The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Episode Date: November 14, 2024Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with politician and son of the previous president of Brazil, Eduardo Bolsonaro. They discuss his father’s story, near-death experience, election win, and why he cann...ot run in 2026. They also discuss the wave of censorship across South America and the West, Elon Musk’s fight with the Brazilian Supreme Court, and the true magnitude of independent media which has tyrants scared across the globe. Eduardo Bolsonaro is a Brazilian politician, lawyer, and federal police officer. He is the third child of Jair Bolsonaro, the 38th president of Brazil. Since March 2022 he has been affiliated with the Liberal Party. Bolsonaro is also the most voted lawmaker in Brazil’s history with 1.8 million votes, securing his second term as Federal Deputy in the Chamber of Deputies. In this, he chairs the International Affairs and National Defense Committee. Bolsonaro is also one of many signatories (including Javier Milei and Giorgia Meloni) of the Madrid Charter, which reaffirms conservative allyship and draws a hard line between liberals and radical leftists. This episode was filmed on November 1st, 2024 | Links | For Eduardo Bolsonaro: On X https://x.com/BolsonaroSP?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
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So Brazil has been on people's minds more in the United States and perhaps in the world as of late, not least because Elon Musk has had a very
public dispute with, what would you say, a renowned member of the Brazilian Supreme Court.
And that has a multitude of implications for the battle between free speech and government
regulation and ideological control across
the world.
Now, I had the opportunity today to speak with Mr. Eduardo Bolsonaro, who's a congressman
in Brazil and who's also the son of Jairo Bolsonaro, who was the president of Brazil,
who's ran an unorthodox campaign, mostly on social media, and became president for a four-year term.
And so we had a chance today to talk about the culture war in Brazil, which is very similar
to the culture war that's running rampant in the United States and in Canada and in
Europe and in New Zealand and Australia, all across the Western world and all across the
world as a whole, to a lesser degree,
although that will mount.
And we delved into, well, the political structure of Brazil,
the political landscape there and how it's shifting
as a consequence of the social media revolution.
We spoke a fair bit about the background to the dispute
that Musk is having with the Brazilian Supreme Court, and we outlined
the implications of that dispute for the battle between free speech and government regulation
and ideology, as I said, across the world.
It's been my experience that getting to know the political landscape on the various countries
that I visited and have been able to familiarize myself with to some degree, helps me deepen my understanding
of what's relevant and important more locally,
say in the United States, in Canada.
And I think the discussion that I had today
with Mr. Bolsonaro with regard to Brazil
has exactly the same consequence.
There's something deep at work in the world at the moment,
and you can see it reflected everywhere,
and the more places you analyze it,
the more positions you can analyze it from,
the more the contours become clear.
And so you can walk through this discussion with us.
You'll learn more about South America and Central America.
You'll learn more about Brazil.
You'll learn more about the political landscape in general
and about the culture war specifically.
You'll have some new light shed on the battle
between Musk and X and the Brazilian Supreme Court,
and you'll walk away smarter and more informed.
So that's a good deal.
So join us for that.
Well, Mr. Bolsonaro, thank you very much
for coming in today.
I was recently in South America.
I spent a few days in Brazil.
That was extremely interesting.
And one of the things that dawned on me when I was there, although I knew it a bit before,
was that many of the issues that are relevant on the culture war front in North America
and in Europe are equally relevant in South America and perhaps particularly in Brazil.
And so I guess we should and so that's why I thought at least in part that a podcast like this would be useful and interesting.
Also, there isn't a tremendous amount of attention paid to South American issues in the North American press,
or in the European press for that matter.
And that's probably not how it should be, all things considered.
And I thought, well, because of that, it would also be useful to bring people some more information
about South America, the political situation there, and again, more specifically Brazil.
But I think we'll start with a bit of a personal discussion.
Let everybody know, well, who you are and what you're doing in Brazil, and talk about
your family and recent Brazilian history, and then we'll expand out from there, I think.
For us, it's great to be here with you, Professor.
Sure, after your trip to Brazil, you know that Brazilians usually love you
because your courage and your background,
the issues about Canada,
even that made you to move yourself to US.
We have the same problem in Brazil.
But starting from your question before we go deep
in all of this future war and future issues,
my name is Eduardo Bolsonaro.
I'm 40 years old.
I have two kids, one of four.
My daughter, she has four years old
and I have a boy of one.
I'm very well married with Elisa, who let me to be here.
And I'm the third son of the former president of Brazil,
Jair Bolsonaro.
Before I talk about the recent political scenario, it's very important to remark that Brazil
we lived from 64 until 1985, a military regime that started avoiding Brazil to turn itself
as Cuba because we had at that time a communist president
that was trying to bring Brazil
to the same situation of Cuba.
So people on the street with the support
of the Catholic Church and some other sectors
of our society approved to the Congress
to impeach this president.
And then we start to have a period of time
from 64 until 85,
electing indirectly because in these elections,
the senators and the congressmen voted for president only,
not the popular vote, only the congress voting.
But every five years, a new president,
a military general president during this period of time.
So after 85, we get back
again with the democracy that we have nowadays and start to elect new presidents, as pretty much as
like in the United States. And during this period of time, my father, in the end of the 80s, he was
My father, in the end of the 80s, he was an army captain. So I was born in 1984.
My father was an army captain and two older brothers than me.
And in the end of the 80s, my father had some problems inside of the army
because he was complaining about the salary of the militaries
and he did not have the permission of his
superiors to do interviews.
So he did an interview for a famous magazine in Brazil and he became very famous.
But because of that, as he didn't have the permission of the superiors, he went 15 days
in jail, in the military jail, and to calm down the situation, he ran for city
council in Rio de Janeiro in 1988.
Because when you do that, you receive three months off in the army.
And I'm not sure if he did expect to get elected, but he did get elected city council of Rio de Janeiro in 1988.
And then 1990, he run for congressman,
so federal representative, got elected.
And every four years, he stayed 28 years
inside of the Congress getting reelected,
mainly through the votes of the militaries
and their families.
So, in this situation, there is a very key point around 2010, I can tell you,
where the political correct in Brazil starts to increase a lot.
Around 2010.
Yeah, around this year.
And my father, he did an interview, and it got, I think it was his first viral interview
on internet, where he is talking about a situation
in a jail in Brazil.
There was a jail in Brazil,
the name of the jail is Pedrinhas Jail.
In this jail, criminals start to kill each other.
And my father was running to be the chairman of the Human Rights Committee in the Congress, in the House.
And a lot of microphones around him,
and journalists start to do some dumb questions
and trying to say,
Oh, don't you care about the life of the prisoners?
They are prisoners.
You know, it's a human life.
And he said, come on, you don't want to go to the jail?
It's just do not rob, do not murder, do not kidnap anyone else, and start to say some
bad words because it was very explosive.
And this interview came very viral.
And at that time, I was in the federal police.
I'm a lawyer.
And I was in the federal police. My first a lawyer. And I was in the federal police.
My first service was on the border between Brazil and Bolivia.
And then I moved myself.
I was transferred to Sao Paulo.
But during that time, in 2014, I asked my father, hey, father, I see you most, like
almost alone in some of the debates that you face inside of the Congress.
Would you support me to run for the Congress?
So maybe instead of only one congressman, we could be two.
And he supported me.
I ran from the state of São Paulo.
I received a little bit more than 82,000 votes, because in Brazil when you vote for someone,
you vote in the state and actually go to the house. So in the state of Sao Paulo, I received 82,000 votes,
and we spent a little bit less than around $10,000
in my campaign.
So he financed my campaign too.
And I became a congressman.
And so he was still a congressman at that time.
Yes.
So let me get the timeline right before we go on.
I just want to make sure.
So from, you mentioned a regime in Brazil that was similar to the regime in Cuba.
Tell me the dates for that.
All right.
So before 1964.
It was before 64.
Yes.
We had a president called Gianni Quadros. After seven months in the presidency in our White House, he resigned.
And there is no reason for that.
It's a very funny chapter of our story because when he resigned, he said that forces outside
of the earth, like kind of aliens.
There was a kind of a threat against him and that's why he resided.
Well, that'll do it, you know.
But then the vice president was a huge communist guy
and he was start to talk to end with the private property,
get the farms and get the land of the farmers and send it to the people.
You know, this kind of issue, very strong at that time.
And regarding that in Cuba, the revolution is 1959.
So we are talking five years after that.
And so he was thinking the way it should turn Brazil
into a communist country.
And the major part of our society didn't want that.
So the National Association of the Press,
Catholic Church, farmers, militaries for sure.
So we start to have a lot of huge protests,
more than one million people in Rio de Janeiro,
for example, on the streets,
asking that the militaries should not let Brazil
turn itself as a Cuba.
And so the Congress on April 1st of 1964,
the Congress said, if the president do not come
to the capital in Brasilia, he was on a trip in China.
If he not come back to Brasilia, to the capital,
we are going to declare that the presidential chair is vacancy.
There is no one in the presidential chair.
And we will open for a new election.
So this was after the gentleman that you described had resigned because of this interference
from external forces.
Yes.
Okay.
In the Congress elected, a couple of days later of that, the Congress elected the first
general of this period of time in
1964.
The military said that they would give back the power to the civil society very quick.
But after almost two years, we start to have radical left groups bombing airports, kidnapping
airplanes, and even the US ambassador was kidnapped during the 17s in Brazil.
So, with this atmosphere, the military said,
all right, we cannot give you back the power because you have a lot of sensibility,
so we are going to rule the country in front of one.
And they stayed there for 20 years.
Okay, and that was the time during when the president was nominated by the Congress,
Congress and the court and not the people? Yeah, only the Congress. The senators and the federal representatives vote for president.
And how did Brazilians generally react to that form of government from 64 to 85?
It's half and a half, I can tell you. Some of the people, they miss this period of time, because it's a period
of time that, for example, the murder rates of Brazil, it was almost the same level of
United States.
We developed a lot our economy.
We became number 44 economy of the world to top 10 economy of the world.
It's a period of time that we have the huge infrastructure buildings as the nuclear using of Angadou's
Hays, the hydroelectric using of Itaipu that it was the hugest, the number one, the biggest of the
world. Now China, they had one bigger than ours, roads all over the country. So they really reduce
the corruption, invest a lot in the infrastructure of the country,
and during a period of time, we had a lot of prosperity.
But in the 80s, the economic rise, mainly coming from the oil crisis, from the Middle
East and the increase of the prices and some other issues, Brazil stopped, stagnated in the economy.
And the political pressure to give back the opportunity
to the people to vote, it was increasing.
So there are two generals that were president
in the end of the 70s and beginning of the 80s,
what they did is first, in 79, they give honesty
to all of the radical left-wing groups, you know, that
kidnapped the U.S. ambassador, that killed some militaries, even foreign militaries in
Brazil, you know, to everybody go back again to the country and trying to pacificate the
country and give it back.
It wasn't necessary, you know,
shooting or killing other people.
The military said, okay, the president at that time,
João Figueiredo, it was a military general,
he said, okay, we are going to give back
the permission of people to vote.
Is that what you want?
I will give you back this permission.
But he warned, you are going to feel,
to miss the time that we were here in the capital because we
cared about people.
This radical left, they are going to take power, they are going to make you suffer.
And I hope God, one day, that you are going to ask the militaries again to take the power
again.
Let's see what happens.
We say that this is the prophecy of the president Figueiredo.
And after, I don't know, 30 years after that, we are in this situation that we have nowadays.
So a lot of the Brazilians who lived that time, not the Brazilians who know about press articles
or left-wing professor that they have in the university or in the college.
So part of the Brazilians, they miss this period of time.
Some others think that it was very bad because you have censorship,
you have the state killing people, people who were exiled outside of Brazil.
So I could say it's 50-50, in my opinion.
And so it seems reasonable to presume that the political spectrum in Brazil for many,
many decades has been much more polarized right and left than is typical in the United
States and Canada and Europe, that there's more activity on the radical left and more activity in the United States and Canada, in Europe, that there's more activity
on the radical left and more activity on the right?
Is that a reasonable way of looking at it as far as you're concerned?
The left, they have, they're a minority that speak louder.
Why do they speak louder?
Because they control the press, they control the unions, they control part of the politics.
And on the right side,
on the side that I consider myself,
the conservative or better,
on the non-left side,
we don't have even a political party.
We don't have a university or college.
You don't have a union.
You don't have a think tank.
If you look to US, for example, since the 70s,
you have Heritage Foundation think tank.
You have CPAC. You had Rund since the 70s, you have Heritage Foundation think tank, you have CPAC, you had the Rundell-Rigan,
you have some leaderships that are very known
and conservative sides.
So in Brazil, we are starting to build that.
What about the military in Brazil?
Is it right wing fundamentally?
Most of them, I say yes.
Yes.
So is it reasonable to say that the right in Brazil
has the military and the left has the institutions
that you, the other institutions that you described?
So, so in their particular opinion,
but the military, they do not go to politics.
After 85, what happened is the left,
as they control the media, mainly the media,
they start to demonize the militaries.
So during the 80s and 90s,
you don't have a politician say,
I'm a right-wing politician.
This was almost forbidden.
The sense of democracy in Brazil that we had,
it was the PT, the Liberals Party,
which is extremely left, communists,
like I can tell you, AOC, Bernie Sanders.
It's the same kind of people that have a relationship
with Lula da Silva and people from their party in Brazil.
And the social democrats, which is center left,
this we thought it was democracy.
You know?
I see, I see.
But then when my father start to appear
in the national scenario,
no, and then they say, oh, wait a minute,
this is not right.
Right is Jerry Bolsonaro or more to the right here.
So we changed the spectrum of Brazil.
And it's that sense, it's so true what I'm talking because in the previous election,
you had the social democrat Geraldo Alckmin running for president.
He was calling Lula da Silva from the Labor Party
as a thief, as a criminal.
Now guess what?
The vice president of Lula da Silva is this guy,
Geraldo Alckmin.
And they don't even have a shame because of that.
So my father, it was disruptive.
It's like, you know, the king is naked.
My father was the one saying, oh, the king is naked.
And everybody starts to pay attention about what is going on
mainly because now after 2010,
you have a new content in this political scenario,
which it is internet.
With the internet, we break the monopoly
of the mainstream media.
And we start to bring more information.
As you know, that's why they are trying to regulate and democratize the internet and
social media.
But at the end of the day, we all know that they want to control the narrative because
they lost that.
Yes, and of course, Elon Musk's battle with Brazil has been with the Brazilian political
leadership.
This is a deep story, Professor, that we can talk about.
Yeah, yeah, well, I think we should get into that.
OK, so OK, so that, so your father
was a city councilor in 1988 and a congressman in 1990,
and then he spent 28 years in Congress.
And the story that you're telling now
is that he shifted the spectrum of political discourse in Brazil from center left, radical
left to radical left, center left.
And what would you describe him?
Where would you put him on the political spectrum?
You described yourself as center right.
Yes, I'll put right.
Why not?
People sometimes say, oh, far, far, far right.
Yeah, well, that's...
Far right for me is other thing because what Lula and the Communists, they want, they want
to control the economy 100%.
We want to, we want, what is the opposite of control the economy 100% is when you do
not have any kind of administration.
It's a narco-capitalist.
We are not a narco-capitalist. We are not a narco-capitalist.
We believe in a minimum size of the administration.
We don't wanna destroy the administration.
We need a government to rule some things,
and you have to be very sensitive when I talk about that,
to not go far away.
What is rule something?
For example, you have the right to go and back
to your home to the work, all right?
You drive your car, but you cannot drive your car
on the wrong way because you are going to put in risk
other people's life, crashing other people's car.
So to somehow rule these kind of situations
and the situations where the individual cannot do, for example, everybody
knows that, have the sense that killing each other is a wrong thing.
All right?
Everybody believes in that.
We should not be a society where everybody is killing everybody.
So we need the police.
We need somehow defend our territory from other countries, because maybe you have in our neighborhood
a dictatorship that want to invade your country.
If you look nowadays to Ukraine and Russia,
to Venezuelan Guiana, Maduro saying that he want
to get the territory of Ezequibo
and some other parts of the world,
makes sense that you need an army.
So to defend your country, preserve your culture,
to have a civilization on the streets, police,
and one or two points, you need the state,
you need the administration.
So it's a limited government vision.
Would you regard your view, now, first of all,
I guess I'd like to know, are your father and yourself relatively united
in your political views?
So, yes, okay, so we can just discuss that,
the two of you as a unit in some way.
Yeah, I don't talk in his name, but...
Right, okay, I got the picture.
And so the way that you laid out
the Brazilian political landscape since 1985
is basically an argument between two parties
on the left.
And so I'm still trying to place the Brazilian political spectrum because in Canada, say,
and also in the United States, you have the socialist types, let's say, and then you have
the classic liberals who are more in the middle.
And in Canada, traditionally, that was the liberal party.
Classical liberal Brazil to be on the right.
Yeah.
Yeah. And so, and the right wing
that you're talking about in Brazil,
would you describe that,
could you characterize it as more libertarian?
Would you call it more classic liberal?
Or would you call it more classic conservative?
We, I consider myself classical conservative.
Okay.
But I'm very friend, for example,
of the classical liberal when you talk about economy. Because if you go to Brazil and you say, I'm very friend, for example, of the classical liberal when you talk about economy.
Because if you go to Brazil and you say, I'm a liberal,
they are not going to link you with the left.
They're going to link you with the right.
Okay, that's what I was wondering.
Liberal here is people who want to control your life,
control the free speech on social media,
want a huge administration, increase the taxes.
Right, liberal here means,
increasingly means progressive, right?
And that means left.
Liberally in Brazil is,
less taxes, free market. Free market, yeah, okay.
And the difference between our liberals and me,
who are in the position of conservative,
it'll be about maybe drugs.
They want to have a more flexible rules about drugs.
I am against to open, you know, to have more flexibility on the drug law, for example,
the regulations.
But you have some odd, as in Brazil, we are deep in a moral crisis.
This is not a priority.
The priority is to rescue our country.
To people believe again that we can have an administration that take care of the people,
take care not look to the people.
Because the current president, what he's doing, he's increasing the taxes, travel all around
the world.
Like the first year of Lula da Silva as president of Brazil, he spent more than two months outside of Brazil,
spending a little bit more than $200,000 daily
when he's traveling outside of Brazil.
He's staying in the most expensive hotels, you know,
and when he come back to Brazil, he start to tax people.
We have, for example, usually people in Brazil,
when you buy something mainly from China,
and it's less than $50, the product that you are buying,
you do not pay any kind of tax because of it.
And usually poor people or medium class, they do that.
Lula is taxing even this kind of situation.
And he spent more money than my father,
J. Bolsonaro, when he was president during the pandemic.
Imagine, how can someone spend more money
than the other president during the pandemic?
So that's why the price of the American dollars
in Brazil is exploding,
and the numbers of the economy are not that good.
Still Lula da Silva, he had a situation
where he's receiving a lot of benefit
from the previous administration
because he privatized it a lot,
we reduced a lot of taxes.
We became the number four in the world
when we talk about receiving foreign investments.
We're doing very good.
It was the first time in history that Brazil,
we had less inflation than United States
because we had a liberal, classical liberal economy
ministry called Paulo Guedes,
who received 100% of autonomy from the president,
from my father, to do his work.
Because my father, he knows his place.
He said, I'm not an economist.
But I will appoint someone that can do the homework as never seen in Brazil.
It was the first time since 1985 that we had a liberal, a Chicago boy in the Minister of
Economy, like with the possibility to do his work.
Okay, so let's build up to that again.
So let's go back to when you ran for Congress.
So now at that point, your father is still a congressman.
Yes.
So take us through the story from there.
All right, so keeping this story, in 2014 I was elected,
82,224 votes, and in my first term,
I was looking to my father,
increasing his popularity, going every place in Brazil.
I like, usually on Thursday, he traveled
to a different state, coming back
to the capital in Brasilia on Friday.
So traveling every week, almost every week,
all around Brazil, talking about-
Still as a congressman. Yeah- Still as a congressman.
Yeah, still as a congressman.
So what's making him popular?
Why is he popular?
Because he's a congressman.
Because the politics- He's obviously distinguishing
himself from other congressmen.
What's he doing differently that's attracted-
Stepping outside of the political correct.
Oh yes, okay.
So when someone says that you are racist,
so okay, why am I racist?
I do not support affirmative action for black people
because in Brazil, since when the Portuguese
arrived in Brazil in the year 1500,
they start to mix with the Indians,
then the blacks, and we are all mixed,
you did go to Brazil, you can look to someone and say,
oh, you look European, you look Latin,
you look Indian, you look black.
We don't have this issue as strong as you have here in the United States.
So if you vote against affirmative action for black people in Brazil,
because we don't have black people very rich in Brazil,
they say that you label you as a racist.
For example, there was a bill in Brazil that if you look for the bill, you can clearly
see that pastors could go to jail if they read part of the Bible.
Is it fair?
No, this is unfair.
So when he positioned against this kind of bill, people say you are homophobic.
But in the end of the day, going to why it was so important he travel all around Brazil.
Because when you go to some states, they have a local press and they do not receive public
money.
So when you talk in a radio, you're talking with a maid, with a trucker driver, with regular
common people directly.
And they listening to Jerry Bolsonaro,
they say, this guy is not crazy.
He's not the crazy guy that CNN tells me that is crazy.
This guy, I agree with him.
So when the election came on 2018,
aside of this work also with the crazy of internet,
smartphone, social media, my father became a phenomenon.
It was fashion, you know, social media, my father became a phenomenon.
It was fashion, you know, support him.
And thanks God, the left, the establishment,
they were all the time saying that he was so ridiculous
that he would never be the president.
But he became elected in 2018.
And at that time, I ran in for my first election.
Did he know when he was starting to speak more broadly across Brazil, early on, do you
think he had visions of the presidency at that point?
Like was this a...
Yes.
You do?
Yes.
I do.
So that was an ambition.
And wouldn't...
The right feeling is he was fed up with the Congress.
Like you are only one in the middle of 513 federal
representatives.
You don't have the power to do whatever you want.
You can do bills, but to approve a bill is very different.
He was looking a radical left-wing administration ruling
the country, deeply into corruption scandals all the time.
And he starts to think,
if Dilma Rousseff get elected, re-elected,
Dilma Rousseff is a former president of Brazil,
semi-party of Lula da Silva,
the current president, Labor's party.
If Dilma Rousseff, who cannot connect one phrase
with other phrase, pretty much the same opinion
that people have from Kamala Harris here,
why not me?
And my father, he's really hardworking, really hardworking.
Still nowadays, he's almost 70 years old
and he's every time traveling, every time.
I really admire him because I don't know if I am 40,
if I could have the same energy of my father
to do all of the work that he does.
So he starts to think, if Dilma Rousseff did that,
why not me?
Why I can't be the president?
So he starts to go for that.
He had a plan, all right, he has a project.
He starts to go around not saying that he's going to be the president, but after this
work people start to realize that he could be a president.
Okay, now explain to us how the president is elected in Brazil.
The prime minister in Canada is the leader of the party with the most seats, and the
president of the United States is elected directly.
What's the situation in Brazil? How is the president elected and how is he,
how is that position related to the other major branches of government in Brazil?
Just lay out the structure. Brazil is a little bit different from Canada because it's
presidentially, not a parliamentarism, and different from the US, because here who win in the state
get all the votes of the delegates.
In Brazil, every vote counts.
Every voter, every people count.
If you have more than 18 years old, you vote.
From 18 until 70 years old is mandatory.
You have to vote.
If you do not vote, you pay a fee.
You are fining in $1.
It's not a big deal, but it's still is mandatory.
And every country votes.
So we are 210 million people living in Brazil.
I guess around nowadays 130, 140 million people in Brazil,
they are able to vote.
So you have to go all over the country. 130, 140 million people in Brazil, they are able to vote.
So you have to go all over the country.
Here, I know the presidential candidates,
they usually look, their focus is on the swing states.
Not in Brazil.
In Brazil, you have to be everywhere, everywhere.
Which makes a little bit harder,
you need more energy to do your campaign.
And in 2018, my father did his campaign
basically with a cell phone.
I can tell you, my father didn't spend,
to be very conservative in my accounts,
he didn't even spend $1 million in his campaign.
This is how powerful was the support
in favor of Jerry Bolsonaro.
He, his flags, defend the family, powerful was the support in favor of Jerry Bolsonaro.
His flags, defend the family, get back again the patriotism, reduce the size of the administration,
respect the kids, no gender ideology in the schools, support the law enforcement, get
the criminals to the jail, like as much time as you can send them to the jail.
So it's the opposite of the left.
When you say that all of these flags, the left,
they say, no, no, no, we need gender ideology,
we need to respect everybody,
and all of this narrative that you know,
that they start to build.
But the mainstream media all the time was labeling my father,
like racist, xenophobic, you don't like poor people,
you don't like women, you don't like black,
you don't like no one.
It's even funny because in the end of the day,
I don't even know if someone like that exists.
And people through mainly by internet,
the social media of my father was controlled
by my brother, Carlos.
The message that we gave to the people
is this message of Patrick Sears.
So how did you guys use social media?
Like you said, it was a very low-cost campaign,
which is extraordinarily interesting.
I mean, one of the things the internet's going to do
is to knock the prices of campaigns down dramatically
because, well, Trump went on Rogan a week ago, 44 million views.
There's just, and those are volunteer views obviously, people are doing that on purpose, right,
rather than having their TV accidentally on to listen to a sound bite.
And the barrier to entry on YouTube and on the social media platforms is basically zero.
We've seen this with Pierre Poliev in Canada, so he'll be the next prime minister by all accounts.
The media in Canada, the legacy media, is increasingly state controlled because it's
subsidized. And so it's very pro-Trudeau. It also happens in Brazil. It also happens in Brazil.
Yeah, I'm sure it's the same thing.
And Pauliev just walked around them.
He set up his own social media channels, his own YouTube site.
He built his own ads.
He made micro documentaries that were 10 minutes long.
And some of his micro documentaries were getting like 400,000 views, which in Canada is a lot
of views.
You know, that'd be equivalent to about four million at least in the United States.
And so he just walked around them completely.
And you could see with Rogan interviewing
Trump and Vance this week,
I think the Vance interview already has
like six million views,
there's just no need for the legacy media.
And so you guys were early adopters of that
new technology.
Like a million dollars for a campaign, that's nothing.
And so did you use all the main social media platforms?
Like were you guys, I don't know what the...
It's active in Brazil.
Like it would be Facebook and Instagram and X
and YouTube primarily, TikTok in the United States.
Is it the same in Brazil?
It's the same situation.
But I have to go back to 2018, we had way more freedom.
Nowadays, I can guarantee to you that sometimes people think maybe even right on X, but they
do not post that, to not have problems with the Supreme Court.
Right, right.
We'll get into that. And I'll tell you how I can make you believe
that my father didn't spend even $1 million
and almost all of the campaign we did
through the social media is because he got elected in 2018
and he took office on January of 2019.
Since 2019, the Supreme Court of Brazil,
they opened an investigation called the Fake News
investigation.
Oh yeah.
Trying to prove that Jair Bolsonaro had kind of AI or an office,
fitted with public money to destroy the reputation of the journalists and the reputation of the
communists and all the other players in the election.
Since 2019, we are in 2024,
this investigation is still open.
They just turned our life towards,
they just did everything that I can do
in terms of investigation against my family,
against my father, the federal police,
went to my father's house to take his vaccine card.
It's funny, this is other things that we have to talk about.
The accusations that they say, the accusations against us.
And still, they cannot prove.
So were they shocked?
Okay, so two things could be happening there.
I mean, one, and maybe both are happening.
One could be that it's
merely an organized harassment campaign. But the other thing is, is that perhaps they're
also completely stunned at how successful that tactic was and couldn't believe that
it could possibly be managed with no budget whatsoever and merely by communicating. See,
one of the things...
See, one could not believe, oh, could build a narrative
to destroy us.
Yeah, yeah.
Because, you know, nowadays,
the reality is just a piece of something.
Yeah.
Reality doesn't matter.
Yeah.
The matter is the narrative that they build inside
of the mind of the people.
Because in the end of the day,
the elite, the radical left, they are smart enough.
They knew that we won the elections
doing everything that we did in social media,
traveling all over the country, because the majority part of Brazil they're conservative.
Well, it's funny though, you know, in the US, recently, I think it was within the last six months,
Gavin Newsom, who's the governor of California, made some denigrating comments about Joe Rogan,
calling him, his son watches Joe Rogan and me, which I'm quite happy about.
And he described Joe Rogan as a fringe figure.
And I thought, see, that's really relevant
because Gavin Newsom is a fringe figure
compared to Joe Rogan.
I think Joe's podcast is number one in 192 countries.
I'm not sure it's 192, it might be 92,
but it doesn't matter, it's a lot of countries. I'm not sure it's 192, it might be 92, but it doesn't matter. It's a lot of countries.
And so he's definitely the most powerful journalist who's ever lived by a large margin.
And CNN is a fringe organization compared to Rogan. But the left in particular, and I would
say even the liberals in the more classic sense, they don't understand this at all. They still think that CNN and MSNBC and the Washington Post for that matter, matter and
they do to some limited degree, but that time is seriously over.
And so I'm wondering even in Brazil, it could be that like you guys were seriously on the
cutting edge of the communication revolution and the people that are watching you just
have absolutely no idea how powerful it is because that isn't their territory.
Yes, yes.
And the thing that makes us kind of special is because my father, he has authenticity.
He is original.
He's pretty much like Trump.
He did not stop to think, oh, I'm going to speak that.
Is it good or bad?
Let me do it from this way.
No, no, no.
They think they talk, you know, it doesn't matter if it's, if it's, is it
going to hurt you is your problem.
Sorry, if you are so sensitive.
No.
So, uh, people start to trust you.
You open a live streaming.
Like, I remember that when a new scandal against my father, oh, he's a racist.
Oh, he's this and that.
When something show up, the first thing that he does is open a live streaming and
start to talk about that openly.
That's why people trust on him.
You know, all the other politicians before a speaker to do an interview, the first
thing that they do, they go to someone in the, on one of the assistants, oh, you are from the market. Should I say that? Am I going to earn more votes saying this or that?
And then they call the press for a conference and do a beautiful speech. So we are on the other way.
If you look for the social media of my father, you are going to see that most part of the videos
are low cost videos. You don't need a cell phone to do that most part of the videos are low cost videos.
You don't need a cellphone to do that.
It's not something beautiful with content and edited.
You know, so these things makes you connect
with the people.
For example, one of the things they always try to say
is that, oh, Jay Bolson, he's not rumble.
Like he wear soccer team jerseys
to pretend to be someone popular.
But my father is the same,
in front of the cameras and behind of the cameras.
And in the end of the day, people realize that.
There was a very, a very special case
when he was president,
right in the beginning of the pandemic where
you had people on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro getting arrested because the
whole city was in a lockdown, very strong lockdown, so it was forbidden to
you get out of your house basically like that, like in Canada. And you have some
videos of one or two ladies on the beach and the cops going there to arrest these people.
And in a meeting of the president, my father, Roger Bolsonaro, with his ministries,
he's talking like using very bad and very strong words.
Why is not the justice ministry talking about this kind of issue?
Drug dealers cannot be arrested like that.
Why ladies on the beach getting D vitamin are going to be in jail because of that?
And at this meeting, here with his ministers, it was recorded, but not for the public.
How people watched that?
Because the Supreme Court,
I think one year after all of that,
God gave an order to the president,
hey, President Bolsonaro, we want the video
of your meetings with the ministries.
And he gave.
For the lucky of my father,
expecting to give in a first hand,
the breaking news to the people,
oh, look, President Bolsonaro talking bad words.
Look how bad he is behind the scenes.
This is Bolsonaro.
CNN broadcast the video live before see that.
And in fact, you have my father talking bad words
for the justice ministry to some of the people
like around him in the,
in our White House.
You know what?
People loved.
People just loved.
People said, Bolsonaro just got reelected
because of this video.
Because people see that this is the president
that I voted for, defending people.
Come on, who think, who judges think they are?
Who do you think the cops think they are
to arrest some ladies on the beach?
I went because I remember, I remind that that day,
I was in Sao Paulo and I do surf.
I went to the sea to surf,
and people came to me, other surfers came to me,
oh, Bolsonaro, because I'm also a federal congressman.
Bolsonaro, your father, he's the best.
People start to accomplish me on the water.
This is not a common.
Usually surfers, when they go to the water,
maybe you can talk with one or other,
but it's not a common, you gather in the water,
you know, with others.
So it was proving that Bolsonaro is the same one
in front of the cameras and behind of the cameras.
That's another thing that's very interesting about the social media landscape.
I know a lot of the main players, obviously, who are pioneers, particularly in YouTube, particularly in the podcast domain.
particularly in the podcast domain. And all the ones that I know are the same
in front of the camera as they are off.
Rogan's, he's a classic example of that.
I mean, you see Rogan.
No, he's the same or he's not the same?
He's exactly the same.
All right.
He's exactly, all of the people that are hyper popular
as podcasters that I know are exactly the same on their podcasts as
they are off.
There's no persona.
And part of that is that lack of professionalism.
You know, and it isn't exactly lack of professionalism.
It's what's happened is that as people have become more and more able to do video editing
themselves, for example, they're much more video literate than they were 10 years ago.
No, they should hide that.
Yeah, well, yeah.
People on YouTube, for example, nobody trusts edited YouTube videos.
Because they don't trust editing.
And so you want to see the conversation unfold as it does unfold.
And I've talked with Rogan about this to some decent degree about interviewing people, you
know, and his experience too is that you can tell who's an empty suit after about 20 minutes,
right, because we're having an unstructured conversation and we both have to be able to
track it and it has to go where it's going to go, but it has to stay coherent and it
has to stay interesting and we both have to be able to track it, and it has to go where it's going to go, but it has to stay coherent and it has to stay interesting,
and we both have to be engaged.
And there's really just no way of staging that.
And if you try to stage it, it just falls flat.
The other thing that happens too,
we experienced this at the ARC conference in London,
is that if it's politicized in a way that's ego-driven,
it also fails. So at ARC the
discussions that were more political were much less successful on YouTube and
at the conference than the ones that were more philosophical and that were
more direct. So the new media landscape, I think it's partly a consequence of
bandwidth. There's no bandwidth restriction, right?
So I mean, 20 years ago, a minute on network television was extremely expensive.
And so everything had to be crafted and edited and produced.
And now there's no bandwidth limitation whatsoever.
So none of that's necessary.
And it's also the case that people have a much longer
span of attention for listening than the TV types presume.
Now, they presume that partly because they were concerned
with bandwidth and trying to conserve time.
But then they kind of thought that, well,
people only had a 30 second attention span.
It's like, no, it turns out that people have a three hour
attention span, no problem.
And of course, Rogan, above all, demonstrated that.
And so, okay, and so your dad,
he did the same thing that Poliev did essentially,
and maybe earlier, about the same time really,
because Poliev was starting to work directly
to social media at that time as well.
Okay, now, the leader of the Conservative Party in Canada. Because he's the other one I know who's used social media at that time as well. Okay, now the leader of the Conservative Party in Canada,
because he's the other one I know who's used social media
so effectively.
And I really think that's what's going to happen.
This is a shift in the way politics
is going to be conducted.
There's absolutely no reason that political leaders
can't take their message directly to people
with no intermediaries.
And I think that's going to be extremely beneficial.
And so while it worked very well for you folks.
Okay, so your father was elected president 2018?
Yep.
And how long was he president?
Four years.
Four years.
So he was...
If I may, professor, excuse me.
On open parenthesis.
One month before the election,
he also got stabbed in the belly during the campaign.
This is very important to say because he was almost killed
by a former member of the Socialist Liberty Party, PSOL.
This party in Brazil is radical left.
They are connected, they have a lot of pictures
and trips here to US to have meetings with AOC, Bernie Sanders and these kind of people,
who is the left, radical left part of the Democratic Party.
The name of the guy who stabbed my father, his name is Adelio Bispo.
My father was on the streets, campaigning with a crowd of 20 or 30 thousand people around him in the city of Jiu Jitsu Fora.
One of the security of my father put a hand on his shoulders.
So you have videos on YouTube everywhere.
And the guy came with a knife, jumped it and stabbed my father, twisted a little bit, and
the knife got into the belly of my father 15 centimeters and cutting some parts his
intestine.
At that time, in the moment that it happened,
you could not see too much blood.
You can see that there was a cut,
and their security ran into a hospital with him.
In the hospital, the doctors identified
that he was with internal hemorrhage. He lost about 2.5 liters of blood.
He died twice.
And he went to the, to the surgery.
And you have a lot of these, more than two liters of blood
together with, how can I say that politely in English,
with shit.
Right.
Which makes you think, oh, so for sure
he had an infection after that.
Like, it's a miracle he survived.
The doctor said two more minutes on the way to the hospital,
two more minutes delay, he's done.
He would be out of blood through the heart bomb.
When he arrived in the hospital, in the emergency,
he had exactly the specialist, medical specialist
required for this kind of situation,
which is very rare in Brazil.
He has a gastro-medical doctor for that part.
The securities of my father,
also they know exactly the way to the Closers Hospital.
So the driver was a local that knew the fastest way
to arrive in the hospital.
And one day before, my father,
he had a problem in the throat
and a friend, Jusso Machado,
which is our former tourism minister,
he gave a medicine to my father,
an antibiotic to my father.
Bolsonaro, you are feeling sick a little bit on the throat.
Yeah, but you're campaigning, you know,
you cannot wait.
It become worse to receive an antibiotic.
Take this pill with the antibiotic.
So my father start to have antibiotic.
So this is, I think, what prevented to get infection
because there's a lot of blood with feces
inside of his body.
So he survived that, but more than 70%
of the time of the campaign in Brazil
have 45 days that you can campaign.
More than 70% of this period of time my father was in a hospital.
So he could not go to the streets running all over the country delivering his message
to run to do a presidential campaign.
And still he got elected.
This is very important.
This is also very important to say because people do a lot of, they compare with the
Trump situation after the shooting case right next to his head.
And it's one more thing that Trump have in common with my father.
So after that he got elected and I also became the most voted ever federal representative,
most vote ever federal representative
in the history of Brazil.
Now he did or you did?
I did. You did.
I did for the Congress, he did as president.
I received almost two million votes.
In my first campaign, my first election 2014, 82,000.
2018, almost two million.
So it was a huge message for all of the country.
Our party became very strong.
We were in a very small party
that we had only three congressmen.
After the 2018 election, we became 52.
And nowadays, after the 22 elections,
we are almost 100 congressmen in my party.
So it shows that the wave is still increasing.
It's not, oh, Bolsonaro lost the election,
and okay, the movement is over.
No, no, no, the movement is still strong.
And the only way that the legacy media, for example,
sees to control us is controlling the narrative
with the new bills against the free speech.
Right, right.
That's why this is so important.
Okay, so let's go to the 2022 election.
So that was, it was six, you said,
just a number of days before that election
that your father was just about killed.
Yeah, one month before the election of 2018.
One month. And what was the outcome of the election
at the presidential level in 2022?
Yeah, to ensure it was the election
that my father wanted for reelection, but he lost.
Yeah, right. And it was a month before that
that he was almost killed?
No, in 2018.
Oh, that was in... Okay, sorry.
It was 2018. Forgive my ignorance.
No, no, no. That's okay.
Yeah, so, okay. so what happened in 2022?
Why did he lose the election?
Then I have to take care about my words
because in Brazil, depending what you talk,
you can be considered anti-democratic.
To talk to the Americans here that are watching us, remember that Trump in Georgia, he was
the mugshot because he was talking about the election process.
But you have a bench of videos of Hillary Clinton and some other people from the Democratic
Party saying that they do not trust in the election. Maybe the 2016 election wasn't 100% trustable, but with Trump things change.
So with us things change in Brazil too.
And we have a target on our head, so I have to take care about what I'm going to say to
not have problems when I come back home.
In 2022 elections, there are two theories.
One theory is the machines that we use to vote,
because in Brazil it's fully electronic.
You go to a machine, developed by the government,
and you dial the number of your candidate.
For example, the number of my father was 22.
Our party number is 22.
So you want to vote for Bolsonaro,
you dial 22 and press the green button.
Blah, blah, blah, blah.
That's it.
And then you pray for God that someone in the Capitol,
the bureaucrats are going to count your vote properly.
But you do not receive,
you don't have a way to recount that.
You don't have a way to audit that.
You know, you just go home and that's it.
Pretty much like in Venezuela.
In Venezuela, they have a similar system of Brazil.
And in 2022, I'm not going to talk about...
We also have to be careful about discussing such things here,
and it's more a consequence of lawsuits.
And so I was warned before the interview started
to tread very lightly on the territory
that we're investigating now.
And it seems to me that independently of the reliability
and validity of the electronic voting process,
these are problems that you just don't have
with paper ballots because there they are
and you can recount them.
And so, to give the devil is due,
you can certainly understand
that if electronic voting machines had a track record
that was as solid as paper,
they're more efficient and can be tabulated faster.
But the truth of the matter is we don't know anything
about this new technology, right?
And you introduce a radically new technology
into the process that determines your political electorate
at your peril, right?
And so conservatives know such things,
unintended consequences.
Okay, so with that aside, back to the election.
I'll not talk about this theory, all right?
Let's say that the arm machine is 100% fully trustable.
Yeah.
But still, in Brazil, who organize the elections,
who coordinate the elections, who judge everything
about the elections in Brazil is a court
called Superior Electoral Court.
I will say only Electoral Court,
referring myself to this court.
Who is on the head of this court?
Who is the president, the chairman of this Electoral Court?
Is a justice from the Supreme Court.
His name is Alexandre de Moraes.
On 2022, it was Alexandre de Moraes.
This is the name that I would like you
to save on your mind, Alexandre de Moraes.
This man, he has a personal problem with my father
and with our family.
He did a lot of interventions in the executive power
and sometimes even in the legislative, in the Congress.
And he was on the-
This was during your father's administration.
Yes, during my father's administration,
we had a lot of conflicts with him.
So he was on the head of this electoral court.
So this electoral court, you had ridiculous decisions such as, my father could not open
a live streaming from his cell phone at his house.
Why?
They say that because all the other candidates, they do not have a house, a public house paid with
public money.
Because when you're president, you live in the White House.
Who paid the rent of the White House?
Who paid the energy and the water of the White House?
Is a taxpayer.
So the reason that they found to avoid Jair Bolsonaro, Jair Bolsonaro was forbidden to
broadcast from his house.
So if he would like to start live streaming
from his Facebook, he would get a car,
get out of his house and start a live streaming.
This is a point to understand how ridiculous
was the decision during this period of time.
And more than that, we could not say some words to define our oppositor, Lula da Silva.
There is the number one conservative media in Brazil, it's called Jovem Pan.
Jovem Pan, they received an order saying that they cannot refer, the journalist of Jovem Pan could not say that Lula is a criminal, is a thief,
or that he was unconvicted from the convictions that he had in the past.
Because Lula da Silva, the current president, the Supreme Court, he was convicted for laundering
money and corruption in the past.
But two years before the election, they overturned all of that and let Lula da Silva run for president.
And all of the establishment was in favor of his election,
very clearly.
So this is how the election happened in Brazil.
So I can tell you, even if you believe that our machines
that we use to vote is 100% okay, 100% trustable,
it wasn't a fair election.
Because basically-
How close was the margin?
My father made 49.1 or 2 percent, Lula made 49.51.
Right, so really split down the middle.
Really split.
Really close, tight margins.
Yeah, well, any election where there's tight margins like that, it's also, you know, you
could imagine that even a well-run political system is, what would you say, corrupt 1%.
You know, and if the margin is 1%, that makes things very awkward.
Yes, and we have some other things that I could add.
For example, the most left-wing states that we have, they were voting even after 5 p.m. on Sunday.
Because in our election, everybody go to vote at the same day. The first Sunday of October, you have to vote.
From 8 a.m. until 5 p.m.
All right? After that, it's closed.
No one, no one, anyone else can vote anymore.
But in the states, where they have the majority in favor
of the left-wing politicians, the state of Bahia
and some other states on the northeast of Brazil, which is the major part of the left-wing politicians, the state of Bahia and some other
states on the northeast of Brazil, which is the major part of the Brazilians receive
existentialism from the government to survive.
In these states, people were voting 6, 7, 8 p.m. and some million more votes were added
in the election.
So what I can say, and I cannot prove to be very honest, Professor, what I can say is
in Brazil, the people who sit on the desks taking the idea of the people and letting
them go vote, most part of these people, they know each other because they are the same
people, election after election, who are there on the sessions, on the electoral sessions,
receiving people to vote.
So, if everybody's left-wing, if you do not have morals,
you are not left-wing, usually politicians are left-wing,
they do not care about values or morals,
you can say, oh, okay, let's see in the list
who did not vote yet, and let's go vote in their names.
It can happen.
So if you stop people to vote after 5 p.m.,
as is the electoral law require us to be,
it will be way more transparency,
way more trustable our election.
I'm telling you that you have a lot of way to do frauds.
All of them were used.
Okay, so let me ask you a question about that too.
I guess, in my opinion.
Well, if you looked at your father's administration over that four-year period, that was his first foray into the presidency.
Certainly Trump has pronounced, announced recently that,
like your father had a lot more political experience
by the time he took the presidency than Trump had.
Trump had business experience,
but that's not exactly the same thing.
But I presume that your family has reviewed the inadequacies,
let's say, of your father's first presidency.
What mistakes do you think were made?
What mistakes do you think were made under his leadership
that might have also compromised the election?
The main thing that people comply about my father is
that he talks too much. But I mean it's it's the opinion of the people. We
usually say that okay are you voting for president or you want a boyfriend or a
girlfriend? You know he talks too much but the economy is going good, the
criminals are having a very tough time with my father.
Regular citizens, they are having a better life.
You have less bureaucracy.
You can take care of your life.
You know, a lot of benefits.
But the press all the time, they are doing some kind of a notorious scandal because,
depending on what my father was using to say,
because he has no future, sometimes getting what my father was using to say, because he has
no future, sometimes getting out of his house, he stopped and started to talk with the people,
with the press around and use non-politically correct words.
And it became a scandal.
In the end of the day, you can affect talking that so much every day, it affects people
and maybe you change your priorities.
Well, certainly his reputation outside of, you know,
I got low resolution.
The reputation outside of Brazil is bad.
If you go to a lot of people,
you think that my father is the evil.
Yeah, yeah, well, then I would say, like...
He's burning Amazon, he's...
Right, right, well, I can't say that, like,
my knowledge of Brazil is shallow, certainly.
And so what that means is that whatever impressions I picked up about the Bolsonaro administration
were like second-hand representations from the legacy media, right? Not even necessarily
direct. And it was certainly the case that the gut sense, I would say, of the typical North American with regards to Bolsonaro was
dangerous right winger.
So definitely.
Now I'm a lot more skeptical about such terminology now that I was, let's say, eight years ago
or even five years ago.
But those sorts of...
See, one of the problems is that it's very easy to tag people, right?
Because you can think about it psychologically in a manner that's appropriate.
There's a lot of people that you could listen to.
There's 8 billion people you could listen to.
And so you need a reason not to listen to most people because there's just too many
people.
And so if you hear something bad about someone
that you don't know, it's easier just to assume,
well, you can just write them off.
And it doesn't matter because there's 8 billion other people
to choose from, right?
So my point is it's very easy to smear someone's reputation.
It's very easy, especially, I think you can especially
do that, you can do that especially with disgust
rather than fear.
Disgust is even more effective than fear.
And so anyways, I mean, my impression of,
for what it's worth, my impression
of the Bolsonaro administration was definitely colored
by the pronouncements of the legacy media
that this was another far right movement.
And I mean, the same thing basically happened to Maloney
in Italy and to Orban in Hungary.
And so, well, and I do think it's part and parcel
of the operation of the legacy media
and the sway that the progressives have
over the universities and the legacy media.
The same thing in Brazil.
It's so interesting to see that exactly the same thing
is playing out there that's playing out
in the United States and Canada and all through Europe.
And that's why Brazil is important to the United States,
because we are the lab.
The ideas usually come from here,
and they apply in Brazil.
So why Americans showed apply in Brazil.
So why Americans should penitentiary in Brazil?
Because we have a unique thing
when we talk about censorship,
is because everywhere in the world,
it comes through the hands of the president
of the prime minister.
For example, you have big issues with Trudeau,
or with the C-16 law, and whatever.
But in Brazil, is the Supreme Court.
Yeah, yeah, so we can delve into that.
Now this gentleman that you talked about,
the Supreme Court, now he-
Alexandre de Moraes.
Now is he the same one, again,
I'm exposing my ignorance here, so forgive me,
is he the same one who's at odds with that musk?
Yes.
Okay, so it is this, okay, that's what I assume.
I just wanna make sure that that,
okay, so why do you unravel that story for us?
You started going down that road and said that,
okay, so what role is the Supreme Court playing
in Brazil at the moment?
And why is it that Musk got embroiled in a,
well, in this very, very public,
internationally public argument
with the Brazilian Supreme Court.
Explain that.
Alexander de Moraes, he was the chairman of the Electoral Court, and he was too aggressive
in the 2022 elections, mainly.
In the 2022 elections, what happened?
Around 100 conservative profiles on Twitter got blocked.
To be blocked in Brazil, our law says that you need to give
to the other side, to the users,
the right to defend himself.
And the platform has 48 hours to block someone.
This is general law in Brazil.
What was happening in Brazil is,
Alexandre de Morais was ordering Twitter and some other
platforms, I guess, because I'm not that dumb to think it was happening only for Twitter.
Right, right.
So he was addressing orders to Twitter saying, block these and that people in one hour, if you don't do that,
I will fine you in, it was, I can tell you around
20, $30,000 to start.
It was a huge fine, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
Daily, daily, if you do not accomplish with his orders.
But the main thing is, Alexandre de Moraes ordered, according
with Glenn Greenwald, the journalist,
articles that came up a couple of months ago,
Alexandre de Moraes was saying to Twitter platform,
do not tell the users that are getting blocked
that this order is coming from me.
Oh yeah.
This is key because during 2022 elections,
Brazilians gotta piss it off with Twitter
because you get your cell phone
and then there is a black screen saying you were blocked
because you violated one of our internal policies.
Sure, sure.
And then you say, but what post did I do
that makes me be blocked in the platform?
You don't know.
These are the candidates you're speaking of?
No, everybody in general.
So this was happening quite broadly?
You have candidates, you have regular people,
you have influencers, you have YouTubers like
Luciano Hangi, for example, who is a very strong supporter
of my father.
He's a billionaire,
he got blocked in this situation.
So you are getting outside, imagine in the United States, you are going to run for president
and you cannot see what Tucker Carlson, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, what they are posting
or producing on their platforms.
This was the situation in Brazil.
So I'm adding one more factor.
Well, they blocked Trump too when he was president, so that's quite remarkable.
Yes.
Yeah.
And Elon, he bought Twitter right between the first and the second round of the Brazilian
election in October of 2022.
That's why we know all of that nowadays.
Right, right.
One year ago, we would be still pissed off with Twitter.
But why?
Elon Musk start a fight, I don't know,
months ago with Alexandre de Moraes.
Alexandre de Moraes, he has,
he is justice of the Supreme Court.
He has a Twitter account.
And he was talking about something,
posting his opinion or whatever about something.
And then, Elon come and commented, why are you demanding so much censorship in Brazil?
Oh yeah.
Boom, then things start.
The chairman of the Justice Committee of the House of the U.S.
Congress, Mr.
Jim Jordan, he asked Ilan Musk to give all the emails changed with the Brazilian
authorities during the 2022 election period of time.
Oh yeah.
With these emails now that we know after reading the report of Jim Jordan in the US Congress,
you have around 500 pages in this report, you know that Alexandre de Moraes,
I mean, the electoral court,
was sending emails to Twitter saying to block people.
And some of the people, for example,
the journalist Paulo Figueiredo,
he only knew why he was blocked in 2022
looking to these reports.
So this is the level of censorship that we had.
And this is the problem because
this is not only about Brazil.
Oh, that's for sure.
Europe's authorities.
Yeah.
Alexandre de Moraes and some other authorities of Brazil,
they do speeches in Paris, in London, in New York.
They are spreading the virus.
And you have some press articles saying that
some of the European's
authority they were looking closely this fight between Alexandre de Morais and
Elon Musk to copy to Europe. Yeah yeah yeah because what happened now I would
shock with the Americans that don't know this story deeply. I'm talking about
Twitter, Elon Musk against Alexandre de Mororaes, right? Well, there was a top EU official whose name escapes me at the moment, unfortunately, who
complained, although apparently not with the full authority of the EU, about the fact that
Musk was talking to Trump.
Come again?
That's...
That he complained using his EU... A Brazilian one? No, no, you're an EU an EU representative
Unfortunately, I can't remember his name. We'll put it in the notes, but
He complained that Musk was talking to Trump, right? So this why is the crime in that?
Conk the House of
Representatives in the US actually wrote a response letter, and I
think it was Jim Jordan who signed it, telling him to really mind his own bloody business
as he should have.
And the EU, to their credit, did separate themselves technically from him, although,
and I don't know the entire background of the story, but the reason I'm bringing it up is because
it lends credence to your claim that the EU bureaucrats
who are not the least bit happy with Elon Musk,
and the same thing could be said about the UK,
especially the Labour Party there, right?
They're definitely Musk's enemies
and will do whatever they need to to stop him.
And so, and that is being played out in Brazil.
That's part of the reason why I think this podcast
should be of broad interest to the international community.
So-
Because as Brazil, we have this special case
because the censorship is coming through the hands
of one of the judges of the Supreme Court.
And also, Alexandre Morais fined Twitter. And the first response of the Twitter is that
they're not going to pay this fine,
but after one month they paid to get back again
Twitter in Brazil because they were banned.
So the Europeans authorities, like the woke people,
the progressive, they were enjoying that.
Wait a minute, so if we do that through the hands of the courts,
maybe we can control Elon Musk,
and force them to censorship whoever I want.
So this is the point, and what I would say
that was shocking is that to do that,
Alexandre de Moraes not only banned Twitter,
he threatened to arrest the Twitter team in Brazil.
Right, yes, I remember that.
That's why thanks President of Argentina, Javier Mele, he offered asylum to this kind of people.
They said publicly through Twitter, if the Brazilians want to come to Argentina, they are more than welcome.
Because here we do preserve the freedom and the free speech and all of that. So thank you Javier Millet,
the greatest president of Latin America by far.
And the second thing is,
Alexandre de Morais freezed some of the resources
of Starlink.
Yes, well-
But Starlink wasn't in the dispute.
So Europeans are toying with that too.
I've looked at some of their background legislation and the fine structures, Canada is playing
with this too by the way, under the auspices of a bill called C63, which is the most totalitarian
piece of legislation I've ever seen written in the West by a large margin, way worse than
nefarious bill C16.
That was just the warmup.
In any case, the fines that are being proposed
in Bill C-63, which I imagine will be somewhat of a template
for the impending war against Musk,
involve percentages of company revenue worldwide.
Like, I think in the Canadian bill,
it's 6% of company revenue worldwide per day.
Revenue, not profit, revenue.
Well, and then the question is,
well, is it X revenue or is it X revenue
and Starlink revenue and Tesla revenue?
And well, you can be certain that that'll be interpreted
in the most liberal manner possible.
Because Elon is not the owner of Starlink.
He has, I guess, 42% of the company,
but he's not the owner.
You have way other people around in the same company.
Details, details, details.
And Bill Ackman, some other billionaires,
start to complain, well, wait, wait, wait.
This thing of the Brazilian Supreme Court's too far.
It's too much power on only one person hands.
And it can be very dangerous,
because we know how dictatorship starts.
And when they start, usually they have support
of part of the people.
But on the next day, these supporters
will be the target of the dictator.
Yeah, that's for sure.
You know, in all the dictatorships, it happens.
And this is one of the things that are happening
in this dispute with Twitter.
And that's also why the US Congress,
they are giving their attention to Brazil.
And nowadays, we have a bill from the representative
Mario Vira Salazar from Florida.
It was approved in the committees of the House and is ready to be voted from
the House. We only need the chairman, Mike Johnson, to put that to be vote. And this
bill says that if any foreign authority do not respect the First Amendment of an American
citizen outside of US, they will lose their visa to come to US.
The country?
Yeah, for example, if a Brazilian authority
do not respect the free speech of Elon Musk
or any other American,
he is not able to come into and enter United States.
He will lose his visa.
So this bill, we hope that is going to be approved
in the House because after that,
I'm sure that the US administration even more with Trump,
I'm always supporting Trump,
that it can be fully applied.
It's a way to avoid this kind of authority because they have too much power.
They are doing whatever they want, even with American companies.
And come on, Twitter is following all of the American and US law.
Why?
The Brazilian Supreme Court is banning Twitter outside of Brazil.
So it's a way to force people to respect the law.
If the Brazilian authorities,
if they were respecting the law.
Well, the war, you know, the war is really going to be. So Americans arguably have the
most potent protection for free speech rights in the world. I think that's a reasonable
thing to say. I mean, countries like Britain, European countries, there's a tradition of
free speech, but it's really, our free speech protections in Canada
are very weak by comparison, very weak,
and that's certainly been demonstrated in recent years.
We have a charter of rights,
but it's got so many loopholes in it that,
and administratively and technically,
that I mean, should I say it's not worth the paper
it's written on? I'd probably say that.
In any case, that's not the case in the US, because the right to free speech is extremely
well protected.
And so what we're going to see really is like a war in cyberspace between the principles
of American law fundamentally and the principles that govern the rest of the world because the American social media companies dominate and they run especially
acts on the principle of free speech.
And so that's another reason why the situation in Brazil and in the European Union is so
incredibly important.
Now, this Supreme Court official, how does he derive his power?
How long is he in office? Where does he get his
legitimacy and his authority? And how is he regarded by Brazilians?
When they are appointed for the Supreme Court, the president appoints the candidate for the
Supreme Court and the Senate, after a sabbatim, approve the name of the person. So in 2017,
Alexandre de Moraes took office
in the Supreme Court as a justice of the Supreme Court,
and he will stay there until he completes 75 years old.
So by the year of 2040 something, he will retire.
I see, so a long time.
Unless he wants to resign.
Right.
But who can stop him?
And under what administration was he appointed?
Before my father.
The one immediately before your father?
And the curious thing is, it wasn't a radical left president.
It was pretty much a central right president, Michel Temer, who appointed him.
No one would expect Alexandre de Morais would do things like he's doing nowadays.
I see, I see.
It's a surprise for him.
And how do you explain it?
It's establishment.
His mission was take Bolsonaro out of power
and end with this spontaneous movement
created not only by my father,
because my father is the political leader
of this right-wing conservative movement.
But on the philosophy part, you have other key men that, unfortunately, last year passed away,
Professor Olavo de Carvalho. I don't know if you've ever listened about him.
He was used to live in Virginia. Several books, very smart, and he is the one who on the philosophy side
was giving the arguments and also forming new leaders
to be on key positions in Brazil to sustain this right,
not right-wing movement, but this movement
in favor of the morals, in favor of the honesty,
and what's in the-
Well, we could call it conservative. Yes, yes, you can call him as a conservative. in favor of the morals, in favor of the honesty, and what's in the-
Well, we could call it conservative.
Yes, yes, you can call him as a conservative.
So it was Olavo de Carvalho on the philosophy side,
and my father on the political side,
converging to the same target, if I can say that.
So the willing, as I can see, of Alessandro de Morais
is to end with this movement,
leaded by my father.
Right, right.
Now, so is that, do you think that that's partly
an attack on the social media structures
that your family used so effectively
in your movement to power?
Is it like, is it a reaction by the legacy establishment
against the emergence
of the social media dominance?
Sure, yes, because if you do not have social media anymore, the monopoly of information
will go back against mainstream media.
Yeah, of course. Well, and of course all the legacy media want that. Well, it's not surprising
that the powers that be on the establishment side, so to speak,
even for reasons of mere self-preservation,
regard Musk as a threat because he is a threat.
I mean, his stated goal for X is to make it
the predominant source of information in the world, right?
I mean, he'd like to supplant YouTube.
And if YouTube continues to muck about
the way they have been,
they're so full of
snivelly tricks that it's just beyond belief.
I mean, they shadow banned the Musk or the Rogan Trump discussion this week because they
play around with the search algorithms.
They did that to me.
Yes.
And they're so sneaky about it.
For example, they blocked, so there's an autofill that people use to find new videos and for a long
time they blocked the autofill on the name Peterson.
And it took us like six months to figure that out because my viewership was declining, we
couldn't figure out why.
It's like, oh, they mucked about with the autofill.
Isn't that unbelievably devious?
And so anyways, Musk obviously wants to make X into, well, a one-stop media platform,
and he's pretty blunt and blatant in his ambitions,
and it's working.
I mean, X is the number one news center in the world now,
and it's just getting going,
because X doesn't do a great job yet
of video sharing and that sort of thing.
It's not got everything YouTube has yet, but...
But they had to bet on a company and it was Google versus Musk.
I bet on Musk, like, no, hands down.
Definitely, because Google's tangled themselves up
in this corporate idiocracy
and it's been that way for about eight years.
But you see, you are right. Sorry, Professor.
No, no.
You are right.
But shadow ban would not be a problem.
If you have other companies on social media,
alternative companies, the problem is in Brazil,
Rumble is not in Brazil, see?
They left Brazil after, do not accomplish
if some of the orders of Alexandre de Moraes,
they said, I'm out.
Oh yeah.
I cannot survive in a country where they do not
have free speech, because free speech is a value
that we care here in Rambo.
So they left the country, just like X left a little bit
after Rambo.
And YouTube is the way that you were talking.
Shadow ban, doing this, doing that, reducing
the voice of the conservatives.
And sometimes you watch a Trump video
and then they suggested of the next video
is a video of Hillary Clinton talking some things.
Yeah.
But if you have the freedom to have a new social media,
it will be okay.
Then I have to talk again.
Remember when Trump was kicked out from Twitter
in January of 2021?
I don't know if it happened here
and also happened in North America,
but in Brazil, people start to run
to two other platforms, Parler and Getter.
Getter, the CEO of Getter is Mr. Jason Miller,
who is together with Trump,
taking care of the market of his campaign,
helping Trump in his campaign.
Jason Miller in 2021 went to Brazil
to do a speech in the CPAC Brazil.
I do organize the CPAC in Brazil.
It's the largest gathering of the conservatives
all around the world.
We have the Brazilian version.
Right, right.
After doing his speech, he went back to the airport.
And guess what?
Alexandre de Moraes ordered the federal police
to go there and detain Jason Miller.
Jason Miller, an American citizen,
stayed almost four hours in a Brazilian airport
because the federal police officers
wanted him to sign some papers written in Portuguese.
He said, I don't know Portuguese.
What is written there?
They called someone from the street to do the translation.
And Jason Miller said, am I under investigation?
Am I a testimony?
What is going on here?
So after some time, a lawyer come, help Jason Miller.
He didn't sign nothing, but it was embarrassing this situation. So Alexandre
de Moraes, he has a personal fight against Elon Musk and against Jason Miller, two people
that are pretty close of Trump. So maybe Alexandre de Moraes is having a conflict with really
big guys, because when you affect a billionaire like Elon Musk, some other billionaires are going
to talk about it and have an idea that Alexandre de Morais is not fighting to preserve democracy,
but is truly doing the opposite of that.
Killing democracy.
Because if to preserve our constitution, you need to violate the constitution, you're not
preserving any
Constitution anymore.
And I think this is getting clear and clear to all of the rest of the world.
So I expect here, Professor, in the great audience that you have in your podcast, to
prevent our friends from Europe, Latin America, North America, to do not copy the model of
Brazilian censorship.
Well, we're going to see that play out over the next couple of years, that's for sure.
Yeah, and it's a tight struggle.
I mean, this new Canadian legislation, Bill C-63, it's the most, it's so, it's so devious.
Because the beginning of the legislation and the end
are all about protecting children
from sexual exploitation online, right?
And so, and so long, Bill.
Well, who, you're opposed to stopping children
from being exploited online?
You oppose Bill C63?
It's like, yeah, because I actually read it.
And I saw exactly what you did.
It's like, all your lovely moralizing at the beginning
and all your lovely moralizing at the end.
And this unbelievable totalitarian proclivity
in the middle, it's just beyond comprehension.
And so online harms bill.
And you can see, like, it's got to be something,
because it's happening everywhere,
it's got to be something like the reaction of the legacy communication systems against the new technologies.
It's something, it's no wonder, right?
Because YouTube, free video, universally distributable and permanent is a technological revolution
larger than the Gutenberg printing press, I think.
Because the Gutenberg printing press obviously spread
literacy everywhere, that and the Protestants,
spread literacy everywhere.
But even with that, reading was still a minority occupation.
Right, I think 2% of people buy hardcover books, right?
And most hardcover books that are bought,
I don't think are read. And so people read, but a% of people buy hardcover books, right? And most hardcover books that are bought, I don't think are read.
And so people read, but a minority of people
read most of the books, but way more people can listen.
Like it's gotta be.
I know with my books, at least half of them now are audio.
Right, and that's the case across the book market in general.
But-
I prefer to listen than read.
Well, many people do.
Many, there's a bunch of- It's more practical. market in general. I prefer listen than read. Well, many people do.
There's a bunch of...
It's more practical.
Yeah, well, one of the advantages is everyone can listen.
So that's a big advantage, you know, because you have to be a highly skilled and literate
person to really enjoy reading.
And you know, maybe that's 30% of the population, but it's not much more than that, I wouldn't
say.
And but listening, man, everybody can do that that and you can do it when you're doing other
things and so it's made, it's absolutely revolutionary.
I knew YouTube was revolutionary back when it first came out, I thought.
Permanent universally accessible video.
Oh, oh, this changes, this changes absolutely everything And that's what's playing out, right?
We have this shifting landscape now where the information intermediaries are now obsolete.
Well, it's no wonder they're annoyed by that.
All the legacy journalists, like, we don't need you.
In fact, you're in the way.
All the legacy broadcasters, it's like broadcasting technology is 20 years out of date.
You know, Musk recently called for the Americans to take broadcast, so the CBS and NBC own,
have rights to the electromagnetic spectrum that they use to broadcast their channels.
Well Musk proposed two weeks ago that that just be taken from them
because they have an obligation,
a legal obligation to tell both sides of the story,
which they certainly aren't doing,
and they don't own that portion
of the electromagnetic spectrum.
And so he thinks it should just be turned over
to the tech companies
who would make much more efficient use of it,
and the legacy media companies can be cable
like everyone else.
And that's going to happen
because there's no reason for them
to have that monopoly anymore.
So it's not surprising that there's this immense reaction.
Like it's broader than the mere antipathy
of the left wing to your family.
And that's partly why it's happening everywhere, right?
Because it's Brazil, it's the same story in Canada,
it's the same story in the US,
the same thing is playing out in Europe and in Australia.
So you know that there's something really fundamental
going on and part of it is definitely
this technological shift.
And then the other thing that's strange about that too,
and this is where your family's more integrally involved
is that you guys were early adopters of the new media, and that was revolutionary.
And so there's two reasons to be terrified of it.
Not only are the legacy media purveyors dead and that whole system of influence archaic,
but it's also empowering a whole new crop of political types who are speaking directly to the people.
Yeah, well, God only knows what that's going to do.
I mean, Trump's team figured that out in this election.
Trump has been on, I think this is because of the influence of his son, Barron,
who from my understanding knows, because he's young enough, he knows the new media landscape.
And so I have reason to believe that he's been recommending the podcast hosts
that Trump has appeared on, you know, people like Theo Vaughn, for example, and who wouldn't
be an obvious for Vaughn's a great interviewer and I like him and he's super smart. But it's
quite surprising that Trump went on Theo Vaughn's show and he did and Rogan as well. And that
was the another demonstration that legacy media
and they're done.
I think Rogan was almost 50 million people.
Yeah, despite the shadow bad.
Yeah.
Right, I saw today, Kamala Harris used Kamala.
There's some way you're supposed to say that
if you're like an acceptable person,
but I'm in Northern Alberta and we can't talk, so.
Her, she did a fairly popular podcast and it's got 745,000 views compared to 50 million.
And I think it's also because the people who are following Trump don't follow the legacy
media, whereas the people who are supporting Harris do follow the legacy media.
So of course Trump's views are going to stack up because all of those people, all the Republicans in the United States virtually,
all of them distrust the legacy media.
And so they're on the cutting edge in that regard.
I think it's for the first time in history here in the US,
people trust more in the Congress than the mainstream media.
Yeah.
And you know things are bad when that happens.
I don't know the source.
I have a friend, he's a journalist here,
and he told me, I don't know the source. I have a friend, he's a journalist here,
and he told me, I do not remember the source,
but he said, this is fantastic.
In Brazil, now in Brazil, we have a lot of people
that still believes and follow our legacy media over there.
But the numbers of this credibility is going down.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and the same thing is happening in Europe.
The legacy media is still comparatively dominant in the UK, less in the UK than in Europe, still very
dominant in Europe. But that's going to change because it has to. You can't compete with
free, right? There's just no way that the broadcast networks can survive because their
economic model has been demolished. And they don't know how to do. No, they are used to control the narrative
and they don't know how to do.
No, I know, it's so funny.
So CBC is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
They have a YouTube channel.
Well, you can't post comments.
So it's like, that's a no-no, guys.
The YouTube ecosystem demands that people post comments.
So you've already made a clausal error in your arrogance.
I looked recently, CBC posts the programming
that it broadcasts also on YouTube.
The last 20 posts that they made,
each got less than 100 views.
100 views.
$1.4 billion in government subsidy a year
and another $600 million in advertising.
$2 billion a year for posts on YouTube
that are getting less than 100 views.
That means that even all the actors didn't watch it.
You had to fire all the crew, all the team.
Yeah, yeah, well that's Poliev's plan.
He said he's going to stop the government subsidy
of media in Canada.
God, I hope he doesn't,
because it's really quite preposterous.
Okay, we should talk about the future.
So tell me about your future
and about your father's future,
and where the political landscape is headed in Brazil,
and also what's going to happen with the Supreme Court.
And are the Supreme Court decisions popular in Brazil and also what's going to happen with the Supreme Court. And like, are the Supreme Court decisions popular in Brazil?
No.
Okay.
But who could stop the Supreme Court is the Senate.
But the chairman of the Senate,
he already said, Rodrigo Pacheco,
that he will not start a impeachment procedure
against any of the judges of the Supreme Court.
So the judges of the Supreme Court,
they are really comfortable because despite these
constitutional tools that we could start impeachment procedure against one of the justice, you
don't have what to do.
That's why we run to United States and are providing information for US authorities trying
to help us down there in Brazil,
also mainly because what is happening in Brazil with the support of Lula da Silva, the president,
is an attack not only against Elon Musk, but against American companies,
and not only Starlink and NX, but also against the constitution of United States, the first amendment.
And thanks God we are having a good interaction,
a good relationship, not only with Jean Jordan,
with Mario Vira Salazar, Chris Smith, Richard McCormick,
and some other players, Mike Lee, Marco Rubio, Rick Scott.
And for the first time in history,
I think we are very well connected
with the American politicians.
How did that happen?
I have to tell you that I come here very often to the United States, opening these doors.
It's not only because of me, okay, you have more people involved, but I hard work in that.
I do not care. I got a plane, fly economy class, come here to have one meeting and come back to Brazil.
I did that several times.
And that's how we know one and another.
And now they're very polite, very smart.
They know the situation of Brazil
and they are taking some actions here.
We had a hearing in the US Congress
in the Human Rights Committee with Chris Smith
inviting the owner of Rumble, Mr. Pavlovsky,
with Paulo Figueiredo, to debate the censorship in Brazil, trying to prevent the US and trying
to help Brazilians that are victims of the censorship.
So in the future, I think we can do much more pressure coming from the international community, not only US,
because they also talked about how great is the president
of Argentina, Javier Millet, and who is a libertarian.
And we can help Brazil in this way,
because with the globalization, everybody's connected.
Yes.
It's not only about Brazil.
Well, as you can tell, because the political issues
are the same regardless of the country.
The same thing is happening everywhere and it is certainly in no small part because we're
so hyper connected.
And that also means that warfare is going to change dramatically and what's happening
in Brazil, this dispute between the Supreme Court official and Musk, that's
is a reflection of a new kind of information warfare.
And it's definitely the First Amendment versus everything else in a very deep way.
Okay, so you fostered relationships in the US.
And so that's so interesting because the case that you're making is that you can understand
why the Senate in Brazil would be loathe to begin impeachment proceedings against a Supreme
Court justice.
Because when one branch of the government starts to go to war against another branch,
there's real trouble there.
So I can imagine why they're stepping carefully.
I'm not justifying it.
I just would say that that is something that you want to do very, very carefully.
But it's very interesting that the pressure is actually being mounted more effectively
through the US and internationally than within Brazil itself.
What about the typical Brazilian?
All the people that were supporting your father, for example, what's happening with them now?
And that'll be our segue, I guess,
into discussion of what you think is gonna happen
in the future in Brazil.
When's the next election?
In 2026.
26, okay.
We had election this year, but it's municipal election,
where we did great.
Like the number of mayors and city councils that we have,
like almost half of Brazil in the capital of the states,
the most voted city council is from my party,
from our party.
Oh yeah.
Oh, that's a big deal to have control,
to have influence at the local level.
Yes. Yeah, yeah, that's a big deal.
No, it increased a lot.
It was great this election for Brazil.
My father, he went for more than 140 cities.
And on the other path, Lula da Silva almost didn't go
to be part of this election.
He was in Mexico, he was traveling,
and not really campaign for people from his party.
And even the mayors, the candidate of the Labor Party,
some of them, they didn't want Lula da Silva
at the same stage of them,
which means that his credibility is going low,
going down.
So it was great to us.
We will have elections on 2026.
Nowadays, my father cannot run
because the electoral court
with Mr. Alexandre de Moraes on the head
decided that he had a meeting with ambassadors
when he was president,
and he criticized the electoral process of
Brazil. This was anti-democratic. So they said that my father is convicted eight years
with fault cannot run with no political rights. So for 80 years, my father can run. How can
we have the expectation in the 2026 he can go back and run again?
Because this electoral court is made by seven judges, three coming from the Supreme Court.
And as I told you, Alexandre de Morais was on the head.
In 2026, Alexandre de Morais, he will not be in the electoral court anymore.
He will be the chairman of the next election.
It will be Cassio Nunes, who is a justice from the Supreme Court
appointed by my father.
And the vice chair of the electoral court in 2026
will be André Mendonça, who is other justice of the Supreme
Court appointed by my father.
So we have an expectation not that they are going to work
in favor of my father, but you have a way
more balanced court to analyze and judge everything and they can have the opportunity to really
work for more transparent and more integrity election.
Here you have-
So do you think there is, I believe you're implying that there is some possibility that
your father will be in a position to run again.
You're not certain of that,
but you think it's a possibility.
I think so.
Lula was in jail two years before the election.
The Supreme Court let him go free.
So they say, you know, Lula,
they annulled all of his conviction.
He was convicted for laundering money and corruption.
They said, oh no, no, no.
Lula would never be sued in the city of Curitiba.
He would be sued in São Paulo or Brasilia. That's why they cancelled all the convictions,
the condemnation that he had. So he got back again, now he's clean again, and that's how he was able to run on 2022.
If it happened with a convicted fellow, convicted criminal, why cannot happen with my father
who is guilty because he had a meeting with ambassadors.
Are you afraid for your father and for yourself?
We think that he can go to jail in this kind of a themospheric scenario.
What about more intense threats? Because he was already, as you pointed out, just about assassinated.
So what, like, what?
He don't care to be assassinated. Think with our enemy's head.
If you send him to jail, they will attract even more attention of the international community.
My father, he'll write a book,
he'll have kind of communication outside of the jail,
maybe between his lawyers, I don't know,
but everybody always, like in a Rocky Balboa movie,
everybody cheers for the one who is receiving
all of these unfair convictions.
You know, we always stay on the side of the victim.
If you kill my father, he's going to become a martyr,
and for decades, he is going to be reminded
as someone that's like fight for free speech
and freedom of the people, you know?
It's a problem for the left to do that.
And to be very honest, I guess, I guess,
the establishment of Brazil,
they are waiting for the US election.
Uh-huh.
Because- Right.
To see which side the bread is buttered on.
Yes, because for example,
when you have a Supreme Court powerful like that,
they are beckoned by businessmen, billionaires, millionaires, people who for sure
have relationship with United States.
They have houses here, they have an accountant
in Delaware, whatever.
They don't wanna have problems with the US administration.
So all of that is, it's on the table.
I don't think, to be very honest,
the chances that my father could go to jail, it was way
higher in the past than it is nowadays.
This is my feeling.
Because in Brazil, you don't need a reason to go to the jail.
You have a congressman like me that is in jail.
His name is Daniel Silveira.
And I say his name to you, make sure that you can Google it and do your research about
who is the guy.
He's in the jail because he got his cell phone
and said bad words to the Supreme Court.
In our constitution, a senator or a congressman like me,
we can say whatever we want,
we will never be sued in a court because our opinions.
But this guy is in jail, convicted nine years almost,
nine years in jail, convicted nine years almost,
nine years in jail because he made a video that through the eyes of the Supreme Court,
it was considered aggression against the democracy.
At that time that this guy was convicted,
Jerry Bolsonaro was the president
and gave to him the presidential pardon.
He got out of jail, then my father didn't get reelected,
and the Supreme Court analyzed the pardon
of the President Bolsonaro and canceled that.
They annulled the first time in the whole history of Brazil
a presidential pardon, and the guy is back now in the prison.
That's why I'm telling you I have to take care
about my words, because I don't know,
maybe this crazy, this...
Careful?
Madness, yeah, yeah.
So let's see, let's see, let's see what happens.
But we have a hope that with the new configuration
of the electoral court, we can overturn
the eligibility of my father, and his moral,
his political capital is huge.
If you look to the social media, everywhere he goes,
even left-wing cities, it's full of people following him.
Full, full.
And on the other hand, no one can go to the streets.
When is the election in 2026?
In October, October 2026.
Okay, well, look, I think we should wrap it up there.
That's a good place to end.
I think what we'll do on the daily wire side for everybody who's watching and listening,
we haven't talked about the broader context of South America.
I want to talk to you about what's going on in El Salvador.
I know that's Central America, but we'll consider that close enough for the purposes of this argument.
And also about Argentina. And so I'd like you to enlighten us more profoundly
about, yeah, the war, the culture war
in Central and South America in general.
And well, I'd like to talk about Malay,
and I read his name all the time.
Bucali.
Bucali, Naebu Bucali.
Good, good, got it, got it.
Yeah, so that's what we'll do on the Daily Wire side.
If all of you who are watching,
or some of you who are watching and listening
wanna join us there, we'll continue this discussion
and that'll update your knowledge
with regards to your neighbors,
likely neighbors to the south.
I know there's people in Europe watching as well, so but.
Naib Bukele is great. Yeah. I've been's people in Europe watching as well. Naib Bukheli is great.
I've been there twice last year in El Salvador.
One in vacation should surf because they have great waves in El Salvador.
And the other visit in the jails, even the famous one that he built,
it has capacity for 40,000 people in that jail.
They call it a center against terrorism.
And what Bukhle basically did is,
he's jailing the criminals
and do not let them get outside.
So he already arrested more than 70,000 criminals
and he reduced, to have an idea, El Salvador in 2016,
the murder rate, it was 102 murders
for each group of 100,000 people.
Right.
102 is the most violent country in the world
in the year 2016.
Now, from 2002, they are around two.
Same level of Canada or some of the European countries.
And this is how he did that.
Wait.
Basically.
Let's do that on the daily wire side.
All right.
We'll continue with that.
Yeah, so that's a good teaser.
So thank you very much.
Thank you, Professor.
My pleasure.
Thank you for coming here.
My pleasure.
Much appreciated.
It's very good to bring these issues regarding Brazil to broader public knowledge, especially given the, there's all
sorts of reasons, but I guess the most compelling at the moment is the connection with Elon
Musk and with free speech in general.
And so, yeah, so thank you very much for that.
And thank you to everybody who's watching and listening and supporting this podcast
and to the film crew here in Scottsdale for making this possible.