Members of @1Sambayan and the broader Opposition need to reflect on why Filipinos hate them

It is clear that the most influential “thought leaders” of the Philippine Opposition still fail to truly understand why they are in the predicament they are today. With just a week to go until the much-hyped June 12 announcement of the candidates 1Sambayan will be endorsing and just 11 months to go before the election itself, neither a semblance of a campaign platform nor any indication of strong leadership has emerged from their camp.

The problem with members of the Opposition is that they continue to refuse to take personal accountability for the pathetic state of their “movement”. Perhaps they are too comfy in their self-appointed role as the “good guys” in an obsolete “fight” narrative of their own making. That’s all thanks to years of locking themselves up in their echo chambers where they exchange high fives amongst themselves whenever one of their lame hashtags “trend” on social media. The years of assuring one another that they are the “victims” — of “trolls”, of “fake news”, of “well-oiled propaganda machines”, etcetera etcetera — and that the “decency” they represent is under attack by “sinister forces” had devalued their narrative because they had all but trivialised the notions of “decent” and “civil” society and turned these into fodder for their dishonest ideologies.

Worse, they use Filipino voters as scapegoats for their failing bid to seize power legally in 2022, denigrating them as bobo (“idiots”), suggesting that the Opposition camp offers a choice that only “smart” people can grasp.

It is clear to most — perhaps with the exception of “thought leaders” of the Opposition — that many Filipinos are now put off by the schoolyard elitism exhibited by many personalities within the Opposition, particularly members of the Yellowtard bloc (the group of partisans rabidly loyal to the Aquino-Cojuangco clan). It does not seem to occur to them that a review and re-think of this ineffective approach of insulting people in order to convert them is long overdue.

That brings us to the challenge of converting voters that the Yellowtards have so far proven to be so inept at. The whole point of an election campaign, after all, is to reach out to the unconverted and not to preach to the choir. 1Sambayan is foolishly using that proverbial choir as a source of insight to aid their process of deciding who to field as their endorsed candidates for the 2022 elections. Same approach will likely yield the same results — for them.

It is easy to see that the personalities they cast into their roadshow narrative makes them come across like an egg — white on the outside, yellow on the inside. Thus Filipinos will continue to see 1Sambayan for what it is: Yellowtard rebranded.

It’s high time someone from the Opposition come up with something original that could recapture the imagination of Filipinos considering alternatives. They will certainly not go for the moronism of communism and are plain and simple tired of Yellowtardism and the lame attempts to disguise that affliction using other colours. Those two ideologies are, at their core, ideologies of butthurt. Communism is all butthurt about capitalist “oppression” and the Yellowtards are butthurt about, wait for it, “The Martial Law Years”. It’s time to move on. Communism and Yellowtardism need to be ditched in favour of something that looks to the future. 1Sambayan is clearly not up to that job of providing Filipinos an intelligent option.