Ezra Levant reports on Brazil’s September 9th rally of 250,000+ protesters defying Lula’s government and judge Alexandra de Moraes’ censorship, which banned 22 million X users and barred Yair Bolsonaro from running. Attendees praised Elon Musk for resisting pressure on X, contrasting it with Meta’s compliance, while comparing de Moraes to dictators like Palpatine or Voldemort. Some poor Brazilians now back Bolsonaro due to his economic policies, fueling fears of authoritarian regression—until Trump’s potential U.S. victory shifts the tide. Footage and crowdfunding details for coverage (costing ~$3,000 CAD) are at thetruthaboutbrazil.com, underscoring free speech as Brazil’s battleground. [Automatically generated summary]
I'm in Brazil, so I'm using a VPN to get on the internet.
What's a VPN?
It stands for virtual private network, and you get around these government firewalls.
Suddenly, the president of Brazil banned his whole country from going on Twitter.
It was a political censorship news.
I've downloaded the VPN from a company called PIA VPN.
We've teamed up with them at Rebel, and it's a great deal.
I got on the internet really quickly, safely, and even I'm a bit of a technophobe.
I managed to figure it out with two clicks.
And here's the great news: if you go to piavpn.com slash rebel news, not only do you get a big discount, but they pay us a bit of a commission too.
Everyone's a winner.
Your freedom, your VPN, and a little bit of cash coming to support Rebel News.
I'm using it myself to get around the censors in Brazil.
You can use it too.
That's piavpn.com/slash rebel news.
Tonight, I went halfway across the world to see the largest free speech gathering I've ever witnessed.
It's September 9th, and this is the Ezra Levant show from Brazil.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Ezra Levant here for Rebel News.
I am in São Paulo, Brazil, one of the largest cities in the world.
There's about 20 million people in Sao Paulo.
It's really a whole country in the form of a city.
I'm here because I came in the night flight last night, landing early this morning, because I want to see what's going on in Brazil because there is a kind of civil war.
It's not really violent yet, but it feels like it could go that way.
On the one hand, you have their authoritarian president, Lula, as he's named, and his right-hand man, a crusading judge, Alexandra de Moraes.
And the judge has decided to censor and silence critics of Lula, and he does this through social media.
He has secret trials of political figures, of journalists, and orders that their Twitter account be silenced, censored, banned, suspended, deleted.
I'm sure he's doing that to the other social media companies too, like Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp.
But the only reason we know about it is because when Elon Musk bought Twitter and renamed it X, he decided to make it a free speech platform, not a censorship platform.
And so when this out-of-control activist judge started having secret trials and saying, you've got to suspend this political opponent of Lula, but you can't say anything about this trial.
We're having a secret trial with secret evidence and the outcome is secret.
Elon Musk said, whoa, no, that's not why I bought Twitter.
We're not going to go along with it and we're going to publicize this.
Well, you don't defy authoritarians in this part of the world easily.
And so they banned Twitter.
The only way I'm able to come to you by Twitter is I'm using something called a VPN, which if I'm not mistaken, stands for virtual private network.
It allows you to spoof the local internet and pretend that you're in Argentina or America instead of Brazil.
If I tried to use Twitter from Brazil, it wouldn't work.
I'm going on a VPN and it's working.
And for a while there, they had huge fines for anyone caught using a VPN.
By the way, I don't usually do this, but I want to give a shout out to the VPN I'm using.
And I downloaded it in about 30 seconds on my phone.
It's called PIAVPN.com.
And they actually give us a commission if you sign up for it.
So I'm going to toot their horn as a kind of advertiser.
By the way, it works great.
It was easy even for a technophobe like me.
If you go to piavpn.com slash rebelnews, you get a big discount and we get a couple of bucks.
Anyways, that's my commercial pics.
Thanks for letting me say it.
Actually, the only reason I mention him is because I've never had to use a VPN to get around censorship before.
And if you're back home in Canada, you're probably saying, well, what's the likelihood that I'll ever need a VPN to get around something that Trudeau is doing?
Rally in Brasilia00:16:08
Well, what do you think the odds are?
10%, 20%.
The answer is 100%.
He actually is already banning things for Canadian.
Try going on Facebook or Instagram to see any Canadian news story.
It'll be blocked.
You need a VPN in Canada to get around Trudeau's censorship.
That's why I recommend piavpn.com slash rebelnews.
I didn't know I needed it, but now I do.
Let me talk about Trudeau for one more minute.
He is proposing a new censorship law in Canada called Bill C63 that allows for the kind of secret trials they have here in Brazil.
The secret trials contemplated in Trudeau's law, Bill C63, allows the accuser to remain secret, allows witnesses to remain secret, and allows people to make complaints against neighbors or rivals and actually get a bounty of $20,000 per person that they rat out to the government.
So what's going on here in Brazil isn't just of interest to Brazilians.
It's of interest to everyone around the world because I promise you that other leaders, whether it's Kier Starmer in the United Kingdom, Kamala Harris in the United States, or Justin Trudeau in Canada, they are all looking at Brazil to see what can they get away with.
Now, the good news is there is an opposition in Brazil.
That's why we're here.
Today is the Independence Day of Brazil, and the chief opposition figure, Yair Bolsonaro, the former president, he's having a massive rally in this massive city of Sao Paulo.
It starts in about 90 minutes and we'll be there.
Lula, the communist authoritarian who's doing all the censoring, he's having his own counter rally in the capital city of Brasilia.
So in Brasilia, you've got the big Lula censorship rally, and in Sao Paulo, you've got the freedom rally for Bolsonaro.
And it'll be interesting to see how important Twitter is in that conversation.
I look forward to finding that out.
To sum up, I made it into the country okay.
As you know, I didn't announce I was coming until I was through customs because I wanted to make sure that I wasn't kept out.
I did disclose to them that I was here as a journalist to cover the Independence Day rallies.
I didn't get into the politics, but I was very candid at the border, and they were happy to see us come through.
I hope that that is a sign that things aren't quite as bad as I had feared.
But we'll give you the straight goods.
Sao Paulo as a city is fascinating.
The first thing that stands out is the graffiti.
It's just astonishing.
It's everywhere, but it's almost like it's being rebutted by massive murals on every block.
A huge skyscraper has a gorgeous, massive mural on it.
There are more murals in this city than maybe any other city in the world.
Now, unfortunately, there's more graffiti in this city than anywhere else in the world, too, but it's a visual feast for the eyes.
As we drove in, there's some astonishingly poor neighborhoods in Sao Paulo, and there were some unusual things.
We didn't stop, but we saw, I think, someone selling voodoo bones.
Like, there's a lot of exotic things.
Let me just use that adjective in this city.
But we're not here as tourists.
I can assure you that.
We are here to cover this rally.
We flew overnight.
Our head of video, Efraino as well, Flores Monsanto and myself, we flew overnight.
We can't even check into the hotel yet because it's not available.
We're going to go straight to the rally, do that all day, go to the hotel, and then probably do some more wrap-up journalism tomorrow, and then home we go.
We're going to have all our reports at a website called thetruthaboutbrazil.com, and that's what we want to do.
We want to follow the facts wherever they lead.
We just got here.
We haven't gone to the protest yet.
We're going with an open mind.
I speak no Portuguese.
A lot of Brazilians don't speak English, but I'm sure we'll find people to help us figure out what's going on.
You can follow us at thetruthaboutbrazil.com.
And the only way we're able to do that is because in this censorship jurisdiction where they have a China-style great firewall, we're using a VPN.
And I'm afraid that other tyrants around the world are watching the censorship here as sort of a lab experiment.
Can they get away with it or not?
I hope freedom rules the day.
And I'm glad that Elon Musk is throwing the weight of X, which is what he calls Twitter.
I'm glad he's throwing the weight of his companies and his own convictions behind the freedom side.
All right, we'll keep you posted.
I'm making my way on foot to the big Bolsonaro rally, which is also a free speech rally, which is also a rally against the censorship of the social media company called X, formerly called Twitter.
It's been a big battle.
An out-of-control judge named Alexandri de Moraes has been banning individual accounts of political opposition, and then the government just outright banned Twitter altogether.
Today is Independence Day.
So Yair Bolsonaro, who's basically the leading opposition figure, he's the former president, is having his rally in Sao Paulo, while Lula, the tyrannical, in my opinion, president, is having his rally in Brasilia, the capital.
You can see it's sort of gridlock on the way in.
I see lots of Bolsonaro supporters, some candidates.
He has adopted the colors of Brazil.
You can see the beautiful Brazilian flag, green and yellow.
It's also sports colors.
So you, I mean, I guess if you see someone today wearing green and yellow, they might just be supporting a football team or sports team.
But I get the feeling the closer we go to the rally, it's going to be a symbol of support.
I spoke to this young lady here who's selling this merch.
Unfortunately, she doesn't speak a word of English.
I'm ahead of her because I speak one word of Portuguese, which is obligato.
Anyways, oh, there you go.
Yeah, that's thank you.
Well, thank you for letting us film in front of your stuff.
I'll let you know how it goes.
We're going to keep walking in this 32 degrees Celsius heat.
That's about 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
I'm not built for hiking in that weather, but I'll do it for you.
We're just on the fringes of it.
You can see it's sort of a festival atmosphere.
Roads are closed, food trucks are here.
It's sort of like, I don't know, in Rio, they might call it Carnival.
And we're just at the fringes of it.
Politics is a huge affair in a country with 200 million citizens.
And it was a razor's edge by which Lula beat Bolsonaro in the last election.
Bolsonaro wants back in, but Lula's right-hand man, an extremist judge named Alexandro de Moraes, has actually issued a ruling saying that Bolsonaro is not eligible to run in the next election just by judicial fiat.
It's really modeled after the U.S. Democrat lawfare against Donald Trump.
Imagine just simply saying, you're not allowed to run again because I'm a judge and I say so, and I'm protecting democracy by not letting the opponents of the regime run.
That's how nutty it is in Brazil.
But that's another reason to be here.
Because although we might think of a Latin American country as perhaps not the heart of liberal democracy, this is a large democracy, 200 million souls.
And if they can get away with the kind of tyranny, lawfare, and chicanery, censorship, and abusiveness, really lurching back to a banana republic-style dictatorship, if they can do it here in Brazil, don't think for a moment that other leaders around the world won't think they can copy it, especially this censorship aspect.
We're going to make our way in.
Hopefully, we'll find some English speakers, but I had to stop and remark on sort of the party atmosphere.
That's Brazil for you.
But what's very interesting is how many signs are here for freedom of speech and for Elon Musk.
There are also signs saying Moraes, which means Mora es out.
Who is Mora És?
He is an extremist judge who has been conducting secret trials, censoring opposition leaders.
I'm going to show you this.
This guy right here is dressed up as Alexander de Moraes.
We have to have courage, the whole Brazil, the freedom is our own heritage, and we have to fight for the anistia of the people who are arrested, unjustly, who are parents and mothers of families.
This is the retrace of the justice that we have today, and it's not just to penalize him, Alexandre Moraes, but his parents, for the inertia and the lack of respect for the citizens of Brazil.
The Venezuela is there, we are going to pass, freedom is our own heritage, we have to fight for our freedom.
Liberty, y bota patora.
There he is.
You don't need to know Portuguese to know that.
He's a critic of Alexandro de Moraes, the extremist judge who wears a black cape like this and has a bald head like that.
What a character.
We've met a few of them in São Paulo.
Obligado.
Thank you, thank you.
Very good.
And look over there.
We're standing in front of the federal justice building, a very symbolic place.
You can see this is a stage from which the speeches will begin shortly.
Lots of Brazil flags.
I think they're calling Moraes a criminal.
We're going to try and get closer.
Why are you here?
I am American and Brazilian.
And why are you here today?
I'm here representing my friend Alon de Santos.
He's one of the journalists that is on exile in America due to Alexander de Moraes' actions, illegal actions.
Why is he in exile?
What did he do?
He's a journalist.
So he spoke the truth and now he's paying for it.
And what has Moraes done to him?
Took his passport, all his access, separated his family for over three years.
And what do you make of Moraes and Lula fighting against Elon Musk and Twitter?
They are wrong.
They are doing illegal things.
And Morai should be put in jail and paid for his actions.
We're right at the front.
This is the stage where the speeches will happen in a matter of minutes.
But even looking around the crowd is fascinating.
For example, look at those three flags at the top: the Brazilian flag, then the American flag, then the Israeli flag, which is a very interesting statement because Lula, the authoritarian leader of Brazil, is very sympathetic to different countries.
Iran, China, Cuba.
And I don't know if you can see it now, but there's a fellow there that has a sign saying Bolsonaro and Trump are both against communism.
There's lots of placards, some of which call for the ouster of Brazil's censorious judge, Alexander de Moraes.
There's posters for Elon Musk.
It's a very interesting mix.
These people care about freedom.
I love Alemasque.
I love Alex Musqueam.
Thank you.
Are you worried that Brazil is becoming a dictatorship again?
We are already a dictatorship.
How many people are expected today?
We are expecting hundreds of thousands of people.
The last manifestation that we had was about a million people.
And how about Lula in Brasilia?
What do you think is about his counter-protest?
Brasilia de Jerofé.
Today is a Brazilian independence.
They hold a parade that nobody supported.
The people of Brazil do not.
It's a Trump-style rally, but this ain't Pennsylvania.
It's Sao Paulo, Brazil.
And they're introducing Jair Bolsonaro, sometimes called the Donald Trump of Brazil.
He used to be the president.
Then the left-wing regime won by a sliver.
They've been conducting lawfare against him ever since.
This is one of his comeback rallies.
But more than that, it's a rally for freedom of speech.
Because just like in Canada, America, and elsewhere, the authorities are cracking down on social media.
Yair Bolsonaro is on the stage.
We'll stand by for his speech shortly.
we're also president and first queen using Brazil.
Father, who passed to the very comoces and vasiuda.
Muyto brigado all day.
O Brazil, or Brazil, se la libre.
Brazil, a field tud.
Do you see that sign there?
Fora Alexandro de Moraes.
That means get out, Morayas.
Let me explain that for Americans and Canadians.
In Canada and the United States, there's lawfare that is using and abusing the courts to criminalize your political opponents.
Here in Brazil, they take it to a whole new level.
They have secret trials and ban politicians and journalists in secret trials and order social media companies to block them.
Only Twitter says no.
And so now the tyrannical regime of Lula and Moraes are seizing assets belonging to Elon Musk.
That's why we're here today on a whistle-stop trip to São Paulo.
We're going home tomorrow.
We're just here for today and tomorrow morning.
We've walked about a block off the main drag on each side of the podium there.
There's got to be a mile of people.
And we were jammed together so closely.
I tell you, it was like a bride and groom.
It's about 32 degrees or about 90 Fahrenheit, but when you're jammed up with people like that, it's 37 degrees.
It's body temperature.
They were passing out little chilled containers of water near the front.
I think they were worried people were going to faint.
95% of the remarks have been in Portuguese, which unfortunately I speak very little of.
But there was a particular mention of Elon Musk in English thanking Elon Musk for providing Twitter and through Twitter a freedom of speech social media platform that has not been censored.
Well, let me correct myself.
Freedom Of Speech Fight00:11:31
It has been ordered to be censored by an activist judge, Alexander de Moraes, but Twitter has resisted, which by omission suggests that the other social media companies have complied.
By the way, historically, the conservative freedom-oriented president before the current left-wing authoritarian president, Yair Bolsonaro, he organized using WhatsApp, the social media app that is owned by Meta.
So they've cracked down on his party's use of WhatsApp, and Mark Zuckerberg and Meta are fine with that.
Same with Instagram and Facebook.
Only Elon Musk's social media app of Twitter has stood up against this activist judge.
And so you saw signs in the audience with praise for Elon Musk, thanking Elon Musk, and there was a shout out to him in English from the podium.
It was interesting looking at the crowd.
And again, I find it hard to measure a crowd when you're in the middle of it.
We put our drone up and I saw some images on our videographer's phone.
It looked enormous.
I don't think I've ever been to such a large protest in my life.
I mean, even the truckers was measures in tens of thousands.
But here, I think they measure their protests in hundreds of thousands and occasionally by the million.
Makes sense in a country with 200 million souls.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were 200,000 here today.
But there was an observation because I go to protests around the world.
I went to a protest a few months ago, you might recall, in Dublin, Ireland.
And one of the things I look for are the flags.
What flags were there here today?
Well, obviously, there was the Brazilian flag, green and yellow.
You probably know it.
It's an interesting flag.
And Bolsonaro has adopted the colors of the Brazilian flag as his own campaign colors.
But in addition to the green and yellow of the national flag, there were American flags.
And I must say, there were quite a few Israeli flags.
What I did not see at all was a single pro-Hamas Gaza flag, not a single one in the audience, because simply that's not reflected by the grassroots will of this country.
I contrast that to the allies of the incumbent president, Lula is his name, who is allied with the likes of Iran, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, and China.
Now, I don't speak any Portuguese, so I wasn't much good at understanding what was said from the stage, but it was a high-energy Trump-like rally.
That is, lots of energy, music.
They have their own Bolsonaro theme song that they played.
They also played what I think was the Brazilian national anthem.
And it was beautiful to see so many Brazilians sing along quite passionately.
I've never been to Brazil before, but one thing you'll note right away is the racial heterogeneity of the country.
They have people of all different backgrounds, black, white, indigenous.
And I would guess just from anecdotal observation, that most Brazilians are a mix of the above.
To see a rainbow of colors of people united in singing a patriotic anthem was actually quite a moving thing.
Again, that's Trump-like.
I don't think you would have that on parties of the left as well.
We found it difficult to upload video in real time because there must be 50,000 people trying to stream this event on their cell phone.
So even though we were using a VPN and we bought extra data, it slowed to a crawl.
So we're going to go to a local cafe and upload our videos.
But it was a fascinating experience.
That's what I'm going to go do now.
Go and upload the video so you can see them live.
And we will come back.
There's just so many people here.
It's almost a certainty they'll be here for hours more.
On our way in, we saw lots of food trucks.
It's got that Carnival feeling to it.
It's such a hot day.
People are selling cold water, cold pop, cold beer.
It's a Brazilian experience, and it's an experience for freedom.
And we're not done yet.
There's very few people here who speak English.
And because of that, it's hard to understand what they're saying.
And it's hard to do streeters, which is one of our favorite ways of doing journalism.
It's also a sign that people here don't follow rebel news.
I've been in places all around the Anglosphere, and people recognize rebel news, but not here in Brazil.
They haven't heard of us.
They simply don't speak English.
But George overheard me speaking in English, and he came up and wanted to share his thoughts because I am eager to hear from someone in English.
We'll now ask George what's cooking here today.
All right, then.
I can tell you that today it is one of the most important rallies on our country.
Today is our Independence Day and we celebrate that, celebrating also our liberty.
Because without liberty, without freedom, you don't have any independence at all.
So all of that you are seeing here today, we are about to reach over a million.
Over a million people here.
Last time it was 750,000 in this avenue.
Today we are reaching out for over a million to speak for freedom, to speak against the banning of the X from our country, to speak for freedom of speech.
So X, you mean Twitter, as it's now called X.
So are you a Twitter user yourself, an X user?
Yes, I am.
Now, do you still use it?
I understand they tried to ban people from using a VPN.
Do you currently have access to X or Twitter right now?
Only if we use the VPN, but as we are banned, we cannot use it.
So this Alexandro de Moraes, he actually, he shut up 22 million people that use X or the next Twitter here in Brazil.
So 22 million.
It's a lot.
It's a lot.
22 million.
And when is the next election, is it a fixed date?
When will the next election be in Brazil?
For our mayors and House of Deputies, it's going to be here next October.
But for president 2026, that's for our next election for president.
Now I understand that the same judge, the Moraeus, who's banned Twitter, has also ordered that Yair Bolsonaro is not allowed to run in the next election.
Is that the current state of the law?
All right, then as what they did, it is they turned at Bolsonaro unelected for the next election.
But now there will be many of the some of the House of Deputies they are fighting for to get back his right to be elected as president again.
So what we are looking for is to be sure that he will be our next president because he's the only one who has fought for our freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of thinking, freedom of thought.
So he's the one that actually should be in that chair today.
Let me ask you this.
You speak about freedom and I saw a lot of people here with placards about freedom.
But when I came in from the airport, I passed through some extremely poor neighborhoods.
There's an enormous number of homeless people in parts of Sao Paulo, grindingly poor.
Do they think about freedom?
Would they vote for Bolsonaro or would they vote for Lula, the socialist, because he's promising to take money from the rich to give to the poor?
You seem to care about freedom, but what about people who are shockingly poor?
Before, I can answer that there's the history.
Before, people from northeast of Brazil, they used to vote for Lula because Lula used to give them money.
Bolsonaro did different.
Bolsonaro gave them jobs.
Bolsonaro gave them the freedom to work and have their own money without the pinning of the government.
So I'm pretty sure that today we have a lot of minds that were for Lula before transformed into go to Bolsonaro today because they saw that you only reach our freedom economically, freedom of speech, if you have independence, if you work, if you are capable to have your own salary.
So that's what Bolsonaro was doing.
Instead of giving money, he was giving jobs.
He was creating jobs around the country.
So that will make, for example, foreigner investors to invest in Brazil, to invest in companies, in the industry, in everything that we needed here.
So Bolsonaro was on the right path for our prosperity.
And now we are seeing everything that you are seeing around the country.
Our DAFIS is go over and beyond the charge.
Do you understand?
So now Bolsonaro was able to keep that in check.
And actually, we have over money, not over Dafist.
Do you understand?
So we have money enough to do all those social programs that the left wing used to do it only by giving money.
Bolsonaro was able to give jobs.
And that's what is important for the people.
For you to know how you catch your own fish, not only be giving.
All right, George, great to catch up with you.
Thanks very much.
There you have it.
George, one of the few protesters we've seen today who speaks English.
A lot of similarities between how they attacked Donald Trump in America and how they attract Bolsonaro here.
Using lawfare, censoring, demonizing.
It'll be interesting to see what terrible lessons Lula teaches Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Justin Trudeau.
To follow along, go to thetruthaboutbrazil.com.
Why are you here?
This place is a good fast, awesome fast.
The future of Brazil is in Bolsonaro in ever Brazilians.
Why do you like Bolsonaro?
I like very.
Can I speak in Portuguese?
Bolsonaro did a lot for our country, especially during the pandemic.
He did things that no other president, before he was prepared to do.
He acted with a strong hand, of course with the direction of God, but he managed to remove our people from a situation that, until then, any other president before he was able to do.
My Portuguese is as good as your English.
Fighting for Freedom00:13:51
What do you think about freedom and freedom of expression?
The freedom of expression is something that is expected in our constitution as a pétria clause.
And I say that the power of power is not respecting the freedom of expression in our country.
So we are here as a way of protest to make it valer this constitution that they so much prez.
But they are acting in a kind of hypocrisy because they say that they respect but they don't respect.
So that's why we are fighting for our freedom of expression, even if we have to pay a high price, but we are fighting not only for the generations of today, but for the future generations.
What about Libertad?
What about freedom of speech?
What I think about the free speech, I think it's fundamental in any democracy, in any fact, in any way.
The right to speak is basic.
There's no need to discuss.
It's a natural right for us.
It is defended and can be expressed.
Do you use social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, X?
What do you have to say to Elon Musk, the owner of X?
What would you say to Elon Musk?
I want to express myself, I'm against the system, but they don't let me talk.
So it was a door that closed for me.
Tell me why you brought the flag israeli today.
Because Brazil is historic, Brazilian Christian, and Christianism, Brazil, for Brazil, decided to find Brazil, and Brazil.
And Brazil is not here.
I also saw some American flags.
What do you think of those?
Because the verse of the United States of Latin America Christianism.
Christianism is scared that Chiran is spillaris due to Christianism.
And there is a musketeer.
So that great portion of Brazil and democracy.
So I think all these people are You know, I asked as many people as I could, why did you come to the big rally today?
And over and over, the number one answer I got was freedom, civil liberties, freedom of expression.
It's not something you normally hear.
People go to rallies for partisan reasons or even for economic pocketbook issues.
But to go to talk about freedom of speech, I was impressed.
Many of them talked specifically about Elon Musk, and they call it X here.
They don't use the old word Twitter.
I asked them, if you had one message to say to Elon Musk, what would it be?
Boy, I got an earful.
Take a listen.
Why were you here today?
Why did you guys come to the rally?
We came here today because we are fighting for our freedom.
You know, we listened to and we saw all the things that Elon Musk showed to us, and we here for fighting for our freedom.
You know, Elon Musk inspired us.
I know that both Lula and Moraes have publicly criticized Musk.
It's easy to be against the world's richest man.
It's easy to be against a foreign person.
Our ordinary Brazilians, how do they feel about Elon Musk?
Do they even know who he is?
You know, most of the people are with Elon Musk because we see what's going on.
We know what is right.
And that's why we think that we support him.
But it's easy to be at Lula's side right now.
Do you use social media like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook?
No, she is anymore.
X anymore.
Aye.
You used to use X?
Yes.
Used to use no more.
They cut off.
Don't you know this?
I do know this.
I use a VPN to get around them.
My husband has a VPN because he's from the United States.
But the girl who use VPN here, they catch too.
They don't want to use because you go X from VPN.
They block this too.
Well, I might be in trouble because I'm using X to the VPN.
I'm for other countries.
You are at Brazilia.
It's okay.
Do you use social media?
Yes, I use.
I used to.
My favorite was Twitter, like X, but now I'm using Blue Sky, Instagram, TikTok.
I use a lot of social media.
So you stopped using X when it was banned by the government?
I stopped it because more.
Elon Musk has stood up to Alexandro de Moraes very noisily and he's pushed back.
What do you think of that?
I think it's good for Brazil because he's not Brazilian, but he's gonna help us a lot.
So go for Broquiatos quarterly here.
So he's blocked.
But we can't use it anymore, it's blocked.
So you use VPN?
Do you use VPN?
If I say this, it's dangerous to be mutated.
So it's $50,000.
If I say that I use VPN, I'm subject to a fine of $50,000.
Which will be $10,000 fine.
But we'll give it a little.
We are here because this, because he led us to talk in the biggest platform of Brazil.
So we are here to fight for this platform and our freedom of speech.
I love Elamasque.
I love Elon Musk.
Brazil, love Elamasque.
Thank you.
If you had one message you could send to Elon Musk today, what would it be?
We are on your side.
How do you feel about Elon Musk?
He's taken a great interest in Brazil.
I love Elon Musk.
Oh, love Elon Musk.
He's helping us so much.
I hope so because he has a lot of power, a lot of money, a lot of everything.
I hope he can help us.
You trust him a lot.
If you had one message for the owner of X, Elon Musk, what would it be?
Brazil, we need to fight for our future and we need to stop more ice.
Hello, Musk.
Thank you for fighting for our freedom.
We are with you.
Thank you very much.
You are the friend of Brazilian people.
Elon Musk, help us, please, please.
Musk, FICA FEMI, non-animal, because Brazil is going to be the most important thing.
No, but you have many.
So, my, I'm so happy for Musk.
So, all the censorship that Elon Musk is fighting against, Mark Zuckerberg is accepting and rolling over.
For all our reports from Sao Paulo, go to thetruthaboutbrazil.com.
And if you like this journalism, please help cover the cost of our citizen activism journalism.
It's about $4,000 all in for my cameraman and I to come down from Canada for a couple days.
You can chip in at thetruthaboutbrazil.com.
Thanks.
We're a couple of blocks away from the big rally.
On a fence, I see this enormous banner, impeachment of the dictator, Alexandro de Moraes, and a shocking picture of him.
He is quite easy to caricature because he's got a completely shaved bald head and he wears this black cape like he's some, I don't know, member of the Spanish Inquisition or some quasi-religious high priest.
And the reason they call him a dictator is because he has unilaterally banned anyone that comes to his attention who criticizes the current left-wing regime.
He's ordered the leader of the conservative opposition, the Trump-like figure here, Yair Bolsonaro, he's banned him from running again.
And he's basically declared war on Elon Musk because Elon Musk won't go along with his censorship.
It's quite incredible to see that personified in one man.
And you might look at that and say, that's just such a shocking, grotesque image, bloodthirsty.
But I think that Moraes actually cultivates that image.
No one wears a black cape and has that astonishing look by accident.
He really thinks he's some high emperor.
And the trouble is, Brazil is not so far removed from a military dictatorship past.
I have to tell you, he would be at home being a ruler of any chinpot banana republic.
That's what he's trying to turn Brazil into.
Yair Bolsonaro wants to make it more freedom-oriented.
It'll be interesting to see which way that goes.
But I just have to stop and remark on this banner.
Why did you come to the Bolsonaro rally today?
I come here because I'm here to defend uh, the free of Brazil.
Because Chandon is uh, he's freedom of speech.
He's closing our, our mouse.
Oh really, because Lula is doing that, or more is.
Um, that's the judge.
He's a judge.
He's uh, Lula is just a toy for him.
It's just a toy.
This Alexandro De Moraes, he actually he shut up 22 million people that use x, or the next tweeter here is in Brazil.
So 22 million, it's a lot.
It's a lot, 22 million.
I think, in the United States, what they're doing to Donald Trump?
Trying to censor him, trying to take legal action against him.
I feel like they're doing the same thing here as well.
Uh, and this Alexander De Moraj I think he's a radical judge does it look likely that he'll be impeached or do you think he's going to continue doing what he's doing?
I think he is unfortunately, going to keep doing what he's doing, which is a shame for us Brazilian, because this he doesn't represent us, but I hope one day it will stop.
They're gonna be one impeachment.
They're gonna ask to impeach this time.
Have a lot of power the judge, Alexander Demoraj.
Yeah yeah, then it's gonna be a lot of power.
This impeachment for nights.
I hope so you win.
So who's more powerful?
Lula or more Lula is?
He's just a part of this wrong thing, this bad thing in Brazil.
Now I understand that this same judge, De Moraes, who's banned Twitter, has also ordered that Yair Bolsonaro is not allowed to run in the next election.
Is that, is that, the current state of the law?
All right then as uh, what they did it is, they turned Bolsonaro unelected for the next uh election, but now there will be many of the some of the house of deputies they are fighting for to get back his right to be elected as president again.
So what we are looking for it is to be sure that he will be our next president.
I don't usually do this, but I want to give a shout out to the vpn i'm using and I downloaded it in about 30 seconds on my phone.
It's called Piavpn.com and they actually give us a commission if you sign up for it, so i'm gonna toot their horn as a kind of advertiser.
By the way, it works great.
It was easy, even for a technophobe like me.
If you go to Piavpn.com, slash Rebelnews, you get a big discount and we get a couple of bucks.
Street Festival Rally00:04:19
Anyways, that's my commercial picture.
Thanks for letting me say it.
I'm worried that what we see with Lula and Demorés is lurching back in time towards a less free Brazil.
Do you feel that way?
Are you worried that Brazil will become a kind of dictatorship?
I am afraid of that and I hope things change in the future.
I hope Donald Trump wins to help us, because it's a terrible country to live right now.
Why does Mauraise wear the black cape?
I find that very weird.
Me too.
Me too, I can't understand why he's the judge because he's not judge here.
Does he think he's maybe like a high priest or a head of the Inquisition?
It's almost like he's dressing up in a Halloween costume as some emperor or something.
Like Voldemort.
Yeah, or Palpatine in Star Wars.
I think he's like Voldemort here for my friends.
And I, he's Voldemort.
And what do you think?
He's just a monster.
Well, it's about 5.15pm here in Sao Paulo.
And the rally for Yer Bolsonaro and Freedom is officially over.
People are slowly making their way home, but I got to say, it's still that festival feeling, that car naval feeling.
There's so many food trucks and stands selling stuff.
People are in no rush to get home.
They blocked off all these streets.
So it's sort of turned into a street festival.
Lots of beer is drunk here in Brazil.
I can testify to that.
Everyone's so friendly.
You know, when we do what we call streeters or man on the street interviews in Toronto, people or New York, people are too rushed.
They sort of brush you off.
They're sort of gruff about it.
But I found that everyone here was very polite.
Now, I have to say, very few spoke English.
We did manage to find someone.
We found a fella who helped us translate.
But there's such a friendliness here to Brazil.
It was very welcoming.
And I mean, I suppose this is all a Brazilian society, but it's such a diverse mix of people from different ethnic backgrounds.
It really is an amazing looking people.
And the harmony is quite something.
My favorite part of today, I have to tell you, was when we were right at the front in the rally, and they sang the Brazilian anthem, at least what I think was a Brazilian anthem.
And everyone sang it with passion.
And to see faces of every race and ethnicity sing that unifying song, I was touched by it.
I was touched by how many Brazilian flags I saw.
And it was notable that I didn't see a single Hamas flag the whole time.
There were some Israeli flags, some American flags.
These people know what they believe in.
It's hard to measure the size of a crowd when you're in one.
How could you possibly do that?
We flew our drone part of the way down a street, but I think there were some GPS limitations in this area.
I saw a lot of other drones.
So we just showed one half of the street, but there was as many people on the other half of the street too.
I heard someone give an estimate.
I don't even want to repeat it because I don't believe that there were a million people.
I just find that hard to believe.
But do I believe there were more than 100,000 people here today?
Absolutely, I do.
We'll have to see what the police estimate is.
Wouldn't surprise me if it was a quarter million.
That's how they roll.
I mean, think about it.
Brazil is the kind of place that puts 100,000 people in a soccer stadium.
So they're used to coming out.
And there's some entertainment here.
I mean, there were some great speakers.
There was even some songs.
They've got their Bolsonaro song that's pretty catchy.
Like I say, sort of a festival feeling.
I was sort of squished and crushed near the front.
And it was extremely noisy at the front.
So I wasn't very able to do some journalism there.
But I enjoyed the streeters that I did after.
And everyone here, when you asked them, why did you come here?
Why did you come to this rally?
They all answered the word freedom, every single one of them.
And that's impressive to me that people care about something like that.
Why They Came For Freedom00:00:25
We'll have some more reports that we put up over the next little while.
We've got to go and edit them.
You can follow all those at thetruthaboutbrazil.com.
And by the way, Efron and I crowd, we're crowdfunding our tickets to come out here.
Two economy class airfares, about $3,000 Canadian combined, plus a hotel room and some taxis.
If you can help chip in, you can do that right there about the truthaboutbrazil.com.