Ramon Revilla, a former action-movie star and ex-senator, grabbed a microphone and crooned a duet with his wife, the mayor of a town near Manila. Revilla had spent four years in prison awaiting trial for plundering $4.3 million in public funds before being acquitted last December; he still faced 16 counts of graft. Now he was throwing his lot in with Duterte and attempting a comeback. Ronald dela Rosa, a brawny and bald former police chief of Davao, who had been the subject of a recent biopic and was now making a Senate run, belted a romantic melody. Then Christopher Go — the presidential aide turned Senate candidate whom Ranada had enraged with her article — addressed the throng.

“Who among you is a drug addict?” asked Go, a slight figure in a polo shirt and jeans. Some of the rallygoers laughed nervously, well aware of the fate that often met anyone accused of abusing shabu, the Philippine name for crystal meth. “President Duterte is against drugs. I am against drugs,” Go thundered. “Duterte says he is against corruption. I am against corruption.”

As a drizzle turned into a downpour, the music came up again, and Go, flanked by a pair of Filipino movie stars, sang a love song; the crowd roared with delight. The sentimental performances were part of the rally’s appeal, but something else was going on: The people in the audience clearly believed in the brutal message delivered by Duterte and his proxies. Most Filipinos weren’t reading Rappler; they were on Facebook, or getting their information from Duterte himself (who had canceled his rally appearance at the last minute, to the crowd’s disappointment). They reminded me of the cabdriver I met who told me he was grateful to Duterte because he could now walk with his children through the alleys of his barrio after dark and not fear being mugged by a drug addict. “People like Maria Ressa from the elite have no idea what it’s like to live in the slums,” he told me. “They are living behind high security, in wealthy apartment buildings, cut off from the people. Really, I don’t think they have the chance to know us.” Ressa was absolutely right that the propaganda campaign was being fought online, but it was also being waged in the public sphere out in the streets, a place where Rappler couldn’t compete.

Duterte’s political alliance won all 12 contested seats in the Senate, handing the president complete control over the three branches of government. When I spoke to Ressa by phone two weeks later, she had just returned to Manila from New York, where she gave the commencement speech at Columbia Journalism School’s graduation ceremony, and had plunged back into the fray, building a new Rappler online platform, speaking before representatives of 12 countries at an inquiry on “big data, privacy and democracy” hosted by the Canadian House of Commons and shuttling between appearances in two Manila courthouses and a mediation meeting with lawyers on the cyberlibel case. Ressa told me that Duterte’s electoral sweep was not necessarily dire news. The consolidation could mean, she said, “that we can do our work. After all, what does he have to fear?”

But a moment later, she despaired at the possibility that a new Constitution could “formalize our democracy’s descent into tyranny and swing the pendulum that began in 1986 back to authoritarian rule.” Ressa and her attorneys have filed a blizzard of appeals to block the closure order from the P.S.E.C. and keep her and the board out of prison. But the courts are stacked with Duterte appointees; the chances of a victory are slim.

Ressa had been talking to her lawyers about protections that might be afforded to her under international law in the event she is imprisoned. On July 23, Ressa’s criminal trial for cyberlibel began in Manila, and soon after that, she was back in court to face the tax-evasion and “anti-dummy” charges. She hired an international legal team, including the human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, to represent her and, throughout the summer and fall, was spending up to four days a week in front of judges at four different trials around Metro Manila; a verdict in the cyberlibel case was expected late this year. If convicted on all counts, Ressa faces a cumulative sentence of just over 63 years in prison. “We’ve developed a gallows humor about it,” Ressa told me; she had talked about the prospect of prison with the three other founders of Rappler. “One of them said she would bring me a fan. Another, bedsheets. Another, food. At the beginning it’s scary, but the more you talk about it, you rob it of its sting. You embrace the fear.”