Transcript of the above video: 

Well the question arises now, we did a video recently on this. Okay let's do the background here. You have got to go all the way back into the first term of the Trump Administration, which not since Grover Cleveland, have we seen a non-consecutive Administration in America which is a credit to Mr. Trump's electoral prowess I do have to say. So okay, at the end of the first term, and I have got to admit myself, I kind of forgot all about this and sort of just tacked it on to this sort of intervening Administration or the Administration that came in between the two, the Trump interregnum if you want to call it that, whatever, but the Biden Administration that came between Trump one and Trump two, I kind of attributed the Uyghur issue more or less to that Administration, that that was sort of priority for them. In point of fact, apparently it was not. It was something that apparently the torch keeps getting passed, it's something that is considered a priority if you will inter-administratively and I didn't really see that - I don't think Thailand really quite understood the implications of that - but we did the videos on that where we wanted to point out, okay, myself I didn't really think of the fact that yeah right there at the tail end of Trump one, this Uyghur thing came up and then we sort of saw the culmination of that involving a deportation which I still don't exactly know what the US expected the Thais to do. But okay, we ended up with this sanction issue which I even was on Twitter likening this to that scene in Bad Santa where the little kid comes up, sits down on his lap and he's having a not great day, but the kid says, "Fraggle stick car" and Billy Bob Thornton looks at him like "what?" He uses some expletives, but he looks like "what is that?" and the kid just goes "Fraggle stick car". All right, I heard you, "Fraggle stick car." That's kind of how I took this whole Uyghur situation. It's like okay, we didn't really notice that was such a priority. Clearly there was a little bit of "lost in communication" or "lost in translation" between the changeover in these administration's and the very unique nature of this non-consecutive Trump Administration, so I think we can chalk it up to that. 

That said, apparently this is having slightly wider or could have slightly wider ramifications. It was my understanding this was going to be sort of narrowly focused on less senior level officials here in Thailand, perhaps those that had more to do with the actual deportation itself, but that remains to be seen now. I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: PM unsure if she is on US Visa ban list. Quoting directly: "Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra said she does not know if she's on the list of Thai officials recently banned by Washington from obtaining visas to visit the country due to the recent deportation of 40 Uyghur detainees to China." And again, let's just chalk it up to miscommunications all around, but I still kind of fail to see exactly what Thailand was supposed to have done under these circumstances. And it's especially difficult to ascertain what the message was supposed to be in sort of the garbled nature of this, again non-consecutive Administration and this policy string if you will or theme if you will, sort of running through it and the prior Administration. Long story short, it's complex to say to say the least. 

That said, quoting further: "Ms. Paetongtarn addressed the media on Tuesday regarding the decision. When asked if she was affected, she said, "There's no confirmation yet. I still don't know." She said the Foreign Affairs Ministry would provide further explanations given more clarity on the issue, adding Thailand has no divisive issues with the United States and was simply fulfilling its responsibilities to the best of its ability in repatriating the ethnic group after their decade-long detention in the Kingdom."

Yeah, again they, what were they supposed to do? I kind of like it into that moment Blinken came in here at the end of the last Administration and had this brief interchange with our Prime Minister here in Thailand, and it was like, "oh that flood is bad," and she was like "yeah, yes. We get that." I mean I'm not trying to be funny in all this and I do get that there are deportees at issue, but these weren't Americans; this was a 10-year long thing. Thailand clearly went through lots of due process here. Again, this is kind of one of those where there's no real clear good side, it's just a difficult situation. That said, as we said in the other video, loud and clear, we get that this is an issue. Hopefully we're not going to see negative ramifications from this go out more broadly than they need to.