It Could Happen Here - Brazil's January 6th

Episode Date: January 11, 2023

Tragedy itself is consumed by farce as Bolsonaro supporters storm the Brazilian capital and try to get the army to install their godking, currently in a hospital in Orlando, as dictator.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. or wherever you get your podcasts. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hegel remarked somewhere that all great world historical facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add, the first time is tragedy, the second time is farce. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the podcast where when we last left Jair Bolsonaro, he had locked himself in the presidential mansion, turned off the lights, and refused to leave or talk to anyone. Now, Bolsonaro has returned to his ancestral home,

a hospital in Orlando where he's been admitted for abdominal pain. Joining me to discuss maybe the first man in history to be his own Napoleon III is James. Hi, I'm very much looking forward to this. Oh, God. Okay, so for those of you who i don't know somehow have missed this i i woke up on sunday and 10 minutes later uh this was happening and i was like well okay i i guess i'm canceling my dinner plans i we're doing this instead yeah i think marks could have added to that quote and then as fast again and then for I guess I'm canceling my dinner plans. We're doing this instead.

Yeah, I think Marx could have added to that quote and then as farce again and then for a third time as farce. Yeah, we really have sort of left the tragedy cycle and are now just in the farce over and over and over again. Yeah, we kind of need a new word for what keeps happening because it's not really a coup and it's certainly not a revolution. It's just like an extreme reactionary tantrum yeah i mean i kind of like storming the capital

because it is what they do but then yeah i don't know like i i'm i'm upset that everyone calls it insurrectionism or insurrectionists because it's like they're not yeah like insurrectionary reactionary is like a powerful yeah it's like like i i think like auto coup is closer but the problem with coup is that coup implies that the military is actually cooperating which it isn't yeah and that's why they always fucking fail yeah we're gonna get into that more in a bit but yeah okay so so the thing that has actually happened is on sunday uh supporters of of a former former brazilian president jr bolsonaro who i fled the country to orlando i sacked the plaza of the three powers

in brazil which is the home of the basically the buildings of the three branches of government and unlike in the u.s they sacked all of them they stormed their presidential mansion they stormed congress they stormed the supreme court and then having seized control of the buildings as cops either sat around joking with them or just actively walked them into the building like there is a video of a procession of bolsonaro supporters with just like they're all walking in a line towards the plaza and there's just like two cop cars like in the middle of the thing driving with them like it's wild there are cops taking selfies of them taking selfies yeah yeah like i that that one that was the one in particular that was like i i feel like that goes slightly above and beyond even what was happening with the american cops like that was some yeah it's been interesting yeah it's okay so they they they they get there they they do that they

do the thing where they grab metal stuff and they break the windows and then they break in and you know they they they they do they do classic january 6th stuff um they take pictures there's one picture that i found that i think it's in the supreme court that's a a picture of someone like you can't see their face it's just them squatting on a like facing backwards squatting on it on a filing cabinet like fully butt out about to take a dump it's wild it's yeah this is what democracy looks like yeah shitting on a filing cabinet in government office yeah

okay so like they this this they don't have a great plan here the thing that they do is that so they all do this they break in they like break stuff they like take random stuff and then they a whole bunch of people sit down on

the ground and sing the national anthem uh waiting for the army to show up because they think that when the army shows up uh the army is going to join them and instead the army shows up and arrest them all um there's some people who try to fight the police uh they they beat up a horse cop which i think is funny because apparently this is just every single one of these now someone beats up a horse cop um but you know but by by by by the end of sunday like it's all over the government forces retake the plaza people try to fight the police but they lose really badly and you know okay so obviously there's a reason why i read that first strategy second time is farce line to start this like okay the january sith comparisons uh start fast and get harder which is this happened literally on january 8th like in it two days after the american one like you couldn't make this shit up oh i mean they stormed the capitol buildings But this is something I think is kind of important to understand.

This is an even worse plan than the January 6th plan. So the January 6th plan, if people remember this. So crucially, January 6th happens while Trump is technically still in office. And what's going on when they're storming the Capitol on January 6th is that Congress is trying to basically pass power to Joe Biden, right? Like they're doing the vote to approve the ballot totals from the Electoral College, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But, okay, so this means that, you know, when on January 6th, right, Congress was actually in session. So the people who were there actually had a thing they were trying to do to overturn the results. And there was like, there were people they could have harmed.

There was like, they had like a goal, kind of. It was like Seth Abramson, but on the other side. Like it was like constitutional fantasy. Yeah. At least they had an idea. Yeah, but like, i can't believe you know like this is the thing about about about what's happening brazil's like i i genuinely cannot believe that i am being made to defend the planning capacity of the january 6th crowd

like i genuinely stunning but the plan for the plan for january 8th in brazil was even worse because okay the the day they do this on right congress is not in session the supreme court is on holiday and lula the actual president of brazil has a already taken power and b is in sao paulo so nobody is there literally they stormed three abandoned buildings there was nothing there they could have they could have tried it his inauguration was like three days before right yeah you know it's funny lula talked about it in this in his speech where he like part of like in his speech after after this happens is he he has this line about how like all of these people were already in brazilia but they were too cowardly to face the people who were there for the inauguration. So instead, they waited for everyone to leave, which is true.

It's really funny. And this is kind of what they always do, right? They always kind of take the easy thing and then grandstand like it's a big, brave thing that they've done. We see this constantly on the right. Yeah. And I think it's reasonable to ask,

what were they actually trying to do? And I'm going to read from the Washington Post. The Washington Post is talking about some of the previous attempts to do the same thing. Quote, one radicalized Bolsonarista named George Washington de Olivaria. What? Yeah, all of the people involved with this are named like George Washington, Olivares. It's incredible. Wow.

Did they change their names or is their whole thing just being a lame parroting of American conservatives? Well, I mean, that is like... There is a lot of truth to the analysis that Brazilian fascist culture is just the fourth time a Facebook meme has been passed around, but this time on WhatsApp. It's somehow more cringe than the American stuff. american stuff like it's sort of incredible but here's okay yeah he was uh yeah there's this guy named george washington uh de alivaria was arrested and accused of planting a bomb beneath a bus at the brazilia airport in a statement to police he said he wanted to quote begin chaos that would lead to military intervention so he's trying to do the strategy of tension right which is which

is this thing from italy where okay so you you you have the government running a bunch of sort of like not i mean i i don't know calling them fake fascist groups is technically correct but you have you have them running a bunch of terrorist groups and you know okay so they they did this is this happening in like the 60s 70s and sort of yeah it gets a little bit into the 80s is that they're doing all these bombings and stuff they're doing all these terrorist attacks and stuff. They're doing all these terrorist attacks. And the goal is to get people to like sort of trust the government and like allow like sort of further state of military intervention. But the thing about that was that crucially, the strategy of tension was a strategy that was done by the government. It doesn't really work if you're not the government and you are, in fact, people causing the chaos in order to get the military to sort of join you. So this is a crucial problem for Brazilian fascism, because as much as the sort of the modern fascist movement is a cult of Bolsonaro, it's really a cult of the military.

Bolsonaro was sort of just a person who embodies a sort of desire of the fascist masses for military rule. But this means that if the military just refuses to do a coup, they have no idea what to do. Yeah, well, they could deploy Bolsonaro himself. Have you seen that video of him trying to do press-ups to prove that he's like... Oh, God! Yeah. He's still a super soldier, don't worry.

You know, but this is sort of... This is a real issue for them. And, okay, so if... I am pretty confident that if the military had actually decided to do a coup, this would have worked. And I think they would have pretty trivially just smashed the rest of the forces of the state. Lulu would be in prison. And this is the thing that's been the key to everything that's been going on in Brazil from the beginning. The army does not have the green light from Washington to do a coup.

Because once again biden just absolutely hates bolsonaro which is why like yeah you know this this this is a coup that was planned from orlando and not langley now we're on like coup number four in the last few years that was planned from florida and notably three of the four of them have failed and this isn't the best failure yeah venezuela one was a real that was much funnier yeah yeah well i mean like to be fair this is a better planned coup attempt than the venezuela one that's not hard that's an extremely low bar yeah the kind of bar that you can get over by tripping but yeah you know we're still in the very early process of figuring out how exactly who was

involved in this and like to what extent everyone was coordinating with each other and like you know to what extent like literally governors were involved seen to have been involved in this but we don't we don't exactly know yet um what we do know in terms of this being planned from orlando is that bolsonaro for literally years has been saying shit like quote the patience of the people has run out i want to tell those who will make me unelectable in brazil only god removes me from power there are three options for me jail death or victory and i'm telling the scandals i will never be imprisoned he was saying this literally years and years and years he's been saying stuff like that like just over and over and over again. Yeah.

And, you know, okay. So the other thing that we know right now, and this is being recorded on, what day is it? Is it the 9th? Yeah, this is being recorded on Monday the 9th. So this is the next day. If by the time this goes out, there's more information, there will be more information.

But this is going on what we have right now. One of the things that we know is that the guy who was in charge of security for the federal district, which is like the federal district is basically like, what if Washington DC was a state, but like a tiny one. Yeah. So the guy who was in charge of security for that,

I was a Bolsonaro supporter who just so happened to be on vacation in Orlando where Bolsonaro was staying with an MMA fighter whose mansion has a Minion's themed room. He's just coincidentally on vacation in Orlando with Bolsonaro while this is happening. So, you know, OK, the Brazilian state seems to be being a lot faster to sort of crack down on everything that's happening than the american state was um the guy who was in charge of security i who was in who was in orlando the brazilian federal defender has already asked the supreme court to arrest him um a supreme court justice like deposed the governor of the federal district

for allowing this to happen yeah it's um yeah it's wild i the the brazilian minister of justice says they've already identified people in 10 states who helped plan or fund the operation they've arrested like well the totals from yesterday said that they'd arrested 400 people i saw somewhere they'd arrested 1200 but i don't know about that that could be wrong but yeah there was at least 400 people um there's a huge like there's a huge crackdown on people involved in this lula it's much better than the january 6th response in that sense yeah like like like part part of what's happening right is like like lula literally like basically declared a state of emergency in in the federal zone and like got basically like i i guess you would call it

like he basically sent in the feds and like has like his people now have direct control over security in the capital because the cat because because the police there are so unreliable and you know like he he's been yeah the brazilian state's moving very very fast yeah just sort of much better than the u.s but of course trump was still in charge and that probably yeah and also like lula unlike biden lula has like like literally like three hours like as this was happening he he's making a speech about like that's him vowing to go after everyone who's involved in this including bolsonaro and um a brazilian member of congress has formally asked the

foreign ministry to extradite Bolsonaro to the U.S. Who knows what's going to happen there? There has been there has actually there's been like a surprising amount of sort of support for that in the U.S. And, you know, I mean, that's everything that's been kind of interesting for this. Before we take the ad break, is that like. He's gotten Lula's getting support from like everyone. Like this is this is one of the rare uh we we we have the the the great capitalist triumvirate of uh vladimir putin joe biden and and macron have all said that they're backing him which is wild yeah real international lincoln project vibes yeah it's uh i mean that that that that that is i guess like who lula is to a broad extent right like you know if you go back to lula

episodes like he was close with the bush administration but also like close with the world social forum people so he's always kind of like been the guy who straddles the divide between yeah like he's not over travis yeah he's not and he's the guy who straddles the divide between. Yeah. Like he's not. Yeah, he's not. And he's the guy who straddles the divide between the sort of like international imperialists and what was the left. Yeah. Yeah. So, all right, we're going to go to ads and then when we come back, we're going to talk more about.

How everything is actually sort of gone. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows. As part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong,

though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award.

Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. All right, we're back. So one of the things i think is very interesting about this whole thing is that for all of the sort of planning and organizational capacity that's gone into building the sort of

like transnational fascist movement the american right like that the american right has been setting up uh the american right has just actively been making their allies worse here. Like, their ideas. It's sort of incredible. I mean, this is something I think that's genuinely very scary about the Brazilian right, is that their regular combination of tactics are really effective. of lawfare, of sort of like using the legal system against their political enemies, of sort of road blockades, mass marches, and just straight up paramilitary death squads of various kinds. You have your sort of urban death squads. You have these like genocidal logger death squads, and that's been very effective. And okay, so like they lost this one election, but their position inside Brazilian politics is still really strong.

They control a bunch of like governorships they like bolsonaro's party and his coalition like control control the brazilian parliament okay so you know like they're in a very strong position but then they talked to the americans and they imported january 6th and stormed the capital and at least right now it looks like it's going really badly for them like even even the sort of like right-wing oligarch press has turned on them globo which is like it's brazil's biggest newspaper well i'm 99 sure it's the biggest newspaper it could be the second biggest i'm pretty sure it's the biggest it's funded by like right-wing shithead billionaires um, you know, their entire front page right now is just them yelling about the coup

and like gleefully reporting on like, like they had a front page thing for an individual sociology professor who stepped off a bus coming back from Brazil and immediately got arrested. Like this is the kind of sort of jubilation that is really, it's kind of amazing too. Cause like-

What kind of cursed sociologist is also a Bolsonarist insurrectionary? Yeah, well, okay, I feel like if you're a sociologist, there are exactly two... Okay, you have three paths. One is you become a cop. Two is you do the Italian thing and you become the Red Brigades. Yeah.

That was Italy's first sociology department, by the way. Turned into the Red Brigades. Or three, you become a Nazi. Those are your three options. Yeah, there are some. I've never been unfortunate enough to run into any of the church sociologists, but you're very right, they are there. Yeah, we stayed away from them in the Anthro department.

We were like, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. Yeah, I've taught in sociology before and uh you definitely do get a lot of students who are there to be a cop i'd forgotten about that yeah it sucks although i will say brazil has had well at least one i feel like they've had at least a couple of sociologist presidents fernando henrique cardoso was what yeah was a sociologist who was president for a while, and then he got replaced by Lula. This has been a tangent about what happens when you put sociology professors and let them out of their cages. So, okay. And I will say this.

Going back to Globo for a second, some of the stuff that they're saying is not exactly true. second like some of the stuff that they're saying is not exactly true like they're they're trying to sort of make a separation between the like extremist bolsonaroistas and then like the people in parliament and it's like okay yeah they have this whole thing about how these are extremists with no support in parliament and it's like okay buddy like there are literally people like in congress who are in congress because they they they were elected because they filmed themselves doing right-wing trucker blow blocks. Like, you know, okay. And funny thing is, other things, one of their other stories was them talking about Brazilian politicians

frantically deleting their social media posts in support of the protests. So, okay, you know. It is actually true that like a lot of like even people in Bolsonaro's own party like denounced it but you know yeah I mean we saw the same shit

right and then they'll gradually reimagine it over the next two or three years to where like they're not denouncing it anymore yeah well here's the thing we'll see what happens because there is also a chance here that like everyone who was even intentionally like involved with this just goes to prison and so everyone's like we'll back out of this i'm not a big pro prison guy but the video of them arriving in a coach at the jail was pretty amazing oh yeah that was pretty funny yeah yeah so okay so right now it looks like this has gone pretty

badly for them again this is this is this is being recorded one day after it happened so i don't know if the army has actually done the coup tomorrow it's not my fault it wasn't out yet um but you know i think we should we should ask we should take a step back and ask why is this happening? And I think we should ask why did this happen in the same way in both the US and Brazil, and why did it not work? And the answer to this is that the capital is a trap. What the American and Brazilian right has ran into sort of ironically is the crisis of the 21st century revolutionary movement so to explain what i mean here i'm gonna i'm gonna read a bit of to our friends which is a work produced in late 2014 by the invisible committee which is the pen

name of some french anarchists who are most famous for writing the coming insurrection um i i'm not normally a huge fan of their work but they got got one thing very, very right, and that's this. 25, 2012, or in Barcelona on June 5, 2011. Riots all around the Chamber of Deputies in Rome, December 14, 2010. Attempts on October 15, 2011 in Lisbon to invade the Assemblea de la Repubblica. Birding of the Bosnian presidential residence in February of 2014. The places of institutional power exert a magnetic attraction on revolutionaries. But when the insurgents manage to penetrate parliaments, presidential palaces, and other headquarters of institutions, as in Ukraine, in Libya, or in Wisconsin, it's only to discover empty places, that is, empty of power,

and furnished without any taste. It's not to prevent the people from taking power that they are so fiercely kept from invading such places, but to prevent them people from taking power that they are so fiercely kept from invading such places, but to prevent them from realizing that power no longer resides in the institutions. There are only deserted temples there, decommissioned fortresses, nothing but stage sets, real traps to revolutionaries. The popular impulse to rush onto the stage to find out what is happening in the wings is bound to be disappointed if they got inside even the most fervent conspiracy freaks would find nothing arcane there the truth is that power is simply no longer that theatrical reality to which modernity accustomed us yeah i think that's very prescient and like i don't know we're raised on these myths right

both on left and right like on the right like there are these myths of these american institutions which are great and unique and shining cities on a hill and on the left like we're raised with the storming of the bastille and and stuff like that as he's the winter palace right these moments of kind of revolutionary change uh but yeah i want to i want to specifically i want to take a second talk about the winter palace because this is actually something that i think sort of worryingly this is uh nick foley's actually talked about this in one of his podcasts which is that like and he's right about this which is that like the there there are like you can't actually just storm a winter palace and take power right it doesn't work anymore and but but i think it's

actually worth like taking like two minutes to lay out why that's true, and it's because the Winter Palace was like a once-in-a-century historical moment, and it only worked because, and this is something that I think people forget, the storming of the Winter Palace was not the thing that overthrew the Tsar. That was later. That was the February Revolution. That is a completely

different revolution. The storming of the Winter Palace, and the reason why that worked, was that the government that the Bolsheviks were overthrowing was karensky's government which is just like really dipshit like interim interim governments that was only supposed to be there until an election happened and had like the most fig leaf legitimacy of any government ever everyone hated them they had no supporters with the but then this is why it worked right because when they they had no power at all and so when the bolsheviks rolled in on them everyone else just stayed home and that is not going to work in any modern context unless like i don't know you're like you're you two were also like two years in a revolution and

there's like a three years into a war yeah there's like an incredibly fig leaf government maybe you can pull this off but like that that that that is not that is a absolutely terrible god-awful model for attempting to seize like any kind of power or bring down any government but you know it's it because that because that became the sort of like mythology of of the soviet union that you know that was sort of burned the sort of false image of that was burned into the sort of memory of of collective memory of the left to the point where like most people don't even remember that karensky was also technically a socialist and that like and that the october revolution was a socialist like a group of socialists overthrowing another group of socialists and both of them have a very tenuous sort of like

it's tenuous of whether either of them are socialists at all yeah and then going on to take power and kill a bunch of other socialists yeah yeah okay so that aside you know this this crisis i was talking about like this is the reason why we're here in the first place right it's in large part because of the failure to overcome the movement of power out of the sort of palace where people expect it to be that in the 2011 revolutions failed like that that that that that's why we're here in hell world because people people were sort of unable to figure out a way

to actually bring down a government instead of sort of being like drawn magnetically into these traps but those problems are sort of like magnetic draw the capital building to will be revolutionaries this is just as much of a problem to the right as it is the left and for right now

this has saved us uh it's caused the brazilian right to abandon things they were doing that actually like are genuinely terrifying and you know could could have been and have been effective like for example one of the cleanup operations that was happening today was uh the brazilian army cleared a bunch of these people who were trying to do blockades of state oil facilities. And that actually could have worked, right? Yeah, that'll shut things down. Yeah. And we've talked about this before

in the other sort of Bolsonaro episodes, but those kind of trucker blockade things, blockading highways, blockading... Those are tactics that the Brazilian right sort of natively uses. And there's a world where the Brazilian fascists stick to their instincts. And instead of doing this doomed attempt to storm the Capitol, they put these same numbers of people into trucks with roadblocks and burning tires and they try to shut down their Brazilian economy. october like an impossible i like january sith revolution where they do an invisible committee one where they realize the power is in logistics and attempting to shut shut down its flow is how

you do a revolution and that is a world that is a lot scarier than the one that we're in yeah but and you know i think we'll see how this ultimately plays out but i act i actually think the fact that this was planned for Orlando is like you know with the help of sort of the usual American January Sith crowd I think this actually really really fucked them like it really deeply hurt sort of

the Brazilian fascist movement which is good it always like when I see I was thinking about this recently with like Myanmar me and mar and everything else like i always come back to like marcusa where he talks about the false choice of masters by slaves and like how the solution is not this like one big sort of uh like like big i don't want to call it like symbolic kind of act of violence but like the great refusal to to

participate in these things which is something that lots of people have power to do as opposed to you're doing this stupid shit which centralizes them in one place and gets them all arrested yeah well i mean this is also like there's another sort of part of this which is that like both in the u.s and in brazil the right is not very good at fighting the cops. They got that one horse cop pretty good. I just saw a video of that. There's a couple. They'll get a couple people, but they only do well

when they outnumber the cops, like 101. Yeah, that is different in Europe. That is a thing that, if you look at where Azov comes from, Azov comes from right-wing football hooligans who took the front line in the Maidan and beat the shit into the cops yeah but but but in the u.s it's like i don't know everyone's just like we just go do this like the right doesn't fight the cops busy shooting people yeah but there isn't that history of like like that's not i know i'm not i don't just want to

pick on like where i come from but like like crowd violence like football hooligans like that that doesn't exist in a meaningful sense in the u.s it's not as commonplace and there isn't that like institutional memory of fighting riot police that exists all over europe yeah well i think i think the thing is that like okay american sports fans do fight the cops but they only do it once a year. If that, like, okay. When they win the Super Bowl. Yeah, well, you know, they'll do it with the NHL, but the thing is, like,

it's only, like, maybe, like, three cities a year that do it, right? Yeah, it's not every weekend. And the World Series, too, it's harder, because the World Series has this whole sort of, like, they have the parade thing, they have this whole stage management thing to get people to stop from rioting.

So, really, there's only, like, two or three events per year where you can get riots whereas like in europe anytime yeah any given saturday you could be throwing down with a cop on a horse yeah but like it's outside of it's gone long beyond that like i remember in like just before this 2011 moment like the 2000 2000, the earlier 2000s, the anti-G8 movement, like the institutional knowledge on how to deal with large volumes of police and still get your point across.

It's just, as we saw in 2020, did not exist here and had to be imported from Hong Kong and other places very quickly. Yeah, badly imported, admittedly. Yeah, yeah. But, you know.

Infographic from Hong Kong. Yeah. but you know infographic from hong kong yeah welcome i'm daniel won't you join me at the fire and dare enter nocturnal tales from the shadows presented by iheart and sonora An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes

with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to

Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.

From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening

in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again. The podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you.

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and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, okay, having said all of this, this is not to say that everything is fine. This is not.

You know, I think something that's very important that I have not seen anyone talk about in either sort of January 6th or January 8th is that the immediate reaction to the coup on the left, and this is as true of the Brazilian left as it was of the American left. In fact, I think the American left did way worse in January 6th, was paralysis, right? Even in Brazil, which has these sort of once-in-a-many social movements, counter-mobilizations took almost a full day to materialize, by which point

the threat had already dissipated. So, you know, for a full day, the only thing standing between the fascists and power was their own stupidity. And, you know, as boundless as their stupidity seems, like watching these people, like, taking a dump on a cabinet like, with a camera in front of them,

like, it's not actually a shield against fascism. Like, every fascism after Mussolini and even Napoleon III, who's like the sort of modern shield against fascism. Like every, every fascism after Mussolini and even Napoleon the third, who's like the sort of modern prototype of fascism has at least one and usually two or three comically stupid, like uprisings and coups that just fail and they fail and everyone laughs at them. And then on coup number four,

they're suddenly in power. And it's like, well, you can't, you can't actually write these things off because they're funny because again, they're always funny for the first, like, two. And then on number three, like, all your friends are being marched into a camp and shot.

And it's like, well... Yeah, and, like, we don't want to be in a place where, like, one grown-up in the room is all that's between us and fascism, right? Like, an adult making a plan. And I think there's a specific, like... I think social media actually plays a really big role in this because you know i because i remember this in january 6th like there was this kind of like the the way that just turns everyone into a spectator everyone was just like you know i i i think it was vicky osterweil i think was first person

who said this was like twitter twitter twitter is a machine that turns action into discourse. Yeah. And so, you know, while it was going on, right, like everyone turned the action of the thing into discourse. Everyone was just sort of like sitting there paralyzed watching it. And that is fatal, right? Like if you look at the actual stress test of the sort of machinery of power, right? Like it's actually, I think it's actually much less of a big deal that the cops were on their side the cops didn't respond or because the cops eventually did clear them out right it took it took a long time but the cops eventually did it but i think i think

the thing that's actually more dangerous is that like there was no there like there wasn't a response to the left at all there's nothing right like there were there were rallies in sao paulo like the next day was which is actually funny because both the rallies, both like the people sacking the capital and the people in Sao Paulo were both singing the national anthem, which is some real fun politics moments. It's another thing to talk about in old nationalism.

Yeah. But yeah, you compare that to Spain, which is obviously where I'm most familiar with, where like people immediately got guns, got in the street, and started killing soldiers, when they had a much more effective and organized coup, right? And that coup would have failed were it not for fascist

intervention from abroad. Brazil has powerful unions who did shit. Yeah, and partially I think that has to do with the hollowing out of the unions. There's a long story here, but even if you look at I think this is a sign really of

how actually dynamic the left is because if you want to look at a dynamic Latin American left there was a very very well organized US backed coup against Hugo Chavez in 2001 it was just before I moved there so i think it

would uh there were other coup attempts in venezuela too that were less well organized yeah 2002 yeah 2002 and yeah that one got far enough that like the New York Times was like, had an article out about how democracy had been restored to Cuba. I mean, to Venezuela. And then, you know, the thing that happened after that, and there's a very famous movie of this from a filmmaker who was just there, is that over the next 47 hours, like the left mobilized. And they put so many people in the street that like the coup plotters had to back down and hugo travis got to be president and you know that that's the thing that that's the thing that a strong left can do right they they can actually defeat the military and yeah but you know but this didn't the u.s just we fell down on the job like there wasn't

much of that in brazil like i like it like it like it is true as lulu was saying they picked a day when everyone was gone but it's still i think really alarming that just by just by sort of acting first they have so much of a a sort of time advantage and sort of an advantage and reaction over us yeah that film by the way people want to watch is called the revolution will not be televised which is yeah kind of a great title to expect on that spectator thing that you were talking about and yeah i watched that bad boy on vhs back in the day oh my god in caracas wow yeah good times so okay finally in a broad sense i want to ask like what are we doing here right um the the sort of dominant mode of quote-unquote anti-fascism and this is the model

that's being adopted by lula and the rest of the sort of liberal and even sort of moderate conservative ruling class in brazil it's what's been adopted by the democrats is their anti-fascism is posing their opposition to fascism as a defense of democracy the rule of law but yeah okay let's look at what's actually happening these coups aren't working this sort of extra parliamentary attempts to take power they're losing every time but do you know how the fascists are taking power? By democracy. Their greatest success has been in taking power by just winning elections. Like, look at what happened in India, right?

That is a country that has been, like, very nearly totally consumed by fascism, and it was done by just elections over and over and over again. Hungary, like, even here. On a fundamental level, like, what we're seeing right now out of the sort of broad swaths of social of a sort of liberalism conservatism social democracy is an unsustainable strategy anti-fascism anti-fascism as a pure defensive democracy is just preserving the

machine that will hand the power of the state over to the fascists on a silver platter and you know like this this defensive democracy in the abstract is a death march right you know if you can you can you can look at the sort of course of the late 19th the late 20th early 21st century right why did the bombs fall over baghdad well protect democracy when when the mexican government was shooting the zapatistas they were protecting democracy when the cops raided the uh when the cops raided the forest defenders in atlanta oh it's because they were domestic terrorists who were threatening democracy. But what's happened here is that the threat of fascism has sort of press ganged armies of people who otherwise would be enemies of sort of capitalist quote-unquote democracy into protecting the very institutions that are inevitably going to bring these people back into power.

and that's really grim because it means that something has to change or we're just going to come back here again and again and again until eventually enough of the ruling class flips to backing the fascists that they seize power once and for all so you know something we have to do something else that's not just this that sort of desperate treading water yeah like like yeah fighting to stand still in this terrible place where people can't pay their heating bills and feed their families yeah it's pretty dire fucking uh outlook for us isn't it yeah but i mean you know i would say this like there was a vision in 2020 of what that something else could be right like it's it's not it's it's not like we're in the depths of like the 2000s where no one has ever seen anything else being possible, right? Yeah, look, there are a lot of people probably listening

because they saw that vision in 2020 and it changed who they want to be and how they want the world to be. And I think that's really good. And for me, at least, I think once people are out in the streets, which people weren't able to do in time in Brazil, like they will tend to find that solution outside of institutions but the response has been almost entirely institutional at least in here in this country to a fascist coup because people didn't

and people were tired from your industries and they'd all been fucking arrested and half of them have been shot yeah and part of the problem also is just that like there's like the us just has a sort of geographical problem and brazil has this too to some extent which is just that like yeah this is not like belgium you can very quickly get people to the capital like you can't you can't actually like it is actually genuinely very hard to get a bunch of people to a place quickly here right which you know is is a thing where we're lucky that yeah like the capital kind of like holding the capital doesn't you know it's it's not a thing that actually allows you to sort of take power but it's also a real sort of concern about politics in the u.s because it can't work

the same way it works in a lot of places that are smaller yeah yeah yeah like bolivia for example yep yeah even venezuela right like so much of the institution almost everything is in caracas even though it's a big country yeah yeah that that that's pretty much all i got um we'll we'll see we'll see if bolsadaro uh when when he gets out of the hospital if he gets out of the hospital um he's returned to his own social home yeah yeah it's always good to see people with uh with takes on the situation in brazil who also think the capital is rio that's always a fun thing that i can see on twitter.com it's okay not to post uh you know i this is my okay i i have

what one of my rules of thumb about talking about a place is if you can't name five cities in a country, don't talk about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a thing that, like, so many, like, people who get paid to write articles about places, like, just fail all the time. That is a low bar.

People who get paid to throw articles, yeah. Like, frankly, you should be able to... Like, if I was doing due diligence, I would be actually learning Portuguese right now instead of, like, relying on my Spanish to sort of, like, power me through it. But, you know, like, the lowest bar is you should know the capital

and you should be able to name five cities in it. And if you can't do that, like, maybe don't post. Yeah, it's fine not to post in fact when dealing with coups maybe consider options that are not posting yeah yeah go go out and stop them make friends

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Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, On Thanksgiving Day 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.