May 19, 2024 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
52:00
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| So if you, if you get a time travel machine and you go back to 2019 and decided to tell me, look, Paul, this is how Brazil will be in 2024. | ||
| I would say, no, you're completely out of your mind. | ||
| Five years now, things won't change that fast. | ||
| But they did. | ||
| And it was very gradual, but nonstop. | ||
| And that was a problem. | ||
| And Malula, so four years of like one freedom after the other taken away. | ||
| Joining me today is an award winning journalist and content creator who's been censored by | ||
| the Brazilian Supreme Court and is also a Brazil and Latin America specialist. | ||
| Paulo Filho, welcome finally to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you for having me, Dave. | ||
| I am glad to have you. | ||
| They have told me that you are the Dave Rubin of Brazil. | ||
| That means we have common enemies, I suppose. | ||
| We do. | ||
| I'm not as good looking, but I do my best. | ||
| We got matching beards, something like that. | ||
| And the hair is getting similar. | ||
| Now that I showed it, yeah. | ||
| Well, it's a pleasure to have you here. | ||
| I've been tracking you for a couple of years now, and I remember when you sort of came on the scene into my world, and I think a lot of the issues that you guys are dealing with in Brazil are very similar to the issues we're dealing with here. | ||
| in America, but for some of my audience that just has no idea who you are, can we do a little background check? | ||
| You just told me a couple things about your business past that I actually wasn't aware of that I think people will | ||
| find interesting and that will get into the issues of the day. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| My background was actually in the business world. | ||
| I worked in the public sector for a few years when I was young as a staff from congressman and then on the city hall of Rio. | ||
| And I learned a lot. | ||
| Then I went back to the private sector, to my family business, and I was fairly successful. | ||
| I did a lot of things in Brazil I'm proud of. | ||
| One of them was, I was telling you, I was partner of the Trump Organization in Brazil. | ||
| I worked on building the Trump Hotel, Rio de Janeiro, and that didn't work well at all. | ||
| No, why not? | ||
| People like telling their stories. | ||
| This is pre-presidential, Rondon. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Actually, we started on 2011 or 2012, so I was just a fan of Trump as a businessman. | ||
| And of course, I met him in person several times, and I was very well impressed with him. | ||
| And, uh, but then we built a hotel and in 2016, when he decided to run for president, that was very bad for business. | ||
| So it was bad in multiple senses. | ||
| Uh, part of our luxury crowd, uh, just decided they don't, didn't want to have anything to do with a Trump hotel because we cater to a lot of artists and, you know, the woke people. | ||
| Was it successful before then financially? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| It was doing all right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But also the fact that we became a target immediately. | ||
| They opened an investigation on the day he was elected president, the Brazilian D.A. | ||
| Today we're two days difference. | ||
| The Brazilian D.A. | ||
| opened an investigation against all Trump organization's projects in Brazil. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| They even issued an arrest warrant against me. | ||
| It was like a nightmare. | ||
| I spent nine months on the Interpol red notice list. | ||
| Just for being Donald Trump's partner. | ||
| Ultimately, they closed the case against me. | ||
| They said, well, you were not supposed to be charged. | ||
| This was procedurally wrong. | ||
| But it was quite an experience. | ||
| And then one day I just decided when I sold a portion of my company that I would dedicate myself to journalism. | ||
| I went to journalism school when I was young. | ||
| And my thing was that I always thought that the Brazilian coverage of US politics was totally biased. | ||
| Although the correspondents do is just read the New York Times and watch CNN and report that and we know how inaccurate is that. | ||
| The Rubin report was already on back then? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I just started to tell the Brazilian people the other side of the news. | ||
| So there were really no Brazilian outlets that were doing that sort of thing, leading to a guy like you watching a show like mine, because online at least you can get a counter viewpoint. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And I think that's the future. | ||
| And you have been very successfully showing that for a long time. | ||
| And one day they invited me to be a guest speaker in a Brazilian TV. | ||
| It went out well. | ||
| They offered me a role as a full-time commentator. | ||
| It went out very well. | ||
| My videos started going viral, especially because I like debating and I could debate with the leftists on air live. | ||
| And that's something I enjoy doing. | ||
| And everything started going viral. | ||
| And by the end of 2022, I was hosting the number one political show in the country. | ||
| We used to have, most of the days, we used to have more viewers than Tucker Carlson. | ||
| So it's like millions of people watching. | ||
| And that was until January 9th, 2023. | ||
| So one day after the January 8th in Brazil, which is our January 6th. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Then they fire all the conservative commentators. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, why don't you tell people what happened on that day in case they don't remember? | ||
| So Brazil is very similar to the U.S. | ||
| in many ways. | ||
| But what astonishes me sometimes is because I cover U.S. | ||
| politics to Brazil, and I cover sometimes Brazilian politics to the U.S. | ||
| Sometimes it looks like I'm talking about the same thing. | ||
| It's just a different accent. | ||
| One of the most similar things we have was the January 8th in Brazil, which was, well, | ||
| we had an election that a lot of people challenged. | ||
| They tried the courts. | ||
| The courts didn't do anything. | ||
| The media started saying that any critics, it was just, they were just lying, spreading | ||
| misinformation. | ||
| And that was the big lie as well. | ||
| The election was perfect. | ||
| And people got revolted, and on January 8th, a bunch of people, and of course it was completely | ||
| wrong, they decided, they started a protest in the Brazil capital. | ||
| And ultimately, they really, like, it was a riot that went completely out. | ||
| It started kind of peaceful though, right? | ||
| From what I remember at the beginning, and then, yeah. | ||
| So a thing that Brazil has very interesting, and we held demonstrations this last week in Rio. | ||
| Probably 50, 100,000 people were there. | ||
| Very peaceful. | ||
| And a month ago we had 1 million people in the streets of Sao Paulo. | ||
| Very peaceful. | ||
| And we have been having that for a long time. | ||
| So Brazil, the Brazilian conservatives have a history of being very peaceful. | ||
| But that day was different. | ||
| That day was different. | ||
| Not only because the level of revolt was just higher. | ||
| People were really upset. | ||
| Did everyone expect Bolsonaro to win? | ||
| Was that what was so jarring about it? | ||
| It's interesting because we live in a weird world in a sense. | ||
| Again, very similar to the United States, Bolsonaro holds a rally, you get hundreds of thousands of people there going nuts. | ||
| Lula slash Biden holds the rally. | ||
| And there's like circles, no one there. | ||
| And that created the perception to people, including to President Bolsonaro. | ||
| He used to tell me, I'm going to have 70% of the votes. | ||
| They're going to try to steal the election, but I'm going to have 70% of the vote. | ||
| I'm more popular now than I was on the first time I ran. | ||
| And he heard this kind of word. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I mean, that's what Trump's saying now. | ||
| He keeps saying, well, we just have to overwhelm them. | ||
| And it's like, all right. | ||
| All right, well, yeah. | ||
| Brazil has a few problems with its electoral system. | ||
| U.S. | ||
| has its own problems as well. | ||
| Some are unbelievable. | ||
| Like in Brazil, let me brag about the advantages we have in Brazil. | ||
| Everybody votes on the same day. | ||
|
unidentified
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You definitely need an ID to vote. | |
| Wow, look at you guys from the future. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Let me brag about it. | ||
| But on the flip side of it, every Democrat's dream come true on the sense that it's fully electronic. | ||
| With no paper trail, so it's impossible to recount. | ||
| And everything is centralized in a federal court that oversees the elections. | ||
| And that was an actual proposal that the Biden administration submitted to Congress in the beginning of his term, to have everything centralized, a federal election. | ||
| And in Brazil, the guy who oversees that, this court, is a guy that became famous for his beefs now with Elon Musk. | ||
| In these last couple of weeks, yeah. | ||
| We'll get to that, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's a problem because the number on a machine, it's a number, you type a number, the number of a candidate. | ||
| And just pray that your vote will be counted right. | ||
| And if it was not, there's no way to audit. | ||
| It's just a byte. | ||
| It's a number that goes to a computer, which is centralized in a court that's managed by a guy that hates Bolsonaro. | ||
| And you add that with several challenges that people did on courts. | ||
| And if you think the courts were not very considerate to the challenges that Trump did in 2020 in the U.S. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| And Brazil was way worse. | ||
|
unidentified
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Way worse. | |
| Because this guy had the authority to decide everything by himself. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And as you said, this is now the guy fighting with Elon Musk. | ||
| But before we get to that, so now Lulu is in charge. | ||
| It seems to me, is it fair to say, is he a communist? | ||
| Is he a Marxist? | ||
| Like, is he an avowed communist or do people just call him communist? | ||
| He brags about it. | ||
| People say, people call me a communist. | ||
| They think they offend me. | ||
| I'm a proud communist. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So you've got a communist leader. | ||
| How now in the, you know, year plus since then, has that changed the country? | ||
| Well, very badly in several senses. | ||
| So, of course, the first thing that happens is that The budget went nuts, like the government's overspending. | ||
| Just Lula increased the national deficits in one trillion reais, which is roughly $200 billion in one year. | ||
| The public deficit, it's completely out of control. | ||
| The dollar, the exchange rate with the Brazilian real is, the dollar skyrocketed, so the Brazilian real is devaluating. | ||
| Crime went up a lot. | ||
| But definitely the area that we can feel the most is on individual freedoms. | ||
| Because to be fair, everything that's happening in Brazil didn't start with Lula. | ||
| It started with Bolsonaro, was done by the Supreme Court by this guy, Alexandre de Moraes, which is a Supreme Court Justice. | ||
| He was definitely the lead guy on all that. | ||
| And he's the guy that rules Brazil right now. | ||
| Not that Lula doesn't have any power, but... | ||
| Murai's is way more powerful there. | ||
| And he also kind of looks like a bad guy. | ||
| We'll put some images in here so that people can see. | ||
| It's like, this is right out of, you guys look at it. | ||
| It's right out of Star Wars. | ||
| I mean, if I was going to cast a movie or something, I was like, if I was going to cast a movie and I would have the lineup, I was like, that guy immediately, he looks like a James Bond villain. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Dresses like one, the whole thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And Elon calls him Voldemort from Harry Potter. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But he's the guy, that's the guy who's ruling the country. | ||
| But while he had Bolsonaro as a president, He had someone on his way, so he couldn't go crazy because they were always afraid, in a sense, of Bolsonaro doing something against them. | ||
| And Bolsonaro was the president. | ||
| The president can do a lot. | ||
| He can do something. | ||
| But since Lula got in office, Lula and Moraes are completely aligned. | ||
| So now the persecution, which originally involved only institutions that belong to the judiciary now is done in a | ||
| Collusion with the executive branch. | ||
| So it's way more powerful. | ||
| The scope of the persecution is way bigger, to the point that Bolsonaro can't run again. | ||
| Is he even in the country right now? | ||
| I know he kind of fled immediately after. | ||
| So he's back and he's living freely? | ||
| So this is what happened. | ||
| Bolsonaro immediately, one day before his term finished, He came to the United States and he spent three months here. | ||
| I think he was here in Miami. | ||
| He was in Orlando, central Florida area. | ||
| But he's been here in Miami several times. | ||
| But he decided that it was a good idea to go back to Brazil. | ||
| I think that was a mistake. | ||
| One of the reasons why he decided it was a good idea to go back to Brazil is because the Democrats gave him such a hard time while he was here. | ||
| They threatened to extradite him, although he was not being charged of any crimes back then. | ||
| The media was treating him horribly also. | ||
| Basically, Florida is protecting this far-right maniac and the rest of it. | ||
| Exactly, exactly. | ||
| So he felt, under Biden and the Democrats and the Senate, Actually, the funny thing, the lead guy against Bolsonaro was Senator Bob Menendez. | ||
| A guy who's literally being charged for international corruption, for aiding a government that's not the U.S. | ||
| government. | ||
| With gold bars. | ||
| With gold bars? | ||
| You gotta kind of admire it. | ||
| Yeah, so I wonder why he was helping Lula, the most corrupt guy in the planet, probably. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That's only speculation. | ||
| So as you've watched your country change, I mean, I think one of the things people wonder from an American perspective, as we kind of seem to be heading in that direction too, is how quickly things change. | ||
| So when Lula took over, like how quickly did you see some, you just described some pretty scary changes in terms of individual rights and Uh, how they're treating the media, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| But how quickly does it happen? | ||
| So if you, if you get a time travel machine and you go back to 2019 and decided to tell me, look, Paul, this is how Brazil will be in 2024. | ||
| I would say, no, you're completely out of your mind. | ||
| Five years now, things won't change that fast. | ||
| But they did. | ||
| And it was very gradual. | ||
| But nonstop. | ||
|
unidentified
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And that was a problem. | |
| So four years of one freedom after the other taken away. | ||
| So give me an example of something. | ||
| We'll get to the Elon stuff, obviously. | ||
| So in 2019 was the first year of Bolsonaro in office. | ||
| In 2019, also, you started having, 2018, 2019, remember that very well because you covered this, that's when social media started to be more aggressive against combating misinformation and all that. | ||
| You started having all the YouTube and Meta, like Facebook, changing their terms of service to be more aggressive, all that. | ||
| You started seeing a lot of people being deplatformed. | ||
| That was a little bit after the PragerU lawsuit. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| A lot of people think it started with COVID, but it was going on before that. | ||
| It was going on before that. | ||
| You can actually track back to a New York Times article about the Cambridge Analytica thing. | ||
| That's when they started blaming the social media on the election of Trump on social media. | ||
| Which is very interesting, because to do that, look into every speech of Democrats before 2018. | ||
| All of them would praise social media. | ||
| Remember, Obama won an election with social media. | ||
| That's how you do it, that's how you do it, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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New public squares, praise about it. | |
| Then you had Trump, and they decided to find out, like, why did this guy win? | ||
| And they came to the conclusion that social media was to blame. | ||
| So you had, well, it was actually first an article from The Guardian, but no one cared about it. | ||
| And then a year after, New York Times, like, republished this story with nothing new. | ||
| But they started talking about the idea of Social media being a threat to democracy. | ||
| Okay, so it's very interesting. | ||
| I think that's very interesting. | ||
| A few weeks after, you start seeing very big shots in the Democrat Party saying that, repeating that, that social media, almost like they had a, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's not that much of a, you see that New York Times cover right there? | |
| You remember that one? | ||
| That Dave Rubin and Milton Friedman are leading the alt-right, so. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Via YouTube algorithms. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Pretty impressive. | ||
| That's why I said, you know this very well. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's almost like they had a meeting and they decided to, well, this is what we're going to say now. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And then social media updated their sums of service. | ||
| In 2019, A couple of months after Bolsonaro was elected, the Supreme Court of Brazil opened an investigation against fake news. | ||
| And that should, if you're not paying attention, that should sound extremely weird because the court doesn't open an investigation. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The Department of Justice or whoever, the police, open an investigation. | ||
| The court just judges based on the accusation and on the defense. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| But the Brazilian court decided that they would open an investigation, and this is how they did. | ||
| They don't have that power, just like in the U.S. | ||
| But just like in the U.S., on the internal bylaws of the court, they have an article that says, look, if a crime was committed within the premises of the court, we can open an investigation. | ||
| And they decided to say, look, people are saying bad things on the internet about the court. | ||
| They're slandering the court on the internet. | ||
| Oh, clever. | ||
| The internet's everywhere, including inside the court. | ||
| So that gives us ground to open an investigation. | ||
| It's like, wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And, and that, that was open in 2019. | ||
| That, it's the famous fake news probe. | ||
| And if you guys think the Bob Mueller and all the probes took a long time, that has been ongoing since 2019 without no one being charged. | ||
| And that's the probe that Elon Musk was now added to. | ||
| But they started doing search and seizures in the House of Journalists. | ||
| Then they started to censor some content, some articles. | ||
| The first one that they censored was a magazine that published an article saying that one of the justices of the Supreme Court was involved in corruption. | ||
| I can't have that getting out there. | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then they started, it was, then they arrested a few journalists and they start with the most extremists. | ||
| So when you see like people going after Alex Jones, for example, you might not like Alex Jones. | ||
| You might think he's nuts, but you're next. | ||
| You just don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Cause that's exactly how it started in Brazil. | ||
| They started with Osvaldo Stacchi, which, which is a guy that I disagree with him in like 99%. | ||
| But of course, I said it was wrong coming after him. | ||
| He was a journalist. | ||
| If he did anything wrong, you can sue him in a regular court. | ||
| But no, people arrested him. | ||
| And then it went after Allen DeSantis. | ||
| Allen's a good friend of mine. | ||
| He's kind of like Alex Jones in a sense. | ||
| A little bit crazy, but a very intelligent guy. | ||
| He's more right than wrong. | ||
| And they came after him. | ||
| Wait, now is this all after the election of last year or are you talking about before then? | ||
| Because I know that there were a ton of people arrested after that, right? | ||
| That was before. | ||
| Okay, so you're still before the election of last year. | ||
| I'm still before. | ||
| Okay, okay. | ||
| And then they started going. | ||
| On the elections, that's when things started to go completely out of control. | ||
| The Superior Electoral Court decided to grant themselves the power to censor people. | ||
| It was temporary, just to guarantee the integrity of the election and protect democracy. | ||
| And they said it would only last during the elections. | ||
| It was an exceptional measure and all that. | ||
| So in December 2022, well, during 2022, I started going live to the new shows And I used to receive court orders from the station saying, look, you can't say that Lula is an unconvicted fellow. | ||
| And I was like, what? | ||
|
unidentified
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He is. | |
| No, but you can't say that because this will mislead people, according to the court. | ||
| I was like, okay. | ||
| Well, you can't say he's a friend of Maduro and Ortega, the dictators of Venezuela and Nicaragua. | ||
| I was like, but he is. | ||
| No, but you can't say that. | ||
| That might mislead people. | ||
| One thing after the other, I couldn't sing on air. | ||
| And I was like, I haven't heard of this happening. | ||
| This is new on TV. | ||
| And we're talking about cable TV, regular, like, like Fox news. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| And then on December 30th, 2022, I got, I, I, I was all that time. | ||
| I was doing it from the U S okay. | ||
| So from the studio in my house, not in Brazil, broadcasting from my house in Florida. | ||
| So in December, 2022, I was skiing in Wisconsin and got a phone call. | ||
| It's like, it was a source that worked for a big tech company saying, I got a court order saying that we have two hours to take you down. | ||
| Our social media, and I assume everyone else got the same order. | ||
| So you have two hours and then you'll be gone. | ||
| And we're talking about like 1.5 million people on Twitter, 1.1 million people on YouTube. | ||
| It's like really, really more than 5 million people if you add the platforms. | ||
| And it happened to another colleague of mine of the same station. | ||
| And then Lula got elected, he took office. | ||
| Wait, so what did you do after that phone call? | ||
| I was still on TV, so I decided, I called the station and said, look, put me on. | ||
| It's like, put me on my show. | ||
| Although I'm not supposed to go there, I'm going to tell people what happened. | ||
| And I went live streaming on Instagram saying, look guys, I'm going to disappear. | ||
| I did not die. | ||
| And I went on TV, and they let me go, and they let me speak. | ||
| But then I disappeared completely from social media. | ||
| I opened other ones to openly defy the court orders, which is completely illegal. | ||
| Is that when you got on Rumble? | ||
| That's when I got on Rumble and Locos. | ||
| So I started opening other rubble. | ||
| Locals were very nice to me. | ||
| They gave me all the support. | ||
| They understood the situation of Brazil. | ||
| Locals even translated the platform to Portuguese. | ||
| And that was very cool. | ||
| So what could I do, right? | ||
| But right now, my show, even with all everything being blocked, I mean, I'm broadcasting for like eight different channels, and my show is right now the number one show on my time slot again. | ||
| So it's like, even with all the censorship, it's impossible to stop. | ||
| But how worried are you just in terms, well, first off, how often do you go back down there, if ever? | ||
| I can. | ||
| Right, so you basically are You're not a refugee. | ||
| Well, in some sense, you're a refugee from your own country. | ||
| It's what happened was that I found out later that that was not the only part of the order. | ||
| They also issued an order to freeze all my assets in Brazil, which was a considerable amount. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They also issued an order to a fine for every time I said anything that's agreed and considered fake news. | ||
| And they also canceled my Brazilian passport, which is almost unheard of. | ||
| It was until that. | ||
| And so I can't go back even if I want to. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| Which I didn't sign up for this. | ||
| I moved to the U.S. | ||
| in 2015, but I used to go to Brazil very often, but now I can't. | ||
| So if my father, God forbid, if he dies, I can't bury him. | ||
| I can go back to my country, I can go back to family parties, I can visit my friends, I can see my parents unless they come here. | ||
| And to be clear, you've never been convicted of anything. | ||
| I haven't been charged, or I haven't been served of any investigation against me. | ||
| It's a never-ending probe that never became an actual case with charge being pressed. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So that's the situation. | ||
| Other people are in the same situation. | ||
| So let's connect this to what's going on with Elon because then I think now, because now we're really seeing this scale across countries. | ||
| I mean, even when you talk about bank accounts being frozen, I'm sure every single person watching this. | ||
| Well, can you talk a little bit about now how this has escalated in this situation as it pertains to Elon, and then we'll talk about how it's kind of scaling around the world? | ||
| Not yet, we'll see. | ||
| Unless there's a right wing banker that will find a way. | ||
| Right, who's like side gig is a trucker. | ||
| Well, can you talk a little bit about now how this has escalated in this situation as | ||
| it pertains to Elon, and then we'll talk about how it's kind of scaling around the world. | ||
| What's very interesting is that, well, you spent quite some time on Axe and you saw how | ||
| committed they are with free speech. | ||
| Which is what is very weird is that, of course, we know because of the Twitter files that | ||
| they were not committed before Elon by Twitter at all. | ||
| You saw the massive algorithm, not even then know how and can't figure out what's going on in there, right? | ||
| But weirdly enough, in Brazil, The guys from Twitter, I'm talking about the same guys who were cozy with the FBI, censoring Hunter Biden laptop story. | ||
| It's like these same guys, they were shocked with what was going on in Brazil. | ||
| And because of the Twitter files that Michael Schallenberger published, because of that, we know that Twitter was sending emails to the Twitter office in Brazil to the U.S. | ||
| saying, these guys are crazy. | ||
| What they're doing here is, we've never seen anything like this. | ||
| And the guys from, I think that says a lot, the guys from Twitter, US, were like, wow, what's going on? | ||
| That's like Xi Jinping gives them a call and say, look, it didn't stop, you're going too far. | ||
| Yeah, it is a bit much even for me. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And they were, because the court orders that they were receiving were like that. | ||
| And Schellenberger published these And one day he decided to tweet to Alexander saying, why are you censoring the Brazilian people so much? | ||
| I think he had a chance to look into that. | ||
| that raised awareness about the situation and that got into Elon Musk's radar. | ||
| And one day he decided to tweet to Alexander saying, why are you censoring the Brazilian | ||
| people so much? | ||
| I think he had a chance to look into that. | ||
| And he started to pretty much, he said he didn't do it yet. | ||
| And that he was going to raise all restrictions in Brazil because they were illegal. | ||
| And what was very weird is because I never had access to the court orders against me until last week when I was in Congress on the Judiciary Committee. | ||
| I was talking to them, explaining the situation in Brazil. | ||
| And that's when they asked, do you ever see the orders against you? | ||
| I was like, no, I haven't. | ||
| And they're like, do you want to see it? | ||
| I was like, yeah, sure. | ||
| They gave me a folder with all the orders against me. | ||
| I was like, wow. | ||
| And they were, well, we subpoena acts for the files. | ||
| We got them and we're going to make them public. | ||
| And that was like an A-bomb in Brazil because it brought light to everything that Moraes was doing. | ||
| Just to give you an idea, The Order Against Me has one page and a part of this order says that The social media platform can't make the information public, so I don't know what's happening. | ||
| The only reason I know is because I got a source telling me, and of course I suspect it, but I never saw the order. | ||
|
unidentified
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So there was no way to appeal. | |
| Because you're never notified. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So if you're not notified, you can't appeal. | ||
| And even if you could, it's the Supreme Court. | ||
| So who are you going to appeal to? | ||
| And this has been ongoing. | ||
| When Musk said that he was going to lift restrictions, the MRIs put him on the same, as a person of interest being investigated, in the same probe as I. | ||
| So we're now buddies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So this is just in the last couple of weeks and Twitter in Brazil is now open still or is it closed? | ||
| I know that Argentina offered to bring the employees over and everything else, but does it even exist there now? | ||
| So we're very curious about what's going to happen. | ||
| So far, Elon said he was going to lift the restrictions in Brazil. | ||
| But on the other hand, his team of attorneys in Brazil said they're going to still comply with all the decisions in Brazil. | ||
| Not that they haven't filed any appeals. | ||
| They filed over a hundred appeals. | ||
| None of them were even looking into it. | ||
| They don't care. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it's the Supreme Court. | ||
| So you're appealing to them. | ||
| In this case, you're literally appealing to the people who opened the investigation. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, that's been at a Republic level. | ||
| And it's interesting because if you think about it, On this probe, they're the victims, because they say this lender's against them, it's an attack against their institution. | ||
| They are the investigators, they are the prosecutors, and they are the judges. | ||
| Can you imagine? | ||
| There's nothing like that anywhere in the world. | ||
| So although I think there's a trend, a world trend, against free speech, which is very dear for you and I, There's a trend on the left. | ||
| I think free speech was a consensus until maybe five years ago. | ||
| And that consensus is gone. | ||
| People are really rediscussing while we, the conclusion that we came like 200 years ago. | ||
| Brazil, Brazilian case is very unique because it's like, the way I put it is Everyone, the world has the same virus. | ||
| We just have countries with different immune systems. | ||
| And I like joking that, you're the comedian, but I like joking that the Harvard University is like the one lab of ideas. | ||
| Yeah, Columbia might've taken over for it, but yeah. | ||
| They're both. | ||
| American University is like the one lab of ideas. | ||
| So they come up with these crazy ideas. | ||
| Yeah, we're sorry about that. | ||
| Yeah, you guys have credit. | ||
| You came up with very good ideas. | ||
| We did some other good stuff, yeah. | ||
| But, I mean, Brazil has two virus, two of these virus. | ||
| There's the virus of the censorship and there's the virus of juristocracy, which is very unique because it's also a trend here. | ||
| It's very big in Israel. | ||
| Just so people know, juristocracy is the transfer of power from democracy, which is the practice of the people, right, the government of the people, to the jurists. | ||
| Government, I mean, meaning the bureaucrats and non-elected bureaucrats that rule and have an enormous power, and they're not elected. | ||
| They don't have any checks and balances. | ||
| And you've seen in Israel, for example, they approved the judicial reform and the Supreme Court said, no, I don't think so. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| So what is that? | ||
| And that never happened. | ||
| That never happened. | ||
| I mean, the founding fathers, if you If you read Federalist Paper 78, you see Hamilton saying, well, we're never going to have a dictatorship from the judiciary, but they don't have the power of the purse or the power of the sword. | ||
| If you read Montesquieu, he'll say, well, the judiciary is next to nothing. | ||
| But now you see that the judicial power in Canada is also bad, the Supreme Court in Canada. | ||
| So you see in different countries, That the judiciary is now, by far, even in the U.S., the most powerful branch of government. | ||
| I mean, I shouldn't have to tell that to Americans because abortion was legalized in the U.S. | ||
| through the Supreme Court in the 70s. | ||
| But what I think the global elites, and again, not a conspiracy theory, but what I think the global elite realize is that while they can circumvent the democratic process, they don't have to go through the tedious process of like, I'm going to, so I'm George Soros. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I need to finance the campaign for a bunch of members in Congress. | ||
| I need to win. | ||
| And then there's the Senator. | ||
| The president needs to have veto power. | ||
| It's like, I can circumvent all that. | ||
| If I support, for example, elections of prosecutors and judges and local judges, and I don't need to finance directly, but I can be cozy and we can go to the same events and we can be part of the same community of the justice of the Supreme Court. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then it becomes like a double-edged sword because we've talked about it from the context of you bring in these DAs, the DAs destroy the cities, and then the lefties look at the destruction as evidence that the system doesn't work. | ||
| So they're getting two wins there. | ||
| They're getting the destruction they want, and then they're getting it as the evidence of if they only had more power, perhaps, to their judiciary or elsewhere. | ||
| Well, you moved out of California, so you know. | ||
| Yes, I moved out of California. | ||
| We're here in the free state of Florida. | ||
| Well, that must be quite a juxtaposition for you to have ended up in Florida, which, you know, you got here before it became sort of the citadel of freedom. | ||
| Yeah, it was a Florida joke in Brazil, that Florida is a further north state of Brazil. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because we have so many Brazilians here now, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I really like to say, and I think we're very lucky with the government that we have right now. | ||
| I mean, I'm very grateful for, especially during the pandemic. | ||
| It was very hard with everyone else, but with us it was pretty okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And not only that, he's been doing so many amazing things. | ||
| It works to the point that he was an example to Brazil. | ||
| Because many of the things he was doing here, Bolsonaro wanted to do in the pandemics in Brazil, and they called him genocidal. | ||
| Because he didn't do the lockdowns as severely as we wanted. | ||
| He was saying that only people that wanted could get the shots. | ||
| And they said, well, this killed that many people. | ||
| Like, no, no, no, I can tell you. | ||
| Everything that he's telling you he wanted to do, we've done in Florida, and it was very successful. | ||
| So Florida was an example not only to America, but it was an example to the world as well, the way that Florida held the pandemics. | ||
| So what is the state of Brazil at the moment? | ||
| I mean, are you hopeful that your country will get out of this current communist predicament? | ||
| I mean, it seems like the judiciary and Lulu have an awful lot of power. | ||
| There are protests constantly, right? | ||
| I mean, you referenced that earlier, but do you see a way that you can get out of this? | ||
| We're seeing the first signs of the establishment getting tired of Marais. | ||
| And the costs of He became too powerful and he made too many mistakes. | ||
| And what the establishment does with these people is that they get rid of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just like... You're just a piece of the system, so the system doesn't need you. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| You're not needed anymore. | ||
| You just take the blame and you just go. | ||
| And that's my hope right now. | ||
| Not that we're going to fix Brazil, but I think the first thing that we need to, and people don't realize that, the thing that you need to fight the most in a country to protect is free speech. | ||
| Because once you lose free speech, you can't fight for any other rights. | ||
| So right now, yes, I have a problem with our electoral system. | ||
| I barely talked about it. | ||
| Barely. | ||
| Because my goal is to reestablish free speech. | ||
| Bolsonaro, I don't care about Bolsonaro. | ||
| I like him, but it's not my main goal. | ||
| I want to reestablish free speech. | ||
| Then I can talk about Bolsonaro. | ||
| So my concern with America right now, That this trend is also very present here. | ||
| And to the point that America influenced the Brazilian situation very much, the Biden administration, this is again, not a, a lot of, I said this is the third time I'm going to say this, not a conspiracy theory, but there's an article from the Financial Times where they brag about it, the Biden administration sent The director of CIA, the Secretary of Defense, and Jake Sullivan on three different occasions to Brazil to pressure public officials, military leaders, and bureaucrats to not challenge Demarais orders. | ||
| Why did, and guarantee that Lula was elected with that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So my concern is why did the Biden administration send their top officials to meddle with the Brazilian election and guarantee that one, free speech was not in place anymore. | ||
| Two, Lula, an enemy of the United States, was elected, got elected. | ||
| And that's what happened. | ||
| Lula is now the most, well, most pro Hamas guy on the planet. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's had some crazy, crazy statements related to Moshe. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| And he openly supports it. | ||
| He's comparing what's happening in Israel and what the Israelis are doing to the Holocaust. | ||
| Israel defending itself to the Holocaust. | ||
| A little sad that. | ||
| He's also the most pro-Venezuela, most pro-Cuba, definitely pro-Iran, to the point that we have Iranian ships docking on Brazilian ports right now. | ||
| And he's also the most pro-China guy on the planet as well. | ||
| He's using the BRICS to undermine the dollars, a global currency. | ||
| So why would the United States It's like, spare no efforts to get a guy like this in power. | ||
| And that, that puzzles me in a sense, almost. | ||
| Yeah, does it puzzle you or do you want to go down the conspiracy road here? | ||
| I mean, I sense it doesn't really puzzle you actually. | ||
| It's almost like these guys hate America. | ||
| It's almost like they want to have the country destroyed. | ||
| And they definitely behave like they do. | ||
| And Lula is not helping America in any way. | ||
| Right now, our hope is that it looks like the U.S. | ||
| Congress, especially the House, with a thin, razor-thin majority of the Republicans, they're starting to look and pay attention to Brazil. | ||
| And a lot of that is thanks to Elon Musk. | ||
| So, yeah, that guy really, I can't overstate the impact that Elon Musk is having in the free speech in the world, but in Brazil, definitely. | ||
| So what do you think, what would have to change now? | ||
| I mean, Lulu's not leaving, he's not just going to walk out, right? | ||
| He's not my main concern. | ||
| I think we need to get rid of him. | ||
| Well, the courts aren't just going to disband themselves, so like, what actually has to happen? | ||
| I think the Morais needs to face accountability. | ||
| Because accountability is very important in a democracy. | ||
| I think it's Nassim Taleb in that book, Skin of the Game, he's explained that very well. | ||
| That when you don't have accountability, you have a moral hazard that you just do more and more. | ||
| You enable the criminal to do more and more. | ||
| So if you let someone get away with their 900-something dollars they steal in a store, you're enabling even worse behavior. | ||
| Same thing if you let someone steal an election in the biggest democracy in the planet and nothing happens and you have any proof you want with the like signatures. | ||
| It's like you have everything, but the courts don't act because that would traumatize a democracy. | ||
| When you have that and you let it happen, you just enable criminal behavior. | ||
| That's why I'm concerned with the election in the U.S. | ||
| right now. | ||
| So the first thing is, Moraes needs to face some sort of bad consequences for what he did. | ||
| And if he does, I don't think Brazil, that will fix all the Brazilian problems, but I think that will send a clear message to the other guys, like, there's a clear line you can't cross, and that line is free speech. | ||
| And that's one side of it. | ||
| One thing that I think will help a lot, and let's say what God has planned, is I think the election of Donald Trump is crucial. | ||
| Because in the same way that we had the Biden administration meddling with Brazil negatively to bring the left to power, I think Trump can work in a more positive way And I'm not asking him to intervene in Brazil, but just the possibility of not having the support of Biden anymore would help a lot. | ||
| And plus, look, this election is crucial for the world because I think, in a sense, we're kind of deciding if democracy is still in place in the world. | ||
| I mean, as a foreigner, I have a very hard time Thinking that Americans will elect a president that 70 something percent of the country think is mentally incapable. | ||
| I think that's very hard to believe. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So if Biden wins, I'm not saying all, I'm not finding an excuse. | ||
| I'm just saying it's very hard. | ||
| If he wins, it means the establishment has so much power. | ||
| Right, it's not even like they're running a good fake candidate. | ||
| He's horrible on face value because of age and the mental capacity and everything else. | ||
| Yeah, and he's weak. | ||
| And people perceive him weak. | ||
| Literally, yeah. | ||
| And if they can elect that guy, it means We don't matter anymore. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's almost like you wish the people pulling the strings were just giving us a better actor because then we could all go along with the show a little bit more. | ||
| It's like they're not even putting on that good of a show. | ||
| And the fact that he is the candidate shows how confident they are that they can elect anyone. | ||
| Well, that's why I'm not confident that Trump's going to win, because every time they show you the polls now and people, you know, and you see more Hollywood celebrities are starting to walk away and everything, I'm like, this doesn't seem like the right recipe for me. | ||
| This seems like the wrong recipe, because then it'll be the day after the election and we're all going to go, what happened? | ||
| What happened? | ||
| And I'm just curious. | ||
| I don't think they can get away with the same thing that they did in 2020. | ||
| A lot of rules changed. | ||
| I think the Republicans are, I hope, they know how to play the game better in the sense that it's like, yeah, not everyone is going to vote in person on the same day. | ||
| Just deal with that. | ||
| I mean, I don't see any evidence that they've changed anything, unfortunately. | ||
| We've changed things at state levels and tightened things up in some ways. | ||
| Our elections here are pretty damn secure, so I'm confident that Florida will give you an honest assessment on election night, but some of these other places, no. | ||
| Yeah, well all the, if I'm not mistaken, all nine swing states. | ||
| I don't think we have nine swing states anymore. | ||
| The traditional nine swing states, all of them changed their legislation to make it better. | ||
| So they couldn't do the same thing that they did. | ||
| We have the Pennsylvania decision on the Supreme Court over there. | ||
| It's important. | ||
| We had some decisions there in Arizona as well. | ||
| So I'm more optimistic than I was in 2020. | ||
| We also don't have the pandemic so they can print out as many ballots as they want to send to people's house. | ||
| But they have everything else, Dave. | ||
| They have Hollywood, as you know very well. | ||
| They have academia, all the universities, they have the financial market, all the Black Rocks and J.P. | ||
| Morgan. | ||
| They definitely have the media. | ||
| The media is, I think, even more crazy than they were in 2020. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, it's completely bananas here now. | |
| Completely bananas, yeah. | ||
| And they have the bureaucracy. | ||
| I mean, they have the bureaucracy, the poll workers and all that. | ||
| And that's what I think gives them confidence to the point that Obama can go to dinner with Biden and say, look, we've got to fix your campaign. | ||
| It's like in a normal world. | ||
| People would say, you're half-dead, just die! | ||
| Yeah, sit it down, man, sit it down. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So, hopefully this will be the first of many conversations that we'll have on camera, but tell me something, since we've done mostly the political stuff and the free speech, just tell me something about Brazil or the Brazilian people that people don't know. | ||
| I think what people don't know about Brazil is that Brazil is so similar to the United States. | ||
| So similar. | ||
| We're way more culturally similar than all other Latin American countries. | ||
| That's why Brazilians come to the U.S. | ||
| and they feel so adapted. | ||
| And we just, I think our women are prettier. | ||
| Our men as well, whatever works, whatever works. | ||
| And I think Brazil is in a positive trend in one sense. | ||
| Brazil has been a Catholic country since its founding, and it worked very well until the 70s. | ||
| And then the Catholic Church started declining all over the world. | ||
| There was a problem with Catholicism, but it was worse in Brazil because of the theology of liberation, which was dominated by Marxists. | ||
| And during the 70s, 80s, and early 90s, Brazil became less and less religious. | ||
| And these values are very important for society, as, again, you know so well after spending so much time with Jordan Peterson, right? | ||
| So these values are very important. | ||
| Starting in the mid-90s, the Brazilian evangelical churches began to spread very fast. | ||
| And now Brazil is in the opposite trend of the United States on that specific trend. | ||
| Brazil is becoming more Christian, and the U.S. | ||
| is becoming less Christian. | ||
| And I think, ultimately, that's what really matters. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It can't be Jew. | |
| It's a matter of having the Judeo-Christian values. | ||
| You need some bedrock, basically. | ||
| You need to. | ||
| It's the same mentality. | ||
| It's the same mindset. | ||
| And you need that. | ||
| I like the Breitbart doctrine that says politics is downstream from culture. | ||
| That's very true most of the time. | ||
| Culture is downstream from religion. | ||
| They need the religious values of people so they share the values and they produce a culture with those shared values. | ||
| And that's a problem we have right now in America, right? | ||
| Hollywood is producing culture that has nothing to do with people's values, right? | ||
| So, I think in a sense, what matters the most, and you can look into that, into the numbers. | ||
| If you look into the demography in the world, if you just get people's age, sex, education, what matters the most is if they're religious or not. | ||
| If they're religious, they're going to vote 26 point less on the left, meaning If Biden, if the United States was as Christian as it was in the 90s, Biden would get like 25% of the votes. | ||
| So the left would never get. | ||
| Well, because all the mainstream policies of the Democrats now would have been crazy fringe policies of the 1990s. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I think my hope, my hope for Brazil is that the trend Religiously is going up. | ||
| Brazil didn't have a right until probably 10 years ago. | ||
| We were just between the left and the central left. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| And now we have an actual right. | ||
| I'm friends of several members of the Brazilian Congress. | ||
| Some of them are amazing. | ||
| Better than most of your Congress. | ||
| Ours aren't great. | ||
| Yeah, some are good. | ||
| We've got some good guys in Florida, but that's about it. | ||
| We do, we do. | ||
| I mean, Chris Smith, a Republican from New Jersey, has been helping us tremendously. | ||
| So I got to praise him for that. | ||
| And he's not a MAGA guy by any measure, but he's been a true friend of human rights and free speech. | ||
| So I got to praise him for that. | ||
| You are also a true friend of human rights and free speech. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. |
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