The Joker Bombs Brazil feat Andrew Fishman & Caio Almendra (E304)
A failed bombing by a profoundly redpilled man dressed as the Joker, a world-cup-themed assassination plot, fallout from an attempted coup, the indictment of the former President… Brazil is full of stories these days. Head of the Intercept Brasil Andrew Fishman is our guest along with editor and repeat guest Caio Almendra.
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Intercept Brasil: https://www.intercept.com.br/
Andrew Fishman: https://x.com/AndrewDFish
Caio Almendra: https://x.com/CaioAlmendra
Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com)
https://qaapodcast.com
QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Welcome to the QAA Podcast, Episode 304, The Joker Bombs Brazil.
As always, we are your hosts, Julian Field, Liv Baker, and Travis View.
Sweetest of listeners, as you enter the cold holiday season, this week we wanted to bring you a little hot flash from the largest country in South America, Brazil.
And holy shit is there a lot going on down there.
Fallout from an attempted coup, their version of January 6th.
A World Cup-themed assassination plot, which is maybe the most Brazilian thing I've ever heard of.
The indictment of the former president.
Thank you.
Nice to be here.
Our format this week is going to involve coverage of various topics up front and then we'll enter a more freeform interview in the back.
So before we get started, I wanted to once again celebrate the cultural exchange between our two countries by playing a short clip of the former governor of California who decades ago had identified an aspect of Brazilian culture that has since become a staple here in the United States.
You know something?
After watching the mulatto shake it, I can absolutely understand why Brazil is totally devoted to my favorite body part, the ass.
That was Arnold Schwarzenegger back when you could say such horrible things from a lost video of him visiting the Rio Carnival where he on video sexually harasses various women.
Extremely awkward.
He actually makes one woman he's having like an interview with suck on like a carrot stick.
It's horrible.
So we apologize for sending our worst to a very wonderful country during a wonderful period.
So after that cultural exchange, I think we can just jump right into it.
So Caio has prepared a wonderful little set of segments here, and I will be reading them because he has what they call Brazilian throat.
It's from partying too hard, and it's actually a condition you developed from vuvuzela.
So, listeners of the podcast by now probably know, and you found out in our previous episode with Cayo, about their version of January 6th.
It happened two years ago and two days after the original January 6th, on January 8th.
It was a direct reaction to the election of Lula, who is broadly considered a left-wing candidate there, and he was running against, of course, the incumbent on the right, Jair Bolsonaro.
So, let's jump into the lead-up to January 8th.
In October 2022, Lula defeated Bolsonaro by less than 2% of the vote.
It was the first time in Brazil's short Republican history that a sitting president failed to get re-elected.
And Bolsonaro tried his best.
And by tried, we mean he committed an astonishing array of illegal and immoral acts to try to secure re-election.
These ranged from direct vote buying, with pro-Bolsonaro mayors caught red-handed with envelopes of cash, to symbolic vote buying, like allowing the country's most popular state-owned bank to let port citizens take out loans using food stamps as collateral, only to discontinue this program right after the election.
And of course, there was the good old voter suppression tactic.
Bolsonaro deployed the federal highway police to block roads in the northeastern region, Lula's biggest stronghold, on election day.
But even with all of that, it did not work.
Throughout the entire process, Bolsonaro repeatedly claimed that the only way he could lose was through fraud.
However, in private conversations, especially with the president of his party, he admitted that he actually lost the election.
Afraid of being arrested, Bolsonaro fled to the U.S. while thousands of his supporters camped outside military barracks, begging the armed forces to stage a coup.
Generals close to Bolsonaro, many of whom had served as his ministers, were pressured by supporters but refused to clearly confirm or deny their intentions to carry out said coup.
So, on January 8th, Bolsonaro supporters stormed the federal government's headquarters in Brasilia.
But what was the plan?
To understand this, we have to refer to the Bolivian coup model.
The attempted coup in Brazil was inspired by a recent case in the neighboring country we just mentioned, Bolivia.
On November 10th, 2019, a series of protests combined with a police mutiny erupted in the country.
Far-right militants, in collusion with police inaction, invaded the homes of MAS, Movement for Socialism, politicians, the party of Evo Morales and current president Luis Arce.
They humiliated an indigenous mayor by pouring paint on her, set fire to lawmakers' homes, and even killed an MAS politician's dog.
Which, that's just standard police procedure over here.
I don't know about you guys.
They're eating the dogs!
They're eating the dogs.
We're shooting the dogs.
They're shooting the dogs so that they don't eat them.
The police refused to suppress the violent protests, forcing the elected president Evo Morales to seek refuge with the military.
Eventually, the military informed Morales that they could no longer guarantee his safety, effectively sealing the coup.
He left the country and Congresswoman Janine Añez declared herself president.
This immediately initiated the genocide of indigenous people.
Today, Añez is in prison and MAS has returned to power after a victorious election.
The Bolivian coup model, therefore, involves violent civilian protests, police mutiny, and inaction by the armed forces.
This creates the illusion of military non-involvement, maintaining a facade of normalcy.
Behind the scenes, of course, the military support of the civilian protests encouraged the police mutiny and threatened to betray Morales.
Bolsonaro never hid the fact that the Bolivian model inspired him.
After all, he had overwhelming support from local police forces.
Despite also receiving total support from the armed forces, many generals and admirals openly admitted they did not want the reputation of being coup plotters.
Bolsonaro also made it clear he was terrified of ending up like Janine Añez, imprisoned and forgotten, outlawed and abandoned after her coup government collapsed.
When Añez was arrested, she was found hiding inside a box bed.
Wait, what's...
Is this like a Metal Gear Solid thing?
What are we dealing with here?
Is that that bed that has a box that you can just open it and put, I don't know, stuff like a pillow inside?
Don't you have it?
Oh, got it.
Yeah, it's like a little storage area under a bed.
Exactly.
I think that's a good place to put these kinds of right-wing politicians, personally, but that's not the opinion of anybody else on the podcast.
Bolsonaro's opponents used photos of box beds as a taunt, suggesting he, too, will one day be arrested.
Man.
Honestly, I think that's a little more dignified than the Saddam Hussein hole in the ground, you know?
It's like, just get him a nice box under a bed.
It's like the way that someone would get arrested on the show Cops.
It's not really the fitting of a world leader, but she was never really supposed to be a world leader in the first place, so I guess it makes sense.
I'm pretty sure that would straight up be like Reno 911. Exactly.
Deputy Dangle finally opening the bed and being like, you're in there, aren't you?
No.
So that's fun, and that's a little kind of reminder of what happened, and we'll be dealing with the fallout of this stuff because a lot has developed since the attempted coup itself.
Our next segment, How George Washington Bombed Christmas.
In December 2022, George Washington de Oliveira Souza, which we have to stop here for a second, is very common in Brazil to have names like Washington, Lincoln, like American presidents.
Jefferson.
Jefferson, but also like Amadeus, Mozarchi, you know, just famous people.
So in December 2022, as I said, Jorge Washington de Oliveira Souza, a radical pro-Bolsonaro blogger, traveled from the country's Midwest, a stronghold for his president, carrying a stockpile of bombs.
He rented a tanker truck filled with kerosene and placed an explosive in it, parking it outside the airport.
His stated goal was to disable the airport and prevent Lula from landing in Brasilia for his inauguration.
That's a terrible plan.
Yeah, what is, I don't understand, like, the goal is like, oh, you're owned, you can't land your plane, you have to land elsewhere.
Like, I've done a terrorism for this reason.
Am I misunderstanding this?
It's a terrorism where you just don't think the next step after that is like, maybe he'll use a helicopter, maybe he'll take a car.
Liv, if you think this was poorly planned, I cannot wait to share the assassination plot with you.
So, our friend George Washington forgot to coordinate with a truck driver who worked for the company that rented out the tanker.
As soon as he left, the driver called the federal police, who quickly neutralized the explosive.
Wow, that's amazing.
That's like being a suicide bomber who just hands off the vest and then leaves.
Hey, just wear this vest.
Okay, cool.
It's like to some Grubhub guy.
George Washington was sentenced to just 10 years in prison.
The financiers of the plot were never identified.
However, it's known that the terrorist plan was devised in one of the camps outside military barracks.
So that's a fun little segment.
Next up, and please don't judge this based on the headline, Black Kids, the World's Worst Special Ops.
The Brazilian Army's Special Operations Unit has the peculiar nickname of Kich Pretus, or Black Kids, in a mix of English and Portuguese.
The origin of this nickname remains unclear.
Their stated mission is to, quote, infiltrate enemy territory and cause chaos behind enemy lines during wartime situations.
In December 2022, the Black Kids were accused of...
That sounds really bad when I say it that way.
I'm just going to say Kich Pretus.
I mean, in context, are they trying to say, like, Black Ops Kids, that kind of thing?
I don't know, but I'm just going to switch to Kich Pretos.
In December 2022, Kich Pretos were accused of sabotaging power transmission stations to provoke blackouts and create the chaotic environment needed for a Bolivian-style coup.
Thanks to recent revelations, it's now known that the Kich Pretos were fully mobilized for the coup attempt.
We'll get more into that later.
Bolsonaro missing in action.
Throughout this period, Bolsonaro was largely absent.
He stayed hidden in the presidential palace, assuming he didn't have to get into a box bed there, so dignified.
He was meeting there primarily with military officials, especially high-ranking officers, and many members of the Kich Pretos unit.
Reports from the press suggested he was depressed and suffering from Erisopilus.
Is that...
What the fuck?
How many...
He has conditions that no one has ever heard of.
He's the most dying man of all time.
He has conditions you only get if you go searching for the lost city of Z. He's in Antarctica, like, trying to find all those microbes that are, like, 10 million years old.
Yeah, he's unfreezing the most ancient organisms to catch new things.
He might be the world's most vaccinated man without ever having to stick a needle into his arm.
Anyways, he had Erisopelas of the leg, whatever the fuck that is.
He was also at the time, right, he was just begging these military guys to do the coup.
Like, please, come on, man, come on, it would be so cool.
And they're like...
I don't know, buddy.
You know, I still want to be around if, like, things go the other way.
To avoid handing over the presidential sash, at least according to the official story, Bolsonaro traveled to the U.S. in December and did not return until March.
During that time, he basically became Florida Man.
Which, that's the thing with Florida Man, is he's not really known for catching weird diseases.
Usually it's like, he goes crazy, tries to eat someone, or, you know...
Exactly.
Well, usually it's like late-stage syphilis that causes half of the things they do, so that kind of lines up with Bolsonaro, probably.
That's not untrue.
January 8th.
On January 8th, protesters encountered virtually no resistance as they entered Brasilia, the Brazilian capital.
Behind the scenes, a Supreme Court and federal government had learned that the local police, under the control of a Bolsonaro-aligned governor, refused to protect the city.
The protesters invaded the Praxa dos Tres Poderes, or Plaza of the Three Powers, Storming Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Presidential Palace.
So, honestly, kind of rookie numbers we put up here with just the capital.
They're closer to each other in Brazil.
It's one single plaza with everything around it, so they're closer to each other.
Brazil was made for this.
Yeah, that's so much more convenient.
We need to, actually, we should put the Pentagon and the White House and the Capitol in one specific place.
I have some other plans, but we will talk about them after the episode.
So when they penetrated these buildings, they destroyed artworks, TVs, windows, and more.
Wasn't there, like, feces smearing, or am I dreaming?
Yeah, the next beggar, Griff.
Mm-hmm.
One infamous moment involved a 67-year-old woman, Maria de Fatima Mendoza Jacinto Souza.
Oh my god.
These names!
Maria de Fatima Mendoza Jacinto Souza, known as Dona Fatima for good reasons, because her name is insanely long.
She comes from the city of Tuberon, and she was filmed defecating on Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes' desk.
Which, like, a lot of people think that happened here, but no, we didn't pull that off.
We were too busy live-streaming.
And smoking weed.
Oh, she was doing that.
She was live streaming her shitting?
No, someone did.
Will you stop doing misinformation on the podcast, Caio?
We want to know exactly how this old lady took a shit.
It's important.
Journalistic ethics.
Both the local police and armed forces stood by and did nothing.
Few were willing to fulfill their duty until a turning point occurred.
Marcela de Silva Morais Pino, a military police officer, was part of a patrol trying to resist the protesters.
She was pushed from a building and attacked with metal rods.
When photos of the beaten officer circulated among police WhatsApp groups, the tendency towards self-preservation, thin blue line, if you will, within the police force took over, and officers finally acted to restore order in the city.
Thousands of people were arrested, many...
Sorry, I posted a picture of Donna Fatima cheating on the table.
Oh, thank you so much.
Wow.
I mean, we're going to have to leave this all in, but thank you for sending me this.
I am very glad that they blurred her butt cheeks.
Yeah.
Thousands of people were arrested, many of them elderly, creating a surreal situation that speaks volumes about the current political climate.
The right wing quickly nicknamed the arrest the Lulags.
So Lula plus Gulags.
And the left wing, of course, adopted this nickname.
I kind of agree.
I think that's very funny.
Yeah, I like it.
Yeah, what would ours be?
The Kamalogs?
The Kamalogs.
Rehab and re-socialization of the Lulogs.
The arrest of these elderly protesters forced their families, often normie or even left-leaning children, to get involved, providing legal defense or just picking them up from custody.
Some of the elderly protesters expressed regret while in detention.
Others, cut off from social media while in jail, went through a kind of forced rehabilitation, quickly realizing the extent of their bad trip, which we got Caillou putting in the American pop culture references, as he knows how to do.
You don't mean that they were forced to rehabilitate, right?
Like, no one forced them to.
It's just like they incidentally rehabilitated from not having social media.
Exactly.
It was a good turkey rehab from social media.
It's basically detox.
WhatsApp is a hell of a drug.
It sure is.
It sure is.
I try to avoid it so much, but having family in Europe and South America, it's just It's just a deluge.
It's a way of life.
The amount of groups that contain people from other groups I'm already in.
There's like a subgroup for the Secret Santa.
There's a group for the Visit that they're doing on Christmas.
And then there's the group that we're all in originally.
It's driving me completely nuts.
Anyways.
Many of these elderly people doubled down, however, accusing their children of being the true reason for their imprisonment.
The general sentiment was that they were, of course, a manipulated mass, useful idiots serving financiers and political leaders who emerged completely unscathed from the entire process.
Was the age demographic of Brazilian January 6th different than the American one?
Like, was it noticeably older?
I guess there were also a lot of boomers in the American one, too.
It was definitely older.
It was definitely older in Brazil.
And, you know, these people that were just hanging out in encampment for weeks, like, you're not employed.
So you're either retired or unemployed or just, you know, independently wealthy, you know, received money from your family.
Right.
I guess two most revolutionary groups is students and like pensioneers.
Yep.
Just like the adults have nothing to do demographics.
Yeah, it is kind of amazing that like the stereotype of QAnon people here was like, you know, boomers in a reclining chair.
And that turned out to be false here in America.
But over there, it sounds like it was a little more on point.
Yeah, I think it was, generally speaking.
There are young people, but those people that stand like three months on encampment in front of a military barracks, of course they were retirees.
And like business owners.
It's like, you know, small business that are like the equivalent of like the, you know, the jet ski dealer in the U.S. who is constantly complaining about how they don't have any money, that the communists are destroying their country and making everybody poor.
But, you know, they have a successful jet ski dealership and they don't ever have to go to work.
They spend all their time at the encampment.
I know of a few people like that.
That reminds me of the woman who basically promoted her real estate business before going into the Capitol.
She's just on camera being like, yeah, if you're looking for a house, you know, I'm available.
Anyways, we're going in.
This was followed by a very partial military purge.
Upon taking office, Lula appointed a general considered to be a legalist to lead the armed forces and a pragmatic politician as minister of defense.
Soon after, Mauro Sigi, a trusted Bolsonaro ally who handled the attempted sale of Saudi jewels, was nominated to lead the Kij Pretus.
Lula clashed with the general who proposed Sigi, resulting in the general's removal.
And that was the entire purge.
Most of the military leadership remains untouched, which I want to say, on the plus side, you don't confirm what the right wing thinks of, like, you know, a guy like Lula, that he's going to be Stalin or something.
But on the other side, you're really fucking yourself here by not being a little bit more strict on coup plotters and trying to get rid of some of the military that are willing to do these things.
Brazil has a very good law, in my opinion, that once you chose a new highest-ranking general, everyone that is younger is automatically retired.
And even though he chose a very old general for this function, he could simply change the whole military high-ranking structure with a stroke of a pen, and he chose not to.
Is this like a desire to not aggravate the military, I guess, that there's like a comfortable balance here and you don't want to push it over?
Exactly.
Like Lula won the presidency, but Lula is not in control of Brazil.
He doesn't run the Congress, which has a lot of power, can stop anything he wants to do.
And the military is so powerful.
I mean, otherwise we wouldn't be in this situation in the first place if the military didn't have such immense power.
So like he came in, but his hands were really tied in so many ways.
I don't think I think they would have liked his hands to be literally tied.
We'll get there in the script that's coming up.
Oh, good.
Supreme Court trials.
Under Brazilian law, crimes against the constitutional order and democracy are judged directly by the Supreme Court.
This means that Justice Alexandre de Moraes, the man whose desk was infamously defiled by Dona Fáxima from Tubarão, would preside over the trials and decide the sentences.
The Bolsonaro camp crafted a narrative around this.
Morais, portrayed as an authoritarian villain in memes, posts, and tweets, was pitted against the image of a helpless elderly woman, quote, fighting for democracy.
One butt cheek at a time.
One turd at a time.
We're fighting for democracy, folks.
I actually, you know what?
Elon Musk also became obsessed with this guy.
He was fucking posting his picture constantly during that whole period where he was asked to basically take down a few insane fascist accounts that were inciting violence and refused to.
And then eventually he said, okay, fine.
I guess we'll bring down the band hammer and thank God you now have access to X. There's a very common right-wing meme here with the face of Justice Moraes with the caption, I didn't like your post.
I'm gonna arrest you.
so arrested for posting which calling shitting on a desk posting i think is like maybe the best physical representation of posting this narrative unraveled humorously when it emerged during the proceedings that dona fachima had a prior criminal record for crack cocaine trafficking for which she'd been sentenced to four years in prison damn 67 years old and she's got game.
I like her even better now.
Gradually, more and more of the Supreme Court invaders were convicted.
The sentences were severe and acquittals were rare.
Dona Facima, for instance, received 17 years in prison.
17. 17th letter of the alphabet.
Q. Message is sent.
While the coup attempt failed, the Bolivian playbook succeeded in some ways.
No police officers, military personnel, or financiers were punished, thanks to plausible deniability regarding their involvement.
And now for the judicial moves against Bolsonaro.
Other legal cases against the former president advanced slowly.
On June 30th of 2023, Bolsonaro was convicted by the Electoral Court for using a diplomatic event to criticize Brazil's electronic voting system, constituting misuse of public resources for electoral purposes.
He became ineligible for eight years.
On March 3, 2024, Mauro Sigi, Bolsonaro's trusted aide, was arrested.
His case was akin to Al Capone being caught for tax evasion.
Sigi was arrested for forging vaccination certificates for himself, his family, and Bolsonaro to travel to the U.S. Amazing.
Yeah, I am experiencing this right now.
Like, I'm in my, like, final stages of my green card, and they want me to re-up vaccinations for shit that has not existed for years, like varicella and mumps.
I'm being shamed for only having those injected in me at birth.
So, thank you, America.
I thought our FK Jr. was going to fix this, but nope.
Still got a vax.
Once arrested, C.G. was forced to surrender his cell phone, and from that moment on, the media buzzed with rumors of a plea deal.
C.G. reportedly spent nearly 18 months cooperating with prosecutors, implicating others in Bolsonaro's circle.
His plea deal is more than 80 pages long and led to an almost 900-page indictment.
Boring.
Did any of you read it?
Yeah, we're starting to.
It was published yesterday.
And it's insane.
It's insane.
The weirdest stuff is in there.
It's insane.
Oh, God.
Caio's work.
Just sitting in front of 900 pages.
And this is, you know, this is like two years ongoing.
And there's just been this drip, drip, where it's finally come out, this big document.
But there's just been these little pieces of news.
Like, Mauro Siege is now going to, you know, he's going to talk.
He made a deal.
And you just have these little tiny pieces where people are getting excited.
Like, it's coming, it's coming, it's coming.
It's been two years.
My lord.
On February 19th, 2024, Bolsonaro's passport was seized, marking an escalation in the legal pressure on him.
Desperate, Bolsonaro hid in the Turkish embassy for two days, but eventually gave up on seeking asylum.
Wait, he wanted Erdogan to save him?
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, wow.
Well, unfortunately, yeah, Erdogan probably is like, hmm, this guy or NATO? LAUGHTER And it's not like he loves NATO, but I think he's going to pick NATO. The Amnesty Campaign.
With thousands of people, many elderly imprisoned, a campaign for their amnesty began.
Mainstream media amplified stories of tragic figures like evangelical waiters who supported families of four persuaded via WhatsApp to save Brazil, given free buses from remote areas to storm government buildings, only to end up defecating on antique furniture.
The Supreme Court, unmoved by these tales, continued convicting the vandals.
Attention turned to Congress, where conservatives hold an unstable majority.
However, amnesty bills stalled in bureaucratic limbo, opposed by leftist parties and even the pragmatic center, wary of mobs storming their workplaces.
Bolsonaro launched a bold public relations campaign, appealing directly to Lula's compassion.
He questioned, quote, If Lula claims to be for the people, how could he let thousands of ordinary citizens remain in prison?
This coming from the guy who, like, literally boasted about torturing people.
What a piece of shit.
I don't even think Trump is stupid enough to do this sort of play.
Yeah, please.
This plea masked a cold political calculation.
Bolsonaro knew that convicting these protesters increased the likelihood he'd be implicated as the mastermind behind January 8. He faces numerous criminal charges, but this case poses one of the gravest threats to his hard-earned freedom.
Even with slim chances for amnesty, Brazil's far right exerted significant pressure.
The campaign energized Bolsonaro's base.
Although Bolsonaro is still ineligible to run for office, his supporters believe that only he could pardon the prisoners, portraying other right-wing candidates as too timid to act.
By the end of this story, we will learn how Bolsonaro ordered the murder of Lula, but somehow was now appealing to his good heart.
And now we have to cover The Joker.
On the night of November 13, 2024, President Lula met with Supreme Court justices at the Presidential Palace to discuss the fallout from recent police operations that had led to the arrests of several high-ranking military generals.
The goal was to determine what measures the federal government should take to maintain order.
As they deliberated, four explosions were heard nearby outside of the building.
A man dressed as the Joker had detonated three makeshift bombs outside a statue of Lady Justice at the entrance of the Supreme Court.
And there's a photo here you've included where they zoom in on his suit and it has all like the kind of card symbols.
So he was wearing some sort of retro Joker, not like the green suit at one, but, you know, a kind of variant card on the Joker.
Oh, interesting.
So it's not the new one.
It's like old school Joker.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
It's the knockoff Joker.
I just realized that there's going to be so many Joker costumes for Carnival this year.
No.
It's going to be unreal.
It's Marais and Joker side by side.
It's going to be insane.
Oh, yeah.
You think there's going to be like General Ancap marching with the Joker?
Oh, yeah.
And I'm assuming if you want to dress as Bolsonaro, you just get like an IV drip and roll it along next to you?
Colostomy bag.
Colostomy bag.
Got to commit to the bit.
Some people will have, like, those plastic, like, fake butt cheeks, and they'll be dressed as, uh...
Fátima.
Fátima.
The perpetrator, Francisco Wanderly, nicknamed Tío Franza, or Uncle Frank, was a former city council candidate in a small town, securing just 98 votes in 2020 under Bolsonaro's PL party.
He was also one of the many radicalized individuals who had camped outside military barracks for months, calling for a coup.
Now, there's a photo you've included here, and I just want to say that this resembles like what a lib would post here in the United States.
It's like a glass of red wine.
He's got like the glasses.
He's bald and he's smiling.
But over there, you've got your WhatsApp-pilled, you know, semi-retired men doing like the soy face.
It's a weird cultural inversion that like the vote face guys are Bolsonaro supporters.
Yeah, having a glass of Chablis after voting.
That's the vibe here.
Estranged from his wife and undergoing a divorce, França left his hometown and moved 1,000 miles away to Brasilia.
There he lived in Airbnb for three months, spending his days visiting Congress and consuming conspiratorial content online.
He was unemployed during this time, and evidence suggests he brought the homemade bombs from his hometown.
França's bombs were almost comical in their construction.
Fireworks wrapped in tape.
I guess that does qualify as a bomb.
Like, he's like, what is the legal definition of a bomb?
Like, how do I get there?
Well, it killed him.
Oh, okay.
Enough.
That's the legal definition.
If it can kill you.
I mean, some fireworks are very big, right?
They have like those M-80s, as they call them, that are illegal here in the States.
And they were tapped together.
So when they exploded, the explosion was way stronger than a simple firework.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, this is the Wile E. Coyote approach.
On the night of November 13th, he threw three of these at the Supreme Court building.
When confronted by security guards, he lit a fourth and lay on top of it, killing himself instantly.
So he thought like his throwing arm was strong, was like stronger than it was, I guess.
Like, he thought he would get it into the building or something?
The building is really far away from that plaza.
He wasn't capable of really throwing it inside.
I don't know what was on his mind.
I mean, it really doesn't make any sense.
It's like he went in there and was like, I'm going to go in and I'm going to kill the minister of the Supreme Court.
And then there's a security guard in front of the building, obviously, and he's like, oh shit, this isn't going to work.
What if I blow up the statue?
All right, fuck, that didn't work either.
All right, I'm going to kill myself.
It really is like, that seems to be the logic that was flying through his head that shows how...
Very incredibly smart this plot was.
Did he get the statue?
No.
No.
Still there.
Poor guy.
Tio Franca, I want to introduce you to the ACMI slingshot.
At first glance, Franca appeared to be another case of a person radicalized by social media, his mental health deteriorating under the strain of personal failures and extremist rhetoric.
But then, his online presence was uncovered.
This revealed a manifesto.
As the nation reeled from the explosions, the internet quickly found Franca's TikTok and WhatsApp accounts.
His TikTok featured a bizarre video where a picture of him holding a wine glass spun into four copies of itself before exploding in a strange animation.
It had no caption or explanation.
This wine is bomb.
It's just pure insanity.
Yeah, I would describe this as like, divorced dad holding wine turns into time cube.
And then explodes.
Yeah, and then blows up.
Which, that's foreshadowing.
Yeah.
The look in his eyes is just like haunting.
He's just completely nuts.
Yeah.
Beatific look.
Yeah.
On WhatsApp, people also found his manifesto.
In several posts, François roleplayed as the Joker, issuing threats reminiscent of Batman Dark Knight.
Quote, Federal police, you have 72 hours to find all the bombs hidden in the homes of these communist scumbags.
William Bonner, Brazil's most famous news anchor, sort of a Brazilian, more successful Anderson Cooper.
José Sarni, Brazil's first civilian president post-dictatorship.
Geraldo Alcmin, Lula's centrist VP. And Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the neoliberal ex-president beloved by Bill Clinton in the 90s.
That's cool.
You have 72 hours.
He didn't even hide the bombs?
He was just cosplaying?
He claimed the bombs were on drawers and cabinets and so on, but none were found.
Of course, he never invaded William Bonner's house or something like that.
It goes without saying, and as an American, you'll probably relate to this.
None of these figures were even remotely communist.
So in his WhatsApp, he was posting a lot of bomb emojis, just lines and lines of bomb emojis.
And he has a text here that says, you want to play?
I love that.
You want to play?
Federal police, you have 72 hours to disarm the bomb.
I love that.
And there's no bomb.
He's just posting.
His political rants were no less bizarre.
One post targeted Brazil's new public digital currency, Drex.
Drex equals shackles.
Drex equals Satan.
Drex equals slavery.
Drex equals pocket.
Drex equals apocalypse.
Drex equals domination.
Drex equals antichrist.
Drex equals prison.
Drex equals control.
Drex equals depression.
Drex equals extermination.
Drex equals death.
Brazilian people, will you accept this?
Okay, Drex equals depression is like the most revealing.
Drex equals my wife will not come back.
90% of Brazilians have no idea what Drex is.
It's basically just like a harmless digital currency system.
Drex actually also sounds like a Batman villain.
Yeah.
Initially, authorities believed França's attack was an isolated case of stochastic violence, a lone individual radicalized by extremist rhetoric online.
But when they inspected his car, they found a sophisticated bomb detonation system connected to his crude fireworks-based explosives.
At his Airbnb, police wisely deployed a bomb squad robot before entering.
opening a cabinet triggered another explosion as there was a detonation system linked to another set of ineffective fireworks within despite the absurdity of his weapons the coordinated systems hinted at planning and possibly outside assistance yeah this guy does not seem smart enough to like rig a dirty bomb Yeah, maybe the firecrackers side, but the detonation stuff?
Yeah.
The investigation took a darker turn when França's ex-wife set fire to his workshop in their hometown.
Police are still investigating why she did this and whether França had accomplices.
So she might have been covering up for him?
Yeah.
And you see, you thought she'd abandoned you, man.
Maybe she abandoned me because he wasn't hired because lies enough.
Hmm.
He was like, you better go kill all the communists.
Yeah.
Explode my eyes and I'll come back to you.
I want to be with a successful Joker, okay?
So either you fucking go out there and do your job, or I'm not coming back.
And now for maybe the most Brazilian part of this entire story, Operation 2022 World Cup.
After a year and a half of investigation based on Mauro Sigi's plea deal, the indictment was finally disclosed.
It was revealed that the Kijpretus, or black kids, were involved in Operation 2022 World Cup between Lula's election victory and its inauguration.
This operation was named that way because each participant was given the codename of a World Cup participant country.
Man, that's brutal.
I mean, nobody wants to be France, right?
Because they remember that 3-0.
The plan involved assassinating three or four people.
President-elect Lula, his vice president, Gerardo Alcmin, Justice Moraes, and perhaps Flavio Dino, Lula's nominee for the Ministry of Justice and now also a Supreme Court justice.
Details of the plan were printed using the presidential palace's printer, which of course logs the content of all documents printed there, and that was sent to Brazil's intelligence agency, the ABIN. So we learned other details because after the indictment, the cell phones of several military personnel were seized.
So insanely good, like, ops here.
Printing it on the official printer of the presidential palace, and then people not deleting their phone messages to each other.
There's so many, like, little leaks that came out.
Like, they were just so sloppy.
It's the only reason why we're having this conversation right now.
So it's basically like they were the kind of boomer who stormed the palace.
They just had more power, so they hung in the background, but they still were using, like, WhatsApp to communicate with each other.
They were just as crazy based on online bullshit they'd read.
The Brazilian military is basically pointless.
They do almost nothing.
And you have these generals that have just been sitting around doing war games, getting called sir for 30, 40, 50, 60 years, talking about the good old days when we were the dictatorship and people had to respect us.
And then they actually have to do something.
And you just see how unprepared they are and how shambolic the whole thing is.
But in Brazil, they're still considered the most respected institution in the country.
But in reality, you look at them and it's like, wow.
Okay, so this is the best of the best here, huh?
Yeah, they were basically LARPing as special ops.
That's the whole thing.
And in the 80s, there was an attempted terrorist plot in Rio that was done by special ops of the military because they were trying to prevent the end of the dictatorship.
And they fucked it up and they bombed.
They blew themselves up.
We talked about it in the first episode I was in about Marielle, the 297th.
Yeah, so like 40 years later, literally nothing has changed.
You know what?
This is the first time that I have wished that like WhatsApp or other messaging apps existed during the JFK assassination.
I have a feeling we'd know a lot more and there would be a lot more emojis.
So, as we mentioned, no member of the Army's Special Operations Battalion responsible for actions of agitation and sabotage managed to delete any of their messages, encrypt them, or even avoid using WhatsApp and Signal to send them.
They also did not purchase typical burner phones, and one of those involved bought a new iPhone, logged into it with an anonymous email account, but then also logged into a personal email account with his name plus his wife's name plus love.
At gmail.com He's a cute wife guy.
Oh, wow.
That's so fucking funny.
Goddamn, man.
On one occasion, they considered using the Army's own messaging app, Una, but they didn't because it was too buggy.
That's good.
Could you imagine if that was the only thing that stopped this plot, was they found this email address linked to this phone and you were the guy who had your name plus your wife's name plus love at gmail.com that ruined the whole thing?
What an amazing email in the first place to just like, basically your email address is what you would write on a tree.
His legal defense is just that he loves his wife.
Let it be known.
On another occasion, one of the kich pretos with the codename Ghana was stalking Justice Morais close to a mall.
After Morais left his meeting, he was supposed to just tail him.
The sting was aborted because he couldn't find a cab for his extraction.
He complained about being unable to find a taxi for an hour and was eventually given a Lyft home.
In one of the C's cell phone messages, a major requested 100,000 reais, approximately $20,000 from Mauro Sigi to fund Operation 2022 World Cup.
The money was paid by Bolsonaro's party, which now risks legal proceedings and even the cancellation of its electoral registration.
Apparently, the Kich Pretos studied the assassination of Marielle Franco, which we covered, as mentioned, in episode 297.
And they were revisiting that case to avoid being discovered.
Failed.
We can only conclude that the Office of Crime, the criminal group responsible for Marielle's execution, was more competent somehow than the Brazilian armed forces.
That is extremely sad.
Yeah, they live in the real world.
They actually do things, they do crime, and they have repercussions.
They'll get killed if they don't do it right.
So they have a reason to do something.
The military is just doing cosplay for decades.
They're totally pointless.
Right.
I was wondering if one of the reasons why this sort of coup failed was that maybe democratic institutions in Brazil are existing for longer.
Because it's unlike America, obviously, where liberal democracy has been for a long time.
But I guess it is just that the military are awash now.
It's not necessarily democracy is stronger.
It's just the people trying to overthrow it are even more incompetent.
Well, Brazil just doesn't have war.
So the only real thing they could do is repress the local population.
And once the dictatorship ended, they didn't have the right to do that as much.
So yeah, it makes sense that they would just kind of rot on the vine.
Thanks to the now-released indictment, we learned that after the coup plan failed, this WhatsApp message exchange between two officers occurred.
One of them sent a picture of Justice Moraes with a mushroom tip of a penis instead of, like, the top of his head with the caption, We are going to be arrested by this guy.
And the play on words here is, instead of Alexander the Great, it's like Alexander the Glance, which is not a commonly used word in English, but in Portuguese and even in French, you know, it's a very common way to talk about the head of a penis.
And the answer by the other guy in this exchange was just, great.
So, I mean, if you scroll down a little bit, Travis, could you, you know, attempt to describe this picture?
I mean, yeah, I mean, it's exactly as it described.
There's a man, you know, in a suit, and yeah, he's got, his forehead blends into a giant cockhead.
Yeah.
Okay.
It's done very well.
It is an actual cock's head.
Yeah, it's very well photoshopped.
It's not like some shitty drawing.
No, no.
They took a little bit of time.
They lined up the forehead and the tip of the cock.
They did a little blending.
They made it look okay.
He's got this nice little impish look, you know, side eye glance at you.
Sort of appealing.
I know, yeah.
He's kind of looking at you sheepishly like, what do you think?
What do you think?
Not everything, however, was a joke.
Bolsonaro authorized the use of tanks and weapons of war to seize Brasilia.
The plans could have involved poisoning Lula and Alcmin.
This wouldn't be very hard since one of the accused was a federal police officer assigned to President Lula's security detail.
Holy shit.
By the way, a former minister in Bolsonaro's government, Gustavo Bebiano, who had threatened to denounce him for corruption, said he feared being assassinated and he died of a sudden heart attack at 56. Furthermore, many of the coup plotters, especially the Kich Pretus, had studied at Fort Benning in the United States in a course offered by the Hemispheric Institute for Cooperation and Security, which is essentially a major training and ideological center for Latin American military personnel.
So it's an American school for coup plotters, basically.
So this kind of reminds me of the School of the Americas, where many of the dictators of South America were trained by Americans.
Fort Benning is like the successor of School of the Americas.
Yeah, School for the Americas got, the name got too hot.
It's like, okay, we'll just change the name and keep doing exactly what we've been doing for decades.
Awesome.
The coup plan was only abandoned because the Navy and Air Force, both in deeply divided internal votes, refused to participate.
God damn it!
Those cucks!
This decision was directly linked to the United States.
The U.S. Senate passed a resolution, authored by Bernie Sanders on September 28, 2022, declaring that Brazil would be sanctioned in the event of a coup d'etat.
Damn.
So Bernie might have, like, actually saved somehow Brazil from having a coup.
Yeah, coordination between Bernie and Biden.
Okay, well, Biden is useful for something.
The Navy and Air Force were more dependent on U.S. weapon supplies than the Army, so that makes sense that they would refuse.
And for once, the U.S. was against a coup in Latin America.
They trained the Coopers, but was against a coup.
Mmm, yeah.
Just wasn't the right timing.
Yeah.
Didn't feel right.
Yeah.
We want you to do it, just not like this.
Not like, you know, don't be so Trumpy about it, you know?
Otherwise, we would have accepted it.
It's just too similar.
And now we need to discuss the indictment.
The news of all of this is still, of course, unfolding in Brazil.
However, recently 37 people were indicted.
Of these, 25 were military personnel, including seven generals, one admiral, and six lieutenant colonels.
Four were former ministers, and one was a congressman.
Unfortunately, the Attorney General of the Republic has already stated that proceedings will only move forward in February 2025. There are concerns that the case will be handled extremely slowly.
Finally, on November 26th, it was revealed that the generals and other coup plotters were calling Bolsonaro's support base, the guys that camped outside the military HQ and that are now in the Lulogs, a group of lunatics, especially when feeding them hope that the elections could be overturned.
So that's good.
Look at these fucking morons.
Anyways, let's hope they do the job.
So, fellas, we want to talk a little bit before we get into more general questions about conspiracy theorizing over there in Brazil.
I hear that you have a kind of Alex Jones of Brazil called Alan dos Santos.
So could you tell us a little bit about him, Andrew?
Yeah, he's the most persecuted man in all of Brazil, according to him.
I mean, he's part of the Bolsonaro machine, and he's, you know, an operative who, you know, says he's a journalist, and he's just constantly instigating and stirring shit and pushing out conspiracy theories and pushing this coup plot.
I mean, at one point, there was a tweet that he did that went really viral where he said, like, The information I just received is very good.
Scary, but very good.
I still need to verify the details.
But here's the summary.
Trump won the elections, but wants to prove the fraud in 2018 and 2020. To do that, he has to let, quote unquote, the enemy, quote unquote, act to expose it.
Oh my god, he's doing QAnon.
This is like the 5D chess theory of like- That's right.
It looks like he's losing, but he actually has a deeper plan to take out the deep state.
And he's just like, he's got that Alex Jones energy too of just like extremely over the top, like just totally wound up constantly, you know, fighting with the allies in his coalition and just insane.
So he, after he kept getting squeezed by the Supreme Court for, you know, trying to be the public relations arm of a coup plot, he moved to the United States.
And now he's, he had his accounts blocked and he was demonetized and certain stuff.
I think he fought, he had a falling out with certain members of Bolsonaro movements.
And now he says that he's working as an Uber driver.
Where in the States?
Florida, right?
Yeah, Florida.
It's always Florida.
Dude, it's so systematic.
Well, we also want to talk a little bit about Brasil Paralelo, or BP. So, what's that?
It is like maybe the biggest online propaganda right wing red pilling machine.
It is huge.
They're really professional.
They're great at getting people to give them money.
And they do all these documentaries about conspiracy theories.
They're basically like flat earthers.
They have a podcast called Red Pill.
They are not a big fan of women.
And all the things that women, you know, say like, you know, violence against women.
They think that that's sort of, you know, overblown.
Not really a big thing.
Slavery?
Actually, not all that bad.
Pretty good.
Eugenics?
Maybe you should try it.
I don't know.
So, you know, like Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, that sort of thing.
But they're really big.
And they've made millions of dollars off of, you know, Google ads and YouTube revenue and that sort of stuff.
They made a documentary about Maria Gipena?
Who's that?
Yeah, Maria da Pena is, there's a law called, you know, the Maria da Pena law, which is to protect victims of violence against women.
And so there's like, you know, special police cars in certain cities that have, you know, the Maria da Pena unit that's specifically going after husbands who beat their wives mostly.
So they hate this woman because she's a feminist activist and they're all about the trad wife, traditional gender roles, men above women stuff.
And so they made this documentary to prove that, you know, actually, you know, everyone thinks that she's the same.
But Maria da Pen, she's got a whole little dark side and maybe we shouldn't buy into this whole thing.
Interesting.
Yeah.
So, yeah, this channel, Parallel Brazil, basically, is just kind of importing sludge from the U.S. alt-right and recycling it.
Yeah, it's just like, it's straight up flat earth into your veins.
Very fun.
So who's Pablo Marsal?
Maybe some of the people listening to this podcast already know him, they don't realize it.
Maybe they saw a video of this Brazilian guy on a debate stage getting slammed with a chair a couple months ago.
That's Pablo Marsal.
Pablo Marcel is a coach.
He's a businessman.
He is someone who has been arrested for doing online fraud against retirees, being part of a scheme there.
And he ran for the mayor of Sao Paulo.
He's got this big social media following.
He's sort of like an Andrew Tate sort of guy.
And he's just like a mixture between toxic coach culture, prosperity gospel...
He's got a bit of that Trumpy showmanship.
And he's just like maybe one of the worst people in the world.
We did a big article in The Intercept Brazil right during the election talking about how he was raising almost a million dollars to send to this town in Angola where he was going to build 300 houses.
And he said that he He raised the money, you know, through online fundraising and that he built these houses.
And so we sent a reporter there and there was like 29, 30 houses.
You know, things weren't really going very well.
People were not very happy with the whole thing.
And that was a fun part of this election cycle.
And then later we showed that the money that he had received, he was funneling it through this like just random backwater, tiny little town in the middle of nowhere up in the northeast of Brazil.
And we went, we sent a reporter there to go talk to the people who were in charge of this on paper.
And it was this guy who runs an illegal betting operation in this little tiny house.
He had no idea what was going on.
Everyone just talked because they didn't even know that they were involved in this because it was all on paper.
And so he's just a con man, basically.
He's a big con man.
He tries to inspire people with his coach stuff.
And so he had a bunch of his followers who he was coaching go on a surprise marathon one day.
He said, okay.
Okay, everybody, none of you prepared for a marathon, but, you know, you have to believe in yourself.
So why don't you just run 26 miles right now, just out of nowhere?
And there was an overweight guy who was part of this group, and he got into it, and he died of a heart attack during this.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
Another one, they went on a mountain climbing expedition out of nowhere.
It was raining.
They had to get rescued by the firefighters.
People were in hypothermia.
And so they're like, Marcel, did you fuck up here?
Is this something that maybe you regret?
And he's like, no, I climbed a mountain.
They followed me because they wanted to.
Tough shit.
Right.
I'm a leader.
Born leader.
Yeah, exactly.
And then, so the big thing that he did in this last election, which was just like beyond the pale, and he was antagonizing everybody.
There was one woman, one of the candidates, he said on stage in a debate that he was responsible for that she was responsible for her dad committing suicide.
Like just really low and nasty, dirty shit trying to provoke all the other candidates.
That's why he got hit with a chair.
But he was going on and on about how the main leftist candidate who's actually had a good chance of winning but ended up coming up short that he was a cocaine user, that he had proof of it that everybody knew.
And he produced a forged, like an obviously forged document that said that he was a cocaine user, you know, just days before the election.
Like he didn't need to do this.
There was no reason, but he's just that kind of guy.
Just complete chaos candidate.
Fun.
You seem to have quite an ecosystem over there.
Yes.
It's a thriving industry.
So, I mean, one question I guess I have is, it seems like the kind of coup plotters for your January 8th got it a little more severely than our January 6th participants.
Do you think that that's just because Brazilian institutions are stronger or are they responding to like a graver threat?
Yeah, I don't think Brazilian institutions are stronger.
Maybe just the opposite.
I mean, the reason why the Supreme Court had to step up and do all the things they did was because of how weak Brazilian institutions are.
I mean, they were the only institution that was left standing in the way of this happening.
I mean, the military is the most respected institution, and they were the ones that were doing the coup plotting.
You know, the president was in it with them.
The Congress was just, you know, they were completely negligent in all their responsibilities and duties and were interested in just seeing how much more How many more billions of dollars that they can get to put to their own projects instead of having the president, you know, put it towards things like education or health.
So, no, I think the institutions are really weak.
And that is why we were in this situation.
We're much closer to the abyss.
And also, you know, Brazil had a military dictatorship in living memory for a lot of people, like a lot of the politicians that are there.
There's the Bolsonaroistas who look on that time very fondly, but everybody who wasn't part of the military or brainwashed by it understands that this is not a joke, that this is a real thing that could happen.
And as you can see now, as more and more information is coming out, they were much closer to a real coup actually happening than the U.S. ever was.
And I think a lot of people in the U.S., certain commentators want to downplay it and just compare the two and say that they're exactly the same thing.
But, you know, there is a whole nother level of scale and sophistication.
I mean, not all of it is sophisticated.
We've just went through.
There's a lot of stuff that was really ham-handed and half-assed and amateur.
But it was a much more – a bigger conspiracy.
I would say it was full-assed.
Yeah.
Well, in that one case, yeah.
And that ass, specifically.
All right.
Yeah.
So I'm kind of wondering because, you know, obviously some of these fringe figures, you know, you see them dealing with these events in wild ways.
But, I mean, how is the mainstream media situation over there?
What's their relationship to what happened and Bolsonaro, the military...
Yeah, the mainstream media is definitely part of the problem, a big part of the problem.
They're probably the most, like, the sneakiest member of the coalition because, you know, Brazil has been in this power vacuum, this crazy, never-ending, bad trip since, like, 2013, 2014 when car wash was happening that happened.
Started putting people in jail and destabilizing the politics.
And then there was the Dilma coup in 2016, which is right when we launched the Intercept Brazil.
It was like weeks before the Dilma impeachment.
And ever since, it's just like just constant churning of, you know, new revelations, new problems.
And the media has always been supporting the worst possible people to further their own interests.
I mean, the media is part of their all-invite.
It's very condensed.
a few billionaire families that are connected to politics and they, you know, have all their corporate interests.
They love big aggro because they're all big landowners too.
And, you know, they were very supportive of the Operation Car Wash, which to get rid of Lula and get rid of the PT because the PT dared to, you know, let poor people go to college, let black people go to college, have poor people go on planes, you know, these crazy things.
Maids have labor rights and not be, you know, pseudo slaves anymore.
Like this was huge scandal because none of the elite wanted this stuff.
And so the media was a major supporter of Car Wash that got rid of Lula and They ended up being big supporters of Bolsonaro in the beginning because they loved his far-right, you know, Javier Millet-style economic policy.
They only really soured on him when he decided to stop doing that and do the things that was going to help him get reelected.
You know, not cutting all of the social spending, going back to some of like the economic nationalism that the country sort of depends on.
But the scavengers aren't able to exploit as much.
So only once he started doing that, that they said, oh, actually, you know, that stuff that he's saying about, you know, murdering all of his opponents and how the dictatorship was pretty good and we needed to kill all the indigenous people.
That was the country's big mistake.
Well, yeah, actually, no, we don't like that, actually.
And he has been attacking us, too.
But those institutions were entirely responsible for putting him into power.
And then they pretended like, oh, we're the great guardians of democracy.
You know, they changed their slogans.
The Folha de São Paulo, which is like the New York Times of Brazil, they did this yellow ribbon campaign about democracy, which is an allusion to the dictatorship or whatever.
But Folha de São Paulo, Globo, the biggest one, Estadão, all these big media outlets, they were all around during the dictatorship and they were all cheerleading for it in 64 and were, you know, working along with the dictatorship for the whole time that it existed.
They are not big fans of democracy.
The owners are the same people that they were back then or their families.
So they're pushing against Bolsonaro because he stopped doing the things that they actually wanted.
They saw that, oh, this is actually going very well for us.
It's starting to get kind of ugly and international.
So fine, well, let's push for, like, Lula's the only one that's going to beat him.
But let's make him as right-wing as possible.
Like, let's force this coalition as right-wing as possible.
And then as soon, like, literally the day that he won, immediately started attacking in the editorials.
Immediately started putting pressure, immediately started squeezing.
And just a few weeks ago, Folha gave Bolsonaro an op-ed where he was saying how, you know, I'm a big Democrat and we got to, you know, come together and peace and love.
And I'm actually a good guy.
I'm not this extremist that you thought I was.
Let's all get along.
You know, after everything that he's done, all the things that we know, his manipulations and his just, you know, his ties to organized crime and the fact that he's doing a coup, they gave him the space to, you know, whitewash his image again because now Lulz is the enemy, right?
He's the one that's in power.
And then, like, what is it, two weeks later, they...
Eleven days before the coup plot was revealed, Bolsonaro wrote an op-ed called Accept Democracy.
We won the mayor elections.
We are bigger, accept democracy.
Eleven days later, he's indicted for coup plotting and trying to murder his political opponents.
So that is the mainstream Brazilian media.
Obviously, there are people in the mainstream media that are cool, that, you know, believe in democracy as a real thing.
But we're talking about the owners and, you know, the people that are calling the shots, the ones that are putting in these crazy right wing, you know, former dictatorship propagandists as their colonists and giving them a voice while always constantly attacking, attacking, attacking anything that's left wing.
And so, you know, obviously there's this idea now or there's an attempt to form this idea of like a global far right.
I know Steve Bannon's toyed with that a lot and visited different countries.
So, I mean, what kind of themes would you say like are adaptable to the Brazilian context and which ones are just not really catching on?
Oh, yeah, there's so much.
There's so much.
I mean, Brazil has this tendency of just importing all of the worst things in the United States.
It's like, if it sucks, if you hate it, there is a Brazilian who is probably very rich and very right wing is like, we need to do that.
You like private prisons?
Let's get that down here.
That's something great.
Expanding gun control.
Absolutely.
Prosperity, gospel, evangelical churches.
Let's do that.
And so, you know, the the Bolsonaro campaign is very much their movement was very much always looking to the United States.
I actually went to Florida before he was officially campaigning in 2017.
And I filmed that image that ended up becoming part of the campaign attack ads from the other candidate where he salutes a giant American flag on this on this big digital screen.
And he says, you know, I salute the United States of America.
You know, this is a guy trying to run for president of Brazil.
And he goes to Miami to salute the American flag.
So there is a lot of this pro-American sentiment.
And he sent his son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, to Mar-a-Lago to become friends with Bolsonaro.
They got in with Steve Bannon.
And he was actually, Eduardo Bolsonaro was in Washington on January 6th.
He was watching the whole thing going down.
It's not entirely clear, but it does seem that he was in the room at the Trump hotel the day before, the night before, when they were deciding how this was going to happen.
But he was definitely in there and he was watching and saying like, OK, how can we do this better?
And so they definitely are doing this QAnon-ish style stuff like anti-communism.
You know, that's the classics.
Everything's anti-communism.
Anyone who's, you know, center right and to their left is a communist.
Gender ideology is a big phrase that's become really a big issue for them.
Anything like the soy boy stuff, basically.
I don't think they use exactly that term.
Some of them do.
You know, they're trying to turn your kids gay.
Globalism, new world order.
Anything leftist is bad.
And actually, I'm not sure if you knew this.
I think maybe you guys do because you're so into QAnon.
But the Nazis are leftists because the Nazis are bad.
And it's National Socialists.
They love doing that here.
Socialists in the name, so therefore they are leftists.
I mean, so much of it is really copied, but then there's just these iterations and these uniquely Brazilian fever dreams that emerge that I'm sure Caio is much more deeply immersed in.
I don't have the stomach to spend that much time in these.
Like, what's a good one, Caio?
We imported Red Pill as a whole, the whole Disney hatred, Disney princess and so on.
So they're saying Disney princesses are corrupting women?
Yeah.
New Disney princesses are corrupting women.
We should go back to old Disney princesses.
The whole Jordan Peterson script they are trying to reenact here.
And also, talking about trans stuff, we have a very huge trans community in Brazil.
It is one of the largest consumers of trans porn, one of the largest makers of trans porn, and we have a huge insertion of trans people.
We have one of the most popular left-wing congressperson in Brazil is Erika Hilton, a trans woman.
They hate her.
They hate her so much.
It's insane.
And she's awesome.
But anyway, it's part of our culture.
It's been part of our culture for a longer time.
And conservative people have a weird Freudian relationship with that.
And they usually exploit it on every single one of their agenda.
They are very good at making memes that conflate sexual attraction with hate.
This is really common on transphobic memes and content as a whole, but this connects very well with Brazilian culture.
So a couple of clarifications.
You mentioned gun control.
They want to have less gun control?
Oh, yeah.
Bolsonaro just...
Brazil had...
There was gun control measures that Lula passed, you know, back in the day when he was president.
And they actually led to a very sharp reduction in homicide rate.
But Bolsonaro trying to do this whole, you know, coup plotting, militia, paramilitary movement, one of the first things that he promised to do was give everybody a gun.
Everyone's afraid of violence and public insecurity.
And so his solution is, why don't we just put more guns in the street?
That's going to fix the problem, obviously.
He actually very famously was on a motorbike back before he was a congressman.
And he was robbed at gunpoint.
And he had a gun, but it was sitting, it was under the seat in his motorcycle.
And so he obviously wasn't able to use it.
He got robbed.
He was humiliated.
The guy, they ended up finding him.
And he was, I guess he hung himself in prison somehow.
It just, I'm sure that wasn't Bolsonaro that did that.
He just, he ended up dead.
Yeah.
I talked about the story on that episode on Marielle.
Because the guy that found the gun back was Marielle Murders.
What?
Yeah.
I didn't know that.
You didn't know that?
No.
It was Rony Lassa.
Yeah.
Oh, Rony Lassa.
They said Marielle's mother.
Murderer.
Murderer.
Yeah, murderer.
Oh, murderer, right.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
There's also one last thing about the whole gun control thing.
Brazil has a very strong peasants movement, landless worker movement in Brazil.
So gun control is not exactly the same problem as in the U.S. Because gun control for farm owners means they can kill indigenous and peasants that were thrown out of their lands and so on more easily.
After Lula restricted gun control, the number of deaths in the...
Homicide.
In the rural communities.
Yeah, plummeted.
And that was a problem because those farmers, those big landowners hated this.
Yeah.
Fleet Wild West.
We actually did a series showing how the far right uses evangelical churches to, you know, as their base, you know, boots on the ground to build their community.
And then they created this secular version of that, which was the gun clubs.
This was the Bolsonaro, you know, church.
They built all these gun clubs.
And we did this series showing how the gun clubs in the Amazon were all popping up.
Next to the places that had the greatest rates of land conflict.
So, you know, peasants being murdered by big landowners.
And so they were using them as basically recruitment and training centers to then go on and steal land attack.
Also, some evangelical churches are making some militant armored groups.
Oh, yeah.
That's fun.
Like the Warriors of God and something like that.
And they leave church and buy some weapons and go to this shooting range and teach each other how to shoot and so on.
The biggest evangelical church is actually doing, like, sessions in the Sao Paulo police.
Like, the Sao Paulo police made a partnership with them, and they're getting, like, indoctrinated by the universal church, which is just obviously not supposed to be happening.
And it's part of this right-wing radicalization that's totally linked to this really fascist, evangelical, neo-Pentecostal movement.
Is there an issue with, because obviously evangelicals are Protestant and Brazil is a fairly Catholic country, is there any schism there?
I was surprised to hear that they were importing Protestant religious institutions.
It's increasingly going Protestant.
It's a much faster growing community because, you know, it's built like a business and they're doing all the different methods that they can to...
It's a neoliberal religion.
Yeah, convert.
But, Caio, tell them about Bolsonaro's.
Like, is he Catholic?
Is he Protestant?
Oh, yeah.
Which is hilarious.
Bolsonaro is married to a woman that is radical evangelical, but he's supposed to be a Catholic.
And he never actually say if he converted to evangelical or not.
He keeps doing the both stuff all the time.
And this reflects an alliance between the right-wing part of the church Of the Catholic Church.
Calfs are a really big part of the Brazilian society, so there is a very strong left-wing movement inside the Catholic Church.
Lula is part of this, but he keeps this foot on both boats at the same time.
But he also went to Israel and got baptized in the River Jordan to do all the symbolism that he was a Protestant.
But then you squeeze him.
If he's in a Catholic room, you're like, oh, no, I'm still Catholic.
And then if he's in a more Protestant...
Maybe, you know, he doesn't play...
You also don't know what team he supports, what soccer team.
He, like, has multiple jerseys and he's just sort of nebulous in that way.
He's really...
And it's not like shoe jersey.
He has, like, 10 or 20 jerseys.
Like, he's clearly, like, not a smart person.
Like, he's a dumbass.
But he does do certain things like, all right, this guy's actually pretty sharp.
Pandering, yeah.
Yeah.
So, I wanted to go back to the Disney princesses.
They think that women should be like Disney princesses or they think Disney is corrupting women?
They want more Cinderella, less Mulan.
None of this feminist, fighting, independent women stuff.
We want the woman who is small and dainty and finds her big hunky hero and traditional gender roles.
None of this gender ideology that's ruining our women.
I won't even bring up Star Wars because I don't even want to fucking talk about it.
I'm assuming they have a real take on the new Star Wars.
I haven't seen the newest one, but I'm sure they think that they're the Rebel Alliance and not the Empire.
Yeah, of course.
So yeah, just before we go, I did want to touch a little bit on how social media platforms work over there.
I mean, is there a relationship between big tech and the right?
Oh yeah.
I mean, big tech is, they are not good for our health.
I mean, obviously our mental health, but they have done so many things to fuck us over along the way.
And I say this particularly as someone who runs a newsroom because we've particularly been getting fucked over.
I mean, our traffic has been tanking because Google, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk now, they hate journalism.
They know that journalism is a pain in their ass.
It's an impediment to their power.
And they were the companies that came in and destroyed the funding mechanisms of journalism and put it in shambles.
They said, oh wait, we can just keep doing this.
Like, we can just, like, stop serving links and we can change the algorithm without telling them why.
And then all of a sudden, all the new sites are going to have a 30% drop in their traffic.
Oh, let's do it again next year.
Let's do it again next year.
So there's that baseline, which is the same as in the U.S. But, you know, we talked about Brazil Parallelo or Alando Santos.
They grew on Twitter and on YouTube, owned by Google.
YouTube would, you know, you do any sort of video, something about politics, like the history of, I don't know, colonization of Brazil, let's say.
And then within like one or two videos, you're going to get Brazil Parallelo or Orlando Santos or some other like far right, you know, red pilling channel that's going to be served to you as the next one, aside from the ads as well.
And they're getting these these in-stream ads.
And so they made millions and millions and millions of dollars from from Google, from YouTube, from all the different platform payment options.
And they were so slow to do anything about it because, you know, Google is making money.
I'm sure their employees aren't really a big fan of these thoughts, but like the people that run it, the people that are in control, they don't like the left-leaning politicians because they had things like Brazil had this very forefront internet regulation law that was done together with civil society and this process over many years that's trying to make the internet serve the public interest more than just the interest of these major corporations.
And so they fucking hated that, obviously.
And they hate the idea of being subjected to any sort of foreign policy.
laws.
They don't want to be subjected to Brazilian rules.
They don't have to pay money to journalists or have to take down people that are plotting coups.
You know, Google and Facebook have been more subtly, let's say, destroying the fabric of society.
And then you have Elon that came in and he just like, all right, let's stop playing games Let's just go straight in for the jugular.
And then he just went full on, you know, red pill on the Bolsonaro bandwagon and used his wealth and his power and his platform to just completely attack Alexandre de Moraes, the Supreme Court minister.
And...
go into this whole thing it's actually about freedom of speech how dare they attack freedom of speech like well there is freedom of speech also in brazil the laws about freedom of speech are different than the united states because it's a different country there are things that you can say there are things you can't say i have my criticisms of the freedom of speech laws here because they are used to censor journalism in a way that i think is completely absurd you know we have 25 lawsuits on our backs right now because anybody that you write about you don't have to
It can even be factual, and you can still lose the case because the legal system is sort of willy-nilly, and they know that, so they just throw suits at you all the time.
Like, that's a big problem.
That needs to change.
But that's not the issue that Alshandji Jumarais, that Elon is talking about.
The thing that Elon is talking about is that I'm not going to abide by these rulings saying that I need to get rid of their accounts.
Meanwhile, obviously, in Turkey, in India, name your far right, you know, country leader.
He's so happy to follow all their rules.
He'll censor the shit out of any leftists that they ask, no question asked, because he supports them.
But he's using this as a cudgel to attack the Brazilian democracy and the institutions of the country.
And so that's why Alexandre Morais shut down access to Twitter for over a month.
He was also maybe a personal friend of Monarky.
Monarky is a guy that I didn't put on the script because...
He's weird, but he has the hugest podcast in Brazil.
He's kind of a libertarian kid, and he's sometimes compared to Joe Rogan.
And I don't know if I should say that in front of Andrew, but after Glenn Greenwood went to Monarchy's program podcast, he was deeply convinced that Brazil should allow Nazi parties to be legalized, which is against the law in Brazil.
And after that, he kept saying stuff about it.
And in Brazil law, you can't sponsor Nazism.
It's against our law.
It's against our constitution, in fact.
So he was banned.
And apparently, Musk really liked this guy.
I don't know how they talk with each other since Monarch has a really broken English, but they talk each other somehow.
And he was really mad that Moraes ordered him, this guy, this guy, especially.
It was one of the seven accounts.
And, you know, on this struggle against Moraes, Justice Moraes, Elon Musk lost about $30 million and 5 million users or 5 million Brazilian users that went to Blue Sky and never came back.
So would you say that one of, you know, I mean, looking at these different big corporate interests, whether it's the big tech or the mainstream media or even some of these large landowners, would you say that they are kind of in the tank for right-wing politicians and even, you know, kind of fascism in Brazil because it directly improves their profit margins and ability to exploit the local population?
Brazil has three big right-wing caucus.
We call them BBB. It's a joke on Big Brother Brazil, Brazil's most famous reality show.
It is the Bible, the bovines, and the...
Bullets.
Bullets.
So it's gun control...
But it sounds like you could add the mainstream media and the big tech companies to those caucuses.
So they invented the fourth one.
It's the click caucus, we call it.
Oh, the cool guys.
The tech bros.
And, you know, the right wing in Brazil has used big tech to elect a lot of different congresspeople.
And they are the main support of this clique caucus.
And the problem with the clique caucus, differently from Bible bovines and bullets, is that they are in direct opposition to traditional conservatives in Brazil.
Since we don't have a district voting, traditional conservative candidates lose on our proportional systems their elections to guys that were TikTokers and there were YouTubers and so on.
So the traditional conservatives are in direct war if they click.
So this is a bit like the rift between MAGA and kind of like old school Republicans and neocons.
Exactly.
Even though they kind of get along most of the time.
Exactly.
And there is an electoral reason for them to rate each other.
So this clique caucus has a little bit more problem in the Congress.
But they are still growing and they are still being really, really nasty in their rulings.
But it's the main reason LGPD, that is this law that protects Brazilian internet, wasn't revoked during Bolsonaro's government.
Yeah, it's like a boxing match between the different types of billionaire parasites.
Yeah.
Great.
I think that should actually be the next TV show.
I mean, I would watch that.
I would pay for that.
You asked about what isn't the media involved.
And yeah, it is, except since the mainstream media sets the discourse, obviously they just sort of allied that part and they never get named as like I mean, that's one of the reasons why The Intercept Brazil exists, because we're one of the very few outlets that actually does media criticism and points out the media's failures because everyone else is afraid to do it because the resources are so scarce, the economy of the media is so shaky that everyone knows that they're about to be unemployed, basically.
And so they're afraid to get blackballed if they say one wrong thing.
And that happens very quickly.
quickly here, very frequently.
And so it sort of puts things in line.
And lastly, the BBB, the one, the cattle farming, that is the biggest parasite and the biggest cancer that exists in Brazil right now, cattle and soy.
I mean, these are the two industries that the Lula government and part of their, they keep pushing further to the right.
They chose them, cattle is one of the big industries that they're going to support because it's such so powerful, such a powerful, like traditional establishment elite.
And they've decided to just do this form of farming that is just destroying the environment, destroying the country, destroying their ability to make money in the future and is putting Brazil on this path that the Amazon's collapsed.
Which means that the water system in all of South America is going to collapse.
And you can imagine what's going to happen after that, you know, refugee crisis, war, whatever the case may be.
And everybody knows this.
Everybody knows that they are actively making it so that the entire economy is going to collapse because of their short-term profits that are like really not that big.
They're not making that much money, but they have that much power that they can do.
It's just the easiest way for them to make money.
And so they have control of the Congress.
They now have basically control of the left-wing parties, too, and Lula, who's basically now center-right in his economic policy.
And they are...
Putting Brazil on this path towards destruction that is going to impact the entire world.
You know, if the Amazon collapses, the entire world is fucked.
And this is what the stakes of this whole conversation is.
Like, I know it's really funny, like these crazy, you know, Wahoos that are doing this and that and shitting on desks and whatever.
And like, yes, we do need to laugh because it's like, But at the same time, the reality of what is at stake and what they're actually standing for is so monumental.
And I don't think most people actually understand how consequential these issues are.
And it's deeply connected with this story because we keep talking about financiers, financiers, financiers.
And in Brazil, we know who these financiers are.
It's cattle ranchers.
Yeah, agro.
Yeah, it's agro.
It's big agro.
It's cattle rancher.
That's it.
So you two have an idea of how this is deep and powerful.
Do you know which is the greatest cattle owner in the U.S. today?
No.
JBS. It's a Brazilian company.
Oh, fun.
Fun.
And they're the biggest, and they're also, they've been described as too big to fail.
Like, if you were to go after JBS in the U.S., which is not even their main base, right?
In Brazil, they're too big to fail.
But in the U.S., they've taken up such a big share of the meat industry that if you were to shut them down for all of the corruption and environmental regulations and labor violations they do in the U.S. too, not just in Brazil, that the meat distribution system in America would collapse.
Yeah.
Well, fellas, on that extremely cheerful note, but I think an important one, I appreciate both of you coming on the podcast.
I really love beef.
This is going to fuck my life up.
Yeah, but I think the other option is obviously worse.
Andrew, Caio, where can people find you and your work?
So I am on Blue Sky now because Twitter, you know, you don't really get a whole lot.
But the best place to find me would be at the Intercept Brazil.
We are on Blue Sky.
We're on all the social media channels.
We have a great newsletter.
We're trying to start doing some more stuff in English.
We partner with different outlets as well in English.
But you could follow us on our website intercept.com.br or the same on Blue Sky and on Instagram.
We're going to put all those links in the show notes, so please go and support The Intercept Brazil if you care about the world not being fucked.
So, gentlemen, thank you so much once again for coming on the podcast.
Thank you, my friend.
Thanks for having us.
Thank you for listening to another episode of the QAA podcast.
You can go to patreon.com slash QAA and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode every week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes.
Also, head to liveagar.com if you want to check out her stuff.
Lots of fun happening over there.
For everything else, we've got a website, qaapodcast.com.
Listener, until next week, may the BBBC bless you and keep you.
Thank you.
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I'm Arnold Schwarzenegger.
My first taste of carnival came at the nightclub Oba Oba.
Cheers.
Serra?
Serra?
How do you say it?
Saúde.
Saúde.
The Brazilians think that the sacral part of the woman is the ass.
And that's not how Americans think.
No, no, I agree with the Brazilian point of view, but, I mean, go ahead.
The Americans think it's the press.
Yeah.
Yeah, right, I agree with you.
I knew I had something in common with the Brazilian man.
I like that.
I like the Portuguese language, because it's so romantic.
