Brazil

 There was certainly some telegraphy that something like this might occur, although it's a bit surprising that it's two years two days after the US's own attempted autogolpe and sometime after the Lula government has already been sworn in.  But now that a scene very familiar to us in the US has emerged in Brazil, it becomes apparent that some of our national figures share some blame. 

The very same ones who supported the attempted coup here. Like Steve Bannon and Matthew Tyrmand. But also Ali Alexander.  And Charlie Kirk has the big-headed, little-faced nerve to ask:

AHAHHAHAH!  Because Ray Epps also doesn't have anything to do with 1/6 other than being another Trump fan who ended up in situ, who got made the subject of an idiotic conspiracy theory that he was a mastermind and a Fed who caused the whole thing by just being some guy who was there, and yeah. It doesn't make sense, and the 1/6 committee has transcripts of his testimony for people who are into that kind of thing. 

I think there have been other people in and around Brazil recently who might be more interesting to look at. We can ask ourselves what Jair Bolsonaro's son was doing January of 2021 in the US--and possibly come up with the answer: taking notes. Obviously--I blame Bannon as an instigator within a worldwide push for more autocratic, fascist or fascist-leaning governments. 

Bolsonaro supporters attacking federal buildings in Brasilia. National Congress and the Planalto Palace, the seat of executive power, both broken into. Images of shattered windows and ransacked workspaces, all painfully reminiscent of Jan. 6. pic.twitter.com/esvFYE0HcC

— Alejandro Alvarez (@aletweetsnews) January 8, 2023

There are differences between what happened in the US and what is happening now in Brazil. Lula is already inaugurated, and the buildings invaded by rioters were mostly empty. They are vandals, not people disrupting an actual significant event allied to the change of power. They are too late, and the response to them is swift. They are being arrested straightaway. 

But I want my readers cognizant that there is a global push towards more right-wing governments, and the US has recently been involved in this--see Venezuela.   (Really--take a look. It might make certain claims about the 2020 "stolen" election in the US make more and less sense.)

It's interesting of course, that Jair Bolsonaro himself is in Florida at the moment. I don't think this riot is supposed to be successful, just demonstrative of the destructive ability of rumor and political fuckery. It's a warning to take seriously. And I believe that the success of any crackdown will also be used as propaganda, just the way Trump is using "Ashli Babbitt" as a martyr figure in his re-telling of the disgraceful activity of 1/6. 

Fascism has a lot to do with grievance and the sense of persecution. I think one will see these themes in the follow-up to this. 

UPDATE: It doesn't escape notice that some of the signs are in English and have "We want the Source Code" and "#BrazilWasStolen" and "#BrazilianSpring"--this keeps alive the idea of some voting machine irregularity and is intended for an international (probably specifically a US) audience.

Opinion: Bret Stephens Should Get Stuffed

 

For Democrats, comprehensive immigration reform presents an "opportunity to defuse the political bomb Republicans would love to plant right under them. And it’s a jobs-creating infrastructure program to boot," writes Bret Stephens. https://t.co/85RmS1adbx

— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) April 6, 2021

The wall is not a jobs-creating infrastructure program; it's a symbolic boondoggle that doesn't actually work because people can go over it, under it, and around it, and building it wouldn't defuse the political "bomb" the Republicans keep lobbing because it is a basically rhetorical bomb and we don't defuse those by accepting their framing.

He uses a vehicle crash (grisly enough) as his example of what's bad about immigration--shouldn't there have been another barrier for these people to have butted up against before their collision? (And if my mother was a quill I could have been a poem....)

Here's the grisly part: the wall, and the policies of Trump, didn't actually stop people from wanting to come here. They come here because they believe the US is nonetheless, a better place to live. Treating people who are amongst us with compassion is a choice we can make for us--the inducements for migrants to come exist whether we decide to be bastards or not. 

He seriously writes this admitting all the reasons he's not actually quite right: he knows it's not a true physical barrier and doesn't address the root causes, but says it's better to try and give the Republicans something they want in order for a chance at comprehensive reform. But no--the wall option exists in the first place, as far as I can tell, so that Republicans can focus on that, call it a plan, and never deal with the actual hard thinky/worky bits.  

The wall itself isn't a serious bargaining chip--it's a talking point. If you give them that, they don't need anything else. The wall is the barrier to real conversations about immigration. (It's also an environmental disaster and a shambles for property rights on the border, for a whole other conversation.)

A wall as an opening is not good symbolism, or anything else. 

Conflicted Because I Know My America

This is the family most often seen in the Twitter protestations against the teargassing of asylum-seekers at our border: they are a real family, not some staging or crisis actors, no matter what the fringe wants to express. A real woman and her barefoot and diapered kids. The world they escaped from has its horrors, and letting hope lead them to a place made politically inhospitable is a cruel joke of the cosmos. 

But this America was never fully hospitable, and I equally want to utter my fullest condemnation of Trump's policies and yet acknowledge we have been failing to be welcoming. This border conflict is a stage Trump made, knowing the caravan was coming, there was a choice between upping the capacity for welcoming and processing asylum-seekers and choosing to aggressively man the border and then issue propellants laden with internationally-banned chemicals. 

We are okay if we teargas our own. We teargas drug houses and suspected drug houses and protesters for free speech and against war and other crazy shit. We flash grenade the cradles of babies. Use of rubber bullets and teargas have been known regarding immigration protests. 

Saying "This is not the America I know" means not knowing this America, the home of the scared of ladder-climbers, the land of social quakes. I am not the type of fool who can't differentiate between the use of teargas by a lone border patrol agent in 2013 inside the US border, with a concentrated effort to fire teargas into Mexico to deter the caravan of asylum seekers, but I will allow there is something already suspect with teargas so long being part of our border defense. We at once legally allow asylum-seekers to arrive at a port of entry to be processed, and establish hurdles, just as if the language of Fox News, the Lou Dobbsian lexicon of invasion and infiltration, meant more than the cry for mercy borne of genuine privation from the people who would set out in such a way, leaving everything behind. 

My fear is not from them but for them--they need a lot, and our people are perhaps too hard-hearted by now to know what they can and should give to the stranger who is not so different from oneself.

Our asylum treatment of children has surely evolved. That does not mean it became better.

But this country stays murderous against those who are poor and those who labor. Are we still the great nation these people who travelled so far on foot hoped for? Are we a land of opportunity or scarcity (and who decides who gets what, anyway?) Can we find a place for doers and believers, or is our reputation as a place for dreams so much trash?

I wish I knew. But I would rather we retain a reputation as a land of opportunity, than a land of punitiveness.