FIRST SAY:
"After I became president, I asked my escort to go to a restaurant for lunch. We sat down and each of us asked what we wanted.
On the front table, there was a man waiting to be served. When he was served, I said to one of my soldiers: go and ask that gentleman to join us. The soldier went and conveyed my invitation to him. The man got up, took his plate and sat down right next to me.
While he ate his hands trembled constantly and he did not lift his head from his food. When we finished, he said goodbye without looking at me, I shook his hand and he left.
The soldier told me:
Madiba that man must have been very ill, seeing as his hands didn't stop shaking while he ate.
Absolutely no! The reason for his trembling is another.
Then I told him:
That man was the warden of the prison where I stayed. After he tortured me, I screamed and cried asking for some water and he humiliated me, laughed at me and instead of giving me water, he urinated on my head.
He is not sick, he was afraid that I, now president of South Africa, would send him to prison and do to him what he did to me. But I'm not like that, this conduct is not part of my character, nor of my ethics.
′′Minds that seek revenge destroy states, while those that seek reconciliation build nations. Walking out the door to my freedom, I knew that if I didn't leave all the anger, hatred and resentment behind me, I would still be a prisoner."
—NELSON MANDELA
—O0O—
Maharlika, Princess Maui, and others of their ilk who are dominating YouTube had unabashedly aired their hope that the people will come out in droves with their just ire and condemn President Bongbong Marcos for sniffing and snorting what looked like Johnson’s Baby Powder.
They timed the showing of the controversial video at the Hakbang Maisug rally in Vancouver, Canada, a day before President Bongbong Marcos was to deliver his State of the Nation Address (SONA) before the Congress of the Philippines.
For several weeks now, Maharlika Contreras has been whetting the appetite of her audience in various social media platforms, saying she had access to a video that purportedly showed Bongbong Marcos while in the act of using illegal drugs. True, when she finally released the video, she did not directly identify that it was Bongbong himself who was sniffing the powder, but whole months of innuendoes and direct statements about this claim were devoted just on it. Likers and followers of Maharlika had been edging her to show the video, which they say would confirm what former President Digong Duterte had been saying just before the elections.
When finally Maharlika’s ally in the Hakbang Maisug camp—Atty. Harry Roque—sponsored a showing of the video in their Maisug rally in Vancouver, Canada, Filipinos all over the world were able to see, watch and analyze this video. Again, the two political camps engaged in deeply personal recriminations. The same video was also shown in another Maisug rally in Los Angeles, California attended by supporters of Digong Duterte.
First, the official version. Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin dismissed a video of a man resembling Bongbong holding a powdery substance as “malicious.” What he called a deepfake video shows a man in a green polo shirt with the likeness of the President holding a small plastic container of what looked like drugs and sniffing it. Bersamin said it was a Korean man and not Bongbong.
Interior and Local Government Secretary Benhur Abalos was furious. He ordered the Philippine National Police (PNP) to investigate the video, how it was made, and who were the people responsible for distributing it on social media.
Abalos conducted a press briefing at Camp Crame saying he has asked PNP chief General Rommel Marbil, General Matthew Baccay and PNP Anti-Cybercrime Group chief General Ronnie Cariaga to immediately form a Task Force to probe the issue. The DILG secretary promised to investigate the matter thoroughly.
In his press conference, Secretary Abalos showed comparative photos of the President and the man in the video, noting that Bongbong Marcos’ ear was very much different from the ear of the man in the video, proving that it was a fake.
But Maharlika and her group kept on harping that it was genuine. A master of ad hominem and red herrings, this popular blogger said that if Abalos honestly believed that it was a fake, and that the man in the video was not the President, then why bother to investigate it through a police task force. She failed to appreciate that the police investigation would center on the failed attempt to discredit the President and his SONA, by showing to the public the supposedly deepfake video on the day of the State of the Nation Address.
Maharlika tried to make a spark that she hoped would induce thousands of Filipinos to protest, but she failed to make rain during the PBBM parade.
Now, it’s back to the drawing board for her group and their financiers.
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