BARDAGULAN
28 March 2025
By Sass Rogando Sasot
The Filipino masses have long been the butt of jokes—conditioned to swallow mockery because bardagulan is baked into their survival. They laugh at themselves because the alternative is despair. But the elite? Cocooned in gated subdivisions, boardrooms, and private schools, they’ve never had to endure the same humiliation. Their privilege was their shield—until now.
Social media shattered that illusion.
Suddenly, the playing field isn’t tilted in their favor. The masses, once dismissed as passive, now have a megaphone—and they’re using it to drag the elite into the mud they’ve spent centuries avoiding. No more polished press releases, no more controlled narratives. Just raw, unfiltered truth—and the elite are
terrified because they can’t silence it.
Duterte didn’t make people cruel, Cielo Magno—he just exposed what was always there. The Philippines has always been a nation where the Filipino masa were expected to take their punches quietly while the elite hid behind piety and propriety. He yanked off the veil of hypocrisy and handed the masses a weapon they never knew they could wield: the brutal, cathartic power of a single, unapologetic—
POTAENA!
And for the first time, the elite felt what the masses have lived with forever—the sting of disrespect, the fear of being powerless. That’s why they’re scrambling. That’s why they’re furious. Because the game has changed, and they’re no longer untouchable.
