Manufactured Narratives and Convenient Amnesia: A Rebuttal to the CPP’s Illusion of “People’s Outrage”

A recent statement by CPP spokesperson Marco Valbuena attempts to project an image of a resurgent revolutionary movement allegedly fueled by people’s outrage against corruption and abuses. Up front, the narrative appears persuasive: widespread frustration, social media expressions of anger, and an imagined groundswell of support for armed revolution. But scratch the surface and we see a deeply flawed, illusory, and self-serving interpretation of reality, one that deliberately ignores the CPP’s own political bankruptcy and the changing sentiments of the Filipino people.

People’s Anger Is Real but It Is Not CPP’s Property

There is no denying that corruption, abuse of power, and inequality remain serious concerns. Filipinos are frustrated, vigilant, and vocal. However, to claim that this legitimate anger automatically translates into support for the CPP-NPA is a gross misrepresentation of public sentiment.

Public outrage against corruption is not synonymous with a desire for armed struggle, nor does it mean people are yearning to revive a decades-old insurgency that has failed to deliver concrete gains for the masses. Anger toward government shortcomings does not equate to endorsement of an organization that has imposed revolutionary taxes, recruited minors, punished dissenters within its ranks, and dragged communities into protracted violence.

The CPP’s attempt to hijack people’s grievances and rebrand them as revolutionary fervor reflects less a mass awakening and more a movement grasping for relevance.

The Convenient Denial of Organizational Capacity

Valbuena claims the CPP lacks the capacity to mount coordinated social media efforts, painting the party as technologically outmatched and censored. This portrayal strains credibility. For decades, the CPP has operated underground propaganda machinery through national democratic organizations, sectoral alliances, legal democratic formations, sympathetic influencers, and coordinated messaging across platforms. This essentially acts as the CPP’s “troll farms.”

What the CPP calls “ordinary people” expressing support are often accounts that echo identical talking points, slogans, and framing long used in CPP literature. The repetition is not accidental but a matter of organizational discipline. To deny this is to deny the CPP’s own long history of information operations.

More importantly, censorship is not persecution when it involves organizations that openly romanticize their members’ participation, and deaths, in armed rebellion. Freedom of expression does not obligate private platforms or the state to provide space for calls to violent overthrow.

The Real Reason for CPP’s Anxiety

The CPP’s sustained and coordinated criticism directed not only at former rebels, but also at organizations and peace-inclined agencies like NTF-ELCAC is clearly a sign of strategic panic.

Executive Order No. 70, which operationalized the whole-of-nation approach and established mechanisms involving former rebel federations and people’s organizations in communities, directly challenged the CPP’s long-standing advantage: poverty, neglect, and the absence of the state in the barangays. Through initiatives like the Barangay Development Program and the Transformation Program, communities once trapped under insurgent influence began receiving roads, water systems, schools, health stations, and livelihood support.

These are not abstract achievements. They are material interventions that weaken armed recruitment by addressing the very grievances the CPP exploits.

This is why the CPP has been relentless in pushing for the abolition of NTF-ELCAC, undermining peace-oriented agencies, and “spy-tagging” or branding former rebels as traitors. It is not because these mechanisms “silence dissent,” but because they erode the CPP’s mass base and reason for being. When people see the state delivering, even imperfectly, and coupled with declining NPA manpower, surrenders of cadres, and dismantled guerrilla fronts, the appeal of armed struggle collapses and communities increasingly become resistant to ideological infiltration.

Anger Without Direction Is Not Revolution

Social media outrage is not organization. Hashtags do not make mass movements. Comments and likes will never rebuild dismantled guerrilla fronts.

The CPP confuses noise with strength because it has lost its footing where it matters most: in the barangays, among workers, farmers, youth, and indigenous communities who increasingly reject violence as a path to change.

Filipinos want reforms, accountability, and justice but they also want peace, stability, and development. They are wary of corruption, yes, but they are equally weary of groups that exploit their suffering while offering only endless war.

The Illusion Is CPP’s, Not the People’s

The CPP’s article is less an analysis of people’s sentiments and more a projection of its own desperation. It seeks to frame public frustration as revolutionary endorsement, erase its complicity with political opportunism, and distract from the fact that its influence is waning precisely because the people are choosing differently.

The Filipino people are not asleep and neither are they easily fooled. They are demanding change, not chaos; reform, not regression; solutions, not slogans. And increasingly, they are turning away from movements that confuse anger with legitimacy and nostalgia with relevance.

The illusion, therefore, does not belong to the people. It belongs to a party that can no longer accept that the masses have moved on.