Media reported that Duterte told his 42-year-old son that he would stand by and watch him murdered like all of the rest: “My orders are to kill you if you are caught, and I will protect the police who kill you.” Of course, unlike the thousands murdered under Duterte without a charge or trial, it is doubtful that his son would be so causally dispatched by Duterte’s police hit squads. He finished with his signature rambling: “That’s better … so I can say to the people: ‘There, you keep talking. That’s my son’s corpse.”
The very idea that this man is the head of a major nation, let alone an ally of the United States and someone President Donald Trump called“a good man”, shocks the conscience. It really does not help to say that you carry out extrajudicial murders in your own family as well as society.
Duterte remains popular with many Filipinos but he has appealed to the darkest impulses of the population, including heaping praise on the Ferdinand Marcos who murdered thousands and stole billions in the country.