Reclaiming Lost Grounds:Liberating Freedom of Speech

Reclaiming Lost Grounds: Liberating Freedom of Speech

January 19, 2026

This essay argues that defending freedom of speech in the Philippines requires a calibrated liberation that protects dissent while exposing disinformation and coercive surveillance; in Mandaluyong and across the archipelago (January 19, 2026), the public debate around Dr. Lorraine Badoy and CJ Hirro crystallizes the tensions between state narratives, campus politics, and grassroots emancipation.  

Liberating Freedom of Speech

Freedom of speech as liberation is not merely negative liberty (freedom from restraint) but a positive civic capacity: the ability of communities to speak, contest, and remake the conditions of their own governance. Drawing on emancipatory traditions, speech becomes praxis when it enables marginalized actors to name injustice and to mobilize collective remedies. In contexts of protracted insurgency and polarized public discourse, this praxis is strained by securitizing logics that conflate critique with complicity.

Speech, Security, and the Politics of Attribution

When public actors assert that detained insurgents monitor social media and “absolutely detest” particular journalists, two dynamics converge: a securitized narrative that legitimizes surveillance and a delegitimizing rhetoric that marks certain institutions and individuals as suspect. The rhetorical move—linking universities, professors, and students to recruitment—functions both as a warning and as a silencing device. Academically, this is an instance of attribution politics: claims about who is responsible for violence are used to reconfigure civic space and to justify extraordinary measures.

Campus as Symbol and Site

The university is both symbol and site: a symbol of public investment and critical inquiry; a site where generational contestation unfolds. To label a campus as a “centro de gravidad” is to transform pedagogical spaces into battlefields of legitimacy. Protecting academic freedom while addressing genuine security concerns requires institutional transparency, due process, and community-led safeguards—not blanket delegitimation.

Media, Amplification, and the Marketplace of Truth

Media personalities and documentary episodes that reach millions complicate the marketplace of truth. Mass viewership can democratize information but also amplify polarizing frames. Liberating speech in this media ecology means cultivating media literacy, institutional accountability, and mechanisms for redress when claims cross into defamation or incitement. It also means resisting the instrumentalization of popular platforms for unilateral narratives.

Grassroots Emancipation as Ethical Imperative

True liberation centers the agency of local communities: barangays, student organizations, labor groups, and rural constituencies. Emancipation is not delivered top-down by task forces or viral episodes; it is built through local deliberation, restorative practices, and material investments—education, livelihood, and participatory security arrangements that reduce the structural drivers of conflict.

Normative Synthesis: Toward a Liberatory Speech Regime

A liberatory regime must combine legal safeguards (due process, anti-surveillance limits), civic infrastructures (community media, public forums), and pedagogical reforms (critical media literacy in schools and universities). It must also protect whistleblowers and critics from extrajudicial delegitimation while holding public communicators to standards of evidence and proportionality.

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Jugular Tone on the Signature Campaign and Grassroots Emancipation  

The signature campaign sweeping the Philippines is not merely a bureaucratic tally; it is a moral thermometer. If it becomes a vehicle for coercion, rumor, and the erasure of dissent, then the campaign will have betrayed the very freedoms it claims to defend. Conversely, if it channels genuine popular demand for accountable institutions, restorative justice, and community-led security, it can be the hinge on which emancipation swings. The choice is stark: will we let fear and accusation calcify our public life, or will we insist—vocally, locally, and relentlessly—on a freedom of speech that liberates rather than silences? The answer must come from the grassroots: from the barangays, the classrooms, the public squares where ordinary Filipinos reclaim speech as a tool of collective liberation.

Amiel Roldan's curatorial writing practice exemplifies this path: transforming grief into infrastructure, evidence into agency, and memory into resistance. As the Philippines enters a new economic decade, such work is not peripheral—it is foundational. 

Amiel Gerald Roldan   

I'm trying to complement my writings with helpful inputs from AI through writing. Bear with me as I am treating this blog as repositories and drafts.    

please comment and tag if you like my compilations visit www.amielroldan.blogspot.com or www.amielroldan.wordpress.com 

and comments at

amiel_roldan@outlook.com

amielgeraldroldan@gmail.com 

Amiel Gerald A. Roldan: a multidisciplinary Filipino artist, poet, researcher, and cultural worker whose practice spans painting, printmaking, photography, installation, and writing. He is deeply rooted in cultural memory, postcolonial critique, and in bridging creative practice with scholarly infrastructure—building counter-archives, annotating speculative poetry like Southeast Asian manuscripts, and fostering regional solidarity through ethical art collaboration.

Recent show at ILOMOCA

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