Have you ever watched an infestation of termites eat through a house?

They don’t make a dramatic entrance. They just crawl in quietly, move entirely in unison based on blind instinct, chew up the structural pillars from the inside, and leave the people living there to collapse under the weight of the ruin.

Familiar? That is exactly what watching EDSA this week felt like.

The Office of the Ombudsman under Boying Remulla just blew the lid off an impending non-bailable plunder case against Senator Rodante Marcoleta, and like clockwork the Iglesia ni Cristo flipped the panic switch.

The charge sheet reads like an absolute comedy. It’s just so ironic.

Marcoleta literally went on television and admitted he hid 75 million pesos in campaign cash from his legal records during the 2025 elections because his wealthy donors—including Mike Defensor—allegedly "asked him to”.

Instead of an actual legal defense in the Sandiganbayan, the response was a massive unannounced swarming mechanism. Over fifteen thousand of the faithful transformed the EDSA Carousel lane into an unpermitted, chaotic parking lot during the morning rush hour.

To be honest, it's not really much of a surprise. Haven’t we already seen this same scene before?

They treated a major economic artery like their own personal backyard, forcing ordinary Filipino workers to sit in a gridlock just so a wealthy politician could throw a collective tantrum over a subpoena.

But the parasites aren't the ones sitting on the hot asphalt chanting slogans they were ordered to yell. The biggest pests are the ones who came flying in the absolute second they smelled the rot.

Look at the stage.

Why were national political heavyweights like Imee Marcos and Alan Peter Cayetano suddenly rushing to the scene, practically tripping over their own expensive shoes to hold Marcoleta’s hand?

Were they suddenly hit by a profound spiritual awakening regarding the sanctity of judicial due process?

Please. They were just looking at a sea of fifteen thousand moving parts and calculating how many millions of mandatory bloc votes that the central office in the Commonwealth can deliver for the next election cycle.

It is the most predictable, nauseating symbiotic relationship in Philippine politics. The politician feeds the hive by defending its corrupt royalty, and the hive feeds the politician by ensuring their survival at the ballot box.

How else do you think Marcoleta secured his 15.16 million votes to seal his Senate seat in the first place? It sure wasn't his magnetic charisma.

Again, the utter irony is staggering.

We are told this is a grand spiritual institution, yet its divine will is apparently deeply invested in protecting a politician from explaining where he hid seventy-five million pesos in private cash "gifts”.

Since when did protecting a public servant's bank account become a foundational requirement for eternal salvation?

Why must an underpaid clerk or a fast-food worker lose a full day’s wages stuck in an artificial gridlock just because a lawmaker refuses to show his receipts?

The church’s defense is that Marcoleta is a "whistleblower" being targeted because he presented 18 witnesses claiming billions in kickbacks went to the President and Speaker Martin Romualdez.

Of course, a classic, beautiful diversion strategy.

They want us to choose between two flavors of institutional rot, as if we should thank Marcoleta for being a slightly less expensive parasite.

Yesterday, the Quezon City government finally found a spine and recalled their permit, forcing the circus to pack up and migrate down to Liwasang Bonifacio.

The streets will be swept. The traffic will return to its usual, miserable baseline, and Marcoleta’s high-priced lawyers will find some loopholes to keep him out of a jail cell.

But the structural damage to our democracy is already done.

The politicians will crawl back to the Senate, satisfied that their public display of loyalty was duly noted by the church leadership. And the rest of us are left living in the hollowed-out remains of a system where the law is an absolute trap for the regular citizen but a minor inconvenience for the people who have a whole hive to protect them.

The Frontman