Lessons from undetonated mail bombs

CESAR Sayoc is half-Filipino. But it is not in his Filipino ancestry that we can learn lessons from the terror that he created. He sent mail bombs to prominent Democrats, who included politicians like former President Barack Obama, ex-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her husband former President Bill Clinton; their campaign contributors like George Soros; their private supporters like actor Robert de Niro and to CNN, the icon of liberal mainstream media.

We can even surmise that his being a Filipino is a part of his identity to which he had an aversion, considering that he has a bad relationship with his Filipino father. In fact, he tried changing his surname to Altieri, which is the surname of his Italian maternal grandfather.

Cesar Sayoc becomes relevant because of his politics. It is from the way he expressed it that we should draw some insights, as we take an introspective look at the similar demons that haunt our political discourse.

Cesar Sayoc is one angry person. He felt that American society is going in the wrong direction. He believes that its purity as a white society is being infected by Jews, African Americans and Latinos. Its his Filipino father, he looked at

will lead white America to return to a pure, conservative society free of blacks, Jews, Latinos, lesbians and gays, Democrats and liberal mainstream media.

And Sayoc lived his politics in how he decorated his van, as one radically extremist manifestation of idolatry of Trump and the Republicans, and intense hatred towards the Democrats and liberal mainstream media. He expressed his politics in incessant posts and tweets in social media, articulating his blind fanaticism in grammatically incorrect prose that is full of hatred.

reminds me of the many voices of hatred that I encounter appearing in my feeds. What is terrifying is that those who know the dynamics of Facebook would know that the fact that I can read these means that these are from people who are in my circle of social media friends.

And it is behavior that is exhibited by persons coming from both sides of the political divide. Hate posts come from friends from both the pro-Duterte DDS and from the so-called yellow political opposition, or the But applying a simple content analysis and matching this with the frequency of hate posts, this has increasingly become a behavior that is more associated with angry Duterte supporters.

The hatred and animosity are palpable and real. The vitriol comes from both sides of the political divide, but it is among the DDS that I see rage that even borders on political violence. There are posts where abuse is no longer simply verbal, but is even expressed as actual threats to become physical. I have personally experienced this myself, during the election campaign, when an angry Duterte supporter threatened to bomb my house and attack my family. The Yellows and Poe supporters only went as far as maligning my character, but have never threatened to physically hurt me.

And I see this happening even now, that Duterte is already President.

And no one can deny that main-

of verbal violence. Maria Ressa

physical appearance, but was even threatened with harm. And she is not alone. Rappler, ABS-CBN and

as institutions, and as is likened to Donald Trump. Many of them even derive from the President their modes of political discourse — the cursing, the swagger, the irreverence. These are people who have felt being

the political elites. They also have a deep-seated hatred for the Left. They abhor liberal politics and its advancement of human rights. They despise mainstream media and its liberal bias. And they all

that can usher in the change that we need, that many of them even call him “Tatay Digong.”

The fact that Cesar Sayoc — who likewise hated the political elites and the liberal opposition Democrats, and despised liberal mainstream media for being their enablers — considered Trump