The Empire of Bullsh*t: How Duterte Got Elected from Jail and Why That’s Just the Beginning

6 min readMay 17, 2025

Act I: The Punchline That Became Policy

Rodrigo Duterte, poster boy for death squads and dictatorship chic, got elected mayor of Davao City while rotting in an ICC detention cell.

That’s not a glitch in the matrix. That is the matrix. It’s what happens when people stop voting based on reality and start voting based on rage, memes, and TikTok edits scored to epic music.

The ballots were real. The beliefs behind them? Imported, injected, and manipulated.

Act II: Cognitive Warfare — The Invasion of Your Head

Forget boots on the ground. China figured out how to colonize minds.

This isn’t new. It’s doctrine. The People’s Liberation Army has it on paper: win the war before it starts — by owning the narrative. Confuse people so much that by the time they vote, they don’t even remember what they’re voting for. They just know who they hate.

They call it “cognitive warfare.”

Here’s how it works:

Discredit institutions (ICC? Western puppets!)
Flood the zone with noise (So much content, so little truth)
Hijack emotion (If it bleeds, it leads — even if it’s fake)

And you better believe Duterte was China’s ideal test subject.

Act III: The Age of Weaponized Aunties

By the 2025 midterms, nearly half of political chatter online in the Philippines came from fake accounts. Think about that. Half. Not just a little fake news. A digital army. One that speaks your dialect. Shares your religion. Sends your aunt Facebook forwards at 2AM with “SHARE BEFORE THEY DELETE!”

You think your uncle’s opinions are his own? No, Karen — he’s been memetically compromised.

These weren’t random trolls. These were state-subsidized psy-ops squads, trained in emotional manipulation, cultural mimicry, and digital insurgency. Their job wasn’t to lie. It was to make the truth irrelevant.

Act IV: Duterte & Xi — The Algorithm Brothers

Duterte isn’t just “inspired” by China — he’s Xi Jinping in flip-flops. He doesn’t oppose China. He performs China.

Both men build their legitimacy on fear and nostalgia — fear of outsiders, drugs, Western interference; nostalgia for some mythical era of order and obedience. Both treat the law as a weapon, not a shield — something to wield against dissenters, not something that binds the powerful. And both believe truth is not discovered or debated — it’s manufactured, declared, then enforced.

Duterte kills critics and calls it justice. Xi erases history and calls it harmony. Both rewrite the script, then punish you for forgetting your lines.

Duterte isn’t an ally of Beijing — he’s their export product. A beta version of what happens when authoritarianism meets a social media feedback loop. He’s proof that you don’t need tanks if you’ve already hijacked the collective memory.

Act V: Digital Colonization — The Empire Without Soldiers

This isn’t diplomacy. This isn’t influence. This is a bloodless coup through your phone screen.

China didn’t “help” Duterte win. They built the psychological infrastructure for him to win:

Algorithmic distortion: Boost the rage. Bury the facts.
Microtargeted paranoia: “The ICC is coming for you next.”
Emotional weaponization: Make every debate feel like an existential threat.

What voters supported wasn’t a man. It was a myth — a myth sculpted from headlines, hashtags, and propaganda loops.

The Philippines that voted Duterte back into power doesn’t exist in maps. It exists in manipulated memory.

Act VI: The Coup Already Happened. And It Was Adorable.

Still waiting for boots on the ground? Missiles? Warships?

That’s so 20th century.

The coup happened when grandma shared a chain message calling the ICC a Western devil plot. It happened when TikTok turned Duterte into a freedom fighter. It happened when you decided facts were boring and feelings were facts.

You were conquered. And you smiled about it.

Act VII: What’s at Stake? Everything.

Zoom out.

This isn’t just about the Philippines. It’s not even just about Duterte.

The same playbook works everywhere:

The U.S.? Already churning in algorithmic quicksand.
Europe? Sleepwalking through the digital disinformation age.
Taiwan? Next in line.

This is imperialism in the post-truth era. No boots. No tanks. Just brain fog delivered via Wi-Fi.

And the scary part? It works faster than war. Cheaper than war. And you’ll never see it coming — because it wears the costume of your own culture.

Act VIII: So What the Hell Do We Do?

You want a democracy? Start acting like it’s worth defending.

Ban algorithmic psych-ops masquerading as “engagement.”
Treat meme warfare like nuclear weapons — because they’re engineered for mass cognitive destruction.
Make media literacy a national security priority — not a cute classroom project.
Choke off foreign disinformation networks like they’re paramilitary threats — because they are.

And stop thinking your news feed is your friend. It’s a digital casino rigged against your attention span, powered by rage, and monetized by chaos.

Curtain Call: Whose Story Are You Living In?

Rodrigo Duterte didn’t win despite his record. He won because that record was repackaged, relabeled, and resold as heroism.

He wasn’t elected. He was installed by an engineered hallucination.

The people didn’t vote for a man. They voted for a narrative. One that had been quietly rewritten by foreign operatives, massaged by algorithmic gods, and downloaded straight into their memory.

And if you think it can’t happen to you — newsflash: it already is.

So the next time you scroll past another hot take, another headline, another AI-generated clip of some angry politician yelling on loop, stop and ask:

Who built this world? And why are you still playing along?

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