Impeachment claims concocted through classic propaganda tricks

THE allegation that Vice President Sara Duterte kept “unexplained,” hidden “billions” by any rational analysis, is pure nonsense, concocted as a smokescreen to justify House members voting for her impeachment in exchange for budget allocations. It was diabolically crafted following classic black propaganda techniques, which bolsters the report that the propaganda blitz for Sara’s impeachment is a very organized, well-financed operation. Let’s identify these techniques. The first propaganda trick is category confusion, in philosophy, “category error”: treating two distinct concepts as if they were the same, so that a conclusion appears to follow when, in fact, it doesn’t.

The bank transactions reported by the Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC) executive director for Sara’s account from 2005 to 2026 totaling P3.5 billion are both credits (inflows) and debits (outflows), not “balance” or what is left when you subtract outflows from total inflows. This could either be liabilities or assets.

If your company deposited P50,000 monthly as your salary in your bank in the last 21 years, and you withdrew it for your expenses, your “bank transactions” would be P100,000 monthly, P1.2 million yearly, and P25.2 million in the last 21 years. But if that were your salary, as many journalists would attest, you’d really be in hock, living paycheck to paycheck, and able to rent a small two-room apartment.

Simple. But morons can’t understand or refuse to understand this to portray Sara as having unexplained wealth. Such as this former Erap political adviser who headlined his column in the Philippine Star as “Sara’s billions.”

He obviously didn’t understand what bank transactions are when he wrote: “But when you have P6.77 billion worth of bank transactions, while announcing only P80.5 million in wealth, these raise serious questions.” As I pointed out above, one could have P25 million in bank transactions in 21 years but have not a centavo currently in one’s bank, and even be millions of pesos in debt. “Bank transactions and wealth” are totally different things.

More moronic of course is the billionaire-owned news website Rappler, which wrote that Sara and her husband had P6.7 billion “suspicious transactions.” But these items, according to the AMLC report, were the total of the couple’s “covered transactions.” These are transactions of at least P500,000, you ignoramuses, as the AMLC doesn’t have the resources to monitor transactions smaller than that. How much were “suspicious transactions”? Zero. Check out the AMLC report which I appended to my column on Monday.

The second propaganda technique is what’s called aggregation manipulation.

Sara’s husband Manases Carpio is not a government official, and their accounts are not joint accounts. Why was the sum of his bank transactions — P3.1 billion — included in the AMLC report? To exaggerate Sara’s bank transactions, which were P3.9 billion, to P6.7 billion. Now that figure will be repeated again and again in headlines, in the Hitlerian technique of repeating a lie again and again until it seems the truth.

By adding her husband’s bank transactions to hers, the propaganda enlarges the total without clarifying ownership or control. In finance and law, accounts are distinct unless proven otherwise. Merging them blurs that line. The effect is simple: a bigger number appears, and size alone is made to suggest guilt.

This was roughly the same trick the Yellows (and the US Deep State) pulled to demonize former president Rodrigo Duterte in his “war vs drugs.” The 2,500 deaths from 2016 to 2017 officially reported by the police in this campaign, was first bloated by Rappler to 7,080 and then gradually exaggerated to 10,000 and to 30,000, a preposterous figure as this would have meant a significant uptick in the country’s official death statistics.

Nevertheless, this figure was repeated again and again by anti-Duterte propagandists, and became the core allegation in the “crimes against humanity” investigation by the International Criminal Court.

A third propaganda technique is temporal distortion — sometimes called “time-frame padding.” By including transactions from 2005 to 2026, instead of focusing on the relevant period of public office (2022 to 2026), the propaganda narrative stretches the dataset until the totals become inevitably large. It is a way of manufacturing magnitude.

The longer the timeline, the bigger the cumulative figure, regardless of relevance. Impeachment is a process to remove only certain top officials of the land, mainly the president, vice president, and Supreme Court chief justice for alleged wrongdoing when they are in office.

Sara’s bank transactions before she became vice president in 2022 are totally irrelevant, and the AMLC should not have acceded to the justice committee’s subpoena to provide it with her transactions as far back as 2005. That the AMLC executive director did so bolsters the allegation that he was part of the plot to produce material to be used in the black propaganda against Sara.

If Sara’s bank transactions from 2022 to 2026 only were reported, how much would these be? Just P64 million, not the P3.9 billion of 21 years, and the anti-Sara operators won’t be able to have headlines like “Sara’s billions” which they allege are not reflected in her statement of assets, liabilities, and net worth. (This, however, is in itself a category error, as an official’s net worth is a different concept from total bank transactions, only his or her bank balance at the SALN reporting period. The AMLC did not report such balances at a specific period.)

A fourth propaganda technique — underlying the above three ones — is “appeal to authority.” In Sara’s case, it was falsely portrayed that the allegations of Sara’s unexplained wealth were made by a reputable authority, i.e., by the AMLC. An honest but intellectually challenged columnist for instance referred to “damning testimony from the AMLC before a congressional panel.”

The propaganda technique here is brainwashing people that the allegations against Sara were made by a body authorized to look into bank records. Ignored of course is the fact that the AMLC reported bank transactions (inflows plus outflows) which were not “damning testimony” at all but which the members of the House justice committee, mainly representatives Gerville Luistro, Joel Chua and Terry Ridon, distorted to mean Sara’s revenues that she kept in her bank.

However, even the “authority” appealed to by the anti-Sara plotters is fake. No AMLC official, not the executive director Ronel Buenaventura who testified in the justice committee hearing, was named as the author of the report nor attesting to its authenticity, nor was it signed by anybody. Buenaventura never even referred to it, but only to “records.” It wasn’t even notarized, which means it cannot be used as evidence in a Senate trial.

But this black propaganda is merely what’s called in media and politics as “air cover,” to provide some justification for these unprincipled politicians to vote for Sara to be impeached.

Who are they fooling that they are on a crusade to rid this country of corruption, even if it involves the vice president?

This plot to impeach Sara out of her position is the last-resort move of the Marcos gang to prevent Sara from becoming president in 2028, since so far she is a shoo-in for the presidency, with no pro-Marcos candidate emerging to compete with her, with just less than two years left till that election.

“Just three little letters will convince congressmen to vote for Sara’s impeachment,” a legislator told me in some jest.

FLR

The three letters are “FLR” stands for “For Later Release,” an allocation in the 2026 budget for congressmen’s projects lodged across several government agencies, including the agriculture, education and health departments. This reportedly will be released when the House gets the 106 votes for the impeachment complaint to be transmitted to the Senate for trial, and only for congressmen who voted for it.

Same old, same old: These politicians are taking Filipinos for fools.

The same propaganda trick was used in 2012 in the House move to impeach the late chief justice Renato Corona, the same threat to withhold congressmen’s funds. In the Senate trial, transactions on his dollar accounts, allegedly coming from the AMLC, purportedly convinced 20 senators to vote Corona guilty. But in reality, it was the fund released for the congressmen’s projects, and from P100 million to P200 million from the so-called Disbursement Acceleration Program for the senators’ projects.

A House vote to impeach won’t be surprising, It would only be another testament to the degradation of this hated, graft body pretending to represent us.

This time though, no amount of money can make two-thirds of the senators vote to boot out Sara. Corona had no mass support at all, as he was appointed to his post by only one person, the president. In 2012, P200 million in exchange for the head of somebody without popular support wasn’t a bad deal, and risk-free for 20 of the senators that voted Corona guilty.

In the current case though, Sara became vice president because 32 million Filipinos voted for her in 2022, the largest electoral mandate ever recorded in a Philippine election. And there is no indication that she has lost their support, with polls showing 55 percent of Filipinos trust her, which converts to 38 million people as her mass base. Losing 38 million voters, as senators would know, isn’t worth P200 million. The upper house certainly won’t embarrass itself by following the will of the lower house.

Would a senator want to be known to have helped thwart the people’s will “for a few dollars more,” as that classic title of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western put it?

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Impeachment claims concocted through classic propaganda tricks
Source: Breaking News PH