch him. Do not leave the building. The Spirit of Arrest will catch you,” Zamora said. 

The phrase “Huli Spirit” came from the pun on “Holy Spirit,” with “huli” meaning arrest or capture in Filipino. Cannor blame people for mishearing Dela Rosa's accent as Visayan, but even a concerned Visayan knows what makes the phrase effective is that it transforms religious-political language into a demand for accountability. If a public official claims guidance from the Holy Spirit, the public replies with the “Huli Spirit” — the spirit of lawful capture, the spirit of consequence, the spirit that says power must eventually answer. 

“Senator Ronald ‘Bato’ Dela Rosa, the former senator is your Spirit of Arrest. He will guide you to the ICC,” Redniel D. said. “Go with your Huli Spirit, Senator.” 

Another user, Yhong K., wrote: “Bato Dela Rosa went from guided by the Holy Spirit, to protected by the new Senate President, ending with the Huli Spirit of the ICC.” 

The jokes should not be dismissed as mere mockery. In Philippine public life, humor often becomes the language of those who no longer trust official explanations. Satire compresses anger into a phrase. It turns legal complexity into a moral verdict. “Come, Huli Spirit” is funny because it is sharp, but it is sharp because it expresses something serious: the public does not want the powerful to hide behind ceremony. 

This is the deeper business of accountability. It is not vengeance. It is not mob rule. It is not the suspension of rights. Dela Rosa, like any accused person, has the right to counsel, remedies, legal defenses, and a fair process. He may challenge jurisdiction. He may question procedure. He may insist that domestic law be followed. These rights must be respected. 

But rights are not immunity. Due process is not escape. Institutional privilege is not personal refuge. A senator’s office cannot become a legal bunker. 

If Philippine authorities believe that an ICC warrant must pass through domestic judicial channels, then that process should be initiated and explained clearly. If a Philippine court must issue a corresponding warrant, then the government should state the legal path and follow it without delay. If the executive branch has obligations through international cooperation mechanisms, then it should disclose the framework and act consistently. If the Senate has rules governing arrests within its premises, then it should publish its position in clear terms and pledge that it will comply with any valid domestic legal order. 

What the public cannot accept is fog. Fog is the familiar climate of evasion. One office says it has not received the document. Another says the matter is being studied. Another says the proper agency must speak first. Another says there are legal remedies. Another waits for transmission. Meanwhile, the accused remains visible but untouched, protected not by acquittal but by administrative drift. 

This country knows that pattern too well. Accountability often dies not through a dramatic refusal, but through endless referral. It is passed from office to office until the public grows tired. It is studied until it becomes stale. It is buried under procedure until outrage no longer has a target. 

The ICC confirmation has made that harder. The first denial has been removed. The document is formal. The warrant is real as an ICC document. The unsealing process is underway. The next moves must now come from Philippine institutions. 

The Senate must therefore protect its dignity by refusing to become a hiding place. The executive must protect the state’s credibility by refusing to drift. The courts, should the matter come before them, must protect the law by refusing unnecessary delay. Law enforcement must protect order by acting only within authority, but also by not shrinking from authority when it exists. 

The people, meanwhile, are making a demand that is broader than one case. They are saying that the same state which asks them to endure economic pain must also show that it can discipline political power. They are saying that the government cannot speak endlessly about unity while refusing accountability. They are saying that national stability cannot be built by asking victims to forget and officials to relax. 

This is why the comparison with other issues matters. Yes, Sara Duterte’s impeachment is another major political question. Yes, food prices, wages, jobs, and public services remain urgent. Yes, the country cannot be governed by scandal alone. But accountability cases involving the highest officials are not distractions from governance. They define the moral climate in which governance occurs. 

A government that cannot answer accountability questions will struggle to persuade the public on economic questions. A state that appears protective of its own will find it harder to demand sacrifice from ordinary citizens. A political class that avoids consequence cannot credibly ask workers to be patient, businesses to invest, and families to trust. 

Trust is a form of national capital. Once depleted, it is expensive to rebuild. 

This is the point that a sober business opinion must stress. The rule of law is not an ornament attached to democracy. It is a productive asset. It lowers uncertainty. It disciplines officials. It protects contracts. It restrains abuse. It allows citizens and investors to believe that outcomes are not determined solely by proximity to power. When the rule of law weakens, the cost is carried by the whole economy, especially by those least able to protect themselves. 

The poor pay first for impunity. They pay through bad policing. They pay through corruption. They pay through failed services. They pay through fear. They pay through the sense that government belongs to others. That is why accountability is a stomach issue too. It determines whether public money is used well, whether officials fear audit and prosecution, whether institutions serve citizens rather than patrons, and whether the weak can expect protection instead of intimidation. 

The “Huli Spirit” slogan, for all its humor, points toward that truth. It is the people’s shorthand for a serious national demand: let the powerful be reachable by law. Let procedure operate, but let it operate toward justice, not away from it. Let the Senate defend the Constitution, but not confuse the Constitution with the comfort of one senator. Let sovereignty be exercised as responsibility, not as refusal. 

Dela Rosa may insist on his defenses. He may say the ICC has no proper authority. He may rely on constitutional procedures. He may ask Philippine courts to rule. That is his right. But he should not be allowed to convert the Senate into a shield against even the beginning of accountability. If he believes he is innocent, he should face the process with the seriousness expected of a public man. 

A republic is measured by whether its powerful men can stand before the law without bringing the whole state machinery to a defensive crouch. 

The country now waits to see whether its institutions can rise to that measure. The answer will not come from slogans alone. It will come from documents transmitted, legal steps taken, court orders issued or denied, Senate rules clarified, executive obligations defined, and law enforcement actions carried out with discipline. It will come from whether officials speak plainly or hide behind careful ambiguity. 

The public has already spoken in the language available to it: commentary, anger, satire, and the now unavoidable phrase. 

Come, “Huli Spirit.” 

But if that phrase is to mean anything worthy of a republic, it must mean lawful accountability, not mob spectacle. It must mean courage within process, not revenge outside it. It must mean that the warrant is answered through institutions, not buried by institutions. It must mean that a country hungry for bread is also hungry for justice, and that no serious government should force the people to choose between the two. 

The Philippines has many urgent problems. It must feed its people, strengthen wages, lower costs, improve services, protect jobs, and restore confidence in the future. But it must also prove that high office is not a hiding place. Economic reform without accountability becomes managerial theatre. Political stability without justice becomes organized evasion. Sovereignty without responsibility becomes a slogan for the powerful. 

The Senate should remember that its dignity does not come from protecting its members. Its dignity comes from serving the republic. The executive should remember that authority does not mean waiting for public anger to fade. Authority means acting with clarity when the law demands it. The courts should remember that delay, in cases of national importance, can become a political act. And Dela Rosa should remember that a public career built on the language of order cannot end by fleeing the order of law. 

The people want bread. The people want work. The people want lower prices. The people want services that function. But they also want a country where power answers. 

That is not a distraction. That is the foundation. 

Come, “Huli Spirit,” then — not as a joke alone, but as a civic summons. Let the warrant be faced. Let the law be clarified. Let the Senate stand for process without becoming a sanctuary. Let the state show that it can handle accountability with the same urgency it claims for every other national problem. 

For in the end, the question is not only whether one senator can be arrested. The question is whether the republic can still arrest the old habit of impunity itself. 

Ayn Rand With a Ring Light, Max Stirner With a Knife

 Ayn Rand With a Ring Light, Max Stirner With a Knife

All after the Mabanta incident, the Influencer Ego,
and the Pornography of Political “Truth”

There is a strange comedy in watching political influencers invoke “principle” after years of living by appetite. The spectacle around Franco Mabanta and his defenders is not merely about free speech, censorship, journalism, or even the alleged extortion case itself. It is also a philosophical farce, though not the kind usually admitted in press conferences, Facebook lives, or emergency statements written in the high fever of damage control. It is the farce of men who sound like Ayn Rand when they defend themselves, but who are better understood through Max Stirner once the costume is stripped away.

They speak as if they are heroes of speech: rugged individualists, independent minds, sovereign commentators standing against the swamp of power. They want the posture of the Randian protagonist — the persecuted creator, the misunderstood man of vision, the productive ego surrounded by parasites, cowards, bureaucrats, liberals, oligarchs, communists, and mediocrities. They want to sound like Howard Roark with a YouTube channel, John Galt with a podcast, a sovereign man besieged by the mob, the state, and the weak-minded public.

But the deeper reality is more Stirnerite and less flattering. The issue is not heroic individualism. It is ownness without honesty. It is ego wrapped in public causes. It is self-interest disguised as “truth,” factional combat disguised as “journalism,” and political appetite disguised as “free speech absolutism.”

Ayn Rand built her mythology around the heroic ego that creates, produces, refuses to bow, and stands against collectivist mediocrity. Max Stirner, colder and more corrosive, did not worship “the heroic man” in the same marble way. He laughed at sacred causes. He distrusted abstractions that demanded devotion: humanity, truth, morality, nation, freedom, people, justice. His question was always more brutal: whose cause is this, really? Who benefits when this thing is declared sacred?

That is why the Mabanta affair, and the online class surrounding it, sounds like Rand fighting against Stirner. The influencer wants to speak in Randian self-defense: "I am independent, I am persecuted, I am the man with a vision, I am the enemy of corrupt mediocrity." But Stirner walks into the room and asks: "is this really freedom, or is this merely your cause wearing a halo?"

The Randian Costume

The political influencer loves the Randian silhouette. It flatters him. It gives him grandeur. It makes his anger look principled and his ambition look philosophical. In that costume, he is not merely a loud partisan. He is a creator. He is a dissenter. He is a producer of forbidden truth. He is a man attacked because he dared to stand apart from the herd.

That is why the language of “free speech absolutism” is so attractive. It allows the influencer to imagine himself as a sovereign individual battling the machinery of state and mediocrity. It turns a legal controversy into a moral drama. It turns an arrest into a stage. It turns a content network into a fortress of liberty.

In this posture, the influencer does not merely publish commentary. He “speaks truth.” He does not merely attack enemies. He “exposes corruption.” He does not merely cultivate factional loyalty. He “awakens the people.” He does not merely monetize outrage. He “builds independent media.” He does not merely enjoy access to power. He “understands the real game.”

It is all very grand. Too grand. The Randian pose works best when the individual is visibly producing something independent of patronage: a building, an engine, a company, a book, a technology, a real institution that exists because of discipline and excellence. But the political influencer’s product is often less impressive. His product is mood. His product is attention. His product is outrage shaped into loyalty. His product is the feeling that the viewer is inside the room where power is supposedly being unmasked.

The Filipino political vlogger often wants the dignity of the builder without the discipline of building. He wants the aura of the independent creator while living inside the factional weather of dynasties, camps, patrons, candidates, and political families. He wants the romance of the outsider while performing proximity to insiders. He wants to be the sovereign man and the palace whisperer at the same time.

That is not Randian heroism. That is brand management — although, to be fair, many Randians, fascinated as they are with free enterprise capitalism, might see brand management itself as a kind of heroism. In their vocabulary, the cultivation of a name, a market, an audience, and a personal mythology can be mistaken for production. The influencer becomes a “creator” because he has built a brand; the brand becomes proof of independence because it attracts followers; the followers become evidence of value because the market has supposedly spoken. But this only deepens the farce. A brand is not automatically a philosophy. A market signal is not automatically moral vindication. Audience capture is not the same as creation, and visibility is not the same as virtue.

The Orderist Ego and the State They Suddenly Fear

The irony is obvious: many of these figures are trying to sound Randian. They posture as absolutists, as sovereign men of speech, as heroic dissenters who refuse to bend before bureaucrats, liberals, oligarchs, communists, and the allegedly weak-minded public. They speak as though they are defending the individual against the collective, the independent mind against the mob, the fearless commentator against the cowardly state.

Yet beneath that libertarian costume sits something more revealing: a fascination with orderism whenever order satisfies self-interest.

That is the contradiction. In one instance, they cry against the Left as “subversive,” “terroristic,” destabilizing, or dangerous to the nation. They demand discipline, punishment, surveillance, loyalty, and state muscle. They praise crackdowns when the target is convenient. They cheer strongmen when the violence of order is directed at their enemies. Some admire the theatrical antics of figures like Argentina’s Javier Milei, not merely because of economic doctrine, but because he performs the fantasy of the chainsaw-wielding individual smashing institutions in the name of freedom.

But when the state counters their own shitstorm, when police language and prosecutorial machinery turn toward their side, they suddenly rediscover civil liberties. This is not principled libertarianism. It is selective anti-statism. It is order for enemies, freedom for oneself. It is the old authoritarian bargain wearing the sunglasses of radical individualism.

That is why their Randian "libertarianism" feels hollow. A real absolutist would defend the principle even when it protects enemies. A true free-speech radical would not discover nuance only when his own faction is touched. But this crowd often treats liberty as private property. Their speech is freedom. Their enemies’ speech is subversion. Their propaganda is truth. Their opponents’ propaganda is destabilization. Their manipulation is awakening. The other side’s manipulation is terrorism, communism, the oligarchy, or simply state interference.

One begins to wonder whether they are trying to be as edgy as the edgelords of the internet without understanding what made the anonymous memer different. Mabanta and his orbit are not the same as the anonymous poster who treats every piece of information as raw material for humor, desecration, and absurdity. The anonymous memer, however ugly or corrosive, often knows he is playing in the sewer. He does not always demand to be called a journalist, patriot, or defender of civilization. He turns politics into a joke because, to him, everything is already a joke.

The political influencer is different. He wants sewer energy with civic honor. He wants to be funny, cruel, factional, and destructive, but also respectable. He wants to wound like a troll, posture like a patriot, negotiate like an operator, and be defended like a dissident. He wants the saltiness of the old “zucc’d” pages, but not their honesty about being creatures of dankness, rage, and bad faith. He wants the edgelord’s freedom with the bourgeois influencer’s legal and moral protection.

This is why the spectacle recalls those moments when lawmakers in the lower house grilled Duterte-aligned vloggers over fake news disguised as “truth.” Many of them, when placed under institutional pressure, suddenly sounded smaller than their online personas. Some apologized. Some softened their claims. Some discovered that a congressional hearing is not the same as a comment section. Others avoided the proceedings altogether, which was perhaps the more honest act: absence as self-preservation. The performance of fearlessness tends to shrink when the audience is no longer made of followers but of officials with microphones, records, and contempt powers.

That earlier spectacle already revealed the structure of the game. The vlogger’s “truth” often survives best in the platform environment, where repetition can masquerade as evidence and engagement can impersonate credibility. Inside a hearing room, where claims can be questioned, dates demanded, sources requested, and responsibility assigned, the magic weakens. The heroic truth-teller becomes evasive. The brave patriot becomes procedural. The digital warrior becomes careful.

Obviously, such activity is not merely ordinary commentary. It is a form of information warfare, and more specifically, cognitive warfare. It civilianizes a military act: demoralizing a population, shaping perception, exhausting the public’s ability to distinguish fact from half-truth, and making people favor one narrative before evidence can stabilize. It does not require tanks or rifles. It uses memes, livestreams, clipped videos, insinuations, emotional repetition, tribal grievance, and the constant recycling of suspicion.

The goal is not always to persuade in the old rational sense. The goal is to condition. To make the audience suspicious of one side before hearing it. To make them laugh at the other side before understanding it. To make them believe that institutions are corrupt only when they threaten one’s faction, and heroic when they punish the faction’s enemies. It is not debate. It is mood management.

That is why many readers of such pages, especially Duterte supporters searching for copium after political setbacks, praise these personalities as though they were John Galts of the Philippine internet. They imagine them as heroic men withdrawing truth from a corrupt world, or brave producers of forbidden knowledge persecuted by mediocrities and parasites.

But this is a fantasy. John Galt, at least in Rand’s mythology, is a creator whose withdrawal reveals the dependence of society on genuine production. The influencer is not that. He is not withdrawing an engine from the world. He is feeding the machine of resentment that keeps him visible.

The better comparison is not Rand’s heroic creator but Stirner’s ego hiding behind a borrowed god. The influencer’s sacred cause is “truth,” but the practical cause is relevance. The sacred cause is “freedom,” but the practical cause is operational space. The sacred cause is “the people,” but the practical cause is audience capture. The sacred cause is “anti-corruption,” but the practical cause is factional damage. The sacred cause is “speech,” but the practical cause is power.

That is the fraud: they want to be Randian heroes while practicing Stirnerite appetite without Stirnerite honesty. They want to be absolutists when speaking, orderists when punishing, libertarians when accused, authoritarians when offended, and revolutionaries when monetizing the chaos. They want the state to be a hammer in their hands and a tyrant in everyone else’s.

And now that the state has answered one of their own storms with its own machinery, they cry as though the weather itself has betrayed them.

The Vulgar Randian Transaction

The incident sounds almost vulgar Randian in the worst possible way: not heroic self-interest, not productive independence, not the grand ego of a builder, but transaction. A price placed beside a truth. A supposed exposé allegedly converted from public revelation into bargaining material. The image is obscene not because money exists in media — all media has economics — but because the alleged logic turns truth itself into inventory.

That is where the public question becomes unavoidable: if they were really for the truth, why would anyone allegedly need to pay just to keep that truth from being blurted out? If the content was a matter of public interest, why would its release depend on anything other than verification, editorial courage, and the public’s right to know? Why would a supposed act of exposure be haunted by the language of tranches, intermediaries, delivery points, hotel meetings, and negotiated silence?

Again, these are allegations, not verdicts. Mabanta is entitled to due process. The NBI must prove its case. But as political imagery, the charge is devastating because it attacks the very mythology of the influencer-truth teller. The brand says: “We reveal what others hide.” The allegation says: “Truth had a price.” The brand says: “We are fearless.” The allegation says: “Fearlessness could be negotiated.” The brand says: “We speak for the people.” The allegation says: “The people might have been only the audience, while the real transaction happened elsewhere.”

This is where Mabanta’s vulgar interpretation of self-interest, if the accusations are proven, makes his brand of journalism or commentary almost pornographic in the older sense of the word. "Pornographos" in Greek meant a writing about prostitutes, from "pornē" and "graphein": the writing of what is sold, the inscription of commerce around exposure. The word is useful here not as sexual insult, but as moral anatomy. It describes a style of publicity in which what should be public interest becomes a spectacle of transaction, where exposure itself is priced, staged, teased, withheld, and potentially exchanged.

That is the obscenity: not nakedness, but the sale of revelation. Not scandal, but the commodification of scandal. Not journalism, but the conversion of damaging information into a kind of political flesh market, where truth is displayed, concealed, previewed, and allegedly offered as leverage.

This is why the Randian pose collapses so badly. Rand’s egoist, at least in myth, creates value through production. The vulgar political egoist creates value through damage. He does not build the engine; he threatens to release the smoke. He does not withdraw his genius from the world; he withholds a video. He does not prove independence through creation; he allegedly prices silence.

Stirner would see the cause stripped bare. The sacred language of truth, freedom, and the people dissolves into the old question: who owns the information, who benefits from its release, who benefits from its suppression, and who is pretending that private leverage is public virtue?

In that light, the alleged transaction is not merely legal evidence to be tested. It is the perfect metaphor for the ecosystem itself: a marketplace where outrage is currency, truth is inventory, silence is negotiable, and every sacred cause comes with a rate card hidden somewhere behind the ring light.

Stirner Enters and Ruins the Party

Max Stirner is useful here because he ruins the solemnity. He does not let people hide too long behind big words. When a faction says “truth,” Stirner asks whether it means truth or advantage. When an influencer says “freedom,” Stirner asks whether he means freedom or immunity. When a camp says “justice,” Stirner asks whether it means justice or revenge. When a network says “public interest,” Stirner asks whether the public was truly the client, or merely the audience.

Stirner’s famous provocation is that men are constantly asked to serve sacred causes while forgetting their own. “Truth,” “freedom,” “the people,” “the nation,” “justice” — all these can become idols. They can be noble in one mouth and fraudulent in another. His suspicion is not that every cause is fake, but that every cause can be used to domesticate the ego while pretending to elevate it.

That suspicion fits the political influencer perfectly. The influencer does not say, “My cause is my relevance.” He says, “My cause is truth.” He does not say, “My cause is destroying my faction’s enemy.” He says, “My cause is accountability.” He does not say, “My cause is surviving the legal blast radius.” He says, “My cause is free speech.” He does not say, “My cause is preserving my audience.” He says, “My cause is the people.”

Stirner would laugh, not because free speech is worthless, but because the sudden sacredness of free speech appears exactly when the speaker needs it most. The abstraction becomes holy at the moment it becomes useful. The banner is raised when the position becomes dangerous.

That is the hidden comedy of the Mabanta spectacle. It is not that the public should dismiss all free-speech concerns. The state can abuse power. The NBI must prove its case. Political timing can be suspicious. Entrapment operations deserve scrutiny. The accused deserves due process. But none of that requires the public to swallow the performance whole.

Stirner’s knife cuts through the halo. It asks whether “free speech absolutism” is principle, tactic, or costume.

Rand Wants the Hero; Stirner Sees the Owner

Rand’s hero says: I stand alone because I refuse to live for others. Stirner’s egoist says something colder: I serve what is mine, and I do not pretend that my appetite is a god.

That is the crucial difference. Rand moralizes ego. Stirner unmasks it. Rand gives the individual a temple. Stirner burns down the temple and asks what the individual does after the smoke clears.

The Mabanta-type influencer wants Rand’s temple. He wants his self-interest to appear noble, productive, persecuted, and civilizational. He wants the audience to see him as a man fighting for a higher moral order. He wants to be treated as a dissident, not an operator; a journalist, not a broker; a truth-teller, not a factional combatant.

But the Stirnerite reading is more ruthless. It sees no temple. It sees a man, a platform, an audience, a factional battlefield, a claim to truth, a claim to persecution, and a sudden appeal to sacred rights. It asks whether all these noble words are merely tools of self-preservation.

That does not automatically make the man guilty. It makes the rhetoric suspect.

There is a difference between defending rights and laundering one’s ego through rights. A real civil libertarian defends due process even for enemies. A factional influencer discovers due process when the handcuffs appear. A real free-speech advocate defends speech even when it damages his own side. A political operator defends speech when his own content is threatened and calls for punishment when enemies speak.

That is where the Randian costume tears. The heroic individualist should be consistent. The factional egoist rarely is.

The Influencer as Second-Hander

Rand despised the “second-hander,” the person who lives through the opinions, approval, and recognition of others. Ironically, that is exactly what much of the influencer class is.

The influencer claims independence, yet lives by reaction. He needs enemies to denounce him, followers to praise him, patrons to notice him, algorithms to reward him, and rival factions to fear him. He is supposedly sovereign, yet his daily oxygen is engagement. His ego is not built in solitude. It is built in metrics.

This makes the Randian pose even more absurd. The influencer is not Howard Roark refusing to compromise his design. He is a man refreshing the feed to see whether the attack landed. He is not John Galt withdrawing his genius from the world. He is a broadcaster of grievance who needs the crowd every hour. He is not the solitary creator. He is the merchant of reaction.

In this sense, Stirner again explains him better than Rand. The influencer is not an independent heroic producer. He is an ego moving through a marketplace of causes, seizing whichever abstraction gives him power: nationalism today, anti-corruption tomorrow, free speech when arrested, due process when charged, public interest when exposed, persecution when cornered. He does not transcend the crowd. He feeds on it.

The supposed individualist is actually a creature of mass attention. Without the audience, he disappears. Without enemies, he softens. Without factional heat, he loses shape. Without outrage, he becomes ordinary. That is not heroic egoism. That is dependency with a microphone.

Free Speech as Property, Not Principle

A Stirnerite reading also explains why “free speech” in this ecosystem often behaves less like a universal right and more like private property. It is “mine” when I use it. It is “abuse” when my enemy uses it. It is “truth-telling” when my faction attacks. It is “destabilization” when the other faction attacks. It is “press freedom” when my platform is threatened. It is “fake news” when another platform wounds my patron.

This is not free speech absolutism. It is speech possessiveness. The influencer treats liberty as something he owns by virtue of his cause. He does not defend the general condition of open discourse. He defends his own operational space within it. That is why the rhetoric becomes so selective. He wants the maximum room to attack, insinuate, dramatize, and mobilize. But when criticism returns, when legal scrutiny arrives, when the public asks whether his methods were clean, he retreats into constitutional grandeur.

The problem is not the invocation of free speech itself. The problem is its sudden sanctification. The right becomes holy exactly when the ego requires shelter. That is Stirner’s point in political form. The sacred cause appears at the moment of use.

This is why the phrase “free speech absolutism” sounds ridiculous when uttered by factional media men. Absolutism requires consistency. It requires defending speech that harms one’s own side. It requires accepting that enemies also have rights. It requires resisting selective outrage. It requires a principle larger than immediate advantage.

What many influencers practice is not absolutism. It is tactical liberty to defend their interests.

Rand Against the State, Stirner Against the Halo

The Mabanta affair also reveals the difference between opposing state power and pretending that all state action is tyranny when it touches one’s own camp.

Rand’s suspicion of state coercion is easy enough for influencers to borrow. The state is oppressive. The bureaucrats are corrupt. The productive individual is being punished. The independent voice is being silenced. It is a ready-made drama, especially in a country where the state often does abuse its power.

But Stirner’s suspicion is wider. He is suspicious not only of the state, but of every halo. He distrusts the moral costume worn by power and by those who oppose power. He would not stop at asking whether the NBI is being used politically. He would also ask whether PGMN’s free-speech rhetoric is being used strategically. He would not merely ask whether Romualdez is powerful. He would ask whether the alleged exposé was public service or leverage. He would not merely ask whether Mabanta is persecuted. He would ask what Mabanta’s “cause” was really serving.

That is the better lens here because every side is trying to sanctify itself. The state sanctifies itself through law and order. Romualdez’s camp sanctifies itself through victimhood. PGMN sanctifies itself through free speech. DDS disowners sanctify themselves through factional distancing. Marcos defenders sanctify themselves through denial of association. Critics sanctify themselves through accountability.

The Stirnerite move is to profane all of them. It does not say all sides are equally guilty. It says all sides are interested. That is a more useful starting point than the childish search for pure heroes.

Information War Is Ego War

The fashionable phrase is “information war,” but beneath it is ego war. Every player wants not merely to speak, but to impose a frame. Every camp wants its interpretation to harden before the facts do. Every faction wants the public to feel the right emotion first: disgust, pity, suspicion, rage, amusement, tribal loyalty.

This is why the Mabanta spectacle feels larger than the case. It is not merely about whether one man committed a crime. It is about who gets to define the meaning of the arrest. Is it proof of extortion? Proof of persecution? Proof of Marcos-Duterte infighting? Proof that PGMN had something explosive? Proof that influencers are frauds? Proof that the state is weaponized? Proof that Romualdez is afraid? Proof that the DDS ecosystem abandons its own?

Every answer is a weapon. As Rand would frame the hero against the collectivist mob while Stirner would see competing egos using collective language. “The people” becomes a mask. “The nation” becomes a mask. “Free speech” becomes a mask. “Anti-corruption” becomes a mask. “Due process” becomes a mask. Behind each mask is a will seeking advantage.

That does not mean truth does not exist. It means truth enters the battlefield already surrounded by men trying to rent it.

The influencer’s genius, if it can be called genius, is to understand that facts are slow and feelings are fast. A case file takes time. A meme takes seconds. A court process takes months or years. A narrative can harden overnight. That is the terrain of cognitive war. It rewards speed, repetition, emotional clarity, and shamelessness.

This is why the old polite liberal vocabulary often fails against it. It assumes that the public square is a debating hall. It is not. It is a market, a cockpit, a revival meeting, a comedy club, a rumor mill, and occasionally a battlefield. The influencer did not create that condition, but he learned how to profit from it.

The Bourgeois Edgelord

The comparison to meme pages and shitposts in social media, including that of Reddit and 4Chan matters because it exposes the class character of local political edginess. The anonymous edgelord often knows he is in the sewer. He does not ask to be mistaken for a statesman. He does not usually demand a civic halo. His ugliness is part of the performance. That does not make him admirable. It makes him legible.

The Filipino political influencer is stranger. He wants sewer energy with drawing-room respectability. He wants to insult like a troll, posture like a patriot, negotiate like an operator, and be defended like a journalist. He wants to be edgy enough to dominate attention but respectable enough to claim persecution when consequences arrive.

That is why the phrase “bourgeois edgelord” fits. He is not raw chaos. He is curated chaos. He is not the anonymous mob. He is the branded personality. He is not merely offensive. He is professionally offensive. He does not simply shitpost. He produces content. He does not merely attack. He frames, packages, monetizes, and networks the attack.

Rand would perhaps admire the self-made posture. Stirner would notice the dependency underneath it. The influencer depends on the crowd, the platform, the faction, the patron, the enemy, the outrage cycle, the illusion of access, and the constant renewal of grievance. His ego is not sovereign. It is algorithmically maintained.

This is why his cry of innocence or free speech can sound so theatrical. He is not wrong to demand due process. He is wrong to expect the public to forget the ecosystem he helped normalize.

The Problem With Sacred Men

Every faction eventually manufactures sacred men. The sacred man is the one whose flaws must be excused because he serves the cause. He may be crude, but he is useful. He may be reckless, but he is brave. He may be partisan, but he is truthful. He may be compromised, but he is ours.

Mabanta’s trouble reveals what happens when a sacred man becomes inconvenient. The sanctity evaporates. The faction begins historical revision. He was not really ours. He worked more with them. The photographs are old. The association was exaggerated. The friendship was misunderstood. The usefulness is quietly deleted.

This is another Stirnerite comedy. The cause claims loyalty, but only while the ego is useful to it. The individual serves the faction until the faction must survive him. Then he is returned to himself, alone, suddenly responsible for his own cause after all.

Rand’s heroic individualist might welcome that solitude. The influencer usually does not. His power came precisely from not being alone. It came from audience, proximity, faction, and amplification. Once those are withdrawn, the supposed sovereign man discovers how crowded his independence used to be.

The Article’s Harder Judgment

The hardest judgment is not that Mabanta is guilty. That belongs to the courts. The harder judgment is that the surrounding rhetoric is shabby. The free-speech defense may contain a valid legal concern, but as political theater it is too convenient. The disowning may contain factual claims about past affiliations, but as public morality it is cowardly. The Palace’s photograph game may be tactically clever, but as governance it is childish. The critics’ popcorn may be satisfying, but it is not a substitute for proof. The NBI’s operation may be legitimate, but it must survive scrutiny. Romualdez may be the complainant, but he is not therefore beyond investigation.

The Randian reading wants heroes and villains. The Stirnerite reading offers something more unpleasant: interests.

Everyone has a cause. Everyone claims it is noble. Everyone insists the public should believe his banner. Yet beneath the banners are egos, factions, fears, calculations, appetites, and transactions.

That is why the Mabanta affair is philosophically useful. It exposes the cheapness of sacred language in a political-media economy built on noise. It shows how quickly “free speech” can become a bunker, how quickly “truth” can become a weapon, how quickly “journalism” can become a costume, and how quickly “loyalty” can become deniability.

It also shows how easily truth can become pornographic in the older, more literal sense: something written around sale, exposure, and appetite. A “truth” teased but not released, previewed but allegedly priced, moralized but potentially monetized, becomes less a public good than a staged commodity. The public is invited to believe it is witnessing courage, but the allegation suggests the possibility of a transaction behind the curtain.

The public does not need to become Stirnerite nihilists to learn from this. It only needs to become less gullible about sacred causes. It needs to ask the old egoist’s question whenever a faction speaks too grandly: whose cause is this, really?

Conclusion: Against the Halo

In the end, Mabanta and his circle do not sound like pure Randians, because Rand’s heroes at least imagine themselves as creators standing on the strength of their work. Nor are they honest Stirnerites, because Stirner’s egoist would not need to pretend that his cause was universal salvation. They occupy a less impressive middle ground: Randian in self-image, Stirnerite in appetite, bourgeois in style, factional in practice.

They want the heroic ego, but not the solitude. They want the sacred cause, but not the discipline. They want the privileges of journalism, but not always its obligations. They want the violence of information war, but not the stigma of being combatants. They want to wound like propagandists and be mourned like dissidents. They want to price the truth, or at least live in an ecosystem where truth can be treated as inventory, while still being praised as men of principle.

That is why the better response is not to worship the state, nor to canonize the accused, nor to treat every influencer scandal as a constitutional apocalypse. The better response is to profane the whole stage. Strip away the halo. Ask for evidence. Ask who benefits. Ask what was published, what was withheld, what was demanded, what was proven, and what was merely performed.

Free speech matters. Due process matters. Public-interest journalism matters. Anti-corruption work matters. But none of these should be surrendered to men who discover sacred principles only when their own cause is endangered.

Stirner’s ghost stands at the edge of the spectacle and smiles at the absurdity. Rand’s hero wants to declare, “I will not live for another man.” The influencer says something less noble but more familiar: “I will live for my cause — and when necessary, I will call my cause the people’s.”

That is the fraud worth naming.