 I want to welcome everyone, hello. And thank you for joining the New America Fellows and the Future Security Program for this discussion of Patricia Evangelista's book, Some People Need Killing, A Memoir of Murder in My Country. My name is Philip Bennett and like Pat, I'm a journalist and I'm a former ASU Future Security Fellow and I'll be moderating today's discussions. In the redundancy department, I've been asked to say the same housekeeping notes that were just told to us by the faceless voice we just heard, but they're worth noting. We will be taking questions and encouraging them. So please drop them in the box and in about the last third of our hour, I will, I'll share those questions with Pat and we'll have a broader discussion there. And the second and important message is apparently you can see a button on your screen that says buy the book and I would very much encourage you to do that. The books are available through the New America Bookselling Partner Solid State Books. So please take advantage of that opportunity. I want to say a few words of introduction. Pat Evangelista is a trauma journalist and former investigative reporter for the Philippine news company, Rappler. Her reporting on armed conflict and disaster was awarded the Kate Webb Prize for Exceptional Journalism in Dangerous Conditions. In addition to being a 2020 ASU Future Security Fellow, she has been a Headlands Artist in Residence and a Fellow of the Logan Nonfiction Program, the Chivitella Ranieri Foundation and the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. Pat lives in Manila, but she's joining us today from Brooklyn, where she is launching this book and talking about it with people around the country. So Pat, it's great to be with you today, welcome. It is an honor to be here and it feels a little bit like coming home given how much New America has supported the writing of this book. So thanks for having me. Great. So thinking about a way into this difficult and so important subject, in some ways the book is a chronicle of many deaths foretold. And back in 2016, with the rise of Rodrigo Duterte as a presidential candidate, you and some other journalists could see what was coming. In fact, you wrote in a column before the election, the streets will run red if Duterte fulfills his promises and indeed they did. So I wonder if maybe we could just start by having you take us back to that election and remind us how a public policy of extrajudicial killing, you know, took hold of the country at that time. Well, in 2016, a mayor from South of the Philippines ran for the presidency. His name was Rodrigo Duterte. And he ran on a platform of death. He said the fish would feed fat on the corpses of criminals. He said morticians would grow rich with the deluge of dead. And essentially what he did was he took every fear and every uncertainty fueled by decades of failed expectations in the Philippines. And then he gave the enemy a name. He called it the scourge of illegal drugs. And he didn't believe in rehabilitation. He didn't believe in restitution. He believed in retribution. He said that drugs were responsible for the shambles the Philippines was in and that addicts were paranoid, heartless, mindless, bestial, bizarre, all of that. And then he won. In the aftermath, people started dying every night, corpses spiling up on the streets. And to your point that we had seen it coming. Yes, we did. We also, as many people all over the world, don't quite expect politicians to really keep their promises. The difference is that when Rodrigo Duterte told the story, a story of all these troubles and that he would end it, he would destroy it. It wasn't just any other story because he was the punisher from the South. Under whose watch, hundreds had been slaughtered reportedly by death squads he had organized on his own. So he could make the promise of death because he claimed he had done it himself. So when I said the streets would run red, I felt bad that I had written that line because it sounded very much like purple prose, a little too dramatic, a little too much. And then I remember being on the street months later and standing on a curbside, stepping on the gutter, a body behind me, and then the blood ran over my boots. And then I remember that line and I thought, well, I guess that wasn't purple. So the killing starts almost right away or does start right away as inauguration. And you at the time are working at the news site, Rappler. You're not a police beat reporter. And so how did you move into this night shift, really gritty, dangerous kind of reporting? Why did you make that decision and how did you do that? Well, I'm a trauma reporter. I've been, before the drug war started in 2016, I had been reporting on trauma for maybe 10 years. And by that I mean, I went to the places where people died. So it was in the aftermath of typhoons. It was in the aftermath of massacres. It was in the aftermath of internal conflict or to report on child sexual exploitation. My beat generally was to look at what happened in the aftermath of terrible things happening to people because those things shouldn't have happened and shouldn't happen again. So when I knew the drug war was coming, I told Rappler, I would be on the street for this. Rappler is too small, at least was too small at that time to even have a police beat reporter. So I mostly a roving investigative reporter. So it was inevitable I would be on the street for this. And the way I got into the night shift was the way all of us did. We sat outside the Manila Police District and waited until the next body drop. So describe that in a little bit more details just so we get a picture of it. And we'll come in the course of this conversation to talk about individual cases and et cetera. But so you're staying up all night or you're up late and you're physically waiting like in a waiting room. Just describe how you're reporting where you race off in cars to a site and then find a body and presumably... Well, yeah, the night shift, it's just a very loose group of sometimes there are foreign correspondents who come in, who come out, who go out. But mostly it's photographers and reporters from many new agencies across Metro Manila. And we would show up maybe nine in the evening outside the Manila Police District outside the press corps office. And then for maybe a few minutes for a few hours, it depends on how the night was playing out. We would sit there and smoke. We would look around and see if the cop cars were racing. We knew which cars would go for corpses for a body drop. When the... Usually it's the radio reporters who got the feeds first, we would chase. So we would sit in our cars, we would race off. There would be one body and then the next body. Sometimes we never went back to the police district because we'd get an alert. There's a body across the 7-Eleven. And then we would go. And at that one particular time, actually, there was a body or we were told there was a body at the 7-Eleven, a dump. A body dump is just, you know, the person is not killed there. It's just it's the body's left there. And we went to the 7-Eleven. There was no body. And then we were told, oh, it's the 7-Eleven, two streets down. So we go to that one. And we cover the crime scene. And we're out there drinking coffee, having done the reporting. And then we get an alert. Maybe 20 minutes later, there's a body in front of a 7-Eleven. We go, we're here, it's done. And apparently it was a 7-Eleven we had just left. In the 20, 30 minutes that we were gone, someone was shot in front of it. So we go back. Some nights there are too much dead for us to cover. Some nights there's one or two. But I guess in terms of methodology, there are many crime scenes. And I had learned across years of doing this that you're not a camera. You take it all in, you know? And you have to stay grounded on the field at least. And whatever happens, happens after that. So the way I operated was that I came up with my own methodology in that I would ask the same questions every night. Was it a drive-by, a body dump, a salvaging, a buy-box? Was the killer a cop or a vigilante? Was there a gun on the ground? Were the hands bound? Was the head wrapped in tape? Was the body stuffed into a bag? Was there a sign beside the body? Was something of a checklist that I ran through? Confirm the street corner. Speak to the investigating officer. Sidle up to the bystanders. Find out if they knew the dead man's name. But the new thing about the drug war, something that it took me a while to learn was I learned to stand still and then listen for the screaming. Because that's when you find out where the families are, who the families are. So you learn to walk softly. Apologize. Condole, keep your voice low. Your question simple. What was his name? Where was he born? When did you see him last? How did you know he was gone? Usually, all it meant was I would say, take me to that moment. Tell me a story and tell me what happened next. And the reason that was important to me, I'm a narrative reporter. So I would have a test for it just before I went back to the car and didn't have to be a crime scene. It could be an interview in the aftermath. If I could close my eyes and see the room or the highway or the alley in 360 degrees. If I knew that the cop had wiped the blood off his hands on his own shirt. Or if I could remember that the blood on the ground was the consistency of tomato ketchup. If I remember that the sheet of paper stuffed into the back pocket of the corpse folded four times was spiked in times near Roman all caps size 12 saying, I am a drug dealer. Or that the killer walked away instead of Fran or that the bullet cracked through the right temple instead of the left. It's the color of the shoe, the tenor of the screen. The fact that the dead man was wearing bikini briefs when they stripped him on the street. I would run through that in my head in sequence. And if I could do that, if I knew that meant I could go home that I had done the job because I would take the story home with me. Because I can't write about what I cannot see. And because it's narrative, I can't make people feel what I can't imagine. So it was that night, afternoon. You said two things I wanna come back to. The first is you said you mentioned the investigating officer. You must have been assuming at that point that the perpetrators were either policemen themselves or connected to the police and that the officers that you would meet on the scene knew things about the murder that you did not know. Was that an assumption you made when you went to those scenes? There were, if you want to put it very simply there were two kinds of deaths. People who died in what the police called legitimate police operations. Meaning that allegedly the dealer, the addict, the criminal, the suspect had drawn a gun or offered resistance and the police had no choice. The phrasing actually occasionally a spot report is that they're forced to retaliate. It's an odd turn of phrase. So they died in an official capacity meaning as the president would put it they died legally. The other sort of deaths they're called deaths under investigation. That's the government parlance. The human rights parlance is extrajudicial killing or targeted assassination or summary execution. Those are your body dumps. Those are your salvaging. So those are your drive bias. So in both cases, there's always a crime scene. And in the crime scene you always have an investigating officer. So in the first case, you're caught there. Generally the stories I do are stories where there is a suspicion, a general suspicion that this is a setup. That there was no gun on the ground when the man died. If there is a gun occasionally the gun is reversed in the hand the trigger is on the wrong finger all of these things but there is a performance of regularity every time. They still pick up the bullets. They still take fingerprints. And even if I suspect that this did not happen in the way the narrative in the police report plays I will ask the question. I will also perform regularity because I didn't expect them to tell me to my face. Yeah, we showed up, he opened the door we shot him in the head. I will let them tell their story. I will listen for everything possible. And then I will find witnesses. I will find the family and I'll see how the story plays out. The other thing I just want to draw attention to that you said, which is one of the really striking things about your book is the way that you chart the language of violence that really takes root in the Philippines during this period. And it's tied to impunity, to disinformation and a kind of Orwellian vocabulary of euphemisms and doublespeak. And you've mentioned already the word salvaging which I had not heard in this context before. Can you just talk for a moment about, first of all what salvaging means and where that term comes from and then the other uses of language that you found as you reported on the subject. I like that you asked that question and that then I won't pop out like a language nerd. I like words and I like the odd turns of phrase. And because we're Filipino and we're an American colony we, our language is English. English is the first language for a lot of us along with Filipino, but we play with a language and the way, you know, in ways other countries don't. So there's in the seventies during the dictatorship the Marcos dictatorship, there was a particular word that evolved for a particular kind of death. The word is salvage. In any other country salvage is a hopeful word means to rescue, regardless of whether the rescue is a ship or a soul, because it has the same root word as salvation, salvage to save. But in the Philippines it's a contraining. It's a Janus word, two-faced, adversarial. Salvage for us means to die in a particular kind of way. So if Rene was salvage, Joshua was salvage, Crisanto was salvage, it means they're dead. And dead in a particular way. I think it was 2015 when the Oxford English Dictionary appended the draft definition, salvage, Philippine English to apprehend or execute a suspected criminal without trial. Now those of us who grew in the Philippines, grew up in the Philippines, we didn't know salvage meant to rescue. So it was years later for most of us even before we learned how to spell it we knew what it meant. And I don't know how much time we have, but would you like me to tell you a story that shows you what salvage is? Yeah, yeah. All right, so you know now my methodology and how to put together a story. So at that, I think it was late in 2016. I was on the night shift and I was standing at the high point of a bridge. And there was all of us, the photographers, the journalists in the screaming circus of a Manila crime scene because we were in the middle of a highway. They had cut off the side with a body, but the other side was just rampaging with trucks and cars and everything. So it's loud and it's noisy. And then there's a body on the ground with a yellow crime scene tape around it. And the body, the man was lying on his back in the shadow of the parapet wall. Now he was a big man and he had big bare feet and his head was wrapped in packing tape. And there was a sign beside him. It said that he was a drug dealer. So that was when I heard the scream. It came from the bottom of the bridge and I heard her before I saw her. She came running up the bridge and then she dropped her knees and outside the crime scene tape beside me. She said her name was Ivy. She said the dead man was her husband. She said she knew him by his feet. So the cops, because this was a death under investigation, the cops tried to lift the mask off the face, but the adhesive had hardened everywhere. So they used a pair of scissors and the scissors broke and they used to cut her and they went from the edge of one ear to the end of the other until they could lift it off like a hockey mouse. And that's when we saw that the face underneath, it was still slack and still damp and there was a line under his chin. So René Desierto had been garoted, suffocated and in the autopsy reports later, stabbed 19 times with an ice pick. So in the aftermath, Ivy lost her job. She tried to cut open her wrist twice. Occasionally she would wrap her head in packing tape because she said she wanted to know how it fell. And in the years after when I would visit, I would bring a bucket of chicken for her son and we would sit across the dining table and she would put the nash tray in the middle. I would push the cigarettes across, we would light up. Then I would say we're on the record. And the reason I tell this story in this particular way is that salvaging is not just a single crime in that when it happens, the person becomes a warning, a scarecrow. It ripples across lives and communities because this is what you can be. This is what the aftermath is. So he is not safe. He is. If you want to go further with a metaphor, the death is salvage for future use. Here is your example. If you are one of these people, then you die. You spend a lot of hours sitting with families of victims. You're in an unusual situation because you're writing about, the center of what you're writing about are people you can't actually interrogate because they're dead. So you're building a portrait of them from people around. You're sitting with them. You're getting them to trust you. There are the kind of transactional elements that occur in a journalistic setting. Not all of these, and there's something in common with many of these families is that they're poor. They're not listened to. They are under threat themselves. So oftentimes other family members are being targeted. And yet you find people who really do push back, who try to find out or to assign some kind of impunity or get some sort of clarity about what had happened. And one of the people you write about is a family of a young man named Justin with a D, D-J-A-S-T-I-N. Tell us just a little bit about that family and him and how they reacted to his death. I learned actually across sometime doing this, that it was very important to speak to families who had some sense that there could be a reckoning. This kind of work requires an enormous amount of consent. And I learned never to make any promises to ask them about risks all the time. And for Justin's particular case, I went to the funeral. And I went to the wake. I didn't go to the crime scene. I didn't know about it when it happened. So the story is something I built across many interviews across three, four years actually. Justin Lopez was a young man, 25 years old, one of nine children. And he's epileptic. He was epileptic. And he was his mother's particular favorite because he needed her. He needed to be cared for differently from the other siblings. He also was occasionally a meth user. As many people are across my country, but he was a nice boy, his mother's nice boy. And when he left, he went to the railroad tracks and aftermath of the character selection. And as per witnesses, the cops came streaming in except they were not in uniform. Again, this is the version of the witnesses. They were not in uniform. And they found Justin, they pushed him into the railway tracks, shot him, and then he seemed to have suddenly been consumed by a seizure. So he was jittering. And then the cop slapped him in the face, shot him, slapped him, shot him, kicked him, then shot him again. And that was it. On paper, it was reported in the spot report as police operation during a legitimate encounter by a suspect who was armed. Justin's mother didn't believe this story. There were in the beginning witnesses who said this was not what had happened. So the mother, Normita, protested. She joined the rallies. She stood beside other mothers who also did the same thing and she filed cases. And there was threat to life, obviously, at this point. And they had identified already the cop who had done this. They filed at the Ombudsman's office, which is the court that tries cases of government officials, whether cops or mayors. And they won. The cop was removed from his position, but it meant charges would be filed, criminal charges would be filed in another court. Went on for years and the cop kept trying to settle. And Normita said, no, no, you can't buy my son's life. But there was some, there was tension in the family. Obviously there's risk to life. They are poor. The money would come in useful. So I had taken this story because it was an example of a woman of a family who decided to fight back. And the latter part of the book was when I had discovered that under pressure they had accepted settlement. It was a difficult situation. And there was some confusion. Should we go on the record? Should we go off? And I will always say the same thing. Can we go on the record? And she did. That's why the story goes in full circle. And in as much as narratively, it would have been neater to have a family to keep fighting. This is more realistic. This is true because it's one thing to have some possibility of justice. But that possibility needs to rest also in the sufficiency of the families who are also fighting it out. So this, I am sure this is not the single case this has happened. And I absolutely respect the family's choices and incognition of the tension and the sacrifices they had to make. So my hope, at least in that story, is I honored that choice. And the bravery when they said, you can tell the story. We're at the bottom of the hour. So I want to encourage those in the audience to send in a question. We've gotten a few already. And in about 10 or 15 minutes, we'll open the floor and share those questions with Pat. I want to ask you about Rappler a little bit and about the impact of your stories. Because, of course, you're writing. You write a series called Impunity. You're digging into this as it's happening. And you're doing it for a new site that is interesting in its own regard. It's a startup in the 2000s and some things, 2013 or so. One of the founders is Maria Ressa, who goes on to win the Nobel Prize. And, of course, it attracts a lot of attention from the Duterte government. Criminal charges, sanctions, cases that are still unfolding in the court over taxes and the like. And you're publishing in this forum. So my question is, what was the reaction or the response to the stories that you wrote? And was that publishing, did that elevate the risk for you? Or did it create a public persona for you that gave you some sense of protection? I will say, but being an Rappler, even given the threats, was the safest place for me. And not just Maria, all the bosses. And we are a largely female company, not because we chose to be, but because journalism is female in the Philippines. But what was good about Rappler is that there was never any question that I was doing this story, or anyone would do this story. Other news agencies that were local had to calculate the risks and paid for it as well when they took those risks. Rappler had Maria and everyone else in that they shielded us. Maria is something of a lightning run in that for as long as the government looked at her, those of us on the field could do the job. We were a very small house with very few resources. When I tell you I went on the night shift every night, I took one of two cars that Rappler had. And when they say they supported me fully, it meant if any other reporter wanted the car, they could get the other car and Pat gets the one that goes to the night because I needed to be kept safe. So Rappler did all that as much as they could, supported me every which way they could. And to your question of what was the reaction, I don't know if I was preaching to the converted. I don't know if people who read Rappler already believe that people should not be shot in the street. When I started doing this work, I assumed everyone believed people shouldn't be shot in the street. But the longer I did it, the longer I realized that just the choice to cover those stories would be viewed as something like resistance. So it was good to work in Rappler. It was safe because we got taken care of. It was risky because we were allowed to do it and therefore we were putting ourselves at risk. But it was a good place and with good people. You know, thinking about the reaction and sometimes it's, you know, hard to predict. You write in one case. I mean, you know, throughout this book, you're going into the lion's den too. You're not just going to the homes of victims. You're talking to vigilantes. You are meeting with uniformed officers who are later implicated in killings. You become close. My friend, you know, Colonel Domingo, who you and you write a story that you're kind of concerned that he might take issue with or offense or be angry with you, which would be an unnerving experience. And then you find out later, what has he done to with the story? You discover later. Yeah, so I did a feature. It turned out a feature because the family that I was, who's deaf I was investigating was too afraid to go on the record. So I was featuring this police officer of a single police station in Manila. And I assumed he would find the story in flattering. And of course I was concerned. I was also concerned about stepping into that police station. So I stepped into another police station, maybe I don't know, half a month ago without being aware he was a new commander. I see him, I hear his voice and I go, well, here we go. And then he takes me to his office. He's a chain smoker like me, so it works. He steps into, he brings me into his office. He calls me Trish. He nobody calls me Trish, but I'm Trish. So I'll be whoever you want me to be. Trish, I have something to show you. And I see the story I had written, printed out and then framed on the wall. And I'm like, well, that works because I had said that the story was called legendary and that you believe the president was a legend. So I was patterning, showing the similarity, all of that and it was flattering to him. It was flattering to them and perhaps that's how they wanted to be viewed. I was okay with that. I wanna ask you about the costs of doing this kind of work for you and your colleagues. And for people around the, journalists around the world who report on trauma and are exposed to trauma and in some cases are traumatized themselves through the experiences that they have. You know, there's a very moving scene in the film, a thousand cuts in which you talk on camera about this. And you talk about being kind of terrified daily through the process of your work. And you say something that really struck me. You said that paranoia leaks into every part of your life. And I wonder if you could just talk about that in any way that you feel comfortable doing, but also tell us a little bit about how you dealt with it. Obviously you went on to write this book. You've continued to deal with these issues. Tell us a little bit about that process. I think years of covering a state sanctioned massacre that's very strange things to your mind. And months in I was burning transcripts on my balcony. I couldn't go on the phone because I thought someone would be listening. If my phone rings and it's an unknown number, I would think someone's going to tell me someone's dead and it's my fault. And it was everything. It was doorbells and credit card receipts and hotel clerks and wakers. Everyone was suspect, white vans. Your universe becomes smaller and smaller when you do this sort of thing. And when I was doing one of the vigilante stories before I published, Rappler sent me out of the country because they felt I shouldn't be on the ground for this particular story. So they waited, wheels up, publish. Then I landed at JFK. And then there was a disembarkation form. You have to write your name, where you come from, that sort of thing, standard. And I was writing out my name and I couldn't trust my memory for the spelling. I just couldn't trust it. I might get it wrong. And it seemed like the worst thing in the world. So I had to pull up my passport, check letter by letter if I had spelled my name out right. And then when I did, I thought it's not double source, we're not sure. So I pull up my phone, find a photo of my birth certificate and double source through that. And it seems funny and strange and quirky, but when you're in the middle of it, it's absolutely real. Everything is a threat. Even getting a comma wrong, I would think maybe that's grounds for criminal libel because it flips a sentence the other direction. So the way I operated to make sure that my stories were safe, I was safe, my people was safe was to think 10 steps ahead every time. What's the worst case scenario? That's great as a journalist. It protects you. It's terrible as a human being. So how did I function? The best thing I learned at least, and I'm a fellow of the Dart Center for journalism and trauma. And they say this a lot, it's belong to a tribe. People who understand what you do, who belong where you do, who when you say I stood over a body in the ground this morning, they're not going to say, oh, mother fuck, that's a terrible thing because they would have been standing over the same body two days ago. You don't have to bring the story home with you. You can talk it out with them. You will drink with them, you will smoke with them. And when someone needs to lean on someone, you're there. That's how it works. It's a shared language and a shared community. And for me, that was self-care. Along with, very particularly, I watched no movies and read no books that did not have a happy ending. Is there anything about what news organizations often are stretched for resources, et cetera? We all know that story. But there's an implication here for news organizations to take steps to try to help people who are working with them for them in the public interest. Is there anything from your experience that you would say to news organizations besides reinforce the tribe, make that easier? I mean, anything there that you would share with us? I think, I'm not sure about other organizations. Covering the drug war was a strictly voluntary enterprise. And I think it was the same for most of us. So work like this requires a particular short of person, I think. And if I hadn't done this for 10 years before this, or versions of this, I don't think I would have survived it. So it matters that there is consent, that it is not suddenly some young kid on the street, this is the police beat, do the job. It can't be, it has to be consenting and there has to be trauma training, meaning not for our mental health, but for the mental health of the people we interview, that it has to be trauma-informed interviewing. I also think it matters when your boss has asked you, are you okay? I never had to file leave in the years I was covering this. They would just ask, you wanna break? And I took it. Sometimes they would shove me out the door and go disappear, and then I would. We're getting to the part where I'm gonna open this up and we have some good questions. I'm gonna make one more appeal to people to if you have questions, please type them up and I will, Sarah will process them, I will see them and I'll share them with Pat. I just have a couple more questions of my own. And one of them concerns, you know, I mean, I think one of the most striking kind of universal aspects of your story is about the general acceptance or at least complicity or acquiescence of the public in these practices. I mean, this is something that we see. The way, one of the ways that you express this is by people saying, we are duterte. You know, we are, that is us. He is us, right? And you have a really, there's a remarkable phrase in your book about how that there, you know, that there were protests against the killings but you write that they were like a whisper in a hurricane. And I wonder when, if you look back now, if you have, you feel like you have an explanation about why, you know, good people, people who, you know, are not, you know, without a moral compass who think of themselves that way, how could they be so quiet in the face of this type of behavior? I think people have their own reckonings that some people decide that the lives of their own families are more important than others. And some people voted for duterte without believing he would slaughter thousands. And some people are just okay with it because these are, as he said, terrible people are no longer people. They're subhuman, so they should die. It's many things, you know. But at the end of it, I think on one hand it's a function of belonging. It's their tribe. They believe that these particular elements of society are others. It binds them further together. It makes them Filipino in a fashion as duterte. It frames it in that we are people who are protecting the future of the children of this nation. So it's both belonging and othering. But we're not exotic in this, in that there are charismatic men all over the world in countries you must be very familiar with who say outrageous things. And sometimes it's just a little bit outrageous and a little bit funny. And then it becomes more outrageous, less funny. But it's more acceptable. You keep lowering the bar, and then it becomes easier first. It's a drug addict. Then it's an activist, a communist, and then it's a journalist. And probably the next time a member of Congress. So I think if nothing else, I learned, because the title is Some People Need Killing. It's a vigilante who gave me that answer. I asked him why he killed. He said, some people need killing. I'm a good guy, but some people need killing. So if nothing else, I hope that in as much as that is a very blunt sentence. And that's the reason it struck me. It was powerful in its bluntness. That's something we say all the time. It's a question we ask in every conflict, in every area, every time we discriminate against someone. So I would ask, do some people need killing? Is it a particular race, a particular nation, a particular enemy? Because my job is to sound over the body on the ground and say, did he have to die? I don't think there are people who need killing. Outside the very, very narrow area of self-defense, I don't think so. I think that the moment you have other people, they're just not people anymore. So that's what happened in my country. And Duterte told this story and the story was believed. Well, I am going to bring in some of the audience questions now. Before I do that, I just, I want to editorialize for a moment and say how much, I mean, read this book. You know, how important it is to watch you restore the humanity to people who've been robbed of their lives. And I think this is, you know, one of the highest, you know, calling in journalism. And you do it with such an attention to detail and such care that it's just, it's very moving. And I just wanted to say that before we, while we're still within the hour. Thank you so much. You just alluded to other elections, other leaders, other rulers, and 2016 was not the only election in the world that brought somebody, you know, to not make light of it. Same words are described to Duterte as we're described to candidate and then president Trump, which is take him seriously, don't take him literally. Oh yes. And in the case of Duterte, it turned out to taking him literally would have been a good bet. And, but we do have a question about whether or not you were in the United States for periods of the Trump regime. And so I do have a question here from an audience member about whether or not you see points of comparison that are meaningful to you. Well, they certainly know how to draw a crowd. They know how to entertain. And they are charismatic men for whom words matter very little, but who know how to tell a story. So I think more than anything, that's your point of comparison. And they have no trouble delineating between the enemy and themselves. So we are Trump is the same as we are Duterte in a fashion however, however the president or the candidate frames himself, then that is acceptable public behavior for anyone else on the ground. Duterte made himself every man. So every man could be Rodrigo Duterte. And I think that's the same everywhere else because Trump claimed to be one of the people. It's the not thing for a rich man to say that and be supported. But in the case of my country, Duterte said, I'm no one special. I'm one of you. I am an ordinary killer. So he was different. He was a man who could do things, but he carried the same rage as everyone else. And he said, I'm going to fix it for you. I have your back. And the struggle ends here today with me. I think it sounds a little familiar yet. There's a question that, that, that takes that a little bit further just about what maybe this is a question about what your, your, the various audiences for your book and, and what you're hoping that American audiences take from it. And what maybe this is going to be informed a little bit by what you encounter now that you go out and talk about the book in this country, but also in the Philippines. And maybe you could use this as a chance to talk about what the publishing plans are in the Philippines. And are you going to be able to promote the book there? What, I mean, what can you tell us about how the book will be sold in. The book also launched yesterday in the Philippines by launch. I mean, it landed in bookstores or it landed in some bookstores. And I hope I make it clear also that there is resistance in the Philippines against slaughter, against this sort of governance. And there are many people who stand, who stand against wholesale killing. And those people, I am told those people have bought the book and I told those people will continue speaking truth to power. So the book will be in Manila. And I hope it is compelling enough to continue to be read as to plans of my going home and going home. Another of our audience members asks, there are a couple of questions about the present. And maybe this is a good segue from your comments just now. You have, you have another Ferdinand Marcus, who is president of the Philippines and you have another Duterte, who's the vice president of the Philippines. And maybe you could help us understand what the, in the wake of the Duterte government are, are things loosening up? Are they, are they becoming freer for the press? Does it, is it more possible to talk about these things than it was? How do you see what's happening there now? I think the question of whether it's better might be the wrong question. It's not a question of whether it's better. It's a question of, is it good enough? You have a pretty low bar. If it's a question of, is he threatening murder? No, he's not. He's not saying it out loud, but journalists are being killed in Manila. Young boys are still being slaughtered. So just last, maybe a week ago, Duterte himself, the former president threatened the member of Congress with death for questioning his daughter. So I think there is a massive need for the Philippines to reckon with both. It's, it's near past and decades ago in the aftermath of the Marcus regime, there was no real reckoning, which is why the dictator's son is now the president. And that is also why I suspect the punisher's daughter is now our vice president. And they were all voted in for the same reason that Duterte won in 2016. Marcus was voted in on the promise of change. Duterte was voted in for the same reason. And then in the 70s, it was a promise of a new society, just something better than what we've got. And I think there, the Philippines has collective trauma. I hate using the word because I think it might be misused in some fashion, but there is in that you have generations who will grow up who are the sons of people who have been killed and the sons of people who have killed and the children who stood with us at crime scenes, watching the bodies being carried out. All of this is made ordinary and we have not reckoned with it. Is it better? Is it freer? I don't know. I don't think so. I think that after what happened for six years, every journalist who speaks is going to self-censor, is going to be worried about the court case, is going to be worried about being shot outside the subdivision as a radio journalist was months ago. So no, I don't think it's a question of it's better. It's a question of, is it acceptable? I'm going to really try to follow your suggestion that we end this on a happy note. That this movie ends happily. That may be a challenge for us, but I want it. I'm going to try to follow your suggestion. You know, for those who haven't read the book, and as another encouragement that they do so, I mean, I think we've, we've looked at some of the very specific things that you were doing, but this is really a, this is a memoir and it interrogates some big questions about the Philippines. And, you know, it's clear from the start of the book that the, the part of the backstory to what you're describing doesn't mean to be Filipino. And one of your touchstones is really, you know, the edsa revolution. That's when you were growing up in 1986, people power, overthrows, you know, for the Marcos, and that government. And there, there, there is such a moment of hope there. And it's, it's hard to see hope. It's hard to imagine that hope is particular. It's completely extinguished inside of a society. So you, you wrote a number of pages about edsa as a real kind of touchstone for you. Is that, do you still have the, the sense of optimism and hope that that. Episode now, you know, 40 years old. Kindled in the country kindled in you. I was born five months old. I was born five months old. Kindled in you. I was born five months before the revolution. I am 38. So my, before the deterrent administration, my entire lifetime was a sport. I was born free because of that revolution. And when I, you know, grew up became a journalist, I was part of the freest press in Southeast Asia. So I operated under the terms of the revolution. In that we will not allow it to happen again. The slaughter of thousands. That was, that was, that was what I was told. Never again. So I am sorry you want to end on a happy note. I am in no circumstances. I'm not an optimist. I don't traffic and hope. So the way, the way I work as both a journalist and a person is I function under negotiated expectations. I do not believe that my stories will change, will save lives. I certainly don't think it'll change policy. I don't know if, if anything, I wrote saved one life on the ground. But I think my job is to keep a record. A good one. If I can. And that's a big thing for me. So if, if I keep my record straight, if I make it compelling, if I do the job, it means when it's needed, if ever there's a reckoning, it exists. Because if, if people like me don't write it down, it means it never happened. So I'm okay with that. So if you want to be slightly optimistic about that, I had a one year contract with random house. And it took five years. So we're done and we're launched. And there's a record on my table. And I'm happy with that. I just hope I honored the family who trusted me with a story. Well, I want to thank you for this hour. And I want to thank you for this book, which is really enlightening, moving. And a real testament to your, to your journalism, your character. And I really applaud you for it. And I want to thank the audience for being with us and say so long.