As truth is firmly on the side of Duterte, fiction and extreme falsehoods and lies are now their ordnance of choice.

For those who’ve lost the substance of their arguments and the proposition that they have a better option to offer the public, repeatedly rejected in a series of electoral exercises and then through updated polls and surveys, their option is to overturn the discussion table in desperation. Part of that loser’s strategy is to move away from the reality that damns them and prosecute their case in the arena of the unreal and make-believe.

We should have seen it coming. In the last midterm elections, the opposition’s squad of nobodies revealed their ploy to employ social media. As before, whether trench-fighting for ballot boxes and votes, or arguing through press releases and TV appearances, they remain constantly sanctimonious and elitist.

That part is a constant since they believe President Rodrigo Duterte is a populist and the opposite. Never mind that upon deeper discernment validated with our president’s approval ratings, they who resort to black propaganda and conjured imageries are fundamentally autocratic as against Duterte’s more faithful adherence to what is deeply democratic.

Note where they array their self-conjured image of decency and pit such coiffured makeover against what they like to curse as Duterte’s uncouthness. Desperately needing an enema, they impose their standards and, parlaying their “decency” as a presidential requisite, they’ve ignored the people’s need for a leader who truthfully tells it like it is.

As truth is firmly on the side of Duterte, fiction and extreme falsehoods and lies are now their ordnance of choice. Indeed, when one loses an argument, the first instinct is to topple the table. Black operations and movie magic, better known by its technical term as the propaganda film, are what’s left of their arsenal.

Propaganda films are not new. In defining these, Wikipedia provides an excellent perspective that eloquently reveals both tact and motivations behind a clandestine gang of self-styled rebels hell-bent on reversing the democratic mandate Filipinos awarded Duterte in 2016.

Allow us a verbatim citation: “Propaganda films may be packaged in numerous ways, but are most often documentary-style productions or fictional screenplays, that are produced to convince the viewer of a specific political point or influence the opinions or behavior of the viewer, often by providing subjective content that may be deliberately misleading. Propaganda is the ability “to produce and spread fertile messages that, once sown, will germinate in large human cultures.”

The allusion to a toxic virus is relevant. Note also key phrases and their aptness as a weapon against our mandate on Duterte. Note the terms “documentary-style productions or fictional screenplays.”

Note that “subjective content that may be deliberately misleading.” Rather than these kilometric definitions, simply use the four-letter word “LIES.”

Heralded in social media by a losing senatorial candidate, who is now a principal respondent in serious criminal sedition charges also involving another piece of cinematic fiction, it starts to appear very suspicious indeed since Jose Emanuel Diokno has a son in the film-making business. Diokno the Younger is a director described as having a “politically charged world view.”

Whether behind the camera or in front of it, with the klieg lights burning overhead to expose the truth behind a nocturnal conspiracy, he would make for an excellent resource at the hearings and the trials of his accused father charged with sedition in connection with a propaganda film produced to undermine the public’s express mandate.

If the “Bikoy” video premiere was the seditious cinematic standard for such documentaries that pass off takes on reality, then as amateurish and filled with untruths as it is, we are certain the younger Diokno had no direct hand in a second propaganda film that demonizes a promise the public approves 82 percent recently premiered to the opposition choir.

Where the so-called “Bikoy” video was the pilot for a popcorn serial of lies, there’s an apparent cinematic sequel for gullible international audiences. Billed by the opposition as a documentary blockbuster intended for foreigners more than for the local constituencies that such sanctimonious spectacles represent, this sequel was designed and produced to be spread and distributed through social media, thus ominously harking to when the losing Otso Diretso once took to the anonymous internet to conjure their fictional mandate.