How Bad Is It?: Political Violence in the U.S., and What We Can Learn from Brazil

0:06Hey, Andrew. Hey, Tyler. Welcome back to the political scene from The New Yorker and to our special series, How Bad Is It?, where Andrew and I sit down for a monthly checkup on the health of our democracy. Yeah, this week, obviously, we're all thinking about the killing of Charlie Kirk and how horrible and scary that was and how it feels like a kind of potential inflection point for a lot of what we've been talking about in this series. Yeah, I mean, his killing highlights how far political violence can go, given that we're not just seeing a politician being targeted, but seeing someone being targeted ostensibly just for their speech and for being an incredibly effective activist.

0:47And we're also seeing how an act of violence like this can be seized upon to potentially justify new waves of retaliation or political repression. Yeah. So we were wondering in this moment what to watch for in terms of could this accelerate threats to democracy? And to do that, we wanted to talk about not only the U.S., but also Brazil, which is, I think, of all the democratic backsliding places, at least that I've been to. the place that comes to mind when you think about not only high-level political assassinations, but also street clashes and threats of street violence and how that can warp and color the ability for people to do democratic politics.

1:32So today we're really happy to have Brazilian filmmaker Petra Costa on. Her documentaries, The Edge of Democracy and Apocalypse in the Tropics, trace Brazil's slide into authoritarianism and what that history can teach us about the dangers of this moment and how we might be able to escape that cycle. And also just the granularity of what it feels like to be in a place where the ambient threat of violence is kind of part of everyday life. This is The Political Scene. I'm Tyler Foggett, and I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker. I'm Andrew Marantz, and I'm a staff writer at The New Yorker.

2:07I mean, yeah, let's get right into it. You have chronicled the far right, the far left, and everything in between, even young people who don't feel connected to either party. You've reported a lot on campuses about the debates over free speech. You've reported a lot about kind of like activist movements. And of course, you've written a lot about Democratic backsliding, which is something that we've been talking about for a while on this podcast. And given all of that, I am curious what your initial reaction is to the terrible news about Charlie Kirk, given that this is it's a story, while tragic, that also kind of combines all of these threads.

2:47Yeah, I think in addition to the killing of Charlie Kirk just being sad and scary in itself, I think a lot of us felt like it could be a pivot point for this sort of democratic backsliding stuff we've been worrying about in this series. Political violence and gun violence have existed, obviously, for a long time in this country. But a really scary high-profile assassination like this can unleash a lot of things. It could unleash a cycle of retribution. It could also be a place for people, including people in government, to use it as a pretext for further crackdowns, which is something I think we should worry about.

3:27So yeah, this definitely felt like a place where we should focus our attention. Yeah. So let's dig a little bit deeper on that. So would you say that political violence itself is kind of an indicator of Democratic backsliding or do you see it as something that could be a precursor to Democratic backsliding because of what it could potentially unleash in terms of like a crackdown on free speech, which, as you mentioned, is like something that we're already sort of seeing with people like Pam Bondi indicating that people who have responded to the Kirk assassination with jokes and hateful speech that they might be targeted?

4:00Yeah, it could definitely be that it could be. I mean, when there was one carjacking in Washington, D.C., Donald Trump sent in the troops to Washington, D.C. and declared a crime emergency. So if that's what they do in response to a carjacking, what might they do in response to this much more scary and high profile thing? And yeah, Pam Bondi is saying free speech is one thing. Hate speech is another thing. Stephen Miller is talking about cracking down on the groups that foment this sort of thing, whether that is really what these groups are doing or not. Donald Trump is talking about that. Right.

4:33So definitely I would worry about it as a precursor. And I also would worry about it as sort of preventing people who want to be part of the political arena from feeling like they're able to do it in the first place. Right. If you feel like participating in political discourse is taking your life in your hands, then how many people are just never going to even consider doing it? So let's talk more about the idea of the specter of violence being used to crack down on free speech. On Monday, J.D. Vance actually hosted the Charlie Kirk show in Kirk's place. And as part of that, he interviewed White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who spoke about how the Trump administration was working on like a broader strategy to go after left wing groups that were promoting violence in the wake of Kirk's assassination.

5:21We're going to go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence. That's not OK. Violence is not OK in our system and we want to make it less likely that that happens. Walk me through at a high level like what you and I have been working on, what the whole administration has been working on to try to make sure that we don't reward and promote this craziness. We are going to channel all of the anger that we have over the organized campaign that led to this assassination to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks. The organized doxing campaigns, the organized riots, the organized street violence, the organized campaigns of dehumanization, vilification, posting people's addresses, combining that with messaging that's designed to trigger and incite violence in the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence.

6:13It is a vast domestic terror movement. We are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen and we will do it in Charlie's name. Yeah. It seems like there is kind of like a weird conflation that's going on between like organized street violence and then kind of like he's describing like online campaigns of dehumanization and vilification. So like you would think that would apply to just people who are like reposting, you know, like kind of incendiary quotes from Kirk.

6:51Like it's hard to understand. Yeah, I mean, literally the only doxing, I'm not even trying to be disingenuous here. The doxing I've seen is like friends of Charlie Kirk trying to dox people who are criticizing him after his death. So I don't know what Stephen Miller is referring to and I don't know what crackdown he is threatening. But I think it's probably not a great sign that the deputy chief of staff and chief ideologist of the Trump White House is J.D. Vance's first guest here and that he's talking about crackdowns on speech in the wake of this. I mean, even if that's just a rhetorical gesture, it's not one that puts me at ease.

7:26So one of the things that we've been doing with this How Bad Is It series is kind of trying to draw parallels between what is happening in the U.S. and what is happening in other countries that are experiencing a kind of democratic backsliding or even just kind of like a full on slip into authoritarianism. So we've talked about Hungary a lot, but as we were thinking about this episode, you actually said that you wanted to talk about Brazil. So why is that? Yeah. I mean, I was actually getting messages from friends in Hungary and elsewhere in the world after the Charlie Kirk thing, and they were totally baffled.

7:59They were like, how can you live in a country where things like this happen? So this is not a feature of the Hungarian loss of democracy. And I was thinking about where is this kind of violence part of the mix when we talk about the threats to democracy? And Brazil was the first place that came to mind. I mean, obviously, there's a lot of violence in El Salvador. There's a lot of violence in Mexico or the Philippines. But Brazil, certainly of the places that I've reported from and am familiar with, it has the most similar mix of a place that was a consolidated democracy for less long than the U.S., but for a long time.

8:37And then through a mix of kind of right-wing populist fervor, threats to the independence of institutions like the judiciary, and also just the kind of ambient threat of violence and the specter of violence being used against one's political opponents, really kind of started to sink back from that consolidated democratic status. And so, you know, you can look at we'll get into all this, but, you know, Marielle Franco was assassinated in 2018. She was a city councilor in Rio who was gunned down on the street and killed pretty much. It seems clear for her political views and it's still being investigated, but it seems like it was a hit that was allegedly ordered by these very well connected political figures.

9:23And then, of course, you have January 8th, which was their version of January 6th, essentially, where Bolsonaro supporters stormed Brazil's Congress, Supreme Court and presidential palace. Not only were they trying to overturn the 2022 election, which Bolsonaro lost to Lula, but this was a whole on this was like a full on plot to try to assassinate Bolsonaro's political rivals and a Supreme Court justice. Yeah. Although, interestingly, just last Thursday, Bolsonaro was actually convicted and sentenced to more than 27 years in prison. So it seems like they got some justice there. Yeah. I mean, I was there.

9:57We can talk more about this, but. You were there rioting on January 8th. I was there. I was gone by January 8th, but I was there for the 2022 election. And I didn't know at the time that, you know, there were people on secret messages threatening to assassinate Lula and Morais. But I was there when the election results came in and immediately the Bolsonaro supporters not only started rioting, but started camping out in front of the army barracks and saying to the military very clearly, please come and do a coup on our behalf and keep Bolsonaro in office by force. So that was like the immediate response to the election results.

10:33Bolsonaro, who was in like Florida at that point? He hadn't left yet. He stayed to try to do the coup. And then when it didn't work, he fled. But he never conceded. He waited for 48 hours. And then when he came out, he just said like, the people who are protesting are very mad and it's understandable. And then just went back and kept sort of plotting in the shadows. You know, he was trying to stay in office. And he, just like Trump, he announced ahead of time that the election would only be legitimate if he won. The election was very close. He actually tried to block people from getting to the polls from Lula supporting areas.

11:04So all the kind of partial election rigging stuff that we're used to in lots of other places, but with, I think, the added valence of if this doesn't work, we'll just bring in the tanks. And in Brazil, this is not an idle threat, right? I mean, Brazil was under military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985. Bolsonaro campaigned on nostalgia for that military dictatorship. So the U.S. is a very violent place. We have a history of conflict and civil war. But in Brazil, those threats are even more omnipresent. And so I thought we should talk to a filmmaker who has made a couple of really evocative films about exactly this sort of thing, about what it's like to do politics in a place where violence is kind of omnipresent.

11:51So when we come back from the break, we'll talk with Brazilian filmmaker Petra Costa, who spent the past decade making documentaries about the state of democracy, which tackle similar questions to the ones that we've been trying to ask in this series. This is The Political Scene from The New Yorker.

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13:13So thank you again so much for coming to join us. Do you want to just say who you are and introduce yourself? Yes. Well, thank you for having me. I'm Petra Costa, Brazilian filmmaker. So your previous two films, The Edge of Democracy and then Apocalypse in the Tropics, are kind of bookend pieces, or I've heard you describe them as a diptych. So starting with The Edge of Democracy, if you could just sort of set the stage for what that film was about. You mentioned in the film that you and Brazilian democracy are about the same age. And then a few years ago, there were a series of corruption investigations, which were maybe themselves corrupt, which led Brazilian democracy to be under threat.

14:00So can you say more about that and why you use the threat to democracy framework to describe those events? Yes. Well, Andrew, my films, even before The Edge of Democracy, had been about trauma, but from a personal level. And in 2016, I felt that democracy, which was, I believed, my birthright precisely because I am the age of Brazilian democracy, but also because my parents fought against the military dictatorship. They were in hiding. Many of their friends were killed and tortured. And after 21 years to have established democracy and then when I'm in my 30s to see it starting to crumble through democratic processes itself, as was the case in many other places of the world as the United States and Britain.

14:53I felt there was a universal phenomenon that I wanted to investigate, which is the citizen's relationship, affectionate relationship to one's democracy. And how the psychological pain, I think, is very understudied. One feels when these institutions start to not deliver what they promise to deliver. That was what I wanted to try to understand better. And I embarked in a journey that I thought would last a week and ended up lasting 10 years. And during this time, it was insane because I was lucky enough to be firsthand with President Lula, ex-president Dilma Rousseff, the first female president elected in Brazil, Bolsonaro, and Pastor Silas Malafaia.

15:47And I was with them when they were elected, imprisoned, impeached, plotting coups, performing coups, and in the ruins that were left after this coup attempt. So it was a very epic journey. Yeah. Well, your level of access is crazy and enviable from a journalistic perspective. So how you were able to pull that off is a conversation for another day. But I just wanted to quote something that you a piece of your narration from the edge of democracy, because I think it goes to, you know, Tyler and I have been talking about this, this way that democracy can kind of be unraveled from within by people who were given power democratically and then can use it anti-democratically.

16:29Yeah, no, when she said watching democracy crumble through democratic processes themselves, yeah, I like shuddered because I was like, oh, that's exactly what we've been debating, like whether that's a thing or not. Like, is it is it technically the demise of democracy if like people are voting for people who then bring about the end of democracy? Or is that kind of like, you know, not that it makes it OK. Right. Right. How does that work? And that process is kind of the main character of your films in a way. And you actually, you put these words to it. You say, fragile democracies have one advantage over solid ones.

17:03They know when they're over. Generals close the Congress, occupy the TV stations, and everyone knows what happened. But democracies can also end slowly. So if you could speak to, you can say in the Brazilian case or in the American case, But, you know, a little bit about how that happens and also how you can bring to light your view that that is what's happening. Because it's so ambiguous, it's hard for everyone to get on the same page. So how do you kind of show in your films that that's what's happening? Well, for me, there was a key moment because when I started investigating, I was very suspicious of myself.

17:43I was like, I'm mourning for the end of democracy. I'm feeling that it is really eroding. But maybe it's because the side that I was rooting for is not winning or is losing. So I was very suspicious of my own feeling until I came across a book called How Democracies Die by Stephen Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, which I really recommend because it's almost a manual, a very detached and objective manual of how to judge the health of a democracy and how to also diagnose when it's getting sick. And that quote is very inspired by their analysis and their framing, which is the way you understand that democracies die today.

18:38They no longer die with military coups. They die through democratic means itself, but particularly by disrupting, disrespecting unwritten norms. And one of the most important unwritten norms is to respect your opponent. and treat him or her as a legitimate political party, not another party that should be annihilated for the end times to arrive, which is the situation we are both in the United States and in Brazil with the rise of the far right, a far right that claims that the other side of the political spectrum should be destroyed. Petra, one of the biggest stories in the U.S. right now is the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the young right-wing activist who was killed on a campus that he'd been asked to come speak at.

19:35This is obviously troubling for a bunch of reasons, but one of them is just kind of the sense, and this is something that you can see both in the statistics, but also as a more qualitative thing, more of a vibe, just that we're living in a country where participating in politics means putting your life at risk. So I'm wondering if you can talk about whether this resonates with what you've seen in Brazil in recent years. Well, I'm aware of this really tragic moment that the United States is going through, and it has many parallels. with what has been happening to Brazil. Brazil was very different from America until 15 years ago.

20:11There was very little polarization. We had, after the military dictatorship ended, people were embarrassed to say that they were in the political right. People would, everyone would consider themselves or center or left. And in 2013, that started to change in Brazil when we start to incorporate much of the polarization and also the influence of religious fundamentalism into Brazilian politics. Yeah, and this is the subject of your more recent film, Apocalypse in the Tropics. And obviously, apocalypse has many meanings, which you explore in the film, some religious, some more having to do with this kind of earthly specter of violence.

20:57I mean, one thing that shows up in your footage with Jair Bolsonaro in both films is that it seems like right away he starts invoking violence or the threat of violence. I mean, you know, he says, I want to get a gun in the hand of every landowner in Brazil. He says, you know, he starts doing finger guns with his followers. And I wonder if you could just talk about the context there, because it's always possible to say it was a metaphor, it was a joke, you know, doing a gun gesture like that is not itself a violent act. But obviously, context matters a lot. And, you know, this kind of gesture or kind of potentially ironic thing can create a climate where this is a real specter of violence.

21:41So how do you see that happening in the case of Bolsonaro and his followers? Bolsonaro made his career around political violence. He became a candidate for Congress and won by defending the return of the military dictatorship in Brazil and saying that if he won an election in 1999, he said, if I win, I will kill 30 ,000 people, starting by the president. That was treated with impunity. He was not punished for saying such violent things. And in 2016, when our first female president was impeached, he dedicated his vote to her torturer. The fact that he was condemned now, sorry to anticipate, but was a civilizational threshold for Brazil because Bolsonaro is the result of the years of impunity that we had towards not just this type of violent speech that celebrated the 21 years of state violence, state terrorism that we had, terrorism implemented by the state.

22:55And so the result of that was the rise of Bolsonaro. So the fact that Brazil managed to finally change that is a moment of a lot of actually after 10 years of successive sad moments, of moments just of grief, it's one of the most greatest moments of joy for me as a citizen to see that political violence will not continue to go with impunity in my country. Yeah, I'd love to ask you more about that because, I mean, so you're alluding to the fact that Bolsonaro was convicted of plotting a military coup to overturn the country's 2022 election and sentenced to 27 years in prison. This is a sentence that came down last Thursday.

23:44And, you know, from my understanding is that there have been at least 15 coups and coup attempts with links to the military since Brazil overthrew its monarchy in 1889. And this is the first time that the leaders of one of those plots has been convicted. And so, as you mentioned, it was this joyous moment. But do you could you explain why? Why now? Like, why is someone being held accountable now and has something changed within Brazil to kind of allow for this sort of backlash to a coup attempt to happen? Or was it just a situation where the evidence was so overwhelming that there was nothing that one could do besides convict Bolsonaro?

24:24I think if we had not imitated your January 6th in our January 8th attempt, so yes, January 6th happened. And two years later, the Bolsonaro supporters, inspired by the fact that Bolsonaro himself was plotting a coup with top military generals and putting the population against the election results, saying that they should not accept their election results, and urging them to revolt. So there was an invasion of the three branches of power, but different from the United States. Here, the police did not resist. The police simply let the invaders and insurgents into these palaces where they destroyed everything.

25:12And they filmed it as in the United States. So yes, the fact that there was so much evidence around the January 8th invasion, but also of the plotting. and the plotting was not just of a coup. It was a coup where they would kill President Lula, his vice president, Geraldo Alckmin, and the Supreme Court Justice, Alexandre de Moraes. And this plan was printed in the presidential palace for Bolsonaro to see. So yes, there was a huge amount of evidence, but also because the Supreme Court, I think, Many members of the Supreme Court had realized in the process of 2016 to 2022 the effects that the erosion of democracy was bringing to Brazil.

26:09I mean, we had 700 ,000 deaths during COVID. And they started to see that if they didn't respond with agility, with the necessary agility to this new phenomenon of the populist fever of the far right, basically Brazilian democracy would succumb to another coup. And the fact that the trauma of our last coup that lasted from 1964 to 1988 is still a memory that is very alive for many people. For most of the Supreme Court justices, they were alive during that time, also helped. For me, it's very interesting the idea that a country like Brazil that sees itself as underdeveloped, that is trying to catch up, can now succeed where America failed, right?

27:08But it can succeed in condemning a president for a coup attempt and through democracy itself, putting a break into this populist fever that we're all confused on how to deal with. So that the southern country and the southern part of the hemisphere could be now giving lessons of maturity to the rest of the world is quite interesting. Yeah. You mentioned Stephen Levitsky. He just made that argument in The New York Times. Exactly. Yeah. So, I mean, we can just add it to the list of, you know, better food, better parties, better football. And, you know, now maybe better tools to get out of democratic backsliding.

27:49We'll see. And on that point, I mean, we've been talking about the many parallels between the U.S. and Brazil when it comes to this stuff. And, you know, one obvious difference, right, is the United States is a very violent country. It's a country with a lot of guns, with a very violent history. It does not have this history of military coups and military occupation. And that's something that I think your films help express, the feeling of being in a place where there's this constant undercurrent of violence. And it's something I know from having been in Brazil during the last election. You know, the feeling of being in Sao Paulo when Carla Zambelli was pulling a gun on someone for, you know, confronting her in the street.