Rodrigo Duterte



Hitler massacred three million Jews. Now, there is three million drug addicts. I'd be happy to slaughter them.

Rodrigo Roa Duterte is the former President of the Philippines from 2016 to 2022. He has been comparable to fellow authoritarian populist lunatics Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro for inappropriate remarks and being an outright dickhead. Unlike Trump, who only thought he could get away with killing someone in public, Duterte has actually repeatedly bragged of killing people extrajudicially while he was the mayor of Davao.

During Duterte's tenure as mayor of Davao (1988-1998, 2001-2010, 2013-2016), he was allegedly complicit with the Davao Death Squad which operated from around 1993 onwards. In 2009, the Human Rights Council of the United Nations and Human Rights Watch accused Duterte of being supportive of the death squad.

He is known for his War on Drugs as soon as he became President and has often just killed anyone who does drugs because apparently doing drugs is way worse than murdering people. He has also been quite sexist and likes bragging about raping women and otherwise attacking women's genitals. Duterte also uses homphobic slurs, but it's okay because he used to be gay, but Duterte's homophobia is not a more conservative position than that of mainstream Filipino politicians, who are heavily Catholic. Indeed, Duterte has made rather conservative and harsh remarks on LGBTQ+ issues, but by Philippine standards, which are very conservative in actual policy, he is implementing a somewhat liberal LGBT policy.

Crimes against humanity aside, Duterte has made many inflammatory statements in public: attacks against the Pope (the "son of a whore", which is also how he referred to Obama), the Catholic Church ("full of shit"), and a rape "joke", none of which have seemed to sway public opinion of him. The last straw may have been Duterte's insulting God: What he did was, Eve eats the apple, then she wakes up Adam.… So Adam eats the apple. Then, malice was born. Who is this stupid God? That [expletive] is really stupid if that's the case.…

Proving that he is unable to take even simple criticism, in 2020 Duterte was accused of being complicit in, if not outright responsible for, the broadcast shutdown of ABS-CBN, a major television network in the country, citing allegedly biased and unfavorable news coverage against Duterte beginning with his campaign in the 2016 Philippine presidential election among other things. Prior to the network's shutdown, he also sought to have independent news site Rappler suppressed over its exposes against Duterte's regime.

While he is often called the "Filipino Trump," which makes him sound like a reactionary, he self-identifies as a leftist. In fact, PDP–Laban, his personal party, is also a democratic socialist and left-wing populist party. In other words, he is a very strange politician whose extreme right-wing tendencies and leftist populist aspects coexist.

And like Trump, one columnist opined that Duterte exhibited a reality distortion field especially during his campaign, where his charisma and appeal to the masses–who were understandably anxious for change in the country–prevailed over both his human rights abuses and obscene remarks towards people and organizations, including but not limited to the Roman Catholic Church and even God himself.

In 2022, the International Criminal Court launched an investigation on Duterte over human rights violations during the drug war. In response, Duterte petulantly withdrew the Philippines from the ICC, but prosecutors said he cannot stop the probe no matter what. As he is term-limited, Duterte might very well be indicted by the ICC for crimes against humanity as an ex-president.