I'm a dual national, US/Brazil, who lives in Brazil, and I want to say how proud I am of the way my country of naturalization has confronted Elon Musk and brought him to heel. Musk seems to have thought that he only needed to bend to authoritarian regimes like Turkey and China, that democratic regimes were soft and weak and that he could…
I'm a dual national, US/Brazil, who lives in Brazil, and I want to say how proud I am of the way my country of naturalization has confronted Elon Musk and brought him to heel. Musk seems to have thought that he only needed to bend to authoritarian regimes like Turkey and China, that democratic regimes were soft and weak and that he could push them around. Minister Alexandre de Moraes of the Supreme Federal Tribunal, our Supreme Court, has proven him wrong and firmly schooled him about how much tolerance at least one democratic country is willing to show to the firehose of lies that he facilitates.
Not coincidentally, it was the same Minister Moraes who led the effort to bring to book the criminals of January 8, 2023, an eerily similar insurrection to the one that was committed in Washington on January 6, 2021. Admittedly, the Brazilian judiciary, like many judiciaries in Europe, has investigative powers that the American judiciary does not -- but Merrick Garland has had them for almost four years. One key difference is that Moraes and his colleagues refused to dither: they acted.
Two years before the next presidential election, the people who committed the actual violent acts have received due process and are in jail, the presidential candidate who inspired the insurrection has been disqualified from running again, and investigations are continuing of the members of the military, police, and bureaucracy who aided and abetted, and of the people in the shadows who bankrolled the whole thing. Searches and arrests are still being made. There are still appeals in process, some people may be let off, Bolsonaro even may be allowed to run again, but it would be hard to say that Brazil isn't in a better situation than the United States is after suffering a similar trauma.
Maybe a decisive group of Brazilian leaders value the rule of law so highly because quite a few of them can remember the period of the military dictatorship, from 1964 to 1985, when they suffered through not having it. I would hope that an experience like that one wouldn't be required; I guess we'll know in a month.
Do you think either side in Brazil's 1/8/23 insurrection was informed by the US insurrection of 1/6/21 and its aftermath? Was Bolsonaro inspired by Trump, and did his opponents learn from the mistakes of Garland?
Oh, yes, there's a LOT of cross-pollination between Trump World and Bolsonaro World. Bolsonaro and Trump are in sporadic contact and think highly of each other, but there's obviously a language barrier. Bolsonaro's third son, Eduardo, a member of the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Brazilian Congress, is the main contact.
Eduardo has lived in the US, speaks fluent English, and is close to Steve Bannon. He is reported to be the South American representative in Bannon's Brussels-based Right Wing organization, The Movement. He also maintains contact with similar groups in Portugal, Spain, and throughout Ibero-America. Political exchanges between Brazil and Portugal are commonplace, but it's quite unusual for a Brazilian politician, especially a relatively low-level one, to include politicians in Spain and Brazil's Spanish-speaking neighbors in his active network: this is another way in which Eduardo Bolsonaro is different. He keeps a lower profile and less controversial than his father or his older brother Flávio, a federal senator, but is probably more influential, smarter, and obviously, very connected.
In Brazil both the courts and the Public Prosecutors are independent of the Executive, so they rather than Bolsonaro's political opponents led the response to the events of January 8, 2023. The President and Congress have mostly stayed out of the way, at least in public. At the time of the riot there was an ongoing investigation into organized disinformation -- the recent X ban was also related to this -- so the courts and the prosecutors were already mobilized. It would be unusual for Brazilian courts or prosecutors to comment on the actions of foreign counterparts, and except for occasional statements of solidarity with the US investigations, I don't think that they have. I think that the dispatch with which they've acted, though, speaks for itself.
I'm a dual national, US/Brazil, who lives in Brazil, and I want to say how proud I am of the way my country of naturalization has confronted Elon Musk and brought him to heel. Musk seems to have thought that he only needed to bend to authoritarian regimes like Turkey and China, that democratic regimes were soft and weak and that he could push them around. Minister Alexandre de Moraes of the Supreme Federal Tribunal, our Supreme Court, has proven him wrong and firmly schooled him about how much tolerance at least one democratic country is willing to show to the firehose of lies that he facilitates.
Not coincidentally, it was the same Minister Moraes who led the effort to bring to book the criminals of January 8, 2023, an eerily similar insurrection to the one that was committed in Washington on January 6, 2021. Admittedly, the Brazilian judiciary, like many judiciaries in Europe, has investigative powers that the American judiciary does not -- but Merrick Garland has had them for almost four years. One key difference is that Moraes and his colleagues refused to dither: they acted.
Two years before the next presidential election, the people who committed the actual violent acts have received due process and are in jail, the presidential candidate who inspired the insurrection has been disqualified from running again, and investigations are continuing of the members of the military, police, and bureaucracy who aided and abetted, and of the people in the shadows who bankrolled the whole thing. Searches and arrests are still being made. There are still appeals in process, some people may be let off, Bolsonaro even may be allowed to run again, but it would be hard to say that Brazil isn't in a better situation than the United States is after suffering a similar trauma.
Maybe a decisive group of Brazilian leaders value the rule of law so highly because quite a few of them can remember the period of the military dictatorship, from 1964 to 1985, when they suffered through not having it. I would hope that an experience like that one wouldn't be required; I guess we'll know in a month.
Do you think either side in Brazil's 1/8/23 insurrection was informed by the US insurrection of 1/6/21 and its aftermath? Was Bolsonaro inspired by Trump, and did his opponents learn from the mistakes of Garland?
Oh, yes, there's a LOT of cross-pollination between Trump World and Bolsonaro World. Bolsonaro and Trump are in sporadic contact and think highly of each other, but there's obviously a language barrier. Bolsonaro's third son, Eduardo, a member of the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Brazilian Congress, is the main contact.
Eduardo has lived in the US, speaks fluent English, and is close to Steve Bannon. He is reported to be the South American representative in Bannon's Brussels-based Right Wing organization, The Movement. He also maintains contact with similar groups in Portugal, Spain, and throughout Ibero-America. Political exchanges between Brazil and Portugal are commonplace, but it's quite unusual for a Brazilian politician, especially a relatively low-level one, to include politicians in Spain and Brazil's Spanish-speaking neighbors in his active network: this is another way in which Eduardo Bolsonaro is different. He keeps a lower profile and less controversial than his father or his older brother Flávio, a federal senator, but is probably more influential, smarter, and obviously, very connected.
In Brazil both the courts and the Public Prosecutors are independent of the Executive, so they rather than Bolsonaro's political opponents led the response to the events of January 8, 2023. The President and Congress have mostly stayed out of the way, at least in public. At the time of the riot there was an ongoing investigation into organized disinformation -- the recent X ban was also related to this -- so the courts and the prosecutors were already mobilized. It would be unusual for Brazilian courts or prosecutors to comment on the actions of foreign counterparts, and except for occasional statements of solidarity with the US investigations, I don't think that they have. I think that the dispatch with which they've acted, though, speaks for itself.