The Brazilian Supreme Court has indicted former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro for allegedly falsifying his own Covid-19 vaccination data, along with the records of his daughter and several associates. According to police, Bolsonaro tampered with the health ministry database before entering the U.S. — Read the rest

Jan 8, 2023 in Brasília looked a lot like Jan 6, 2021 in D.C., with supporters of a defeated right-wing populist storming government offices in a last-ditch effort to overturn an election. Many of the same figures in Trump's orbit encouraged them to riot. — Read the rest

Outgoing Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, accompanied by his wife, left the country for the U.S. today, two days before the inauguration of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who defeated him in the country's recent election. Bolsonaro promises to be back, but no-one seems particularly confident. — Read the rest

After two days of silence following his narrow defeat by leftist Lula da Silva in Brazil's presidential election, far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro today indicated he was not planning to contest the result: "it's over", he reportedly told the nation's Supreme Court. — Read the rest

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the leftist Brazilian president who exited office with an 83% approval rating only to be jailed on corruption charges that were later overturned, has staged the political comeback of the decade to defeat incumbent ultraconservative Jair Bolsonaro at the polls. — Read the rest

Last week, Brazil's far-right president Jair Bolsonaro declared he would not get vaccinated before attending this week's UN General Assembly in New York. "Why would I get vaccinated?" the confused gentleman asked in an online broadcast."

Coming from a country that just reported 150,000 new Covid cases in one day (a number that may reflect previously unreported cases over the last few months), his question is preposterous. — Read the rest

Brazilian premier Jair Bolsonaro has tested positive for coronavirus after falling ill with symptoms typical of Covid-19.

Bolsonaro regularly downplayed the risks of the virus, comparing it to the common cold, and Brazil soon became an infection hotspot with the world's highest tally of reported cases outside the U.S. — Read the rest

Brazil's Trump, right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro, formally authorized deployment of military forces in the Amazon rainforest region, purportedly to fight deforestation and fires. Surely the massive influx of armed troops to the region populated by indigenous people won't result in coronavirus infections and COVID-19 deaths. — Read the rest

Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro boasted that his citizens are immune to the coronavirus because they have the magical ability to wallow in human waste "and nothing happens," reports The Guardian. "They never catch anything. You see some bloke jumping into the sewage, he gets out, has a dive, right? — Read the rest

Last week, Roberto Alvim, gave a speech in his capacity as Brazil's culture minister: backed by a Wagner aria, Alvim gave a speech about reforming Brazilian art that literally plagiarized the words of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda.

This is the future, I guess.

After a massive trove of leaks revealed deep corruption in the Brazilian "anti-corruption" heroes who put the popular left-wing presidential candidate Lula in jail and paved the way for the election of the fascist strongman Jair Bolsonaro (a crisis that engulfed Sergio Moro, the judge who jailed Lula and went on to serve as Bolsonaro's public security minister), the Bolsonaro regime retaliated with a federal criminal investigation of Glenn Greenwald and The Intercept Brazil.

Torture apologist/homophobe/racist Jair Bolsonaro — whose successful election to the Brazilian presidency was the result of a conspiracy among the wealthy and senior prosecutors and judges, who subverted the justice system in order to ensure that his rival was kept off the ballot — has presided over record-breaking Amazon deforestation.

Sergio Moro was once the darling of the international press, lauded for his role as the judge in Brazil's Operation Carwash anti-corruption prosecutions, which saw public accusations against the country's most powerful people, from billionaire oligarchs to Dilma Rousseff, the successor to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (who had been term-limited out of office after a long career as the country's most popular leader); and her successor, the far-right Michael Temer; and Lula himself, who has been locked away in a special prison, denied access to the press, a situation that paved the way for the election of Jair Bolsonaro, a fascist who has publicly regretted the decision of the military dictatorship he once served in to merely torture dissidents, rather than murdering them.

The first line of Jon Lee Anderson's long-awaited profile of Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro in the New Yorker is a real killer. "The authoritarian leaders taking power around the world share a vocabulary of intolerance, insult, and menace…"

Hey you know what happens when a superpower declares that it's going to take steps that will allow it to dictate the internal policies of other nations?

I'll give you a hint: nothing good.

Twitter was ordered to appoint a legal agent by Brazilian authorities, a requirement for all foreign companies doing business there. It didn't and a judge there yesterday ordered local ISPs to block access to the platform. Brazil's National Telecommunications Agency has 24 hours to enforce the decision. — Read the rest

Jennifer Rubin has been one of the best WaPo columnists for years. Yes, she's definitely on the conservative side, but she has been forcefully anti-Trump from the beginning, pro-gay marriage, pro-environment. I've heard her described as a Moynihan Democrat. 

The headline of her latest column is so important:  

Republican denial: They think tyrants won't come after them

It's always always always the same — some "in" group goes along with the crazy and the fascism because, even though they are not true believers, they think they'll be protected — after all, they helped enable the fascist takeover in the first place.  — Read the rest

Today, far-right populist Javier Milei won Argentina's presidential primary elections for the Liberty Party. His blend of right-wing libertarian and conservative strands, as well as right-wing populist and far-right politics, is resonating with some voters who see him as a solution to runaway inflation in the country. — Read the rest

You may be familiar with the idea that the planet's tropical rainforests are the earth's lungs. Lungs that right-wing capitalists are destroying with the extractivist logic of accumulation through dispossession, in Brazil, for example, under the Trumpy former President Jair Bolsonaro. — Read the rest