Carolyn Kaster/AP

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt attends a meeting at the White House in Washington on Feb. 12, 2018. Trump is offering his support to the head of the EPA, who is at the center of swirling ethics questions.

Donald Trump first uttered the rallying cry “drain the swamp!” just three weeks before the 2016 election. Promising to “make our government honest once again,” Candidate Trump unveiled a five-point proposal aimed at reining in the influence of lobbyists.

“Drain the swamp!” quickly became one of Mr. Trump's central campaign promises – and one of the most popular chants at his rallies.

Today, experts on government ethics say, President Trump is presiding over one of the most ethically challenged administrations in modern history, especially this early on. Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, is only the latest example of a cabinet member operating under a storm cloud. Most recently, Mr. Pruitt has been accused of an improper housing set-up connected to an energy lobbyist, unconventional pay raises to favored political appointees, and reassignment or demotion of senior staff who questioned his spending. His job reportedly hangs in the balance, amid mixed signals from Trump and his spokespeople.

Other Trump cabinet members have already gotten the heave-ho, after questionable spending came to light. Former Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin, fired last week, had faced criticism over travel expenses for a trip to Europe, including airfare for his wife, which he says he repaid. Mr. Shulkin, who had also served as an under secretary in the Obama administration, maintains he was let go because he resisted pressure from the Trump White House to privatize veterans’ health care. 

All presidents deal to some extent with alleged wrongdoing by senior appointees, but “I have never seen anything like this,” says Scott Amey, general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan government watchdog group.

Why is this happening, especially under an outsider president who swooped into Washington promising to change the way the capital operates?

One answer may center on what, exactly, Trump meant by “drain the swamp.”

Focus on deregulation

“We thought he was saying, ‘Hey, there’s going to be a new sheriff in town,’ and that he would do things differently with the revolving door [between government service and lobbying] and cleaning up ethics laws and regulations,” says Mr. Amey.

But so far, draining the swamp has been more about deregulation and shrinking the federal workforce, and less about strengthening or even adhering to the norms and rules of ethical behavior for government officials. Trump’s attacks on the media and on entrenched members of Congress – of both parties – have also tended to label them as members of the “swamp.”

Of the proposals in Trump’s original five-point plan, only one is fully in place: an executive order barring executive branch officials from lobbying for foreign governments or parties after they leave the administration.

The president’s own behavior has been important in setting the tone for his team, political analysts say.

Trump has yet to release his tax returns, defying the customary practice of modern presidents. He faces multiple lawsuits over his businesses and whether the income he derives from them violates the Constitution’s emoluments clause, which forbids the receipt of gifts from foreign countries. A federal judge ruled last week that one of the lawsuits can proceed. Trump’s business dealings are also under scrutiny as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and whether the president colluded with the Russians or engaged in obstruction of justice.

Besides Pruitt and Shulkin, multiple Trump cabinet secretaries have found themselves in hot water: Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin have all faced questions about their use of taxpayer money. In addition, Trump’s first secretary of Health and Human Services, Tom Price, was fired after just seven months on the job, following reports that he had spent $1 million in federal funds on private jet travel.

Not that members of the federal bureaucracy are above reproach. Former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe was fired last month after the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility found he had leaked to the media and “lacked candor” under oath, charges he denies.

Question of experience

But the swarm of ethics allegations facing Trump’s team is unusual. It may well reflect the fact that Trump is new to public service and came into office under his own ethical cloud, says Mickey Edwards, a Republican from Oklahoma who served in Congress from 1977 to 1993, including a stint in the leadership.

“I think some of [Trump’s appointees] came in with a sense of, ‘We’re now the bosses, and we can get away with whatever,’ ” says Mr. Edwards, now a vice president at the Aspen Institute and author of the book “The Parties Versus the People: How to Turn Republicans and Democrats into Americans.”

Like Trump, some appointees entered the cabinet with no prior experience in public office. Secretary Carson, at HUD, was a renowned surgeon, and ran briefly for president in 2016, before becoming a prominent defender of Trump and then a cabinet secretary. The purchase of a $31,000 dining set for Carson’s HUD office set off an uproar last month; he has testified that he was not involved in the purchase, and canceled it.

Secretary Mnuchin, a former investment banker and film producer, faced criticism last fall when the Treasury Department’s Office of Inspector General found that seven flights he had taken on military aircraft had cost the federal government more than $800,000. The report stated that no laws were broken, but criticized the use of federal funds all the same.

But other Trump appointees came to the administration with extensive experience in government, either as members of Congress or in state government. All have previous experience working under governmental ethics rules. Before coming to Washington, Pruitt was attorney general of Oklahoma and before that, a state senator.

Kind words for Pruitt, but ...

Both Carson and Mnuchin seem to have weathered their storms. But Pruitt may not. Trump still praises him publicly – he’s doing a “great job,” the president tweeted on Friday – but such kind words are no guarantee of job security. According to news reports, chief of staff John Kelly advised Trump last week to fire Pruitt, though Trump wasn't ready to let him go at that point. Friday morning, Trump and Pruitt met. 

The dilemma for Trump is that, as head of the EPA, Pruitt is doing exactly what the president wants – rolling back environmental regulations that he says have been holding back economic growth. Three Republican members of the House have called for Pruitt’s resignation. But prominent conservatives have defended him, including Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky.

Senator Paul tweeted Thursday that Pruitt is “likely the bravest and most conservative member of Trump’s cabinet” and is needed to help Trump “drain the regulatory swamp.” Senator Cruz, in a tweet, blamed “Obama and his media cronies” for wanting to drive Pruitt out.

Conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh opened his show Thursday with a full-throated defense of Pruitt, blaming the liberal “deep state” for attacking the embattled EPA administrator. Mr. Limbaugh, with millions of listeners, has broad power to influence public discourse among Trump supporters.

Other conservatives speak of a “witch hunt” against Pruitt – the same language Trump uses when speaking of the Mueller investigation.

“The ‘witch hunt’ meme comes from the top, and is applied to anyone who disagrees with the president,” says James Pfiffner, professor of public policy at George Mason University. “Instead of confronting the issue, or arguing against the allegations, they resort to name calling. It is very sad.”

The crowd is rapturous, as Hungarian far-right rocker János Petrás strides onto the stage, launching into the song he starts all of his concerts with lately, “Soldiers of Hungary.”

He rouses the audience with his lyrics, calling on Hungarians – real Hungarians, meaning white and Christian – to get on their feet and defend a nation pitted against “half the world.”

Many of his fans know the words by heart and sing along, joining him in choruses about “freedom” for the “homeland” and the “holy land.” Sweat drips down his face. Fists pump in the air.

Mr. Petrás has penned 186 disparate songs for his band Kárpátia, but all of them are essentially about one thing: “Loving the homeland,” he says in an interview before the concert, held in a ho-hum community center in this nondescript town outside  Budapest. And for him there is no doubt about it: His homeland is under threat. “Europe is a Christian continent, a Christian place, and it is under attack by migrants, and also by the liberal point-of-view.”

There are no campaign posters here for Hungary’s parliamentary elections, set for Sunday, but this may as well be a political rally for incumbent Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. These rockers were once more closely aligned with the far-right fringe in Hungary, but Mr. Orbán has since co-opted their message on homeland.

In fact, as he seeks to win a third consecutive term, he has made defense of the “Christian nation” – against migrants; against globalism; against American-Hungarian Jewish philanthropist George Soros, whom Orbán blames for both; and most recently even against the United Nations – the centerpiece of his platform.

Yet, in his zero-sum portrayal of the stakes, whipping up nationalism and nostalgia along the way, the fear of others has grown, and many say the strong homeland that so many Hungarians seek has, in fact, never been more fragile. Surveys show xenophobia at its highest since the fall of communism.

“It is raising suspicions in society, not just against the target,” says Endre Sík, a Hungarian sociologist who measures xenophobic attitudes, “but also against each other.”

Christianity and xenophobia

Leading up to the ballot, Orbán has dialed up the panic. On March 15, he gave a speech marking the 170th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, which painted Hungary, and Europe, at the “epicenter of a civilizational struggle” in which mass migration is threatening “Christian culture,” he said. “This is our homeland, this is our life, and we have no other.”

These words resonate among his base, who in them see patriotism. Gyorgyi Marosvalgyi, a 60-year-old elementary school teacher dressed in an elegant yellow scarf, is one of the few concert-goers to take a seat at the Kárpátia concert before it begins. She says Petrás’s songs give her the chills. “I have the feeling of cooperation, of all being together,” she says. “I shiver when I hear the words, thinking about our ancestors, and the past to be proud of.”

Sara Miller Llana/The Christian Science Monitor

Far-right rocker János Petrás (r.) and his band, Kárpátia, sing to a rapturous crowd about homeland in a town outside Budapest.

But she calls the future “very questionable,” and that’s why she plans to vote for Orbán Sunday. “His purpose is to stop migrants. He is a very religious man,” she says. “He works for a Hungarian vision of the country.”

That vision has changed dramatically over the past 30-plus years. In his studies, Mr. Sík has asked the same question on xenophobia since 1992: Should Hungary allow in all asylum seekers, none, or only some? In 1992, 15 percent of respondents chose none. The year Orbán won his second term, in 2010, it was 29 percent. In 2017, 60 percent said none, the highest on record. He calls this the intentional push of the “moral panic button” to shore up support.

And the message jars with some of the Hungarian faithful's view of what it means to be a Christian. The religious roots of Hungary trace back to Stephen I, who in 1000 AD founded the Kingdom of Hungary and later was venerated as its patron saint. Though like in all Soviet nations, religion was largely repressed here during the Communist era, Hungary, like Poland, retained its Catholic identity. But unlike Poland, Hungary has not been a particularly churchgoing society, and in fact Catholic affiliation has declined since 1991. For Christians, Orbán's revival of a religious identity in Hungary ought to be rejuvenating. But that's not the case for some.

The day after the concert is Palm Sunday, which is called Flower Sunday in Hungary, during which church-goers carry bunches of pussy willows.

After mass at the Church of the Holy Family of Zugliget, Attila Herbak is buying jam with his wife and four young girls. He discusses the sense of community inside the church and points to a plaque which commemorates the role it played helping East German refugees escaping for West Germany in 1989, after Hungary dismantled its border with Austria.

That, he says, reflects Christian ethos. “Orbán is creating an enemy, either the EU, or George Soros, migrants, whatever it is. But it’s not the reality, it doesn’t exist,” he says. Of those who seek to defend a Christian nation against all others, he says simply, “I don’t understand how they can say they are Christians.”

‘Open society’

Andras Kovats, director of Menedek, which helps asylum seekers and refugees, says he sees a missed opportunity in the new embrace of Hungary's Christian identity. Instead of being used as a symbol of differentiation between “us” and “them,” he says, it should be an inspiration for building bridges.

As Palm Sunday mass is underway elsewhere, his organization is celebrating the Persian New Year at a Budapest restaurant named, fittingly, Refuge, where he is welcoming a diverse crowd of locals and his clients. “If we talk about Christianity, our Christian heritage, I think we ought to talk about it in a positive manner. This is something we have, something which gives us strength,” he says. “But this political discourse, this identification of the community as a Christian community, is very much based on political fear-mongering and fighting. It’s a constant combat.”

“These people come to Europe because they see it as the land of opportunity, the land of their future. If we have such strong values, then why not share it with these people?” he says at the celebration. “The kind of society we advocate for is a society strong enough to remain open.”

The very phrase “open society” is a loaded one, as it shares a name with Mr. Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Soros has long been a target of Orbán – and populist leaders throughout Europe – who claim the 87-year-old Holocaust survivor wants to bring his left-wing vision of the world to traditional societies via his nonprofit funding. Billboards ahead of the campaign feature his face with the claim that he’ll dismantle the border fence that Hungary erected in 2015 during Europe’s migrant influx.

Orbán railed against Soros in his March 15 speech. “In the end we sent the Sultan home with his Janissaries, the Habsburg emperor with his accomplices, and the Soviets with their comrades. And now we will send Uncle Georgie home.”

Csaba Csontos, spokesman for the Budapest branch of Soros’s Open Society Foundations, condemned the speech for its divisive nature. “Unfortunately the government party has no other message to Hungarians than Soros-bashing, a message that is anti-migrant, anti-Soros, anti-international entities,” he says. And the anti-Soros campaign has magnified anti-Semitism in the country, he adds. “It is Mr. Orbán’s narrative that liberalism, someone with liberal ideas, equals a globalist, the people without homeland.”

A history of loss

Such globalists get Petrás, who won a top cultural award from the Orbán government, going. His newest album is called Territorium, and its message is this: “Everyone should stay where they are,” he says, "similar to how animals are. Everyone has their own place in the world, this is our place.”

And yet his notion of Hungary’s own territory is much more expansive than present-day borders. His ballads, surprisingly folkish and pop-like, are odes to the Kingdom of Hungary, before the Treaty of Trianon of 1920 that left the Hungarian state landlocked and with two-thirds less land. He sings about the plight of ethnic Hungarians outside the country, getting him banned from performing in many, including most recently Romania in December.

Outside the show, merchandise features black hoodies with an embroidered turul, the mythical bird that guided the Magyars on their founding of the Hungarian nation. Ancient Hungary is on his mind each time Petrás plays.

“Every concert puts one nail into the coffin of the Treaty of Trianon,” he says.

Krisztián Ungváry, an historian and author of “The Siege of Budapest,” says a sense of loss runs through Hungarian history, from territorial and population loss under the Treaty of Trianon to the failure of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. Many Hungarians still blame the US and NATO for the latter, based on a Communist-propagated myth that the West had promised backing for the uprising. (Petrás, when asked where his patriotism derives, says his father drove an ambulance riddled with 32 bullet holes during the uprising.)

Mr. Ungváry says Hungary has often been on the losing side of liberal pacts and treaties, and today Orbán masterfully plays on old resentments in his nationalist drive. In Orbán’s narrative, the EU, the most liberal of projects, threatens Hungary’s pride and place in history. In emphasizing the country’s Christian roots, Orbán is not speaking to a deep religiosity in Hungarian society but a fear of multiculturalism imposed by the West. “Viktor Orbán has positioned himself as a savior from Western Europe,” he says.

‘We have to talk about these questions’

Árpád Schilling says that the transformation to democracy and capitalist society happened so quickly that people were told what they were supposed to believe and how they were supposed to act, but not taught their rights and responsibilities – what he believes lies at the root of Orbán’s power today.

Mr. Schilling was a successful theater director in Hungary but left it behind in 2008 to focus exclusively on community building, particularly for youths, with his Krétakör Foundation. It takes pro-democracy, pro-inclusiveness projects into rural communities that deal with the toughest questions of the day, from gender to race to migration. He blames not just the ruling party but the opposition too for failing to engage in real dialogue around these issues.

“Everyone is against migration, but nobody knows what it is,” he says. “We need to talk about what we think about our own migration, of the hundreds of thousands of Hungarians who have left this country for better jobs or better lives, about how we feel when British people say ‘we don’t need Eastern European immigrants.’ We are very insulted. We think, ‘how do you talk about us like that?’” he says. “The first thing we have to do is talk about these questions.”

Schilling says too many lack the educational tools to discern the contradictions. Instead, he says, Orbán tells the people that Soros wants to relocate hundreds of thousands of migrants to Hungary, and ruin the “homeland,” and they believe him. “Orbán gives this pride to people but in a very bad way, because we can be proud only if we think all the people are enemies around us.”

Mr. Kovats, of Menedek, says it is normal for communities to fear the kind of changes that new immigration, geopolitics, and cultural change imply. Two years ago, at the height of the migration crisis, their organization led a campaign precisely about the legitimacy of fear. “That is fundamental in our training, that to be afraid is absolutely valid,” he says. “But it is the solution that has to differ. If you are afraid and if you remain in that status, then you lose. You can’t win a fight if you're hunkered down.”

The idea of home is elastic, he says. People want to improve their homes, to move to new ones, to renovate them to reflect the times. Home, both spiritual and physical, should be a show of strength to the world. “If your home is in order, then you are probably very proud of it, you want to invite guests. If your home is in disarray or you have problems at home, you are less likely to invite anyone in.”

Today he sees a society guarding its home. “People are afraid and don’t get the right answers.”

Romeo Ranoco/Reuters

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte reviews honor guards upon his arrival during the 121st founding anniversary of the Philippine Army (PA) in Taguig city, Metro Manila, Philippines, March 20, 2018.

The first time Margie saw Rodrigo Duterte was on the hit Filipino talk show “Gandang Gabi, Vice!” (“Good Evening, Vice!”)

President Duterte – still mayor of the southern city of Davao – sat before a live audience and opened up about his political and personal life: He conceded that he did things others wouldn’t do, like using brute force to wipe out crime. He bantered over his extramarital affairs. He danced to a pair of American pop songs. 

Margie, a factory worker, was struck by Mr. Duterte’s candor and humility. Here, she thought, was a man grounded in a culture she recognized – a foil to highbrow politicians with their foreign degrees and lofty speeches. Duterte, she says in Tagalog, “seemed genuine.”

Less than a year later, Margie counted herself among 16 million Filipinos who handed Duterte the presidency. Today – despite his reputation abroad as a misogynist and despot – Margie (whose last name has been omitted for privacy) stands by her president.

“I know he’s got a lot on his mind, because it’s hard to be the father of our government,” she says. “But I know he will help us.”

Duterte is a source of deep dissonance among Filipinos today. Either he is leading the Philippines to ruin, paving the way for the demise of democracy and human dignity; or he is carving a violent path out of the mire of crime and corruption that has corroded the nation’s soul for more than three decades, and shattering status quos along the way. In each side’s eyes, the other lives in a fantasy wrought of malice, ignorance, or some warped combination of both.

The grounds for the West’s condemnation of Duterte are already familiar: that his most notorious acts – joking about rape, cursing world leaders, commanding an anti-drug war with thousands of casualties – are an affront to democratic ideals like civil discourse and human rights. Not all of his supporters contest that. But in the president’s coarse, authoritative manner, they see order, competence, and authenticity in a country where red tape makes a nightmare of getting a driver’s license or starting a business; where cab rides could quickly become robberies; and where the ruling philosophy has long been that everyone – from local traffic cop to head of state – can be bought. 

It is a vision defined by fear, many of Duterte’s critics argue, and that fear is ripe for exploitation. But if the president’s rise was powered by a “politics of anxiety,” it is intertwined with a “politics of hope,” sociologist Nicole Curato argues in a 2016 article that pushes against simple interpretations of his popularity. Duterte’s message confronts many Filipino voters’ concerns in a way that they see as both aggressive and empowering, giving voice to the “agency, esteem and collective aspirations” they feel mainstream politics has denied them, she writes. 

Supporters like Margie speak of Duterte as an avatar for hope and change in a country buckling beneath three decades of weak and corrupt leadership. His allies among the upper classes say he has the backbone to stand up to powers, both foreign and local, that have long exploited the country’s people and resources. And his aversion to bureaucracy and self-proclaimed penchant for blunt solutions have been salves to a swath of citizenry that has felt politically impotent for decades. 

“In all the years I’ve been alive, and I’m old now, nothing has changed. Things just got harder,” says Margie. “So when I saw [Duterte] on ‘Gandang Gabi Vice!’ I said: Let’s give this guy a try.”

Jessica Mendoza/The Christian Science Monitor

Factory workers Gina and Margie explain why they support President Rodrigo Duterte on Feb. 26, 2018, at the offices of the Associated Labor Unions-Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (ALU-TUCP) in Quezon City.

Near midday on a Monday, Margie and a colleague sit side by side on a small gray couch at the national offices of the Associated Labor Unions-Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (ALU-TUCP) in Quezon City. Posters exhorting, “Jobs for all” hang on the whitewashed walls. A window air-conditioning unit labors to dispel the humidity.

The two women have suffered through the three-hour trek from their homes to get an update on a wrongful termination lawsuit they had filed against their former employer, an electronics company. (The company contends the layoffs were due to financial pressures, but the women claim it was because they formed a union.) For months, they had waited for the government to process paperwork that would allow them to receive two years’ worth of back pay from the firm, Margie says. 

Then, in early February, they called the president’s 24/7 grievance hotline. Less than a week later, the papers were released. “It was so fast!” Margie says, leaning forward in her seat, wringing the small pink towel in her hands. 

The administration has yet to produce evidence that the hotline has made a dent in dismantling institutional red tape. Still, Margie’s story points to a key part of the president’s sustained appeal, says Louie Corral, ALU-TUCP vice president. Headlines have for years trumpeted that the Philippines has one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, he says, but the working-class Filipino hardly ever sees windfall from this progress. In 2016, the nation’s 50 wealthiest individuals were worth nearly a quarter of the country’s gross domestic product. Meanwhile, more than 20 percent of the population makes less than $2,000 a year.

“A Filipino worker, looking at all these high-rises going up and seeing the new car shows putting on their products for display, understands the kind of lifestyle he will never have,” Corral says. “Duterte spoke to that as candidate and still, now, as president. He speaks to that sense of frustration in that they’re helping create this wealth, but they’re not sharing in it at all.”

What something like the grievance hotline provides is a sense of agency in the midst of that helplessness. “The politics of hope opens up spaces for citizens to visualise better conditions within their lifetime,” writes Curato, a research fellow at the Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis at the University of Canberra in Australia, in her 2016 article.                                 

Money and prestige might afford the middle and upper classes a more comfortable vantage point, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t also yearned for transparent, efficient government. Rey Joseph Nieto, a writer who runs the pro-Duterte political blog Thinking Pinoy (slang for “Filipino”), recalls his shock when he moved to Davao in 2007. By then, Duterte had been mayor for five terms, was on his way to six, and had developed a reputation for turning the city around by being tough on crime.

“You know that feeling when you come from the Philippines and you go to Singapore for the first time?” Nieto asks, in a mix of English and Tagalog, during a phone interview. “Everything works. If you need something, you can get it.” That’s how he felt in Davao, he says. “I didn’t have to worry about safety, about paperwork.” 

“If he does [in the rest of the country] just 20 percent of what he did in Davao,” Nieto adds, “he’s golden.”

***

In mid-March, Duterte announced his intent to withdraw the Philippines from the International Criminal Court, a decision met with global criticism. The ICC – established in 1998 as a way to prosecute individuals accused of war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity – is currently looking into the deaths of more than 8,000 people since Duterte began his drug war in Davao City in 1988.

In Manila, the fear and anger about the campaign are real. Hundreds of reports, many from local photographers, have captured the horror and heartbreak families and communities experience when a drug addict – or someone suspected of being one – is shot to death on the street. Media, human rights groups, and the Roman Catholic Church (the Philippines is a majority-Catholic country) have all denounced the killings.

“Killing civilians, killing as a solution, is not a solution,” says Raymund Villanueva, a local reporter and director of the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines. “That’s a failure of governance.”

How then to explain Duterte’s satisfaction rating, which in the last quarter of 2017 averaged at just above 70 percent among Filipinos across most ages, class, and gender?

Critics of the president – who often dispute the validity of such surveys  – tend to see his support, in part, as a commentary on human nature. Empathy fades in the face of hunger and poverty, they say, and the value of life diminishes when that life is unfamiliar – when the dead man is not a friend or family member; not someone of the same class; not perceived as a law-abiding or contributing member of society.

“To the ordinary citizen, a life is only valuable when it is close to him,” Rizalito David, a board member of the Pro-Life Philippines Foundation, says in Tagalog. “If he thinks someone is breaking the law, that person’s life is forfeit. ‘It’s good that you’re dead, because you were selling drugs or using drugs.’ ”

The drug war is billed as a war against criminality, which many, both poor and privileged, see as the reason the streets were so dangerous and the country’s progress kept stalling. Margie, for instance, claims she’s never felt safer in her neighborhood. “It used to be very dangerous once you stepped outside,” she says. Anyone out after 10 p.m. risked getting robbed, raped, or killed, she argues. “At least now there are plenty of cops making the rounds. You’re not afraid of the street anymore.”

Was killing really the way to get there? Margie frowns. “To be frank, if that’s what you’re facing anyway, we might as well make sure there are fewer bad people,” she says. “No, really. People have been killing each other [in my community] since I was a kid. Who do you think the victims were?” 

***

Franco Mabanta strides into the lobby of the swanky Dusit Hotel in Manila’s central business district. He stops to greet some people he recognizes, then commandeers a table at the hotel restaurant. T-shirt peeking out from under a suit jacket; hair in a “man-bun,” sides shaved, Mr. Mabanta, 34, is among the president’s most prominent and controversial advocates online. [Editor’s note: Mabanta and the reporter have known each other for nearly a decade. Their families have long been friends.]

His central assertion: Duterte is unafraid to do what needs to be done to get the country on the right track. 

“I thought that corruption would always be there, that it would be our ubiquitous Voldemort and it would never go away,” says Mr. Mabanta, a social media strategist whose company handles campaigns for a number of politicians, including, he says, pro-bono work for the president. “When I first heard [Duterte] speak, I felt this beaming hope that things could actually be different.”

The way Mabanta sees it, Filipinos are tired: of bureaucracies that don’t work, of social conservatism that stifles innovation and progressive thinking, and of leaders who grovel to superpowers like the United States. For the first time in his lifetime, he says, world leaders seem to recognize the Philippines as a player, not just a pawn. To Mabanta – and, he says, to many supporters – much of that is thanks to Duterte’s willingness to face down the corrupt and the powerful.

“I can imagine the stress knots on his back every day,” Mabanta says. “Yet he does not care.”

The president has Filipinos’ best interests at heart, he adds. “But he also thinks that in order to control a big population he has to function through fear.” 

Duterte’s (not to mention Mabanta’s) critics argue that a society governed by fear is a broken one; that a struggle to disentangle religious conservatism from public policy was already underway; and that cozying up to the likes of Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin is a questionable enterprise at best. Corruption and violence against journalists and activists is worse than before Duterte took office, according to the latest report by the non-governmental organization Transparency International.

Above all, Duterte’s opponents say, none of these supposed successes are worth the cost of so many lives.

“We have a president who thinks nothing of killing tens of thousands,” says Mr. Villanueva, the journalist. “A switch has been turned off in the minds of those who can accept that. Something’s wrong.”

If so, it may not last. Since 1986 – when dictator Ferdinand Marcos fled the country – nearly every Philippine president has enjoyed high support in the early years of administration. Eventually, each leader stumbles, along with his ratings, says Leo Laroza, communications director for Social Weather Stations, one of the nation’s top polling institutions.

Back at ALU headquarters, Margie and her colleague wait to close our their case. They want to find steady work, and live stable lives. And they hunger for leaders who will help them do so.

“My goal in life is to be able to pay for my [condo] unit,” Margie says. “That way I know I’ll have somewhere to go when I get old.” Her mortgage is 3,000 pesos, or $60, a month – a far-off dream for someone who, when employed, gets paid about $6 a day.

But she’s willing to hang on “because we know: our president, he will help us,” she says. “I know he will.”

Todd McInturf/Detroit News/AP

Adults and students walk away from the John R. King Academy passing a Detroit Police Bomb Squad vehicle after the scene is cleared safe by first responders in Detroit, on March 22, 2018. Threats against schools have increased since the shooting in Parkland, Fla., in February, leaving authorities scrambling to determine authenticity.

The Snapchat post showed several guns and warned @MHS students not to go to school the next day. It spread so quickly in January that it sparked investigations in at least 30 states at schools that share those initials, until police in Virginia arrested a juvenile and declared it a hoax.

Since the February shooting in Parkland, Fla., school districts have faced a predictable spike in such threats. Some real plans to do harm have been thwarted as alert students, parents, and citizens speak up. In many more cases, threats have not been genuine. But no one wants to miss warning signs that could prevent the next school shooting.

Increasingly, those “signs” are coming through young people’s communications via social media – a realm where it can be particularly difficult to tell the difference between a real threat, a hoax, and a comment that would be constitutionally protected, such as a joke or satire.

It’s making for a lot of sleepless nights for school officials and law enforcement as they try to balance school safety and justice.

“School shootings are a needle-in-a-haystack problem…. The challenge of looking for a needle in a haystack is that you mistakenly pull out a lot of hay,” says Mark Dredze, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., and one of the authors of a briefing on preventing youth violence by the American Psychological Association in 2016.

“We need to carefully consider the implications of wrongly suspecting someone of violent intent,” he adds.

Society wants to send a strong message to young people to deter hoaxes that can cause expensive disruptions. On the other hand, if adults misinterpret statements, and punishments go overboard, they risk alienating the very students they rely on to report truly worrisome messages from their peers.

For at least a small subset of innocent students, there’s also the risk of permanent disciplinary records or criminal justice involvement – which can have serious implications for their education and mental health.

Banned from Internet before trial

Justin Carter’s attorney says his case serves as a cautionary tale.

Mr. Carter faced felony charges of making a terroristic threat in Texas in 2013, and he was expecting to go to trial next month. The charges, stemming from a Facebook post mentioning shooting up a kindergarten, carried up to 10 years in prison.

The comment was taken out of context – a hyperbolic back and forth with a fellow gamer who had suggested Carter had mental problems, says Carter’s attorney, Don Flanary of San Antonio. It also did not name any particular school or otherwise indicate a plan, he says. 

Carter, 18 at the time of the post, was assaulted in jail and faced extremely high bail, $500,000, which kept him there for months, Mr. Flanary says. For five years, while pre-trial challenges went through appeals, Carter had no access to the internet. 

On March 28, he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of making a false report and received time already served.

“In this day and age, threats to shoot up schools and harm children simply cannot be tolerated,” Comal County Criminal District Attorney Jennifer Tharp told the Express-News. Ms. Tharp did not respond to the Monitor’s requests for comment.

The plea suggests the prosecutor didn’t have evidence to prove the more serious charges, and that if the teen needed to learn a lesson, he probably learned it five years ago, says Carlos Monagas, managing deputy district attorney in Riverside County, Calif., who co-authored a law review article on social media threats in 2016.

School threats are serious, but the First Amendment is meant to protect people like Carter from being punished severely for speech that isn’t intending to threaten, Flanary says. “We could say … here’s a list of things you can’t talk about in our country; don’t even joke about it…. But that’s not how we chose to create our democracy…. The First Amendment creates a lot of mess in society, but the pros outweigh the cons.”

He acknowledges, though, that in this day and age, people need to be mindful that even flippant statements about shooting up a school might cause concern. The misdemeanor charge can cover something that triggers emergency response even if not intended to. “It’s a better fit with his acts, and allows him to be done with this,” Flanary says.

Blurry legal lines 

The problem from the law enforcement side is that the legal lines are still somewhat blurry when it comes to social media threats and the First Amendment. 

Some prosecutors and state lawmakers have been calling for better laws to catch up.

“Threats that a young person would probably never deliver in person, they somehow feel OK delivering online … but the recipient doesn’t have the social cue to let them know this is a really bad joke,” Mr. Monagas says.

California and many other states need “a law that is more specific to school threats but that also lowers the bar of proof somewhat, so we can capture threats that are targeted at specific campuses,” he says. Then the system could intervene, “not to destroy the life of the young person, but to in fact help to educate and turn that young life around.”

There’s no national tracking of threats against schools, but the nonprofit Educator's School Safety Network saw an average of 70 threats or incidents of violence per day in media reports in the weeks after the Parkland shooting. That’s up from about 10 per day last fall. By late March the number had tapered off to about 40 a day, says Amanda Klinger, director of operations for the network, based in Genoa, Ohio.

Ms. Klinger says about half of those threats have been coming through social media.

At least eight states have laws specifically addressing threats against schools, with several more considering them, Sarah Pompelia, a researcher at the Education Commission of the States, told the Monitor in an email.

Some communities aren’t waiting. Orlando, Fla., fast-tracked a misdemeanor category for school threats, to close a loophole that police said made it too difficult to make arrests. At least one commissioner cautioned against overreacting, noting that mental health supports should also be addressed, the Orlando Sentinel reports. 

Cases like Carter’s were on the minds of First Amendment defenders who sent briefs to the US Supreme Court when it considered Elonis v. United States in 2015. The Elonis case involved alleged threats made via social media in forms such as rap lyrics. They targeted an individual, not a school.

Many in the legal community hoped the ruling would broadly address “the First Amendment status of threat speech in the unique social media context,” says Frank LoMonte, director of the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

But instead, the narrow ruling left a lot of uncertainty.

When it’s a matter of school discipline, rather than criminal charges, “the courts have been much more forgiving in allowing punishment for speech on social media,” Professor LoMonte says. 

Trust-building plays a role

While police and prosecutors have an important role, some educators and school safety experts say promoting safety is first and foremost an educational issue.

Too often, dollars go to hardware such as security cameras instead of to training for educators and administrators to serve on threat assessment teams and handle crisis communications, says Ken Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services in Cleveland, Ohio.

Prosecution of disruptive threats can be a good deterrent, but people also need to ensure that students don’t worry that the law is going crack down too hard on their peers, since “most of the best tips right now … are coming from students,” says Ron Stephens, executive director of the National School Safety Center in Westlake Village, Calif.

“We’re always good about saying ‘Oh, let’s pass 15 more laws.’ Maybe what we need to do is create a much better spirit of cooperation,” Mr. Stephens says. “Some of the schools that have done the best job of reducing school crime and creating that safe haven of an environment, they find that school children tend to share more of their concerns.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File

A war re-enactor hangs out by his tent in the Union camp during the Battle of Gettysburg reenactment on the 150th anniversary year of the event, on July 5, 2013, in Gettysburg, Penn. Documents from the Civil War are among those that volunteers today are being asked to transcribe to make them available online.

One of the hazards of transcribing historical documents is that you never know when you might suddenly find yourself in the middle of a battle. 

“I was typing these notes about what seemed like a routine day [on an aircraft carrier],” says Colleen Crook, a retired teacher. “But then the Japanese attacked … and there was a strafing incident and people died and it was very dramatic.” 

Ms. Crook, who lives in Columbus, Ohio, is a volunteer with the US National Archives. Programs like the one she’s part of can be found at libraries, archives, and other institutions across the United States, as groups push to digitize documents so they can be available to the public online. The keyboard work of these “citizen archivists” helps organizations complete projects that otherwise would not have been possible – and in return brings people closer to history. 

“Having a group of people work on it for you and create something that is useful and good for scholars is immeasurable,” says Mario Einaudi, Kemble Digital Projects Librarian at the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif. 

To prepare volunteers for the work, organizations host trainings and workshops, even “transcription parties.” Those who want to get right to it can visit websites like that of the National Archives or the Smithsonian’s Transcription Center for digital volunteers. Online training prepares volunteers (there are already 10,748 of them on the Smithsonian site) to work on projects such as transcribing the field notes of an Irish naturalist who liked bees, or the receipts of an ivory trader. 

The purpose, the site explains to would-be typists, is to “make our collections more accessible and useful to curators, researchers, and anyone with a curious spirit. Because computers have a hard time understanding handwriting, many of our collections still hold many secrets and hidden knowledge inside their pages. With your help, we can bring that knowledge to life.”

Projects throughout the country are benefitting from that spirit. Thanks to more than 5,000 volunteers, it only took a year and a half to transcribe telegrams and ledgers for the Decoding the Civil War project – launched in 2016 – that Mr. Einaudi is in charge of at the Huntington Library. “In terms of time and staff labor, we could have transcribed everything, but I estimate that it would have taken us four to five years,” he says. 

This was the first time the library had crowdsourced a major project. “That was totally new territory for us,” he says. 

Elsewhere, volunteers like Amber Oldenburg say that the activity transports her to not only a time but a place she might otherwise never experience. “I guess I like getting into records that I maybe would not have exposure to,” she says. “When I’m looking at a Mexican baptismal record, I don’t usually see those on a daily basis.”

Ms. Oldenburg – who is studying family history research at Brigham Young University-Idaho and also conducts historical research for clients – has done most of her volunteer work through The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. One historical record she transcribed that stuck with her was a list of slaves in Louisiana. “You see the master’s name, and then all you see – it was just so heartbreaking. You just see these, just, checkmarks. ‘Ten-year-old mulatto boy’ – you know, no names, nothing,” Oldenburg says.

The current popularity of looking into a family’s past can sometimes motivate her to do one more record, hoping that it will help someone trying to connect the twigs on a family tree. “I think it really does give me more incentive to say, rather than searching Facebook right now, I can be indexing this,” Oldenburg says. “I could be using my time more wisely.”

But can amateurs really do what those trained professionally can? Patricia Delara, an assistant archivist at the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco and a processing archivist for the Archdiocese of San Francisco, says that transcribing is just a small part of the job. Her duties also include processing collections and helping patrons and researchers, among various other tasks. 

“I’m all for getting the public in and working together for the archives and … bring[ing records] out there, making it accessible...,” she says. “But I think there should be a different way to [refer to] these volunteers, because in a way, having a different name other than ‘citizen archivist’ would also help put more into detail what the archives profession actually is.”

One area that the public, including younger helpers, struggles with is being less familiar with cursive writing. “It’s one of the most amazing things that I have seen as a librarian and as an archivist, is the fact that we have a younger generation that cannot read handwriting,” says Einaudi, whose project offers a primer on historic cursive.  

Despite that difficulty, staff at the Huntington Library are already anticipating tapping volunteers again. “As a result of this, a number of our curators here are extremely excited about the possibility of continuing this and doing new projects with crowdsourcing of material,” Einaudi explains.

When Crook, the volunteer from Ohio, thinks about those whom her work could help, she envisions her transcriptions aiding people who are attempting to find out more about their family tree.

“In terms of other research, I don’t know,” Crook says. “I hope it’s of value. But if not, it’s still interesting to me.”

AP Photo

Survivalist and television personality Bear Grylls, right, and actress Julianne Hough participate in AOL's BUILD Speaker Series in 2016 to discuss the television show, "Running Wild with Bear Grylls."

Of all the global trends today, two seem to be on opposite poles. One is the new feminist era of #MeToo, which aims to elevate women in ways that would prevent abuse by powerful men. The other is the era of the ultra-masculine strongman. These men are rulers like Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Egypt, and Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela who preside over nominal democracies.

Such men may find inspiration from Russia’s Vladimir Putin. For nearly two decades, he has systematically undercut opponents and found scapegoats – such as perceived threats from the West – to justify his long-term rule. These leaders sometimes display a male physicality, epitomized by the iconic photo of a shirtless Mr. Putin.

With the appeal of strongmen on the rise in many nations, what could provide an alternative model of leadership? Might it be found in the #MeToo movement?

The answer to the latter question, of course, is yes. The #MeToo movement puts an emphasis on lifting the views of men about their identity to include the positive qualities of both the masculine and feminine. The best leaders of the modern era – and of either gender – can be both strong and nurturing, wise and cooperative, brave and consoling. In many companies, a popular concept of leadership entails “followership,” or an expertise in effective listening and consensus-building.

Men in particular should express a “relaxed masculine confidence,” as writer Richard Godwin puts it, that is not threatened by feminine qualities. For women, there are numerous female leaders who have displayed masculine qualities in difficult times. Britain’s “Iron Lady,” Margaret Thatcher, led her country through the Falklands War. Many women now run Fortune 500 corporations in traditional “male” industries.

Popular culture also can help one gender adopt the best traits of the other.

Bear Grylls, the popular host of reality TV shows such as “The Island” and “Running Wild with Bear Grylls,” teaches contestants how to survive in the wilderness, an endeavor that could be seen as ultra-manly. But he rejects conventional views of manliness. When men arrive on his shows to test themselves, they “think it’s all about machismo and muscles, but it’s not,” Mr. Grylls told The Times of London. “I don’t think being macho is about banging your chest,” he adds. “It’s a much quieter thing. Being a man, hopefully, is showing those qualities of kindness, courage, and humility...” that actually yield better results for surviving in the wilderness.

Such higher views of masculinity can help shape leaders who reject the destructive era of the strongman’s false masculinity. The #MeToo movement is not just about ending sexual misconduct of powerful male leaders. It can also be about men and women redefining leadership itself.