and I'm

hesitant to just say cycle because it's been a couple of cycles now that have just been poisonous for incumbents and anybody who has the stench of incumbency on them.

And I think that's a lot of what's going on.

There's just a ton of discussed with the status quo in the United States.

And this is actually not just here, it's in much of the world.

And in ways that are very inchoate, like people don't necessarily know what they want that's different, they just want things that are different.

And I think a lot of that is what El-Sayed represents.

He's a Black

And the second one is perhaps maybe we can talk about Jimmy Barbecue, his own origins, his relation to the state, and how this relation is perhaps indicative of the larger structural issues in the Haitian state and governance.

Yeah, absolutely.

So the thing to understand, taking it back to Ariel Henry, who you talked about, after Moïse is assassinated, there is sort of a question of who's going to run this place.

And there were kind of two dueling prime ministers because his current prime minister was on the way out.

He had announced his intention to have Ariel Henry assassinated.

be his next prime minister.

But of course the prime minister couldn't be approved because that has to be done by parliament.

So first part of my question, I was wondering what you think the function of anti-Haitian rhetoric specifically is within the second Trump admin's kind of mosaic of racial and ethnic policies, or to put it another way, Why Haitians? And then in closing, what would a plan to stabilize, restore and uplift Haiti look like in your mind? What are the different stakeholders in Haiti missing or neglecting, whether it's domestic governments and interest groups or foreign governments, international agencies or NGOs?

Is this the Monroe Doctrine, what I've been hearing about a lot in the last few days?

So the Monroe Doctrine gets – invoked in this period in a way that is equally wrong to the way the Monroe Doctrine is being invoked in 2026.

The Monroe Doctrine, as it is called, isn't really a thing.

In 1823, James Monroe, the President of the United States, gives a State of the Union address, or actually delivers a written State of the Union address to Congress.

And in it, he covers a whole bunch of ground.

but he makes a couple of statements that are actually not even written by him.

They're written by John Quincy Adams, who's his secretary of state.

What would you say to that?

What would you say to that?

I would answer with a question.

Worked for who and was good for who? you know, very much throughout the, certainly in the first decades of the 20th century, and then again during the Cold War, the United States invades, the invasions are really more the beginning of the century.

We invade, conquer, occupy, overthrow governments.

And the answer is that a lot of these episodes worked out pretty well for, you know, say, major U.S. business interests.

United Fruit is one of the big examples.

So United Fruit, which is now Chiquita Brands International, is a They end up a major land holder in Central America.

God, it sounds so much like Venezuela right now with the conversation about oil.

Is this the Monroe Doctrine, what I've been hearing about a lot in the last few days?

So the Monroe Doctrine gets invoked in this period in a way that is equally wrong to the way [chuckles] the Monroe Doctrine is being invoked in 2026.

The Monroe Doctrine, as it is called, isn't really a thing.

In 1823, James Monroe, the President of the United States, gives a State of the Union address, or actually delivers a written State of the Union address to Congress, and in it, he covers a whole bunch of ground, but he makes a couple of statements that are actually not even written by him.

They're written by John Quincy Adams, who's his Secretary of State, and what Adams, and thus Monroe, are saying is, they're basically just saying, "We recognize..." So there are all these independence movements happening in Latin America, Spanish America, mostly, as it, as it's called, where all of these colonies of Spain are rebelling against Spain and getting their independence, right? Chile, Mexico, Peru, et cetera.

And what Monroe, what Adams and Monroe are just saying in this State of the Union address is, "Congrats, guys, [chuckles] on getting your independence, and we think that our policy should be that the European empires who these colonies are getting their independence from should lay off.

They shouldn't come back and try to re-colonize them." This is really just Monroe, Adams and Monroe saying, "Hey, we're Republican," small R Republican, "brothers-in-arms with these fledgling democracies in, in the Western Hemisphere, and we're siding with...

Um, but maybe the people who are in charge now are like, "Well, but it worked, and it was good." What would you say [chuckles] to that?