Interior secretary and former general Eduardo Año must be condemned for using the communist bogey to justify the Duterte regime’s plans to stop people from staging demonstrations on June 30 to protest the inauguration of Ferdinand Marcos Jr as president and express indignation against his illegitimate regime.

He claims that planned protest actions on June 30 are part of a so-called “communist plot” to “embarrass” Marcos Jr. Such an objective, in fact, is futile because Marcos Jr and the entire Marcos family are beyond embarrassment and shame.

During their decade and a half in power, they stole billions of dollars of people’s money, and openly led a lavish lifestyle while the majority of the people–workers, peasants and ordinary people–suffered from widespread poverty and hunger. Under the US-Marcos dictatorship, the broad masses of the people suffered from low wages, landlessness, foreign indebtedness, high taxes, as well as from arbitrary arrests and detention, torture and killings.

General Año’s claims that the CPP wants to discredit Marcos Jr. do not stick. In the first place, the CPP does not even have to do anything to discredit Ferdinand Jr because he is already discredited having rigged the May 9 automated elections in collusion with Rodrigo Duterte to install himself in power. Before the eyes of the Filipino people, the Marcos II regime is an illegitimate regime established on a massively fraudulent elections that saw preprogrammed results giving the dictator’s son an impossible 31.5 million votes to fake a landslide victory.

Duterte’s National Task Force-Elcac, military and police officials, their minions, and even Juan Ponce Enrile–Marcos I’s martial law architect and now Marcos II legal counsel–are singing the same tune, pointing fingers at everyone and seeing a “communist plot” everywhere.

The stage is now being set for the intensified suppression of democratic rights under Marcos II.