The Trial Isn’t About the Money

July 14, 2026

I wrote a piece a while back about why the Pink and Yellow factions appear to be propping up an administration they spent years opposing. Moral decoupling, I called it — the cold discipline of separating a player’s flaws from their usefulness and running the two ledgers separately. Readers liked it. A few asked the obvious follow-up question, the one I’d ask if I were still in the room: fine, but what would you tell the other side? So let’s do that. Let’s sit in the other war room for a minute — the one defending Vice President Sara Duterte as her second impeachment trial opened last week — and read the same board from that chair. I’ll say this up front: neither the Vice

Two Lefts, One Label

July 9, 2026

Where the Makabayan bloc and the Akbayan bloc sit in the Philippines’ war of misdirection A follow-up to “Strategic Misdirection in Political Messaging” The first piece argued that a great deal of Philippine political messaging works not by lying outright but by pointing the audience at the wrong object — collapsing distinctions the speaker would rather you not see. Nowhere is that mechanism cleaner than in how the country talks about “the left.” The word does an enormous amount of quiet work. It flattens two rival traditions, born of a bitter split, into a single red silhouette. And that flattening is not an accident of shorthand; it is a political asset that different players spend and defend. So it is worth doing the un-collapsing. Where,

The Enemy of My Enemy Is a Strategy, Not a Truce

July 8, 2026

In every war room I’ve sat in, the hardest order to give a fired-up team isn’t “attack.” It’s “stand down.” Ask true believers to hold their fire while the other side is stumbling, and you get the same look every time — the one that asks whether you’ve lost your nerve. I hadn’t. And neither, I’d argue, have the Pinks and the Yellows. To the casual observer, the sight of the Pink and Yellow factions quietly holding up a shield for the Marcos administration looks like total ideological surrender. How, they ask, can the people who built their identity on opposing a Marcos restoration suddenly line up behind him? Someone coins “Uni-Pink,” a tidy betrayal narrative is born, and everyone nods along. If you’ve worked

Infographic showing a 2x3 crisis response grid based on incident intensity (high or low) and market sentiment (negative, neutral, or positive): Mobilize, Monitor, Amplify, Watch, Observe, Engage.

Data Is the New Oil — But Discernment Is the Refinery

July 6, 2026

There’s a moment in every crisis room I’ve been in — and I’ve been in more than a few — when someone opens a laptop, pulls up a dashboard of real-time social media data, and says something like: “We’re trending.” And then everyone looks at each other, because trending could mean anything. It could mean you’ve gone viral for doing something right. It could mean a false rumor is currently racing ahead of the truth at the speed of a share button. It could mean a journalist with a large following just posted something that is factually incorrect, emotionally charged, and already spreading fast. Data tells you that something is happening. Discernment tells you what to do about it. This is the distinction I’ve spent

Dark storm clouds hanging low over a wide, open ocean, with faint silhouettes of ships on the distant horizon

Rene Was One of Ours: What Ateneo de Manila Forgot About Cura Personalis

July 4, 2026

I keep coming back to one small, unbearable fact. Before Rene Clert Baterbonia was a name on a national headline, before he was a “Blue Eagles recruit” and then, God help us, a body pulled from the surf in Dipaculao, he was a boy from Talacogon, Agusan del Sur, who wore the same blue we wear here in Davao. He was an Ateneo de Davao product. He led our region to a Palarong Pambansa gold and took home the MVP. He was, in the truest and most literal sense, one of ours. So no, I can’t write about this the way a columnist writes about a distant tragedy in Manila. This one landed at home. And that’s exactly why I need to write it honestly,

Abstract illustration of a glowing signal cutting through scattered noise, representing a clear narrative breaking through misinformation during a crisis.

When the Casino Is on Fire and Twitter Thinks It’s ISIS: A Crisis Manager’s Playbook

July 1, 2026

It was past midnight on June 2, 2017, when a lone gunman walked into Resorts World Manila, set fire to casino tables and slot machines, stole chips, and then took his own life. Thirty-eight people died — almost entirely from the stampede and smoke inhalation in the chaos that followed. Within hours, a journalist who billed herself as a terrorism expert reported that an ISIS faction had claimed responsibility for the attack. Her report went viral. It wasn’t ISIS. It was a debt-ridden former civil servant named Jessie Javier Carlos who had run out of options and made the most catastrophic of choices. But by the time the facts caught up with the story, the narrative had already taken on a life of its own

The Ban Is Coming. Are We Ready to Lose 90 Million Hours of Attention?

June 28, 2026

Here’s what should be keeping every marketer, PR lead, and digital strategist in this country up at night: the Philippines is not watching the UK’s under-16 social media ban from a safe distance. We are about to pass our own version of it. Digital Secretary Henry Aguda has said the government wants an online safety law enacted by the end of 2026, with a minimum age of 16 — even as industry players like TikTok lobby for a lower threshold. The specifics matter, because this isn’t one bill, it’s five. The Senate Committee on Public Information and Mass Media has already held hearings on a stack of competing proposals: Erwin Tulfo’s SB 595, which would bar children 12 and under outright and require verified parental

Infographic comparing bullying prevention approaches: one-off campaigns that show little effect versus whole-school programs shown to reduce bullying, with the statistic that Philippine students report bullying at roughly double the OECD average.

What Actually Stops Bullying: A Guide for Schools Beyond “Be Kind” Posters

June 25, 2026

In 2022, the OECD’s PISA survey asked 15-year-olds how often they get bullied. The global average came back at roughly one in five experiencing it multiple times a month. In the Philippines, that number was 43 percent of girls and 53 percent of boys — more than double the international rate. Researchers studying the data concluded the Philippines had effectively become the “bullying capital of the world.” That statistic sat in policy briefs and committee hearings for a couple of years. Then, on June 22, 2026, it stopped being an abstraction. Two students at San Jose National High School in Tacloban City opened fire on their classmates and told police they had been bullied. Four students died. Nine were wounded. The motive police cited was

Infographic summarizing the Tacloban school shooting: three columns covering bullying response, firearm access, and the juvenile justice debate, with incident details for June 22, 2026.

Tacloban Wasn’t Supposed to Happen Here — That’s Exactly Why It Did

June 23, 2026

Tacloban Wasn’t Supposed to Happen Here — That’s Exactly Why It Did On a Monday morning that started like any other, students at San Jose National High School in Tacloban City were settling into class around 9:20 a.m. Two minutes later, police were already responding to gunfire. By the time it was over, three students were dead and 20 others wounded — a wounded count that has been revised upward more than once as treatment continued. Two of their classmates — 14 and 15 years old — were in police custody, charged with carrying out the attack themselves. This wasn’t a foreign news story playing out somewhere distant and unfamiliar. It happened at a public school with more than 1,500 students, in a city of

Black-and-white photo of Nicanor "Momoy" Gabunada Sr. and his bus conductor leaning against the front of their passenger bus, number 208.

The Bicycle I Never Got, and the Lesson That Mattered More

June 21, 2026

There was a year in grade school when my father promised me a bicycle if I topped my class. I studied like that bicycle was already mine. I never got it. What I remember, decades later, is that the promise itself — made by a man who probably didn’t have the money to keep it — taught me more than the bike ever could have. That was my Papang. Nicanor “Momoy” Gabunada Sr. left Cebu as a young man chasing a better future in Mindanao. He drove for a living, raised a family, and spent most of his life making sure we had food on the table — even when that wasn’t guaranteed. This Father’s Day, I want to tell you why a man who

Journal