Red Alert! Yellowtards and communists up in arms over Toni Gonzaga’s Bongbong Marcos interview!

Today, the Yellowtards and communists are having a cow over the latest outrage fad being spun around Toni Gonzaga’s interview of former Senator Bongbong Marcos on her YouTube show ToniTalks.

Why is wokedom all hopping mad about this? It is because they are offended by the notion that a popular celebrity whose YouTube channel Toni Gonzaga Studio boasts more than four million subscribers is “giving a platform” to the “dictator’s son”. “Activist” Katrina Stuart-Santiago went on a tililing rampage on Twitter to explain to us “why this is a problem”.

To people like Stuart-Santiago, it is unfair of Gonzaga to be featuring Marcos on her show even if she’s had Yellowtard politicians like Vice President Leni Robredo in the past. That’s because, according to Stuart Santiago, the “Marcoses and Villars are already spending money (on the back of the people) for propaganda. Lamang na sila to begin with. Walang fairness dito.” It seems to escape her that the Opposition enjoy the backing of ABS-CBN and the Inquirer the country’s biggest media conglomerate and its most widely-circulated newspaper respectively. If that isn’t an unfair advantage long enjoyed by the Opposition, what is?

Evidently, the Opposition are all sore over their continued failure to put out a leader possessing enough charisma and gravitas to attract the favours of the Filipino public. Robredo, the personality perceived to be (or what tradition dictates to be) their “leader”, consistently languishes at distant fourth or fifth places in various surveys conducted by reputable polling firms over the last several years. Clearly, the Opposition are unable to put forth a better proposition that resonates with Filipinos.

How much simpler can one put it? To engage Filipino voters, you have to show how you can do things better. Today’s Opposition still don’t get it, however. To them, winning an election is all about convincing Filipinos that the incumbent or bogeyman of choice sucks. They do this by creating and latching on to one or another outrage fad every week — be it a video leaked of the Presidential Spokesperson “berating” a bunch of doctors, an audit finding midway through a standard reporting cycle, or rich people doing what rich people do and making it all about how the current administration does not give out enough ayuda. This week it is Gonzaga’s Marcos interview.

This sort of trial-and-error negative campaign approach insults the intelligence of Filipino voters and, as such, it is no wonder that the Opposition are so far failing to gain any traction with the public. They remain fixated on blatant attempts to distract voters from the fact that the Opposition don’t have anything to work with — no charismatic statesmanship, no leader, no platform — in short, no value proposition. The Opposition — and I mean just about every party across the non-admin board and the personalities they put forth — are an empty shell of form within which rings not much more than hollow rhetoric. How much more can be squeezed from obsolete signalling of one’s “care for the poor”, outrage over “corruption”, and grandstanding of inconsequential ambag initiatives that lack scale? But this is exactly the sort of thing we see being spewed by Opposition “thought leaders” that is amplified by their cronies in Big Corporate Media.

Surely Filipinos deserve something a bit more than rhetoric that paints them as perpetual victims. There are lots of Filipinos who would like to see options that describe what the Philippines could be and, perhaps an even greater number who are sick of being told what a leader should not be. The Opposition can shout out “Never Again!” ’til the cows come home. But until the Yellowtards and communists learn to show Filipinos what can be rather than what should “never” be “again”, they will continue to suffer catastrophic election losses. To the wokedom of today’s Opposition: Learn to be better instead of cancelling people like Toni Gonzaga.

benign0

benign0 is the Webmaster of GetRealPhilippines.com.