Premium Episode 197: Bolsonarismo, Conspiracy Theories & the Jan 8th Riots feat Ben Fogel (Sample)
On January 8th, in the city of Brazilia, supporters of Brazil’s ex-President Jair Bolsonaro stormed multiple government buildings. The Bolsonarista movement, as it’s known, had grown convinced that their idol’s 2022 presidential election loss was fraudulent. We explore what happened that day, the movement that spawned it, and the Brazilian new right — ascendant, extremely online, and with their own reactionary conspiracy theories. We also have a segment on how the American right is reacting to the events. Our guest is Ben Fogel, a contributing editor for Jacobin who is currently working on a phd in Brazilian anti corruption politics at NYU.
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Ben Fogel: https://twitter.com/BenjaminFogel
Music by Pontus Berghe, Christiane Needs FX, CE. Editing by Corey Klotz.
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Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 197 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Bolsonarista Insurrection Episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rogatansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
On January 8th, in the city of Brasilia, supporters of Brazil's ex-president Jair Bolsonaro stormed multiple government buildings and basically trashed the places.
The Bolsonarista movement, as it's known, had grown convinced that Bolsonaro's 2022 presidential election loss was fraudulent.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the winner of the election, had long been the ire of a growing coalition of far-right interests.
Now, obviously, the history of the biggest country in South America is a complex one that includes far-right coups and military dictatorships, so the context is a little bit different than we might use to examine something like January 6th in the United States.
But Brazil also has an ascendant and extremely online new right festering in its vast ecosystem of social media influencers who have a history of leveraging their platforms to become politicians.
To dig into all of this, we'll be speaking to Ben Fogel, a contributing editor for Jacobin, who is currently working on a PhD in Brazilian anti-corruption politics at NYU.
He's going to fill us in on Bolsonaroismo as a movement, provide historical context for the election, and help us explore what happened on January 8th in the capital.
We'll also be touching on conspiracy theories spawned by the Bolsonarista movement, much like the MAGA movement spawned stuff like Pizzagate and QAnon.
But before we dive into that interview, Travis has prepared a short segment about how the American Right is reacting to January 8th.
So let's jump right in.
The American far-right's reaction to January 8th.
So, as the attacks unfolded on January 8th, American far-right figures, they went right to work jumping in to defend, justify, downplaying the violence.
And these sorts of reactions were documented by Media Matters and others.
You know, there have long been close ties between the Brazilian right and the American far-right, with some of the latter even echoing false claims about Brazil's 2022 election.
For example, Steve Bannon claimed in posts that people storming the buildings were freedom fighters and that Lula stole the election.
Joe Hoff of the Gateway Pundit wrote, "The people in Brazil know that their recent election
was stolen just like the two recent elections in the US."
In a series of posts, Ali Alexander, who was partially responsible for the Stop the Steal
movement expressed his support for the Bolsonaro supporters, writing that "The national supreme
court in Brazil is illegitimate and the most corrupt part of the country.
Do whatever is necessary."
necessary.
And over on Gab, the founder of that website, Andrew Torba, called those who stormed the buildings great patriots of Brazil.
QAnon influencers, who have previously expressed support for military coups and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, praised the storming as, quote, a proper civilian coup against tyranny by those not standing for the rigged election and as proof that, quote, people around the world now know for a fact that elections are rigged On InfoWars, Alex Jones accused the State Department and Brazil's new government of staging the attack to quote, demonize the opposition as lawless.
Jones claimed that the same thing happened with the January 6 attacks in the United States.
They could have seized the media.
They could have seized the control of the infrastructure.
They could have blocked the main roads, but they didn't.
Instead, they stood down and provocateurs Once the Communist government is well into power for seven days, let them completely take over the Capitol and the President's facility, so they can then demonize the opposition as lawless.
You're about to see a rerun of the whole January 6th program, because the same people that ran January 6th are the ones that run the UN and just ran the operation we saw.
It was recently revealed in text messages published by Huffington Post that Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones were actually in close communication.
Tucker Carlson, for his part, dismissed accusations that Steve Bannon or Trump had any role in the events in Brazil, but he also insinuated that it would be fine if they did have a role.
You may actually have seen some of that video in the United States over the last couple of days, and you saw it because it has political uses.
What's happened in Brazil is being likened to January 6th, and of course populist leaders in this country are being blamed for it.
Oh, it was Trump and Steve Bannon who did it.
That's not true, but even if it were true, it would be just the tail end of the story.
It would be the result of something that happened before.
So the obvious question is, why are protesters in Brazil so angry?
The way he structures his sentences is so fucking annoying.
It's not true, but even if it were, what would that mean?
As we see, time moves chronologically forward.
Yesterday came before today.
But the real question is, why are Brazilians so angry?
Why are they doing these big steaming dumps?
Why are they in the palace?
Why are they gouging the eyes out of presidential portraits?
Why are they beating horses to death?
Why did they beat two horses to death?
The real question is, what did these two horses do to these patriots?
Were they woke horses?
Were they trying to change your gender?
I'll be back after the break with more information.
We are joined by Ben Fogel, a contributing editor for Jacobin, who is currently working on a PhD in Brazilian anti-corruption politics at NYU.
Welcome to the show, Ben.
Thanks for having me.
So for listeners, you know, who may not be familiar, you know, Brazil is a country that we haven't covered that much and in depth because it is just such a complex beast.
But could you try to outline the nature of the Jair Bolsonaro presidency and just kind of what happened during this last election?
That's a pretty crazy story that goes back at least to 2013.
In essence, through an anti-corruption investigation that was highly mediatized, and then later turned out to be corrupt itself in terms of fabricating evidence, complicity between prosecutors and judges, And also a congressional coup against the Workers' Party government of Dilma Rousseff in 2016, Brazil's political class managed to entirely discredit themselves.
So what did that mean?
It meant during a time of recession, a time in which every day there was a new headline about corruption and the Workers' Party, a sort of deep process of alienation and radicalization of the Brazilian
moderate right-wing voters or center-right voters in a country which has never really had
a strong democratic tradition, began increasingly to reject democracy, to take on a
radicalized politics of the extreme right, and looked for a figure outside of the mess of corruption,
and a former army captain who had been kicked out of the armed forces for a failed terrorist
attack called Jair Bolsonaro, who had been a congressman, a professional politician for 28 years,
and mostly his base was in Rio de Janeiro, which has the largest concentration in terms of
the Brazilian armed forces. So a lot of military voters are there and there are a lot of police
voters, and that's where he was his base.
He used to particularly look after their pension interests.
He was also noted for his consistent attacks on democracy, support for the Brazilian
dictatorship, and frequent remarks about "you're too ugly to rape" or "if only we had killed 30,000 more
people during the dictatorship, everything would be okay." Anyway.
So he became, during these sort of anti-corruption protests of 2016, 2015, to the 2018 elections, the new leader of the Brazilian right.
So, in other words, as the traditional party of the Brazilian sort of center-right voter was the Social Democratic Party, all Brazilian parties have misleading names, so that's another story altogether.
So those voters and other voters for center-right parties radicalized and, in rejection of the corrupted political class, Which not only included the left, but it also included the centre-right, opted for Bolsonaro as the guy who was outside the system, who'd come in and clean it up, who would deal with all the problems caused by the corrupt left, the gays, people who didn't know their place, restore hierarchies and order to Brazil.
And that brings us to 2018.
Now, 2018 was a rather crazy election, and in fact, the current president of Brazil, Lula da Silva, was leading all the polls.
Now, Lula had been president twice, had left office as one of the most successful democratic leaders anywhere with an approval rating of 84%, which is pretty much unheard of.
So, having taken a lot of people out of poverty, introduced Brazil as an international player, and generally seen as a statesman of a rising power.
So, he had been convicted of corruption for, I don't want to go into the details too much, but basically these charges are now thrown out.
There were evidence of complicity between the prosecutor and the judge who heard this case.
The evidence was extremely weak.
It was basically, we can say, a stitch up.
But on appeal he was hoping to run as president.
Now what happened was Lula was leading all the polls and then Sergio Moro, the judge in question, sent him to prison and then his candidacy was disbarred.
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