Patricia Evangelista’s bullshit published on The @NewYorker

The basic problem with Rappler‘s journalists has always been their reportage adheres to the cliché of the “rules-based international order,” which is whatever is the latest dictate in the West about social and moral mores. At the country level, they don’t bother to take into account what the reality is on the ground.

The latest source of high-profile Western “insight” into the situation in the Philippines, however, revolves around former Rapplerette Patricia Evangelista. She, along with her new book Some People Need Killing, are the subjects of a piece published on the New Yorker and authored by David Remnick. Remnick calls Evangelista “a very rare talent” who has “written a journalistic masterpiece”. Basing his views on what he was told by Rappler CEO and Nobel “Peace Prize” laureate Maria Ressa, Remnick writes…

Ressa would surely be the first to say that there would have been no Nobel, and very little truth in the Duterte era, were it not for the meticulous reporting of Evangelista and others like her. Evangelista was on the street every night, surveying the horror, examining the corpses, talking to the grieving families, and prodding the police. She wrote news pieces, and she wrote longer investigations.

…or so he and many of us keep being told.

Ask any average Filipino if they thought the drug problem of the country in 2016 was serious or not and their answer would be yes. I saw it for myself and several of my friends had close kin who had drug problems, particularly ones involving shabu. I had verified information also that several officials of the administration of the late former President Benigno Aquino III were protectors of drug lords. It was why the problem was prevalent and most or the majority of the barangays had to contend with it.

Evangelista writes about impunity but she fails to take into account the bigger picture; the menace to society and what effect it had on the victims of heinous crimes as a direct effect of the problem and that of the drug addicts and pushers families themselves. More laughable is how Evangelista claims that she had to move to New York because her life was in danger.

Now, how long has it been since you left the Philippines?

A few months, give or take. It was recommended that it was in my best interests.

What does that mean?

It means we don’t know the risk of my having released this book. There was a security assessment, and the assessment was, Get the fuck out.

And do you think you’ll go back?

Yes, absolutely. When I’ll go back is not certain, but I have to go back. It’s not moral patriotism or anything—that’s my home. And the story is ongoing. It’s not over. People are still dying on the streets. Journalists have been shot in Manila. And there are many other stories that have to be told about my country. I am a field reporter; that’s where I belong.

Bullshit. Evangelista’s mother is the sister of a good friend of mine. Their ancestral home is in Heroes Hills QC. No journalists, who were staunch critics of former President Rodrigo Duterte, were killed during his six-year term. It’s common knowledge that cRappler is funded by American liberal interest groups and the CIA front organizations as well. The very people who are against Duterte can hardly be called Filipinos because they don’t think and act like the typical Filipino. Maria Ressa herself is an interloper because the Philippines allows her to have dual citizenship.

Patricia Evangelista didn’t move to New York because of death threats. She moved to New York because that’s been her lifelong dream; to be an American and move in the intellectual and literary circles of the journalistic elite in America.

Ramon Ortoll

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