Part of Duterte’s success is the fact that he says the right things, at the right time, specifically for his audience. This audience, of course, might not necessarily be us, who stand strongly against human rights violations, or repression, or state violence, or misogyny. But we barely matter. His audience is his base of supporters, who have been listening to him, who wait for him to speak, who hear him through his propagandists from Bong Go to Mocha Uson. These mouthpieces will deny they speak for him, but it won’t matter: they deliver the same rhetoric, in the same tenor, with basically the same content. It is all the absentee-President needs to stay afloat.
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