Paulo Figueiredo Filho details Brazil's free speech collapse since 2019, where Justice Alexandre de Moraes weaponized court bylaws to censor content, arrest journalists, and freeze assets under President Lula's administration. He exposes the fully electronic, un-auditable electoral system and alleges U.S. interference in favor of Lula, contrasting this with Elon Musk's partial Twitter intervention. Filho argues that evangelical Christianity offers a vital cultural counter to Marxist dominance, suggesting global democratic restoration hinges on accountability for de Moraes and potential U.S. political shifts. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
It's not that much of a, you see that New York Times cover right there?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.