Journalist Roby Alampay who formerly held executive positions at BusinessWorld and the TV5 network asked a question yesterday that launched a thousand responses and plunged Yellowtardom into a fit of long-overdue introspection. Alampay posted his question on both Twitter and Facebook after which it attracted some interesting responses that revealed quite a bit about what goes on in the Yellowtard mind.
Following a quick peruse of the responses, the most common type boils down to this essence: Yellow was the colour of the Aquinos and represented “us” while Pink is the colour of a true reform movement and represents “we”. In short, the Yellowtards imagine a hard line between the Yellow of the Aquino-Cojuangco clan and the Pink of Leni Robredo. They see Yellow as exclusive and Pink as inclusive. Yellow is Aquino, Pink is Robredo. Are we starting to see the pattern here? This is the sort of response coming from members of what was once a monolithic Yellowtard community that is now divided from within into two colour-branded factions. From an outsider, however, they are all essentially Yellowtards quibbling over what, in the bigger scheme of things, are immaterial differences between two Yellowtard sub-cultures.
| SUPPORT INDEPENDENT SOCIAL COMMENTARY! Subscribe to our Substack community GRP Insider to receive by email our in-depth free weekly newsletter. Opt into a paid subscription and you'll get premium insider briefs and insights from us. Subscribe to our Substack newsletter, GRP Insider! Learn more |
Alampay qualifies his question as a “serious” one. But the responses it attracted borders on hilarity. The tidal wave of funny responses can only be collectively described as a tidal wave of intellectual dishonesty. Examples to illustrate this dishonesty abound even just over the last several months. To welcome the New Year back in January, no less than Yellowtard ally Akbayan repurposed an old photo of a relatively slim Robredo posing with Akbayan honcho Risa Hontiveros for use in a campaign tweet. Akbayan evidently does not see much difference between the two colours.
Alampay’s question is all the more confronting to Yellowtards today because it is coming from one of their kind. That said, this is not a new question and is one we asked as far back as 2018 in our piece “Why do Yellowtards no longer wear the colour yellow in their rallies?“. In that article is highlighted a key reason as to why the Yellowtards take so long and miss so many lessons before they learn to come together for the sort of introspection that is routine to most normal people who are consistently self-aware.
Has the colour yellow become a taboo colour in Philippine Opposition politics? The concept that yellow had become taboo boggles the mind considering how, for more than three decades, the colour yellow was regarded by many Filipinos as a symbol of all in politics that was good.
How do we go about solving this mystery? One would think it would be a simple matter of asking a typical Yellowtard the simple question:
Why do you Yellowtards now seem to shun the colour yellow?
Perhaps it is because the typical Yellowtard would likely answer in a not-so-straightforward manner or would simply outright refuse to “dignify the question” with an answer. That’s pretty typical of a Yellowtard, to be fair. A Yellowtard would be offended by what is otherwise a pretty valid question. One’s perfectly sensible curiosity is met with a baffling defensiveness.
Furthermore, “[the] change in choice of political colour amongst Yellowtards seems to have been driven from within their ranks. Yet, because they have long shown an inclination to externalise the perceived causes of their problems, they fail to consider that, perhaps, there is something about their very nature that contributes to the failures they’ve been experiencing in recent years.” This then brings to the fore the inconvenient truth about Leni Robredo’s dilawan partisan origins and how she morphed from one colour to another over the last six to seven years like any traditional political chameleon.
The six-year colour mutation of Yellowtardom was not any one person’s brainchild but, rather, a pathetic trial-and-error journey. The colossal defeat of Liberal Party (LP) presidential candidate Mar Roxas to Rodrigo Duterte in 2016 seems to have been where it started. Robredo was part of all that being no less than the LP vice presidential candidate and Roxas’s running mate. The campaign in the lead up to those elections was totally bathed in Yellow to the point of monumental cringe.
If it weren’t for Robredo’s dubious “win” over then rival Bongbong Marcos, the LP would have been a total write-off as a political force right there and then. Still, the top “thought leaders” of Yellowtardom evidently continued believing that the yellow stain that blights their lot only needed to be whitewashed which they literally did shortly after that fiasco. That sloppy whitewash delivered an even bigger disaster to their political brand.
Opposition re-branding: Losing the ‘loser’ hand gesture in favour of the Girl Scout salute
What were the Opposition thinking when they came up with their latest media stunt? It’s an aping of the Hunger Games salute that came across like the Nazi Sieg Heil! salute. Talk about double-whammy fail! If this was attempt at a rebranding to distance themselves from the Yellowtards, it seems they made things worse and further revealed just how confused their collective movement is.
Today, we see only the most recent flavour the Yellowtards have taken. The rise of pink as the dominant Opposition colour is a product of the very social media “effect” the Yellowtards keep whining about. Inquirer columnist Joel Ruiz Butuyan captured the spirit of this mass tingala to a dishonest brand that started it all. In his October 2021 piece “The tasks ahead for Leni supporters”, he wrote of the “dream candidate of the opposition, Vice President Leni Robredo” and how her candidacy for president “generated a stirring momentum from the moment she made the announcement”…
For three days from the day she delivered her “Lalaban ako” speech, there was a sea of pink on my Facebook wall. Many of those passionately coming out for Leni on social media are millennials. If this reflects a trend, it bodes very well for her because the youth are a huge chunk of the voting population.
Therein lies the whole trouble with the Yellowtards. Rather than listen, they behave like a Taliban-like lynch mob of book burners and censors — quick to judge, utterly lacking in imagination and curiosity, and guided only by primal tribalism. You’d think you could expect a bit more from private school Katipuneros like “journalist” Howie Severino, for example. To the late National Artist F. Sionil Jose who, at risk of being burned at the stake for his views, expressed direct opposition to Rappler CEO Maria Ressa’s Nobel Peace Prize award on Facebook last year, all the “respected” GMA News Online honcho could respond with is a lame ad hominem…
My opinion as a reader — I’ve read your books and I’ve read Maria’s books. She’s a much better writer.
Your books are hard to finish. Your dialog is stilted and unrealistic. Even your columns contain little to no insight. But I like your bookstore.
What’s the difference between a Dilawan and a KakamPink, Alampay asks? Nothing. They are both Yellowtards. Often it is the simplest explanation that tends to be the most sound one. There is no squirming about that confronting reality.
benign0 is the Webmaster of GetRealPhilippines.com.
After the Otcho Diretso disaster, the Dilawans, instead of reflecting on their mistakes and analyzing why people did not vote for them, decided to simply “rebrand” and use the same old tactics that failed. This is the very definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
But to be fair, Leni is a lot worse than Mar Roxas, so we cannot brand her as a Roxas clone. She is so inept, she makes Mar Roxas traffic antics tame when compared to her idiotic hadouken. Honestly, I thought it was a digitally forged video when I first saw it. I found it inconceivably idiotic that any intelligent candidate would agree to such antics, yet it was indeed true. To make matters worse, her camp refused to own up to the idiotic hadouken as a mistake (even Manolo and many die-hard dilawans think it was mistake).
But intellectual dishonesty is the heart and soul of these so called “Pinoy liberals”. They fail to admit any mistake and they willingly omit facts. Some will even selective amnesia like our idiotic poster here named Juan Luna.
I do not mind watching this train wreck of a circus though. Because I do really find it entertaining to watch people who think they smart continually shift their arguments as reality catches up with them. They continue to delude themselves until the final punchline of a BBM victory come election time. You think these fake-intellectuals are funny now? Wait until BBM wins, then you will see the most ridiculous excuses to keep their delusional bubbles from popping.
To be clear, I cannot vote in the Philippine elections and I do not care who wins. I do intellectually lean as “liberal” and I think Benign-Zero also does, since we come from the same University that teaches you to distrust the Catholic Church (and Christianity itself) on day one. Filipino liberals are not true liberals because they are intellectually dishonest. Have you ever seen one, just one, say “Okay I got that wrong”, “You have a point there” or “I stand corrected.”
It is just a grand pissing contest. But it is very entertaining to watch as the world burns around us, so carry on guys! Type away and let us hear how brilliant you want us to make you believe you are (trust me, you aren’t).
Because of the barrage of criticism let off by benigno to all the Dilawan & KakamPink, the article tends to drag the reader groggy in every corner of the boxing ring feeling like Miguel Sotto being hounded by Pacqauio. ?
I say the shots by benigno are right on target because they are all possibilities why there was a change of heart in picking the Pink color of the opposition/Liberal party. Overall, I agree that one reason why VP Leni opted to have a different official color this time was to forget the lost suffered by the Dilawan in 2016.
After that debacle, the color yellow and the Liberal party got clobbered again in their fight against Pres. Duterte for being called destabilizers out to get the popular president. Pres. Digong’s army of diehards were able to counter and demonized the opposition in social media that led to some loses in the party’s influence and sway.
Another angle is that, VP Leni in her desire to distance herself from Mar Roxas who miserably lost in 2016, was opting to have her own color pink, instead of yellow, in time for her turn to run for president. To interpret her move as her declaration that she’s not the understudy for Mar Roxas by the Dilawan is not a long shot.
In another view, it can also be seen as ‘hitting two birds with one stone’ strategy. Her group, which was obvious in her campaign sorties, tried to focus on the youth sector, women and the other sexes under the cover of Pink while the old followers of the Liberal Party remains under the control of the Yellow wing. It would have made sense hadn’t it backfired because of the confusion and suspicion it created when the Pink brigade suddenly was hugging the limelight and outfront pushing for ‘VP Leni for president’ to the consternation of the Dilawan. I know because I have a friends and relatives, long time Dilawans, who expressed dismay about the color shift. And the move was made worse by several missteps in her campaign strategy which we already mentioned in several articles here in the past.
So, what now? I think two months is just right for the camp of the VP to make quick, relevant and drastic adjustments to be able to catch up, at least, narrow the gap in the race and have a fighting chance on election day.
sino ba naman ang kakain ng lugaw na dilaw ang kulay para kang kumakain ng tae nyan eh
Leni is trash.
Just a trashy candidate.
But she will be filthy rich in a few months time..
it is very disgusting, as well as very sad on the way the opposition uses colours to suit their personal whims as well as their outdated hard-selling philosophies/rhetoric based on the martyrdom of Ninoy. In as much as both colours, according to the mindsets of the opposition, represent their quest for hope and determination to win against the odds, the truth is, when one analyzes the negative aspects of these two colours they perfectly epitomize it. Psychological analysts tag the colour pink as akin to someone who is feeble, weak, naive, timid, and childish; yellow, on the other hand connotes cowardice, sickness, deceit and even betrayal. If only they accept these painful realities on the colours that they had adopted which, in turn, had ruined their image with the public!
This includes wokes, LGBTQIA+, labor groups, anti-Marcos, CPP-NPA-NDF.