TRASHFUTURE - The Dirtiest Carwash feat. Vincent Bevins

Episode Date: March 23, 2021

Journalist Vincent Bevins (@vinncent) joins the gang to discuss the unravelling of Brazil's Lava Jato corruption investigation, the seismic impact of Lula's re-emergence as a political contender on Bolsonarismo, and some idiotic responses to same. Also, Britain's long love affair with statues and nukes heats up once again. If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture We support the London Renters Union, which helps people defeat their slumlords and avoid eviction. If you want to support them as well, you can here: https://londonrentersunion.org/donate Here's a central location to donate to bail funds across the US to help people held under America's utterly inhumane system: https://bailproject.org/?form=donate *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello, and welcome back to this episode of TF, the free edition. It is me, Riley. Free edition. Yeah, that's what it is. Yeah, we're doing that voice every time to get you to subscribe. Oh, gee. It's the free one. The free edition is much more annoying.

Yeah, that's right. Join me in the free edition. The free edition, the free edition of each episode is going to be like include that like chime that the Blair government played in the early 2000s to scare teens away from public places. Oh, yeah. The DREAM people solo. No, that was a real thing. No, it was a real thing.

It was a real thing. Teen sound apparently. The mosquito, the really high pitch. You should get that for your building because you have rowdy teens, right? You have a teen infestation. Yeah. I don't know where all these freaking teens came from. Our building is full of like a bunch of, there's like 50 teenagers in like tracksuits who are

bizarrely eating fish and chips and like hanging out weird like loitering in our office building. Like I don't think they've got an office. Yeah, I don't know why we rented a studio in this school. Yeah. You got to start the mosquito going. It's the only way. Yeah, that's right. We got to frighten away the teens from our building.

That's right. Yeah. And we got to frighten you into listening to the Patreon episode. That's right. It is Riley Milo, Alice and Nate today. Yes, I'm here. Rare one, but I'm here. Post rare nights.

We always love to have links on the podcast. Don't post rare nates. If you do, it's just that same photo of me from seven years ago, just more pixelated. That's right. It's just, it's just four or five pixels now. And we are very lucky to be joined for the second time, collecting his TF lounge plus club membership. It is Vincent Bevan's author of the Jakarta method and journalist about various, various interesting things, including Brazil, EU tech regulation, inter alia.

Vincent, how's it going? Good. I'm good. How is everybody? Good. Returning champion. Yes, that's right. Returning champion and we can, we'll give you your lounge access card once we are finished here.

Yeah, you can go hang out with the teams. No, I hung out with them for a little bit for a while. Yeah, it was good. Oh yeah. I didn't even know them. Yeah. That's the warm up for the podcast. You chat to the teens.

Yeah. Well, that's what journalism is. Yeah. As you find a hallway. You replace the green room with a teen room. Yeah. The red wall voters. That's who you're communing with.

God, it's, that's, that's just sounds very, very much like sort of, you know, what, like 10 years into a very conservative Britain is there's the teen room in BBC. Try explaining trans rights to the teens in the trash future foyer. That's right. The teens in the TF foyer love, they love the no-nonsense style of Cure Starmer. That's right. That's who it's for. I like the teens in the foyer and I welcome that they're eating fish and chips, but I

do feel that they could add a gherkin or a Wally. So we got some, some, some stuff to talk about today. We're going to talk about ongoing developments in Brazil. Could things possibly be looking up? We're going to talk about EU antitrust stuff. But first, an update from the tightly contested London mayoral election. Yeah, that's right. The guy you learned to jack off from the Chinese guy is going to win.

No, it's the number one, Alice. I'm thinking ads for him on YouTube now is a consequence of the stream that we do. Yeah. You're like, Alice, you too like to jack off. Yeah. We taught how to be jacked off by a Chinese man. Well, no, the Chinese man is like, I hear that you destroyed a space station that we could learn so much from each other.

No, this is, this is the Lawrence Fox campaign update. Oh, the other fun candidate. Yeah. Yeah. They're all fun candidates except for Sadiq Khan. So Lawrence Fox has said, if I'm elected mayor, no statue will be torn down. I pledge to increase the number of statues in the capital. Oh, if anything, the number of statues will go up.

Yeah. I love the statues, actually. What statue is he going to put up? Is he going to put up the Evangelion? And if not, why not? He has a number one, hard G number two. I don't care. He has said it's not never go hard.

Victoria. If Victoria Cross recipients will be receiving statues in London. Doughty Wiley with a big walking stick hitting a Turk over the head. That's the statue I want. H. Jones leading from the front in statue form. Absolutely. Or just like some guys that got blown up by IEDs in Afghanistan. Statue of H. Jones is like a comedy, like Looney Tunes explosion with just like various

arms and legs sticking out of it. And recognizing, though, that Lawrence Fox's statue based culture war, completely idiotic statue based culture war party that I think is going to do a little better than everyone expects. Yeah, he's going to be mad. All those rally teens are going to vote for him because they love statues. Yeah, they're all like base team nationalists who all want statues, more statues on every corner.

You should not be able to move for statues. Anyway, if you're not following based white chap. So the Tories are set going to give a 10 year jail term for threatening statues. Hell yes. Shake your fist at the big statue of an exploding H. Jones. You will be surely killed. Man out there, if you see your friends threatening statues, call them out because there are no more pressing issues than this in London right now.

Absolutely nothing. I've said this before, if you're not a middle or upper middle class white guy and you want to be treated with basic humanity and respect in Britain, the best thing to do is have yourself encased in metal and put upon a plane. Yeah, be a human statue. Just do that. Go to Covent Garden and become a human statue. Just like Lawrence Fox just walking up to the human statue and just tearfully saluting.

Due to a loophole in the laws, we've inadvertently protected human statues with a mandatory 10 year sentence. So before we go on, Vincent, has this all been at all surprising to you, this statuphilia sweeping the nation? No, I don't think I pay as much attention to this as you do because I try to stay away from things that make me go crazy. But would this really happen? Do you think they would actually hand out a 10 year sentence for breaking down a statue?

That's right. 100%. Do we think that there will be a human being in prison for this? Oh, yeah. That was that kid who swung off of one of the flags at the Santa Toff during a- Oh, it was Dave Gilmour's son, Charlie Gilmour. Yeah, it was. There was a kid who was sentenced to five years in prison for stealing a bottle of water in

2011. Oh, I remember that. And the person who was running the Nightcork. Oh, I remember that. I mean, because not to make it sound like the systems are equivalent, but the fact that they reference that this would be an emotional drama or an insult to the United Kingdom. I mean, what would we say if Hong Kong protesters were faced with 10 years in prison for insulting the Chinese Communist Party?

I mean, it seems really, really bizarre to explicitly say it's about insulting the nation. I find it really remarkable. I think it's partly that Britain basically is instituting less majestic laws, just like- No, we would be less insane if we just did that. If we just had a law that said flat out, you cannot insult the dignity of the state or whatever, and if you do your guilty of wrecking or fucking counter-revolutionary behavior or whatever, we would have a lot less cognitive dissonance than having to do it piece by piece like this, like, oh, if you touch the big statue of this guy who poisoned dogs for all of his life,

then we are going to have you shot. Why do they- Why do they- It's called being English. Don't like it. There's the door. Why did they even put up a statue of Reginald Dog Poisoner VC? Probably because of the VC.

He was poisoning dogs for the Queen in Obama. He poisoned a bunch of German dogs on the Western front. People don't understand about Reginald Dog Poisoner. Many of those dogs were very right-wing. The thing is, right, it's because for the last several years, as soon as Cameron was out, Spike just started writing cultural policy basically, whether it's sort of indirectly via sort of Nick Timothy and Theresa May, or sort of directly with Boris Johnson and his coterie of freaks and weirdos.

It is just all of the things- Because Spike just exists to try to identify what the sort of liberal or progressive or whatever view is and just try to infuriate it like they have since the 80s when they were the Revolutionary Communist Party. And so the whole thing is- Triggering the Libs since 1984. It is a trigger the Libs law, and that's all it is. And speaking of triggering the Libs,

I want to do one more quick UK news item before we move on to sort of other, better and more real countries than this one, which is that we've decided that we're going to vastly increase the number of trident nuclear warheads from 180 to 260. We'll be deploying them in plain clothes throughout nightclubs to protect women. That's right. That's right. If someone touches a woman without her consent in a nightclub,

that nightclub will be mute, thereby preventing any issues involving violence against women. Every statue will have a trident warhead embedded in it, and if you tamper with that statue- That goes very hard, actually. Kind of in favor of that. It's fine. Finally, annihilation.

So that's one thing. We have ended three decades of nuclear disarmament and reversed basically a global trend where nuclear proliferation is back again because it triggers the Libs or makes people in Red Bridge feel good. Imagine getting nuked by Britain. Imagine your death and the death of everyone around you coming at the hands of these fucking islands. You see the warhead coming towards you, and it's just got a there are only two genders and a bunch of crying, laughing emojis on it.

That would be cool. It's like the Enola Gay from fucking Dr. Strange. Yeah, yeah, just riding it down. It's like bass riding the bomb, like England football shirt. So basically, the other thing they've done is, in addition to increasing the number of pointless world-ending weapons that basically also don't work, that we're just going to have on subs just tooling around the North Sea

in case the Danes get a little bit too uppity. To be honest, if they say they're going to nuke the Danes again, they've got my names. The Danes, the Danes. No, the Danes, fuck. Nuking broads. I'm not so... Hey, what do you get?

What do you get office girls? So they also said they're lowering the threshold for their youth. What the fuck was the youth threshold before? Well, it was like if someone else is about to nuke you, right? Yeah. It's a preliminary or second strike. Like if someone looks at you funny or touches your wife. Kind of.

Unless they said now the state will use their nuclear weapons if they are threatened with a cyber chemical or biological attack using emerging technologies. We're doing fucking first strike capability. We're actually furthest to the right of North Korea on this one. Nice. Yeah. If you're hacking.

So like, yeah, if some country does like Russia gate stuff to UK, or they think that they will, they can do it in advance. 100%. If some Macedonian teens like hack into Boris Johnson's Twitter and I'm like, hey, send me some crypto currency. I'll double it and send it back to you. Nuked. Macedonia is fucking gone.

Vincent, I have a question for you because you're the rare to have a Brazil expert in studio. And I'm just wondering, given similarities to American psychosis in Brazil, do they have an also similar call it post empire collapse syndrome where they're just freaking out about insane nonsense like this? Because Britain really does seem to have like a, I don't know, perfected and refined variant of it. And I'm just wondering, is it unique to this just horrible island

in the North Atlantic? Or is this something you perceive in places like the country that elected Jair Bolsonaro? Well, like the one thing about the right in Brazil over the last few years, and I've written about this a little bit and it's pretty well documented by now, is they like took quite a large extent and learned how to be right wing from American YouTube. So they often like, like, like, and this is explicit.

They'll like say this, they love this. They often use like the big right wing guys in Brazil, like move to the United States and then get on YouTube and get really close to like Ben Shapiro and then try to like replicate that discourse. So a lot of times they end up sort of reproducing memes or discourses that don't make much sense in Brazil, but they're just importing them from the United States. How do you say trigger the Libs in Portuguese?

Like, yeah, that's like the way that you like own someone online is you're trying to like, let's just say hypothetically your president has coronavirus. But like it's absolutely, absolutely. Bolsonaro adopted the trigger the Lib strategy that he saw working in North America and like his son specifically is credited with creating like an online it's called the hate factory that just sends out what's that messages to all of Brazil and based on whatever it is they think will play on a certain day they'll attack this party, this person.

And yeah, it's absolutely about provocation rather than governance. He's got his own Don Jr. I didn't know about this. This is very exciting. No, it's he has three, yeah, three fail sons. Three Don Juniors. Yeah. None of them are the Eric who's like worse looking,

but somehow more of a reasonable person. I certainly know Ivanka's. He's got three Don Juniors. Yeah. No. Yeah. Well, the most the most hardcore one who like flew to Hungary to like praise the government there, like learned how to be really right wing while snowboarding

in Colorado. Montage. I'm snowboarding, but what I'm really training for is being racist. Is ruining the largest country in South America. Yeah. Absolutely. So if you look at like, if you just Google his name like Eduardo Bolsonaro, you Google him like Google him and his house.

He'll have all this mess with Texas or like guns on the wall, like all this weird like cowboy right wing kind of Fox Newsy visual language that he picked up in the United States. And he thinks is like, he thinks he like brought it back. Like he discovered like the future of politics, which maybe maybe he did. Interesting. Well, because also Brazil, Brazil is also a state with its own nuclear history as well, right?

I don't even know what's they, they, I mean, Brazil had a quite an impressive like space program. They never developed a nuclear weapon as far as I know. They intended to. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This was, I think this was in the air of the military dictatorship when like, even

though the military dictatorship took, took power in 1964 with the full backing of the United States, knowing that the United States wanted them to do it, the military dictatorship at some point got very like jealous of their power, especially in the United States. They thought they made half, might have to sort of defend themselves from an attack even from the United States. And this is to a large extent why they threw white people into the Amazon to destroy it. They believe that if they did not populate the Amazon with what they believe to be real

Brazilians, like not an indigenous Brazilians, because they had, of course, a very racist view of the actual Amazonians that the rest of the world could try to take over this part of the world. They have this weird nationalism that is super pro-America, but also very jealous of anybody else messing with them. So they basically were so racist. I don't know any countries like that. They were basically so racist that they declared an inhabited part of their own country Terranulias.

Yeah. Well, they, they said we have to put people out there or else, or else they, there would be, we would get risk of, of invasion. You see, when you first said, we've got to, we've got to throw people into the Amazon to destroy it. I was imagining they're throwing people into the river to break the river for some reason, like fuck this river. We're going to throw corpses in here.

That's because you got Eduardo Bolsonaro's WhatsApp message that said that's what PT is planning on doing. All right. That's what Bill Shorten wants to destroy the Amazon and the weekend. Throwing white people in it. That's right. Yeah. So in this UK thing though, they're saying basically that they must do this so they can

avoid the grasping naivety of the David Cameron years with regard to China. So we're basically doing a big China Hawk thing where we're glad. That's had no consequences where we're going to be like yeah. Well, time to develop more world ending weapons. So like if just really to ram that point home, life on earth ending weapons because someone is going to like again the worst possible. I'm even going to be charitable right the worst possible cyber attack completely freezes the power grid.

You know, completely shuts everything down. Probably cyber threads. So I probably even yeah, like I'll probably having a pretty high body count. The UK is like even if you do that, if we think you've done that, we're going to end all life on earth. Yeah. Which to be fair, if you cannot log on to Twitter.com. Yeah.

Fucking end it all pull the plug. The nation of posting through it has finally secured an unwavering commitment to destroy all life on earth if we can't do that. And I for one think that. If I can't read a pastel infographic posted by a simpleton, what is the point? We will defend these TikTok dances with not only our lives, but the lives of everyone on the planet. It would be very funny to nuke the Chinese for denying us access to TikTok.

Yeah, that's right. It would be an amusing geopolitical. Yeah, it's really reversing the US position. I know. Holding the gun on Milo like step away from the light. That's right. So anyway, so those are some little news tidbits about the UK. But I want to sort of go back to Brazil for a little while and talk about Lava Jato and

the possible end of the world's longest car wash. So we've spoken a little bit about Lava Jato before, but just to catch people up. Vincent, how clean are the cars in Brazil? Well, they used to be very, very dirty. And then one heroic man in the south of Brazil named Sergio Moro started cleaning cars and he cleaned cars so well that they let him clean the entire country. And now there is no more dirt on a single car for forever. He solved all of the problems of dirty cars in Brazil and we should never think about

it again or look into what's actually happening. Indeed. That's right. Well, that's that segment over then. If you have a car in Brazil, be confident that it's clean. But no, no. So in an actual point of fact, what this was was there was a sort of major series of corruption investigations that was led by this judge, Sergio Moro, who we'll talk about again later,

in Brazil, where they were finding that there was allegedly a lot of money being laundered through a car wash. Therefore, the name Lava Jato outside Brasilia. And it was one of these investigations that, again, correct me if I'm wrong, was sprawled and sort of implicated everyone in Brazilian politics. It destroyed the government, essentially, if I'm not mistaken as well. It brought to, I mean, it led to the fall, certainly, of one president, although she was not implicated in directly.

But it did start in 2014, as I said, and it became very, very big, implicating much of the political class and really rocking the nation to its foundations. You could argue that it did collapse the government because there hasn't really, really been one since that impeachment in 2016. Yeah, there's been a YouTuber. There's been a YouTube channel, basically, and a WhatsApp guy. Yeah. Well, he's a Facebook livestream, is in charge of Brazil.

And it absolutely transformed the country. When I got there, I moved to, I've lived in Sao Paulo for most of the last 10 years. And I was sent there by the Financial Times to cover what was at the time the emergence of this booming giant in South America. There was an economic boom. The country was sort of stepping on the geopolitical stage. All of that changed. It started to change in 2015.

And the last six years have been really sort of a political and human and economic catastrophe. And of course, the president now, Bolsonaro, would not be in power if it were not for Lava Jato. And the thing about Lava Jato, right? And this sort of came out and sort of has been coming over the last 12 months. The extent to which this anti-corruption investigation, which implicated the widely beloved ex-president Lula of the left, where it transpired that Sergio Moro, this guy, this judge, was basically coaching prosecutors and sort of exchanging lots of WhatsApp messages with them about like how to bring this guy down.

And then Bolsonaro made Moro his justice minister. Yes, that's absolutely right. So that happened in 2018 and that leak that you referred to come out in 2019. But if you go back even further, I mean, there was, as far back as 2015, 2016, it was very clear that this judge, Sergio Moro, who did start in sort of a small town, he was not like a national level judge, was cutting corners or being especially aggressive. He was using the media to organize the kinds of provocations that he wanted to make happen. He was illegally leaking recorded phone calls.

By 2016, it was already clear that he was breaking the rules to do this. But at that point, it was seen by a lot of people in the mainstream press within Brazil and definitely in the foreign press, sort of worth doing the impeachment of to get results down. I mean, it was absolutely seen that way, like he was seen as a crusading superhero. And then in 2016, Dilma Rousseff was impeached on very minor sort of budgetary rules by a Congress, which that was, by all accounts, much, much corrupt than she was. But then as you get in 2017, 2018, it becomes clear, like, no, not only was he sort of cutting corners, he was really breaking the law and this was really an impartial investigation, right?

And then in 2018, Lula is running against Bolsonaro. Lula is first in the polls. Lula, as you said, a very popular president. I would say that Lula's Workers' Party is probably the most successful social democratic movement in the history of the Global South. At the same time, I'd also say that what I was living there, I was also reporting on many failures of that government. But he outhanded his term in 2010 with, like, 87% approval rating. So in 2018, he's running against Bolsonaro. He's in first place.

Sergio Moro puts him in jail on very flimsy charges. Bolsonaro wins and then turns around and makes Sergio Moro his justice minister. So at this point, we've gone really good at administering justice. Yeah, I can't see how that could be a problem. Like, that seems like, because he did such a good job, that was why he became... Yeah. I mean, if he didn't put him in jail, he wouldn't have done a good job. That's not justice minister material.

Yeah, exactly. Obviously. Yeah, and so, like, Bolsonaro, Bolsonaro was a joke before this, right? Like, he had been a long time... And we also are under a flexer. I'm pretty sure that when Vice did their series, Gaycation with Elliot Page, hosting it, that they... The team that the co-hosts at one point did, like, a small feature

where they met with Jair Bolsonaro, who was at the time famed for being, like, the most homophobic office in Brazil. Yeah, he was, like, a joke interview to get. Like, people would trick him into saying things like, oh, and I grew up on a farm. I used to fuck chickens all the time. And, like, he did that. Yeah.

He liked chickens, like a normal person. Yeah, no, he was absolutely... Well, he was in the army, but he was kicked out, and he was forced to resign because he was accused of planning to plant bombs in Rio to, you know, this is, like, a very common thing that the military dictatorship would do, false flag operations to get what they wanted. He was caught allegedly doing this,

and then he spent decades in Congress doing really not much except for screaming to nobody that would listen and that the military dictatorship was good and should have killed more people. He was basically freelancing Gladio. Yeah, no, he, yeah, he, well, he absolutely said, we should not have transitioned to democracy. We should have killed more people.

We should kill the president. He said that on television. And then the day... Because that's not the kind of man who would then put a guy in jail for running against him in an election. No, no, he's, yeah, it's above, you know, it's above board. Once he was elected, of course, he was doing whatever was needed to save the economy.

How has mellowed him? He's matured. I mean, in one sense, right? Like, a lot of... Like, people love to talk about, oh, a Bolsonaro-based nationalist. And it's like, I don't know, he's like, basically... He's sort of governing kind of just like a right-winger, right? Yeah, so he, I mean, the day that he was sort of launched or that he launched himself to the center of Brazilian politics

was the day that Dilma Rousseff was impeached. I met him a couple hours before I interviewed him for the first time before that and vote to impeach Dilma Rousseff. But when he impeached her, he dedicated his vote to the man that had tortured her under the military dictatorship. And this was such a sort of YouTube-friendly provocation that he became the face of opposition to everything at a moment of sort of national crisis.

And when the, you know, the political center and central left had been blown apart by Lava Jato. But yeah, and then he, but in power, he's not doing anything. He like, you know, like, I think the... Yeah, successfully. He, but for a lot, you know, I went back at the beginning of... I guess I shouldn't just say he's trying to trigger the libs in power. He's like launching, I understand he's like launching like homophobic.

He's making Brazil more homophobic, right? Like legally and so on. But he's not like instituting some... He's not like instituting a top-to-bottom transformation of society a la the military dictatorship. Right, so he never really had... Yeah, he never really had the institutional power to do that. So I went back last year to go do a...

I was actually in Congress interviewing some of the most crazy Bolsonaroista congressmen, like when the pandemic really, really hit. But really Congress had kind of taken over because he wasn't really capable of governing. What he would like to do and would still like to do is to wipe the left off the face of the earth. Like that's his main goal.

Like he doesn't think that the left should exist. They should all have to either go to jail, be killed, or leave the country. And now he has very little power to like... He can remake Brazil in his own image, but to the extent that he can really like mess up the response to coronavirus, the way that he can like push pro-gun legislation

in Congress, it's absolutely... Down the Amazon. Yeah, just give the green light to a process that was already underway. It's been absolutely a disaster while he still has not been able to like create Brazil in his own image. So what's happened, right?

The reason, one of the reasons we're talking about Brazil is that Lula has now essentially been exonerated from his accusations in Lava Jada, as I understand it. Wait, what? But he was put in jail by the guy who did a really good job. That's the interesting thing. Exonerated basically based on a jurisdictional technicality. Again, as I understand it, but nevertheless exonerated.

Yeah, so it's a bit technical and like Brazilian jurisprudence is even more like bizarre than that in the English-speaking world. But why not telling me that the country where half the political class went to jail over some Christopher Maltes anti-shit has a Baroque justice system? It is quite Baroque.

Yeah, they look, they like dress like wizards. It's an interesting Supreme Court. Yeah, that's cool. Who would do that? Yeah, Alice. And so what the ruling that we just got from a single justice basically came to the conclusion that Sergio Morrow did not have this jurisdiction

to try him where he was tried. Now, this has been criticized as a very narrow and strange way to overturn this conviction. Usually this criticism has come from people that don't want Lula to be free to run in 2022. But ironically, he may have done this precisely to save Sergio Morrow himself from trouble because if he had made the other ruling, which was possible,

which was to say that Sergio Morrow had acted incorrectly had been an impartial judge, then you would open up the entire Lavajato to prosecution and Morrow himself may have been in trouble. So what we have is a strange situation now where Lula is now politically rehabilitated. So he's now allowed to run in 2022 if he wants. And he had been quite quiet in the early years of Bolsonaro.

But when this decision came, he came out and he made a very aggressive speech that a lot of people really liked including people that had sort of convinced themselves a few years ago, I'm never going to vote for that party again. So he's definitely back and it's in just a few weeks totally changed the political landscape. His approval rating is now like not where it was when he left but it's quite high now, isn't it?

Lula. Yeah. Yeah, so they just did like a poll really recently. And he came, you know, like it's divided up in like this is the person I want to vote for and this is the person I would never vote for. He has the highest number of people saying that they would definitely vote for him and the lowest number of people saying that he wouldn't.

So he's ahead of Bolsonaro now again. Taking advice from Saquia Stahmer. Arguably why he was put in jail in the first place is because that he was going to win in 2018. I mean, what are the, I mean, call me cynical. What are the chances that like Bolsonaro right now is like sitting in his perfect replica of Joe Rogan's studio with his like three idiot sons trying to come up with a way

to like entrap Lula in another crime? Like that's what I'm worried about is I'm worried that they're just going to try and kill him, right? And I want to know what the chances of that are. Well, somebody on, well, this was, I mean, this is kind of like noise, but somebody did threaten to kill him on a Brazilian Twitter the other day. But I think that the other possibility is a real one.

Like you never know if Moro and the judiciary and whoever has been prosecuting for years may have some card in their back pocket to say, oh, no, actually we have you on this other crime. But I think Lula came back so forcefully that that would be hard, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't try it. Like this whole Lava Jota thing, like reporting on it got very like annoying because like every three months you had

like a crazy twist that nobody expected. But when you have like 47 of those, they stop being interesting. So like is it, is it even possible now to answer the question of whether Lula was personally corrupt on any real level or is that just now totally obscured? Yeah, you could, I think if you could sort of answer the question, I think I would say that Lula took power in

2003 into a system that a left wing president had never governed, knowing very well that it was a dirty one and knowing that he had to get his hands dirty in order to make any progress. And he went in there sort of knowing that that would be how he did things and it is how he did things. The giant corruption scan of the Lava Jota uncovered was absolutely real.

It was much bigger than sort of one party or one person, but it absolutely continued to go on while he was president and probably expanded a little bit. Now, did he get rich? Did he like buy stuff? Did he like get, you know, grab money, threaten his back pocket and like buy a house in Miami? I think there's no evidence for that happening.

The evidence is that he sort of allowed or encouraged a unofficial corrupt means of raising money for political parties to continue while president. And correct me if I'm wrong, but it was like funds or proceeds from the state oil company. Yeah, so it was a sort of automatic understood process that when there were very big infrastructure projects or oil projects, a certain percentage would be taken and

put into a slush fund, which would then be redirected political parties that for use in things like campaigns, not just his party, a lot of parties. And it was a lot of money, but it was moving it from one part of the state to a different part of the state without, without admitting to the public that that's what was happening. Got it.

Okay. Yeah. And I mean, like even, even with the scandal and even with getting impeached under a Fernando Haddad, it looked like PT did okay in 2018. Well, 2018. Yeah. So 2018 and I was there as well.

It was a strange moment and some people on the left were very upset with Lula for insisting that he was the candidate, even though he was in prison and he certainly wasn't going to be allowed to run. So some people that I know wanted him to step back and allow some other left-wing candidate to take, to take the reins from him, but he insisted on being the candidate. And it wasn't until very late in the campaign that finally

Haddad's year, you know, Fernando Haddad became the candidate. And so he didn't debate Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro just didn't show up to the debates. He didn't, you know, probably judge rightly that it wouldn't help him. And so Haddad had a really strange, short campaign, but he still did okay.

Right. Like it wasn't, it wasn't like 55, 45, something like this. And the, the possibility that Lula himself could run in 2022, I think would be quite bad for Bolsonaro. And so I think, let's like thinking about, like thinking about this as well, right? Like as I understand it, Lula's tenure was marked by quite a few things.

Like it was, and it was under Lula that sort of Brazil became the first letter of the bricks that we got. I was like a lot of that GDP growth. And, you know, I mean in Bolsonaro, despite all of his promises to, you know, turbocharge the economy with shock therapy and make the whole place more right-wing and all this, basically, like it should, to no surprise, the listeners of this podcast, but basically just failed to do

much sort of for Brazil's economy. And I know, arguing about GDP, about GDP growth to justify left-wing politics is always Charlie Brown kicking the football. But like Bolsonaro just, he doesn't seem like he could even, he could really make any kind of claim except trigger the ribs versus quite a bit of growth in their prosperity under Lula.

Yeah, and that's exactly the case that Lula's going to try to make, I think fairly successfully. Like, you know, lucky for Lula, there was a commodities boom in the years of his office. So it was the case that almost everybody got better off, the rich got better off, the poor got better off, there was inequality was reduced. And under Bolsonaro, he admits quite freely he doesn't know

or care about economics. But what he did is he grabbed a Chicago boy, like a literal Pinochetista, like who had started in Chile and really praises the Pinochet approach to economics. And he was like, yeah, this guy's going to do his name is Paulo Guedes. That didn't really work out. And now it's whatever, I mean, even if you all you care about

is sort of like market reforms in square, scare quotes. The damage that Bolsonaro did to the economy, reputationally, through the Amazon and through the horrible managing of coronavirus, like it's been a net negative, even for sort of the most ideologically committed neoliberals. And Lula's going to make the case that like, oh, well, actually, you know, we'll just go back to, you know, everybody

getting along and the workers getting along with the bosses and they'll be growth. And the question is if Brazilians will vote for that. And also with the military will let that happen. I mean, in 2018, there were noises from the military saying like, if Lula is allowed to run, we will take action. And this kind of thing hangs over Brazil. I mean, you know, re-democratization only took place,

you know, a couple of decades ago. So like, yes, there's this walking, this really tight rope where he has to sort of appeal to the people and say, I'm going to be the anti Bolsonaro, but not scare international capital or sort of like the urban bourgeoisie that could really sort of just block him from taking power again. I mean, I guess the sort of the crassness of Bolsonaro

is quite useful here because we see a rare example on the left or the center left of the kind of Biden campaign of like after this embarrassing interlude of just like letting the dumbest guy in the country do stuff, we're going to go back to being normal and respectable, right? And I don't know if that's going to work or not. Yeah, no, I think that's ironically sort of a good parallel. Like when Biden himself was elected,

like a lot of centrists or center right commentators in Brazil were like, oh, we need to look, what's the Brazilian Biden? What would the Brazilian Biden be like? And they implicitly were looking for a center right figure that would be in the middle of what they thought would be acceptable. But I think the more proper Brazilian Biden is just someone from the workers party because that's the party that was in charge

the last time things were normal. It's the nostalgia candidate. It's the recent nostalgia candidate. Yeah, you know, that's who was running things before. Everything just got unnecessarily chaotic and shitty. How lucky would it be if Lula gets in in 2022 and there's just another big commodities boom? I mean, people have talked about that possibility.

I mean, it could be, you know, he could like like like Biden just kind of pick up the upswing, you know? He kind of has that luck on a personal level, doesn't he? It's interesting. The off-wood lumber is up the moment he takes office. But that also goes to the heart as well as to why like, unlike other, even though people sort of like to talk about Lula as this, you know, as all this populist or whatever,

he has a great deal more legitimacy in like the in the global north than like Nicholas Maduro or Evan Morales, precisely because Lula, because his governing style is very sort of much consensual. It's very, like I said, consensus based. It's also quite, it's about, and especially now, he's going to have to not scare anyone. Like there's no one's going to say Lula took my family's slaves,

but they will say that about like, about Maduro or Chavez. We're not about to see a bunch of like Brazilian chavismo. Well, no, I mean, this was, I mean, this, they scared this up in 2013, 14, 15, because if you go back to the moment when they decided to impeach Dilma on very flimsy charges, the PT had won four elections in a row, and Brazil's traditional elites were terrified.

Like, oh no, like these guys are just going to win forever, and they're cheating by being popular. That's right. So they got those up. Why does that sound familiar? So going in, just seeing some butter on the stairs, like, oh, Jesus, this guy. Oh, no.

And this was like, Peter Mandelson dispatched to Brazil on a special mission. Yes, Mr. Bolsonaro, very, very buttery staircase. And this was explicitly, I mean, maybe perhaps implicitly what they were worried about when they put him in jail. Like, well, he can't run because that's not fair, because of course he'll win, right?

People like that guy. Why about we have someone the people don't like for a change? Yeah, and so, yeah, this is worrying. But again, like as you said, when Lula, at the end of Lula's term, Obama very famously was like, you're the most popular leader in the world, you know, he's the man.

And the financial press, absolutely. I mean, loved him in the late 2000s. He is a union boss. Like, his whole life has been, I mean, this is like totally cliche in Brazil, but, you know, relations aren't Brazilian. He like, is the kind of guy that will have, like, whiskey with the bosses, like with the capitalists,

and then later get really drunk with, like, the football fans on, like, cheap cachaça. Like, he knows how to talk to everyone and sort of stitch something together. Almost like in a bit of an Obama coalition. It was the same era, but he came from, like, he came from, like, a real organization that had been built up over decades,

like, among the actual proper working class. Like, Lula lost a finger, like, he's a metal worker. Like, he's, like, actually a representative of the working class that sort of helped to overthrow the dictatorship in league with, like, more liberal elements within the Catholic Church. So he had, like, a real organization.

But it was, yeah, it was, it's, I think that, like, the comparison to Biden in terms of not their, like, specific approach to the world because, like, Lula's, like, left leaning at least leader, he's not going to, like, try to overthrow Venezuela. But he's, he's the sort of, can be the return to normalcy even for a lot of the middle class that kind of might have decided

that he was very dangerous a few years ago. Well, if you want to talk about who thinks he's dangerous, I have some of Bolsonaro's responses to that speech he were talking about, where... Oh, I'm sure these are going to be so long. Among other things, sort of, Lula, again, in this very fiery, multi-hour speech, basically just excoriated Bolsonaro

for giving everyone in Brazil COVID on purpose, more or less. Including himself, many times. Including himself, like, vibrate. Yeah, like... That's actually, that's, that's the question that I want to ask Benson here is, why does Jair Bolsonaro get coronavirus every two weeks? Persistence.

Yeah. Well, let's make it like... Dedication. Jair Bolsonaro has the physicality, I think, of, like, an Elmer Fudd, where he's all, he's constantly just getting, just the shit kicked out of him by circumstances. He has every disease under the sun.

Jair Bolsonaro embodies the Santa Spirit and that he will never ask Brazilians to do something he's not prepared to get himself. And that is get the coronavirus. Yeah, he's becoming infected with the novel coronavirus. It's not a novel to him anymore, is it? Yeah. And then there's some element to this

that is from his sons that think they're good at social media. They like to show his sort of vulnerable side. Like, because him getting stabbed during the 2018 election, which was one more thing, which like threw the whole thing into chaos, they figured had helped him and it did, probably. So... And then getting stabbed every two weeks after that.

So you're suggesting that his, he may never even have gotten COVID. His sons kept on like drenching him with fake sweat and putting him in a hospital. Well, there was a weird thing because when I was in... That's elder abuse. I think that he probably got it. But I think it would not be insane to find out

that he didn't get it when he said he did. Yeah. Does that make sense? Because when I was in Brasilia about to interview a real, a real hard Bolsonaroista, like they shut down Congress as I was trying to get in and everybody got it. But then he was tested several times

and then he wouldn't release the results. He had double COVID. He didn't want to scare people. Yeah. But then randomly a few months later, he like just announced that he had it. It just, it's... These people think that they're really good

at using the internet. And you know, I mean, they run, you know, they run one of the world's most important countries. Maybe they are good, but... So Bolsonaro's response to Luna Lula's... Well, number one, he appointed his fourth health minister in one year, which I'm sure is going to fix things. And his response to Lula was he said,

he's never called COVID-19 just a little flu. He's never doubted the effectiveness of vaccines. He said, in my case, due to my past as an athlete, if I were to be contaminated by the virus, I wouldn't have to worry. I wouldn't feel anything. At most a little flu or a cold. But then he's denied ever having said that,

despite having said it many times. I've seen this man trying to do a push-up and this man does not have a past. It's really weird that he, that's his big, like sort of proto-fascist like symbol and he hasn't like figured out how to do one yet. Like if you just Google Bolsonaro push-up, he's so bad at push-ups.

And he just like humps the air. He was a paratrooper. He was a captain in the fucking parachutes. Can we just say that it is absolutely normal and acceptable for former captains and paratroopers to be complete idiots and suck at doing anything physical? You could do one push-up right now. Yes, I could do one.

You're beating Bolsonaro. So in this address on Thursday, in addition to like crushing an entire Gatorade and then doing one push-up and then being like, there. Yeah, just getting covered. Now pay your fucking Patreon subs. The videos that he puts out are ridiculous, right?

Because he'll go and like, he'll inspect the troops and you see the video of these like 19-year-old psychos in uniform and he'll be like, okay, fine. Let's do push-ups right now. Everybody gets down into the push-up position and then he doesn't do one. He fakes one. He just like shits his hips.

Because it was Biden's thing was to challenge people to push-up competitions to make a point. That's the weird thing. Maybe Bolsonaro is the visibility in Biden. I think they're all a little bit Biden. When he called that guy fat and he like kind of threatened to... Yeah, he said, he said, Why are we governed by like insane old guys?

Because they're the smartest, most capable people that we have. There was a few things like this about Biden. There was number one. He challenged someone who asked him a question on a debate panel to an IQ test. That's just king shit. A guy argued with him and it wasn't just that he called him fat. He said, listen to that.

I thought it was great. He said... It all started when he said he wanted to take Trump around the back of the barn and deal with him. Oh, yeah. Take Trump and take Trump and that dump around the back of the barn. There's the famous story where the famous story

down by the pool when he threatened the guy with a chain and then somehow solved racism in Delaware. Fucking corn pop. I feel like there's so many things that I'm going to remember on my deathbed and that's one of them. So there are a few more things about this Bolsonaro speech. He screamed, I am the most important person right now, which...

Cool. That's very Don Jr. That's like powerful. Don Jr. is on YouTube. He's wide-eyed and sweaty. I'm the most important person right now. I'm at the queen. So he says, I'm the most important person right now.

That sack of meat said yesterday that I should speak to the science minister and Marcos. He's genuinely so satisfying, right? How scared he is of Lula. Yeah, this... Even the stuff that he just mentioned, that U-turn on vaccines on the little flu, people think it's because he's responding to Lula.

Everyone responded really well to that Lula speech. He's like, never mind. Science is good. Vaccines are good. Oh, yeah. I always said that. And then it cut to a montage, a full hour of him just saying it's a little flu.

Vaccines don't work and because I'm an athlete, I wouldn't even get it. No, he said, that sack of meat said yesterday I should speak to science minister Marcos Pantes, who has been to space and ask him if the earth is round. Which is a fantastic guy. Look at the quality of my science minister and that criminal's cabinet and then we'll talk.

So he basically... That's a fantastic own. Just pointing to an astronaut that this guy employed and is like, yo, you should take this guy. You should ask this guy if the world is round. That rules. I love that. That's great.

He is... Because that's the problem, right? Is that trigger the libs campaigning only really works if your opponent is like, again, beyond say others putting their thumb on the scale. And Lula is the reverse of this. He's the first guy for a long time who's managed to work out how to trigger the right.

Yeah. Yeah, he's very good. I mean, this speech was like people were... It really like all of the Brazilian internet was like, whoa, he's really good at this. And I think he'd been really waiting to say this stuff for the years that he'd been kind of muzzled because in the years that Bolsonaro's been in power,

this is speculation, but I think it's credible. He didn't really want to attack Bolsonaro too aggressively because that could have triggered some kind of judicial action to put him back in jail. And now he was like, he came with the really good stuff and Brazil was like, wow. I've just realized why the sack of meat thing made me laugh so much is because it's reminiscent

of that line in the film Troy, where I think it's Achilles says it to Agamemnon. It's because you suck wine for like no reason. Yeah, that's right. I would be incredibly unsurprised if the Bolsonaro family had not seen Troy several times. Yeah. Your favorite documentary, Troy.

Yeah, that's great. But Bolsonaro building a giant wooden horse? Yeah, he's doing the action. He's an athlete, manly to do that. Yeah, that's right. Sneaking into the judicial system. What I think is interesting is that a trigger the libs campaign in Brazil seems to be kind of falling flat

when met with an actual sort of substantive popular resistance. It's not basically purely triangulated. Yeah, and I think what really matters is the last few years have been awful. Like, constant chaos. I was here a little bit over a year ago, right? On this podcast. And I went back to Sao Paulo and I ended up being stuck there

during the pandemic. And it was like really bad. It was one of the hardest, probably things I've lived through. Like, Sao Paulo was just, it was really just human misery everywhere. And you can only, you can only sort of justify that that's not the president's fault for so long. After a while, it becomes clear like,

oh, this guy's responsible. And you mentioned like there's been four health ministers. And like the health ministers don't like leave because like, he fires them or like, you know, there's some kind of a deal where they, someone else takes over. There's like really public, like in the media fights between the health minister where the health minister says, health minister says, you're being incredibly irresponsible.

I cannot do this job if you refuse to do what is right for the country. And then like resigns and there's a new person that resigns immediately says the same thing. Like it's just, it's, yeah, you can only get so much juice out of like saying provocative stuff and praising fascists on YouTube. Well, it's the, it's the whole thing of like,

of that kind of government hates to govern because actually doing stuff isn't fun. It's not popular. It's not making people cheer for me. In fact, if I do stuff, there's a chance I could do it wrong and I don't know how to do anything. Yeah. I mean, Bolsonaro was in Congress for three decades

and he didn't really do anything. He sort of tried to funnel more money. It's a low level police and, you know, again, speculation, but very credible. His family developed, nah, not speculation. His family absolutely developed close ties with the police militia, which is a kind of paramilitary slash mafia criminal organization run by former cops

in Brazil, especially Rio. But yeah, he didn't do anything and he has no interest in governing. And so Congress took over a lot of that the first year of his government. But like in a crisis, that, you know, that's, it's hard, you know, you need to do something. And like in the neoliberal era or whatever you want to call it,

we sort of become accustomed to the idea that like everyone, you know, the market will just run the country. My job is to make speeches and attack whoever. And the pandemic right now is very, very bad. It requires doing. Yeah. You have to be the government. And like, and this is one thing that Lula said in the speech

that like really reverberated like so many other things. Like we don't, he's like, number one, we don't have a government. I repeat, we don't have a government. And he's like, do not follow any of the stupid imbecilic orders given by the current president of this country. They're all wrong. Listen to science and like listen to doctors. And like that was such a normal thing to say that people are like,

oh man, it's nice to have like a normal person up there. Can I ask a quick question for you, Vincent? I was just wondering because there are a few things that I'd seen like maybe traces of reporting in English, but I wanted to get, if you could maybe talk about a little bit because like there have been some incredibly insane things that have happened even above and beyond the catastrophe in the US and the UK in Brazil.

The things that I'm thinking of are, I think it's in the state of Amazonias. The hospital is basically running out of medical oxygen and running out of ICU space. I know that there's currently an issue with like a new variant in Brazil that's apparently very, very dangerous to even young people. And it seems like it's spreading pretty much out of control. I'm wondering like has that stuff been the kind of thing

that would break through as like a people losing, I don't know, losing their patience, losing faith in this government because obviously like in the US, I don't know, it's hard to gauge. Like it seemed like there was no possible low that would stop Trump supporters from supporting Trump, but it also seemed like some situations got genuinely, what's the right word here, dire in a way that they didn't even get to

except in like maybe small, like isolated areas in the United States. Yeah, so the city of Manaus, M-A-N-A-U-S, you can Google that if you want to see like, read some really horrifying stories. Yeah, people like the collapse that people were worried about here or in the US like actually happened, like people died because of a lack of care, like people asphyxiated because there was no oxygen,

people got to the hospital and then died because the system had been overrun. And for a lot of the pandemic, Bolsonaro was actually doing okay in terms of popularity. Like he was never, he's never been a really popular president, but he had some level of stable support. It tends to be sort of like the urban middle classes that really care about the way the pandemic is going,

whereas a lot of the working classes know that no matter what, they're not getting a lockdown either way. Sorry, they're not going to get like safety either way. Some part of the sort of right-leaning working class has always been with Bolsonaro, but for the first time in the last few weeks, you saw his approval rating drop below 30%. So yeah, short answer, yes and yes.

Like the systemic collapse happened there in a way that we only feared that it would happen in places like New York and London. And it is getting bad enough to really sort of put a dent in his popularity even with people that spent eight to 10 months not really caring that much about the way he was handling it. Thanks, man.

Yeah, I was just wondering about that because it looked dire, but also there seemed to be... Yeah, and it seemed to be... There wasn't a ton of... Here and there, you might get a foreign correspondent article or something like that, but it didn't seem like it was getting a ton of coverage. It's tough to go out to Manaus right now

because it's just everything is so... Yeah, I mean, Manaus is really far. Brazil is huge, right? Brazil is twice the size of the European Union. You really need good coordination in a moment like this and it doesn't help that the top guy is just getting in the way. First Brazilian city to dig mass graves in response to COVID apparently.

Well, that can only be good. That sounds to me like they're putting in the necessary infrastructure, so I think... Yeah, getting going is what's needed, yeah. Yeah, how many mass graves is Lula, Doug? Zero, I think, so... The other thing is that the FT's editorial board, a paper I've normally very much enjoyed,

has kind of made a... Look, we have some friends of ours over at the Financial Times. We want to make it clear we enjoy that work, okay? We respect them, they respect us. Well, it sort of produced a rare stinker, I'm afraid to say. We're going to have to have a sit-down with the guys over at the FT. Right, so where there is this emerging argument

that actually Lula... The problem is that Lula coming back in Brazil and being a government to gain is bad because it's going to cause polarization. Yeah, I saw this editorial from the FT and I used to work there, I have good friends. I probably know who this is and later when we're not recording,

I can probably tell you about what their background is. We'll find it interesting, but I'm not going to say it on the podcast. But yeah, this seems like one-part concern-trolling, one-part cope, right? It's like they don't... The idea that Lava Jato had a lot of credibility until three weeks ago is just... It's a fantasy, right?

You want to understand this, again, very flat version of where you have almost like the civics class understanding of global politics. Yeah, well, yeah, I read this editorial too and I was like, oh yeah, yeah, that's okay, I know it's okay. And the idea... There's a lot of concern about polarization, right? It's like, oh well...

It's new, we can't have polarization. What if we have polarization? You can't have left and right. We need to have only right and right We need to have right and nice right. Yeah, we need... Yeah, good right and bad right and that's it. And then we let the good right win.

And I think for two years, actually like some people in the financial press or some people in the press in Brazil, which is sort of tailored to local elites, really thought they had turned the page on the workers part of the PT. And so they thought, okay, let's find the new center right guy and then everyone had had a lot of fun picking amongst all these center right quote-unquote moderate candidates, even though they had also...

Yeah, John Jackson, Jack Johnson, Jack Johnson Jr., Jair Bolsonaro, Eduardo Bolsonaro, Carlos Bolsonaro. And even though all these quote-unquote center right candidates had supported Bolsonaro when push came to shove, which is like a point that all like the best Brazilian journalists make, like the Brazilian right will be extreme right if nobody is putting a check on them from the left. You need some kind of a polarization,

some kind of a threat of like, if you don't do a good job, the other side will win, right? So the idea that the worst mistakes of the Lava Jato must be maintained in order to preserve the investigation's credibility seems like it's really something that you would write in 2014 or 2015. I mean, like I said, I laid it out, like it's been years that it's been really clear that this has been unfair and maintaining unfairness is not, I don't think,

better for the credibility of an investigation than fixing, even in some small way, some of its abuses. So what the editorial says is it says, Bolsonaro has a woeful record in power, which has included repeatedly praising dictatorship, allowing Amazon deforestation to serve 12-year highs in dangerously mismanaging the pandemic while disappointing investor hopes for big economic reforms,

which I don't know about you guys, that's the biggest sin of all. Yeah, that was the saddest day of my life. Do you remember, I sometimes remember this, I found this, that Economist article from 2019, where they were like, ah, Jared Bolsonaro tackles Brazil's pension problem. Again, I definitely know who wrote this. Yeah, cool, thank you, Economist.

Yeah, but again, to the extent that this happened, I mean, even if you are, you know, a liberal in the economic sense and these people exist and they believe in it and that's okay, the extent to which progress was made on that front was not even him, it was Congress that kind of took over because he wasn't governing. And yeah, I mean, if you're an investor or a member of the Brazilian elite,

Bolsonaro has not been good for you. It just didn't work out. What is it with right-wing governments and simply refusing to govern? It's very like, we've seen it a lot in Britain. We're seeing it in Brazil. It's like a very... It's not in America, really.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I kind of, you know, it's like, if you even remember right-wing minorities in the Senate in the US would like threaten to destroy the US government and sort of put it out of business for sort of several months at a time, there is just...

I mean, I think really there is... The neoliberal idea was always that the state should be as small as possible. The market should do as much as possible. And so you develop this sort of... You get this generation of political leaders who are sort of raised on this ideology that they shouldn't really ever do anything.

I mean, I always talk about this in terms of, you know, David Cameron as well, right? Like... Did he do things? I was here the whole time. He did things to a pig. No, he also bet the entire future of his political project on a referendum

which he then lost. But like, even if I mean again, respect for that. That's a very tough thing to do. Even that was him trying not to do things, right? He was just kind of... He was trying to avoid having to do... He thought that now it's something...

He's going to keep yelling at me, so I'll give them the referendum. I'll pretend like I care about this. That's what I always remember, right? Like, Blair worked very hard at being a monster when the old story is always that... Like, the retreats of Blair's closest aides to like go into the countryside

and cook up policy or whatever was basically 72 hours, no sleep, lots of coffee, constant work, work, work, work, work. Whereas when it was with Cameron, it was always basically going and playing croquet in his house with his wife and drinking pims the whole time because there's this acknowledge...

I know David Cameron's whole life. There was this acknowledged thing where I think a lot of the right sort of knows that it doesn't really... It's not there to do anything. It's there, in fact, to keep things from being done and to just sort of allow... To just sort of allow the markets

into more and more and more facets of your life. And the problem was when you get someone like Bolsonaro who doesn't even really know that he's not supposed to govern, he just has this sort of cartoon image of what governing is, which is going up on a podium and making a fiery speech and then things will work themselves out from there.

That's a cartoon image of what a fucking press-up is. His political project is one of cleansing the nation. He just thinks that if you remove this cancer, which is the left, then that's all you need. That's my job. I need to cut this piece of the body off and then everything will go well and it's an entirely repressive operation.

And so doing sort of proactive things, that's not part of the job. So much of it, aside from the bits of actually enforcing crackdowns and minorities, which we've seen in the US, we've seen in the UK, we've seen in Brazil, other than that, these guys basically just govern in the superstructure. They're just there to react to and make more ideology.

They're not sort of doing stuff. You're really seeing this in the United States from a strange extent too. Ted Cruz exists purely at the level of discourse now. You're just on Twitter responding to tweets about tweets. I think this is where we're going probably globally. I've never seen a man who looks as much like the neighbor in the sitcom whose wife is cheating on him as Ted Cruz does.

For that reactionary of a politician, he has such a fascinatingly wet energy. Well, they all do, really. I mean, all of them are very pathetic people. Trump doesn't. With the exception of Trump, I think Trump, no, Trump ruled, but like a lot of the guys who are like, who sort of have, who are just sort of cynical

and kind of just want power and were sort of center right playing, playing to the further right. The problem is, is they're massive, they're like Marinetti. They're massive pussies who are trying to impress the big strong soldiers. It will always come off ridiculous.

I also eat aluminium and stuff like that. They have elaborate dinners. They just take a really long time and they're boring, but they sound good on paper. The waiter comes by and sprays the coronavirus into your face. But this editorial goes on. It says, the judge's decision has had unhappy consequences striking a heavy blow against the credibility

of Latin America's biggest and most successful corruption investigation. I mean, absolutely biggest and like. In terms of convictions. Again, if you're paying any attention, it's been a long time since you can really make this claim. Like I said, Sergio Moro became justice minister in 2018. So I think one easy, perhaps overly schematic way

to think about this is that political corruption has existed for a long time. And then there was a judicial crusade, which became in itself judicial corruption. And at some point that corruption, the judicial corruption became larger and worse than the thing it was combating, right? When you put Bolsonaro in the presidency

and then you award one of the most important offices of that presidency to the man who removed the most powerful president in Brazilian history from the running, now you've fought the battle with something even worse than you were trying to exterminate. And so... Yeah, we had this night problem,

but now we've released all these mongooses. And so, and it's like I said, just this view that the exoneration of Lula on a technicality, just like the idea that, oh, this is bad because it discredits Lava Jato and it's on a technicality only makes sense if you ignore everything else. Yeah, I mean, it makes sense if you think about

what you wanted Lava Jato to be, not what it actually was. What it actually was was the employment of large-scale judicial corruption to, in a partisan way, remove certain actors from Brazilian politics and not others. And again, I actually definitely know the person

of this editorial. But again, the last line in the editorial really gives away what it's really about. Almost as unappealing is the promise of a polarized election that next year will be between candidates of the hard right and the old-fashioned left. Now, again...

Not the old-fashioned left. Yeah, not the people... Lula isn't really old-fashioned either. Old-fashioned is dictatorship in Brazil, right? Usually the old left in Latin America is like the Stalinist Communist Party or something, right? Which they totally still exist, right? But no, the old-fashioned left.

I mean, again, this is a weird projection. That's the best, yeah. And the old-fashioned left is the... It's the dolphin guys, the space guy. Lula has reanimated Chairman Mao. Yeah, that's right. Well, it's the classic... It's also like...

I think if you talk about the old-fashioned left in this context, I imagine that this editorial is sort of projecting the image of a certain UK politicians onto... I was gonna say, there is a really weird like, grey-on-white font here that simply reads in 4,000-point font, Jeremy Cropnitz.

Yeah, but this is an interesting way if you compare... Like the way that sort of the English language press treats movements in the Global South compared to the way they talk about their own countries. Like, you wouldn't say about Germany or France, like, well, you can't have the same party that was in power 10 years ago. We need to have a new set of parties every three years

to renovate the political... Like, everybody understands... And yet they do do that in Germany and France. Everybody understands that you need to work with the movements that exist, right? Like, there is no other left with the institutional power to take on Bolsonaro. And I think in some ways, it's suboptimal

that it's Lula again, but like, that is the best... That side of the spectrum has to offer. So it's... Because earlier, I said to you, it sounds like this idea of putting together this coalition, basically, of workers and kind of socially progressive bosses and sort of urban middle class. It's a bit of an Obama coalition,

but it doesn't make Lula an Obama figure. No, yeah, yeah. And I think what the... I think a lot of western watchers of Brazil seem to want is they're like, ah, this guy again, I wish they would change the actors on this TV show like the Obama that I liked. You know, he was fun and inspiring

and maybe feel good about myself. Why can't they do that? I don't like this season of the West Wing. I want the old season of the West Wing. Yeah, more or less. Yeah, it's just... I mean, like I said, like, a lot of people thought he was gone and they really liked that

and they began planning their sort of horse race sort of coverage of the new crop of center-right people that these were all people that, you know, hope against, I think it's fantasy, but I sort of see why they had this fantasy. Hope against hope would be the perfect socially liberal sort of pro-environment, but also good reformers, right? You know, meaning sort of austerity and...

We're going to tackle the liberalization... ...pension problem and then we're also going to get a glowing right up from the economist. Right, they thought that, okay, well, actually maybe we'll come out of this with the best possible candidate for like the readership of the economist, but like when you have Bolsonaro running the country,

you can't let, you know, you can't... That kind of a fantasy, even if you think it would be good, it's just, it's not realistic. Are you suggesting that some kind of a Brazilian version of a never Trump conservative national review guy wasn't going to save the country? They had, I mean, they had...

Who they had... Well, Sergio Moro himself was like thrown about forever, although he's like really not... Yeah, he did a really good job. He's really, really unimpressive if you like see him speak. And then like this guy who runs a TV show, like, you know, again, this is where all politics is going. This guy Luciano Huck,

just like had done years and years of these like grading TV shows where he goes into favelas and gives poor families like a present. They got the guy from undercover boss Brazil to run against Bolsonaro. Sort of a more condescending bar rescue, but like for... He writes their asses. It's kind of weird. Barrio rescue.

Yeah. But yeah, it seems fantasy to me. So yeah, I also didn't love this editorial, although I hope he doesn't get mad at me. I feel like there's an extent to which you'll see this. And I do recall this when Bolsonaro won, that it seemed to immediately turn around to, well, we can work with Bolsonaro.

There's some great things he can do. Like you said, tackling Brazil's pensions or, you know, what are your opportunities in, you know, mining and minerals for investments, you know, based on the new Bolsonaro government. And I feel like it becomes a cliche. It feels like a cliche to point this out, but then it also can be so disorienting

to watch it play out in real life. It's just so revealing, right? Like, oh, this Bolsonaro guy, who's like an incompetent right-wing boob, offers some great opportunities for us to do corruption in Brazil. Like that's basically what they mean. But you feel as though those same people, you know,

it's like when Berlin passed a relatively, I mean, I would say relatively aggressive, a certainly pretty strong rent control law, and Politico's Europe correspondent, who's like a weird, like Austrian nationalist, Austrian American nationalist, was calling it full Venezuela. And I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about?

It's the same kind of thing that you can see this play out once again that, you know, the very legitimate concerns about PT or legitimate concerns about Lula, but then if somebody like a Bolsonaro analog or someone who's 1% less insane, but still just his right-wing, economically, socially, et cetera,

that we can always find a way to accommodate them. And it's just, I don't know, I feel like... That's why I'm so terrified that they're just gonna patrice Lumumba, Lula, you know? What are you doing here? I googled Venezuela! Yeah, man, I mean, that question, it comes up a lot that the accommodating the right

and absolutely being just purple in the face about the possibility of a left-leaning government actually wielding power in a way that matches their rhetoric. Like, you see this happen over and over again, you see it happen here, you certainly saw it with the establishment press in the UK. And I just, I don't know, this editorial sounds like just that except for their South American version.

Brazil, like the United States and the rest of the Western Hemisphere, is like a violent settler colony. Whose history you can tell if you want as just a series of slave revolts and then the elites violently crushing the slave revolts? So, like, there is deep somewhere in the cultural, I mean, not DNA exactly,

but in the culture of South American elites and North American elites to be absolutely terrified of revolution from below. So even when it's not going to happen at all, you do get this ancestral terror of the machete. Yeah, yeah, like, it's actually like something kicks in. You're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, not this. We're not going to get anything close to this.

And Venezuela chatter, as you know, you won't be surprised to hear, was really common when they were trying to bring down Lula and Dilma, you know, ultimately successfully. Well, I for one am excited for Joe Biden's cool, woke, new, multi-ethnic, many-gendered CIA to get to do their own Patrice Lumumba on Lula. 100%.

Yeah, absolutely. They're going to do, they're going to do, they're absolutely going to send people down. What if they, what if we assassinate this sense of leftist with a trans assassin makes you think? That's right. This is, I 100% am convinced. And Vincent, please feel free to shoot this down.

If this is just me being an idiot and talking about stuff I don't know that much about. But I have this Colton, not quite a conspiracy theory, but suspicion that one of the reasons for the success of the like the early 2000s pink tide movement, governments in South America was that the U.S. foreign policy establishment was fixated on the Middle East and Central Asia.

And so like they were just dumping all their money and attention. Can't walk and chew gum at the same time. Yeah. Yeah. They weren't able to, they weren't able to, to, you know, train the next generation of Dina agents, you know, at the school for the school of the Americas

or the Western Hemisphere Institute for National and Economic Security Cooperation. They had to give it a new name because the school of the Americas was too offensive. They just didn't have the time and attention. They were too busy planning to invade Iraq. And thus, Lula got involved in the first place. Now all those guys are busy on Ukrainian flag Twitter.

So like it's good news for South America. Oh, Bolsonaro fans, by the way, will fly right-wing Ukrainian flags. So like if you're at a Bolsonaro rally, the way you didn't know, the way you could see from like 10 blocks away that they're, it's a Bolsonaro rally, you'll see American flags because the American flag,

of course, is coded as right-wing in South America, Israeli flags and Ukrainian fascist flags. Huh. Much like a meeting of Canada's social democratic party, the NDP. The, what's it called? The, in the UK right-wing protests, typically it's the Union Jack and the Israeli flag

and then sometimes the English flag too. What you said is absolutely right. Like other people have noticed this and it's like, there are incredible like real studies of this. The quote unquote war on terror took a lot of the heat that the United States could generate in the first years of the 21st century. And then in South America itself,

Venezuela was like kind of like the human shield for the rest of the left in South America because they were the most, they were like at the front of US attention after the US backed coup in 2002. So because Lula was like not as radical as Venezuela and because the war in Iraq was happening, yeah, I think that there was,

there was a moment where like there wasn't a lot of attention paid to the rest of South America. Effectively, that is more or less like a natural experiment that proves that the US is the great Satan. Proving in a lab with like actual, you know, like rigorous analysis. So we don't need to, you heard of your first DNA test and I'm 100% the great Satan.

The US is absolutely the great Satan. Trying to do a Lizard. Yeah, I wish I could remember the way the Lizard. Yeah, so, you know, the Lizard song, but with the US being the great Satan, that's the joke. That's right. Yeah, absolutely. But also I am noting that we are getting to about time. So I just want to say to you, the listeners of this podcast,

if you have not read the Jakarta method, you should run. Do not walk to your nearest Kindle. Don't chew gum at the same time. Your nearest Kindle, Nook, MoBo, ZoonBooks, Apple Books, Bookstore, if you're in jurisdiction with those are open. The Zoom user. Download Vincent's book on your Zoom.

Yes, download or read. By the audio book and transcribe it yourself in long time. That's right. And then read it. Yes, that's right. Read the Jakarta method, which is, I think, more evidence of anything that the US is the great Satan. Yeah, I was in, I didn't set out to make that point, but people have, a lot of people have read it.

Well, a lot more people have read it than I expected. You just follow the signs. Yeah, they, yeah, I just, you know, I just lay out the facts. Which is all about the, essentially, the sort of methods of mass murder and torture used in sort of in anti-communist movements in Indonesia and more generally the world. So I strongly recommend you read it if you want a...

If you want to understand John McDonald's joke after they lost the election of, could be worse, we could have ended up on a football pitch. Read the Jakarta method. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've heard that joke from, yeah, like, I talked to some people in the Labour Party and said, I'm trying for sort of dealing with the,

like, you know, the security state and that guy, yeah, we didn't have one. Probably should have had one of those. What were you gonna do if the military didn't want you to be Prime Minister? You're trying to tell me that Jeremy Corbyn wasn't like planning a hostile takeover of the UK and he didn't have plans for all those ways.

You're trying to suggest to me that this man who was vilified for years and portrayed as a sort of evil, Stalin-like figure, but also Hitler, but also worse than Hitler because he was more anti-Semitic than Hitler, actually was just a kind of bumbling old man who wanted people to have, like, nicer things. Yeah, it was just, like, out. He's like, well, we're gonna, we try to be really nice to them.

Yeah, yeah. With the British Chavas. We were gonna give, we were gonna make, we were gonna make the, we were gonna make them, make them some jam. That's why you need Bernie Sanders. They'd be like, what were your plans to deal with the security state? I was going to headbutt them. That's right.

So with all of that being said, you must get the Jakarta method. And also to say to Vincent, thank you very much for coming and talking to us about this today. Yeah, thank you for having me again. And to say to you, the listener again, so I'm talking to you again. So if you weren't paying attention, I was talking to Vincent.

Right, he's pointing right now. You can't see that, but he is. You. When you get a Yamaha, like, soundboard. Yeah, that's right. That's where they live. Yeah, I live on the Steinberg. I'm, I also would like to remind you

that we have a Patreon five bucks a month for a second episode every week. You can get it. Yeah, the bonus feed. The bonus feed. Yeah, that's right. I don't remember what the bonus. Oh yeah, the bonus episode is going to be

all about NFTs this week. We're finally talking, you have asked for it. You've been adding me about it. You've been quote tweeting me about it. You've been tagging me in NFT posts. We are finally talking about, and no, it's not going to be all technical. There's a lot of silly fun stuff in there too.

Coconized future. Yeah, that's right. And we're going to be talking with Dan Bechner. Second returning guest. Who's that guy? And also with Matt Lepchansky. So do to him for that. Yeah.

Do join us. So join us in the, in the block chain. Yes, absolutely. Join us in the block and the podcast. And we will see you soon. Bye. Bye.