Behind the Bastards - Jair Bolsonaro: The President Who Promised to Kill 30,000 People

Episode Date: November 20, 2018

In episode 32, Robert is joined by actor and activist Behzad Dabu to discuss Jair Bolsonaro, a murderous nutjob who was elected the President of Brazil. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm doing good. So you also want me to note that you're an activist. You want to talk a little bit about what you're working on right now in that regard? A lot of what I do is I work on ways to increase representation and level the playing field for women, people of color, and LGBTQ populations in the media and the arts.

I do a lot of audience talk backs, post-screenings. I do a lot of post-show discussion and audience facilitation. And I do a lot of outreach with theater companies and media companies to help sort of increase the awareness for populations that haven't been represented on TV and film as much as they should be. That's awesome. So obviously our listeners right now, we're holding them hostage a little bit to get to the story. And I think a lot of shows do an ad plug now. Is there a charity you'd like to plug or a specific organization people can donate to to help with that sort of work that you're doing? That's fantastic.

Um, no. Follow me. I plug a lot of organizations. I plug a lot of charities. I plug a lot of stuff. So follow me on Instagram and Twitter and you'll see a lot of things. Right now I'm looking at Sean King has a new publication coming out. He's revamping Frederick Douglass' publication, The North Star. Oh, cool.

And so that's a really cool thing that's happening. The Chicago Inclusion Project is a company I'm a founding member of that seeks to do this type of work in Chicago. And so I'll keep plugging stuff like that on all my social channels. Okay, and consider that stealth plugged listeners. So go check that out. Check out Bezod's social media. And yeah, all right, we're going to get into the story now. Let's do it.

You ready to talk about a bastard? Uh, do you know who Jair Bolsonaro is? I've heard about him a little bit. I keep hearing that he's sort of like the Trump of Brazil. Yeah. And it's frustrating because I think that like, just because of where we are in America politically right now, anytime a populist gets elected around the world, we're like, it's the Trump of Austria. Right, because it makes us understand down to the brass tacks.

We can discuss at the end whether or not you think that title is fair. I would say he reminds me more of a guy like Rodrigo Duterte. But, you know, we'll kick it into there and we'll see how you feel at the end. I saw a meme and I wasn't sure if it was true or not, but I saw a meme with a picture of his face and all kinds of horrible things he said, yeah, around it. And I was like, wow, he is a quotable piece of shit. In a way that like, like to be honest, this is part of why I'm frustrated and people call him like the Brazilian Trump because it's like, no, Donald Trump wishes he could get away with saying this kind of shit.

Really? I mean, maybe in a year or two, it'll be okay. Maybe in six months, it'll be okay for the president to say the kind of things that Bolsonaro is saying. But it's pretty intense. All right. So on March 21st, 1955, one day and 33 years before my birthday, if you're keeping track listeners, Alinda Bonturi, a woman in Glissario, São Paulo, Brazil, gave birth to a squirming and blood-covered baby named Jair Messias Bolsonaro. This little squealing baby would eventually grow into the squealing president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro.

His route to what really seems like it might be absolute power is one that would have seemed unlikely about three years ago, but is by now pretty familiar. I'm going to quote from a time article on Jair written back in August. Quote, Trump may be politically incorrect, but Bolsonaro goes way, way further. In this interview alone, he advocated the possibility of unbridled state violence, equated homosexuality with pedophilia, and defended Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, whose henchmen raped women with dogs, as well as Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte, who is boasting of personally killing criminal suspects.

So, it's the kind of guy we're talking about. What's interesting when you hear that is, like, Trump has compared a lot of homosexuality. I mean, Pence has certainly compared with homosexuality. Yeah. And then the way he's defending Pinochet, I mean, like, Trump's best friend is dude from North Korea. Yeah. And it is interesting, and then an important story, how many of these kind of autocrats, the sort of quasi-dictators who are kind of right on the edge of being... Right. Well, they all have ideological differences, because, like, Duterte is a socialist,

but he and Trump really get along, and he and Bolsonaro really get along, though Bolsonaro is, you know, a conservative. They all, I think, recognize that as autocrats and wannabe dictators, they are more in common with each other and have a common cause with each other. For sure. Yeah. It's really interesting to me. I don't know if it's in your story. I'm just curious on why the people of Brazil... We're going to try to talk about that.

Did he steal this election? He did not. I will say this, it was handed to him by his political opponents. So, we're going to get into that in, like, seconds. Okay. So, I've been able to find very little about Jair's early life, and I'm also trying to pronounce his name right. I've listened to a bunch of pronunciations online.

It's kind of hard for me to get, I believe, it's supposed to be something like Jair Bolsonaro, but I'm not going to get it perfect. I'm going to trust you. I'm working on it. So, I've been able to find very little about his early life, which is unfortunate. I do know Jair's parents originally wanted to name him Messias, which means Messiah, but according to America's Quarterly, quote, a neighbor suggested Jair after a midfielder on the Brazilian national soccer team,

so Messias became his middle name instead. So, Jair was originally meant to be named after Jesus Christ, the Messiah, but upon reflection, his parents decided a random soccer player would be a better name sake, which says some interesting stuff about, like, how important soccer is. They were like, Soccer first. We'll make Messiah the middle name. Jesus' middle name.

Cool. Soccer first. Yeah, and that makes sense for Brazil, too. It really does. It makes sense for, like, 40% of the world. Yeah, it does. Or football, to our Australian listeners and a lot of other people, I guess. His father was an unlicensed dentist, and also the only dentist in the towns where they lived,

which was not uncommon in Brazil at that point in history. Like, if you were a dentist, you were probably just a guy who kind of, like, pulled a teeth and was good at it. And again, we're talking, you know, back in the day here, so there's not a whole lot of licensing going on. The family eventually wound up in a town called Eldorado Polista, which is a rainforest banana growing town that was occasionally host to vicious gunfights between different militant groups and criminals.

Jair spent his childhood regularly taking shelter with his five brothers and sisters underneath beds and stuff, as, like, people in town would just start shooting at each other. So violence is pretty normalized in his childhood. Yeah, it's not rare, which is, again, the same kind of thing you see with a guy like Duterte, you know, growing up, there's a lot of violence around them. It makes harder people. So a lot of what I found on Bolsonaro comes from an NPR article that went to Eldorado and interviewed a bunch of people who'd grown up with him.

Gianni Antonio, who went fishing with Jair when they were both little kids, said, quote, Bolsonaro always said, one day I'll be president. So he seems to have had this goal from the beginning of, like, rising to the top of national politics. Another one of his friends, who's now the vice principal of a local school in Eldorado, says they both spent their childhoods like you'd expect from kids who grew up in the middle of a rainforest. They swam in rivers, they hunted birds, and they played a lot of soccer. Jair grew up during a time of great chaos in Brazilian politics. There was a revolt of lower-ranking military officers against high-ranking officers,

regular labor strikes, and the kind of rapid secession of governments that you tend to see in countries that are headed to a bad place, democratically speaking. In 1961, a guy named Jau Gollert became the president. Now, Jau was a leftist and was focused primarily on keeping his country independent from the United States and the control of the International Monetary Fund. He also was an advocate for greater social justice for the poor in the labor-rank class. He was obviously unpopular with the U.S. government and big business interests, and there's evidence U.S. intelligence agencies started working to destabilize his government as early as 1961.

In 1963, the U.S. government endorsed a group of military officers who sought to overthrow Gollert. So in 1964, Gollert introduced the Reformus Basicus, which is the basic reforms, a series of political reforms aimed at alleviating the difficult conditions of Brazil's impoverished classes. Gollert promised to impose by presidential decree voting rights for the illiterate, the nationalization of Brazilian oil and gas industries, and his hope was basically to do this so the people would benefit from their natural resources rather than a bunch of foreign investors and corporations, mostly United States-based investors and corporations. So in essence, Gollert and the people who voted for him were like,

what if we didn't cut down our rainforests and didn't take a bunch of money that we had to repay from foreign governments and industrialize and instead just sort of lived nice and quiet lives in our beautiful tropical paradise? So a cabal of military officers, we're not big fans of this, and they got supported by the U.S. government and decided to overthrow Gollert. The U.S. government at this point was dominated by Democrats, which is important to note. This started when JFK was in office. So we first start backing the anti-Goller rebels in the military with JFK's president.

Then JFK gets assassinated, LBJ takes over. Ted Cruz's dad, something would say. Yeah, Ted Cruz's dad kills JFK, strangles him, and then yeah, we've got LBJ and he authorizes essentially U.S. support for a coup against Goller. Now the House and the Senate in the U.S. were also controlled by Democrats at this point. And one of the things that's important when you talk about U.S. foreign policy in this period is how everyone was a hawk. Like in the 50s and 60s, whether you were a Republican or a Democrat,

the whole country was addicted to international intervention on a pretty hardcore scale. Even Bobby Kennedy worked as an advisor to Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare. So these are like, when we talk about like Democrats in this period, we're talking about guys who would make George W. Bush be like, whoa. So one of the things that was really important in the thinking of these elected officials in the United States at the time, like when they decided to intervene in countries like Brazil and all across Latin America, is the concept of totalitarianism, which was a pretty new idea back in the early 1960s. So I'm going to quote from an article in the Bulletin of Latin American Research by Anthony Pereira.

Quote, The concept of totalitarianism was important to the realism of this period. Realists argued that totalitarian regimes were ruthless and relentlessly expansionist. The totalitarian menace was supposedly so great that it required the managers of the U.S. state to abandon conventional morality in order to combat it. An important creator of the idea of totalitarianism was Hannah Arendt. Arendt published the Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951. In the book, she uses documents captured from the Nazis to extrapolate to the USSR and create an ideal type totalitarian regime,

unlike the portrait of the Nazi regime, which was based on a rich documentary foundation. The analysis of Stalinism was largely conjectural. According to Arendt, both regimes were monolithic in structure and globally hegemonic in aspiration. So the USSR was not actually a real totalitarian regime. You could argue it was during chunks of the time when Stalin was in charge. But by the early 60s, they'd had a couple of different peaceful transitions of power without mass murder and stuff. And there were multiple factions within the USSR. So it wasn't really fair to call them that.

But because of a lack of knowledge, there was this very strong belief in the United States that the USSR was gearing up for world domination. And there was an equal belief that if a country went with a socialist leader like Brazil had just started to do, they would never come back. Which kind of makes you think like, why are you so convinced that you're the good guys if somebody trying this out is never going to come back? But like this is the idea in US politicians at the time, that if you allow any sort of socialism in a country, they're instantly lost forever to this totalitarian menace that is like the creep of global communism. It was a wild time. Yeah. I mean, but it's that sort of socialism is such a buzzword today still.

And I think it's like from that generation who grew up in this time. Yeah. And is now Bernie Sanders age and is like, socialists are communists and communists are fascists and fascists are dictated. Yeah. The words all blend together and no one. I want to ask a lot of people say, please tell me the difference between a socialist, a fascist and a communist. Please go ahead. I think that's really useful when you're talking about the political arguments we have.

Because like a young person who's talking about like, I'm a democratic socialist. What I mean is like, I think people should have single payer health care and like, we should spend more money on roads and bridges than we are. Right. And what a lot of older people who grew up in this time period that we're talking about now think is like, you want communism. Exactly. You want to destroy all freedom. It's pretty funny. I'm a pretty like left guy.

I'm a pretty leftist guy, I would say. And I lean left on most issues. And I went on a date recently and I was with this girl and she was like, I mean, and we're both anti capitalists. And I was like, well, I'm not anti capitalist at all. And we went on this whole thing. And I was like, I just realized that you don't know what anti capitalist means. You don't know what capitalism is. This is just like buzzwords that are thrown around of like socialism bad, communist bad.

Democratic socialism means again, single payer health care. Like it's just people just don't know what the words mean. No. And that's one of the biggest problems we're having right now. It's a subset collect Colts kind of work in this way where they'll create new words. The church Scientology is all sorts of words that only exist there. But we have almost a problem with like politics in this country where the same words are used by both sides or by every side because there's definitely more than two, but they all mean different things. And so you can't really have a conversation a lot of the time.

Or the same tactics are being used with the NFL. Both sides are boycotting the NFL for the same. Yeah. It's like, I love it. They're like, well, see how bad the ratings are. I was like, well, both sides are boycotting. Everyone's boycotting. Boycotting because they're kneeling. I'm boycotting because they're blocking him for kneeling.

It's like, okay, well, you're both boycotting. We're in an interesting time. And this was an interesting time too. So again, like this is to establish that like when the U.S. is like, yeah, we've got to overthrow this popularly elected leader. A lot of people will reduce that now to like U.S. corporations intervening to cause regime change in these countries. And that's certainly a factor because like there's a lot of businesses that we're making the same thing with like Guatemala. There were a lot of American businesses involved. But this idea of we have to stop the creep of communism was also a major factor.

And so it's it's a bunch of different things that kind of coalesced here. I'm going to read another quote from that bulletin of Latin American research quote throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. The totalitarian model was used to justify hardline positions against communism and hints of communism. According to this view, once a country went communist, it was impossible to ever restore capitalism and liberal democracy to it. In the words of Elliott Abrams, the architect of policies against the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua in the 1980s. If communism was a disease whose existence could not be prevented, it was one whose spread was controllable. Therefore, a global system of quarantine or containment was necessary. So that's what's going on in U.S. politics.

So we contain the shit out of Brazil's leftist movement by backing a violent overthrow of the country. This military junta was in power when Jair Bolsonaro grew into a young man and joined the army. He became a captain in time and was a paratrooper. And if you're wondering how good he was at soldiering, his commanding officer described him as having quote, excessive financial ambition and lacking logic, rationality and balance. So wants to make money is an idiot. Yeah, wants to make money is bad at his job. For look at what kind of time it was for other people who weren't Jair Bolsonaro.

Let's look at a fun Guardian article titled Brazil president weeps as she unveils report on military dictatorship abuses. Now the president in that title was Dilma Rousseff Bolsonaro's predecessor. She was a Marxist guerrilla during the time Bolsonaro was a paratrooper when the military junta isn't charged. She was captured at one point and was brutally tortured by the military. So you'd understand why when she was elected president, she supported a giant three-year study into exactly what the old military regime had gotten up to. In 2014, the study was finished, revealed evidence of at least 191 killings, 243 disappearances and 1,900 people tortured. And the actual numbers are likely much higher. This is what they were able to find solid documentation for.

So over the 20 years that the junta was in power, the U.S. and the UK provided Brazil's torturers with special training so that they could torture an unknown number of revolutionaries and freedom fighters. According to Hugo de Andrade Abral, one of the generals who ran Brazil during the dictatorship, quote, at the end of 1970, we sent a group of army officers to England to learn the English system of interrogation. This consists of putting a prisoner in a cell in Comunicado, a method known as the refrigerator, because the cell was refrigerated. Wow. So they just stick you in a cell that's refrigerated and then leave you alone for days. And you don't die?

Usually not. Sometimes you do. I worked at Cold Stone Creamery in high school, and we used to lock people in the freezer. But like for 30 seconds, we would lock, you know, you'd go in to get the chocolate ice cream and you'd end up locked. Well, if that's what you were doing at Cold Stone Creamery, then you were unknowingly engaging in what the Brazilians call the English system of torture. So that's me. Oh man. I remember how hard it was. I mean, you get locked, you'd be like, no, this could be the worst 30 seconds ever.

I can't imagine days. I mean, it's not that cold. I don't think we're talking about like an industrial freezer cold, but it's pretty miserable. And again, they received training from both the CIA and the US and I think MI5 from the UK. But they really seem to prefer the way British people taught them the torture for whatever reason. They might have just like not thought we were as good at torture as the British. So they built a special torture center to British standards called the House of Death. Good name.

Good name. Yeah, it had an asbestos lined cold room. It had a sound room, which was just supposed to bombard people with noise while they sat there for days. It also had all white and all black rooms where you could keep people in isolation because that really fucks with somebody's head. And all of the rooms had monitoring equipment so that the interrogators could hear their victims heartbeat. So according to Amalcar Lobo, a Brazilian army psychiatrist who worked at the House of Death, quote, they were variations of the techniques used by the British army against Irish terrorists that were designed to destructure the personality of the prisoners without touching them. So it's kind of neat.

What the fuck? I mean, it's one of those things. I think this is something that like Ireland's so nice now and like so much of the conflict there has been settled since you and I have been alive. That people don't realize like how fucked up the shit that was until like 2001. Right. It's really the dawning of the war on terror that led to things calming down in Ireland. But yeah, I mean, the British learned how to torture from what they were doing to the Irish and they taught the Brazilians and the Brazilians tortured thousands of people there and so on and so forth. What should we call it?

The House of Death. I'm guessing that was a nickname. Casa de Muerte. Well, it's Portuguese. So it's probably very similar but slightly different. Casa de Muerta. Why didn't offend anybody who speaks Portuguese? Yeah.

I certainly don't know. I know Obrigado. That's most of my Portuguese. Yeah. That's like I'm sorry, right? Or thank you. Thank you. It's been a while since I've been to Portugal.

I've actually been to Brazil. It sounds lovely. I did Curitiba, São Paulo and Rio for like a week. It was fun. Oh man. Beautiful place. Yeah. I'd love to go.

Maybe before this episode drops. Not in all white rooms or all black rooms. No. But do you know what I do like is the products and services that support this show? That was an ad pivot. Gotcha. Pivoting from torture to ads. Inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the gun badass way. Nasty sharks.

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today

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that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. Boy, those were some good ads. We just finished talking about horrific torture and how the British taught the Brazilians torture. And this is all going on while Jair Bolsonaro starting out his career in public life.

He's a mid-level officer in the army and is apparently not too great at it. I do want you guys to know that while all these torturing and murder and horror was going on, Jair Bolsonaro did not just sit back and let these injustices happen without taking action. He realized something was wrong and he knew that he had to do something about it. And so in 1986, the year after the military dictatorship ended, he wrote a column for the magazine VEA, complaining that soldier's salaries were too low. That was his big issue during this period. If you're going to torture people, you better get paid.

We're not getting paid enough to torture these people. He was a soldier at this point, so he may have had a bias. He was sentenced to 15 days in military prison for insubordination, but for some strange reason this helped to kickstart his political career. He presented himself as a defender of ranker soldiers who were suffering during the hyperinflation that struck Brazil after the military dictatorship collapsed. Bolsonaro was elected to Rio de Janeiro City Council in 1988. In 1981, he was elected to Congress.

Almost immediately, he said publicly, quote, I am in favor of a dictatorship. This is like, Bolsonaro gets elected to Congress in 1991 and then supports returning to a dictatorship. This is the beginning of his political life. That's the line he's taking. Now he was obviously a fringe figure at this point in Brazilian politics. You might think about him as sort of like a Brazilian Ron Paul, but with even less mainstream appeal. Bolsonaro's main claim to fame is that he openly and repeatedly stated that the dictatorship had been an awesome time and that the government should go back to doing that.

In 1999, first year as a congressman, in response to the president attempting to privatize some state assets, congressman Bolsonaro said this on live television, like right after this, so the president's attempting to privatize some state assets. Bolsonaro gets asked about it and he says, quote, through the vote you will not change anything in this country, right? Nothing, absolutely nothing. You will only change, unfortunately, on the day when we begin a civil war here inside. And doing the job that the military regime didn't do, killing 30,000. Beginning with the president, if some innocents die alright and every war innocent people die, I would even be happy if I died as long as 30,000 others died with me.

He's Thanos. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's Thanos. That's how he starts his political career. As fucking Thanos. We need to kill a shitload of people. Because like Gamora asks him too, she's like, well, what if you die in this snap too? He's like, then I die in this snap too, but half of us are gone.

Yeah, that's Jair Thanos Bolsonaro. I mean, Messias. Kinda, right? I don't know. Jair Thanos Messias Bolsonaro. Yeah, that's a new nickname for him. There you go. It's worth noting that when Bolsonaro advocated the murder of the president on the start of a new civil war, the president at the time, a guy named Cardoso, replied, it's clear he hasn't been converted to democracy, which is a little bit of an understatement. So when Jair was asked about these comments earlier this year during the campaign,

he did distance himself from himself in the past. Saying, people evolve, I am not a troglodyte, it's been a long time since I touched the subject. The subject, of course, was the execution of tens of thousands of human beings. At the time, there were calls from within Congress to expel Bolsonaro, but nothing happened. He was just, again, seen as a fringe nut and not really worth dealing with. According to America's Quarterly, he was so distant from real power in a Congress that also included a professional clown and several legislators accused of kidnapping and even murder that few paid him much attention.

He said awful things, said Ignacio O'Connor, a president at the State University of Rio de Janeiro and frequent Bolsonaro critic, but he was marginal and pretty much considered harmless. There was a clown to deal with. So in the first few years after the military dictatorship fell, things were kinda rough in Brazil. The economy was bad, there was a lot of unemployment and inflation and all the things that come with that. But around the turn of the millennium, things started to get a lot better. Brazil got its most beloved president, Lula, who was in office for eight years. The economy turned around and, in general, it seemed like people were really getting the hang of being a country.

A democratic one, at least. So the president who followed Lula was Dilma Rousseff, who we've already heard from a little bit. She was reelected in 2014, the same year that the government finished that study on how many people had been killed and tortured during the military junta. Now, when this report was read, Maria do Rosario, the secretary of human rights under Dilma, praised the report during a session of Congress. As she walked away, Bolsonaro shouted this at her. Quote,

Stay here, Maria do Rosario. Stay. A while ago, you called me a rapist in the green room and I said, I won't rape you because you're not worth it. Stay here. Listen. This is in Congress. So he threatens to rape one of his fellow Congressmen.

But he won't. Because she's not worth it. Yeah. He says she's not worth raping. That's fair. That's fair. I was being unfair by, yeah. So this was not the first time Bolsonaro had threatened his colleague in Congress.

According to The Guardian, Bolsonaro's first instance was an incident in the parliamentary green room in 2003 when he shoved her, described her as a slut, and then told her to go cry. So this is how Bolsonaro treats his fellow people in politics. Yeah. He's a nice guy. I'm just trying to think, like, the closest we have to that was when, like, during the debates, Trump was going at Megyn Kelly for bleeding out of her wet surface and things like that.

And, like, it's still not as bad as this. No, exactly. That's why I think it's really unfair to call him the Brazilian Trump. He's, yeah. Trump is the American Bolsonaro. Trump is the American Bolsonaro with anything. Or they're the Brazilian and American de Tertes, respectively. I don't know.

Like, maybe it's useless to, yeah. So the Attorney General pressed criminal charges against Bolsonaro because, you know, you can't do that. Well, you can, actually, but there were charges for a little while, but very little happened. And the reason that very little happened is that the Brazilian government is preposterously corrupt. Like, I know we have a lot of issues with corruption here in America, but things are on another level in Brazil.

At the time, Jair threatened Rosario, roughly 200 of his fellow 600 national legislators were facing trial for crimes ranging from fraud to murder. So, like, a third of the elected politicians at the national level are actively being investigated for felonious crimes at the time when he says, I'm not going to rape you because you're not worth it. So it's like, yeah, you shouldn't say that, but... But this guy killed somebody. This guy, the clown murdered somebody.

Like, so nothing really happens. I wonder what type of clown this is, because there's like the bozo, the clown clown, but there's also like clowns who are just like movement professionals. Yeah. I'm feeling more of like an it clown. Like, Brazil just elected Pennywise. They were like, well, he keeps luring children in the storm drains, but my god, he's got a good economic policy.

He's real popular in his district. Oh, man. Hey, we had a guy who liked to lure children in. We do? Elected a... The longest-serving Republican Speaker of the House. Yeah. He also likes to lure children.

Yeah, serial child molester. So we're working on being as entertaining as horrible Brazilian politics. I just feel like this is a blueprint we're on the path for. Mm-hmm. Which is, again, does that happen a lot on the show? Yeah. It's... People usually walk away really bummed out.

Yeah. Ooh. I'm going to go get ice cream after this. Yeah, that's always recommended. I used to advertise Doritos on the show, but they never gave us any money. I advertise whatever happens to be lying around on the table. So, right now, it's Mountain Zevia, which is a stevia-flavored diet beverage that is sort of like Mountain Dew, but legally distinct.

Legally distinct? Yeah. I love that. It is legally distinct. Yeah. That's great. Legally distinct. I love how on YouTube, they do a TV show, but they'll mirror it, so it's legally distinct.

Yeah. As long as you mirror the TV show, everything's backwards, you can air it. Okay. Okay. So, telling a colleague that she wasn't worth raping worked out really well for Jair, his popularity among conservative Brazilians rose, and by 2016, he was the third most liked Brazilian politician on Facebook. What?

What? We did elect Donald Trump. Like, he said a lot of terrible things and never heard him. I know. So, he was like the Maxine Waters or something, or like the Kamala Harris, like the super like popular politician, the Cory Booker, the Beto, like... It was more that there's so much corruption in Brazilian politics, and so, he was seen as like honest.

Like, he's clearly has no filter, so he's not lying to us, and we have all of the, exactly. I'm going to read a quote from The Guardian here that tries to explain this. Part of the reason is Brazil's culture of machismo, which is according to Rousseff has also contributed to the desire for impeachment of the country's first female president. So Dilma Rousseff basically said that like, this is a machismo thing, like there's masculinity is so important to Brazilians. That's why they want the first woman president impeached, and that's why Bolsonaro's seeing so much popularity is it's like a toxic masculinity thing.

And I won't deny that that's probably an aspect of it, but it also is really important to note that the desire to impeach Rousseff probably had just as much, if not more to do with the absurd and shamefully rampant corruption going on in her administration. March of 2014, which is the same year that they released their report on what the military junta had done, the Brazilian government opened Operation Car Wash, which was initially an investigation into Petrobras, which is a state owned oil company. So there was evidence that this state owned oil company had been taking bribes and that politicians elected leaders have been getting bribes in exchange for giving certain construction

firms preference and bidding on projects that the state owned oil firm was doing. The investigation turned into one of those spiraling and sane monstrosities of incompetence and shameless graft that implicated dozens of the most powerful people in Brazil. Haliburton, this reminds me of Haliburton, even bigger is a deal, because it's way more direct and obvious. Because it's the government funded one, not just the private one, like Haliburton. Exactly. And this included former president Lula and of course, Doma Rousseff.

The ex-president Lula was found guilty of accepting a beachfront apartment as a bribe from a construction firm. Rousseff was also implicated in the scam and subsequently impeached. It's hard to overstate the importance of Operation Car Wash and everything else that's happened since with Bolsonaro. America's Quarterly calls it possibly the world's largest corruption probe. So we're talking about like billions and billions of dollars going into the hands of politicians in exchange for like, yeah, it's super fucking shady.

You're talking about Machismo in Brazil. The late Robin Williams has a bit inside the actor studio where he talks about how Machismo is hugely important in Latin America. Then he goes, and then he imagined a world where all their soccer players they love so much are very effeminate. And he does them and he's like, why didn't you call me after the Mexico game says one soccer player to the other soccer player, but then all these like super Machismo toxic masculine guys who were like, these are my heroes, these are my heroes, which circles

right back to naming him after a soccer player over Jesus. Yeah, it's interesting. It is interesting. Now the investigation basically implicated everybody in sort of the liberal establishment in Brazil. So like the left had really been pretty dominant up to this point, Rousseff's workers party had been like the major party. And then basically everybody gets implicated in massive corruption and graft.

And this is at a time when the economy is taking a shit. So people are like, things are harder for us, food's more expensive, poverty is soaring. And we found out that all these guys we've trusted for the last like 15 years to govern the country have been robbing us all blind. So that's the environment that Bolsonaro starts to surge in around 2015, 16. So in the wake of Operation Car Wash, we're not just talking about like the last guy, Dilma Rousseff being disgraced. We're talking about the entire political class in Brazil being exposed and shamed.

When Rousseff was impeached in 2016, Bolsonaro cheered that they lost in 1964 and now they have lost in 2016. He dedicated his vote to impeach the president to quote the memory of Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, the dread of Dilma Rousseff, because Colonel Ustra was the man who had tortured Rousseff while she was in prison. It's the kind of thing that would have been outrageous in a healthy democracy, but it only increased Bolsonaro's support. A poll taken later that year found that seven out of 10 Brazilians had no trust in any political

party. In this environment, Jair Bolsonaro thrived. You could say a lot of things about the man, but he didn't seem like a liar. He didn't hide that he wanted to go back to a dictatorship and kill tens of thousands of leftists. And that was refreshing to a lot of voters at this point in Brazilian politics. So Jair grew to become the most well-known and popular politician in the Bullets, Beef, and Bible Caucus, which is roughly analogous to the American right wing.

He started to lay the ground for a presidential campaign in 2018. Bullets, Beef, and Bible? Yeah. That's our Bible Belt. Yeah. I mean, that's our Bible Belt. Exactly. Yeah.

It's a better name. Yeah, it is. The Bullets, Beef, and Bible Caucus. That's exactly, that's our country. Yeah. People are the same everywhere. There's always going to be a group that... You know what you said when you just said that people were refreshed by the idea that

this guy wanted to kill 10,000 leftists? I think it's hard to date here, cross parties. Can you imagine trying to date as a young person in Brazil and one person supports this dude and one person is like a leftist and you want me dead? No. No. It's impossible. Yeah.

It would be rough. And it is rough. That's part of what polarization does, and that's probably why it continues to get worse is that... Of course. Yeah. It's like a civil war without the war. Yet.

Yet. It's a cold war. Yeah. Yeah. It's a cold civil war. So, yeah. Bolsonaro promised his supporters that he would loosen up the country's gun laws, open up untouched rainforests inhabited by indigenous people to strip mining, and lower the age of

criminal responsibility to 16. This was a major centerpiece of his campaign. Under current Brazilian law, three years is the maximum punishment you can give someone who's 18 or younger. Here's how Bolsonaro pitched changing that. Quote, an adolescent can rape and kill 200 people and he is still not treated like a criminal in Brazil. Most miners know that if they are going to commit a robbery, it is better to kill the

victim as there is less chance of being caught, and if they are, the punishment will be the same. So this is the argument he's making. Now, UNICEF says that Brazilian teenagers are actually vastly more likely to be the victims of violent crime than the perpetrators. Less than.013% of murders in Brazil are committed by 12 to 17 year olds, meanwhile 36.5% of all non-natural adolescent deaths in Brazil are caused by murder. So Teenager is actually, if I'm doing the math right, hundreds of times likelier to

be murdered by an adult than to commit murder while underage. But of course, we all know how much facts matter in political discussions these days. Jair Bolsonaro is also a major advocate. But he framed that really well, because if I didn't know that, I'd be like, well, if I'm going to get robbed, I'd rather just get robbed and not killed. That's like the way a layman is thinking of that and going, great idea, dude. But it just doesn't line up with the facts, but like, people know crime is out of control. And it is in Brazil, and he posits a solution that seems reasonable if you're not aware

of the actual statistics. So Jair Bolsonaro is also a major advocate of bringing back torture, which probably isn't surprising at this point. During one interview, he explained happily, quote, I'll give you an example. I have two small daughters, five and three. If a criminal kidnaps my daughter and starts sending a piece of ear, a piece of finger to my house, and the police catches one of the criminals from that gang of kidnappers, and he doesn't tell where she's being kept, I'm going to volunteer to torture that guy.

I'm not in favor of torture as state policy, but in certain situations, any human being, you weigh what is more important, valued in your life. Is it your daughter or the right to remain silent? Do you understand? What? Yeah, that's his argument for torture. What? It's smart.

The way that he's framed that, if you start arguing with him, he's going to be like, what would you do if your daughter was getting a piece of ear sent to you? And this is one where I'm betting he is taking a leaf out of American politicians because for as long as I've been alive, on the right, when there's arguments about the death penalty, that what happens if they murdered your daughter, and it's like, well, that's not what we make laws based on, is like our personal rage at the thought of someone close to us getting hurt. Anyway, speaking of rage, you know what doesn't make me angry?

It's for the products and services that support this show. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. This season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way, he's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based

on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't

a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back and we're talking about Jair Bolsonaro. So we just got into his argument about torture and allowing the government to charge 16-year-olds

as adults. The reason these policies really took off is that Brazil has kind of an enormous horrifying crime problem. The nation has 19 of the world's 50 most violent cities. There were 56,000 murders in Brazil in 2017. Now in the same year in the United States, there were 6,791 murders and the US has 125 million more people than Brazil. So they have an enormous violent crime problem.

So a lot of this is not explained by people being evil or dumb, it's them just being scared and not being well informed. That has to be a huge factor here. They have reason to be scared. Crime is a horrifying problem in Brazil right now. And so they're going to the guy who claims, I'm gonna fucking law and order this shit and the way to do that is by executing teenagers and torturing people, but you can see why they would fall for that.

So Jair Bolsonaro has occasionally walked back some of the things he's claimed, but in general he spent the last 20 years of his public life being really upfront with his breathtakingly gross beliefs. In a 2011 interview with Playboy magazine, Bolsonaro stated that he would quote, be incapable of loving a homosexual son and added that, I would prefer my son to die in an accident than be gay. Jesus. Yeah.

This is the whole role of terrible quotes from Bolsonaro. This is the meme I saw. In 2016, on Brazilian television, he referred to having a daughter after four sons as a moment of weakness. Oh. I know, right? During a different TV appearance, he said this, quote, because women get more labor rights than men, meaning they get maternity leave.

The employer prefers to hire men. I would not employ a woman with the same salary of a man, but there are many women who are competent. So it's like the sum of them are good people of justifying employment discrimination. In 2017, Jair said, a man who doesn't kill isn't a policeman. In 2018, he was asked how he'd spent his housing allowance that he gets as a congressman, the money from the government that they pay him for his house because he's a government employee.

He said, quote, since I was a bachelor at the time, I used the money to have sex with people. You can see why people are like, oh, well, that's what I would do too if I was a bachelor and hired the money. He's an honest man. Everybody else is corrupt. He's an honest man. He wants to buy hookers and shoot criminals.

So obviously every terrible thing Jair Bolsonaro did just made him more popular. I'm going to guess everyone listening to this is familiar with kind of how that works. If you're asking yourself, how did this keep making him more popular? Think back to the guy who won the presidency after talking about grabbing women by the pussy. This is just how things work in 2018. So I should note that one of his election ads was literally a picture of Jair standing in front of a Brazilian flag while a voiceover said, Hitler, Mussolini, they call him everything

but corrupt. What? Yeah. That's pretty fucking bonkers, isn't it? Compared himself to Hitler and Mussolini in a campaign ad. Oh my God. You got to give it to him. That's some chutzpah.

I could shoot somebody in the middle of fifth ab and they would still vote for me. People love me. People are the same everywhere when shit gets rough. And shit's rough in Brazil, so this worked. Hitler, Mussolini, at least he's not corrupt. What? So this message sold very well, first on social media and then at the ballot box. Before he was elected, Bolsonaro had more than 1.7 million more followers on Facebook

than his nearest rival. The core of his supporters were of course young men, only 36% of his voters were women, or at least of his supporters prior to the election were women. So yeah, we're all intimately familiar with the next part of the story. Jair Bolsonaro dominated all of his political rivals and won by nearly 10% of the vote. The only real wrinkle in the story is that during a rally in September, a young man on a mission from God, according to the young man, stabbed the shit out of Jair Bolsonaro. Hurt him very badly, came pretty close to killing him, but didn't.

Here's a picture of him in mid-stab. It kind of looks like he's pooping. What the fuck? He's ugly. Well, he's getting stabbed. Nobody looks their best when they're getting stabbed in a little bit of fairness. I think in mid-stab, you're not the best version of yourself. The audience can see these pictures on BehindTheBastards.com.

So you got stabbed a bunch of times, that probably made his popularity fly. Oh yeah, yeah, it was great for him actually. Of course. The best thing that can happen to you if you're a politician is someone tries to kill you and fails. It's an assassination attempt, of course. It always boosts your popularity. That's the one thing I hope doesn't happen in the next seven days, because that's, yeah.

It's always good for popularity. Don't try to kill politicians you don't like. It doesn't work. Now you can try to send fake bombs, no one really care about that. Well, why should we worry about some fake bombs? So the wounds were serious, but not serious enough to stop Bolsonaro from campaigning, and all likelihood, as you mentioned, they probably did more to help his election than anything else.

There were stories in the news of him running his campaign from a hospital bed and stuff. It played really, really well. The same night that it happened, a Senate candidate aligned with Bolsonaro claimed, a message to these bandits who tried to ruin the life of a guy who was a father, who was the hope of all Brazilians. You just elected the president. And they did. And now, Bolsonaro is the president-elect, and in all fairness, I should mention that

in interviews that he did before the election, Bolsonaro did promise not to become a dictator. So that's nice. Here's a quote from a Time article that ran back in August. Can he confirm that he would not instigate a military regime of elected president? No, there is no such risk. There is no such risk, Bolsonaro says. If elected, he insists, the next presidential elections would happen as normal in 2022. The only modification I would make is to introduce paper voting, to end electronic voting.

We distrust the electronic vote here. That is the only difference. So committed as he did in democracy, he adds that he is considering a political reform proposal to limit a president to one term only, beginning with mine. Which hey, maybe he'll do that. Maybe he's had a change of heart since 1999, however, that Time article does note that in Jair's office, the only portraits he has on his wall are pictures of five of the generals who managed Brazil's bloody military junta, which does not instill a great deal of confidence

in his respect for democracy. At least for me. And that's where we are today. Well, he got elected like last week, right? He got elected like last week. We're a little further than that today. So now that Bolsonaro is president or president-elect, a new group is more terrified for their lives than the nation's LGBT population.

Here's another thing Jair Bolsonaro said about gay people during that time interview. I do not kiss my wife on the street, why face society, why take that into the school. Little children of six or seven watching two men kiss as the government wanted them to do is this democracy, visibly struggling to contain his temper. He asserts angrily that most gays will vote for him and then pivots to pedophilia. So let's respect the pedophile's right to have sex with a two-year-old? Would that unite Brazil? But he adds, if anyone interferes with the private life of two people, I will defend

the life of these two people between their four walls. That is no problem. So he would be a president for all Brazilians? Yes. So, you can trust Jair Bolsonaro or not. He's said some of the right things, but again, this is like immediately after his election when you do the conciliatory gestures. There's some reason to suspect that he will not keep up with his promises.

During that same interview with Time, Jair Bolsonaro simultaneously denied his desire to create a military dictatorship and promised to make roughly half the government ministers generals, which sure seems like it's on the way to a military dictatorship. He praised the Chilean dictator Pinochet for murdering more than 2,000 people, and he cited his desire to stop the demarcation of indigenous land and basically cut down more of the rainforest. One of the things that he's been really consistent about is saying, I don't think indigenous people have the right to giant tracts of land, to have chunks of the country partition

that we can't develop. He's a big advocate of allowing companies to come in and basically pay indigenous people pennies on the dollar for their land and then strip mine it, which is kind of a problem because 20% of our planet's oxygen comes from the Amazon rainforest. There's some reason to be worried there. There's also some reason to be worried because on October 21st, 2018, Jair Bolsonaro vowed to purge Brazilian leftists to a cheering crowd of his supporters. A month or so before this, he told Time, like I'm going to be the president for all Brazilians,

and then a couple of months later in October, he said, quote, this time the cleanup will be even greater. This group, he's talking about leftists, if they want to stay, they will have to abide by our laws. Either they stay out or they will go to jail. Immediately before the election, Brazilian police, often without warrants, began barging into university classrooms, questioning teachers and students. They started taking out books and classroom studies related to fascism and sort of the

spread of dangerous right wing ideology. And they justified this under the claim that these schools were doing illegal election advertising. That was like a bunch of professors were doing essentially classes on fascism and the dangers of fascist authoritarian regimes. And this was cracked down on by the government immediately before the election. They claimed that it was election tampering, essentially. So that's not a great sign.

It's kind of up in the air as to what's going to happen and whether or not things are going to get tremendously worse. But yeah. I get a lot of messages on my social media from people who are like, can you amplify this? Can you amplify that? Can you amplify this? Whatever their cause is, they want me to amplify.

And I can't, I can't amplify every cause. But I've been getting a lot from LGBTQ populations in Brazil recently and I just have been glossing over them. I'm realizing exactly what they're referring to. I think there's a deep fear. It's a big problem. And I think a guy like Jair Bolsonaro, I think we're less likely to see any sort of really clear government policy aimed at LGBT people that you can point to and say, the government

said they're going to do this. The government said they're going to do that. I think what we will see and we've already started to see is groups of right wing activists in the street doing violence to gay people and doing violence to leftists and attacking anyone they see as not part of them. And I think we won't see a lot done to prevent those attacks. But I do think that's, that's the smarter move if you're a guy like Bolsonaro. Why would you have gay people arrested when your supporters will murder them anyway?

Do you know, has Trump been asked about his feelings about Bolsonaro? Oh, he called him. He was a big fan. Big fan. Tweeted about it and everything. Called him as soon as he won. Super, super down with him. Says that they're going to, we're going to have great trade deals.

And I read another article that was like a Canadian economist style magazine saying like Bolsonaro's election is going to be great for Canadian businesses. Angela Merkel. No good. Bolsonaro. Big fan. It is a similar thing to what happened when the military junta took over. How you have this government that's like, we need to not develop the rainforest.

We need to not allow foreign corporations to strip mine our nation for pennies on the dollar. And then a right wing government gets in that says, no, no, no, do all that. Fuck the rainforest. And, and like, we will do whatever it's necessary. As long as you keep money flowing into us, we'll do whatever is necessary to put down rebellion within the country. By the way, we talk about how Bolsonaro's not as corrupt as the other people in politics.

There have just been some findings by America's quarterly that there's about four and a half million dollars that have been transferred to his family over the last like year or so. And we don't really know where it came from. So the early evidence suggests there will eventually be findings that like he's corrupt as shit. But he was, I think smarter about it than Dilma Rousseff and the workers party people, which is all it takes. You don't have to not be corrupt.

You just have to convince people that you're less corrupt than the person you're going up against. And it turns out that works. One of the message I got, I just read was from a Brazilian woman and she asked me to amplify and she said, if you do take me up on this offer, basically to say that he's bad, please use the hashtag that we're here in Brazil are using. And it was hashtag LNOW, I don't think I'm saying it right, is E-L-E-N-A-O. Oh, doesn't that mean not him?

Anyone but him. Anyone but him. Yeah. LNOW. Yeah. That's a pretty bold campaign. Anyone but him. Not him, but anyone else is fine.

I mean, that does get it kind of a, I mean, clearly it didn't work in this election, but I think it is something that like everyone who's not an outright fascist in the democratic world needs to get better at, which is just sort of like a common front against like, okay, we're not going to agree about everything. You may consider yourself a Marxist or whatever, you're a libertarian, you're a Democrat and you know, a centrist or whatever. Let's all agree, we don't want a fascist in charge and have like a broad front there. I'm going to say something that reminds me.

My ancestry is Indian and people often talk here in America about the vitriol for a two party system. People always like, two party systems are bad, two party systems are bad. And I often say, I agree they're bad, but let's just think about something else. And I want to use India as an example. India is the world's largest democracy and in India, they don't have a two party system. There's actually like several viable parties. And what ends up happening though is every week closer and closer to the election, what

you just said happens, happens. And by the end, by voting day, you got two choices. It always ends up being a two party system because it'll be like 22% of the vote and 24% of the vote and 26% of the vote and 29% of the vote. And then it's like, oh, we got a team up and we get to solve course the environmental party and the left party, which are only slightly different. And then like the conservative party and the BJP party, which are only slightly different, end up teaming up.

And then once again, you go to the polls and it's a 51 49 win. Yeah. It ends up being a two party system. There's obviously a lot of flaws in our system and every system, there's not a government that doesn't have a shitload of them. But I think that that's probably not the root problem of why politics is so fucked in America. It's not that there are two parties. There are some inherently human things that means that when we have a system like ours

that invests so much power and whoever manages to like win in an election, that might be more of the fact that the president and that Congress has this much power. And if you control Congress for eight years, you can do so much redistricting and shit that you can lock in your congressional advantage for another 20 years. Those are bigger problems than the fact that there's two political parties that are available. So we don't know what is going to happen to the future in Brazil. Again, Bolsonaro has been very clear that he does not intend to become a dictator. Maybe he's had a change of heart.

I am not super confident on that. And I would like to read one more quote from a 1999 interview that Bolsonaro gave at the start of his political career. He was asked right before saying this, if he would shut down Congress once he was elected president because, you know, he was an advocate of dictatorship at that point, quote, there is no doubt I would perform a coup on the same day. Congress doesn't work. And I am sure at least 90% of the population would celebrate and applaud because it doesn't

work. The Congress today is useless. Let's do the coup already. Let's go straight to the dictatorship. It's so funny when someone starts a sentence like that. There is no doubt. Yeah. There's no doubt.

So like, no one. It's like, oh, he doesn't mean that. He said that there is no doubt that that is what I would do. Yeah. It's like everybody says that this caravan has an invasion. No, we don't. Some of us say it's the same caravan that comes up every couple of years and it's already lost half of its numbers and like.

It's so funny. I saw a good tweet about that. It was like, what caravan that plans to come here and kill you warns you three months in advance that they're coming? Yeah. They're half a continent away and we're walking. It's so funny to say walking too because Trump keeps using the word marching, which has like.

Military. Military. Yeah. You use every military word you can. Like strong men and it's like 70% women and children. Yeah. And they keep using the word. These are strong guys.

Yeah. Like they're a bunch of Liam Neesons coming to our country. As if a single Apache helicopter couldn't wipe out most of this, like if it was an armed group of 3,000 people on foot, what a patchy. And like everybody in Palestine can tell you throwing rocks does not mean that you should get shot. No. Well, any U.S. soldier who's been stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq will tell you they

get rocks thrown at them and it is a war crime to fire back with guns at someone throwing a rock at you. Yeah. Now you also remember some stories of like Marines having rocks thrown at them and like getting slingshots and shooting rocks back at the people throwing rocks at them because it's like you got 19-year-old kids throwing rocks at 16-year-olds. It's whatever. Yeah.

I get that. But you can't shoot at them with guns. No. I mean it's like getting cut off in traffic and then so you pull out your pistol and shoot the guy who cut you off. Yeah. You're going to jail. Yeah.

You shouldn't have cut you off. Right. But like your escalation was... Yeah. Oh man. Anyway. You want to plug your plugables before we're out here? Yeah.

Follow me on Instagram and Twitter, B-E-H-Z-A-D-D-A-B-U. If you guys are feeling lucky and you want to donate, there is a thing you can donate too. It's my student loan campaign. I'm looking to pay off my student loan. Oh. I'm joking kind of. But if you want to pay off my student loan, you can.

Okay. You can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK. You can find the show on the internet at BehindTheBastards.com where we'll have any links and pictures from this episode. You can find us on Instagram at Twitter at atbastardspod and you can buy t-shirts if you're in a t-shirt buying mood at teapublic or hoodies that have assorted designs. We don't have an L. Ron Hubbard learn to fuck shirt up yet, but we're working on that. We're working on that.

Did you guys do L. Ron Hubbard? Oh yeah. We did like a four hour episode on L. Ron Hubbard. I don't live far from here and I was walking by and I saw two Scientologists because I could tell from their like uniform type things. They were walking past me so I got about half a second of their conversation, but I heard one fully grown adult woman say to the other fully grown adult woman, this is the one sentence I heard in my walk.

Yeah, they changed my shower time. I just thought it was so creepy. Oh no. You have a shower time and then they changed it and like now you're in distress. I just thought the whole thing was like, I don't want to know more, but I do. I mean, I think when you're talking about a cult like Scientology or you're talking about the desire to vote for an authoritarian who promises strict government control and violence against the people you don't like, they both have a similar route which is that

like people are just exhausted at how many choices they have. Politics is exhausting, like voting in the midterms. There's like all these different proposals and you got to figure out like what you feel about them and understand them and a lot of them, it's usually not something that's as simple as like abortion, right? Right. You know, pretty, depending on your beliefs, you're going to land out, but if it's like, well, okay, do we allocate this much money to firefighting?

But if that happens, like because we're, you know, in order to allocate this money, we're imposing an additional property tax or like a lot of stuff is like, and it's exhausting and so whether you're poison as a cult or a dictator in a society that's free and open, there's always a huge amount of, fuck it, just let some asshole figure it out. So don't let some asshole figure it out. Think for yourself and buy a t-shirt from tpublic.com behind the bastards. All right. That was a good ad pivot.

All right. Thank you. We will see you later on this week and Tuesdays and Thursdays behind the bastards. Take a sec. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns.

But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space?

Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based

on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.