Brazil Riots: Three Hot Takes From Right Wing Media
By Kevin Howley, January 12, 2023
Who says right wing journos can’t walk and chew gum at the same time? Conservative news outlets are hyperventilating over revelations that classified documents were found in a private office that once belonged to President Biden.
But all the schadenfreude and “whataboutism” over Biden’s latest gaffe, or rather his gift to political opponents, hasn’t stopped right wing media from cheering fascist thugs who stormed government buildings in Brazil last weekend in a bid to oust democratically elected Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva.
The parallels between the anti-democratic riot in Brasília and the January 6, 2021 US Capitol insurrection are hard to miss – harder still to overstate, much less ignore. Unless of course you adhere to a right wing extremist ideology that defies the rule of law and threatens the democratic order in countries around the globe.
Here are three “hot takes” from right wing media on the Brazilian insurrection.
Brazilian Patriots
The headline from Big League Politics says it all: “Brazilians Peacefully Occupy Government Buildings Protesting Socialist Takeover.” Echoing GOP talking points defending the January 6 insurrection as “legitimate political speech,” Eric Simmons writes, “These patriotic Brazilians, unwilling to see Brazil fall to convicted criminal Lula’s designs for their nation, recently occupied … the buildings that house Congress and the Supreme Court, along with the presidential palace, in another round of vastly peaceful protests.”
Like their American cousins, Brazilian “patriots” cling to a big lie propagated by their former president, the so-calledTrump of the Tropics, Jair Bolsonaro. “The protesters, along with Bolsonaro, insist that problems with electronic voting are responsible for inaccurate results – a claim increasingly common in Western nations – that handed the federal government of Brazil over to pro-China socialist Lula.”
As events unfolded on Sunday, The Gateway Pundit offered this update: “The already massive crowd in Brazil is growing. The people are taking back their country.”
Scary Socialists
Headlined “Chaos in Brazil: Protesters Storm Capital, Destroying Supreme Court and Congress,” early reporting might have you thinking that Breitbart is giving it to you straight. Think again. The story’s lead tells an altogether different story. “Thousands of opponents of socialist convicted felon President Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva stormed his offices and the headquarters of the Congress and Supreme Federal Tribunal (STF) of Brazil on Sunday.”
Ominously, the story lends tacit approval for a military “solution” to Brazil’s political crisis. “Many of the protesters convening in Brasília on Sunday are part of a movement demanding that the nation’s military oust Lula. They insist that their demand is not for a coup d’état, but for a ‘military intervention’ they say the Brazilian constitution provides for in the event of an illegitimate election.” You can bet your bottom dollar that the Donald has added such a provision to his reelection wish list.
Meanwhile, The Gateway Pundit (TGP) portrayed President Lula as a cowardly red on the run: “Per reports, socialist criminal Lula has left the complex and city and fled to Sao Paulo.” Not that facts matter in the right wing media sphere, but Breitbart managed to get it right: “The riot in Brasília occurred while Lula himself was in Sao Paulo state assessing the damage of recent floods.”
Nonetheless, the specter of socialism haunts right wing reporting on the Brazilian insurrection. For instance, another story in TGP offers this bit of reassurance: “The people of Brazil know that the recent Presidential election was stolen by convicted criminal Lula and his gang of socialists. They are fighting back.”
Yet another TGP headline pulls out all the stops with hints of a global socialist conspiracy. All the while disavowing any similarity between the Brazilian uprising and Trump’s failed coup attempt: “Is the International Media and Global Socialist Movement Trying to Make Brazil’s Sunday Protests Their Jan 6 Event and Reichstag Fire?”
Kicking The Autocrat While He’s Down
Like his BFFL, Donald Trump, Brazil’s former president left town ahead his rival’s inauguration. Unlike Trump, who sulked off to his Mar-a-Lago hideaway, Bolsonaro went one better and left the country. As it happens, he landed in Florida. Talk about a small world.
Still, those pesky socialists want to make life difficult for Brazil’s biggest loser. A recent op-ed in the American Thinkerslams House Democrats calling on the Biden administration to extradite Bolsonaro for his role in last weekend’s violent protests.
Headlined “Leftists Joaquin Castro and AOC Buck for Brazil’s Bolsonaro to be Deported Back to Brazil,” Monica Showalter claims the two Democrats are a couple of know nothings who refuse to give the former Brazilian president credit for disavowing last week’s violence.
Showalter hastens to add that Castro and Ocasio-Cortez are kicking a man when he’s down. “The guy is sick and in a hospital bed, and they are showing their true colors by calling for the gendarmes. Such a compassionate bunch.”
Funny. Reading right wing media all this time, I thought compassion was out of fashion.
Kevin Howley is a writer and educator whose work has appeared in Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, Social Movement Studies, and Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture. His most recent book is Drones: Media Discourse and the Public Imagination.
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Like their American cousins, Brazilian “patriots” cling to a big lie propagated by their former president, the so-calledTrump of the Tropics, Jair Bolsonaro. (Image: Pixabay)
