Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Rodrigo Duterte: The Hitler of the Philippines

Episode Date: October 4, 2018

In Part Two about Rodrigo Duterte, Robert is joined again by comedian Blake Wexler and they discuss Duterte's presidency and spoiler alert how Facebook helped him get elected.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So we're back. I'm again Robert Evans and this is Behind the Bastards, a show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. My guest today is Blake Wexler and he did an album called Stuffed Boy and is a stand-up comedian and a variety of other things. Correct, yeah. So this is part two of a two-part episode on Rodrigo Duterte. If you haven't cut part one, probably listen to that.

But they will be labeled so I assume if you're listening to this as part two, you've made a choice one way or the other. And we're just diving into it now. We're just getting into it. November of 2016 was a surprising time for a lot of people around the world. It came at the end of a surprising election for those of us in the United States. But I think we in the U.S. all owe an apology to the people of the Philippines because I don't think we had the craziest election of 2016. You remember like how a couple of months before the election came down that Access Hollywood tape leaked and we got to hear a presidential candidate make laughing references to sexual assault. You remember that? Oh yeah.

How crazy that seemed. Yeah, there's no way that guy won, right? There's no way another presidential candidate topped that in the same year. Right. That exact thing happened because one month before the May 2016 Philippine presidential election, the clinical analysis that I read in the first part of this episode that declared Rodrigo Duterte an aggressive narcissist was leaked to a Philippine national television news station. Suddenly every voter in the country knew that a mental health expert had declared a major presidential candidate to lack, quote, any capacity for remorse or guilt. And yet 16 million people still voted for Rodrigo Duterte, more than enough to hand him the election.

Part of why this happened has to do with the Army of Trolls candidate Duterte wielded to a great effect during the race. See, Duterte has an active cyber army today, but according to New Republic he started using it from the beginning of his national ambitions. Quote, in November of 2015, when he decided to run for president, he enlisted a marketing consultant named Nick Gabonata to assemble a social media army with a budget of just over $200,000. Gabonata used the money to pay hundreds of prominent online voices to flood social media with pro Duterte comments, popularize hashtags and attack critics. So what we had going on in our election, some of it directed from Russia, some of it just completely organic. He was harnessing himself to use and it's as if Trump had actually been getting on eight-chan and four-chan and trying to get people to make memes and stuff like Duterte was actually organizing a troll army. I assume he delegated a lot of that to people who understood the internet because he's like 70, but still like this was a major part of his strategy because he very famously spent way less money on his campaign than any of his competitors. Because he knew where to focus it.

On murderers. Well, you're going to pay some to murderers. That was already going on, but no, on trolls online. That was his thing rather than traditional advertising and whatever. He realized that's not going to convince anybody, but a bunch of arguments on Facebook have a better shot at actually changing some minds. So the article of that New Republic, Sean Williams, knows very well what it's like when one of Duterte's mobs goes after a critic. He earned their attention after reporting on the bloodshed behind the new president's now national anti-drug campaign. Here's another quote. So it's very familiar sounding. It's uncanny.

Yeah. It's really uncanny. And it seems silly. It is very silly, but the sheer flow of information did its job. Hundreds of thousands of paid and unpaid people successfully dominated much of the Philippines national digital discourse. Rodrigo Duterte owes a lot to our dear friend Facebook because in March of 2015, Mark Zuckerberg announced that his company was partnering with smart communications to release a free app called internet.org. This app provides free mobile internet access to anyone with a smartphone, but it doesn't give users access to the whole internet. Just 24 websites, including Wikipedia, AccuWeather, and of course, Facebook. Have you spotted the downside of this plan yet?

So the median age in the Philippines is 23 as compared to like 37.8 something years here in the United States. So it's a very young country. Half of the nation's 100 plus million citizens are active social media users. At least one study suggests that Filipino people may lead the world in terms of time spent on social media. An average of four hours and 17 minutes per day, a half hour longer than the next highest country in Brazil. At Blake Wexler, by the way. At Blake Wexler, those in the Philippines. At Blake Wexler.

You're going to get a Duterte mob on your fucking ass. I hope so. I need the followers. The followers, man. I need the PR. This guy sounds like a genius. Well, so, I mean, this is like the perfect storm, because like, at least when we started dealing with all this, most people have access to the internet and the whole internet.

What happened in the Philippines is that Facebook gave millions of people free mobile internet, but also in doing that, they created a separate walled internet that millions of poor people were on. And the only reliable source, sort of, was Wikipedia. And the vast, vast majority of news came through social media. So you would see people posting about news on Facebook, but you wouldn't be able to click on a link to read about it. Or to confirm or deny. All you had was the misinformation spreading through social media, because that's the only internet Facebook has any vested interest in giving you for free.

So they created a separate internet for poor people where disinformation was even easier to spread. And Facebook did this. They did this presuming to be nice. Like, that was how they presented it. I mean, obviously, they just wanted the data on these people. But they didn't think about the fact that... Any repercussion whatsoever other than money. And Duterte was like, oh, so millions of people now have access to Facebook, but nothing else. Well, let's hire people to spread propaganda on Facebook.

That seems really worth the money. And it totally was. When these people would see or participate in fights on Twitter or Facebook about Mayor Duterte's murderous policies, it would just look like one horde of angry people screaming at a smaller horde of angry people. There would be almost no way for people looking at this to research any of the claims being made. You might just side with whatever groups seemed the most confident and prominent. Needless to say, fake news spread through the Philippines like wildfire. The book Fire and Fury in the Philippines gives a rundown of how adept Duterte's campaign was at using this to their advantage.

One example of the government's use of fake news was a viral post by Duterte's campaign spokesman Peter II LaVenia, which defended the war on drugs. LaVenia cited a report about a nine-year-old girl who was raped and murdered. He lambasted human rights, bishops, and prostitutes for their failure to condemn what he called this brutal act. They, he said, were derailing the government's war against drugs and crime. In Trumpian style, he went on, Our righteous battles are fierce and relentless because we face the devil himself. We cannot be softer, let our guards down, lest we ourselves be devoured and defeated.

Below this, he posted a graphic and distressing photograph purporting to show the dead child and her weeping mother. As the online news website Rappler would later point out in a series of articles which showed how the government was weaponizing the internet, the photo was taken in Brazil, not the Philippines. So, fake news, big part of this election. Trolls were used to burnish the mayor's record in DeVal. It was critical to his presidential campaign that he be seen as having cleaned up the city. One piece of evidence used to support this was a 2015 crowdsourced survey that had ranked DeVal City as the ninth safest city in the world. You want to go too much higher.

Well, there are way bigger cities out there who have legitimate people voting on them as opposed to this, but still, you have a bunch of people vote in your online mob vote for DeVal City as the safest city in the world, and you get up to number nine. That's good enough to get the election in. Cracks the top ten. Cracks the top ten. That's not bad. So, Duterte's trolls earned their money on a sliding scale based on how active they were, with salaries reaching up to 2,000 a month, which you'll remember from the first episode, more or less the same retainer you get for being one of the leaders of the DeVal Death Squad. These trolls are augmented by true believers and of course bots.

Some research suggests that 20% of all Twitter accounts that mention Rodrigo Duterte are bots. That's a quote from Free Republic. Alistair Carlos, a human rights advocate, was forced to change his Facebook profile after he received repeated threats of violence in a country where anti-government activists have been killed during Duterte's drug war. Carlos takes such threats seriously. Sometimes you go home, you're alone, and you need to buy something from the store, he says. Then the fear kicks in. Which is, again, these are not just petty criminals and stuff who have been killed into Val. There have also been journalists killed, there have been political opponents of his killed, and as president he's continued to do this sort of thing,

to go after people who speak out against him. Because now there's just this precedent that people die in the streets a lot. People are gunned down in the streets a lot, and it's just these vigilantes. Right. That's what happens in streets. People die in streets. Cars are there, foot traffic is there, but death is the primary inhibitor of streets. Death is the main thing you go into the streets for, of course. So Duterte acknowledged hiring social media commenters for his campaign, but he denies running a digital army, just like he denies running a death squad. Sometimes. Sometimes he admits running a death squad.

He denies it until he doesn't. He was against the death squad before he started the death squad. Despite running by far the cheapest presidential campaign of any major candidate, Rodrigo Duterte won nearly 40% of the vote. He was elected in May of 2016, and his spokesman issued Duterte's thanks to 14 million social media volunteers. Once he was president, several bloggers who spread pro-Duterte fake news were given press credentials. In July of 2017, an Oxford University study revealed that roughly 500 paid trolls were likely involved in Duterte's online army. Oxford estimated that it would have cost him around 200 grand to do so. This is a pretty good value for the money.

When Duterte was told about this study, the now president replied, Oxford University, that's a school for the dumb. Perfect. And you know what? Fuck their dictionary as well. Fuck their dictionary. I'm a Merriam-Webster guy. It's a school for the dumb. A school for the dumb. I've been saying that for years. On June 30th, 2016, right after his inauguration, Duterte visited the slum of Tondo in Manila. He told a crowd, quote,

If you know of any addicts, go ahead and kill them yourself, as getting their parents to do it would be too painful. He's a humanitarian. I mean, that's nice. Just go ahead. Kill a drug addict so his mom doesn't have to. Because before the moms had to kill their own drug addicts. And that was a dark era. We're more humanists now. We kill drug addicts for their mothers. That's nice.

In August of 2016, President Duterte announced his new narco list of more than 150 citizens. Many of them local government officials, judges, or police. They were all stripped of any police escort. Any who were serving as officers were relieved of duty. By this point, just a few months into his presidency, 852 people had already been killed in the now national drug war. When questioned by reporters about his list, the president explained that if suspects show the slightest violence and resistance, I will tell the police, shoot them.

By early 2017, the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency revealed that the narco list had been expanded to more than 6,000 suspects. This is somewhat at odds with the reporting of the New York Times, who suggests the list may have over a million names by now. Quote, said Duterte in October, The human rights people will commit suicide if I finish these all. Which, again, there's never any hiding this. No. We're never not pretending to be a terrible, terrible monster.

Jesus Christ. Yeah. Here's the New York Times. The list was a distilled essence of Duterte's appeal, a raw and brutal effort at law and order, whatever the cost. As of October, the president enjoyed an 86% approval rating nationwide. His popularity was greatest among the poorest Filipinos surveyed. Family members of the drug war's casualties on several occasions told me they supported Duterte's violence,

even as they insisted their sons and daughters were targeted inaccurately. Which is, if you get people to believe that, like, yeah, that sort of tough justice thing is the only way to keep the country safe, they'll be like, yeah, man, it's just a shame that they got Mark. Yeah. You know, I mean, if Mark has to go, he's got to go. He did sniff glue. You know, he was a glue-stiffer. He was a glue-stiffer, and he stole a cell phone that one.

I mean, the point of the matter is, no death squad is perfect. Right. You can't hold a death squad to an unreasonable standard. You know, a death squad, I would say you want a death squad to be at least 60% accurate. But any more than that, you're kind of asking for the moon. You really are. Yeah. Yeah.

And you don't want them going to some shitty college like Oxford. No, no, no. That's our university. They do their own research. Poorly, I would imagine. So Duterte had won 6.5 million more votes than the next most popular candidate in the presidential election, so it was not particularly close. The public seemed to eat up his promises of unspeakable violence and death.

In fact, after his election, the president started to claim that he'd killed three suspected criminals while he was mayor of Devau City. The way he tells it, it sounds like he ambushed three people and gunned them down in the street. Right. He's very proud of this. Yeah. He also claims to have thrown a rape and murder suspect out of a flying helicopter. Well, here's just a quick question. It's not like a bus, you know, like where you just happen to run into someone that you don't know who happens to be a rape and murder suspect.

Like, why were they in the same... There's the pilot, there's the co-pilot, there's the president, and then there's a rape and murder suspect. Like, how many people are in this helicopter just wandering in? I'm assuming what he's talking about is like, when Pinochet was president, they would capture communists, they would take them up in helicopters, and that's how they'd execute them. Oh, okay. So I'm going to guess it was something like that. It wasn't an opportunistic thing.

He was just in a helicopter. Who the fuck is this rapist? So who are you? I'm the president. What do you do? Well, I'm a rapist and a murderer. Well, undo your seatbelts, sir. I have a door to open.

It would be kind of cute if it was just serendipity. Well, that's a weird coincidence. You're the president. I'm a rapist. Oh, well, just push me right on out. Jump up into the blades. Oh, boy. Rodrigo, you know, now that he's president, has managed to stay humble.

He insists that his colleagues continue to call him mayor. Somewhat fitting, because Duterte more or less does the same things as president that he did as mayor, just on a grander scale. One of his first priorities after being elected was to secure a massive increase in the Presidential Intelligence Fund, which can be used with the president's discretion with no oversight to do things like pay assassins on motorcycles to murder drug users in the streets. Hypothetically. Hypothetically.

Hypothetically. You could also use it at birthday parties. Of course. Streamers and stuff. We don't have to name all the things. Let's just name that one and set the table. And in fact, disbursements from the Intelligence Fund are not itemized and unless supported by agencies and receipt of the money are not audited.

So that's nice. Yeah. It increased roughly from like $50 million the year before to $110 million now that Duterte was president. And yeah, he gets to use it basically on whatever he wants. So yeah, that's kind of neat. He gets to buy gifts and rewards for people he wants to bribe. And he also gets to buy bullets for people that he wants to kill people and then pay

the money for killing people. That's nice. We should have a presidential intelligence fund that just is completely unaccountable. That's like a good time. Yeah. I'd be good with a president with intelligence. Thank you so much. We'll be right back.

Nice. Nice. It is about time. I know that you were joking with that ad break. Yes. But let's do an actual ad break and fucking blow some people's minds. I'll take it. Buy some products.

During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you get to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters

in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good-bad-ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Boy, howdy. I mean, those products and services were just so much better than the products and services that came on during whatever last ad break you'll listen to.

I feel comfortable saying. You build off the previous one, which is a professional thing to do, obviously. Yeah, absolutely. Always taking steps forward, never taking steps backwards, unless you're taking a step backward in order to make a long jump forwards, like Shaquille O'Neal. Yeah, or one of those assholes on a hike who walk up backwards to work the front part of your leg. Does that happen in a lot of hikes? I'll see him.

Yeah, I'll see him. That could be your death squad thing. That could be what you use your death squad for. They're on the list. All right. We've got two things for the death squad, people who make their own speed limits and people who walk backwards on hikes. All right. Yeah.

See, everybody's got a death squad if you really think hard enough. You do. And I challenge you listeners at home, pick your death squad target. Everyone's got a group, you know? All right, so Duterte's first year in office saw 10,000 deaths from his now national death squads. Now, you may note that it's three times as many people who died during the bloody reign of Ferdinand Marcos. So he is. In the first year.

In his first year. Jesus. Yeah, and Marcos had like 14 years as dictator. And fucking Duterte's not even dictator yet. And he's already way better at killing people. So I'll give that to him. Yeah. He's a better dictator than Ferdinand.

He's better at murdering people than Ferdinand Marcos. He moves quick. He moves fast. He's not a lazy president. Right. You would not say that about him. Although he does not like to get up early in the morning. Now, one-third of the people shot dead were by the police.

The vast majority, two-thirds, died in vigilante hits by killers writing in tandem. Now, writing in tandem is sort of a phrase in the Philippines now. A bicycle built for two. Right. It's two people on a motorcycle. Right. And his technique was first pioneered by Griselda Blanco, who he did an episode on. She was most likely the inspiration for this strategy because Rodrigo Duterte is a huge

fan of true crime novels and I think the show Narcos. So he seems to get ideas. He invited like a true crime novelist over to the country to hang with them and stuff. Oh my God. Like he seems to get a lot of his ideas from these things. And he clearly saw like, oh, motorcycle assassins. That's a really good way to kill people. Right.

And it is. Yeah. You know, that's true. Yeah. It's sensible. It's the only way to run a death squad in a city with severe urban congestion. Yeah. I mean, you can't do it from an SUV.

Oh my God. No. Can you imagine? No. Jesus. No. What a waste of gasoline. Yes.

I mean, you only have so much money in the slush fund. Right. Like it's just, it makes more sense. It's just good economics. Exactly. A lot of little kids have died and that's an ugly segue. I'm sitting that one out. A lot of children died in the crossfire of this drug war.

Juterte refers to these dead children as collateral damage. Here's the guardian. Juterte said those cases would be investigated, but added that police can kill hundreds of civilians without criminal liability. He gave a hypothetical example of an officer using an M16 rifle when dealing with a gangster who wields a pistol. Quote, when they meet, they exchange fire. With the policemen and the M16, it's one burst.

Brrr. And he hits the thousand people there and they die. It could not be negligence because you have to save your life. It could not be recklessness because you have to defend yourself. So if a policeman fires a thousand rounds wildly into a crowd because one guy had a gun, that's okay. Oh my God. Which is like, it's like the problems we have now with police in our country, but taken

to the nth level because here we'd be like, at least there is a trial and people panicked and like, you know, the right thing wasn't done, but it was not purposeful and he's just like, no, you could fire a thousand rounds into a crowd. Fuck it. Yeah. What are you guys, idiots? One guy had a gun. One guy had a gun.

I mean, that guy with the gun could have killed 10 people. Upwards of a dozen people. Yeah. So a thousand people's a good trade-off. To save 10. Yeah. Of course. The math checks out.

Dictator math would be a fun class to teach, associate math. It would. Yeah. On Christmas 2016, 12-year-old Christine Joy Selag was shot and killed in the car park of her church as she left Christmas mass. The bullet that killed her was alleged to have been fired by a masked man on a motorcycle, aiming at someone else who also died in the attack. At least 31 children were shot dead in the first six months of the national drug war.

The youngest victim was four. In August and early September of 2017, 96 people were killed in Manila in the space of what the police called a one-time big-time assault on drug dealers in the capital. Here's fire and fury in the Philippines. The first to die was 17-year-old Ken Lloyd Delos Santos in Calo Can City on the northern fringes of metropolitan Manila. Police claimed that he was a meth dealer who had fired at cops during a raid. They had acted in self-defense, they said, after he had opened fire on them.

But for once, CCTV footage emerged that told a very different story. It clearly showed two plainclothes police officers dragging the teenager away before he was shot dead in a rubbish strewn alleyway. His body dumped next to a pig sty. He was found with a hole in his head and another gunshot wound to his torso, grasping a pistol in his left hand. His parents said their son was right-handed. Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre II described the killing as an isolated case.

Human Rights Watch said that to deliberately target children for execution marks an appalling new level of depravity in this so-called drugs war. So people started to have issues with all of the murdering. Ken's funeral became a giant protest march against the new drug war. More than 5,000 people took to the streets. Many of them were family members of people who'd been murdered by Duterte hired guns. The government was forced to investigate, and the Justice Department actually did look into the killings.

This led to the firing of the entire 1,200 person police force in the city of Calucan, where Ken had been killed. They were ordered to receive 45 days of training, and then most of them were rehired and reassigned to other stations, which you may recognize as not being fired. Right, right. And also very odd for the Catholic Church, which he hates so much, he's taking an exact strategy that they use by reassigning. Oh my God, I didn't even think about that, but he is doing the rapey priest thing but

with cops that shoot children. Right. That's remarkable. One of the worst sentences I've ever heard, just the rapey priest thing with cops who shoot children, is just a bang bang bang of horribleness. Yeah, it's really... But efficient, a very efficient sentence, and accurate, unfortunately. We'll say this for the Catholic Church, they know how to cover up a crime for a while.

Yeah, for a while. So yeah, Ken's parents met with Duterte who told them those who had committed wrong would not go unpunished. This was not enough to stop the Catholic Church from condemning Duterte for all of the deaths. Duterte did not actually give a fuck what the Church had to say. As I noted in the first episode, in 2016, after your Pope Francis' motorcade caused a traffic jam in Manila, he called the Holy Father a son of a whore. Now this particular phrase is, if you haven't guessed, the President's favorite.

The exact term he uses is Putangina, which translates roughly to son of a whore. Basically some people count his PIs, fire and fury actually makes the claim that there are people who listen to his speeches to see how many times he'll say son of a whore. And so far, the record is 48 times in a 45 minute speech, which is a lot of times... It does make it seem like less of an attack on the Pope. He just can't... That's just a comma for this guy. 100%.

What was the speech on? Oh, I have no idea. That would be... Orphans? I don't speak the language. Yeah. When Philippine priests condemned Duterte for slandering the Pope, Duterte responded, We are all the creations of God.

We have God-given talents. The talent that God gave me is cussing. Instead of blaming me, blame God because he created me. Bulletproof fucking logic. You gotta give it to him there. The ultimate deflection. Yeah. No, God made me.

He made me good at saying fucking whore. Like whatever. Right. You prayed to him. You ask him. Yeah. I'm just doing what's natural. Right.

Now, President Duterte did eventually apologize to the Pope, but he seems to honestly have very little control over his mouth in the moment. When he met with then Secretary of State John Kerry, he called the U.S. Ambassador, America's gay ambassador, and he meant gay as a slur and as a literal thing. It's kind of hard to tell. He called President Barack Obama a son of a whore in 2016, and then apologized for that too. On June of 2018, Rodrigo Duterte really shot for the moon and declared God stupid.

He's just going after God now. The guy swings at everything. Here's the BBC reporting on a speech he gave in DeVal City, asking, who is this stupid God? Mr. Duterte criticized the biblical story of creation and Adam and Eve being thrown out of the Garden of Eden after they ate the forbidden fruit. You created something perfect, and then you think of an event that would attempt and destroy the quality of your work, he said.

So it really has some logical problems with God. Right. Fair enough. Stupid God. There's some holes in that story if you poke enough. Yeah. Yeah. Oh boy.

Yeah, we'll get to the fallout of calling God stupid, because it's not great in a country where like 90% of people are Christian. Right. Yeah. Now, right now one of the big debates in Philippine politics alongside should we be murdering drug users and petty criminals in the streets is whether or not President Duterte is going to declare martial law like his predecessor Ferdinand Marcos and like the U.S. military before Marcos.

In May of 2017, around 100 Muslim fighters laid siege to the city of Marawi on the island of Mindanao. In response, the president declared martial law across the island. So not all of the Philippines, but in the island of Mindanao, which is also the island where DeVal City is. Fire and Fury discusses an address he gave to soldiers on Mindanao shortly after the declaration. Quote, he sought to reassure them that should they be accused of committing abuses under

martial law, he would take personal responsibility for their actions. Then he joked, if you raped three, I admit it, that's on me. Yeah. No one laughed, but when social media exploded without rage, yeah, that's what Fire and Fury says, no one laughed. I wasn't there. All right. The ultimate fool me once.

You raped three people, that's on me. Social media exploded without rage. Chelsea Clinton attacked Duterte, said he was a murderous thug with no regard for human rights and a sickening sense of humor. Rape is never a joke, not funny ever. So that Chelsea Clinton went after the president of the Philippines. Not sure why she wound up seeing his tweets, but whatever. Yeah.

It's a worthwhile thing to attack him on. Duterte did not wait for his PR people to figure out a good response or some way to spin the story. He gave another speech a little bit later to naval officers in DeVal and reminded Miss Clinton of her father's affair with Monica Lewinsky. Here's Duterte talking to naval officers, but really talking to Chelsea Clinton because I don't think he's a big Twitter guy. These whores, they hear rape like Chelsea.

She slammed me. I was not joking. I was being sarcastic. I will tell her when your father, the president of the United States then, was screwing Lewinsky and the girls in the office of the president on the table on the sofa. How did you feel? Did you slam your father? Which if you thought locker room talk was bad, try a Filipino naval ship talk is pretty

bad as well. This gets me to something. One of the nicknames he's gotten is like the Trump of the Philippines, which I don't think is fair. He is way worse than Donald Trump. I know. And that's saying something. He is so much grosser and more violent and scary.

And also, but who is, because they both admire each other like you said before. They really get along. Yeah. I'm sure. They're almost the same person. They are. One's more openly violent. I feel like Duterte is Donald Trump if he had physical courage, because Duterte is clearly

not afraid to get down and dirty. That's well put. Yeah. Like his Las Conyas, the guy who claims to have been one of the heads of the Desquad, claims that he's watched the president kill eight people. I can't imagine Trump doing that. I just don't think he's got the stomach for it. He is one of the biggest narcissistic assholes in the world Trump is, but he is also a coward.

Yeah. Whereas Duterte is not the opposite of a coward. He's certainly not a physical coward. No. He's willing to get into the fucking muck, so say that for him. He's also really attacking Chelsea Clinton here in a way that's very gross. In October of 2017, Steven Seagal came to visit Rodrigo Duterte. Of course.

Of course. Of course, Steven Seagal came to visit Duterte. I'm surprised he wasn't already there. He just has a home there. The two hit it off. Seagal was in country to do location scouting for a film about illegal drugs and other crimes. That's apparently what he said. They took a picture together, punching towards the camera, and it's everything that you would

expect. That's incredible. That's incredible. It's a great picture. That's the one. That's the one. That's the website behindthebastards.com. Steven Seagal.

What a ride. What a ride. What a ride. I really know who to associate himself with. Yeah. The president allegedly told Seagal that he believes movies reflect life, then talked to him about his plans for the drug war. Quote, Seagal endorsed him in exchange confiding that he had made close to 100 visits to the

Philippines over the years, although he didn't say why. What he did say was that he was a big fan of the president who has been instrumental in making the Philippines a safer place. We all know why Steven Seagal has been to the Philippines 100 times. Yes, we do. And it's gross. We don't need to say anything more about it. And it is gross.

It's super gross. Right. Also, I feel like you can predict that with any vacation Steven Seagal makes, there's probably one reason he's vacationing there. Yeah. And it's gross, Steven Seagal. All right. Oh, God.

That's disgusting. That fucking ponytail. That vile, vile man. Good Lord. He's just poison poured into a heavy suit, whatever kind of suit he's wearing in there. That's a solidified cylinder of milk. Yeah. Poison in case in it.

Yeah. He does look like what happens when a human being curdles. You're right, you're right. In February of 2018, President Duterte gave a speech to 200 communist guerrilla fighters who had surrendered. A quarter of them were female. During the speech, he specifically instructed his soldiers not to kill any female fighters they encountered in the field.

Shoot their vagina because without that, they are useless. He then addressed the surrendered women, we won't kill you. We will just shoot your vagina. If there is no vagina, it would be useless. And he's referring to the women's. Women is it. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Rodrigo Duterte, everybody. Yeah. For the first year or so that he was in power, Duterte's approval ratings were unassailable, but in more recent months, it seems like he started to stumble. It's kind of hard to say because I've found some surveys and whatnot say that his approval ratings dropped after the calling God's stupid comment down to like 45%, but that's just

one. Another said 56%. I found another couple that say he's still very popular in the 70s or 80s. So these aren't numbers being filtered through the government. These are actual. These are other people trying to figure out what's going on. It does seem like his approval rating has fallen, particularly in the last six months. Losing inflation seems to be a big part of that, so it's not clear if all of the murder

and vagina shooting comments have actually had an impact or if it's just because the economy stumbled, but it seems like he may be finally losing some support, but there's also evidence that he is still very popular. So I don't know. It's like, what do you have to do? It's almost in another just mirroring Trump is when Trump said that like famous quote where he could shoot someone in the middle of the street and it wouldn't affect anything. Duterte literally shot multiple people in the middle of the street.

He bragged about it. And his approval rating skype and he got elected president. He became president. Yeah. People were big fans of that. Right. Right. Interestingly enough, Rodrigo Duterte is something of a hypocrite on the matter of drugs, according

to Fire and Fury in the Philippines, Duterte has confessed to taking several times the prescribed dosage of the powerful painkiller fentanyl, the synthetic opioid on which the musician Prince overdosed and died. When it was reported that Duterte himself was a drug addict, he retracted his claim and said he'd been joking. That effects of this highly addictive drug include mood swings, cognitive abnormalities, confusion, trouble concentrating, feeling sad or empty and erectile dysfunction. Although this would be countered by his enthusiastic embrace of Viagra, which he has publicly

bragged about. So no evidence that that is an actual thing that he takes. What a fucking drug cocktail that is, like a bunch of Viagra and fentanyl. Yeah. Good Lord. That is poor heart. Quite the speedball. Yeah.

We hope it's bad for us. So as we speak, Duterte is currently trying to convince both houses of the Philippine Congress to reintroduce capital punishment. If that happens, they will be the first country in history to ban capital punishment and then reintroduce it. Duterte has said he'd like to put five or six people to death every day. As you might expect, he's never a dull man for journalists to cover. On one occasion, a Filipino journalist asked about the president's health.

He called the assembled journalists, sons of whores, and then he asked the reporter who'd questioned him, how is your wife's vagina? Is it smelly or not smelly? Give me a report. This is the president in a press conference to national news. Another time he was asked... Why does that even insinuate? I don't know.

He's saying that it's inappropriate to ask if he's in good health. He's like, you're the president, it's always appropriate to make sure you're in good health. You're the president. Right. It is our business. You're the president. Yeah. Okay.

I'm sorry. I was trying to apply logic to a new logical situation. No. He's just a mad man. Right. Yeah. That's the answer. He's a journalist in the Philippines, the deadliest country in Asia for journalists.

Five, I think, have died, at least, since he took office. Jesus. DuTerte responded, just because you're a journalist, you are not exempted from assassination if you are a son of a bitch. So it's good to know it's going to be a qualifier. Right. Yeah. It's hard to say how serious Rodrigo is about that or half of the ridiculous things he says.

The president is on record as saying that out of every five things he says, only two are true and the other three are just wisecracks. That's why it's hard to know if his next plans for the nation include an expansion of the state of martial law in Mindanao. When asked about that, he has said, quote, you know I have to protect the Filipino people. It is my duty. And I tell you now, if I have to declare martial law, I will declare it. I will declare martial law to preserve my nation, period.

So he's probably going to declare martial law. Yeah. Yeah. Or he's joking because you know how funny martial law is. That might be one of those three out of five statements that he's joking about. Right. Right. I wonder, he's claimed to kill people at least three times.

So the odds are he's at least not lying about one of the murders that he's admitted to committing. Rodrigo Duterte, quite the fellow. How do you feel having learned all this? I feel great. I feel good. Good. I feel energized. I feel like it's motivating me to do more with my life and lie more often.

That does seem to be one of the through lines of all these bastards is that if you just keep lying and saying insane things to people and shouting. And then not accepting responsibility whatsoever. No. Accept responsibility. Call everyone a son of a whore. Have people shot. Yeah.

That is, if I was going to write, what's this famous self-help book people like, The Purpose Driven Life. Perfect. The Death Squad Driven Life. You could do a Duterte themed version of that and it would have a lot of good advice for politics and murder. Yeah. Which are, yeah, unfortunately have come together as one thing in this podcast.

Well, they're inextricably intertwined. Yeah. Well, this has been great. You want to plug some plugables before we, I am Blake Wexner. That was just me stalling for time, so I said my own name. BlakeWexner.com at Blake Wexner on Twitter and then new album, Stuck Boy, my stand-up comedy album is out on everywhere you download that shit. Beautiful.

Yeah. You can find us on BehindTheBastards.com, all of the sources for this article will be available. You can also find us on Twitter and Instagram at At BastardsPod. We have t-shirts and coffee mugs and phone cases and stuff with all sorts of funny doogos on them. You can get them on the BehindTheBastards store for T-Public. So check that out too.

The money goes to me so that I can buy narcotics. So yeah, help me not be as sober as I am right now in the second. Anyway, check us out. We'll be back next Tuesday and every Tuesday from now until the end of time and until then I love about 40% of you. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. And our federal agents catching bad guys or creating them. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become

the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know. Because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your

podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.