The renewed claims of so-called “terror grooming” against progressive youth organizations and young people who immerse and integrate with poor communities are systematic and deliberate assaults by the State on critical thought, political agency, and the right of the youth to protest, organize and dissent.
What the State seeks to suppress is not “terrorism”, but the ability of young people to think independently, question injustice, and act collectively. The labeling of youth organizing and mobilizing themselves as “grooming” conveniently justifies heightened surveillance, harassment, and violations of rights against the youth.
Young people are not blank slates to be programmed, nor are they helpless or hapless victims to be “lured” into causes they do not understand. Young people who go to the countryside are not naïve, brainwashed, or coerced. Students and youth who immerse in poor communities do so voluntarily and consciously, driven by need and duty to learn from the conditions of peasants, workers, and indigenous peoples. To deny their exercise of agency is to infantilize generations of young people and erase their capacity for moral judgment and political choice. To frame them as “helpless or hapless victims” is not only false but deeply patronizing. It strips the youth of their intellect, moral judgment, and political will, reducing them to objects rather than actors in society.
It is an open attack on the exercise of critical thought, the very faculty that allows young people to question everything wrong in society – corruption, militarization, social inequality, state violence and more. It is an open attack against the exercise of empathy, the very reason that allows young people to shun the dominant individualist culture and to act for the collective wellbeing of the people. This is what the State wants extinguished.
Despite billions of pesos poured into state-led information operations, red-tagging, and psychological warfare against progressive youth organizations, generations of young people continue to organize, campaign, and march by the thousands against corruption, militarization, foreign domination, and attacks on education, livelihoods, and the environment. They continue to immerse themselves with peasants and workers, not because they are deceived, but because they believe that knowledge is derived from the lived realities of the poor and in studying the historical roots of poverty and injustice.
The persistence of youth activism exposes the bankruptcy of the State’s narrative. Young people have consistently seen through and defied the lies, moral decay, extreme individualism, and reactionary ideas promoted by a system that seeks to produce idle, fearful, and politically indifferent minds. The “terror grooming” label is a tool to intimidate, silence, and discipline the youth – to criminalize critical thought and empathy, vilify solidarity and service to the community, and normalize repression and State terror against a thinking and organizing youth.
Immersion, organizing, and collective action are not crimes. They are legitimate and necessary forms of education and engagement. What should alarm the public is not the youth who choose to serve the people or go to the countryside, but a State that fears critical minds and perpetuates injustice and oppression by using fascism and terror, even against the young.
Let the youth think. Let the youth organize. Let the youth resist. A government that fears the young people’s collective action is one that reveals its own failure to address the people’s demands for justice, rights, and genuine social change – a kind that is always bound to fail and be overthrown. (19 January 2026)