by Miguel Nunes Silva
Trump's measures to pressure the Brazilian government must be understood as the unmaking of an injustice perpetrated by the U.S. Left with Biden era taxpayer instruments at its disposal.
As the October election in Brazil approaches and is likely to pit, once again, a Lula vs. Bolsonaro matchup—this time with President Bolsonaro’s son Flávio running in his place—timing has never been better to hold accountable those in the U.S. who collaborated in the subversive campaign, both stateside and abroad, that would lead to President Bolsonaro’s political persecution and ultimately, incarceration, following the presidential election of 2022 in Brazil.
It is in this context that President Trump’s measures to pressure the Brazilian government must be understood: as the unmaking of an injustice perpetrated by the U.S. Left, with Biden-era taxpayer instruments at its disposal.
Amongst the trove of revelations that the second Trump administration has managed to expose since coming to office, those connected to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funding are some of the most shocking and insidious.
These investigations were fueled by the Twitter Files scandal, which Elon Musk made available following his acquisition of Twitter, and soon afterward by the Musk-created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which went in-depth into U.S. federal government expenditure.
Cyber-forensic analysis by Mike Benz and Michael Shellenberger has revealed enormous amounts of money and political interference flowing from the U.S. federal government into other governments. Together with several pro-Bolsonaro networks, Brazil has been a big focus of leftist interference in the Americas, with Biden efforts and money flowing to Brazilian academia, media, and political agents to undermine or subvert the Bolsonaro government and supporters.
The scheme involved two components: censorship and discrediting of Bolsonaro officials, media, and policies, on one hand, and lawfare against them, on the other. Though not always in that order, the effort consisted of the undermining of conservative narratives and actors first, then, ultimately, cancelling them altogether via legal lustration.
Whereas in the U.S. that strategy failed, its implementation in Brazil was successful, resulting in the imprisonment of Bolsonaro, the exile of many of his most prolific influencers and aligned journalists, and the almost complete reversal of his policies. The instrument of a false-flag operation on inauguration day was identical. Both Biden and Lula officials shared, in addition, the sheer hypocrisy of feigning outrage over election protests, after decades of defending criminal behavior and justifying political violence from their own side.
In the U.S. there were lethal and destructive BLM riots, attacks and assassinations of right-wing politicians such as President Trump himself and Charlie Kirk, the Congressional baseball shooting, the hounding of SCOTUS justices and their confirmation hearings such as Brett Kavanaugh’s, riots in universities aimed at censoring conservative speakers, ANTIFA attacks against federal facilities and agents, setting up of lawless and deadly autonomous zones, not to mention older instances of systematic violence such as the Battle in Seattle and numerous anti-globalization riots, the firebombing of ROTCs and occupation of universities during the Vietnam War, etc. None of these instances has any corresponding right-wing equivalent in scale, and the American Right never scapegoated this political violence in order to politically purge the Left.
In Brazil, there were illegal occupations of private property by the Sem Terra movement, violent censorship of political opponents in universities, making the universities Marxist sanctuaries (link in Portuguese), providing legal aid and political protection to inner-city gangs involved in organized crime, assassination, and the drug trade. Once again, with nothing even remotely similar observable on the Right.
The proof that the Biden administration changed policy specifically on Brazil is in the money trail: USAID (which functioned under the umbrella of the State Department) disbursements to Brazil more than doubled after Bolsonaro’s election victory in 2018, and throughout his tenure totaled over $322 million—a Brazilian congressional hearing on the matter can be found here.
However, the insidious component of the equation is not only the amount but also the nature of the expenditure. Under the guise of combating disinformation and misinformation, pro-Bolsonaro social media were censored, closed, and persecuted. This is especially egregious, taking into consideration that, as happened elsewhere in the West, Bolsonaro had secured an electoral victory against the bias of mainstream media in the first place, communicating directly to voters through social media. While Donald Trump had relied on YouTube and Twitter, Jair Bolsonaro had made ample use of WhatsApp in his campaign.
The Biden administration used a handful of institutions to undermine Brazil’s conservative right, including USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the U.S. Embassy in Brasilia, and the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Just as in the U.S. and Europe, it was the pandemic that was initially weaponized against the online Right. The joint efforts of the two totalitarian parties—the U.S. Democratic Party and Brazil’s Workers’ Party (PT)—started with speech-policing.
The NSF took the academic route by subsidizing U.S. universities researching “pandemic misinformation” in Brazil. Eventually, the NSF had these U.S. academics partner with Brazilian mainstream fact-checking projects as well as Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court (TSE). These entities all had a vested interest in guaranteeing that independent social media influencers and right-wing narratives did not get a fair hearing by Brazilian society at large: the mainstream media regarded independent social media as market share competitors, whereas civil servants in general tended to skew left-wing, not only personally reviling the Bolsonaro movement but also fearing cuts in the federal government budget, which could compromise their tenured positions.
As elsewhere in the West, the greatest purveyors of misinformation ended up being the mainstream media themselves, which backtracked on the efficacy of masks, on vaccines preventing contagion, on the origin of the virus, not to mention on the scale of the side effects of vaccination, on the comorbidity of lockdowns, or on the necessity of vaccinating children, a practice that to this day is recommended by health authorities in Brazil. Similar to China, the Orwellian surveillance system set up with U.S. help in Brazil contained public outrage and delayed the lifting of the lockdowns, along with the free flow of information running counter to governmental narrative—in turn slowing the lifting of needless emergency measures and the change in narrative necessary to return to normalcy.
NSF’s “academic” grants ran into the millions of dollars and included racial and ideological clauses, making sure the “projects” skewed non-white and anti-right-wing in their hiring and focus: “Minority-Led Partnerships.” The purpose statements also painted Bolsonaro supporters as intentionally spreading dangerous disinformation.
NED, on the other hand, pursued more political avenues by funding think tanks and social media influencers directly. Some of the funded entities publicly called for an end to the online dialogue between Bolsonaro and Trump supporters, and the mission statements of some of the projects aimed at countering the “malicious use of false information.” Coincidentally, the targets of scrutiny never turned out to be mainstream media or left-wing politicians.
The U.S. Embassy engaged with high-level actors such as superstar YouTuber Felipe Neto through his Instituto Vero. Neto would end up with an official role in the Lula Ministry of Human Rights, helping run a task force combating “hate speech” and “extremism.” His institute’s activities include briefing Supreme Federal Court (STF) judges—the same judges who imprisoned Bolsonaro, tried to ban Twitter, and arbitrarily ordered journalists arrested without jurisdiction. In the same vein, Vero is also a close collaborator of the TSE’s Misinformation Confrontation Program. It was later revealed that Neto had direct access to Twitter executives and requested arbitrary bans and account suspensions for ideological reasons, just as the now-infamous judge Alexandre de Moraes did—in the pre-Elon Musk ownership era.
A foreign embassy bankrolling the political actors responsible for censorship and political persecution found doing it for that express purpose… is not a good look. Will any federal official ever be held accountable?
In another instance, the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, and Stanford University collaborated with a Brazilian fact-checking publication to create a guide on combating misinformation, which advocated backdoor, opaque connections between governments and social media execs, intending to monitor and fight “false information” and “hate speech.” The guide made specific reference to techniques learned from WhatsApp in Brazil.
In time, the language of the financed projects became more extreme, such as “zero-tolerance policy for gendered, sexualized, racist, and other forms of hate speech” in an NDI-funded report in Brazil focusing on gender.
Led by the ultra-partisan Supreme Federal Court Justice Moraes, the country’s judiciary carried out a campaign of intimidation by inquest, active legal censorship, and proscription by arrest without habeas corpus, as well as through forced exile.
A Brazilian jurist described the current situation (link in Portuguese) as one in which the “judge abandons institutional inertia to assume functions that should belong to the police and the Public Prosecutor’s Office, forming judgments incompatible with impartiality,” and many agree that “Moraes has accumulated decisions that jurists, press organizations, politicians, and even some fellow justices describe as unprecedented in the history of the Supreme Federal Court.” The right-wing newspaper Gazeta do Povo recently listed 104 rule of law violations by Moraes, which include disrespect for legal deadlines, ignoring impartiality standards, incurring multiple conflicts of interest, outright partisan censorship, carte blanche accusations and investigations, bypassing official bodies and procedures in arbitrary arrests, illegal accumulation of functions, with him often acting as both investigator and judge and even as plaintiff, abusive use of preventive measures and exorbitant bail fees as forms of intimidation, cases of outright illegal sealed proceedings, arrests en masse without individual legal proceedings, interference in proceedings outside of his purview, arbitrary removal of defendants’ legal representatives from cases, punitive legal measures adopted against individuals by virtue of them being relatives of other defendants, unlimited jurisdiction, partisan censorship during political campaign season, submission of evidence for arrest gathered post facto, and court-mandated violations of freedom of speech and freedom of the press, amongst many others.
In some cases, the imprisonment of Bolsonaristas puts them in physical danger since prisons are mostly controlled by organized crime, which favors left-wing parties. In addition, they can end up in solitary confinement as protection, which also contributes to physical and mental degradation, as is the case with Filipe Martins, a former Bolsonaro adviser.
The Lula government that cracked down on Bolsonaristas also made use of the Antiterrorism Law since it had originally been drafted by Lula’s socialist predecessor and typified terrorism as motivated by “xenophobia, discrimination or prejudice against race, color, ethnicity and religion”, i.e. only left-wing designed motives, which is common in many western ‘human rights’ driven judiciaries.
The result of this weaponised use of media, academia and the courts was the ostracisation of Bolsonaro supporters by the thousands: in the US the number of Brazilian asylum claims more than doubled with 3500 new requests in 2023 alone, and almost 200 in Argentina, a country that virtually had none until then. Scores more stayed in Brazil under professional gag orders, imposed or threatened.
The costs for Brazil included the corrupting and politicizing of the judicial branch of government, as well as mass censorship over the population. For the US Democratic Party, the regimes of Brazil and South Africa feature prominently in their pantheon of foreign political realities to aspire to. Part of the motivation for the woke era democrats to help subvert Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, will have been ideological: a fellow ‘rainbow nation’ could not be allowed to prosper and improve safety with a right-wing agenda lest the role model go on to set a trend…
Now, on the eve of this year’s election on Brazil, it is paramount that both Americans and Brazilians be made aware of how the Left has perverted democracy and rule of Law in the hemisphere and the risk for governance and liberty, should the Left be allowed to remain in power, be it politically or through technocratic deep states.
Miguel Nunes Silva
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/09/14/how-the-biden-white-house-subverted-brazils-bolsonaro/
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