This is Mauder Rebels. I'm Ben Norton. We have a guest back with us who is a superstar in Mexican politics and is all over the media right now.

I'm talking about John Ackerman. John is a professor at the Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM, and he's a major ally of the left-wing president, Andres Manuel

Lopez Obrador, who's known by the acronym AMLO, AMLO. So we'll probably, we'll switch between calling him

Amlo and Lopez Obrador in this interview. You all, you know, the hardcore listeners and viewers

might remember that Max interviewed

John back in Mexico after the inauguration of Lopez Obrador.

This was a historic inauguration.

Amlo is the first left-wing president in Mexico in really about 40 years, and he is a progressive who has launched a kind of revolutionary

movement he calls the fourth transformation and has been trying to fight systemic corruption.

He's also pledged to combat neoliberalism. And John Ackerman has been a major supporter of

Amlo and has a lot of enemies on the Mexican right wing.

So today we're going to start off talking about what Amlo has been doing and what the fourth transformation is.

And then later on we'll get into some deeper details here and the kind of scandalous part, maybe the more fun part. We're going

to talk about who some of the far-right forces are trying to destabilize the Amlo government,

including some very weird fringe characters like Iberto Lusano and some others. So we'll talk

about that later on.

And then we're also going to talk about just what the media situation is

because there have been so many media attacks,

not just on Lopez Obrador, but specifically on John recently.

So with that, John, we'll cut to you.

Thanks for joining us.

It's always a pleasure to have you. And can you just, you know, the last time we had you, it was right at the beginning of the Aml administration. There was so much excitement. And what has happened in the past two years?

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