Nick Hauselman is still out and about, so Jared Yates Sexton dives into the Brazilian election, the economic crisis in Great Britain, Elon Musk's continued futurism grift, and, unfortunately, crystal flutes. This is a preview of the patron-exclusive Weekender show. To hear the whole thing, and support the podcast, go over to http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| Hey everybody, welcome to the Weekender Edition of the Muckrake Podcast. | |
| I'm Jared Yates Sexton. | |
| Nick Haussleman, still out in the world, doing Nick Haussleman things. | |
| But do not worry, I'm here holding down the fort for this patron-exclusive episode. | |
| A reminder, if you want to listen to this whole episode. | |
| And let me tell you what, we got everything today. | |
| We've got potential coups. | |
| We've got the decline of one of the world's most celebrated nations. | |
| We've got robots. | |
| We've got crystal flutes. | |
| All right? | |
| Don't sit there and tell me that this show can't do a lot of different things. | |
| All you've got to do to listen to the entire show, go over to patreon.com slash mccraigpodcast. | |
| That being said, I hope everybody out there is doing well. | |
| There's been a lot of good feedback and excitement from my conversation with Sarah Kinzier on the regular episode on Tuesday. | |
| If you haven't listened to that, maybe pause this. | |
| Maybe contain your excitement about robots and crystal flutes and go listen to that conversation with Kinsey from Tuesday's episode. | |
| In the meantime, I hope everybody's having a decent start to the autumn season, or as I like to call it, time to put my little short-haired dog in pajamas and love her and laugh at her ridiculousness season. | |
| It always helps around here. | |
| As everybody knows, fall is the official season of the Muckrake podcast. | |
| It's a time for flannels and trying to stay warm. | |
| Fantastic stuff. | |
| But unfortunately, we need to go someplace where things aren't going so well. | |
| That's right, we're going to Brazil, where the national anthem is we're going to Brazil, where the national anthem is jaunty, I guess. | |
| I don't know if there's any other way to put it. | |
| It sounds like something that should be playing in the background of a Kubrick movie as scenes of ultraviolence play out. | |
| But down in Brazil, we have a developing story that is taking place. | |
| This Sunday, October 2nd, will mark the new election for the Brazilian presidency. | |
| For those who are maybe not up on their Brazilian politics, and I promise there's a reason we're talking about this, this will most definitely inform your understanding of American politics and global politics as they are currently. | |
| Current president and absolute embarrassment, Jair Bolsonaro, is facing off against Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, also known as Lula, who is the former president of Brazil and head of the Workers' Party. | |
| Uh, this is already shaping up to be a little bit of a preview of where the erosion and corruption of politics is going. | |
| To give you a little bit of an idea, Lula, who is the former president and sort of standard bearer for not just the Workers' Party, but Brazilians, leftists, Lula was just recently in prison, sentenced to 22 years on trumped-up Lula was just recently in prison, sentenced to 22 years on trumped-up corruption charges, which is almost always what happens in | |
| Leftist leaders are either just out of nowhere toppled by coups that are often backed by entities like the United States of America and or they are imprisoned because they are considered corrupt and their project is painted by right-wing conservatives and the wealthy as being just riddled through with criminal corruption. | |
| Leftist leaders are either just out of nowhere toppled by coups that are often backed by entities like the United States of America and or they are imprisoned because they are considered corrupt and their project is, you know, painted by right-wing trumped up corruption charges, which is almost always what happens in these cases. | |
| But Lula is out and it appears that the nation is more than likely going to pick Lula over Bolsonaro, which isn't surprising. | |
| Bolsonaro is incredibly unpopular. | |
| This is, for those who maybe haven't spent much time paying attention to Bolsonaro, a very Trumpian figure of course. | |
| Offensive, misogynistic, just aggressively anti-intellectual and unintelligent in all things. | |
| And has ruled, not surprisingly, as an autocratic leader but also is completely in the tank for the wealthy and the corporations who are plundering Brazil and its resources and also exploiting its people. | |
| It looks like right now, based on polling and the numbers coming in from Brazil, that Lula might very well go ahead and in this first round of voting win the necessary majority in order to avoid a runoff, which would be great. | |
| This would be something that We could celebrate. | |
| We could say, hey, look at what's happening here. | |
| People are pushing back against this bullshit. | |
| And, you know, maybe the rightward turn of global politics, particularly in the global south, where, you know, these things are being pushed back against on a fairly regular basis right now. | |
| We could go ahead and say, hey, this is a victory. | |
| This is fantastic. | |
| The problem here is that Bolsonaro has already made explicit statements saying, surprise, surprise, if I lose this election, it has been stolen from me. | |
| If I possibly lose, I probably will not accept the results. | |
| And it is obvious that any election that I lose is proof that the system is corrupt and that there has been a theft that has taken place, another iteration of the big lie. | |
| Bolsonaro, it's not like he came up with this scheme on his own, although as we've talked about at length on this podcast, authoritarians They naturally see the world through this lens. | |
| There is no possibility at any given time that they could lose a contest, right? | |
| That they could possibly ever come up on the short end of any stick. | |
| And if they do, whether it's an election or their own personal business successes or failures, It's always a conspiracy against them, so it lends itself naturally. | |
| This is the worldview of authoritarianism. | |
| But Bolsonaro has been counseled pretty regularly over the past couple of years by this growing right-wing authoritarian movement that has taken the world stage. | |
| Steve Bannon Has offered his Grim Reaper services in this, has counseled Bolsonaro on how to build his brand up in a Trumpian sense, how to go ahead and proliferate suspicion in terms of public elections, but also how to peddle these conspiracy theories in order to protect himself and the people that he represents. | |
| In all of this, what is taking place is not just a replay of what has happened in the United States, everything from the 2020 presidential election to the events of January 6th, but there are some telling signs in all of this. | |
| And one of the things, I guess one of the themes of this episode today is Precursors. | |
| Things that we can see that are taking place that give us a glimpse of where we are going. | |
| Things that right now feel very strange and very off-putting and disturbing, but also sort of gesture at something that's coming down the pike. | |
| In this case, the election between Bolsonaro and Lula comes down to this. | |
| Lula, who is the head of the Workers' Party, is promising to address inequality and current problems by effectively taxing the wealthy, bringing taxes back up to a point of actually bringing in some revenue for the state and starting to equalize the balance between the state and the corporate and the wealthy. | |
| Bolsonaro obviously has no plans because there's a reason why this authoritarian movement is pretty low in terms of principles and game plans outside of some ideologues out there who are, you know, like Bannon, who are trying to literally roll back progress. | |
| There's nothing on the agenda to actually help people. |