The International Nationalist Movement Hits Brazil
Another Comical Attempt to Upend the American-led World Order
History often repeats itself as farce, and thus it is with the January 8th insurrection in Brasilia.
Thousands of protesters stormed government buildings, including the presidential palace, congressional building, and Supreme Court. They vandalized the buildings, attacked police officers, and caused millions of dollars of damage. Federal police had to be called in to confront the rioters and clear the buildings.
400 of them were arrested, all of them supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro, a nationalist firebrand who lost the 2022 presidential election to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Spurred by unfounded claims of election fraud and draped in green and yellow — the colors of the national flag adopted by Brazil’s right-wing nationalist movement — these “protesters” wanted revenge for the electoral rebuke of their leader.
Bolsonaro appears to have at least learned from Donald Trump’s failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election results. He publicly, though grudgingly, conceded the race, and wisely left the populist agitation to his surrogates. Many of those surrogates are American and connected to Donald Trump.
In November of last year, Bolsonaro traveled to Florida and met with the former American president, his son, Steve Bannon, and former White House advisor Jason Miller. Around this time, Bannon, Miller, and others encouraged the same conspiracies in Brazil that plagued the 2020 American election.
They attempted to run the same playbook, attributing Bolsonaro’s loss to a global conspiracy to hijack electronic voting machines and change the vote to their preferred “globalist” candidate. Sympathetic government officials ensured that resistance to the rioters was minimal on the chosen day. They openly supported vigilante acts of defiance and civic disobedience.
Steve Bannon was a central figure in the January 6th riot. On his podcast the day before, he said “All hell is going to break loose tomorrow.” This was after months of spreading false conspiracies about the election being stolen. He followed the same playbook in Brazil. “The whole thing smells,” a guest said on his show in October, days after the Brazilian election. In the lead-up to the run-off, Bannon used his podcast and social media presence to amplify allegations of a “stolen election”.
Even the American “conservative” movement has in general lined up behind Bolsonaro. The influential conservative group CPAC has held conferences in Brazil in recent years at which Bolsonaro and his allies have appeared. And in mid-November, Eduardo Bolsonaro, the former Brazilian president’s son, attended the America First Policy Institute’s gala. The Trump-inspired think tank held the event at Trump’s Palm Beach Mar-a-Lago club, where the younger Bolsonaro later joined a table with Trump and defeated Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake.
Bolsonaro used this same line of attack in the leadup to the run-off, repeatedly casting doubt on the results and making similar claims about election machine malfunctions. After his runoff loss, he filed a petition to have votes thrown out based on these allegations. That request was thrown out on January 4th after the inauguration. Though he never conceded the loss, Bolsonaro pledged to honor his constitutional obligation to hand over power. He fled to Florida on the eve of Lula’s inauguration.
A perfect storm occurred in the lead-up to January 8th. Not only were Bannon and his associates successful in spreading election conspiracies, but a network of pro-Bolsonaro officials and activists had taken up the cause. Then, when Elon Musk took over Twitter, many Brazilian accounts that had spread election denial rumors were reinstated, most of the moderation team was fired, and Musk himself suggested evidence of “political bias” concerning Brazil.
Like the lead-up to January 6th, 2021, the election results were met with widespread protests. However, the political culture of Brazil is much less reserved, and these protests were large, loud, and disruptive. They included nationwide trucker protests that snarled traffic across the country. Even government officials spoke out openly in favor of Bolsonaro. Clearly, the scale of this seditious effort would be greater than in the United States.
Camps of Bolsonaro supporters had been in place in Brasilia since the election, and they formed a base of operation for the attack. They also gathered outside military bases and called for military intervention like what had led to the military junta that governed Brazil from 1964 to 1985. Bolsonaro did nothing to dissuade these efforts. The result was what we saw on Sunday.
Even after the riot, Bannon has refused to back down. Clearly, they wanted this to happen. “I’m not backing off one inch on this thing,” said former Trump adviser Steve Bannon in an interview on January 9th. Earlier in the day, he repeated his claims of election fraud in Brazil and called on Lula to open an investigation. He referred to the rioters as “freedom fighters.”
Tucker Carlson, America’s most-watched cable news host (with tremendous viewership numbers totaling an earth-shattering 1% of America’s population) has also double-downed. If you want to see the connection across different authoritarian nationalist movements, he’s the person to watch.
Just a week ago Russia’s favorite American talk-show host complained about Volodymyr Zelensky showing up to the American capital dressed, in his words, as a strip club manager, and daring to ask for help in keeping his nation from being wiped off the face of the Earth. A Russian defeat would not serve the cause of taking down the liberal international world order, after all. To Carlson, Bannon, and their ilk, the blood of innocent Ukrainians must be sacrificed for the Cause. These are missionary zealots who would make the Spanish Inquisitors blush.
Carlson served up another of his propagandistic extravaganzas on Monday. According to him: “Thanks to what was very clearly a rigged election, a convicted criminal called Lula da Silva is now the president of the most important country in South America. Millions of people in Brazil understand exactly what happened. They know their democracy has been hijacked possibly forever. But there’s not much they can do about that. Lula may be a criminal, in fact, he is, but he has the full support of both the Biden administration and the Chinese government.”
Of course, this ignores that Bolsonaro’s party was fined by Brazil’s election commission for its false allegations of fraud. It also ignores that Lula da Silva’s corruption conviction was overturned, and there is no evidence for the election being “hijacked” beyond the fact that voters voted and rejected a right-wing nationalist darling. References to a seedy relationship between Biden and the Chinese Communist Party are just the chef’s kiss on this work of art.
Jamie Raskin, a Democratic Party member of the US House of Representatives and a member of the committee that investigated the Capitol riot, called the Brazilian protesters “fascists modeling themselves after Trump’s Jan. 6 rioters.” Sadly, America’s failure to hold the January 6th coup plotters accountable has led to the export of their tactics abroad. Rather than being a bastion of democracy sending its light to the rest of the world, it is now transforming into a haven for the international authoritarian nationalist movement.
Brazil, however, appears to be doing a much better job, immediately rounding up and arresting 1,500 people, removing pro-Bolsonaro officials like the governor of Brasilia from their positions, and holding police officers who colluded with the rioters accountable. Yesterday also saw massive demonstrations to protest the riots. Unlike the United States, there is unity across the political spectrum for defending democracy.
Hopefully, the actions of these Brazilians, and others such as the Ukrainians who are defending themselves against authoritarian nationalists, will eventually remind America of what she has always represented.