What the Heck Is Going On in Brazil?

Welcome to The Liz Wheeler Show. I’m Liz Wheeler. If you haven’t already subscribed to my show, please do so. You can go to Apple Podcast or Spotify. If you like to listen to the podcast, hit subscribe over there. If you prefer the video version of the show, you can go to YouTube or rumble or Locals and hit subscribe over there as well. On YouTube, if you hit the bell, then I can notify you every time we have a new episode, a new interview, or a new video for you. I greatly appreciate everybody who has been subscribing. So what the heck is going on in Brazil? This is what I wanna talk about today. Protestors in Brazil stormed the capitol. They stormed the presidential facilities, the legislature, the Supreme Court. The American mainstream media is pretending that what’s happening in Brazil right now is like January 6th all over again, but this time in South America.

And what I wanna talk about today is I wanna talk about why these protests are happening, and why they’re happening in the way that they are happening. Because the reason that the protestors give for why they’re protesting is they claim the election that happened a couple months ago was unfair. They say the election was stolen. So maybe there is a little familiarity, a little comparison hereto the United States. And in order to examine whether the election in Brazil was fair, we have to talk about the president who was inaugurated last week. Lula is what he is known as, who is Lola? And did he cheat? Did he steal the election? We’re gonna dive into that. He’s a communist, by the way. So that gives you just a little bit of a clue here. And when the people of Brazil feel that the election was stolen, that it was unfair, what recourse do they have? Why do they feel that they have to resort to what they’re doing, which is storming the government, apparatuses the Capitol, and the Supreme Court, et cetera, et cetera. And then of course, we’re gonna talk about why the mainstream media here in the United States and American politicians as well, why they are deliberately hiding the truth about what’s happening in Brazil. So let’s get to it.

Okay, before we get into what the heck is happening in Brazil right now the latest news is that Congressman Jim Jordan is going to serve as the chair of this new church committee or church-style committee. This committee that the house is going to convene on FBI accountability. You’ll remember the church committee was holding the CIA a accountable. It’s when MK Ultra and these experiments that the CIA was inflicting on the American people were exposed. Well, this new committee for FBI accountability is gonna be chaired by Jim Jordan, which I find to be the best news that I’ve heard in a long time. I’m very happy about this. But what I wanna say about this before we get to Brazil is what I want from this committee and what I don’t want from the committee, what I don’t want from the committee is just showmanship.

What I don’t want from this committee is a lot of viral clips on Twitter that, that’s fine. They’re viral clips on Twitter are useful. They’re good to expose the corruption to the American people. They help build political capital. But I don’t want only that. And I think that oftentimes, in house committees and investigations and hearings, that’s what we get. We get congressmen and congresswomen who use these interviews, use their minutes of questioning of witnesses just to get these video clips. And there’s no accountability mechanism that follows. It’s just a way for the politician to humiliate the subject, which may be deserved. That’s fine. I’m not opposed to that. But that shouldn’t be the end goal. The end goal should be accountability. So what I don’t want from this committee is for it just to be a show committee. We’ve had enough of that from both Democrats and Republicans.

What I want from this committee is I want to see the following things. I want documents and communications and testimony from insiders at the FBI about what the FBI’s mission is. And what I mean by this is the Department of Homeland Security, for example, I know that’s separate from the FBI, but the Department of Homeland Security is the example I’m using here because it was created in the wake of nine 11. And the mission of the Department of Homeland Security at that time was to combat the threat of global terrorism. And the threat of global terrorism was key there because it, it meant seeking out radical Islamist terror cells around the world and preventing those terrorist cells from attacking us here on our homeland. But once that threat had been, I don’t wanna say neutralized because I know ISIS is still a thing, and radical Islam is always going to be a threat, but the Department of Homeland Security retooled their mission.

They now focus their search for terrorists domestically here in the United States. And they label us conservatives, Christians parents who oppose critical race theory as terrorists. I want to see how the FBI has retooled their mission, because I suspect, I would stake a lot of money and my reputation on the fact that the FBI has retooled their mission in a way that puts us in the crosshair. And I wanna see proof of this. I wanna see their definition of everything because this is the FBI. Project Veritas revealed that the FBI has internal training documents that label us. I have a flag flying at my house that don’t, that don’t tread on me. Flag people who fly that flag have been labeled as possible. Militia extremists, militia violent extremists by the FBI. I wanna see all of this kind of stuff.

I wanna see all this. And then I wanna see the personnel who was behind this, who wrote this, who approved this, who disseminated this. I wanna see the names and the faces of these people, and I wanna hear testimony from them. And then I want them fired. I wanna see all the emails that the FBI has ever sent, what we’re seeing with the Twitter files right now. I wanna see the F B I files. I want all the documents, all the databases of all the FBI communications, and I want them combed through by journalists of integrity. Most importantly, I want the emails between the FBI and elected officials. I think that we will be surprised, but also won’t be surprised by what we see. I want investigations into January 6th, the role the FBI played in January 6th. I want investigations into the pipe bomber outside of the DNC.

Can we finally get some answers on that from this committee? I want an investigation into the Gretchen Whitmer fednapping and the role the FBI played in that I want an investigation into the Mar-a-Lago raid when the FBI raided President Trump because of some argument he was having with the National Archives about whether or not the letter that Kim Jong-un wrote to him, belonged to him, or belonged to the federal government. I want all of that, all of that investigated. And ultimately, the end goal of this is not just exposing the corruption which exists. It’s not just exposing the weaponization of the FBI against us. The ultimate goal of this should be the FBI being abolished. The FBI has betrayed the American people. They’ve not only lost our trust, they should lose their license. They should not be a thing.

I know that there are vital functions that the FBI serves in some ways, and that’s fine. I acknowledge that. And those vital functions should be farmed out to other agencies who have not betrayed our trust and the rest of the FBI should be raised. That’s what I want from this committee. And if there’s anybody that can do this, it is Congressman Jim Jordan. I also, by the way, if you broaden this, it’s bigger than the FBI, it’s the entire Department of Justice. It’s been weaponized. Merrick Garland is one of the most dangerous people in our country, the Attorney General, but it’s before him as well. I want Merrick Garland brought before Congress. I want Christopher Ray brought before Congress. I want Peter Strzok and Lisa Page and Christopher Seale and the FISA judges all brought before Congress for all of us to hear their testimony.

I want media organizations who colluded with the Russia collusion narrative and the Ukraine narrative, I want investigations into the Department of Justice targeting pro-lifers, but ignoring Black Lives Matter in Antifa, all of that. And I want people fired. If there’s anything less that’s produced from this new church committee, I confess I will be quite disappointed. But if there’s anybody that can produce results, it’s Jim Jordan and Congressman Jordan, the result I want is I want the FBI to be abolished. Okay, so now let’s talk about what’s happening in Brazil. Some people have followed very closely along with what’s happened in Brazil in the past couple months. They had a presidential election in October, and since then there’s been, I would call it widespread unrest. There’s been protests in the streets of Brazil for the last 72, 73 days and counting because so many people do not feel that the election was free and was fair.

It escalated, these protests escalated. And by the way, when I’m talking about protests, I’m not talking about a couple dozen people, a couple hundred people. I’m talking about millions of people in the streets that turned into tens of millions of people in cities all across Brazil. When the president who was elected in October, Lula was inaugurated last week, tens of millions of people turned out in the streets in Brazil. And several days ago, they stormed the presidential facilities, the legislature, and the Supreme Court buildings. We have some videos. You can see this. This is not a peaceful protest there. Some of it is. I mean, you can see this right now. This is just people crawling all over the governmental facilities, and these people are carrying Brazilian flags and wearing green and yellow and acting in a peaceful manner.

And then some of them aren’t. Some of them aren’t. There was some arson, there was some broken glass, there was some breaching of some facilities. And you might notice that I’m saying this. You can see the fire right there on that video. I’m saying this not with an incredible amount of indignation, not with a horrified tone of voice, because the question that I think is the most important question to ask when you see a people rising up against their government, we shouldn’t just assume that this is wrong, but my question, my threshold for I guess this sort of soft, vanilla political violence is what I’ll call it, my threshold for this is have you exhausted every other method of recourse? You feel that you’ve been wronged? And in a free society, in a democratic system, which Brazil is supposed to be, you have many layers of recourse before you would resort to essentially revolution or the threat of a revolution.

And so my threshold, that’s my question is have you exhausted every other method? And in order to answer that question, we have to talk about the entire backstory of what has happened in Brazil since the last presidential election. So as I said, tens of millions of people have been protesting the presidential election that happened in October when Lula, his name is actually Luis Lua DeSilva, but he is known as Lula, defeated Bolsonaro, who was the previous president. And we covered that on the show because Lula’s a communist. He’s a socialist communist, and Bolsonaro is a populist. And it’s not great to see in South America a matchup between a communist and a populist and see that communist win. We actually, in the United States, have an interest in making sure, or doing our best to make sure that that doesn’t, that communism doesn’t creep into the Americas, even into South Americas.

And Bolsonaro has been criticized a lot. Some of the criticism is probably fair. Politics is never an absolutist exercise. It’s always an exercise in picking the lesser of two evils. And in that sense, looking at the presidential election in Brazil through that lens than Bolsonaro is clearly the right choice. He’s clearly better than a communist than Lula. So that’s what happened in October, is that election went down. We’re gonna talk about the mechanics of that election in just a minute, because there’s some major problems with the mechanics of that election that led to this widespread unrest by the people of Brazil who felt that the election was stolen from them. But before we even get to that, this is how the Brazilian government, who right now is being directed by the Supreme Court, is treating citizens who are protesting sometimes on government ground. In fact, the government, I wanna show this video, this is the federal police. The federal police is shooting citizens. I don’t show you that to sensationalize violence. I show you that because the first thing that we have to do here is establish the what-it-is of what’s happening in Brazil. And this is the what-it-is. We’re seeing the federal police of Brazil actually opening fire on Brazilian citizens who are protesting. And we also see helicopters. We see helicopters dropping tear gas on mass groups of protestors. You can see that in this video.

I think the most striking part of that video to me is that those protestors were all peacefully protesting. That wasn’t a matter of people breaking through glass and breaching a government building. Those were just people gathered on government property. But because they were protesting against the current president, because they were making an allegation of an unfair election, the federal police was dropping tear gas on these citizens of Brazil. So it’s not just the people, people in charge of Brazil right now, these government officials who are trying to silence the people of Brazil. We have social media companies based in the United States like YouTube and Google, which I know are the same company. And then meta the owner of Facebook who are not allowing any posts on their platforms right now that are, that are positive posts related to these protestors.

They say that’s aiding and abetting. And any post that, that’s calling people to arms against the Brazilian government will not be allowed. That’s their way of saying that they are enacting censorship against any critics of the Lula government, which, like I said, was just inaugurated last week. There’s even been a threat that the internet would get turned off so that there would be no communication across the country, any communication between the protestors across the country. So that’s the what it is of what’s happening. This is just painting a picture of what’s going on there. So what’s going on is begot of how the people feel about the election that happened in October. There are some serious abnormalities, some serious issues with what happened in the election in October. There are tens of millions of people, citizens of Brazil, who have turned out to protest the election because they said it was a stolen election.

It’s unfair. They did in the last couple of days, storm the capitol in Brazil and the police force in Brazil is responding with violence to these protestors. Now, what’s funny is, here in the United States, our media apparatus for a long time ignored what was happening in Brazil. They weren’t interested in covering the election in Brazil beyond just reporting that the populist, oh, look at that, the populist lost. That must mean that Trump is unpopular here because Trump endorsed Bolsonaro during that election. That’s the only thing the mainstream media said about the election at the time. After the election, when the Brazilian people were like, wait a second. There’s some really fishy stuff that happened here, and we feel like our votes were not counted properly and our voices were silenced, the mainstream media and the United States had zero interest in investigating what happened.

Zero journalistic curiosity, nothing. So fast forward to today. Fast forward to this week when these protestors breached the presidential facilities, the legislature in the Supreme Court in Brazil, all of a sudden the mainstream media here in the United States are so interested in this, so interested in this. But the reason that they’re interested is because they’re trying to make a comparison. They’re saying, oh, look at that. The Brazilian people were influenced by January 6th. Look at this picture. They even have the Brazilian people even have their own shaman, just like there was on January 6th. This shaman that we were told was an insurrectionist, even though he, you know, didn’t overthrow the US government and he wasn’t armed. Well, the mainstream media is at Payne to blame both Donald Trump and Steve Bannon for what’s happening in Brazil. This is Morning Joe.

All right, we get the idea, we get the point. Trump’s not comment on the rights in Brazil, but he expressed his support for this thug several times. He took credit for helping him reach the runoff in the presidential election. Jimmy Raskin of Maryland made his direct comparison between what’s happening in Brazil and Donald Trump’s supporters tweeting apart these fascists modeling themselves after Trump’s January 6th rioters, must end up in the same place. Prison. Michael Steele, this is, well first of all, if you’re in Brazil and you see fascists trying to undermine democracy in Brazil, you could be forgiven for asking, wait, how does this guy keep getting arrested? How does this guy keep getting convicted? How does this guy keep getting sentenced? And how does this guy keep out of jail to export fascism and the undermining of democracy?

That’s part one of it. But part two is, and I know you’ll share my feelings as for me, a former Republican, but we used to be the people that praised Ronald Reagan for talking about exporting democracy, for calling the Soviet Union an evil empire. And while everybody freaked out in the West, while he was saying that we heard after the iron curtain fell, that people were whispering, you know, from prison cell to prison cell in the gulags, there is hope, there is a president who understands what what’s going on. And we have a chance to be liberated. That’s where we used to be. Now, we actually, after 240 years of exporting democracy from this country, Jeffersonian democracy from this country around the world, we’re now we’re through Donald Trump. We’ve got people exporting fascism election denialism, a hatred of the press, hatred of the courts, all the things that Bannon was saying right there, and that the people of Brazil picked up on.

Like, what world does he live in? Exporting fascism, the Brazilian people just picked up on this? No, no, no, no. The irony here is that when people like Morning Joe talk about democracy and praise democracy, the irony is that pure democracy is mob rule. We actually don’t have democracy in the United States. We have a representative constitutional republic because our founders deliberately did not structure our government to be a pure democracy, because they know that pure democracy is something that doesn’t last. Countries that try pure democracy often implode. They don’t work because it is so prone to mob rule. And so it’s funny to me that people like Morning Joe look at mobs in Brazil and talk about wanting a pure democracy when that is a better example of pure democracy than almost anything else. But the fact that these leftists morning show is not isolated here, he’s just the funniest example, I think the fact that they’re claiming that the United States has exported fascism, that the Brazilian people are copying January 6th is deliberate.

This is a snow job. This is what the media wants you to think, because they don’t want you to know why the Brazilian people are unhappy and what actually happened in the Brazilian election. So let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about why the people are so angry. So in order to, to talk about whether or not the Brazilian election is fair, was fair, whether it was free, we have to actually look at the man who’s been inaugurated President Lula and asked the question, why was Lula even allowed to run? Now, the reason I ask that question is because Lula was, at one point, imprisoned in Brazil. He was convicted of crimes. He essentially sold out his country, and he was thrown in prison for it. Now he’s not in prison now. You’ll notice he is not in prison now because he was released from prison by a corrupt judiciary.

He was released from prison by judges, who were his own judicial appointments, who were, if not on the physical payroll, on the ideological payroll of Lula. Lula, as I mentioned, is a communist who wants communism and Marxism for Brazil. And he appointed his buddies, his cronies to the judiciary. They let him out. Now, not only did they let him out of prison, which he should not have been allowed out of prison, he had a 12 year sentence. He did not serve that. When he was allowed out of prison, he still shouldn’t have been allowed to run for president, because in Brazil it’s against the law. If you have a felony on your criminal record, you are not allowed to run for office. So in order to be allowed to run for office, he would’ve had to have his criminal record expunged. Well, his judicial appointees expunged his record, even though, again, this is against the law in Brazil to do.

This is a wildly unconstitutional and a legal thing that Lula was allowed out of prison. And the reason that his conviction was overturned is they claimed that it was a jurisdictional technicality. What does that mean? A jurisdictional technicality? They claimed nothing about the crime that he committed because it was so obvious that he was guilty of this crime. He faced 12 charges, he was found guilty on all of those charges. He was sentenced to 12 years. 19 judges unanimously found him guilty. So when they said, when they let him out, when this judge let him out and expunged his record, they didn’t pretend that he didn’t commit the crime because it was obvious that he did. They didn’t pretend that it was an unfair verdict because it was a just verdict. No, no. They said, well, he was tried in the wrong court.

This technicality just, wouldn’t you know it, let him out. He got, got out of prison after 580 days served of what should have been a 12 year sentence no appeal, nothing. Just what wiped it away, wiped it away. This is judicial tyranny is what it is. It is a corrupted judiciary. So that in and of itself, before we even get to the election and the mechanisms of the election, and whether it was fair and whether it wasn’t fair or how it was rigged, whatever you wanna call it, we have to understand that just the fact that Lula was allowed to run for president was a sign of corruption. Corruption in the institutions of the government of Brazil, particularly in the judiciary. So when Morning Joe is saying, oh, you know, people are anti-court now, well, maybe the people of Brazil are anti-court because the courts in Brazil are corrupt.

Maybe they’re violating the law instead of enforcing it. Maybe they are violating the constitution instead of adhering to it. And in that case, it’s right and it’s properly ordered for the people of Brazil to protest against that. Because how is that weaponized against them? Like this. By allowing a criminal who wants to impose communism on them against their will to run for president? So that’s where we are in the lead-up to the presidential election in Brazil last October. So it’s also important to note the popular opinion in Brazil. Are the people in Brazil more populist-minded? Are the people in Brazil more communist minded? Because that’s a pretty stark contrast between two political candidates. We have Bolsonaro the populist, and Lulu the communist. Where are people on this ideological spectrum? What are their views?

What are their values? What are their political beliefs here? Well, the people in Brazil, by and large hate Lula, and they did before his election. This is very important because very important to note, because of the anomalies, which we will discuss, that we’re evident in the election result. There’s a comparison here. And not to get too much ahead of myself here, because we’re gonna talk about the comparison between what happened in Brazil and what’s happening in the United States and why the media in the United States is covering what’s happening in Brazil, the way that the media in the United States is covering what’s happening in Brazil because of what’s happening in the United States. It’s all one big tangled web here. But it’s important to note the people in Brazil hate Lula because of the anomalies that showed up in some of the election results.

And it’s similar to what happened in the United States during the midterm elections, where public opinion was widely against President Biden, something like 75% of voters in exit polls after the midterm elections expressed on happiness or dissatisfaction with what Biden has done to our country in his first two years in office. And yet, even though they expressed that kind of discontent, even though inflation is as high as it is, even though gas is so expensive, even though food prices are astronomical, still, still, the Democrats staved off the red wave in the midterm elections, and it’s incongruent. It’s something that you cannot marry those two things. You cannot marry the public opinion being what it was against Biden with the fact that so many people voted for down ballot candidates that share Biden’s ideology. And of course, the answer to that is something that YouTube won’t let me say, which is why we’re gonna bleep out this next sentence that I’m about to say.

The reason for that, of course, is electioneering. It’s unfair election practices. It’s a form of cheating, even if it’s not the type of outright voter fraud, where someone walks into the polling booth, pretends to be someone else, and casts a ballot in someone else’s name. It’s the changing of election rules and procedures and laws at the local and state level by people who have no authority to make those changes in a way that either creates vulnerability for fraud or allows the Democrats to build an apparatus to target people, exploit people, manipulate people who would not otherwise vote, into voting for their radical candidates. That’s what happened in the United States, and it’s something to keep in mind as we continue to unpack what’s happening in Brazil. So the people in Brazil hate Lula. They actually call him the squid. Now, squid is a derogatory term in Portuguese.

I don’t even know what the analogy would be in the English language, but it’s slander. It’s a nasty term. If you call someone a squid in Portuguese, it’s a really nasty term, and that’s what he’s widely known as in Brazil. He also, Lula, this is not a commonly known fact, I think, in America about Lula. He only has nine fingers on his hands. Why does he only have nine fingers? Was he born like that? No, he was not. This was not a birth defect. Was he in some kind of accident, maybe a car wreck? You know, I’ve heard of men and on their wedding ring finger, their wedding ring getting caught and it slicing off the finger. Maybe that’s just a horror story. Did that happen to him?

No, it didn’t. Why does he only have nine fingers? Lula purposely destroyed his 10th finger while he was engaged in, quote unquote, worker activism. Meaning, while he was engaged in communist community organizing, he didn’t want to be considered a fully-abled worker, an employee who could actually work. So he disfigured himself, disabled himself, in order to reap the government benefits. That’s really messed up. It’s like trans-abled before it was a thing. This is a weird guy, a communist guy. The people do not like him. They see through him. The people in Brazil are not communists. They don’t want Marxism or socialism brought to their nation. So how, then, did Lula end up winning by the margin that he won? Well, the answer to that, according to some, is the machines. They used a digital tallying system, these electronic machines. And what happened across the country as Bolsonaro was leading when the first, you know, 10, 15, 20% of the votes were tallied on these machines, and suddenly, when two-thirds of the votes in every precinct were counted, suddenly Lula pulled away the rest of the votes. Essentially, it’s a little hyperbolic, but the rest of the votes were in Lula’s column. Particularly egregious was the indigenous regions of Brazil. The indigenous regions of Brazil are very anti-communists. They’re very right-wing. They supported the populist. And yet, these indigenous precincts went for Lula. And some of these indigenous leaders, these people marched. They said, listen, we did not vote for Lula. Why are you telling our votes for the candidate that we voted against?

And right now, to this day, in Brazil, indigenous leaders are imprisoned. The government of Brazil is torturing an indigenous leader in order to try to coerce him into issuing a public denunciation of the allegations of voter fraud, of cheating in the election that he has made, because he was disenfranchised. These indigenous leaders have appealed even to the United Nations, because they say that their rights were violated, their votes, they were cheated of their votes. And where’s the international media? Where are these activist organizations? They’re silent. They’re silent as serious anomalies were evident right from the get-go in the aftermath of the Brazilian election. So we have to zoom out here for a second and talk about the history of Brazil. So the history of Brazil is different than the history of the United States. The history of Brazil, Brazil was under military rule just decades ago.

They aren’t anymore, but in their very recent history, they were under military rule. And so the military today is viewed very differently than the United States views our military. The US military is very separate from the American citizen. The US military would never be used against us or used domestically. And we’ve always been very, very careful about making sure that that line is crystal clear between the US civilian population and the military. The military’s not used for enforcement of laws here domestically in the United States. Not at all. But it’s different in Brazil. In Brazil, the military is viewed as being the most disciplined and trained and hierarchical institution, an institution to be trusted in Brazil. And when something is wrong in Brazil, especially when something destabilizing to society happens in Brazil, they turn to the military to right that wrong.

They turn to the military for recourse, especially for investigations regarding elections. So all of this is to say, in the Brazilian constitution, there is a clause, it’s Article 142, and in article 142, it essentially suggests, this has not been adjudicated in the Brazilian court system, but it suggests that if there is a dispute, a separation of power’s dispute in Brazil, that leads to the destabilization of society, which I think we can all agree that that seems to be what’s happening right now in Brazil. That there’s, there’s somewhat of a war going on between a corrupted judiciary that’s acting in a tyrannical sense, an executive branch that is also acting in a corrupt and tyrannical sense, and a legislature that’s being completely discarded. It has destabilized society when tens of millions of people turn out in the streets and feel that their election was stolen and their votes were subverted in a way that causes them to storm the capitol.

I think that’s the definition of a destabilized society. Article 142 says, in this case, who checks the judges, right? Who holds the courts accountable, when the courts are supposed to hold corruption accountable, but the judges have been corrupted. Well, the answer to that in the Brazilian constitution is the military. The military is empowered via Article 142 to conduct an audit of the elections. Now, this audit of the elections this article 142 audit, is triggered by either the executive branch of the government, the chief, chief executive, the president, or by the military itself. So when Bolsonaro was the outgoing president, when he lost, but he had not yet left office, he did not invoke Article 142. He could have, because he was the executive branch, he did not. Why did he not?

He did not, because in order for that to be effective, in order for it to work, he would have to have had the support of military generals, because you can invoke this, but the military then has to be in agreement because they’re the ones that conduct the audit. I have some sources who tell me that Bolsonaro had maybe seven, maybe eight of the 12 military generals in this hierarchy that were necessary. Their support was necessary for this to work out. But he had not yet convinced the general of the army to support his cause. And this holdout, this army general, would’ve been necessary for this to be a successful effort. And the reason that Bolsonaro didn’t try this, didn’t do this publicly, just hoping that the public might pressure the military to support this, is because he was afraid.

He was afraid that if the military did not support what he was doing, that he would be arrested and accused of trying to stage a coup. So he couldn’t get the unanimity of the generals in order to do this. So that leaves it to the military. If the executive branch doesn’t trigger Article 142, then the military can do it. So the military stepped up. The military began to conduct an audit, and what they found is they found indications of shady behavior. They found something fishy. They found, indication is the word that they used, that something was wrong. And one of the things they found, for example, was down ballot performance. Meaning candidates that were not presidential candidates, weren’t in line with Lula’s victory. So for example, in precincts where Lula the communist won, the communist down ballot candidates didn’t win, the populist down ballot candidates won.

So there’s a contradiction there. Did the same people that voted for a communist president vote against communist lower ballot candidates? Did they vote for populist lower ballot candidates? Because that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Usually if you vote for communist president, you would vote for a communist representative. If you vote for a populist president, you would vote for a populist representative. But that wasn’t the case. That’s what you call an election anomaly. An election anomaly. People didn’t vote for the communists down the ballot. So as soon as the military began to conduct this audit, just two days later, the data that was publicly available on Brazil’s government websites was scrubbed offline. It was removed from the web so that people, you and I, and journalists and people of Brazil, could not analyze these types of anomalies, could not analyze the precinct district data that would demonstrate that maybe something shady or something fishy happened.

This report from the military, they couldn’t complete it. They couldn’t complete it. They eventually, by the way, the Supreme Court in Brazil eventually put some of this election data back up online after backlash. But there were large swaths of data that were missing. The military wasn’t able to properly analyze this because there just wasn’t enough information. So the military has a constitutional role to adjudicate separation of powers disputes, which is what’s happening in Brazil right now. The judiciary is in dispute with the executive branch and the legislature, and because of that, they should have the right to audit these voting machines, to look at the source, the code of these machines to have access to all of the tabulation data, everything. But the judiciary refused to allow the military to conduct this audit.

The military issued a 60-page report that said that there was an indication that things are off, that there are anomalies that happened in the election, but they could not come to a conclusion. They did not have a conclusive result to this report because the court refused to give them the information. Now, this report that said that there is indication of anomalies in the election, and yet they couldn’t complete the report because the judiciary denied them the data to do it, that in and of itself should have triggered Article 142. That should have led to courts being raided and machines being seized, and judges who are violating the constitution being arrested for crimes against the constitution. But it did not lead to that. It did not lead to that. Instead, it led to this. It led to what we’re seeing in Brazil right now, where the Brazilian people are crying out.

The Brazilian people are saying, Hey, wait a second, we live in a free country. We live in a representative democracy, where our votes should matter, and the government of Brazil is corrupt. The government of Brazil is denying these people recourse. And that’s what’s leading to these people storming the capitol. That’s also, by the way, that’s also why the American mainstream media is covering this the way that they are, because there are similarities to what’s happening in Brazil compared to what happened here in the United States in 2022 and in 2020. Of course, there are similarities. There’s electioneering, there’s rules that are being changed when they shouldn’t be changed. There’s a separation of powers dispute in Brazil that mirrors some of the state-by-state constitutional problems that we’ve seen that impact that, and I know YouTube’s not gonna let me say this either, but yes, led to a different outcome in both the midterm elections and the 2020 presidential election than we would have seen, had this meddling not have happened in the election process.

So of course, the mainstream media doesn’t want you to think that there’s any legitimacy to the protests. They want these people painted as terrorists. They want them painted as fascists because if they allow even an ounce of legitimacy for the protests in Brazil, then here in the United States, maybe we, the people would say, well, wait a second, why are they allowed to protest when their elections have been rigged, but we’re not allowed to protest when our elections have been rigged? So the mainstream media is at pains to blame Trump and to blame Bannon and to blame and to claim that the US has exported fascism, when really what’s happening in Brazil is sad. It’s awful. It’s a crisis of the democracy that the left claims that they care about. Lula, of course, doesn’t care at all about democracy. Lula’s tied to the Chinese Communist Party.

He’s a bad, bad dude. Not only is he communist and socialist in his ideology, he has sold Brazilian state assets to the Chinese. He’s sold land, he’s sold oil. For what? For wealth and for ideology. He’s a very bad dude. He is a communist. And huge thanks to Matthew Tyrmand for being an incredible resource for putting together this episode today. Matthew Tyrmand is one of the only independent journalists who has been covering the corruption in the Brazilian election system since before the election actually happened. He was arrested by authorities in Brazil and that triggered him to look into exactly what’s going on. You can follow him on Twitter, is Matthew Tyrmand, T-Y-R-M-A-N-D, Matthew Tyrmand doing incredible coverage of everything that’s happening in Brazil. The mainstream media, why are they covering it the way that they are? First, silence. They wanted you to ignore it. Then blaming Trump for exporting fascism because they don’t want you to see the similarities in how our voices and our votes have been subverted by those who hate us. Thank you for watching today. Thank you for listening. I’m Liz Wheeler. This is The Liz Wheeler Show.