498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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Episode: 498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro
Author: Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Duration: 01:51:54
Episode Shownotes
Dr. 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 cannot 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
Summary
In this episode, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson converses with Eduardo Bolsonaro, analyzing Brazil's political landscape and its parallels with cultural conflicts in the West. They discuss Jair Bolsonaro's near-death experience, political polarization, and the rise of censorship in Brazil, particularly concerning free speech issues involving the Supreme Court. Eduardo outlines his father's journey to the presidency and the role of social media in shaping political narratives, emphasizing the need for transparency in elections and the impact of independent media against censorship. Overall, this discussion highlights the critical importance of ideological battles in both South America and globally.
Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (498. Is Brazil on Path to Become Cuba? | Eduardo Bolsonaro) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.
Full Transcript
00:00:01 Speaker_02
¶
00:00:15 Speaker_01
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.
00:00:35 Speaker_01
And that has a multitude of implications. for the battle between free speech and government regulation and ideological control across the world.
00:00:45 Speaker_01
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.
00:01:07 Speaker_01
And so,
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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.
00:01:24 Speaker_01
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.
00:01:38 Speaker_01
We spoke a fair bit about the background to the dispute that Musk is having with the Brazilian Supreme Court.
00:01:45 Speaker_01
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.
00:01:54 Speaker_01
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.
00:02:14 Speaker_01
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.
00:02:30 Speaker_01
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.
00:02:42 Speaker_01
You'll learn more about Brazil. You'll learn more about the political landscape in general and about the culture war. Specifically, you'll
00:02:49 Speaker_01
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.
00:03:05 Speaker_01
I was recently in South America. I spent a few days in Brazil. That was extremely interesting and one of the things that
00:03:14 Speaker_01
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.
00:03:29 Speaker_01
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,
00:03:39 Speaker_01
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. That's probably not how it should be, all things considered.
00:03:52 Speaker_01
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.
00:04:08 Speaker_01
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.
00:04:19 Speaker_00
Sure. First, it's a great honor to be here with you, Professor. Sure, after your trip to Brazil, you know that Brazilians usually love you.
00:04:27 Speaker_00
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.
00:04:37 Speaker_00
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.
00:04:54 Speaker_00
I'm very well married with Eloisa, who let me to be here. And I'm the third son of the former president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro. Before I talk about... about the recent political scenario.
00:05:09 Speaker_00
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.
00:05:29 Speaker_00
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
00:05:48 Speaker_00
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.
00:06:04 Speaker_00
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 United States. And during this period of time, my father, in the end of the 80s, he was an army captain.
00:06:25 Speaker_00
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.
00:06:44 Speaker_00
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.
00:06:54 Speaker_00
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 run for city council in Rio de Janeiro in 1988.
00:07:11 Speaker_00
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.
00:07:28 Speaker_00
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.
00:07:46 Speaker_00
So in this situation, there is a very key point around 2010, I can tell you, where the politically correct in Brazil start to increase a lot. Around 2010. Yeah, around this year.
00:08:01 Speaker_00
And my father, he did an interview and it got, I think it was his first viral interview on internet where he's talking about a situation in a jail in Brazil. There was a jail in Brazil. The name of the jail is Pedrinhas Jail.
00:08:18 Speaker_00
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.
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And a lot of microphones around him and journalists started to do some dumb questions and trying to say, oh, don't you care about the life of the prisoners? They are prisoners. It's a human life. And he said, come on, you don't want to go to the jail?
00:08:47 Speaker_00
It's just so do not rob, do not murder, do not kidnap anyone else. And started 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.
00:09:03 Speaker_00
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,
00:09:16 Speaker_00
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.
00:09:31 Speaker_00
I ran from the state of Sao 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.
00:09:43 Speaker_00
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.
00:10:00 Speaker_01
And so he was still a congressman at that time.
00:10:02 Speaker_00
Yes.
00:10:03 Speaker_01
So let me get the timeline right before we go on. I just want to make sure. You mentioned a regime in Brazil that was similar to the regime in Cuba. Tell me the dates for that. All right.
00:10:16 Speaker_00
So before 1964. It was before 64. Yes. We had a president called Jânio Quadros. After seven months in the presidency in our White House, he resigned. And there is no reason for that.
00:10:33 Speaker_00
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 resigned. Well, that'll do it, you know.
00:10:52 Speaker_00
But then his vice president was a huge communist guy. And he was starting 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.
00:11:10 Speaker_00
And regarding that in Cuba, the revolution is 1959. So we are talking five years after that. And so he was thinking the way to turn Brazil into a communist country. And the major part of our society didn't want that.
00:11:26 Speaker_00
So the National Association of the Press, Catholic Church, farmers, militaries for sure.
00:11:33 Speaker_00
So we start to have a lot of huge protests, more than 1 million people in Rio de Janeiro, for example, on the streets, asking that the militaries should not let Brazil turn itself as a Cuba.
00:11:44 Speaker_00
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 in a trip in China. If he not come back to Brasilia, to the capital,
00:12:00 Speaker_00
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.
00:12:09 Speaker_01
So this was after the gentleman that you described had resigned because of this interference from external forces. Yes.
00:12:19 Speaker_00
A couple of days later, 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 quickly.
00:12:32 Speaker_00
But after almost two years, we started to have radical left groups. bombing airports, kidnapping airplanes, and even the U.S. ambassador was kidnapped during the 70s in Brazil.
00:12:46 Speaker_00
So with this atmosphere, the military said, all right, we cannot give you back the power because you have a lot of instability. So we are going to rule the country from now on. And they stayed there for 20 years.
00:12:58 Speaker_01
Okay, and that was the time during when the president was nominated by the Congress.
00:13:04 Speaker_00
Yes.
00:13:05 Speaker_01
Congress and the court and not the people.
00:13:07 Speaker_00
Yeah, only the Congress. Only the Congress. The senators and the federal representatives vote for president.
00:13:13 Speaker_01
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.
00:13:22 Speaker_00
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.
00:13:34 Speaker_00
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 Angra dos Reis,
00:13:48 Speaker_00
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.
00:13:59 Speaker_00
So they really reduce the corruption, invest a lot in the infrastructure of the country. And during that period of time, we had a lot of prosperity.
00:14:12 Speaker_00
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.
00:14:26 Speaker_00
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.
00:14:39 Speaker_00
What they did is, first, in 79, they give amnesty to all of the radical left-wing groups that kidnapped the US ambassador, that killed some militaries, even foreign militaries in Brazil,
00:14:58 Speaker_00
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 peoples.
00:15:08 Speaker_00
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.
00:15:19 Speaker_00
But he warned, you are going to feel, to miss the time that we were here in the capital Because we care about people. This radical left, they are going to take power. They are going to make you suffer.
00:15:34 Speaker_00
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 President Figueiredo.
00:15:47 Speaker_00
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
00:16:00 Speaker_00
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.
00:16:09 Speaker_00
Some others think that it was very bad because you have censorship, you have the state killing people and people who were exhalated outside of Brazil. So I could say it's 50-50 in my opinion.
00:16:26 Speaker_01
And so it seems reasonable to presume that
00:16:31 Speaker_01
The political spectrum in Brazil for many, many decades has been much more polarized, right and left, than is typical in the United States, in Canada, in Europe, that there's more activity on the radical left and more activity on the right.
00:16:48 Speaker_01
Is that a reasonable way of looking at it as far as you're concerned?
00:16:51 Speaker_00
The left, they have, they are 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.
00:17:03 Speaker_00
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 union, you don't have a think tank.
00:17:20 Speaker_00
If you look to U.S., for example, since the 70s, you have Heritage Foundation think tank, you have CPAC, you had Ronda Riga, and you have some leaderships that are very null and conservative sides. So in Brazil, we are starting to build that.
00:17:35 Speaker_01
What about the military in Brazil? Is it right-wing, fundamentally? Most of them, I say 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?
00:17:51 Speaker_00
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.
00:18:05 Speaker_00
So during the 80s and 90s, you don't have a politician say, I'm a right-wing politician. This was almost forbidden.
00:18:12 Speaker_00
The sense of democracy in Brazil that we had, it was the PT, the Liberal Party, which is extremely left, communist, like, I can tell you, AOC, Bernie Sanders, is the same kind of people that have a relationship with Lula da Silva and people from their party in Brazil.
00:18:29 Speaker_00
And the Social Democrats, which is center-left, This, we thought it was democracy, you know?
00:18:36 Speaker_01
I see, I see.
00:18:37 Speaker_00
But then when my father start to appear in the national scenario, they say, oh, wait a minute, this is not right. Right is Jair Bolsonaro or more to the right here. So we changed the spectrum of Brazil.
00:18:52 Speaker_00
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 Labour Party as a thief, as a criminal. Now, guess what?
00:19:11 Speaker_00
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.
00:19:30 Speaker_00
And everybody starts paying attention about what is going on, mainly because now, after 2010, you have a new content in this political scenario, which it is internet.
00:19:40 Speaker_00
With the internet, we break the monopoly of the mainstream media and we start to bring in more information. As you know, that's why they are trying to regulate and democratize the internet and social media.
00:19:51 Speaker_00
But at the end of the day, we all know that they want to control the narrative because they lost that.
00:19:55 Speaker_01
Yes, and of course, Elon Musk's battle with Brazil has been with the Brazilian political leadership.
00:20:01 Speaker_00
This is a deep story, professor, that we can talk about.
00:20:04 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah, well, I think we should get into that. Okay, so, okay, so that, So your father was a city councilor in 1988 and a congressman in 1990, and then he spent 28 years in Congress.
00:20:17 Speaker_01
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?
00:20:36 Speaker_00
You described yourself as center right. Yes, I'll put right. Why not, people sometimes say, oh, far, far, far right. Far right for me is another thing, because what Lula and the communists, they want, they want to control the economy 100%.
00:20:53 Speaker_00
We want, what is the opposite of control the economy 100%? is when you do not have any kind of administration. It's anarcho-capitalist. We are not anarcho-capitalist. We believe in a minimum size of the administration.
00:21:09 Speaker_00
We don't want to destroy the administration. We need a government to rule some things, and you have to be very sensitive when you talk about that, to do not go far away. What is rule something? For example,
00:21:23 Speaker_00
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.
00:21:37 Speaker_00
So to somehow rule this kind of situations and the situations where the individual cannot do, for example, Everybody knows and has the sense that killing each other is a wrong thing. Everybody believes in that.
00:21:55 Speaker_00
We should not be a society where everybody is killing everybody. So we need the police. We need to somehow defend our territory from other countries. Because maybe you have in your neighborhood a dictatorship that wants to invade your country.
00:22:09 Speaker_00
If you look nowadays to Ukraine and Russia, to Venezuela and Guyana, Maduro saying that he wants to get the territory of Ezequiel and some other parts of the world, makes sense that you need an army.
00:22:21 Speaker_00
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.
00:22:37 Speaker_01
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.
00:22:49 Speaker_01
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.
00:22:57 Speaker_01
And so the way that you laid out the Brazilian political landscape since 1985 is basically an argument between two parties on the left.
00:23:07 Speaker_01
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.
00:23:21 Speaker_01
The classic liberal Brazil would 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?
00:23:33 Speaker_01
Or would you call it more classic conservative?
00:23:36 Speaker_00
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 a liberal, they are not going to link you with the left.
00:23:51 Speaker_00
They're going to link you with the right. OK, 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.
00:24:06 Speaker_00
Right, liberal here increasingly means progressive, right? And that means left. Liberal in Brazil is less taxes, free markets. And the difference between our liberals and me, who are in the position of conservative, it'll be about maybe drugs.
00:24:21 Speaker_00
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, as in Brazil, we are deep in a moral crisis. This is not a priority.
00:24:41 Speaker_00
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 now, look to the people.
00:24:53 Speaker_00
Because the current president, what he's doing, he's increasing the taxes, travel all around the world.
00:24:58 Speaker_00
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.
00:25:13 Speaker_00
He's staying in the most expensive hotels, you know, and... When he come back to Brazil, he start to tax people.
00:25:22 Speaker_00
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. And usually poor people or middle class, they do that.
00:25:38 Speaker_00
Lula is taxing even this kind of situation. And he spent more money than my father, Jair Bolsonaro, when he was president during the pandemic. Imagine, how can someone spend more money than the other president during the pandemic?
00:25:57 Speaker_00
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
00:26:09 Speaker_00
a situation where he's receiving a lot of benefit from the previous administration because he privatized a lot, we reduced a lot of taxes, we became the number four in the world when you talk about receiving foreign investments.
00:26:23 Speaker_00
We're doing very good. It was the first time in history that Brazil, we had less inflation than the United States.
00:26:31 Speaker_00
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.
00:26:45 Speaker_00
He said, I'm a non-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.
00:27:04 Speaker_01
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. Okay, so take us through the story from there.
00:27:15 Speaker_00
All right, so in 2014, I was elected, 82,224 votes. And in my first term, I was looking to my father, increasing his popularity,
00:27:29 Speaker_00
going every place in Brazil, 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.
00:27:45 Speaker_00
Yeah, still as a congressman.
00:27:46 Speaker_01
So what's making him popular? Why is he popular? Because he's a congressman, he's obviously distinguishing himself from other congressmen. What's he doing differently that's attractive to people? Stepping outside of the politically correct.
00:27:58 Speaker_00
Oh, yes, okay. So when someone says that you are racist, so, okay, why am I racist?
00:28:04 Speaker_00
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 didn't go to Brazil.
00:28:18 Speaker_00
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 United States.
00:28:29 Speaker_00
So if you consider, if you vote against affirmative action for black people in Brazil, because we will have black people very rich in Brazil, they say that you label you as a racist.
00:28:40 Speaker_00
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.
00:28:56 Speaker_00
So when he positioned against this kind of bill, people say, you are homophobic. But in the end of the day, going to, why was so important he travel all around Brazil?
00:29:09 Speaker_00
Because when you go to some states, they have a local press and they do not receive a public money. So when you talk in a radio, you're talking with a maid, with a trucker driver, with, you know, regular, common people directly.
00:29:23 Speaker_00
And they listening to Jerry Bolsonaro, they say, this guy's not crazy. It's not the crazy guy that CNN tells me that is crazy. This guy, I agree with him.
00:29:33 Speaker_00
So when the election came on 2018, aside of this work, also the crazy of internet, smartphone, social media, my father became a phenomenon. It was fashion, you know, support him.
00:29:47 Speaker_00
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 for my first election.
00:30:03 Speaker_01
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, yes. I do. So that was an ambition.
00:30:19 Speaker_00
And when... 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.
00:30:38 Speaker_00
He was looking a radical left-wing administration ruling the country, deeply into corruption scandals all the time.
00:30:48 Speaker_00
And he started to think, if Dilma Rousseff get elected, reelected, Dilma Rousseff is a former president of Brazil, same party of Lula da Silva, the current president, Labour's party. If Dilma Rousseff
00:31:02 Speaker_00
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.
00:31:17 Speaker_00
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, I'm 40, if I could have the same energy of my father to do all of the work that he does.
00:31:30 Speaker_00
So he started to think, if Dilma Rousseff did that, why not me? Why I can't be the president? So he started to go for that. He had a plan, all right? He has a project. He started to go around, not saying that he's going to be the president, but
00:31:48 Speaker_00
After this work, people start to realize that he could be a president.
00:31:51 Speaker_01
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?
00:32:06 Speaker_01
How is the president elected, and how is that position related to the other major branches of government in Brazil? Just lay out the structure.
00:32:15 Speaker_00
Yeah, Brazil is a... It's a little bit different from Canada because it's presidentialism, not parliamentarism. And different from US because here who win in the state get all the votes of the delegates. In Brazil, every vote counts.
00:32:32 Speaker_00
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 fined in $1. It's not a big deal, but it still is mandatory.
00:32:50 Speaker_00
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.
00:33:07 Speaker_00
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.
00:33:25 Speaker_00
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.
00:33:39 Speaker_00
This is how powerful was the support in favor of Jair Bolsonaro.
00:33:45 Speaker_00
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.
00:34:06 Speaker_00
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 they start to build.
00:34:23 Speaker_00
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.
00:34:33 Speaker_00
It's even funny because at 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.
00:34:48 Speaker_00
The message that we gave to the people is this message.
00:34:50 Speaker_01
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
00:35:04 Speaker_01
Well, Trump went on Rogan a week ago, 44 million views. And those are voluntary views, obviously. People are doing that on purpose, rather than having their TV accidentally on to listen to a soundbite.
00:35:19 Speaker_01
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.
00:35:33 Speaker_01
Media in Canada, the legacy media, is increasingly state-controlled because it's subsidized. And so it's very pro-Trudeau.
00:35:42 Speaker_00
It also happens in Brazil. It also happens in Brazil.
00:35:44 Speaker_01
Yeah, I'm sure it's the same thing. And Poliev 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.
00:35:57 Speaker_01
And some of his micro documentaries were getting like 400,000 views, which in Canada is a lot of views. You know, I'd be equivalent to about 4 million, at least in the United States. And so he just walked around them completely.
00:36:08 Speaker_01
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.
00:36:26 Speaker_01
Like a million dollars for a campaign, that's nothing. And so, Did you use all the main social media platforms? I don't know what's active in Brazil. It would be Facebook and Instagram and X and YouTube, primarily TikTok in the United States.
00:36:44 Speaker_00
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 write on X,
00:36:59 Speaker_00
but they do not post that to not have problems with the Supreme Court. Right, right. We'll get into that.
00:37:05 Speaker_00
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.
00:37:21 Speaker_00
Since 2019, the Supreme Court of Brazil, they opened an investigation called the Fake News Investigation, trying to prove that Jair Bolsonaro, he 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.
00:37:45 Speaker_00
since 2019, we are in 2024, this investigation is still open.
00:37:51 Speaker_00
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.
00:38:07 Speaker_00
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 two things could be happening there.
00:38:22 Speaker_01
One, and maybe both are happening, one could be that it's merely an organized harassment campaign. But the other thing is that
00:38:30 Speaker_01
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.
00:38:42 Speaker_00
See, we do not believe all could build a narrative to destroy us. Because, you know, nowadays, the reality is just a piece of something. Yeah. Reality doesn't matter. The matter is the narrative that they build inside of the mind of the people.
00:38:56 Speaker_00
Because in the end of the day, the elite, the radical left, they are smart enough.
00:39:00 Speaker_00
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 are conservative.
00:39:07 Speaker_01
Well, it's funny though, you know, in the US,
00:39:11 Speaker_01
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.
00:39:25 Speaker_01
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.
00:39:40 Speaker_01
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,
00:39:59 Speaker_01
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.
00:40:14 Speaker_01
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.
00:40:23 Speaker_01
And the people that are watching you just have absolutely no idea how powerful it is because that isn't their territory.
00:40:29 Speaker_00
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 first, he did not stop to think, oh, I'm going to speak that. Is it good or bad? Let me do for this way.
00:40:47 Speaker_00
No, no. They think they talk. You know, it doesn't matter if, is it going to hurt you? It's your problem. Sorry if you are so sensitive. So people start to trust you. You open a live streaming.
00:41:01 Speaker_00
Like, I remember that when a news 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.
00:41:17 Speaker_00
You know, all the other politicians before a speaker to do an interview, the first thing that they do, they go to someone 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?
00:41:31 Speaker_00
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.
00:41:45 Speaker_00
You don't need a cell phone to do that. It's not something beautiful with content and edited, you know. So these things make you connect with the people.
00:41:58 Speaker_00
For example, one of the things they always try to say is that, oh, Jerry Bolsonaro, 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.
00:42:15 Speaker_00
And in the end of the day, people realize that. There was a very, very special case when he was president right in the beginning of the pandemic.
00:42:25 Speaker_00
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.
00:42:40 Speaker_00
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, Jay Bolsonaro, with his ministries, he's talking like using very bad and very strong words.
00:43:01 Speaker_00
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,
00:43:17 Speaker_00
he 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, gave an order to the president.
00:43:32 Speaker_00
Hey, President Bolsonaro, we want the video of your meetings with the ministries. And he gave. For the luck of my father, expecting to give in the firsthand, the breaking news to the people. Oh, look, President Bolsonaro talking bad words.
00:43:49 Speaker_00
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 our White House. You know what?
00:44:10 Speaker_00
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 judges think they are?
00:44:27 Speaker_00
Who you think the cops think they are to arrest some ladies on the beach? I remember, I remind that that day, I was in Sao Paulo and I do surf. I went to the sea to surf.
00:44:39 Speaker_00
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.
00:44:53 Speaker_00
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 proven that Bolsonaro is the same one in front of the cameras and behind of the cameras.
00:45:08 Speaker_01
That's another thing that's very interesting about the social media landscape. I mean, I know a lot of the main players, obviously, who are pioneers, particularly in YouTube, particularly in the podcast domain. And all the ones that I know,
00:45:27 Speaker_01
are the same in front of the camera as they are off. Rogan, he's a classic example of that. You see he's the same or he's not the same? He's exactly the same. All right. All of the people that are hyper popular as podcasters.
00:45:42 Speaker_01
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.
00:45:52 Speaker_01
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.
00:46:05 Speaker_00
Nowadays you hide that.
00:46:07 Speaker_01
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.
00:46:20 Speaker_01
And I've talked with Rogan about this to some decent degree about interviewing people. And his experience too is that you can tell who's an empty suit after about 20 minutes, right?
00:46:37 Speaker_01
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 engaged.
00:46:47 Speaker_01
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 art conference in London, is that
00:46:59 Speaker_01
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.
00:47:18 Speaker_01
So the new media landscape, I think it's partly a consequence of bandwidth. There's no bandwidth restriction, right? I mean, 20 years ago, a minute on network television was extremely expensive.
00:47:33 Speaker_01
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.
00:47:42 Speaker_01
And it's also the case that people have a much longer span of attention for listening than the TV types presumed. Now, they presumed that partly because they were concerned with bandwidth and trying to conserve time.
00:47:58 Speaker_01
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.
00:48:09 Speaker_01
And so, okay, and so your dad, he did the same thing that Polyev did, essentially, and maybe earlier, about the same time, really, because Polyev was starting to work directly to social media at that time as well. Okay, now,
00:48:23 Speaker_01
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.
00:48:35 Speaker_01
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,
00:48:49 Speaker_01
Okay, so your father was elected president 2018? Yep. And how long was he president?
00:48:56 Speaker_00
Four years. Four years. So he was... If I may, Professor, excuse me, I want to open a parenthesis. One month before the election, he also got stabbed in the belly during the campaign.
00:49:08 Speaker_00
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.
00:49:20 Speaker_00
They are connected, they have a lot of pictures and trips here to US to have meetings with AOC, Bernie Sanders, and this kind of people who is the radical left part of the Democratic Party.
00:49:31 Speaker_00
The name of the guy who stabbed my father, his name is Adélio Bispo. My father was on the streets campaigning with a crowd of 20 or 30,000 people around him in the city of Juiz de Fora. One of the securities of my father put a hand on his shoulders.
00:49:49 Speaker_00
So you have videos on YouTube everywhere. And the guy came with a knife, jumped and stabbed my father, twisted a little bit, and the knife got into the belly of my father, 15 centimeters, and cutting some parts of his intestine.
00:50:06 Speaker_00
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 securities run into a hospital with him. In the hospital, the doctors identified that he was with internal hemorrhaging.
00:50:29 Speaker_00
He lost about 2.5 liters of blood. He died twice and he went 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.
00:50:50 Speaker_00
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 to the heart to bone.
00:51:05 Speaker_00
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.
00:51:22 Speaker_00
The security of my father, also, they know exactly the way to the closest 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.
00:51:43 Speaker_00
And a friend, Giuso 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.
00:51:59 Speaker_00
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 it's a lot of blood with feces inside of his body.
00:52:15 Speaker_00
So he survived that, but more than 70% of the time of the campaign, in Brazil, you have 45 days that you can campaign. More than 70% of this period of time, my father was in a hospital.
00:52:29 Speaker_00
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.
00:52:44 Speaker_00
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 things that Trump have in common with my father.
00:53:02 Speaker_00
So after that, he got elected and I also became the most voted ever federal representative, most-voted-ever federal representative in the history of Brazil. Now, he did or you did? I did. I did for the Congress. He did as president.
00:53:18 Speaker_00
I received almost two million votes. In my first campaign, my first election in 2014, 82,000. 2018, almost two million. So it was a huge message for all of the country. Our party became very strong.
00:53:36 Speaker_00
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. congressman in my party. So it shows that the wave is still increasing.
00:53:55 Speaker_00
It's not, oh, Bolsonaro lost the election, and OK, 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
00:54:06 Speaker_00
is controlling the narrative with the new bills against the free speech.
00:54:11 Speaker_01
Right, right. 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.
00:54:22 Speaker_00
Yeah, one month before the election of 2018.
00:54:24 Speaker_01
One month. And what was the outcome of the election at the presidential level in 2022?
00:54:28 Speaker_00
Yeah, 2022, it was the election that my father wanted for re-election, but he lost. Right. And it was a month before that that he was almost killed. No, in 2018.
00:54:38 Speaker_01
Oh, that was in... Okay, sorry. It was 2018. Forgive my ignorance. So... No, no, no. That's okay. Yeah. So, okay. So what happened in 2022? Why did he lose the election?
00:54:49 Speaker_00
Then I have to take care about my words because in Brazil, depending on 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.
00:55:11 Speaker_00
because he was talking about the election process. But you have a bunch 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.
00:55:29 Speaker_00
But with Trump, things change. So with us, things change in Brazil too. And we have a target. on our heads, 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.
00:55:48 Speaker_00
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.
00:56:04 Speaker_00
So you want to vote for Bolsonaro, you dial 22 and press the green button. That's it. And then you pray for God that someone in the capital, the bureaucrats, are going to count your vote properly.
00:56:17 Speaker_00
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.
00:56:33 Speaker_00
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.
00:56:42 Speaker_01
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
00:56:52 Speaker_01
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.
00:57:05 Speaker_01
And so, you know, to give the devil his 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.
00:57:22 Speaker_01
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?
00:57:34 Speaker_01
And so conservatives know such things, unintended consequences. Okay.
00:57:40 Speaker_00
I'll not talk about this theory, all right? Let's say that our machine is 100% fully trustable. But still, in Brazil, who organize the elections, who coordinate the elections, who judge everything about the elections in Brazil,
00:57:57 Speaker_00
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.
00:58:14 Speaker_00
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.
00:58:29 Speaker_00
He did a lot of interventions in the executive power and sometimes even in the legislative in the Congress. And he was- This was during your father's administration. Yes, during my father's administration, we had a lot of conflicts with him.
00:58:44 Speaker_00
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?
00:59:04 Speaker_00
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 pay the rent of the White House? Who pay the energy and the water of the White House?
00:59:18 Speaker_00
It's 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,
00:59:30 Speaker_00
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.
00:59:49 Speaker_00
There is a... the number one conservative media in Brazil is called Jovem Pan.
00:59:55 Speaker_00
Jovem Pan, they received an order saying that they cannot refer, the journalists 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.
01:00:09 Speaker_00
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.
01:00:24 Speaker_00
And all of the establishment was in favor of his election, very clearly. So this is how the election happened in Brazil.
01:00:31 Speaker_00
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.
01:00:51 Speaker_00
Right, so really split down the middle.
01:00:54 Speaker_01
Really 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 percent.
01:01:06 Speaker_01
You know, and if the margin is 1%, that makes things very awkward.
01:01:10 Speaker_00
Yes, and you 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.
01:01:24 Speaker_00
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, anyone else can vote anymore.
01:01:37 Speaker_00
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 Brazilians receive assistance from the government to survive,
01:01:52 Speaker_00
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 a very honest professor, what I can say is, in Brazil,
01:02:10 Speaker_00
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 school, the sessions, on the electoral sessions, receiving people to vote.
01:02:30 Speaker_00
So if everybody's left-wing, if you do not have morals, you are not, Left-wing usually, politicians of left-wing, they do not care about values or morals.
01:02:40 Speaker_00
You can say, oh, okay, let's see 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,
01:03:00 Speaker_00
it would be way more transparency, way more trustable our election. I'm telling you that you have a lot of way to do frauds.
01:03:11 Speaker_01
All of them were used. Okay, so let me ask you a question about that too. Well, if you looked at your father's administration over that four year period, That was his first foray into the presidency.
01:03:28 Speaker_01
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.
01:03:42 Speaker_01
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 under his leadership that might have also compromised the election?
01:04:02 Speaker_00
The main thing that people comply about my father is that he talks too much. But I mean, 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?
01:04:17 Speaker_00
You know, he talks too much, but the economy is going good. The criminals are having a very tough time with my father. You know, regular citizen, they are having a better life. You have less bureaucracy. You can take care of your life.
01:04:31 Speaker_00
You know, a lot of benefits. But the press, all the time, they are doing some kind of notorious scandal because, depending on what my father was using to say, because he has no future.
01:04:46 Speaker_00
Sometimes getting out of his house, he stop and start to talk with the people, with the press around, and use non-politically correct words.
01:04:55 Speaker_00
And it became a scandal, you know, in the end of the day, you can affect talking that so much every day, it affects, you know, people and maybe you change your priorities.
01:05:07 Speaker_01
Well, certainly his reputation outside of, you know, I got low... The reputation outside of Brazil is bad.
01:05:13 Speaker_00
If you go to Europe, people think that my father is the devil.
01:05:16 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah, well, and 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.
01:05:27 Speaker_01
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.
01:05:38 Speaker_01
And it was certainly the case that the gut sense, I would say, of the typical North American with regards to Bolsonaro was, you know, dangerous right winger. So, definitely.
01:05:50 Speaker_01
Now, I'm a lot more skeptical about such terminology, you know, 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, is that it's very easy to tag people, right?
01:06:07 Speaker_01
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.
01:06:17 Speaker_01
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.
01:06:31 Speaker_01
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
01:06:40 Speaker_01
I think you can especially do that, you can do that especially with disgust rather than fear. Disgust is even more effective than fear.
01:06:50 Speaker_01
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 another far-right movement, right?
01:07:06 Speaker_01
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
01:07:22 Speaker_01
progressives have over the universities and the legacy media. It's 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.
01:07:34 Speaker_00
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 should penetration in Brazil?
01:07:48 Speaker_00
Because we have a unique thing when I talk about a censorship is because everywhere in the world, it comes through the hands of the president of the prime minister.
01:07:56 Speaker_00
For example, you have big issues with Trudeau or with the C-16 law and whatever, but in Brazil, is the Supreme Court.
01:08:05 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah, so we can delve into that. Now, this gentleman that you talked about, the Supreme Court, 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 Musk?
01:08:19 Speaker_00
Yes.
01:08:19 Speaker_01
Okay, so it is this, okay, that's what I assumed. I just wanted to make sure that that, okay, so why don't you unravel that story for us. You started, you started,
01:08:28 Speaker_01
You started going down that road and said that, okay, so what role is the Supreme Court playing in Brazil at the moment?
01:08:35 Speaker_01
And why is it that Musk got embroiled in a, well, in this very, very public, internationally public argument with, well, with the Brazilian Supreme Court?
01:08:45 Speaker_00
Explain that. Alexandre 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.
01:09:03 Speaker_00
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.
01:09:21 Speaker_00
What was happening in Brazil is Alexandre de Moraes 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.
01:09:33 Speaker_00
So he was addressing orders to Twitter saying, block this and that people in one hour. If you don't do that, I will fine you in, It was, I can tell you, around $20,000, $30,000 to start.
01:09:56 Speaker_00
It was a huge fine, you know, daily, daily, if you do not accomplish with his orders.
01:10:01 Speaker_00
But the main thing is, Alexandre de Moraes ordered, according with Glenn Greenwald, the journalist, articles that came up like a couple of months ago, Alexandre de Moraes was
01:10:17 Speaker_00
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 got to piss it off with Twitter.
01:10:32 Speaker_00
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.
01:10:49 Speaker_00
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,
01:10:59 Speaker_00
Luciano Hang, 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.
01:11:10 Speaker_00
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.
01:11:22 Speaker_01
Right.
01:11:23 Speaker_00
So I'm adding one more factor.
01:11:24 Speaker_01
Well, they blocked Trump too when he was president. So that's quite remarkable.
01:11:28 Speaker_00
Yes. 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. One year ago, we would be still pissed off with Twitter. But why?
01:11:46 Speaker_00
Elon Musk started a fight, I don't know, months ago with Alexandre de Moraes. Alexandre de Moraes, he has, he's Justice of the Supreme Court, he has a Twitter account. And he was talking about something, posting his opinion or whatever about something.
01:12:03 Speaker_00
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 US Congress, Mr. Gene Jordan,
01:12:22 Speaker_00
He asked Elon Musk to give all the emails changed with the Brazilian authorities during the 2022 election period of time. Oh, yeah.
01:12:33 Speaker_00
With these emails, now that we know, after 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.
01:12:52 Speaker_00
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.
01:13:09 Speaker_00
Oh, that's for sure. European authorities. Alexandre de Moraes and some other authorities of Brazil They do speeches in Paris, in London, in New York. They are spreading the virus.
01:13:21 Speaker_00
And you have some press articles saying that some of the European's authority, they were looking closely this fight between Alexandre de Moraes and Elon Musk to copy to Europe.
01:13:34 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
01:13:35 Speaker_00
Because what happened, now I would shock the Americans that don't know this story deeply. I'm talking about Twitter, Elon Musk against Alexandre de Moraes, right?
01:13:44 Speaker_01
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 he complained
01:14:03 Speaker_01
using his EU... A Brazilian one? No, no, 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. What is the crime in that? The House of Representatives in the U.S.
01:14:25 Speaker_01
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.
01:14:40 Speaker_01
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?
01:14:58 Speaker_01
They're definitely Musk's enemies and will do whatever they need to to stop him. 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.
01:15:13 Speaker_00
As Brazil, we have this special case because the censorship is coming through the hands of one of the justices of the Supreme Court. And also, Alexandre de Moraes fined Twitter.
01:15:25 Speaker_00
And the first response of Twitter is that they are not going to pay this fine. But after one month, they paid to get back again Twitter in Brazil because they were banned.
01:15:36 Speaker_00
So the Europeans' authorities, like the woke people, the progressive, they were enjoying that. Oh, 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.
01:15:54 Speaker_00
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 threat to arrest the Twitter team in Brazil.
01:16:05 Speaker_01
Right, yes, I remember that.
01:16:07 Speaker_00
So that's why thanks president of Argentina, Javier Mele, he offered asylum to this kind of people.
01:16:13 Speaker_00
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.
01:16:25 Speaker_00
So thank you, Javier Mele, the greatest president of Latin America by far. And the second thing is Alexandre de Moraes freezed some of the resources of Starlink. But Starlink wasn't in the disputes.
01:16:41 Speaker_01
Europeans are toying with that too. I've looked at some of their background legislation and...
01:16:47 Speaker_01
The fine structures, Canada is playing with this too, by the way, under the auspices of a bill called C-63, 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 C-16.
01:17:03 Speaker_01
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.
01:17:21 Speaker_01
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?
01:17:37 Speaker_01
Well, you can be certain that that'll be interpreted in the most liberal manner possible.
01:17:41 Speaker_00
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.
01:17:54 Speaker_00
And Bill Ackman, some other billionaires, they start to complain, wait, wait, wait. this thing of the Brazilian Supreme Court is too far.
01:18:03 Speaker_00
It's too much power on only one person's hands, and it can be very dangerous because we know how dictatorships starts.
01:18:12 Speaker_00
And when they start, usually they have support of part of the people, but on the next day, the supporters will be the target of the dictator. That's for sure. In all the dictatorships, it happens. And this is...
01:18:26 Speaker_00
one of the things that are happening in this dispute with Twitter. And that's also why the U.S. Congress, they are giving their attention to Brazil. And nowadays, we have a bill from their representative, Mario Vira Salazar from Florida.
01:18:41 Speaker_00
It was approved in the committees of the House and is ready to be voted from the House. We only need that the chairman, Mike Johnson, to put that to be vote.
01:18:52 Speaker_00
And this bill says that if any foreigner 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, yeah.
01:19:09 Speaker_00
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 the United States. He will lose his visa. So this bill, we hope that is going to be approved in the House
01:19:29 Speaker_00
Because after that, I'm sure that the U.S. administration, even more with Trump, I'm always supporting Trump, that can be applied, fully applied. It's a way to avoid this kind of authority because they have too much power.
01:19:47 Speaker_00
They are doing whatever they want, even with American companies. And come on, Twitter is following all of the American and U.S. law. Why? Brazilians are, the Brazilian Supreme Court is banning Twitter outside of Brazil.
01:20:01 Speaker_00
So it's a way to force people to respect the law. If the Brazilian authorities, if they were respecting the law... Right, well, the war, you know, the war is really going to be...
01:20:12 Speaker_01
So Americans arguably have the most potent protection for free speech rights in the world. I think that's a reasonable thing to say.
01:20:20 Speaker_01
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.
01:20:32 Speaker_01
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.
01:20:46 Speaker_01
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...
01:20:55 Speaker_01
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.
01:21:12 Speaker_01
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?
01:21:24 Speaker_01
Like, where does he get his legitimacy and his authority? And how is he regarded by Brazilians?
01:21:31 Speaker_00
When they are appointed for the Supreme Court, the president appoints the candidate for the Supreme Court and the Senate, after a sabbatin, approve the name of the person.
01:21:43 Speaker_00
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. Unless he wants to resign.
01:22:02 Speaker_01
But who can stop him? And under what administration was he appointed? before my father.
01:22:08 Speaker_00
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.
01:22:21 Speaker_00
No one would expect Alexandre de Moraes would do things like he's doing nowadays. I see, I see. And how do you explain it? It's establishment.
01:22:30 Speaker_00
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.
01:22:55 Speaker_00
I don't know if you never listened about him. He was used to live in Virginia. several books, very smart.
01:23:02 Speaker_00
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- We could call it conservative.
01:23:26 Speaker_00
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.
01:23:40 Speaker_00
the willing of, as I can see, of Alexandre de Moraes is to end with this movement leaded by my father.
01:23:49 Speaker_01
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?
01:24:00 Speaker_01
Is it like, is it a reaction by the legacy establishment against the emergence of social media dominance?
01:24:08 Speaker_00
Sure, yes, because if you, If you do not have social media anymore, the monopoly of information will go back against the mainstream media.
01:24:18 Speaker_01
Of course, all the legacy media want that. 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.
01:24:32 Speaker_01
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.
01:24:40 Speaker_01
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.
01:24:47 Speaker_01
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. And they're so sneaky about it.
01:24:59 Speaker_01
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.
01:25:13 Speaker_01
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.
01:25:29 Speaker_01
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.
01:25:42 Speaker_01
But if I had to bet on a company, and it was Google versus Musk, I'd 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.
01:25:59 Speaker_00
But you see, you are right. Sorry, professor. No, no. You are right. 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?
01:26:17 Speaker_00
They left Brazil after do not accomplish some of the orders of Alexandre de Moraes. They said, I'm out. I cannot survive in a country where they do not have free speech because free speech is a value that we care here in Rumble.
01:26:29 Speaker_00
So they left the country just like Axe left a little bit after Rumble. And YouTube is the way that you were talking. Shadowban, doing this, doing that, reducing the voice of the conservatives.
01:26:44 Speaker_00
And sometimes you watch a Trump video and then the suggested of the next video is a video of Hillary Clinton talking some things. Yeah. And, but if you have free, if you have the freedom to have a new social media, it will be okay.
01:27:01 Speaker_00
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.
01:27:18 Speaker_00
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 CPEC Brazil.
01:27:33 Speaker_00
I do organize the CPEC in Brazil. It's the largest gathering of the conservatives all around the world. We have the Brazilian version. Right, right. After do his speech, he went back to the airport And guess what?
01:27:44 Speaker_00
Alexandre de Moraes ordered the federal police to go there and detain Jason Miller.
01:27:50 Speaker_00
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?
01:28:06 Speaker_00
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.
01:28:20 Speaker_00
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.
01:28:36 Speaker_00
So maybe Alexandre de Moraes is having a conflict with really big guys.
01:28:43 Speaker_00
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 Moraes is not fighting to preserve democracy, but truly doing the opposite of that, killing democracy.
01:28:57 Speaker_00
Because to preserve our constitution, you need to violate the constitution. if you're not preserving any constitution anymore. And I think this is getting clearer and clearer to all of the rest of the world.
01:29:11 Speaker_00
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 not copy the model of Brazilian censorship.
01:29:26 Speaker_01
Well, we're gonna see that play out over the next couple of years, that's for sure. Yeah, and it's a tight struggle. The new, this new Canadian legislation, Bill C-63, it's the most, it's so, it's so devious.
01:29:43 Speaker_00
How is that?
01:29:43 Speaker_01
Because the beginning of the legislation and the end are all about protecting children from sexual exploitation online, right? And it's a long bill. You're opposed to stopping children from being exploited online? You oppose Bill C-63?
01:29:59 Speaker_01
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.
01:30:13 Speaker_01
It's just beyond comprehension. 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.
01:30:29 Speaker_01
It's something that'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
01:30:46 Speaker_01
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?
01:31:02 Speaker_01
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.
01:31:14 Speaker_01
I know with my books, at least half of them now are audio, and that's the case across the book market in general. I prefer to listen than read. Well, many people do. It's more practical. One of the advantages is everyone can listen.
01:31:31 Speaker_01
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.
01:31:43 Speaker_01
But listening, man, everybody can do 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.
01:31:56 Speaker_01
Permanent, universally accessible video. All. 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.
01:32:13 Speaker_01
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.
01:32:25 Speaker_01
You know, and Musk recently called for the Americans to take broadcast, so the, like CBS and NBC own, have rights to the electromagnetic spectrum that they use to broadcast their channels.
01:32:42 Speaker_01
Well, Musk proposed two weeks ago that that just be taken from them because they have, they're not, 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.
01:32:57 Speaker_01
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.
01:33:08 Speaker_01
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.
01:33:21 Speaker_01
And that's partly why it's happening everywhere, right? 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.
01:33:30 Speaker_01
So you know that there's something really fundamental going on and part of it is definitely this technological shift.
01:33:36 Speaker_01
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, right?
01:33:47 Speaker_01
And so there's two reasons to be terrified of it, right? Not only is 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.
01:34:06 Speaker_01
Yeah, well, God only knows what that's going to do. I mean, Trump's team figured that out in this election.
01:34:11 Speaker_01
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.
01:34:23 Speaker_01
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... 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 another demonstration that legacy media... I think Rogan was almost 50 million people.
01:34:49 Speaker_01
Yeah, despite the shadow ban, right? 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 Albertan and we can't talk, so.
01:35:02 Speaker_01
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
01:35:15 Speaker_01
don't follow the legacy media, whereas the people who are supporting Harris do follow the legacy media.
01:35:21 Speaker_01
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.
01:35:33 Speaker_00
I think it's for the first time in history here in the U.S., people trust more in the Congress than the mainstream media.
01:35:40 Speaker_01
And you know things are bad when that happens.
01:35:42 Speaker_00
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.
01:35:50 Speaker_00
In Brazil, we have a lot of people that still believe and follow our legacy media over there, but the numbers of this credibility is going down.
01:36:00 Speaker_01
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.
01:36:14 Speaker_01
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 it.
01:36:24 Speaker_00
No, they're using it to control the narrative and they don't know how to do it.
01:36:28 Speaker_01
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.
01:36:43 Speaker_01
So you've already made a colossal 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.
01:37:03 Speaker_01
$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.
01:37:16 Speaker_00
You have to fire all the crew, all the team.
01:37:19 Speaker_01
Yeah, well, that's Polyev's plan. He said he's going to stop the government subsidy of media in Canada. God, I hope he does it because it's really quite preposterous. Okay, we should talk about the future.
01:37:32 Speaker_01
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. Are the Supreme Court decisions popular in Brazil?
01:37:48 Speaker_00
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 an impeachment procedure against any of the justices of the Supreme Court.
01:38:03 Speaker_00
So the justices of the Supreme Court, they are really comfortable because despite this constitutional tool that we could start impeachment proceedings against one of the justices, you don't have what to do.
01:38:17 Speaker_00
That's why we ran to United States and are providing information for U.S.
01:38:22 Speaker_00
authorities trying to help us down there in Brazil, also mainly because what is happening in the 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 Nex, but also against the Constitution of United States, the First Amendment.
01:38:45 Speaker_00
And thanks God, we are having a good interaction, a good relationship, not only with Gene Jordan, with Mario Vira Salazar, Chris Smith, Richard McCormick, and some other players, Mike Lee, Marco Rubio, Rick Scott.
01:39:00 Speaker_00
And for the first time in history, I think we are very well connected with the American politicians. How'd that happen? I have to tell you that I come here very often to United States, opening these doors. It's not only because of me.
01:39:16 Speaker_00
We have more people involved, but I hard work in that. I do not care, get 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.
01:39:31 Speaker_00
And now they are very polite, very smart. They know the situation of Brazil and they are taking some actions here. We had a hearing, the U.S. Congress, in the Human Rights Committee with Chris Smith.
01:39:44 Speaker_00
inviting the owner of Rumble, Mr. Pavlovsky, with Paulo Figueiredo, to debate the censorship in Brazil, trying to prevent US and trying to help Brazilians that are victim of the censorship.
01:40:00 Speaker_00
So in the future, I think we can do much more pressure coming from the international community, not only US, because I also talked about how great is the president of Argentina, Javier Millet, and who is a libertarian.
01:40:14 Speaker_00
And we can help Brazil in this way, because with the globalization, everybody's connected. It's not only about Brazil.
01:40:22 Speaker_01
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.
01:40:34 Speaker_01
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 is a reflection of a new kind of information warfare.
01:40:51 Speaker_01
And it's definitely the First Amendment versus everything else in a very deep way. Right. Okay, so you've fostered relationships in the U.S.
01:41:00 Speaker_01
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 loath 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.
01:41:16 Speaker_01
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.
01:41:25 Speaker_01
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?
01:41:38 Speaker_01
I mean, 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.
01:41:50 Speaker_00
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,
01:42:03 Speaker_00
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.
01:42:11 Speaker_01
Oh, that's a big deal to have control, to have influence at the local level.
01:42:16 Speaker_00
Yeah, yeah, that's a big deal. No, we 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.
01:42:31 Speaker_00
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.
01:42:43 Speaker_00
which means that his credibility is going low, going down. So it was great to us. We will have elections on 2026.
01:42:51 Speaker_00
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.
01:43:07 Speaker_00
This was anti-democratic, so they said that my father is convicted, eight years without, cannot run, with no political rights. So for 80 years, my father cannot run. How can we have the expectation in the 2026, he can go back and run again?
01:43:25 Speaker_00
Because this electoral court is made by seven judges, three coming from the Supreme Court. And as I told you, Alexandre de Moraes was on the head. In 2026, Alexandre de Moraes, he will not be in the electoral court anymore.
01:43:41 Speaker_00
Who 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.
01:43:49 Speaker_00
And the vice chair of the electoral court in 2026 will be Andrea Mendonça, who is other justice of the Supreme Court appointed by my father.
01:43:58 Speaker_00
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.
01:44:11 Speaker_00
And they can have the opportunity to really work for more transparent and more integrity election.
01:44:19 Speaker_01
Here, 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 do you think it's a possibility?
01:44:28 Speaker_00
I think so. Lula was in jail two years before the election. The Supreme Court let him go free. Lula, they annulled all of his conviction. He was convicted for laundering money and corruption.
01:44:42 Speaker_00
They said, oh, no, no, no, Lula would never be sued in the city of Curitiba. He would be sued in Sao Paulo or Brasilia. That's why they canceled all the convictions, the condemnation that he had.
01:44:59 Speaker_00
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?
01:45:17 Speaker_00
Are you afraid for your father and for yourself? We think that he can go to jail in this kind of atmosphere and scenario.
01:45:27 Speaker_01
What about more intense threats? Because he was already, as you pointed out, just about assassinated.
01:45:35 Speaker_00
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 probably write a book.
01:45:49 Speaker_00
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.
01:46:05 Speaker_00
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. It's a problem for the left to do that.
01:46:23 Speaker_00
And to be very honest, I guess the establishment of Brazil, they are waiting for the US election. Aha.
01:46:34 Speaker_01
Right, to see which side the bread is buttered on.
01:46:37 Speaker_00
Yes, because, for example, when you have a Supreme Court powerful like that, they are backed by businessmen, billionaires, millionaires, people who for sure have relationship with United States. They have houses here.
01:46:51 Speaker_00
They have an accountant in Delaware, whatever.
01:46:54 Speaker_01
Right, right, right.
01:46:54 Speaker_00
They don't want to 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.
01:47:12 Speaker_00
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.
01:47:24 Speaker_00
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.
01:47:39 Speaker_00
But this guy is 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.
01:47:56 Speaker_00
At that time that this guy was convicted, Jerry Bolsonaro was the president and gave to him the presidential pardon.
01:48:03 Speaker_00
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.
01:48:14 Speaker_00
They handled, 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.
01:48:29 Speaker_00
Madness, yeah, yeah. So let's see what happens. But we have a hope that with the new configuration of the electoral court, we can overturn the illegibility of my father. And his moral, his political capital is huge.
01:48:45 Speaker_00
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, Lula cannot go to the streets. When is the election in 2026? In October. October 2026.
01:49:03 Speaker_01
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.
01:49:15 Speaker_01
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
01:49:29 Speaker_01
more profoundly about, yeah, the war, the culture war in Central and South America in general. And, well, I'd like to talk about Malai. I read his name all the time, Bukele.
01:49:42 Speaker_00
Bukele, Naibu Bukele.
01:49:43 Speaker_01
Good, good, got it, got it. Yeah, so that's what we'll do on The Daily Wire side.
01:49:47 Speaker_01
If all of you who are watching or some of you who are watching and listening want to join us there, we'll continue this discussion and that'll, what, update your knowledge with regards to your neighbors, likely neighbors to the South.
01:50:01 Speaker_01
I know there's people in Europe watching as well, so, but.
01:50:03 Speaker_00
Naibu Bukele is great. Yeah. 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 visiting the jails.
01:50:15 Speaker_00
Even the famous one that he built, it has capacity for 40,000 people in that jail they call is a center against terrorism. And what Bukele basically did is, He's jailing the criminals and do not let them get out of sight.
01:50:30 Speaker_00
So he already arrested more than 70,000 criminals. And he reduced, to have an idea, El Salvador in 2016, the murders rate, it was 102 murders for each group of 100,000 people. 102 is the most violent country in the world in the year 2016.
01:50:58 Speaker_00
Now, from 2002, they are around two. Same level of Canada or some of the European countries. And this is how he did that, basically.
01:51:09 Speaker_01
Let's do that on the Daily Wire side. All right. We'll continue with that. Yes, that's a good teaser. So thank you very much.
01:51:16 Speaker_00
Thank you, Professor. My pleasure.
01:51:16 Speaker_01
Thank you for coming here. Much appreciated. It's very good to bring these issues regarding Brazil to broader public knowledge, especially
01:51:26 Speaker_01
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.
01:51:35 Speaker_01
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.