The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Michael Fox:

Fernando Cerimedo, a name that unless you follow Latin America closely, you likely have never heard. He’s been called MAGA’s man in Latin America, and he’s at the heart of a shocking scandal that includes election rigging, fake news, disinformation, and powerful political ties to far right presidents across Latin America, and even the White House under Donald Trump. It’s big news in Latin America, even though it’s been largely under the radar in the United States until now. The scandal has dire implications for the legitimacy of elections up and down the Americas, including elections where US President Donald Trump has been throwing his weight around over the last year. Elections where right-wingers have won close but shocking victories. Like Lawyer Abelardo de la Estrella’s right-wing defeat of the leftist candidate Ivan Cepeda in Columbia in June, he won by less than 1% of the vote.

Donald Trump:

He called me at 8:30 in the evening just to thank me very much. And I said, “You ran a great campaign?” He’s LT Gray, right?

Journalist:

And what do you anticipate for the relation with Colombia? Good,

Donald Trump:

Much better. It’ll be better. He’s going to be a great president.

Michael Fox:

And big elections are coming up in Brazil and elsewhere. We begin here. That’s him, Fernando Cerimedo, walking down a hallway lined with people ahead of Chile’s new far right president, Antonio Cast. Cerimedo puts a hand on his back and ushers him into a side room to meet with a group of men in suits. Cerimedo is a 45-year-old strategist and publicist from Argentina. He’s a co-founder of the right-wing Argentine outlet, La Dereche Diario. And in recent years, he’s become perhaps the most prominent political consultant for the far right in Latin America. But as we will see in this episode, he’s much more than a consultant. I think you could call him an election fixer and not in a democratic way.

Jake Johnston:

So you’ve had this sort of network of far right leaders who’ve shown a lot of affinity for one another, traveling to each other’s countries, supporting each other, this sort of broad network. And behind that, there’s been this sort of digital infrastructure that is built out to support this sort of new wave of far right leaders in Latin America.

Michael Fox:

I asked Jake Johnston from the Center for Economic and Policy Research to set the scene here.

Jake Johnston:

I mean, if you’ve spent any time on social media, you have seen the bots, you’ve potentially been attacked by the bots. You see this happening every day and you’ve seen it in all of these elections, many of which it should be noted were extraordinarily close elections. I mean, less than one percentage point separating the winner from the loser. And throughout this last year, year and a half, there has been one very prominent person sort of parading around the hemisphere and claiming credit for a lot of these electoral wins. And it’s just this guy, an Argentine political consultant that apparently used to drive a taxi in Argentina and has sort of risen to the top of the food chain in Latin American politics is Fernando Serimedo.

Michael Fox:

Here is the reason why we’re all talking about him right now.

Last month on August 18th, 2026, Cerimedo was arrested at Bolivia’s Viru Vero Airport after attempting to board a flight to Buenos Aires, Argentina. He was accused of ordering a hit on his pregnant girlfriend. Her name is Nadia Bayer. She’s a Bolivian lawyer and a political analyst. She’s a former supporter of leftist president Eva Morales, turned staunch critic. She was shot three times by two armed gunmen the day before outside of a hotel in the Bolivian lowland capital city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra. That’s the heart of Bolivia’s agricultural heartland and one of the most conservative regions in the country. She survived. From her hospital room, she asked to speak to press.

This is the video. You can find it online. She’s laying in a hospital bed, the back slightly raised, so she’s kind of sitting up. She wears a white and gray striped hospital gown. She has several bandages and she’s attached to some machines. She sounds exhausted. “I’ve requested the presence of DTV to make a live statement because they tried to silence me,” she says. “And I’m absolutely sure that if I don’t speak out to the Bolivian people, they’re going to finish what they tried to do today. They’re going to end my life.” She speaks for 15 minutes about her relationship with Fernando Cerimedo, about his physical abuse, his cheating on her and others, and then she reveals dirt on Cerimedo and his underhanded political dealings across the region, including in high, high places.

She discusses Cerimedo’s ties to Trump’s former campaign manager, Brad Pascali, referring to Parscale as a member of the CIA. She describes her personal knowledge of corruption committed by Cerimedo and Bolivia’s new right-wing president, Rodrigo Pas and his family. Pas is the eldest son of the former Bolivian president, Jaime Pasamora. He was born in Spain, went to college in the United States, and Fernando Cerimedo helped to lift him into the presidency last year. “The government is the main one interested in silencing me,” she says. Rodrigo Pas, his wife, his family, they make the biggest deals with the brokers, with all of the insurance companies of all the state companies. They are the ones who negotiate the broker’s commission. “Do you have proof of all that?” Asked the man interviewing her behind the camera. “I have proof of many extremes,” she says. She also details Cerimedo’s power in Bolivia and abroad.

“Rodrigo Pas does not govern here,” she says. Fernando Cerimedo governs and they will absolutely cover it. He manages a group of the police that supposedly operates around the hotel where he made me go. That was the hotel where she was shot. All of this is just the tip of the iceberg about Cerimedo, the disinformation campaign he concocted, and the right-wing election wins he had a large hand in securing across the region.

Jake Johnston:

This is a door that is opening to a world that has largely been closed. I think that’s the interesting part about this. It’s what does this tell us about the broader infrastructure that exists in the region and likely elsewhere across the globe that is using digital sort of shock troops, bots, disinformation, media polarization to try and skew electoral outcomes, even at the margins where it might have a tremendously large impact, even if the operation itself seems sort of small.

Michael Fox:

All of that in a minute. This is Under the Shadow, an investigative narrative podcast series that looks at the role of the United States abroad in the past and the very present. This podcast is a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA. I’m your host, Michael Fox, longtime radio reporter, editor, journalist, the producer and host of the podcast, Brazil on Fire: Stories of Resistance, and my new series, The Battle for Free Speech. I’ve spent the better part of the last 20 years in Latin America. I’ve seen firsthand the role of the US government abroad, and most often sadly, it is not for the better. Invasions, coups, sanctions, support for authoritarian regimes. Politically and economically, the United States has cast a long shadow over Latin America for the past 200 years. It still does. This is season two of Under the Shadow: Trump’s attack, episode 14, Fernando Cerimedo.

It’s February 10th this year. A passionate man is speaking in Spanish on a stage in Mar-a-Lago, Florida. This is Trump’s Hispanic prosperity gala. The back wall of the stage is plastered with a logo of a bull’s head and the words Latino Wall Street, Spanish language financial website. The name of the man on stage is Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, and brother of the current far right presidential candidate, Flavio Bolsonaro. Eduardo resigned as a member of Congress in 2025 and moved to the United States after he came under investigation for trying to pressure the Supreme Court in defense of his father, who is now on house arrest for couplotting. The Bolsonaro family are close allies of President Trump, and Eduardo Bolsonaro has close ties with Trump’s former campaign manager, Steve Bannon. On stage, Eduardo Bolsonaro is praising Fernando Cerimedo. They’ve reportedly known each other for years, since 2010 when they met in the United States.

Eduardo invites Cerimedo to the podium. So I have the great pleasure, a great honor, he says, to call here on the stage Fernando Cerimedo, a brave Argentine who had the courage to denounce the bad things that happen in the world.

Eduardo Bolsonaro presents Fernando Cerimedo with the award for Best Hispanic Political Consultant of the Year. Cerimedo is wearing a black suit, white shirt, black tie. He has a bald head. Fernando and Eduardo embrace, and then they pose for the cameras with a tiny statue. Then Cerimedo walks to the podium. 2025 was a very good year for us. Together with our team, we won two elections, he says, Bolivia and Honduras. Serimedo also gives a shout out to the Bolivian First Lady and her daughter who he says are in the audience. Serimedo then turns and thanks his connection with the Trump administration.

Fernando Cerimedo:

I want to say something in English. Thank you to Brad Parscale for believing me all the time and give me your technology and Tim Dunn for do the fighting in Latin America against socialism. Thank you, Brad.

Michael Fox:

Tim Dunn is a Trump allied businessman from Texas. He’s in oil and gas, and he’s a big financial supporter of conservative causes. As for Brad Parscale, if you remember, Serimedo’s girlfriend mentioned him in her hospital interview. She said he was tied to US intelligence. He is a digital consultant with deep ties to the White House and Mar-a-Lago. He ran digital media for both Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns. Since 2025, he’s been the chief strategy officer at the right-wing Christian Conservative Media Corporation, Salem Media Group. In May, The Intercept reported that he had been hired by the Israeli government to push pro-Israeli views over conservative media. Serimedo closes his acceptance speech.

“The message I want to give you is that it’s not about winning elections,” he told the audience. “That can even seem easy. If we don’t help our candidates govern so that the left never returns to those governments, our work will never be finished. So let’s keep fighting the cultural battle. That’s not just winning elections and taking positions. It’s battling every day to be able to regain freedom in Latin America. Thank you all very much and goodnight, “he said. Fernando Cerimedo. This guy is no ordinary political consultant. The things he has done that helped him win that award presented by Trump allies and Mar-a-Lago have included using underhanded, dirty, and other illegal means to help his candidates win elections, candidates who are all right-wing or far-right Trump allies. And look, he allegedly even tried to kill his own girlfriend to silence her. Cerimedo is just one man, but he’s part of a much broader network.

And for them, pushing their agenda is not politics as usual within democratic systems. As Cerimedo mentioned at that award ceremony, this is a culture war and they are fighting to win by any means necessary. It all calls into question many of these victories that the right has been winning across Latin America in recent years. Jake Johnston.

Jake Johnston:

But of course he’s not operating alone and his business partner in his company, Neumann Advisors, which was actually first registered in Florida, is Brad Parscale, who is Trump’s former campaign manager. And the way that it has been described, and Saramedo has given some interviews on this in the past, is that Parscale provides a sort of digital infrastructure that was implemented in the United States during Trump’s election and is sort of exporting that to the region. And the connection to all of these far right Latin American leaders in these networks between Parscale and them is Fernando Ceramedo.

Michael Fox:

Jake says that a key mouthpiece of this right-wing network has been La Derecho Diario, a right-wing news and opinion site founded by Serimedo and two of his colleagues around the year 2020. La Derecho Diario is now partially owned by Javier Negre, a Spanish right-wing media entrepreneur and disinformation broker.

Jake Johnston:

Now, in parallel to this, you’ve had this sort of digital media outlet, Ladarecho Diario, that has sort of risen to prominence as big promoters of the new far right in Latin America, sort of classic disinformation campaigns and things like this, but always sort of in support of these candidates and have been extremely active in a number of these electoral races and have sort of begun to expand both in Mexico and certainly are looking at Brazil, and Sarameto was also a partial owner of that operation. And of course, this is nothing new, right? I mean, this network of right-wing political operatives has been extremely active in Spain and Europe, but also in Latin America for any number of years, going back decades and following a lot of these folks’ work. What’s changed is that they now have an administration in Washington that is directly supporting the same agenda.

Donald Trump:

Found out in Chile, the person I endorsed who was not leading ended up winning quite easily, so I look forward to paying my respects to him. I hear he’s a very good person.

Jake Johnston:

And so that has sort of elevated it to a different level and certainly sort of just put a lot of money in the pockets of a lot of people who have an interest in promoting this new far right in Latin America.

Michael Fox:

The other thing is that we don’t actually know the true extent of everything. We have clues. Many are really concerning, but not all the dots connect. Just remember that as we continue. It’s been reported that Serimedo has had a role in the political victories of the right and far right in at least seven countries over the last four years, including Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, Polivia, and Peru. That is not a bad record. The first place I want to visit though, came before all of those in Brazil in late 2022. It’s election night, October 30th, 2022. Former Brazilian President Luis Ignacio Lula de Silva wins the vote by a slim margin, defeating Trump ally and incumbent far-right President Jair Bolsonaro in a huge victory for the left. But the next morning. Bolsonaro supporters hit the streets in protest, claiming the election was stolen. A claim Bolsonaro himself had spread ahead of the vote.

They shut down highways. They set up vigils in front of military barracks demanding the country’s armed forces rise up to overturn the results.

Amid this chaos, Jair Bolsonaro’s son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, who we heard from earlier, is interviewed by a right-wing Argentine media outlet where he spreads lies about Brazil’s electoral system. The interview was aired just three days before the vote. According to news reports at the time, the video had a live audience of more than 400,000 viewers. I remember this. It was a big deal because what Eduardo Bolsonaro did was actually illegal in Brazil. You can’t disparage the country’s electoral system, particularly just days before the vote. That’s why Eduardo Bolsonaro did the live in Argentina. Anyway, what most of us only realized recently is that the guy who interviewed Eduardo Bolsonaro during that live was Fernando Cerimero, and that outlet was Cerimedo’s La Derechediario. You can think of it as something akin to the bright part of Argentina. That live, I’ve been looking for it to play a clip here, but it was taken down shortly afterwards in Brazil.

It still had a wide reach though. It was shared across WhatsApp groups and far right media spheres. It reportedly played a significant role in undermining the election result and intensifying the widespread protests by Bolsonaro supporters in the wake of the 2022 elections.

All of this stoking of Bolsonaro’s base would of course culminate in the January 8th, 2023 invasion of Brazil’s capital by Bolsonaro supporters. They wreaked havoc, causing millions of dollars of property damage in Congress and the Supreme Court in a copycat performance of the January 6th US Capitol invasion in 2021. There was pushback against Laderecha Diario in Brazil.

Maria Martha Bruno:

And because of that live broadcasting and because of Cerimero’s intervention after Lula has won, actually the Brazilian electoral justice decided to suspend Laderecha Diario’s account in social media because it identified that it was a source of falsehoods and rumors that had been extensively dismissed by the Brazilian authorities.

Michael Fox:

Maria Marta Bruno is a journalist at Ajin Shepublica, the largest nonprofit investigative newsroom in Brazil. That outlet did an in-depth investigation in 2023 into the so-called digital militias and the use of internet, bots, disinformation, fake news, and media manipulation to sway opinions and elections across Latin America.

Maria Martha Bruno:

And the investigation is named the digital mercenaries. And Fernando Serimero is a core figure in this ecosystem because he orbited between Brazil, Argentina, and more recently we knew that he was also participating in the electoral process in Honduras in 2025.

Michael Fox:

Maria Marta actually spoke with Serimero for their report.

Maria Martha Bruno:

But Fernando Serimedo, when he talked to and to our partners at the Central Latin American he actually admitted in some of the interviews that he twisted and that he put many informations out of context just to make the case that he want to make the case. He admitted that that was sort of his strategy.

Michael Fox:

It’s a strategy that has been deployed across the region. Last month, Brazil’s Folio de Sao Paulo newspaper interviewed Nalia Bayer about Fernando Serimedo’s work fixing elections around Latin America. Remember, Bayer is Serimero’s ex-girlfriend who he allegedly tried to kill. This video was published eight days after the attempt on her life. She’s laying in bed and looking up at a cell phone through which she’s doing the interview. She spoke about the cases that she remembers where Serimedo used bots to sway public opinion online ahead of the election.

“I knew that in Honduras,” she says. “I knew that in Chile, in the constitutional assembly vote. I knew that in Brazil, in Bolivia, obviously in Argentina, in Columbia, they were going to do it, but I think they didn’t get to do it. I don’t know why. I think maybe it was because of economic agreements that weren’t closed or unless they had told me later that they had done it. But there were some negotiations with Spain as well, she says. I don’t know if you caught that, but she just said that he was even supporting Jair Bolsonaro’s digital campaign in Brazil in 2022. Maria Marta Bruno.

Maria Martha Bruno:

Fernando Serimedo, it’s a very key example of a core figure that get all those notes together, all those wires together across Latin America and help to boost this very successful digital communication ecosystem that has been helping the right and the far right in the past eight or so years.

Michael Fox:

The Brazilian outlet released the Fordham has reported that during an investigation into Serimedo’s properties, investigators discovered a mini bot farm worth more than $40,000 with a digital infrastructure to coordinate campaigns over social media. Jake Johnston.

Jake Johnston:

There’ve been a lot of allegations around. I mean, he’s even bragged around his control of hundreds of thousands of bots and things like this. And I think we do have to take a second to think like, okay, putting aside any legality or anything like this, or whether this is electoral interference or electoral fraud or anything, just put it aside. I mean, could this have had an effect on these elections? And I think you start to look at that, you say, “Well, these elections where there’s less than 1% difference between a winner and a loser, yeah, these sorts of interventions may have had a really profound effect in shaping this narrative that we have today of this rightward shift in Latin America, and how much of that narrative is really the product of a sort of digital army of folks all associated in one way or another with Serameto and with connections right back to the Trump.

Donald Trump:

When people like me, I like them. It’s very simple. It’s a very simple formula, and I like him. He said really nice things about me and the job we’ve done in the United States, and very, very powerful.

Michael Fox:

Here’s the thing, and Jake mentioned this earlier, this Cerimeto scandal has opened a window into the underhanded or dirty maneuvers one man has taken, in part on behalf of the Trump administration, to win elections for the far right in Brazil, but we don’t really know the full extent of what was done behind the scenes to sway the vote.

Jake Johnston:

It is important to note, we really don’t know much of what these people were doing, right? I mean, that is, I think, hopefully what we can learn through these investigations that are happening in Bolivia, through what I think should be far greater attention from the US media about the role of Brad Parscale and Trump connected officials with him and what they’re actually doing. What is the gangway? How have they helped these campaigns or interacted with these campaigns?

Michael Fox:

We do have a glimpse into actions that Serimeto took to allegedly help the right return to power in Honduras last year, and it is extremely concerning. Honduras. It’s just after the country’s election on November 30th, 2025. The race was so close the winner won’t be announced for weeks.

The conservative candidate Nazri Asfurda has faced off against leftist Rixi Muncada and Centris Salvador Nasraya. The leftist Libre Party has run the country for the previous four years. Before then, the US back right-wing national party held onto the presidency through violence, repression, and fraudulent elections. They took power after the 2009 coup. The president who ruled the country for much of that time with an iron fist was named Juan Orlando Hernandez. At that point last year, he was in a West Virginia prison serving a 45-year sentence for drug trafficking. We looked at a bunch of this in episode 12 about Honduras Gate. If you miss that, you can go back and listen. But here’s the thing. There’s a new audio clip about Honduras that was only released last month. It’s a one-minute, 30-second voice message from political consultant Fernando Serimedo to a member of the electoral campaign of Nasri Asfura.

He’s the right-wing candidate, Trump ally, and the man who would be declared president in late December after a protracted recount. I just have to tell you, this voice message gives me the chills. In it, Serimedo says not to worry that they’ve rigged the election, stuffed ballot boxes where necessary, and removed votes elsewhere, all with the support of members of the armed forces who are stationed at polling stations. Serimedo is confident about their victory.

“Yes, from all of this, the only thing we can learn is that the area where the votes are coming in right now is where Tito wins, “says Serimedo. Tito is the nickname of Nasri Asfura, the national party candidate who is now president. “In the second place, the locations where more national party votes are going to come in, if there were votes from somebody else, those were taken out. Those are being fixed,” he says. “We already have the numbers. According to what I’m seeing, we already have people aligned in the armed forces. It seems that everything is going well, “he says. “If we have the votes and we know where we lost the election, that’s where we place more votes, and they talk to everyone at each polling station. “That’s all that matters. We don’t have to worry,” he says.

This audio was released publicly last month by Marlon Ochoa. He’s a former member of the country’s electoral court who had to flee Honduras over death threats against him. He said he handed over the audio evidence in December 2025 before the election results were finalized, but investigations didn’t move forward and election authorities rubber stamped Asfura’s win. Ochoa did not reveal how he obtained the damning audio. I’m left with so many questions. Did Seri Medo really rig the elections for Nasre Asfura? If so, did the United States know? Did Israel? Both of them are staunch allies of former right-wing president Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was sentenced to decades in a US prison for drug trafficking and who Trump pardoned just after last year’s vote. Most importantly, if Seri Maedo rigged the elections in Honduras, did he also do it elsewhere? In Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru?

Even if he didn’t stuff ballots everywhere, it’s clear he was willing to use whatever means necessary to get his candidate elected, including spreading disinformation or fake news during the campaigns and even about the country’s electoral system. And this is “MAGA’s man in Latin America. Democracy itself is at risk.” Serimado is now in custody. He’s being investigated for attempted femicide. Many of his former staunch allies are trying to distance themselves. Jake Johnston.

Jake Johnston:

And so this has been a huge scandal and the investigation in Bolivia has expanded to move from femicide to illicit enrichment to the protection of drug traffickers. And so there’s at least three now investigations taking place in Bolivia. And one of the most shocking things is just the way in which all of the politicians who just a few months ago were working quite closely with Sarameta. Now totally wash their hands. I don’t know who this guy is. Rodrigo Paz, the new president in Bolivia says, “Oh, he was involved a little bit in the campaign, but I don’t know who he is.” There are photos of him meeting with Marco Rubio and the Bolivian president from just a couple months ago. So this is a total sort of hand wash. You saw the same thing in Argentina where Sarameto was very involved in the campaign of Javier Millet.

Now Miley said, “Oh no, he has nothing to do with us. Of course, it just came out that he visited the Casa Rosada 14 times last year.” So you see this all over the hemisphere. He was obviously very involved in Honduras and very publicly involved in Honduras and that electoral process. Again, another razor thin electoral margin there. I mean, obviously this fits into a much broader conversation around social media disinformation and what its effect is on democracy, on political processes more broadly. It’s certainly a conversation that has been quite prevalent in the United States for a long time now that is extremely relevant for the upcoming election in Brazil.

Michael Fox:

Jake says it’s not just about what Serimedo has or hasn’t done in these other elections. It’s about what underhanded tactics may still be used in future elections with or without Serimedo, and not just in Latin America, but in Spain and elsewhere where right-wing parties are gaining ground.

Jake Johnston:

There is a lot of people who are looking to make money off the political changes that are happening in Latin America, and they can sell their access to the Trump administration, their access to this legislator, this lobbyist, this business, and they play up those connections to get a contract, to get a consulting gig. And this is sort of the brave new world of the Don Roe doctrine in Latin America where it’s not just Sara Mato, it’s not just Brad Parscali and Javier Negre and Londoreche Diario. I mean, this is happening all over the place. You can see these lobbying filings that are coming in every day with different people hiring Trump connected folks. And so they’re all sort of competing for this space and to influence pedal and make money doing so in the region and take advantage of the sort of political interventionism and rightborn shift that we’re seeing.

And so this is just one piece of it.

Michael Fox:

In other words, this doesn’t begin or end with Serimado, but as Jake Johnston said in the beginning, this is a door that is opening to a world that has largely been closed. And there is so much more we need to understand and consider about how US President Donald Trump is using his power to influence elections around the region. This is where we’re headed next time. In the lead up to high stakes elections in Brazil in October where Trump is vying to help the son of the former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro win the election. Trump has levied tariffs and revoked the visa of the Brazilian ambassador to the United States and state department officials are allegedly courting journalists in order to spread the US narrative around the country’s elections. That is next time on Under the Shadow.

Folks, first off, I have big news. I’ve just launched a new website called Pan-American Dispatch. It’s a project of The Real News. We are translating daily articles from Portuguese and Spanish into English for a US audience. Over the next two months, we’re exclusively focused on the Brazilian election and Trump’s attempts to influence it. Please check it out. You can find us at panamericandispatch.org. As always, you can find me at patreon.com/mfox. There you can also support my work, become a monthly sustainer or sign up to stay abreast of all the latest on this podcast and my other reporting across Latin America. You can find a ton of content there exclusively for my supporters. Many, many thanks to SIEPR’s Jake Johnston and Ajin Shepublica’s Maria Marta Bruno. It was a pleasure to speak with you. I’ll add links to some of the reporting from their outlets in the show notes.

As always, if you’re looking for more information, news and reporting on Trump’s onslaught, both on communities within the United States and abroad, please check out The Real News and NACLA. Both of them are publishing daily indispensable reporting. The theme music is by my band, Monte Perdido. You can find us on Spotify or wherever you stream music. This closing music playing right now is off our 2024 album, Ofrenda. I hope you check it out. Under the Shadow is a co-production of The Real News and NACLA, it’s produced in partnership with Global Exchange. This episode was written, researched, reported, and produced by me, Michael Fox. The script was edited by Heather Geis. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Michael Fox:

Hi folks. I’m your co-host, Michael Fox, and this is The Battle for Free Speech. So as promised, this is the first of a number of bonus episodes we’ll be rolling out in the coming weeks. Today, I speak with Fara Dabhoiwala. He’s a professor of history at Princeton University, and he’s the author of the book, What Is Free Speech: The History of a Dangerous Idea. That book was published last year by Penguin Random House and Harvard University Press. And if you’ve listened to this podcast series, you have heard his voice before because I go to him for analysis and insight in numerous episodes. That’s because he’s a wealth of knowledge on this subject, but also because his book in many ways challenges the status quo about our understanding of free speech. In this podcast series, I feel like I was able to only just barely scratch the surface on so many questions, particularly about the beginnings of what we understand as free speech in the United States and elsewhere, and also the difference between free speech in the United States and abroad.

So today I’m bringing you my conversation with him in its entirety. I know you will appreciate it.

Well, Fara, I just want to start off. Thank you so much, so much for your time and for being here.

Fara Dabhoiwala:

A pleasure to talk to you, Mike.

Michael Fox:

Fara, can you start with by just introducing yourself and tell me a little bit about why this became such an interest for you, why you wrote this book?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

Well, I’m a historian at Princeton, but I used to teach at Oxford University in England. And more than 10 years ago now, I published a different book on the history of Western attitudes to sex and what I call the sexual revolution of the 18th century. And that was a very popular book and I went around the world talking about it. And in the course of that, almost immediately, I was censored in various ways. I was deplatformed, I got into trouble for saying things on the radio, and then it all culminated in my book being translated into Chinese. And when it was translated into Chinese, it was censored. And then I went to China and traveled around talking about it. And at that point, my interest shifted from my own experience of being silenced to the extraordinary things that were happening in China already 10 years ago, which was, as a historian, I realized every single apparatus of censorship ever invented in the history of the world was now simultaneously being deployed to muzzle free speech in China, as well as some totally new ones that the Communist Party had developed to deal with the internet.

And of course, 10 years ago, everyone still generally believed the internet was a technology of freedom that would set people free. And before long, surely the Chinese would also experience it that way. And my experience traveling around taught me that actually that was a very naive idea and the opposite was happening. So I came back from that trip really shocked by the way in which a modern dictatorship like China can operate to muzzle free speech and silence dissent at every level, believing myself in free speech and starting to think, well, why do we have such different views about this? Where does first of all, this Western belief in free speech come from? And given that we all believe in it, and I do very strongly myself, why can we never agree on what it means? I mean, within our cultures, we’re fighting about that all the time and across cultures now, this is a really important political transnational problem in the world, but it’s not just a political series of questions and problems.

It’s also a historical problem because people didn’t always believe in free speech. Anyway, so that’s where I started. I though in 2015, oh my goodness, it’s peak free speech time now. I should hurry up and write this book before the moment passes. And sadly, the moment has not passed. It’s just got worse and worse. But I can explain why that is, which is part of the interest of the subject.

Michael Fox:

Yeah, that’s exactly what I was going to ask you. How did we get into this mess? And obviously through reading your book, I’m just fascinated by the Cato letters and all this, but if you could give me a little bit of how do we get to this point?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

Well, it’s taken us 300 years to get to this point because the modern idea of free speech really is invented about 300 years ago. But the reason it’s such a hot topic right now, let me just deal with that. The reason it’s such a hot topic right now is because we’re living through a giant communications revolution. I mean, the internet has completely transformed how humans communicate at every level about every subject. And every time that’s happened in the past, in the 18th century with print, in the 19th century and the 20th century with new forms of print and the telegraph and broadcasting and all the rest of it, every time there’s been a new communications revolution, people have needed to think about free speech harder and in different ways. And so that’s part of what’s happening right now. Do you want to come back to me about the history?

Michael Fox:

Yes. Yeah, yeah. Let’s dive all the way back in the history and we’ll bring it up to the present. Talk to me about those beginnings of what free speech meant in those days.

Fara Dabhoiwala:

Yeah. So really the first thing you need to understand about free speech is it’s on the one hand, a very old idea. There are various forms of freedom of expression that go right back to the classical period. On the other hand, our current sense of it is really quite recent because older ideas of free speech are always very restricted. They had to do with speech in an emergency, the idea of scholars communicating peacefully amongst themselves. But what’s always lacking in all those earlier notions is a notion of political free speech, that everyone has the right to speak out on matters of public concern. That’s really the core of our modern idea. One reason that’s lacking before the 18th century is that people have a very sophisticated understanding of what words really are. That’s to say words are not different from actions. Words are a type of action in the world.

Everyone in the past knew this. They also know that words, although often trivial and harmless and fleeting, sometimes can have really potent consequences in the world. And thirdly, they know that sometimes those potent consequences can be dangerous and harmful. And they’re particularly focused on the harm to individuals from lies and slanders and defamation, which is something that everyone sees is a real problem. And people all the time in the pre-modern world are going to court to defend themselves against the bad words, the slanders, the lies of others. And the second way in which they are focused on this is the dangers, the problems of untruth and misinformation and conspiracy theories. Everyone knows in the past, and it’s a documented fact, that first of all, lies and misinformation spread very quickly, much more quickly than the truth, and that they can, if left unchecked, cause riots and political disorder and pogroms and massacres and bloodshed on a horrible scale.

Everyone in the European past knew this. Happens time and again. And so because of these insights into the power of words, they are very keen to control technologies of print when those are invented and they’re keen to regulate speech in all sorts of ways. Okay, so that’s the background. Then what happens in the early 18th century, and it happens first in England, is that for contingent religious and political reasons there the government cannot anymore agree on exactly how to regulate the printing press. There’s been a political and religious revolution. And so the normal forms of prior censorship whereby you go to the church with anything controversial on a spiritual subject and ask them to sign off on it before you print it, that doesn’t work anymore. Anyway, I won’t go into the reasons, but what you get is this explosion of new kinds of printing because now for the first time people are allowed to just put it out there.

You can still be punished and prosecuted if you publish something that is beyond the pale, but still it’s a different form of regulation. And so in London, which is the epicenter of this, you get an explosion of political pamphlets, newspapers, a much more fast-paced, a different kind of media world than has ever existed before. And the reason for this is partly also that this is the first age of permanent political parties. In England, the Wigs and the Tories are constantly, they’re popular parties. They’re appealing to the people. And so they use this new technology right from the outset to start to attack each other. And as part of that, they are constantly shouting back and forth across the partisan landscape that the other side is lying and abusing words and misinforming the public. They on the other hand are trying to tell the truth. Anyway, it’s a situation very analogous, very evocative of our own age.

And in this new landscape, people get addicted to fast-paced news and newspapers and so on. They like it and they celebrate that this has come about because of the liberty of the press. So the liberty of the press comes this new slogan that everyone loves to be in favor of, but that doesn’t mean that anything goes. On the other hand, they can also see actually very sharply, acutely, that this new technology has also made worse all the problems of mass communication that have always existed. I mean, the first law against false news in the English speaking world dates back to 1275. These are not new problems at all. So in the 18th century, people see that, for example, print has only made worse the problem of lies. There’s a great quote by Jonathan Swift, the great writer of the early 18th century, which is basically that truth is slow and lies are false.

It goes like this, falsehood flies and truth comes limping after it like a man who’s though of a good repartee long after the party’s over. It’s still true. And Daniel Defoe, his co-journalist and writer, brilliant novelist as well, complains that newspapers have created an explosion of “false news, forgery, infamy, and absurdity, masquerading as fact.” So everyone who looks into this and understands how the world works knows that this has just made things worse. And the final aspect of that, that all people in the know are aware of is that this new media world is hugely corrupt. It’s not about spreading truth so much about making money. Everyone is trying to make money out of the print revolution. It’s hard to do, many newspapers go under, but everyone wants to make it big. They’re always primarily concerned with selling advertising, getting sales, and above all, getting sponsorship by a politician.

And so the world of journalism is hugely corrupt. People are writing for money. Newspapers are being bought and sold all the time, and this is not a neutral marketplace of ideas at all on the contrary. So in this world, liberty speech, everyone agrees is great, but because of all these problems, they also agree that liberty speech is easily abused and they call that licentiousness. Licentience is bad, liberty is good. But the problem with this balancing model of saying liberty speech is good as far as it goes, but you shouldn’t abuse it, is that everyone can also see this lies entirely in the eye of the beholder. It’s a subjective judgment. And that’s why no one is able to put forward a really cogent theory of free speech. Everyone can see that, for example, opposition politicians are always banging on about freedom of speech and all for it and maximally for it.

And then the moment they get into power, they start censoring their opponents as heavily as they can. So there’s no worked out theory of free speech. And into this moment come these two journalists called John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon who put forward the first much more hard-edged theory of free speech in which they describe what we might call the origins of the absolutist view of free speech. And their argument, which they put forward in an anonymous newspaper column called Cato’s Letters, which is immensely successful and has a very long afterlife, is that liberty of speech is the foundation of all liberty and that governors are always trying to abuse power and aggregate more power to themselves. Governors are in fact always trying to turn into tyrants. On the other hand, the people are always noble and virtuous and able to see that. And so you should allow the people maximum freedom of expression in order that they can keep a check on their tyrants, their governors, and call them to account.

And so they claim this, they claim that liberty’s speech is the foundation of all liberty because the moment you see it being reduced even a tiny bit, then you know you’re on a slippery slide to tyranny because that’s the first thing that tyrannical governors try to do. Now, everyone has always known that Cater’s letters is a tremendously influential text in the history of free speech. Cater’s letters is this not just about free speech, it’s a series of essays putting forward simple understandings of important Republican thinkers like Locke and Machiavelli. And in the Americas, in North America, it becomes the most important political text for the Patriot movement in the middle and later 18th century. So the founders of the United States take this as gospel truth and they import these slogans from Katie’s letters into the Declarations of Rights about free speech in 1776 and then into the First Amendment.

So it has a very long afterlife. It’s very powerful. Everyone’s always known about this, but when I started reading it, two things revealed themselves to me that no one had ever really noticed before, and they’re really quite astonishing. The first is this is a theory full of holes. This is not a coherent, sincere doctrine of free speech. It’s in fact an attempt to justify the practices of these two hack journalists themselves in attacking the government and calling for the lynching of stock market profiteers and the overthrow of the current administration. They are justifying themselves by saying, “Well, of course, freedom of speech can never be abridged and there’s no such thing as liable.” That’s another thing they try and claim that if you attack someone and you spread lies about them, then the people will just see that they’re lies and that will just have no effect at all.

On the other hand, if you criticize someone and it’s true, then it’ll stick. And so really there’s no such thing as liable. It’s a very dodgy argument, but they make it with great passion. So the first thing is they don’t pay attention to any of those things that everyone else around them notices, that this is a deeply corrupt media world, that the newspapers themselves are writing and the journalists are writing for money, that the people don’t always agree on everything, that truth is difficult to establish, and that lies can spread dangerously if you allow them to. None of those things are there at all. So it’s full of holes. The second thing, even more remarkably, that I discovered is that they themselves are not writing in good faith. They’re not just writing to defend themselves. They are deeply, deeply complicit in this corruption and political partisanship of the age.

They are writing basically to be noticed by the government and then to be paid off by the government. And the lead author, Thomas Gordon, he does exactly that. He writes Cater’s letters about the people are always right, the people should never be suppressed. And then the government reaches out to him and say, “Hey, you are quite a good writer, but why are you wasting your time with this muckraking rabble-rousing stuff? Why don’t you come work for us?” And he says, “Oh yes, that sounds quite interesting. Thank you so much.” And he starts writing simultaneously for the government press, exactly the opposite. The governors know what they’re doing. People are often being misled by dangerous hack journalists. Misinformation is rife. And then finally he jumps ship and they shut down Cater’s letters and he makes a deal with the government and he becomes the prime minister’s chief propagandist.

He goes rich and famous over the next 20 years as a spin doctor on the establishment side. So anyway, these were remarkable discoveries and they really also I think are important, not just historically, but in showing up that from the outset, theories of free speech are very difficult to make watertight. They often are concocted in bad faith, and yet what lasts is powerful rhetoric. And so over time, no one knows about Thomas Gordon’s own corruption, but his text lives on and it’s very powerfully still read as an epitome of wisdom and truth and foundation for why we should think of free speech in a particular way.

Michael Fox:

Why has this concept, this absolutist concept and these concepts of free speech at all costs, particularly in the United States, why has this remained so powerful over the centuries up until today?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

Well, one of the revelations of my book is that actually Americans didn’t always think exactly as they do now about free speech, that for most of American history, actually from 1789 all the way to the 1960s, Americans had views that were quite similar to those in the rest of the world, a more balanced understanding of free speech as a matter of both of rights and of responsibilities as something that required attending to the public good, something that required looking at the role of the mass media, et cetera, et cetera. And it’s only because of the Cold War really that they diverged into a more hard line libertarian outlook, the results of which we’re living through today. But more fundamentally, I think the reason that these slogans are so attractive is that everyone wants simplicity and everyone likes the idea that the rules of free speech should be simple and straightforward.

And everyone can also see that if you take a balancing approach that on the one hand talks about this as a right and on the other hand talks about the possible harms and thinks about the public good and gives powers to regulate and so on, that this can lead to all sorts of serious problems of subjective interpretation, of censorship on grounds that we don’t agree with. That creates all sorts of problems that you can see playing out in countries around the world that take that approach. If you look at Britain, for example, right now, it’s a mess.

So that’s not a good solution. It’s not a perfect solution either. I happen to think that that approach is more intellectually justified, but I don’t think that it is problem free at all. And so the alternative of just saying, “Well, this is a simple matter. We just need to make the rules as simple and as hard edged as possible has an obvious intellectual appeal.” I think there’s also a really interesting psychology here, which I experienced myself when I was censored in trivial ways at the start of this project, which is no one likes to be told that they can’t say something. No one likes to be told to shut up. So the reverse psychology here, again, makes this a wonderful slogan to appeal to. If you feel censored, you feel aggrieved in a way that other rights maybe don’t quite have that immediate emotional purchase.

Michael Fox:

I thought one of the themes, the essential themes of your book, which I found fascinating, is that freedom of expression, freedom of speech isn’t just about the words that are used, the individuals that are speaking, but it’s also about power, the different groups and structures and systems that exist in order for some people to be able to speak and others not to speak. Can you speak a little bit about that?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

So another problem with laws about free speech is that if you think about communication and free speech in a sophisticated way, you need to acknowledge that speech is always exquisitely contextual. It’s never just about the words, the action in the world. Voltaire once said, “I write in order to act.” Let me just remind people, this is an action in the world, but the outcome of that action, the impact in the world is different, not just according to the words, but according to who is speaking, who is the audience, what is the context, what is the intention, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Me saying something to you in a bar in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere is a completely different speech act, even if I use the same words as the president of the United States standing up and broadcasting this around the world repeatedly over and over again.

Just to take a trivial example, and that’s a problem, this exquisite contextual understanding of what’s happening when someone says something. We can navigate that in real life. We can navigate that face-to-face pretty well. We know when someone’s joking or when they’re saying something seriously, we know if we’re aligned in our understanding of what this conversation is about. When we’re not, that’s when miscommunication occurs. Online miscommunication is much easier than face-to-face. The larger the setting number of people involved, the greater the problems of miscommunication. But basically we know this is a matter of judgment on all sorts of levels. And the problem is laws are predicated pretty much on the opposite set of principles. That is to say consistency, transparency, everyone has the right to be treated the same. And if you think that for the same action, and if you think that the action is basically saying X, Y, Z, then it doesn’t seem right that people should be treated differently or that these other contextual elements should be brought into the frame.

And again, then you come into the problem that it becomes very subjective to judge exactly what’s happening, what the effects are. Anyway, so that’s the problem with laws, but it also points to the complication of the real issues, right? Free speech is a great noble ideal, but communication is really quite a complicated thing. And if we don’t attend to that, if we just push it all aside as American free speech jurisprudence increasingly does for the sake of simplicity, then we’re throwing out with the bath water, we’re throwing out also the baby, which is the fact that speech is an action and it’s an action that can cause harm. Now we need to take a minimalist approach to making laws. We need to take a maximalist approach to rights, but still there is something called truth. Sometimes the truth is very important. There are ways in which communication can cause harm.

We’ve known this throughout history, see it time and again. If we just ignore that completely, we’re opening up a whole set of different problems, which is where the absolutist doctrine leads us.

Michael Fox:

This is the thing for me that I find shocking, surprising, is that every time we’re talking about free speech or people are speaking about free speech, it’s as if this question of hate speech, truth, fake news, disinformation, intentional disinformation, particularly in the United States, it’s like this huge elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about. It’s just there and then people go, “Oh yeah, well there’s a…” And then we end up in this same cycle where then obviously, as you’ve mentioned, that’s the stuff that goes viral, right? It’s the lies, disinformation. This is why Brazil has really cracked down hard on that, particularly around the election time and why the United States is of course calling Supreme Court justice censorship judges and things like that. Where does fake news fit into this question of free speech or where should it fit into this question of free speech or how are some countries handling this vis-a-vis how the United States is handling in a different way?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

Yeah. So one of the problems with free speech and one of the reasons why we’re in such a mess today is that our approach to it is really way too simplistic. There’s a reason why, because everyone wants the rules to be simple and just to be about individual rights, but it’s not enough. And so one thing we might start by acknowledging is that free speech can be many different things. There are many different forms of free speech. For example, free speech for writers of fiction or artists or comedians is one thing, and free speech in the political sphere is another thing because for artists and comedians, the aim of their freedom of expression is to amuse people, to make them laugh or to enlighten them, to spin worlds that will blow their minds. But in doing so, the literal truth is actually not really that important.

The literal truth is something that you play with in art and comedy, and rightly so. So we need to think about what the free speech is for. Now, in the case of democratic discourse of citizens trying to deliberate around the public good and about politics more generally, truth is actually very important. And the foundation of our democratic discourse has always been that we deliberate in good faith and that we don’t spread lies and misinformation because that way we are going to end up with a corrupted public sphere. So there, if we’re talking about freedom of speech, we do need to have truth somewhere in our sights as part of the aim and the purpose of the speech. Now, already in the 19th century, people started to see, here’s another way in which our notions of free speech are too simplistic. They started to see that thinking about free speech just in terms of the rights of the individual on the one hand and the powers of the state and the government on the other hand was not sufficient.

Why is it not sufficient? Because if you’re thinking about the sphere of political discourse, the marketplace of ideas, if you like, then what also is very important and shapes that whole sphere is the power of the media, the power of the mass media, the power of the private media. And already in the 19th century and into the 20th century, people who thought about this in sophisticated ways, including in the United States, focused on that as a real problem because from early on, people could see that the incentives, the motives, the aims of the mass media, not primarily to educate the public or to advance truth, they are on the contrary to sell advertising and to increase the power and the wealth of their owners. So out of that comes a very powerful socialist and communist critique, but also conservative and across the political spectrum, people can see this as a problem.

And so if you fast forward to the 1930s and 40s, this is something that Roosevelt and the administrations and indeed the Supreme Court of that era are very highly focused on. If you read First Amendment jurisprudence of that era, it’s full of people saying, “Well, it’s completely insufficient to think of this in simplistic way of just about individuals versus government. The real problem of our age is how to tackle the power of the mass media.” And out of that comes an attempt to reconsider free speech as also a matter of the public good, and indeed as people conceptualize it at the time of the right to truthful information on the part of citizens. This is also, of course, a time where people everywhere are thinking about this against the backdrop of The 1930s in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, and they can see how powerful propaganda is and that vehicles of mass communication are not neutral.

They are instruments of power. Anyway, so out of that comes a jurisprudence, which feeds into, for example, the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, which after all an American document drawn up under Eleanor Roosevelt. If you look at that document’s definition of freedom of expression, it channels what is then the mainstream American and European view, which is on the one hand, freedom of expression is a right. On the other hand, it can never be abused to harm the rights of others. So it’s a balance between rights and responsibilities, and it includes the right to truthful information. And out of that also came a huge effort to impose on or remind the mass media of the age of their responsibilities. So out of that come ways of rethinking what mass media could be, public broadcasting, subscription models, all sorts of ways in which we might have a better alignment between the incentives of the media and the incentives and the needs of the public, but also journalism school, the professionalization, especially in America, and the taken seriously by news organizations of their responsibilities, fact checking, making sure that you’re not telling lies to the public and correcting things as necessary.

It’s hard. It takes a lot of money, it takes a lot of effort, but people generally in what we now disdainfully call the legacy media were very heavily invested in that project because they saw what the stakes were. The stakes were a healthy public sphere with truthful information. I’m afraid what’s happened in the internet revolution and the communications revolution of our own time is that model has been destroyed by a new ecosystem where these things are simply not attended to at all. And we as a public have lost sight of the fact that we used always, including in the United States, to regulate mass media in the public interest for the public good for precisely this reason. That happened to broadcasting, it happened to television, the FCC was set up for that purpose. All markets, even in the United States are regulated. Again, this doesn’t mean by the government, precisely regulated at arm’s length by non-governmental organizations that are supposed to be nonpartisan or at the very least bipartisan, the FTC, the FCC.

All that is now under assault by right-wing authoritarians whose project is made easier by the fact that our public discourse is now being overwhelmed by greedy social media companies that take no account at all of the public good insofar as it contravenes their profits.

Michael Fox:

You mentioned as well this weaponization of the discourse of free speech. Everyone should have it, but then how it’s used over time is usually the powerful and eliminating free speech from folks that are marginalized or minorities. And I think we’re at this even hyper moment because social media has this image of appearing as though anyone can say whatever you want to, but you still have the algorithms. It’s controlled by some people and not by others. So how dangerous is this moment? And if you could just speak for a moment about this use, this weaponization of the discourse of free speech, either in the past or currently still.

Fara Dabhoiwala:

Well, sadly, free speech has always been a weaponized slogan. It was a weaponized slogan at the outset in the early 18th century and that has never gone away. We see that today. I mean, the worst senses are often the people shouting most loudly that they ask for free speech. Trump is a great example of that. The moment that we’re in is really very dangerous political moment because of the ways in which social media. Social media is really an old-fashioned anachronistic term for the mass media of our age. It’s not social, it’s political discourse and every other kind of discourse.

The difficulty with that is really manifold. One is, as that nomenclature already indicates, we’ve now shifted to a moment where all discourse happens in the same medium, on the same level. So pictures of cats, jokes, serious political debate all happening in the same sewer, and that muddles the rules and how the audience understands what’s going on. And it makes it much easier for untruth to spread, for sloganeering to take over from fact-based, evidence-based argument. So that’s one intrinsic difficulty with the medium. But the deeper problem is that these social media companies to begin with had some sense of the public good and of moderation and of applying standards of truth, for example, and not allowing someone who’s just attempted a coup against the elected president of the United States as Trump tried to do and whipped up people on social media to attack the capital.

It seems a long time ago, but that could get you banned on de-platformed and rightly so. In the political moment that we are in now, of course, all of these companies are rolling all that back and hiding behind the slogan of free speech to moderate as little as possible because again, it’s politically inconvenient. It’s also expensive. They never put a huge amount of effort into it. They always try to get away with as little as possible. And finally, it plays into a political discourse which is increasingly dominated by populist rabble rousing. There’s an understanding that this is good politics on the part of right-wing politicians that chimes with good business model of just allowing anything to go. And at the heart of this, in terms of the technologies, as it were, of our mass communication now, first of all, these media companies, the online media companies are the most powerful publishers the world has ever seen, but they’re not treated as publishers.

No one thinks of them as publishers. Governments fail to think of them as publishers. We as citizens are no better. They are publishers. The reason that’s important is that it focuses on two things. First of all, that they are constantly censoring discourse. Their algorithms amplify certain voices and certain messages and they suppress and silence others. That’s what publishers do. They make judgements automatically or otherwise about what they want people to see. So in that sense, they are deeply influential on public discourse. They also, of course, when it suits them, don’t stand up for free speech. When they are issued with a take down notice by an unsavory overseas government, they obey the law. So what can they do? They say, “We’re just trying to obey the law.” I would feel slightly less contemptuous of them if they did sometimes stand up for what we would think of as real free speech in countries under unsavory regimes, but they don’t.

Michael Fox:

Or just the situation in the United States and students protesting at universities and university freedoms and things like that. Oliver Wendell Holmes, I wanted to touch very briefly on his marketplace of ideas because I feel like this is this mythic idea, this concept that people bring up again and again every place and how everyone uses this as the reason why free speech works in the United States. What’s your analysis of that today? What do people actually have to understand about this idea and what it means for us today?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

It’s a wonderful ideal and he’s a wonderfully readable writer of opinions, Holmes. One of the interesting things about Holmes that I discovered was that he was too high-minded to read newspapers. He didn’t really engage in the mass media of his age. And so he was able to take this Olympian view of the marketplace of ideas and how it might work. I think he also, to be fair to him, he wasn’t sure this would work out, but he was willing to let the experiment run out. It’s a noble American ideal. They’re always saying it’s an experiment. Oh, well, it’s slightly annoying to an outsider. Slavery, oh, it’s just an experiment. Oh, genocide of the unions. Oh, we’re just doing an experiment here. Anyway, back to your question, a marketplace of ideas is a fantastic ideal, but think about what it really means. It would mean that each of us is independently able to walk around a marketplace where all ideas are given equal weight and airing, that we are all equally reasonable in our approach, and that we’re equally able to judge truth against falsehood somehow intrinsically, and that we’re all doing so in good faith and that all the arguments being put to us are being put in good faith and in reasoned ways.

That’s absolutely the opposite. And we could go on. There are many other ways in which we could flesh out this as an ideal. It’s actually the opposite of the kind of shit-filled sewer of public discourse through which we have to wade every day with our very different levels of understanding of things, our very different perspectives and backgrounds and abilities to judge the truth. No one has an intrinsic ability to judge the truth. That’s a presumption that is there in many free speech doctrines, but it’s actually conclusively debunked by history and by science. What we require is attention to how as a society might create a better marketplace of ideas. And I’m afraid just throwing everything into the jumble of social media and allowing private companies basically to determine how they can best keep people hooked on their platforms is not the best way of creating, especially a political sphere of debate.

Michael Fox:

Yeah. Would you say that there’s a battle today over the definition of free speech, the absolutism versus a more balanced approach or at least going back to what we understood, say free speech in the 1960s where people can get out and protest and now kind of a free for all of absolutism?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

I mean, free speech has always been about power, both in the theory and in practice. We see that today, what voices are silenced or elevated is about power. It’s a noble ideal because everyone can appeal to it and throughout history, as my book shows, those without power and those who attempted to be silenced have also appealed to it from abolitionists and early feminists onwards into the present day. So that’s the good side of why it’s a dangerous idea. And we should all be shouting from the rooftops that right now free speech rights are being trampled upon. The First Amendment is being completely disregarded in the United States and the rest of it. But I think that the real global battle here is about how to deal with the communications revolution that we’re living through and how to deal with the power of media companies, the unfettered transnational power basically of American media companies.

And I think that the minimalist approach that the Europeans have taken to this is really an encouraging way forward. Again, it’s being faced by massive amounts of corporate and political opposition from the United States. It’s always in danger of being watered down. Nonetheless, what they have said and what the Brazilians are also trying to do is basically to ask these companies, it’s not censorship, it’s to ask these companies to be transparent upfront about their moderating practices. They are publishers, they’re constantly censoring. Tell us what the rules are, A, secondly, apply those rules consistently and fairly. Thirdly, show us the public that you are doing that consistently and fairly. Report back, commensurate with the power. The Europeans have this in their legislation. I don’t know if the Brazilians do, but proportionate to the power of your platform, you have a greater obligation because you have greater power, you have a greater obligation to report on how these rules are being followed.

And that’s not imposing any kind of censorship from the outside. It’s just asking them to be transparent about what they’re doing. I would go further as a citizen and require them to uphold standards of truth in political discourse and to do more about curbing misinformation and so on. But as a first step, we really do need to tackle the power in our societies. Americans are very bad at tackling corporate power of any kind. The First Amendment has always been weaponized by corporations and by people with money to claim that money equals speech and corporate power should never be limited. But even Americans, I hope, will see and try and do something about this big problem of our time.

Michael Fox:

Fara, last question is, could you just speak a little bit about what free speech meant for the abolitionist movement back in the 1800s?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

Frederick Douglass once said, I think something like the Civil War would never have happened if American politicians had taken government had taken the First Amendment as seriously as it took the rights of states. And by that, he was alluding to the fact that abolitionists before the Civil War were routinely appealing to their right of freedom of expression to make their case. And they were met with violence both in the north and the south and by the presumption that what they were saying was completely beyond the pale was dangerous and harmful and couldn’t be allowed. It’s a good example of how our understanding of the First Amendment has evolved, our understanding of harm has evolved. When I say that harmful speech is something that societies should be allowed to take a view on and potentially to regulate public discourse about, I don’t mean that those things are set in stone and they’re always self-evident.

I mean that instead of shouting about censorship and free speech, we should be having a discussion about what is harmful and as a society trying to take a view on that and that view will evolve. So abolitionists are shut up violently and otherwise and out of that develop even stronger passionate view that they have a right to speak out. The same is true of early feminists who are told. Actually this comes out of the abolitionist movement. First American feminists are told when they are leading the campaign for abolition that they may not sit with men or address men on equal terms and out of that develop the view that actually there’s something wrong here. Their voices deserve to be heard. And so the early women’s movement starts not primarily as a campaign for the vote, but simply for the most basic right of all, which is to speak out and be heard by the public.

Michael Fox:

Fara, is the United States really such an outlier in the world in terms of its understanding, absolutist understanding of free speech?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

It’s an outlier at the moment in the jurisprudence of free speech in the way that the laws are drawn up. I don’t think it’s an outlier in the sense that actually even absolutists or self-proclaimed absolutists are always drawing limits and balancing harms against rights. The Supreme Court does that all the time, even when it’s supposedly not. So in that sense, not. But I think the difficulty that United States has is that it has a very ancient constitution. It’s a bit like having a very ancient car. You can be proud of it, but it’s not necessarily roadworthy in the 21st century. And there are very few citizens’ rights in that. Indeed, even the First Amendment is not a right of citizens. It’s another big flaw that Americans tend to overlook. It’s only a prohibition on the government censoring anything. In the private sphere, people get sacked and fired all the time for expressing their views, political or otherwise.

So it’s not a right of citizens. But the fact that there are very few other rights in the Bill of Rights and in the Constitution and that this one happens to be named first, and because we all love free speech, of course, it’s given it this elevated popular kind of supremacy, which means it’s the ultimate legal Trump card. There’s nothing that can trump the First Amendment. So that’s why it’s especially been weaponized by anti-regulation corporate forces, by people who want more money in politics and all sorts of ways, because there’s no legal comeback against it. Once you can define something as free speech in an American courtroom, you’re home and dry. And that’s not necessarily the best way of balancing the right free speech, which is a great thing against other important rights and indeed the common good.

Michael Fox:

Fara, thank you so much. I really, really appreciate your time. This has been fantastic.

Fara Dabhoiwala:

It’s great to talk to you, Mike. Thank you.

Michael Fox:

Hi folks. I hope you enjoyed our conversation. As I mentioned before, this is the first bonus episode of this series. There are more on the way. Please watch out for those in your feed. This is the battle for free speech. This podcast is co-hosted by myself and Marc Steiner. This show is produced by The Real News. You can find out more about my work and this show on my Patreon. That’s patreon.com/mfox. And as always, please make sure to sign up for the Real News Network’s newsletter so you never miss an episode. You can find that at therealnews.com. Thanks so much again for listening to this podcast. See you next time.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Speaker 1:

A few weeks ago, the US State Department released this video over X.

Speaker 2:

It’s 1823. The map of the Americas is being redrawn. Spain has spent centuries amassing a new world empire stretching from Patagonia to California. Now their grip was slipping fast.

Speaker 1:

The video is narrated by Kevin Marino Cabrera, the US ambassador to Panama, and it’s highly polished with images, map graphics, animations, and dramatic music.

Speaker 2:

Monroe then declared a decree to Congress, among the boldest diplomatic statements in American history.

Speaker 3:

The American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintained, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.

Speaker 1:

The text of the post reads, “The Monroe Doctrine has shaped US foreign policy for over two centuries. American dominance in the Western hemisphere will never be questioned again.”

Speaker 2:

But these were defensive applications, keeping European powers out, not asserting American control over the hemisphere’s affairs. That changed in 1895 when Secretary of State Richard Olney invoked the doctrine, declaring that the United States was practically sovereign over the Western hemisphere and demanded for its submit to American arbitration. He had redefined the doctrine. It was no longer just a warning. It was now a claim to regional primacy.

Speaker 1:

The video is remarkable because it doesn’t mince words or attempt to paint a rosy picture of the United States. In five minutes and 31 seconds, it just lays out the justification for the US imperialism that has cast a shadow over the region for the last two centuries up until today.

Speaker 2:

Three years later, war with Spain erupted and when the smoke cleared, it transformed the hemisphere. The United States expelled Spain from Cuba, seized Puerto Rico, and stepped into the world stage as a genuine imperial power with dominance over the Caribbean. Just four years later, that dominance was tested again. German and British warships sailed into Venezuelan waters and blockaded its ports over unpaid debts. Roosevelt intervened and declared if a Latin American nation fell into chaos or instability, the US would step it and manage it. The doctrine has started as a shield. Roosevelt had just turned it into a mandate.

Speaker 1:

This was all a good thing, the video seems to say. A natural course of history that the US should be proud of and the rest of the region should just accept. And all this backstory is a lengthy setup for the video to then make the case that Trump’s actions in Latin America are nothing more than a continuation of the same model of imperialist intervention that the US has carried out since its inception, or at least since the beginning of the 20th century when Roosevelt declared his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

Speaker 2:

Fast-forward to the modern era where the doctrine has found its latest champion in President Trump. Through the execution of Operation Absolute Resolve, the United States seized Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, transporting him to American soil to answer for charges of narcoterrorism. This calculated maneuver delivered a resident signal across the hemisphere, punctuated by President Trump’s own declaration.

Speaker 4:

Under our new national security strategy, American dominance in the Western hemisphere will never be questioned again.

Speaker 1:

It’s a fascinating piece of propaganda that tries to place Trump’s actions as the logical next step in the long trajectory of US imperialism in the region.

Speaker 2:

Over two centuries, Monroe’s declaration had shaped US foreign policy across administrations and throughout fundamentally different geopolitical eras. Well, began as a warning to European powers evolved into a framework for regional dominance, one that remains the cornerstone of American strategy in the hemisphere today.

Speaker 5:

What is extraordinary about that video is that it says what has never really been said about the Monroe Doctrine by US officials, which is that the Monroe doctrine has served as a pretext for US intervention in the region and is essentially there to ensure that the US has a great deal of political influence and economic influence over the entire Latin America and Caribbean.

Speaker 1:

That is Alexander Main. I reached out to him to get his take on this video. He’s an old friend and the director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington DC.

Speaker 2:

When Soviet missiles were discovered in Cuba in 1962, Kennedy didn’t need to invent a new framework. He simply invoked the doctrine. The weapons had to go.

Speaker 5:

This video is saying that there is such a thing as the US Empire, something that most US officials have never wanted to publicly recognize and saying that that is a good thing and that more needs to be done to ensure that the US can be an effective empire over the entire Western hemisphere.

Speaker 1:

Key to this video, Alex says, is the idea that brute military force must be deployed to achieve this imperialistic doctrine. And right now that is being done under the pretext of a new sort of war on terror. There’s no clear definition of exactly who or what narco-terrorist is, but that might be part of the point. Alex says that much like the Cold War’s fight against communism, the vague image of the narco-terrorist boogeyman allows US authorities and their allies to go after left-leaning opponents with force.

Speaker 5:

We’re seeing something similar now, and I think this is really what the US is going to be relying on under the Trump administration. They’re going to be relying more and more on military action and the threat of military action in order to advance this vision of complete political domination over the region.

Speaker 1:

In Brazil, high stakes elections are coming up in October. Advisors for leftist president Luis Ignacio Lula de Silva saw the timing and content of this video as a direct threat against the president’s reelection campaign, a sign that the Trump administration has its sights on Latin America’s largest country. According to Brazilian columnist Valdo Cruz, Lulu’s advisors compared Trump’s foreign policy team led by Cuban American Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Madagascar Penguins piloting Air Force One. It’s a reference to the Madagascar cartoon.

Speaker 6:

Attention, this is your captain speaking. I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is we’ll be landing immediately. Bad news is we’re crash landing.

Speaker 1:

That is where we are at, a new definitive Monroe doctrine for the Western hemisphere, and it’s being fueled by brute US military force in the region as we have already seen unfold in unprecedented terms over the last year. And the Trump administration isn’t just using those actions and threats abroad. They’re now going after progressive individuals and groups in the United States accusing them of being pawns of foreign nations. People have even been subpoenaed.

Speaker 7:

There’s nothing organic about it. It is funded, it is organized, and Cuba is a part of that network and in some cases a critical part of that network.

Speaker 1:

It’s like something out of the McCarthy era or the Cold War. It’s a fabricated witch hunt. And as we will look at today, it’s being supported by artificial intelligence, but people across Latin America are also organizing against the threats. All of that in a minute. This is Under the Shadow, an investigative narrative podcast series that looks at the role of the United States abroad in the past and the very present. This podcast is a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA. I’m your host, Michael Fox, longtime radio reporter, editor, journalist, the producer and host of the podcast’s Brazil on Fire: Stories of Resistance and my new series, The Battle for Free Speech. I’ve spent the better part of the last 20 years in Latin America. I’ve seen firsthand the role of the US government abroad, and most often sadly, it is not for the better.

Invasions, coups, sanctions, support for authoritarian regimes. Politically and economically, the United States has cast a long shadow over Latin America for the past 200 years. It still does. This is season two of Under the Shadow: Trump’s attack, episode 13, American Dominance.

Okay, let me just first say that I’m so excited to be diving back into this season of Under the Shadow. If you have been following this podcast, you’ll know that I was largely absent this summer. I was busy cranking out my podcast about Trump’s attack on free speech rights today in the United States. It’s called The Battle for Free Speech. It’s now out completely. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts. I’ll add a link in the show notes. In July, we shared an episode from that podcast on the Under the Shadow feed about the battle underway in Brazil right now ahead of the general election in October. I think it’s really good. Before that, my last Under the Shadow episode was about Honduras Gate back in May, so it’s been a while. Today, I want to catch up on several important developments related to US intervention and the pushback against it in the region, including the latest boat strikes, the State Department’s war on Cuba, and the recent Pan-American Congress in Uruguay.

These all fall under the rubric of where we started at the top with the video about the Dunro Doctrine and Trump’s promise that American dominance in the Western hemisphere will “never be questioned again.” In this episode, I’ll look at ways that this is unfolding, both abroad and inside the United States, and also how progressive leaders in the region are very much continuing to question American dominance and organizing against Trump’s rhetoric and threats. Okay, we begin in the abnormally warm waters of the Caribbean and Pacific oceans.

These waters have been central to Trump’s military attack on the region, and this week marks a sad anniversary.

Speaker 8:

When you come out and when you leave the room, you’ll see that we just over the last few minutes literally shot out a boat, a drug carrying boat, a lot of drugs in that boat, and you’ll be seeing that and you’ll be reading about that. It just happened moments ago.

Speaker 1:

On September 2nd, 2025, one year ago this week, Donald Trump announced the first airstrike on a boat in the Caribbean. Trump said the boat allegedly carried drugs off the coast of Venezuela. He later posted on True Social a video of the airstrike, black and white labeled unclassified. A missile hits the boat and it explodes. The White House said without providing evidence that it killed 11 alleged narco terrorists. If you remember, this is where I began this podcast series, because for me, it marked a clear break with the decades of US foreign policy in the region. The US attack on that boat in early September was the very first time the United States had launched a unilateral airstrike or carried out a deadly military operation on its own in Latin America in nearly four decades, not since the 1989 invasion of Panama. According to Trump’s national security strategy published in December 2025, his administration was planning to ramp up US intervention in the Americas with his new Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

He has made good on that promise. With the US invasion of Venezuela, the oil blockade of Cuba, the shield of the America’s initiative and the boat strikes, the administration labeled those strikes Operation Southern Spear. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth joined Fox News Live to gush about the boat strike.

Speaker 9:

So we’ve got assets in the air, assets in the water, assets on ships, because this is a deadly serious mission for us, and it won’t stop with just this strike. Anyone else trafficking in those waters who we know is a designated narco-terrorist will face the same fate, and it’s important for the American people to protect our homeland and protect our hemisphere.

Speaker 1:

Hegseth was right about one thing. That strike was just the beginning. They’ve been ongoing since last year. There was a two-month lull, which miraculously coincided with the World Cup competition in the United States and Trump’s grand 4th of July 250th anniversary celebration. But in recent weeks, the US military has kickstarted the strikes again. This news report is from August 26th this year.

Speaker 10:

The human rights groups are condemning the latest round of US military attacks on a high speed boat in the Caribbean, which the Pentagon says killed four narco-terrorists. This is now the second strike this week as the White House targets vessels accused of transporting deadly drugs into the US for the past year.

Speaker 1:

But the whole justification for the first strike last September and everyone sense that they’re fighting drug trafficking is just false. This has never been about fighting drug trafficking. Most of the cocaine trafficked into the United States doesn’t come from Venezuela and it doesn’t travel across the Caribbean, but the Pacific. Fentanyl’s the same thing. It’s not made in nor trafficked from Venezuela despite Trump’s discourse.

Trump’s campaign has been about sending a message, even if it means carrying out extra judicial killings in international waters against innocent people, because it’s become clear that many of the boats they’ve hit haven’t been operated by narco terrorists, but fishermen. And contrary to Trump and Secretary of Defense Hegseth’s claims, other Trump administration officials admit that the strikes haven’t decreased the amount of drugs being run into the United States. In late July, the Washington Post reported that both Pentagon and DEA officials had said the boat strikes hadn’t impacted the supply of cocaine in the United States. Drug traffickers just developed new strategies. They were taking different routes, bigger boats, or relying more on planes from clandestine airstrips. One DEA official who asked to remain anonymous told the Post, “When you squeeze the balloon on one side, it always expands on the other side. They always find the weak spots and exploit them.” Nevertheless, the boat strikes have continued.

Welcome to the closing session, hosted by the Secretary of War and Chairman of the America’s Counter-Cartel Coalition, the Honorable Pete Hegseth. Pete Hegseth spoke about this during a Counter-Cartel Coalition conference in Panama City on August 12th.

Speaker 9:

We have knocked the narco terrorists and the maritime domain on their heels. We forced them to adjust their tactics, techniques, and procedures, their TTPs, and operate outside of their comfort zones. We are retaking the open seas and our maritime borders. This is a bad time to get in a drug boat in the Western Hemisphere.

Speaker 11:

In one year now, at least 68 publicly acknowledged strikes on alleged drug trafficking vessels right in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, extraditionally killing over 228 civilians.

Speaker 1:

Jake Johnston is the director of international research at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. He also runs SIEPR’s US Escalation in Latin America Tracker, which he has updated almost daily since last year. I just want to pause here for a moment to underscore that number. More than 228 civilians, and that is a number that’s likely to only continue to grow. Just to put that into context, before the September 11th attacks, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was the deadliest terror attack in the history of the United States.

Speaker 12:

If it seemed like war yesterday, the reinforcement showed up tonight. At the center of it all, of course, is the bombed out shell of the federal office building, and in its shadow, the exhausted, who for a day and a half now have sifted through its debris and counted its dead and seen up close why they call it terror.

Speaker 1:

168 people were killed in that bombing on the Alfred P. Murrow Federal Building. It shocked the nation. Yet the United States has unleashed a round of terror attacks over the last year in international waters in the Caribbean and Pacific, which have killed far more people than the second most deadly terror attack in the history of the US. In fact, the US drug boat terror campaign is deadlier than both the Oklahoma City bombing and the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting combined. Now, it might seem strange that I’m making this comparison. The US government has carried out the boat strikes, individual perpetrators carried out these other attacks, but I think it’s an important comparison to make. All are acts of terror, all are illegitimate uses of violence without any legal founding. The US boat strikes aren’t operations against enemy combatants in a time of war. The US government hasn’t carried out a trial against the victims or offered any proof that the people killed in these raids are actually drug traffickers.

Their actions are illegal under international law, and the result in all cases is the same, the extra judicial killing of innocent people, which undermines the basis of the rule of law in the United States, the United Nations, and most democratic countries around the world, that you are innocent until proven guilty. Jake Johnston.

Speaker 11:

What is the sort of takeaway after a year? I mean, this is an assault on the rule of law. This is assault on international law. And I think you can see over the course of the year how these strikes serve this broader purpose of normalizing, rationalizing and sort of gaining at least some public acceptance of just the sort of trampling of international law. And now we have transitioned, or at least the US is saying they’re transitioning from these boat strikes to land strikes. It’s there. We’ve already seen, in fact, some strikes on land in Ecuador, or hitting a dairy farm, reports of torture of the farm workers who were there. And so you can see how this can extend and expand. You can see how the erosion of international law comes right back here to home, and you have ICE agents killing US citizens in the streets with impunity, and these things are connected.

These developments are connected, and they certainly mutually reinforce each other through this administration’s policies.

Speaker 1:

Ecuador has been collaborating with the US military under the Counter Cartel Coalition, which I looked at in episode eight of this series, and not just on that dairy farm strike. The United States has also taken some concerning actions against boats off the Ecuadorian coast.

Speaker 11:

This started earlier this year, the bombing of at least three fishing vessels off the coast of Ecuador, which took place in a very different manner than these other boat strikes we were talking about where SOUTCOM was posting smut on the internet about them blowing up boats. These ones were totally unacknowledged, and the reports that we’ve had from investigative outlets that have looked into it, local press in Ecuador, human rights organizations, et cetera, one of the boats first off is still missing and all the crew members are still missing.

Speaker 1:

People from some of those boats were killed and others have been returned to the country, but that was only after being abducted on the high seas.

Speaker 11:

Onto a nondescript boat in the middle of the ocean with gringo looking guys with US flags on their uniforms and being taken to El Salvador of all places before facing torture and abuse and then eventually being released back to Ecuador where they face no charges, it should be noted. And you mentioned in each of these cases, the reporting indicates that Ecuador and Coast Guards actually stopped the vessels and cleared them prior to them being bombed, right? Obviously, there’s been reporting, the Washington Post reported a few weeks ago that this was part of a clandestine CIA operation. The New York Times has come out with reports suggesting that the potential involvement of private military contractors. So there’s tremendous questions that remain exactly about who is responsible, who is involved, why this was happening. But what seems quite clear is that US intelligence is operating out of El Salvador, a CIA base that was white active during the Dirty Wars in the ’80s.

Speaker 1:

Jack here is referring to what we learned from reporting in the Washington Post in mid-August, which broke the news that a covert CIA program based in El Salvador was likely behind the Ecuadorian boat attacks. According to the Post, a plane operating out of El Salvador’s small Ilopango International Airport was likely responsible for the attacks during the 1980s. This airport was also a launching pad for US operations in nearby Nicaragua.

Speaker 11:

This didn’t come out of nowhere, right? I mean, it is really based in the past, and a lot of the people who are involved in this are really rooted in those previous episodes of right-wing dictatorship and US interventionism in the region. And so in a lot of ways, it is a return to that earlier period.

Speaker 1:

There is another country in the region whose conflict with the United States hearkens back to US intervention of the past, Cuba. So back in episode seven, we looked in depth into the US actions against Cuba, and in particular, the devastating oil blockade which is strangling the country, and it’s still ongoing. The situation in the country has only deteriorated. It’s ironic because the United States brags about how they’re sending aid to the country, and yet the US is solely to blame for the crisis. The US government could fix the problem almost overnight by just lifting the embargo, both the oil blockade and the larger embargo that the US has had in place in some shape or form for more than 65 years. Belly of the Beast is a Cuban investigative journalism outlet based in Havana. I spoke with Belly of the Beast Liz Fernandez in my previous Cuba episode of this series.

A couple of weeks ago, they released this great video report titled Helping Cuba While Destroying Its Economy. The word helping is in quotes. Here’s a clip. It starts with Belly of the Beast journalist Johan Rodriguez standing on a Cuban street.

Speaker 13:

Good news for us here in Cuba. The United States is here to help.

Speaker 1:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio appears on screen. In Spanish, he says, “I want to tell you that we in the United States offer to help you not only alleviate the current crisis, but also to build a better future.”

Speaker 13:

A better future deliver in cardboard boxes.

Speaker 10:

This is the first of a hundred million dollar humanitarian aid package promised by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Speaker 13:

The US government is donating 700 boxes of food and hygiene products. Each one is supposed to last 10 days. That’s nice, although it might be even nicer if they had simply lifted the oil blockade.

Speaker 1:

The video cuts to numerous Cubans who are suffering. “They give us 20, 24 hours without electricity,” says one elderly resident. “It’s the whole day cooking with coals, “says a woman. “I haven’t had water for three and a half months,” says another woman.

Speaker 13:

The boxes of aid are welcome because people here are desperate. If someone breaks your legs and offers you an aspirin, you’ll take aspirin, but when you wear soft, your legs are still broken.

Speaker 1:

That is the state in Cuba right now, a country on life support. The United States could fix it, but it doesn’t want to. It wants the people to suffer an indirect way to try and force regime change, or at least that has been the stated policy since the beginning of the embargo in the 1960s. And the Trump administration is blatant about its motives. On July 20th, the US State Department released a 100-page report titled Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism. It essentially accused Cuba of infiltrating the US left over the last half century and being behind a host of progressive organizing, everything from Black Lives Matter and George Floyd protests to pro-Palestine encampments on university campuses and “the rise of Antifa.” It’s incredible because it makes the United States look like it’s in the crosshairs of this tiny Caribbean country, the US, a country that is nearly 90 times larger than Cuba and has a GDP that is more than 300 times the size of the islands.

The report makes no mention of the countless US attempts to overthrow or assassinate Fidel Castro, undo the Cuban Revolution, and above all, the decades long US blockade on the country. Instead, the document paints the United States as the victim of a Cuban plot to overthrow US capitalism and Western society.

The summary for the report reads, “Cuba’s assault on the United States was never at root a quarrel over economic policy or sovereignty or even ownership of a particular territory. It was a revolution against Western civilization itself, waged in part via the novel and insidious method of persuading the children of the West to turn against their own inheritance.” Let me just repeat that. Persuading the children of the West to turn against their own inheritance. I’m not exactly sure what that inheritance is, but the report paints activist and leftist organizations in the United States as willing pawns in Cuba’s evil plans to subvert the United States. The document reads, “Through its cultivation of American activists, its infiltration of American universities, its sprawling influence and espionage networks, and its position as the spiritual hub of the Third World Revolution, becoming a pilgrimage destination for generations of new left activists and intellectuals, Cuba has played an instrumental role in shaping America’s radical left from the 1960s through to today.” It singles out organizations like the Vencerimos Brigade, Pastors for Peace and the Anti-War Group Code Pink as essentially Cuban front groups.

It’s a ridiculous claim because these are solidarity organizations that literally carry humanitarian aid to countries harmed by US policies. And this idea in the Cuban report assumes that everyone in the United States should just be on board with US administrations that punish other countries and peoples for not bowing to Uncle Sam. The document also accuses the New York Political Education and Community Center at the People’s Forum and the National Lawyers Guild of being influenced by Cuba. The document states, “From its very first years of existence, the National Lawyers Guild operated as a defacto communist front group designed to organize and agitate for revolution in the United States. It’s interesting that the document also spends three and a half pages discussing the Democratic socialists of America’s support for Cuba. At a time when DSA is growing and actually winning primaries ahead of the US November midterm elections, it’s clear that Marco Rubio’s State Department is interested in doing all it can to paint that group as Cuban influenced.

The document sums up all of this by saying, “These groups collectively represent one of the single largest, most sophisticated and dangerous vectors for hostile foreign influence in modern American history.” Too bad that statement is not only totally conspiratorial, it is also not based on reality.

Speaker 14:

And it was shocking on every page to see the way in which the State Department’s report was reiterating the same claims, and many of them very fraudulent claims, that had been leveled against American solidarity activists in the 1960s and 1970s.

Speaker 1:

Bailey of the Beast recently interviewed historian Tayshon Latner about this report in his 2018 book, Cuban Revolution in America. Latner writes about how generations of activists in the United States have found inspiration in Cuba, but he says that if State Department officials were reading his book, they completely missed the point and blew it out of context.

Speaker 14:

But in reading Rubio’s report, it was enormously clear that they were reiterating, you could almost say regurgitating the same claims and some of the same material that had been circulating in the 1960s and 1970s. The FBI and the CIA both produced copious reports that claimed to, let’s not say prove, because I don’t know if even they themselves would’ve used that terminology, but they tried to demonstrate a linkage between American solidarity movements and the Cuban revolution.

Speaker 1:

That is what they’re doing now. Even before the report came out, the Trump administration was already investigating activists for traveling to Cuba in March for the Nuestra America convoy. Their solidarity groups brought 20 tons of humanitarian aid to the Caribbean Island. In May, roughly 40 US activists were subpoenaed, including progressive influencer Hassan Peiker and Code Pink founder Mydia Benjamin, who I’ve spoken with in this podcast. In the days following this Cuba Reports release, several groups that were mentioned in the document were also subpoenaed to testify before Congress, including the People’s Forum, Breakthrough News, and the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research.

Speaker 5:

Are you agents of foreign influence?

Speaker 7:

I’m an agent of my own conscience.

Speaker 1:

Manolo de Los Santos is the director of the People’s Forum. He responded to the Trump administration’s allegations against his organization on MS Now in late July.

Speaker 7:

I’ve been moved constantly by the belief that the United States has to do better and that we can change the reality in this country. If we were to accept what this committee is demanding from us, it essentially would be to accept that people in the United States have no right to protest, no right to organize, no right to express their differences with the US government. The Trump administration is mired in a series of failures. It has been incapable of convincing the American people that deporting millions of immigrants is the right thing to do. And therefore it goes after the people who organize the defense of immigrant families. The fact that we stand with the Palestinian people, that we say no to a blockade against Cuba, these are not fringe positions. These are the positions of majority of Americans right now. It’s our consciousness that’s moving us to say that these things are wrong in our society.

Speaker 1:

Jake Johnston.

Speaker 11:

Yeah, it’s a great example of our interventionist foreign policy blowing back at home and seeing these connections. I mean, this is pretty clearly for the Trump administration, part of going after its domestic opposition ahead of midterm elections, consolidating its own political power, but of course at the same time, justifying its illegal blockade and siege of Cuba in doing so.

Speaker 1:

Here’s the thing. I read through the report shortly after it was released and one thing stood out for me above everything else. It was like the report was grasping at straws, like it was trying to string together a random hodgepodge of people and groups to make the case that Cuba had infiltrated the United States and was responsible for leftist descent going back decades. It seemed like it was generated with artificial intelligence. So I tested it. I ran it through some of those sites online where you can see how much a document was likely created using AI. One of the results came back with a 96% chance that it was made with artificial intelligence. ChatGPT told me the likelihood that “AI was substantially involved in producing or editing this report was high, roughly 80 to 90%.” Now, I’m not saying that it was completely AI generated.

I don’t believe that, but the State Department did likely use substantial artificial intelligence in research gathering, writing, and editing. Okay, you might be saying so what? A lot of people are using artificial intelligence today. Well, here’s the problem. AI we know has the tendency not to argue with us, but to give us back what we want to hear. It helps us to find information that will support our beliefs or our objective regardless of if they’re based on fact or not. It’s called AI bias. And look, it’s one thing if AI is being used to write an email to a friend or to help me pick out my clothes. I think I look good in blue. Thank you. Those have very little, if any, geopolitical implications. It’s another entirely, however, if you’re using this to develop an official government document that will guide public policy and which will be used to attack your political opponents, that is dangerous and it means that AI is being weaponized to benefit a certain political class and silence dissent.

In other words, government censorship. There has been limited discussion about the possibility that Marco Rubio’s Cuba document was likely created with the help of AI, and I wanted to get a deeper sense of the implications. What does that actually mean? So I reached out to Tal Hagen.

Speaker 15:

There we go.

Speaker 1:

All right, fantastic. Okay, so Tal, this is what I’m trying to figure out today. You might remember him from my episode about disinformation and deep fakes on Venezuela earlier this year. He is an online AI watchdog. He’s now the director of Otis, which provides human-run intelligence services. Anyway, he’s an expert on artificial intelligence, and I wanted to get his analysis of what it means when AI is being used to develop policy like this. And let me just say that I didn’t ask him specifically about the Cuba document because I wanted his objective opinion about the concerns over the use of AI in these circumstances. Because we know that if you go on a ChatGPT and you’re chatting with ChatGP and you’re saying, oftentimes it’s going to give you back what you want. Do we see the same thing in reports and documents where if you’re looking for something, if you’re trying to find something, the document that is produced through AI has the possibility of also giving you what you’re looking for because you’re asking it to go out there and find stuff that would make your statement true.

That make sense?

Speaker 15:

Yeah. At the end of the day, something that we need to understand with AI is that AI always agrees with us. It always wants to give you a simple, fast answer as quick as it doesn’t argue with you.

Speaker 1:

Tao says that you can test this by asking AI something in two different ways. One where you’re trying to get it to agree with you about something and the other where you’re playing a devil’s advocate and you’re trying to get it to agree with you about the exact opposite thing. Depending on how you phrase your question, you can get either result.

Speaker 15:

But AI almost always will give you what you want.

Speaker 1:

But Tao says that doesn’t necessarily make it untrue or false.

Speaker 15:

For example, maybe I’ve collected all the evidence and then I’ve asked AI to compile that into a comprehensive report for me. It’s still my information. I just asked AI to help me build it. So it’s not an AI made report, it’s an AI enhanced report. So that also complicates things because just because it was AI generated doesn’t mean it wasn’t real.

Speaker 1:

It also doesn’t mean that it was. For instance, Tao says, “It all depends on the input or information that you give the AI tool.”

Speaker 15:

Sometimes it also has access to the web, but it doesn’t actually understand what’s true, what’s false, and especially in evolving crises when things are just happening right now, whatever is on the web, that becomes the truth. And I’ve seen AI mess this up a lot. And so the bias is from what information you even provided in those documentations because when you provide me with documentation, I will ask you, “How do you know this is true? How do you know this is true? Where’s this from?” The AI doesn’t ask you that. It just assumes that everything you’ve given it is correct. It doesn’t start refuting your sources.

Speaker 1:

Tao says many officials and government departments, not just in the United States, are now using AI.

Speaker 15:

A lot of the governments, agencies, and individuals are using AI now to craft their official responses. We know there was some government official on Twitter who put out a post and he accidentally left in the prompt of making it sound better.

Speaker 6:

Madam Speaker, another concern relates to expectations.

Speaker 1:

There was also this Canadian politician who read an AI prompt in the New Brunswick legislature.

Speaker 6:

Here’s a more natural flowing version of that section that reads like a legislative speech rather than a series of short points. Madam Speaker –

Speaker 15:

The US government released photos of their war room and you could see them using AI, like writing different types of prompts.

Speaker 1:

Should we be concerned about governments, entities that are creating policy and an increasing use of AI and what that might mean for the policies that they’re creating?

Speaker 15:

Even when you’re writing in the Chachemia and you’re creating what you want or you’re creating a policy decision with AI, you are creating the report. But the problem is that your critical thinking skills are diluted because you are asking AI simple questions, you’re asking it to do the heavy labor. And if you say, “Find me an issue, find me an issue and then solve that issue,” you’re not the one solving that issue and it’s solving an issue just based on general information from the public. The problem with AI when it’s used by many different individuals is it replaces your own critical thinking where you no longer are researching the work, you are just editing it.That’s essentially what it becomes. You become an editor, you stop being a researcher. And so instead of you looking at all these different sources, trying to understand what the truth is here, what’s the facts and what’s the narrative being driven, you’re allowing the AI to just compile random pieces of information through its token generation and that’s the result that you’re

Speaker 4:

Getting. We will make America proud again. We will make America safe again and we will make America great again. Thank you. God bless you. Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 15:

It’s why we like things that rhyme. The reason that a lot of political slogans are rhymes is because things that sound good are right. If it sounds good, it’s right. It’s why when you look at the comment section of a right-wing activist or a left-wing activist, all of its supporters say, “This sounds amazing. This is so good because they’re hearing what they want to hear.” And so even though the policy that they’re writing or they’re talking about might be complete and utter bullshit, it sounds good, but it’s not based on factual information. The same thing is happening with AI where it sounds good to the user, but they don’t actually know what it’s based on. And so they’re essentially being driven by just a random algorithm.

Speaker 1:

In other words, ask AI to give you a report that says Cuba has infiltrated the US left and is behind protest movements in the United States going back decades and it will do your bidding. We can’t know for sure, but that likely sums up Marco Rubio’s Cuba report. With or without AI, this Cuba report is a dangerous weapon that is now being deployed against progressives and opponents of the Trump administration. Jake Johnston.

Speaker 11:

I mean, I think just about everybody who read it laughed, but it is serious because this is about justifying war crimes. I mean, what we’re doing to Cuba right now is an active war. It is illegal and is an act of war. And yet here we are justifying it and at the same time sort of demonizing the opposition, the domestic opposition to those very actions.

Speaker 1:

The opposition to Trump’s policies has also been organizing abroad. On August 21st, 150 leaders from 15 countries from across the hemisphere and Europe met in Montevideo Uruguay for this year’s Pan-American Congress. It’s an event founded three years ago with the stated goal of fostering “solidarity among peoples and sovereignty among nations.” It’s been an important event for organizing the left in the region. The first two summits were held in Columbia and Mexico, both then countries run by progressive governments. SIEPR’s Alex Main, who I spoke with at the top, attended the conference.

Speaker 5:

The bulk of the people that were there are lawmakers who are doing their best to try to push forward progressive policies despite often being the minority and despite dealing with increasingly authoritarian right-wing governments. So they had a lot to share.

Speaker 16:

Good afternoon everybody. I’m Congresswoman Primila Jayapal. I represent the great state of Washington in the United States. I’m the first Indian American woman in the United States Congress. We are here, my esteemed colleague, Chuy Garcia and I, because we want to be very clear about two things. Number one, we oppose the Trump administration’s Don Roe foreign policy doctrine. We oppose the unilateral executive actions that Donald Trump has been taking without our congressional authority for both strikes, extra judicial killings in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean. We oppose the use of military might, of economic tariffs to try to bully and coerce nations into actions that do not benefit the people of those sovereign nations. And we oppose the election interference of the United States in other nations’ elections.

Speaker 1:

Talk of President Donald Trump’s onslaught on the region was front and center, as were discussions about how to push back. Uruguayan Congresswoman Ines Cortez spoke to the press.

Speaker 16:

She said,

Speaker 1:

“Above all, the issue that cuts across the different workshops and debates is the current situation in which we still have the United States interfering in the local politics of each of our countries more than ever.”.

The former Honduran Minister of Defense and the former presidential candidate for Honduras’ leftist Libre Party, Rixi Moncada, said they must stand for national sovereignty and a multipolar world. She said, “The United States is a military technological and financial power, but the world is no longer unipolar. China, India, Brazil, Russia, the BRICS, they’re all participating in defining the new international order. Multipolarity is a reality and our stance must not be to trade one form of subordination for another. The Latin American dilemma is not Washington versus Beijing. We want relations with all the nations and peoples of the planet to engage with everyone, to submit to no one. There were also discussions among progressive leaders from Trump allied countries where democracy is being rolled back and there’s a breakdown of the rule of law and respect for institutions. Alex Main said the meeting went a long way in helping to build solidarity between progressive leaders from across the region and leftist leaders in the United States.

Speaker 5:

For instance, in Ecuador, and we’re beginning to see this in Columbia and also in Honduras, both those countries of course are now governed by right-wing governments since quite recently. So yeah, I think it was important for the US delegates to be hearing from these other countries in the region. They’re all impacted in different ways by the Trump administration’s policy, by the so-called Don Roe doctrine, which is really very heavily interventionist. And they heard about US electoral interference. They heard about the US support for the expansion of militarization in the region and this pretext of a war on so-called narco-terrorism to, in a lot of places, bend the laws or declare sort of states of emergency and deploy the military and engage in egregious violations of human rights. So there was a lot to take away for these US delegates.

Speaker 1:

Alex explained that on top of the Congress people who were in attendance, you had staffers for Senator Bernie Sanders and Chicago Congressman Jonathan Jackson, as well as a number of delegates who won primaries and who will likely be elected to Congress in November.

Speaker 5:

Three of them belonging to the Democratic Socialists of America, the other one supported by the Democratic Socialists of America. I think it was very productive, and I think certainly the US delegates left Montevideo with commitments to themselves to do a lot more on Latin America that is of course suffering a new era of extremely aggressive interventionism from the current Trump administration.

Speaker 1:

But it wasn’t all about the United States. Alex says there were meetings about the impact of artificial intelligence on these countries, a session about green industrial development, multilateralism, and of course, democracy, peace, and security.

Speaker 5:

That is what was kind of important about these sessions is that there was a lot of information sharing, experience sharing, and people talking about various policy ideas that can be implemented sometimes at the congressional level. But also, the pendulum is bound to swing back in the other direction in spite of the best efforts of the Trump administration and some of the other more authoritarian governments in the region.

I absolutely came away with a sense of hope from the conference in Montevideo because one, you had a lot of strong leaders from the region that despite the rise of authoritarianism everywhere are not giving up. In fact, they are optimistic about the future and about returning to power. They know it’s in many cases going to be a tough process because in some instances, democracy, the rule of law and so on have to be reestablished. So it’s going to take very strong people’s movements to do that, but they really seem up to the task. And what was also very encouraging was just the amount of young leaders from the region, a new generation of progressive leaders that have very big plans for their countries and for the region, and in particular for regional integration between Latin American and Caribbean countries.

Speaker 1:

The final declaration referenced Simon Bolivar’s historic Panama Congress, which took place 200 years ago this year. It read, “Today, August 23rd, we therefore unite to combat the renewed doctrine of domination in all its forms, defending the rights and freedoms won across centuries of struggle for self-determination, collaborate from respective legislatures to advance our own vision of hemispheric cooperation based on solidarity between peoples and sovereignty among nations. They plan to meet again in Brazil next year.” Hi folks, that is all for this episode of Under the Shadow. I’m now getting back on track and I will be bringing you much more in the coming weeks, both about Trump’s shadow looming over the upcoming Brazilian elections and the shocking revelations in the wake of the arrest of Argentine right-wing election fixer Fernando Serimedo. If you can’t wait for my reporting on Brazil, I’ve just released a 10-minute video from Sao Paulo.

I’ll add a link in the show notes. Also, please check out Belly of the Beasts reporting. They are so, so good at what they do. Many thanks to the team for allowing me to use clips from their footage. I’ve added links in the show notes. In the meantime, as always, you can find me on Patreon, that’s patreon.com/mfox. There you can also support my work, become a monthly sustainer, or sign up to stay abreast of all the latest on this podcast and my other reporting across Latin America. You can find a ton of content there exclusively for my supporters. As always, if you’re looking for more information, news, and reporting on Trump’s onslaught, both on communities within the United States and abroad, please check out The Real News and NACLA. Both of them are publishing daily indispensable reporting. The theme music is by my band Monte Perdido.

You can find us on Spotify or wherever you stream music. This closing music playing right now is off our 2024 album, Ofrenda. I hope you check it out. Under the shadows of co-production of The Real News and NACLA, it’s produced in partnership with Global Exchange. This episode was written, researched, reported, and produced by me, Michael Fox. The script was edited by Heather Geis. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. An updated version will be made available as soon as possible.

Michael Fox: Okay. Max, can you hear me?

Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah, brother, you’re coming in loud and clear on this.

Michael Fox: All right, fantastic. Max, I want to tell you a story. It’s a tale of two countries, the United States and Brazil. They are the two countries with the largest populations and the largest economies in the Western hemisphere. Brazil is about the size of the lower 48 of the United States. And politically in both countries, something very similar has happened in recent years. In both countries, far right presidents come to power. In both those countries, the president spends several years unraveling democratic institutions and public policy. Then both those presidents run for reelection. Both the presidents lie about their country’s voting systems in order to undermine the elections and whip up their base. Both those presidents lose their reelections. They both claim fraud and then they both try to carry out a coup to stay in power. But that is where these two paths diverge. In the United States, President Donald Trump continues to peddle his lies about the election.
He creates his own social media platform and uses it to push his agenda. He returns to power in 2025. You know the story. In Brazil, however, the country’s supreme electoral court blocks former President Jair Bolsonaro from running for office for eight years because of the lies he told about the country’s electoral system. It is not censorship. It’s a different interpretation of free speech, one that says the right to free expression must be balanced within the other rights in the country and the country’s democratic system. To quote Robert Frost, that has made all the difference.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: Bolsonaro is basically being punished by something that he said about the electoral system.

Michael Fox: I’ve been speaking lately with Fabio de Sae Silva. He’s a Brazilian legal expert and an associate professor of international studies at the University of Oklahoma.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: And in the United States saying things, propagating lies and misinformation about the electoral system, I don’t think it would be punishable at all under any circumstance because of how strong the protection to free speech rights is in the United States. And in the past, I think a lot of people though of this as an advantage of the United States in comparison to other societies. But I think more recently there has been a rethinking of this and there has been an understanding that it’s not that other countries lack free speech rights. It’s just that they have other rights that they balance free speech rights against. And in the case of Brazil, because we all understood in the 2018 election that misinformation was a serious threat to democracy, the legal system began to offer a response.

Michael Fox: In 2023, Bolsonado was banned from running again. And if you’ve been following news on Brazil, you know that he was later sentenced to 27 years in jail. He’s currently under house arrest because of health issues. He was sentenced for his participation in a plot to carry out a coup and overturn his 2022 electoral loss and to even assassinate leftist President Luis Idnacio Lula de Silva. In other words, in the United States, Trump is allowed to say what he wants, disparage the electoral system, create his own social media platform, spread as many lies as he likes, and he is awarded for it by being allowed to run again and win reelection where he is now presiding over an assault on free speech rights, the likes of which we have not seen in modern day history in the United States. Meanwhile, in Brazil, Bolsonado is banned from running and he is in jail.
And here’s the point. The roots of all of this, the roots of this difference are the two countries’ vision and interpretation of free speech.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: All these things that Bolsonado has been accused of at the center of them was speech because what the federal police points to in their investigation is that the attempted coup involved promoting publicly and even internationally this idea that the Brazilian elections had been defrauded. They associated with the attempt to co-ops the military to take over and nullify the elections basically. And also including maybe some more unorthodox activities such as assassinating the elected president and some judges. But just to stay in the first component of this criminal enterprise, it is something that involves limitations to speech in Brazilian law.

Michael Fox: In past episodes, we’ve been looking at the attacks on free speech in the United States. Today we look at how another country, Brazil, has pushed back on the fascist and far right wave with its own interpretation of free speech. And here’s the thing, Brazil’s understanding of free speech, as we will look at throughout this episode, is pretty similar to most of the rest of the world. The United States is the outlier, but Trump far right activists and owners of big tech platforms are trying to change that in order to push their absolutest interpretation of free speech abroad and undermine Brazilian democracy in the process. All of that in a minute. This is the Battle for Free Speech, a multi-part narrative podcast brought to you by The Real News. In this series, we take you on a journey to understand the important role free speech has played in US history and the fight being waged over it today.
I’m your co-host, Michael Fox, and I’m so excited to be joined today by Max Alvarez. He’s the editor-in-chief and co-executive director of The Real News and the host of the Working People Podcast. Max, seriously, thank you so much for joining me.

Maximillian Alvarez: So grateful to be here, brother, and grateful for all the incredible work that you and Marc and the whole team have been doing on this very, very necessary podcast. And also I’m just like a massive fan as you know of Under the Shadow and everything else that you do. So I’m very excited to finally be on one of the podcasts I’m going to be listening to from you.

Michael Fox: Aw, thanks Max. And in particular, I’m really excited to speak with you today because you are on the front lines of standing up for free speech, but also the working class and also covering the rise of the right. So you kind of straddle all of these things at the same time, which we’re going to be digging into today. All right. We are going to begin on our journey here. Let me just say this before we get started. So far in this podcast, we’ve looked back on the attacks on free speech and press freedoms today. Under the Trump administration, we’ve looked at movements using free speech to stand up for their rights. Today we’re going to look at how Trump and the far right are trying to push a US definition of free speech abroad in order to lift their agenda internationally and so much more.
I got into this a little bit in the beginning. Today’s episode is going to focus completely on Brazil and the role the United States is playing in the country. And today’s episode is a joint collaboration together with my podcasts, Under the Shadow and Brazil on Fire. Because as you will see, there are connections throughout. If you haven’t heard those, I suggest you go check them out.

Maximillian Alvarez: Oh my God. If you haven’t heard those, I envy you because you have a feast in front of you. Under the shadow, Brazil on Fire. They are so good and so essential. And they’re award winning contributions that I guarantee if you’re listening to this, you are going to love them. So go check them out. And I don’t say that just as a collaborator with Mike on producing these series, but as a devoted listener who always learns a lot from them.

Michael Fox: Thanks, Max. Three things to say before we get started. If you have been listening to this podcast series, The Battle for Free Speech, you know how this works. I go out, I do a ton of reporting. I bring that back to discuss it here. Two, I love time travel. I often say that podcasting for me is the closest thing we have to actually traveling in time. So my goal here is to take you to another time and place and I’m glad you’re along for the ride, Max. And three, I know Brazil well. My wife is Brazilian. I’ve lived here for years. I’m here now. And I say this so that you know that everything that we’re digging into today isn’t just based on my interviews for this podcast, but on my on the ground reporting on this over the last decade. And I seriously have been wanting to do an episode like this for a very long time, so I’m super excited.
Okay. Max, are you ready?

Maximillian Alvarez: Let’s do it, baby.

Michael Fox: Okay, here we go. I want to begin exactly one year ago today, July 9th, 2025. US President Donald Trump writes a letter to Brazilian President Luis Idnacio Lula de Silva. In the letter, he announces that he’s levying a 50% tariff on all Brazilian goods. Among the reasons for this new tariff is the country’s legal case against Trump ally, former President Jair Bolsonaro, for attempting to carry out a coup amid the 2022 elections. He also chastises Brazil for allegedly violating free speech rights. In the letter, Trump denounces Brazil’s insidious attacks on free elections and the fundamental free speech rights of Americans. He also criticizes the Brazilian Supreme Court’s secret and unlawful censorship orders to US social media platforms. It’s incredible to see the Trump administration lecturing anyone on free speech, but that is how our most basic right is being weaponized today. Anyway, moving on. A few weeks after that letter, the US Embassy in Brazil releases a fact sheet explaining Trump’s new tariffs.

Artur Romeu: It was like a one and a half page document.

Michael Fox: And I spoke with Arturo Romeo about this. He’s a Brazilian journalist and the director of Reporters Without Borders for Latin America. And he says he’s reading this and they mention free speech, free expression or censorship like 10 times. It’s only a page and a half, but the entire thing, it gets into just repeating this line basically saying that the United States is tariffing Brazil because it was promoting censorship.

Artur Romeu: Free speech is being weaponized against freedom off expression.

Michael Fox: He describes this as the United States trying to make it look like a free speech champion.

Artur Romeu: But actually what your distorted vision of free speech is doing is fragmenting the diferent ideas behind what freedom of expression really is and mostly the social and collective dimension of freedom of expression. You are only saying that people should say whatever they want without any kind of interference. You are basically ignoring completely the fact that people live in a society and part of the freedom of expression right is related to receive pluralistic, diverse, reliable information.

Michael Fox: And I should just pause here to say that internationally, and this is really important, especially for our US audience. Internationally, many definitions of free speech include the right to receive reliable or truthful information. And that’s key because in the United States, that clearly is not part of the equation. Anyway, this is a really important distinction between how free speech is generally understood in the United States and elsewhere around the world. I got into this a bunch in the last episode. If you haven’t heard that, you can go back and check it out now, but the idea is this. In the US, your right to free speech is generally seen as absolute. In other words, you can pretty much say what you want without repercussions regardless of how bad it is or racist or homophobic or discriminatory. In every other country in the world, every one, your free speech rights are seen as balanced with other rights.
So your right to free speech isn’t more important than my right not to be harmed. For instance –

Brian Mier: The view followed in Germany, France, and especially for the case of this conversation, Brazil said according to the Constitution, all human rights are equally important.

Michael Fox: Brian Mier is a correspondent for a Telesur who’s lived in Brazil for more than 30 years. And I spoke with him about this. You

Brian Mier: Can’t say that one human right is more important than another human right. So you can’t have one human right that’s absolutist in its nature, free speech, that would enable someone to limit or deny other people’s human rights.

Michael Fox: For instance, in Brazil or in Germany, Nazism is a crime. It’s illegal to be a Nazi or to spread Nazi propaganda.

Brian Mier: Because it damages the peace of mind, the freedom to come and go as they please, the freedom to interact with the public of certain minority groups in Brazil, mainly Afro-Brazilians, Northeasterners, but also Jewish people as well. So in Brazil, this is called the harmony of rights according to the Brazilian Constitution. All rights are equally important. Freedom of a speech is a very important right, but it can’t be used to trample over some other group of people’s rights.

Michael Fox: That’s the idea and this distinction is really important. And let me just say that as I touched on last time, in the United States, we also had this kind of balancing definition of free speech until roughly the Cold War in the 1960s. And that’s when our current day libertarian absolutist view of free speech really took hold. What’s interesting is that we don’t even really realize this. We don’t know this past, right? And yet our definition now of free speech, absolutist definition within the United States is now being weaponized by Trump and his far right supporters and far right allies abroad to push their agenda as we will look into throughout this podcast. Before we move on, Max, do you see this? Have you been seeing this battle over free speech? And do you think that people understand this within the United States, understand how free speech kind of is being weaponized and this interpretation of free speech is being weaponized?

Maximillian Alvarez: Yes. And I would say that we are not only aware of the hypocrisy of these people using free speech to take our free speech away or to impose their will on Brazil or other countries because that’s what we’ve come to realize our country does. That’s as American as apple pie. That’s in fact what most of the world knows America to be. They don’t know it anymore as the America my parents knew it to be. And my dad came to this country for, his family came to this country for. So the world today does not know us as that. They know us as the place that the most powerful country and military empire in the world that has been going around the world undemocratically overthrowing democratically elected leaders, undemocratically invading other countries and bombing other countries and torturing people in the name of democracy and saying like, we’re spreading democracy to you, you’re welcome.
And now smash cut to 2026 these sort of fascist posters of Donald Trump are draping Washington DC and everything that we’re talking about on this series unfolding before our eyes. And I don’t think a lot of us know what free speech means in this context. And I think that is why the takeaway for this discussion and any discussion that we have about it is like, well, what are we going to fight for it to be?

Michael Fox: Yeah. Max, I really appreciate you wrapping in this question of how the United States has justified interventions abroad in the name of democracy and how what we’re seeing now is the justification for the tariffs in the name of free speech, which I think is a great connection. In order to understand all of this, Trump’s letter in particular, his pushback on Brazil and Trump’s rationale for imposing these tariffs, we need to back up a little bit. So we’re going to go back in time. We’re jumping in the time machine, Max. Here we go.

Maximillian Alvarez: Let’s go.

Michael Fox: The year is 2018. It’s the lead up to Brazil’s huge presidential elections. Former President Lula was the front runner, but he was jailed on trumped up charges of corruption. Bolsonaro is the Trump outsider candidate, longtime congressman, former captain under the Brazilian military dictatorship, something he is still vocally proud of. And he’s surging in the polls because of a slew of fake news and disinformation, the likes of which the country has never seen. Just one example. I was covering the election for numerous outlets and I went to this press conference for the then leftist candidate, Fernando Adaji. And in this press conference, it was just a couple of days before the first round vote and he had called it because his workers’ party had created a WhatsApp hotline to receive complaints of false or misleading news and memes being spread. They said that within 24 hours they’d received 15,000 messages.
24 hours, 15,000 messages. The day before I spoke with this street artist who told me, “Our election will not be decided by the candidate’s proposals or their speeches. It’ll be decided by the lies spread online. The Brazilian elections will be decided by the ability of some groups to push fake news and the ability of us, the voters, to discern what is and what is not real.” And that is exactly what happened. The voters could not discern. Most but not all of the fake news or misleading news were being pushed by Bolsonaro’s allies and supporters. The country was overwhelmed and unprepared for the disinformation campaign and so was the Supreme Electoral Court, which oversees the elections.
They were able to request that dozens of posts be taken down, but they just didn’t have the breadth of being able to handle a barrage of posts like this. In the end, the result. This is Bolsonaro’s, Brazil. The world’s fourth largest democracy has voted on a new president. Bolsonaro won the election with roughly 55% of the vote. I was covering the election outside of his home that night in Rio de Janeiro. And then Bolsonaro came into power and proceeded to run the country into the ground like I detailed in depth in Brazil on Fire, my podcast. He guided social programs, privatized state businesses, denied the COVID pandemic, pushed unproven drugs, attacked universities, much of which we saw under Trump in the United States as well. But in Brazil, and this is the reason why I’m bringing all this up now, the courts learned their lesson.

Fernando Paulino: Joseph’s system learned to create and to stimulate some vaccines for this information and misinformation during the electoral periods.

Michael Fox: Fernando Paulino is a communications professor at the University of Brazilia. He’s also the president of the Latin American Communication Researchers Association and a fan of heavy metal rock music, Max. In particular, he likes stuff from Rage Against the Machine, Metallica and Sipultra, who he said stand for free speech. And I think that’s like, I’m sorry for the aside, but I think it’s really cool because in our conversation we got into some of these questions about how this heavy metal music has stood up for free speech in time. Anyway, he says that the

Fernando Paulino: Judicial system using the constitutional principles established some procedures to avoid misinformation information during the campaign and also before the campaign because Jaibosonaro tried to disseminate misinformations information or in other words, fake news against the political and electoral system.

Michael Fox: The other thing that came out of the 2018 election was they created Brazil, the Brazilian courts created a precedent for making it illegal to promote conspiracy theories about the safety of the electoral system. And this is key. I spoke with Professor Fabio de Saisilva.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: Because there was one candidate who started spreading videos, fake videos of Bambagi trying to vote for Bosona and the vote going for Adat at the time. And there was a case that was filed against him by the public prosecutor’s office for violating electoral laws. And that case got up to the Superior Electoral Court where the justices on that court ruled that if you spread conspiracy theories about the safety of our electoral mechanisms, you’re violating the law and you can even lose your seat if you have been elected.

Michael Fox: Let me just pause here to explain why this is so important for Brazil because I think a lot of people in the United States might not get this. Brazil, if you remember, is a country that returned to democracy again in just 1985. For the 21 years prior to this, from 1964 until 1985, it was ruled by a brutal military dictatorship that censored speech disappeared and killed hundreds and imprisoned and tortured thousands. That was not long ago. My wife was born under the dictatorship. For Brazilians, the right to free speech and every other right for that matter fall under the umbrella of their democracy. The democracy is most important. That’s what comes first. And that’s codified into their laws. It’s codified into their constitution. As Brian Meir mentioned earlier, their right to free speech doesn’t trump their right to free and fair elections. Okay, just want to say that fast-forward to the 2022 vote.

Speaker: Their politics couldn’t be more different, but both of Brazil’s main presidential candidates have gone into overdrive online.

Michael Fox: Campaigns try to push the same fake news and disinformation. You’ve got Bolsonado running for reelection against President Luis Ignacio Lula de Silva, who is now out of jail clearly. And so campaigns try to push the same fake news and disinformation in particular on behalf of Bolsonado, but the Supreme Electoral Council’s ready. They demand flag posts must be taken down within two hours and then just one hour when it got close to the election. Bolsonado tries to raise doubts about the country’s electoral system. Fabio de Saisilva says that the discourse was central to Bolsonado’s attempt to cause disruption in the country and to maybe open the space for military intervention.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: So it was very central to Bolsonago’s speech as well as to the activity of his supporters on social media. And what the Lula candidacy did and the public prosecutor’s office sometimes did was to take those cases to court saying, “We have a law that says that you can’t say those things and these people are saying those things.” And so what Mogayas did, he was presiding over the Superior Electoral Court, was to just try those cases and enforce the decisions sending communications to social media platforms, ordering the social media platforms to remove those forms of content. And so there were some profiles that were taken down during the elections for spreading that conspiracy theory all based on Brazilian law, just as he took down some posts against Bosonago by the Lula campaign that violated other aspects of Brazilian law. So that was happening on both sides.
The only difference was that the Bosonago campaign was using this to victimize itself and to say that it was being persecuted by this censorship judge.

Michael Fox: So later on when you hear that, and we’re going to be talking about it in this episode, but from the United States and from elsewhere, you hear people talking about this censorship judge or censorship that’s been happening.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: That accounts for a large number of the cases involving guys and this accusation of censorship.

Michael Fox: Because there are measures in place to stop fake news and disinformation from being spread and trying to roll that back amid this electoral moment. Max, let’s stop your pause really quick. I mean, is this all making sense? Do you have any questions?

Maximillian Alvarez: Sadly, it is making sense. I mean both in terms of why these things happened the way that they did and why they didn’t happen the same way here in the United States. I
Mean, because you talked about where the roads really diverged in the past five to six years especially with how we dealt with these attempted coups. Donald Trump is not in jail. Donald Trump was not barred from running for president. In fact, he used the presidency to outrun the legal system and proving that actually power wins over principle in America and has now thus taken all of our institutions to serve his will. But I think in terms of why we didn’t do that, I mean the answers are very complex, but I think what folks just need to know is that should we have a more stringent, robust kind of understanding of the people’s right to truthful information and the harm, the social harm, the harm to our society and our democracy and not our health and safety by treating lies and truth as having equal standing.
That problem that really showed the differences in how America and the USA and Brazil have treated this question in much deeper ways.

Michael Fox: Absolutely. Absolutely. Max, I want to bring in an important figure here. His name is Aleshande de Morais.
Fabio de Saisilva just mentioned him. He’s a member of the Brazilian Supreme Court and he presided over the Supreme Electoral Court during the 2022 elections. As you will hear today, he has been a major thorn in the side of Bolshonato and his supporters for years, but he’s not necessarily left wing. He’s a bit of a wild card. He was appointed by Michelle Temmer, who was the right wing president back in 2017. Bolsonado supporters understandably hate him. After President Lula, he’s pretty much public enemy number one for the right and they’ve actually compared him to Superman’s archenemy Lex Luther. I know you like that reference, Max. He kind of does actually look like him, which is the reason why they make this comparison. Mordaise is the top person who they have accused of censorship in recent years. Trump and his supporters have joined the campaign because Aleshander Morais has been the top Supreme Court judge in Brazil to push back on Bolsonaro’s measures during his presidency and the fake news over the last eight years and the power of US social media companies in Brazil, which we’ll get into in a second.
But as Fabio Desai Silva says, he didn’t ever do it alone.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: He was backed, for the most part, he was backed by two courts because he sat on the superior electoral court where he handled some cases that had to do with speech and he sits on the Supreme Court where he handled other of such cases. And like I said, he was for the most part backed by if not all the other justices in those courts by the vast majority of those justices.

Michael Fox: But he was always the most visible figure, Lex Luther, but a good guy if you like democracy. Anyway, he was also the judge charged with investigating what would become known as Bolshonato’s hate cabinet. And this is crazy, Max. I don’t know if you remember hearing about this, but imagine if you will, a troll farm inside the White House with connections to right-wing influencers within the United States who used their power, influence and social media prominence to attack political opponents. This is what you had in Bolshinado’s government.

Maximillian Alvarez: Wait, that’s what we got now, baby.

Michael Fox: That’s what we have now. Okay, true. But this is an actual entity. It’s like its own little office within Brazilia. Fabio de Sali Silva, talk to me about this.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: As far as we know, it was a relatively well organized and hierarchical structure where you had people whose job was to produce content. You had people then outside of the presidency, big influencers whose job was to disseminate the content.

Michael Fox: This is all coordinated so they would target someone and say, “We want to take this person out. ” And it wasn’t always someone on the left. In many cases, it was a bolsonado supporter who split with bolsonado or criticized bolsonado for some reason. And they say, “This is the enemy of the day.” And everyone would just pile on posting whatever they could about that person to intimidate them and make them stop criticizing bolsonada or whatever. And when you say it’s what we have now, in many ways it’s true because there is no doubt in my mind that this tactic is influenced not just by… It didn’t just come out of thin air in Brazil. Clearly the far right is organizing when it has to do with tactics and things like this.

Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah. And Bolsonaro is like government. It was like sort of a department within a government that was still trying to present itself as a government. In the United States, it’s Trump. And so the fish drops from the head down. So it’s just like Trump is the megaphone who owns his own social media platform who is sicking his entire government apparatus and his billionaire oligarch network to gobble up all the legacy media, destroy the ones that he doesn’t like, yada, yada, yada.

Michael Fox: So Ali Shander de Morais is the point person for the investigations. He coordinates this together with the federal police and they work to undo this and they do an incredible job at it. So they issue search and seizure warrants, arrest warrants. Some Bolsonaro influencers went to jail, others had their social media accounts blocked. And this is just another example of why Morais is so hated by Bolsonaro and his people. Anyway, 2022. Lulu wins the elections, but then Bolsonaro supporters hit the streets.

Maximillian Alvarez: The president’s office may have conceded a feat, but many of J. Bolsonaro’s millions of supporters have not

Michael Fox: They’re spurred on by Bolsonaro’s claims of fraud in the elections. They block roads across the country. They set up vigils in front of military barracks all across Brazil demanding that the military rise up to overturn the results and they stay there for more than two months and then on January 8th, 2023. Balsinado supporters invade the Brazilian Congress and Supreme Court. They attacked the buildings causing more than $3 million in damage in a copycat performance of January 6th, 2021, Washington.
I should probably also say that the police response, because we’re talking about free speech right now, but I should probably say that the police response to the Bolsonaro protests before January 8th was initially pretty lenient, like far more lenient than you would see in the United States if thousands of people decided to block roads all across the country and then set up vigils in front of military barracks, you probably wouldn’t see that like, “Okay, you can stay there.” But in Brazil, they basically let him do what they needed to do. But after January 8th, when it was clear that an attempted coup was underway, the response was far quicker than in the wake of January 6th in the United States.
They did away with the encampments. Hundreds were arrested in Brazilia. The Supreme Court would convict more than 1,400 people for their involved in the Capitol invasion in Brazilia. Hundreds are still in jail. I mention this all because like in the United States, many of the claims that Brazil has been imprisoning political opposition come from the legal response to the country’s capital invasion. In other words, some of the people that they call political prisoners are those people who are in jail or who were in jail or who were convicted by the Supreme Court for their role in the Capitol invasion. But again, this comes back to the idea of the importance of democracy in Brazil and particular Brazil’s interpretation of free speech. The point is here, you have a right to protest. You have a right to speak. You even have a right to protest for months.
You just don’t have a right to try to overthrow the country and don’t mess with the country’s democracy. June 30th, 2023, six months after Brazil’s capital invasion. The Supreme Electoral Court bans Bolsonaro from running for political office for eight years for spreading lies about the country’s electoral system. Five judges agreed that he used government channels and social media to spread misinformation about Brazil’s elections.
The ruling focused on this meeting that Bolsonaro held a few months before the election, where he told foreign ambassadors that the country’s electoral voting system was rigged and the elections could be manipulated. Of course, this was despite the fact that Brazil’s electoral system had long been internationally recognized as safe and secure. Brazilians celebrated the ruling across the country. It was the first time a Brazilian president had been borrowed from holding public office for election violations. Bolsonaro denounced the judgment against him calling it politically motivated. Max, can you ever imagine something like this happening in the United States?

Maximillian Alvarez: Now, no, but I think a lot of us had still had lingering hope that our institutions would hold and that we would prove ourselves capable of this as well, but we didn’t.

Michael Fox: So I just want to focus on this point I made at the very beginning of the episode right now to kind of tie this into where we were at the beginning. Remember how I mentioned that the two paths diverge between the United States and Brazil. Clearly I’m generalizing, but in many ways, this is one of those moments where you can really tell the difference. Bolsonaro is blocked from holding electoral office. Meanwhile, in the United States, Trump continues being Trump. It

Donald Trump [Recording]: Is great to be your president. It is great.

Michael Fox: In Brazil, something else is happening at the same time Bolsonaro is banned from holding office. There is a nationwide debate over a new bill that would regulate social media platforms as if they were television or radio. Tech platforms push back with all of their might. Telegram, for instance, sends millions of Brazilians a message telling them that if Brazil passes the law, it will “end freedom of expression.” Congressional leaders attack the message on the floor of the lower house. The head of the government coalition of the Senate, Randolph Rodriguez, told press, “To the heads of the big tech companies and their shareholders, Brazil will not be no man’s land. It’s a threat against Brazilian democracy. We need regulation. The big tech companies say they are tech companies, but more and more they’re acting like communication companies and our telecommunication sector has been regulated since 1964. Social media is the same.
Brazil had suddenly become the battleground over the power of tech companies to remain unregulated and free to push their agenda. At the time I sat down with David Nemer. He’s a Brazilian University of Virginia communications professor who studied social media platforms for years. And he told me that these platforms, as we’ve looked at in this podcast, they are not neutral.

David Nemer: These platforms are not just publishers. They are part of the message as well in curating the message.

Michael Fox: And this bill is really just about bringing transparency from big techs.

David Nemer: In terms of access to the algorithm, access to reports about the algorithm, understanding how these platforms behave. So we have a more transparent way of understanding how these platforms, like the role of these platforms in everyday life. This is why the big techs are playing hardball in Brazil because they know that if Brazil pisses this bell, then it sets the precedent and the other countries will follow as well.

Michael Fox: Sxzo that was enough for these tech firms to fight tooth and nail and the bill stalled in Congress. Max Brazilian lawmakers, they want to regulate the social media platform, say its censorship. Where do you stand on this? Do we need regulations for tech firms and social media platforms?

Maximillian Alvarez: I mean, absolutely. And when I say yes, we need regulation. I don’t want the current powers that be being the ones who to regulate it, nor do I want the ones who are in power before to be the ones regulating it. So do I think they need to be regulated? Yes. Do I think we need a better system of regulation and a better sort of societal understanding of what the hell regulation is and is for? Yes. But right now that ain’t going to happen in this country where the worst parts of capitalism will kill the best parts of democracy. Any semblance of an understanding of free speech that we have had as Americans that gets that free speech is important for a healthy democratic society has been eroded by this sort of individualistic consumer capitalist model of free speech for me is the only thing that matters.
Like my rights and my ability to say whatever I want whenever I want is the only point of free speech and no one can take that away. But it’s like Margaret Thatcher saying society doesn’t exist. There’s only a collection of individuals in pursuit of their own self-interest.
That’s what they have tried to make true in America. Out of the same country that birthed so many incredible contributions to democratic history, that same country has been overtaken by this democracy killing capitalist serving system.

Michael Fox: Well, no, and it’s interesting that you mentioned Margaret Thatcher because I got into this a little bit several episodes ago. We don’t think that, for instance, a financial system can be completely unregulated. You have to have rules. It can’t just be a free for all. There have to be certain rules or else what happens? You have massive monopolies. You have massive corporations with huge power, which we do right now, but still there needs to be regulations and all these things. And it works the same way with social media platforms and with communications. That’s why we have communications, telecommunications laws. That’s why TV and radio are regulated. Newspapers are regulated. The way that most people get their news nowadays is through social media. There has to be some form of regulation. It can’t just be a free for all, but these companies are using the discourse of free speech in order to push their vision for the world and really sell their agenda, really push their bottom line, their profit margin.
They don’t want to be regulated because they’re a business. And of course, now they’re in cahoots with Trump even more.

Maximillian Alvarez: America is the land of deregulation. And so when we say we need to regulate these companies and that we live in a more deregulated kind of society, I don’t know if people outside of America fully grasp how deregulated we are. I mean, look at the way that big tech has forced AI into our lives with like no regulations whatsoever. And look at the effects that it’s having on our society, on our politics, on our children, on our sense of truth. I mean, it’s such a big world changing technology that has been allowed to just kind of flood every device that we use and change society however it’s going to under a system where the companies that own and invest in these technologies are consolidating power and collaborating with state power to ultimately, like you said, serve their agenda. And their agenda is basically continue to twist and bend and force the world to be something that continuously delivers more and more power and wealth to them at our expense.

Michael Fox: So I want to underline something here that underscores the question at the heart of this debate and I think is really important. All of these tech companies are from abroad. None of them are in Brazil, mostly from the United States, but not all. And they’re all pushing their corporate agenda, wrapped in the discourse of free speech, but they’re companies. They’re concerned with profit like you were just talking about Max and yet they’re actually attacking the sovereignty of foreign countries in the name of free speech. There’s something just so wrong with this, but because of the way that this discourse kind of permeates into the mainstream or the way that it’s covered and the way that they sell it, that’s not the way that people read this. It’s usually seen, oh, well, Brazil is censoring speech, whatever else. But here’s the thing, Max, Brazil’s battle with the tech platforms is just heating up.
Fast forward one year August, 2024. Brazil’s dispute with tech billionaire Elon Musk is heating up. One of Brazil’s. Elon Musk. Richest man on earth, owner of Tesla SpaceX, old buddy of Trump’s, or I guess frenemy now perhaps. Of course, he ran Doge, Department of Government Efficiency in the first 120 days of Trump’s second term. Remember that he bought Twitter in 2022 and transformed it into X. So in August, 2024, he begins to butt heads with our friend, Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Aleshandre Morais, who we introduced earlier. Mordais orders X to take down a number of users on Musk’s platform who are actively sharing fake news online and who in some cases are wanted by the Brazilian judiciary. They are all supporters of far right President Bolsonaro and here’s just one example of someone Morais ordered to be taken offline. Alen Lopez Do Santos. He’s a Brazilian blogger who fled to the United States after being under investigation in two Supreme Court inquiries for threatening justices, spreading false content online and financing anti-Democratic acts.
Musk refuses Mordeise’s order. He calls it censorship. His app X still works in the country, but he pulls his team out of Brazil so they can’t face reprisals from the Brazilian judiciary. In response on August 30th

Speaker: A Brazilian Supreme Court judge has ordered the immediate suspension of the social media platform X in Brazil, meaning people there can no longer acces or use it. Ex-owner Elon Musk failed to meet a deadline set by the court to name a new legal representative in the country. The Brazilian court and –

Michael Fox: Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes. I spoke with Fabio de Saisilv about this.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: Elon Musk is a businessman and like all businessmen, he doesn’t want to see his business regulated and this is what the Brazilian judiciary is doing indirectly to the extent that Mr. Musk’s platform is hosting speech that’s contrary to Brazilian law in different ways and the judiciary is pushing back against that.

Michael Fox: Again, these are corporations pushing their bottom line and Musk is also a free speed absolutist aligned with the far right. Aleshandani Morais pushes back defending his opinion. He says basically. Spread hate, racism, misogyny, and homophobia. David Nemer.

Donald Trump [Recording]: The Brazilian politicians have very specific interest in keeping Twitter the way it is. They prevail because of misinformation. They prevail because of hate speech that they promote and in Brazil, that’s not allowed. So they need a platform to create that sort of engagement and build their base. So it’s like a win-win situation for both of them.

Michael Fox: X was blocked for 40 days until the company finally gave in. Musk paid the fines and began taking down the accounts ordered removed by Morais. So in the end, X did everything that Morais wanted them to, but Musk created this whole problem for himself in the meantime and actually convinced thousands, if not hundreds of thousands or millions of Brazilians that they should move to other platforms because during those 40 days, they couldn’t use Twitter. So a bunch of people started moving to Blue Sky or Mastodon or other places. Max, did you see this unfolding? Do you remember watching this?

Maximillian Alvarez: Not only do I remember watching it, I mean, I’ve lived through it and I’ve tried to navigate a media organization through it. Musk buying Twitter was a seismic change to our industry, the entire kind of way that our public discourse operated and who participated in it, right? I mean, the Twitter of old was in no way perfect. None of these platforms are, but it was a space where politicians, corporations, journalists, artists like public figures of all sorts kind of had access to each other in a way that they never had before and it is not that after Musk bought it. And I would actually just push back when you called Elon Musk a free speech absolutist, he is absolutely not a free speech absolutist. I mean, I think so many people on the right, particularly people in power on the right, like Musk embodies what in the internet age has come to be known as Wilhoit’s law, which boils down to this quote, which was actually left in a comment section on the internet, but it so succinctly articulated this problem that it’s become a meme in and of itself.
But Wilhoit’s law states that conservatism consists of exactly one proposition to which there must be in groups whom the law protects but does not bind alongside outgroups whom the law binds but does not protect. I think this applies not just to kind of like how people like Elon Musk see free speech. It’s always free speech for me and the people who agree with me and not for thee. Musk has censored plenty of people on X. Totally. Musk artificially alters the algorithm so that it’s artificially like visibilizing certain views over others.That’s the way that this stuff operates. And then you add on top of that, like you said, just the bare fact of these people are businessmen and capitalists whose primary goal is to get more money and power for themselves.

Michael Fox: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that’s so important because what we often see is so – called self-described free speech absolutists use that discourse to say that, “Oh, I believe in free speech for everybody and it’s part of this image,” which is exactly what Musk is. When he bought then Twitter, now X, his whole thing was, “Oh, I believe in free speech and everyone should have it. ” But in the end of the day, what they’re actually doing is canceling and censoring people that don’t believe in their viewpoint.

Maximillian Alvarez: And this is, again, the continuing line of how the sort of media ecosystem in America, it’s not just Musk and X. This is why the freaking Ellison family who just acquired Warner Brothers also has control of CBS and a controlling stake in the American owned TikTok. This is why Silicon Valley oligarch and Trump advisor Mark and Dreesen is the primary backer of Substack. This is why Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, right? This is why Mark Zuckerberg controls not just Facebook but Instagram and WhatsApp and threads and so much more. You can subvert the sort of democratic principles of a healthy public sphere in which truth wins out through debate, inquiry and honest, open discussion by buying all of the platforms and networks and artificially imposing your designs and desires on the discourse and subject everyone else who depends on it for their information.That’s kind of how things work in this country.

Michael Fox: And here’s the thing, it’s not just the tech platforms. Far right activists have also been pushing their agenda of free speech absolutism or quote free speech absoluism and using it to cry censorship against Brazil. Here’s an example. The

Speaker: Hearing of the subcommittee will come to order and I want to welcome our very distinguished witnesses and –

Michael Fox: May 7th, 2024. Republican leaders held a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington in the House Foreign Affairs Committee. It’s titled Brazil: A Crisis of Democracy Freedom and the Rule of Law. The hearing was chaired by New Jersey Republican Representative Chris Smith. He kicked off the meeting.

US Rep. Chris Smith: Since late 2022, Brazilians have been subject to grave human rights violations committed by Brazilian officials on a vast scale. Documented right violations in Brazil include the political abuse of legal procedures to persecute political opposition, including jailing opposition figures on sparious charges, violations of freedom of speech and media freedom, including persecution of journalists, the silencing of opposition media, banning individuals from social media, thinly veiled censorship laws claiming to fight disinformation and many violations of rule of law and judicial malfeasance.

Michael Fox: If you heard what he was saying, you would imagine that the country had been taken over by a tinpot dictatorship and not just saved from an attempted coup. Among the individuals invited to speak are Paolo Figueredo, the son of the former Brazilian dictator, Christopher Favlotsky, the Canadian founder of the video platform, Rumble, considered the right-wing YouTube. And unsurprisingly, they painted a terribly disturbing vision of Brazil as if the country had fallen into an authoritarian censorship regime.

Donald Trump [Recording]: There’s one single name behind every one of these decisions. That’s Alexander DeMaris. Remember this name. He’s the defacto dictator of Brazil.

Michael Fox: Rumble will never back down from our mission. We are the tip of the spear in this fight and we relish that. We urge everyone, especially the US State Department to join us. The other person invited to speak at the hearing, the only legal expert invited, in fact, Brazilian University of Oklahoma Professor Fabio Desai Silva. Remember, I’ve been speaking with him throughout the episode.

Speaker: In your assessment, how high was the risk of the coup succeeding had then President Bolsonaro managed to gain the support of these branches of the armed forces?

Fabio de Sa e Silva: Thank you, Congresswoman. It was very high. I believe when you draft a decree outlining what’s going to happen once the military take over, which in some versions of this drafting even included the arrest of Justice Mogais. I think you’re trying to anticipate what you’re going to do when push comes to shove.

Michael Fox: And Fabio told me that he was there to basically clarify that in Brazil

Fabio de Sa e Silva: It has been a violation of the law to articulate speech that’s intended to undermine confidence, public confidence in the electoral system if you don’t have any proof of that as well as to, as I was mentioning before, pit the military against civilian power and incentivize the military to take over because of the history of the country. So one of the reasons why I was there was precisely to share my knowledge of Brazilian law and to show to the people in Congress that You cannot say that the Brazilian judiciary is abusing its powers because it’s holding people accountable for committing those violations of the law. And even if in the United States, these things would not be necessarily a crime or could not be criminalized. In Brazil, it’s been well established in Brazilian law that you can’t do those things. You can’t convey those messages, especially if you are in office sitting in the president’s office and therefore having all that attention at your disposal as the chief executive in the country.

Michael Fox: So that was 2024 and that’s happening on Capitol Hill Max. These are the debates that are happening in Washington, which are then pushing this image that there is censorship happening in Brazil. And it’s the same thing we’ve seen from Trump time and time again and his people is that if you repeat a lie long enough, then it becomes truth. But the threats from Washington and Silicon Valley are ongoing.

Speaker: Also developing this morning, the Trump administration placing sanctions on a Brazilian Supreme Court justice over concerns of human rights violations and politicized prosecutions.

Michael Fox: Just last year, alongside the 50% tariff on Brazil that Trump levied that we started this episode, the United States also issued sanctions on Supreme Court Justice Alice Andre Morais and his wife.

Speaker: Well, look, Muris is an activist judge that abused his authority by engaging in a targeted and politically motivated effort designed to silence political critics through the issuance of secret orders, compelling online platforms, including US social media companies, banning the accounts of individuals for posting protected speech. The actions taken by Muris impact US persons and companies and the United States did not tolerate maligned foreign actors who abuse their positions of authority to undermine freedom of expression of American citizens.

Michael Fox: Mordeise called the sanctions illegal and deplorable. He said the court would not quote bow to cowardly and fruitless threats and that he would ignore the sanctions. The sanctions were later dropped in December of last year, shortly after Trump also removed the 50% tariff he levied on Brazil. But the thing is, is here again, it’s the use of this vision of literally fake news and a false narrative to spread these lies in order to undermine a Democratic country, Brian Meir.

Brian Mier: The American far right supported by these crypto fascist libertarians in Silicon Valley like Elon Musk has teamed up through Steve Bannon, the point man between the US far right and the Brazilian far right and the bolsonaros and their allies to try and force a change in Brazilian laws citing free speech absolutism to legalize Nazis in Brazil and other hate groups and to undo the hate speech legislation and things like that. And the reason the Silicon Valley tech fascist social media companies are interested in this is that it’s to eliminate any kind of liability for their platforms being used to disseminate hate speech. And so they’re interested in weakening Brazil’s regulatory atmosphere so that they can’t be held liable for crimes, currently crimes committed on their platforms by Brazilians.

Michael Fox: And the problem, Max, is that this is not the end of what the far right and the US campaign is planning against the government in Brazil. There are high stakes elections happening again this October. President Lula will be running against him is Bolsonaro’s senator son Flavia Bolsonaro.

Speaker: At the end of this last year, my father gave me the greatest mission of my life to run for president in his place in October 2026 elections.

Michael Fox: Flavio recently wrote to Marco Rubio and told him that if he won, he would be willing to place a transition team at the disposal of the Trump administration. Meanwhile, Trump is considering new tariffs on Brazil over the country’s financial system of payments and the US government has placed Brazil’s two largest gangs on the US foreign terrorist list. So it all is clearly leading up to the October vote. It’s clear that Trump and his people will be pulling out all the stops to influence the elections in the same way they’ve done all across so many other countries in Latin America. Brazil at this point is one of only a handful of countries still on the left in Latin America. All of the others have fallen to Trump’s sphere of influence and many are concerned that the US pressure is going to only get worse in the coming months and it will likely be using free speech as a weapon, using it in absolute free speech terms.
Brian Meir told me that they’ve been successful in Brazil with that language because it’s become a rallying cry for the far right.

Brian Mier: And so free speech is one of those things. It’s on their list of things that weaponizing anti-corruption, rhetoric against leftist politicians. And this take of free speech is definitely a weaponization of the concept of free speech.

Michael Fox: But he says it’s not necessarily an end in itself. It’s just a tactic for the far right to achieve its goals.

Brian Mier: That’s what it really comes down to. I don’t even know how much these tech fascists even believe in their own ideology. It’s just being spread around because the end goal from a business standpoint is to have total regulatory liberty or freedom. I feel bad calling it freedom, but total deregulation so that they can’t have any kind of scrutiny. They can’t be punished in any way for collectively brainwashing large segments of the population to supporting them and their goals.

Michael Fox: This is a really useful tool, this kind of absolutist free speech framework. And we’ve seen over these platforms, speech has become privatized. It’s not about our right to speak freely. What these tech platforms and absolutist free speeches are pushing is the censorship of other viewpoints of free speech in the name of their vision of free speech. It’s again, like I’ve talked about so oftentimes in this podcast, censorship in the name of free speech.

Maximillian Alvarez: So like the very reality of the world that we live in today kind of proves that free speech needs to mean more than just like my ability to say what I want when I want.
It’s much more complicated than that. These big tech oligarchs and the platforms that they own, the oligarchs who own the legacy media that we still have, they are proving that you can accomplish censorship in a number of ways while still sort of ostensibly bearing the flag of freedom of speech.

Michael Fox: Yes, absolutely. Max, I want to close on a couple of thoughts here that I think are really important for this discussion and also that shine a little bit of positive light on things that were where they are right now despite everything. First, in Brazil, according to recent surveys, roughly 60% of Brazilians are in favor of some form of social media regulation. According to a Nexus poll from this time last year, 80% of Brazilians believe social media companies should take more responsibility for the content they publish online. 60% of those surveys say they believed digital platforms should remove more posts than they do and 60% of Brazilians said that regulating these platforms is essential to tackling anti-democratic content and hate speech. There is a 2014 Brazilian law titled the Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for the Internet, which was really important when it came out and it can be used to hold companies accountable in some cases, in particular when they don’t apply with court orders to remove content, but that doesn’t specifically regulate tech companies or apply in other cases, but that’s one thing that can be used and is used.
The other thing that people are thinking about is how to democratize this space in particularly around what we want, public policy. So I spoke with Fernando Paulino. He’s a communications professor from the University of Brazilia. He’s the guy we heard up from up top and I love how he says this, Max. He said we should be thinking in terms not of freedom but of fairness.

Fernando Paulino: It’s important to establish these parameters, especially during electoral periods to organize fair competition. I think maybe we need to use this word as well, maybe the society needs more fair, more accountable, more equal principles to defend and promote democracy

Michael Fox: We talk about free and fair elections, but oftentimes there’s so many barriers to actually holding those elections, but the same thing works within the communication sphere in which in social media. How do we create equal principles to defend and promote democracy and to replace the authoritarian push that we’ve seen recently? And I think what’s important about this is also to look at something that Brazil’s been really successful at over the last 30, 40 years since democratization. Like I’ve mentioned in this episode, Brazilians really care about their democracy. And so one of the things that they’ve done really well since the end of the dictatorship is pushed to try and incorporate all sectors of society in the decision making of public policies

Fernando Paulino: To involve social organizations, universities, researchers, to expand the debate about communication and democracy. And I think especially in terms of the social media regulation and the internet context right now, this debate expanded a lot with more people involved in this discussion.

Michael Fox: And I think this is really, really important because what Trump and Silicon Valley tech moguls are largely demanding is corporate free speech, not free speech for everybody. They want speech that can be decided behind closed doors. They want speech where there’s hidden algorithms in which nobody knows what they are and they’re decided by Musk or some high end people within these social media firms. That is not free. That does not create a free media. That doesn’t create free speech. It’s the exact opposite. And so what Fernando talks about is the need for diversity when we build public policies around things like social media, online speech and regulations.
We need to think about how do we make these decisions in which more people are included, other voices are included, and not just rich powerful men from Silicon Valley. I think this is really important as we’re looking forward and trying to grapple with these questions, free speech, the whole idea of free speech is it has to be at the root of our democracy. And if it is leading us in the direction of less speech, if it is leading us in the direction not of democracy, but of authoritarianism, if it’s leading us in the direction of a space where less people have a voice and less people have the ability for their speech to be heard, then something is drastically wrong. And this goes back a little bit, Max, to what I was talking about in the last episode with Maryanne Franks.

Speaker: The First Amendment’s one job is to keep us from becoming a totalitarian society. That’s its primary job. Everything else is secondary. And if your free speech doctrine, if your free speech law isn’t keeping us from sliding into fascism, but is instead accelerating our path to fascism, then it’s not working.

Michael Fox: And I think we need to look at what do we want from our free speech? What do we want of our media sphere? And this is something that people in Brazil are trying to grapple with. When they weren’t able to pass the social media regulation law, then they started to piecemeal things. And so they started to look at, okay, well, let’s pass a law having to do with children and social media. Let’s look at this other case. And so they’re looking at how to break this apart and pass these smaller laws in order to still get in the direction they want to get into. We need to understand speech within democracy. And if that is being undermined as it clearly is right now and when countries like the United States are using the discourse of free speech to attack and undermine the Democratic principles of a foreign sovereign nation, we absolutely have a problem and we need to understand it like that.

Maximillian Alvarez: Mike, you said earlier that Brazilians are very proud of their democracy. I don’t think a lot of Americans are anymore. I think that we grew up to feel proud about it, but like right now there’s so little to be proud about. But also like I remember growing up again in the ’90s and early aughts and sort of being berated by older generations of how we didn’t know what these freedoms meant. We didn’t know what it meant to sacrifice and die for our country and the freedom of speech and freedom of religion and yada, yada, yada. And that was the sort of message that we got, but simultaneous with you should be grateful for all the rights that you have and go live the best life that you can with them. And like now is the moment where we got to fight for something and it’s not just something we got to fight for everything.
Everything that we hold dear is at risk of going away. Democracy and all the people who fought for that idea over the centuries is at risk and we are now the ones who have to pick up that fight. And I don’t know about you, brother, but like I’m ready to rumble. Like I said, I ain’t going down without a fight and I’m not giving up on these principles. This is too beautiful of a country. This is too important of an idea and people’s lives are worth too much to just give up on so that Jeff Bezos can have three more yachts and Elon Musk can have another trillion dollars and a space rocket to Mars. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That is unacceptable and I will not accept it. Neither will you and neither should anyone listening to this.

Michael Fox: Max, thank you so much for joining me, man. I really appreciate it. It’s been fantastic.

Maximillian Alvarez: Thanks for having me, brother. Sorry I talked so much.

Michael Fox: Folks, that is all for now. Thanks for listening. Next time we hop across the pond to Europe to take a deep look at their definition of free speech, how countries there are fighting disinformation and also grappling with these same questions of social media. That’s next time on The Battle for Free Speech. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and you like this series, please do us a favor. Go to your podcasting app and give us a like, a follow, a subscribe, or tell a friend about it and leave us a comment or a review. It really helps to spread the word about the show and the state of free speech in the United States today. This podcast is now on Blue Sky, not X. Just search for the Battle for Free Speech. If you’d like to find out more about the Battle for Free Speech and my work on other podcasts, you can find me at patreon.com/mfox, or you can follow the link in the show notes.
There you can also support my work, become a monthly sustainer, or sign up to stay abreast of all the latest on this podcast and my other reporting across Latin America. This really helps me to continue to do this important work. I’m adding links to all the people who I spoke with today in the show notes. A huge thanks and shout out to Max Alvarez. You can find his Working People Podcast wherever you listen. Also, please make sure to sign up for the Real News Network’s newsletter so you never miss an episode. You can find that at therealnews.com. The Battle for Free Speech is a production of the Real News. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

Narrator:

Al-Shifa hospital is the largest medical complex in Gaza. Since October 7, it’s been repeatedly raided, occupied and targeted by Israeli forces. Over the course of the Genocide, hundreds were killed in and around the building and the hospital itself was completely destroyed.

In November 2023, under Israeli fire, 8 premature babies in incubators were hurriedly evacuated to Egypt. Joud was one of those babies.

Fatima Dakkeh:

I gave birth to my son, Joud, in July. Joud needed neonatal care at Al-Shifa Hospital. We placed him in the neonatal unit, but then the war started and Joud was there in the hospital. We couldn’t get in touch with Joud because of the shelling and the war.

Narrator:

Fatima Dakkeh and her son Joud have been unable to have a regular mother-son relationship. Joud was born in Gaza just a few months before October 7th 2023 and so, their story has been shaped by war, displacement and separation. Shaped that is, by Israel’s war on Gaza.

Fatima Dakkeh:

When we tried to get to the hospital to get Joud, we weren’t able to get to him and take him out, because of the situation—things had gotten really bad. There was a lot of shelling and there were airstrikes and quadcopters. We planned to go back another day to get Joud, once the situation calms down. But the situation just kept getting worse. The Israelis entered Al-Shifa Hospital and occupied it— that was the first invasion of Al-Shifa Hospital, and my son was inside.

About a year later, I found out my son was in Egypt. I mean, I didn’t give up; I kept going to hospitals, I went to the Red Cross and places like that to search for news about my son, no one could help me. I went to a doctor I know. I told him my story, he said, “I’ll try to get in touch with your son and see where he is.” Thank God, he was the one who discovered my son was in Egypt. After a few days, they sent us pictures of my son, and we found out he was OK. Thank God. They knew he was our son through my name—they had my name on file. We started communicating with him more through my sister-in-law—my sister-in-law in Egypt. We told her the story, and of course she didn’t hesitate; she visited him in hospital, sent us pictures and reassured us about him, thank God.

Honestly, I was happy and upset at the same time because my son was in Egypt, if he would have been here in Gaza he would have suffered a lot. We were starved, even nappies were cut off. Most children were using scraps of cloth as nappies. And milk too, was cut off—we had no milk at all in northern Gaza. I said to myself thank God my son is in a better place than Gaza. But at the same time, I was upset that my son was far from me. I would see mothers playing with their kids, dressing them, carrying them—and I would feel these feelings. I would miss my son. I wished my son was with me. At the same time, I’d look at my situation—how we’re living, in tents, in all this difficulty. I’d say to myself, hopefully he will return to us in a better situation, there will be a ceasefire and we will make up for the days we lost.

I had lost hope that he would return. With the crossing closed and the Israelis were not letting people return. When they first told us he was returning, I was shocked. My husband and I both. We were surprised—how could he come back just like that, overnight? He’s just going to come back, all of a sudden, after we’d lost hope all these years. I was overjoyed with the news that I would see my son again, it was the best news. When we went to the hospital to collect him, it took a really long time for them to bring him to us—many hours. With each passing hour, I would get more and more excited: about seeing him and about how I would greet him. I mean it was really hard, but at the same time, the moment when I saw him was really beautiful.

Yeh, honestly, when I first saw my son, he wouldn’t come to me; he’d cry and avoid me. He would go to his dad before me. he didn’t want to come to me, so I was afraid that he’d stay that way uncomfortable around us And afraid of living with us, and afraid of the situation we’re in— that he wouldn’t accept us Thank God, little by little, he started to accept us.

Narrator:

According to estimates by the International Rescue Committee, 20,000 children are still living separated from their parents in Gaza. Fatima was reunited with Joud and though their separation which lasted 2 years and 8 months impacted both mother and child, they are now reunited. As for the thousands of other survivors in Gaza, for many there will be no reunion.

The campaigns are underway ahead of Brazil’s October elections

And U.S. President Donald Trump is doing his best to sway the vote…

“Lula, Lula!”

Thousands of supporters of leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva attended his campaign launch in mid August.

Karen Silva

“We came to support Lula, especially in his last election. And we believe that we are going to win. This is a fact.”

They filled May 1st Stadium in Sao Bernardo do Campo….

A place, where Lula led an iconic metal workers strike and rally in 1979.

They say Lula has changed their lives. 

Raimunda Silva Santos

“Yeah, he changed my life. He changed the life of my whole family.”

During his years in office, he promoted education, health and social programs. He helped to lift millions from poverty. They have not forgotten.

Raimunda Silva Santos

“Wow, this is the greatest joy of my life. I’m 76 years old. I’m so happy. Lula is coming to stay. He’s an incredible person. He’s helped a lot of people there in the northeast. We owe a lot to Lula.”

They want him back for a fourth and final term.

Valmir Lima, Movement of People Affected by Dams

“Lula will win with the strength of social movements, of the movements of people affected by dams, all the social movements that are helping on his campaign. And all of civil society.”

Applause

Lula has promised to continue to fight poverty, promote industry, create jobs and invest in Brazil’s future.

Lula

“What kind of a future do you want for the Brazilian people if you don’t invest in education? What future do you want for the Brazilian people if you don’t invest in health? What future do you want if you don’t invest in jobs?” 

Lula

“We need to win these elections. To elect our people to congress so we can do everything we need to do for this country.”

Lula’s challenger is the son of the former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. 

His name is Flavio Bolsonaro. He’s a Senator and he launched his campaign in his hometown of Rio de Janeiro.

Flavio Bolsonaro 

“Come with me and rescue our nation. Brazil above all. God above everyone. Brazil above all. God above everyone!”

Flavio is in the race, because his father is under house arrest. 

Former president Jair Bolsonaro was first barred from running for spreading lies about the country’s electoral system. Last year, he was convicted of attempting to carry out a coup to return to power.

His son, Flavio, has attacked the left, and promised to fight crime and insecurity, cut bureaucracy, promote private business and privatizations, and develop close ties with the United States

He spoke at the US Conservative Political Action Conference in March.

Flavio 

“Let me look you in the eyes and tell you,“we will win.”

Much of his discourse, and that of his supporters, is wrapped in a religious language of good versus evil.

“You are the son of hope. You are the first born. You received the legacy of representing your father. And now, for everything that is more sacred on the face of the earth, honor your father. Honor his days on earth.”

That goes over well with his evangelical supporters, an important base for Bolsonaro and far-right politicians in Brazil.

Glayson Araujo is a youth pastor at an evangelical church in a working class neighborhood of São Paulo. He joined others on the streets in mid August to promote Bolsonaro and other far-right candidates running for local office.

Glayson Araujo

“I believe that Flavio Bolsonaro is the only viable candidate, who can beat Lula and the Workers Party.”

Glayson Araujo

“I am a Christian here, I behave as a Christian, but I am also a political activist. Here on the streets to defend my beliefs.”

Flavio Bolsonaro also has powerful support in high places.

In particular… from Donald Trump.

The U.S. president is a longtime ally of his father, Jair Bolsonaro. 

Last year, Trump imposed 50% tariffs on Brazil, in part, because of the country’s trial against the former president. In May, Trump met with Flavio Bolsonaro at the White House. In June, he reposted an article over Truth Social that said Brazil was his next big challenge. He recently imposed new tariffs on the country and revoked the U.S. visa of the Brazilian ambassador.

Igor Fuser is a professor of foreign relations at Brazil’s ABC Federal University.

Igor Fuser

“This is not just about the United States trying to remove the government of a left-wing party, the workers Party or a left-wing leader, which is Lula. It’s about subjecting Brazil to the policies of the United States. And Brazil, being the largest country in Latin America, is precisely the biggest obstacle to the American project of global dominance of the Western Hemisphere.”

Over the last year, Trump has pushed the United States into a new era of dominance over Latin America the likes of which the region has not seen in decades.

Boat strikes in the Caribbean. The U.S. invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of president Nicolas Maduro. The oil blockade on Cuba.

And Trump throwing his weight around… and meddling in elections across Latin America.

It is all justified by a renewed Monroe Doctrine…

Pete Hegseth

”President Trump has established the Trump corollary of the Monroe Doctrine, the Donroe Doctrine. And the War Department is implementing it as fast as we can.”

Brazil is the latest battleground.

Igor Fuser

“So, it is clear that the United States is doing everything, and will do everything possible to prevent the re-election of Lula in the next elections.”

Fuser says that if Flavio Bolsonaro wins, he will bow to Trump and the United States.

Igor Fuser

“Brazil will become a country under the tutelage of the United States, a colony, or almost a colony, of the United States, as it already happens with Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, and many others. And if Lula is victorious in these elections, we will live a very intense period of confrontation between the two countries.”

Fuser says the U.S. stated dominance over Latin America imposed by Trump is analogous to the control of the Soviet Union over the Eastern Bloc countries during the Cold War, under a Russian foreign policy imposed by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in 1968.

Igor Fuser 

“So, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, all those countries were formally independent countries, with their own government, their own laws, their representation in the United Nations, but these countries were not autonomous, they did not have sovereignty. Any movement that they made that clashed with the interests of the Soviet Union was repressed. Some of them were invaded, etc. So, we are living in Latin America a Brezhnev Doctrine, capitalist, imperialist, dictated by Donald Trump.”

Lula has accused Trump of trying to influence Brazil’s October election. Lula’s allies are taking action ahead of the vote…. to stand up to Trump and to push for Lula’s reelection. Brazil has denied visas to U.S. State Department officials who they feared wanted to travel to Brazil to cast doubt about the country’s electoral system. People are hitting the streets to campaign for Lula, who has long stood against U.S. intervention in Latin America. Over the next two months, Brazil will be a key battleground for Latin American sovereignty against Trump’s attack on the region. 

For The Real News, I’m Michael Fox. Sao Paulo, Brazil.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.
Maximillian Alvarez:

Welcome back to the Real News Network. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Two years ago at the height of Israel’s US-backed genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, we witnessed one of the most widespread waves of college campus protests in this country since the Vietnam War. Student-led Palestine solidarity encampments exploded from Columbia University in New York to UCLA to right here in Baltimore. And as we’ve been covering continuously here at The Real News, what we’ve seen since then has been a harrowing assault on free speech and the right to protest from the federal government and Zionist organizations. And we’ve also seen universities themselves, private and public, ramp up their own internal surveillance and repression machines and weaponize them against their own students, grad students, and faculty. Life, learning, and activism on America’s college campuses looks very different today. And today we’re talking with a number of student organizers across our home state of Maryland about how they are adapting their tactics today to continue their struggle to end the slaughter and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and to hold supporters and enablers of the genocide accountable, including their own universities.

And I am really grateful to be joined today by four students from different institutions across the University System of Maryland who are all also organizers with the USM Divestment Coalition. Thank you all so much for being here. Please introduce yourselves to our listeners.

Khadeeja:

Hi everyone. We’re so excited to be here today and grateful for the opportunity to share a little bit about what the University System of Maryland Divestment Coalition does. My name is Khadeeja. I’m a student within the USM system. I’m also a member of the USM Divestment Coalition and I’m a former member of UMBCSJP. The USM Divestment Coalition is an organizing body of students, faculty, staff, alumni, and community members of the USM and the broader Maryland community organizing for the end of our university system’s complicity in violating Palestinian human rights and upholding the settler Zionist state. Hey

Zyad:

Everyone. We’re really grateful to be here. My name is Zyad and I’m one of the members of the USM Diveston Coalition and a former member of the UMDSJP. I got involved with the coalition after we at UMD finally had successfully achieved a divestment win via our referendum in the student government elections, which over 3,000 students voted in favor for calling UMD to divest from companies complicit in the genocide in Palestine. The university refused to take action on this. However, we knew that the power of divestment was really at the USM level and recognized this led to where we are today with multiple USM schools part of the coalition.

Mohammad:

Yeah. Hi, my name is Mohammad. I’m also a student at the University of Maryland College Park, involved in the SJP. Don’t want to reiterate what Zyad said too much, but similarly, we saw that there was only so much we could do at the school level. We’ve been meeting with our school administration for years and they would always just point their fingers and say, “Hey, we don’t have power over divesting the USM’s $2 billion endowment from weapons manufacturers and companies enabling the genocide in Palestine.” So yeah, that’s why we got involved just to shift the pressure onto the people who actually have decision-making power and to hopefully shift all of our activism back to gain back the momentum that we had during the encampments and actually start negotiating with the people that have the power to divest rather than just screaming it into a vacuum.

Fi:

My name is Fi. I am Towson YDSA’s incoming co-chair. I’m a Towson University student, and I got involved with the USM Divestment Coalition following a teach-in that they had at our university.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, thank you all so much for being here. It really, really is incredible to have you all here on the same call together. And I wanted to ask if y’all could just explain a little bit more for our listeners what this Divestment Coalition is, how it came to be, and how you personally got involved in it.

Khadeeja:

Yeah, so I was actually one of the founding members of this Divestment Coalition around two years ago, post-October 2023. A few of us started attending Board of Regents meetings to clarify how the university system of Maryland structure works. Essentially, there’s 12 Maryland public state universities, and they’re governed by one body, which is called the Board of Regents. And these are 21 governor-appointed individuals. So they’re not elected and they’re not necessarily paid for their positions by the state, although we can kind of elaborate further on how they benefit from the structure later. But essentially, they sit above the president. So most people think that university presidents actually control all university operations, but the presidents merely form one of multiple advisory councils to this Board of Regents that ultimately have final say. And these Board of Regents also govern over a $2 billion pooled endowment that is shared between all the schools.

So essentially in that first year, post-October 2023, a few of us started attending Board of Regents meetings and speaking during the public comment portion. And in the past year, we have done a lot of outreach and organized much more with Towson and UMD students. And we’ve developed a lot more internally and externally with a social media presence, as well as developing internal and external goals, increasing our presence at board meetings, and really built up a dedicated organizing body overall.

Fi:

I do want to say one small thing. Although this coalition has sort of united around the issue of Palestine, and that will always remain the core goal is liberation of the Palestinian people and the Palestinian cause. Divestment from weapons manufacturing is an issue that has much broader implications with other imperialist struggles in the world. In countries such as the Philippines, weaponry manufactured by Lockheed Martin, a corporation that the university does a lot of business with, has sort of been used to target certain student activists that have done work in the Philippines, humanitarian work in the Philippines, which I think we’re going to elaborate on more. But divestment is an issue that has very wide-reaching implications, and we are fighting for freedom for colonized and oppressed peoples around the world.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, let’s talk a bit more about that and what the USM Divestment Coalition does and why. From the organizing and advocating that y’all are doing on a week-to-week campus-to-campus basis to these larger actions and campaigns like the People’s Tribunal that y’all held earlier this year. Tell us more about what this coalition does and tell us how your universities have responded to the coalition and your demands.

Mohammad:

So I was talking before about how the divestment movement has been around on USM campuses for over a decade now. There have been huge pushes. I have friends who are around now who used to come to these divestment meetings urging the USM to divest from Israel back when they were in middle school. So it’s been going on for a while, but during the encampments era, it escalated and we got to the point where the university couldn’t ignore, or at least not entirely ignore, the calls of its students who overwhelmingly wanted to divest. And at first, the way that manifested was they established an inquiry process. So before, there was no formal way to request that the USM divest its endowment from anything, but they established an inquiry process where every semester there’s a deadline and you can submit something. Usually it’s like a student government at the university that’ll submit a resolution calling on them to divest from anything, whether it be fossil fuels or from Israel, from weapons manufacturers.

Unfortunately though, it wasn’t really legitimate. It was more so just a formal way for them to tell us no, and it wasn’t really being taken. We still weren’t being taken seriously at that point, which is why I think the coalition needed to be formed because all of us, we had the three biggest universities in the USM, University of Maryland College Park, UMBC and Towson University, all pass resolutions calling on the USM to divest, and they were still ignoring it. At that point, you have a substantial portion of the 180,000 students that you represent telling you that they want you to divest, and we still weren’t actually having negotiations with them or having the demand seriously considered or given a reason as to why we can’t divest. So the USM Coalition was basically just a way for us to bridge those concerns that people had and the call for divestment to the people who actually have the power to make it happen.

And we can talk more later about how the response has been on campuses to those calls and the repression we’ve seen. Yeah, essentially what we’ve seen is just them trying to give us more creative ways to deny the calls for divestment. Yeah.

Zyad:

And to add on to that, I think Mohammed mentioned and other people mentioned it as well, and I did as well, but I want to talk more specifically about UMD, at least at UMD and the divestment campaign there, which has a history dating back to actually 2017 where the calls for divestment and specifically for Palestine were made. So it’s clear that the organizing that we’re doing now isn’t new, it’s just how the strategy has shifted. For years, organizers would bring divestment bills to the Student Government Association. And again, like mentioned before, this was done at UMD, at Taos, and then also at UMBC. But at least at UMD, they were blocked by legislatures who weren’t willing to take the stance and didn’t have any morality because they were in there for their political gain. However, like I mentioned before, in spring of 2024, the strategy changed in the sense that instead of trying to persuade the legislatures that didn’t represent the opinions of the students, at UMD, at least we ran a pro-Palestine slate that ran strictly on being pro-Palestinian and being pro-divestment, and basically almost sweeping the entirety of the student government elections and building what became the first pro-Palestine super majority in UMDSJ history.

So with that super majority, we passed our BDS resolution, which went more specific into the other aspects of BDS, boycott divestment and sanctions that followed the demand from the referendum that over 3,000 students voted for. And like we kind of mentioned before, the administration acknowledged the referendum and the resolution, but choose to ignore both. That being because of how the structure is, they actually generally don’t have the power to divest, at least at the system level. And with that, the coalition, the form of the coalition, it was a necessity because the money wasn’t sitting in a place that each individual university has a say over. In fact, the investments are managed through the USM Foundation and the Common Trust Fund, which are governed, like we mentioned, by unelected board of regents that are appointed by the governor. So the campus organizing, the campus wins, they’re real, and we saw a lot of that post-October 2023 and post the encampments because of the escalate organizing that was done specifically with the genocide in Gaza and seeing that escalate.

And over the last two and a half years, we see these wins, but the actual target this entire time was the system itself.

Khadeeja:

So I did my first two years of my undergraduate degree at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and I spent two years heavily involved in the SJP there. UMBC was always heavily invested in divestment efforts post-October 2023 as the genocide against CASDA accelerated and public consciousness simultaneously was raising. UMBC is actually a minority-serving institution, so the majority of our student body are minorities. So we did receive a lot of support amongst the student body for divestment, and we were the first university within the system to pass a divestment resolution within the Student Government Association. And it explicitly used the Palestinian Boycott Divestment Sanction Movement Framework, which was definitely a big win, and I think set UMBC apart early on within the USM. Not only that though, hundreds of students also signed a petition urging the university’s career center to stop inviting defense contractors to recruitment events.

And two of the main war profiteers in America, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, actually did stop coming to our career fairs in 2024 and have continued to stop. So UMBC’s student population has always been relatively easy to organize around. That being said, administrations are separate from the student body. We are lucky at UMBC. We’re definitely a bit better off than UMD. UMD is definitely more repressive. Our administration was definitely willing to hear us out a little more and even remove sober homeless off campus. So that was a BDS win. However, they did charge the students wrongfully with student conduct violations in 2024, although they lost the case. The students won that case, but they did release interim time, place, manner policies, which all the universities around that time actually released post-encampments across the nation. So there’s collaboration between universities across the nation and also between the states.

So universities serve as a mouthpiece of the state to repress us. And we saw that at a national scale after the encampments, despite these restrictive efforts, the student movement is constantly adjusting and growing despite their efforts to stall our clearly winning movement. In terms of, I mentioned the Sobrahamus and other divestment efforts at UMBC, but along with divestment also comes the academic and cultural complicity that our universities play in upholding the Zionist settler ideology. So for example, at UMBC, a couple of the campaigns that we are still working on is one of the professors, his name is Eli Lieberman. He teaches Jewish studies and has taught courses that are explicitly biased against the Palestinian people and their struggle for self-determination. He has released papers on deterring terrorism where he compares Palestinian people directly to terrorist groups. There has been a call to remove him, which has not happened yet.

The administration has largely ignored those calls. And then lastly, and also very horrible and shamefully, UMBC has been in a partnership with Israel’s Minister of Agriculture for an aquatics research partnership. And like I mentioned earlier, part of the divestment within the coalition is not only cessation of financial complicity, but also a cessation of academic complicity in the apartheid occupation. So UMBC students have been appealing to university admin to end this partnership. This minister, current minister has called the current genocide in Gaza as rolling out the second NECBA, which the NECBA was the expulsion of over 600,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1948. But regardless, the university has made no effort on that.

Fi:

I can say on Towson University’s campus students, there was one specific instance of students facing very clear repression for exercising their right to free speech, being attacked under these time, place, and manner policies. A die-in was organized shortly after October 7th where students mourned in the University Square and they were threatened with disciplinary action and some were even tracked to their vehicles as they were leaving. And recently there was an IDF soldier came to Towson’s campus unregistered. They showed up, they set up a table in a kind of Kirkian way, just sort of had this sign that was like, “I’m an ex – IDF soldier, ask me anything.” And they were able to bring their own security detail that was not vetted by the university. Their presence themselves was not vetted by the university. And it was a presence that was clearly very intimidating for Arab students.

And yeah, the university responded to. They have not released a statement on this as I am aware. And even in the moment, they did not kick him off campus even as he was in violation of the same sort of jurisdictions that caused very intense discipline to students for exercising similar rights. They just allowed him to be moved back to a different area a little further off campus. So there was very little solidarity for students and tolerance for this kind of rhetoric as well.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Let’s take a step back and put all of this in the context of the past few years. From the genocide in Gaza to the student encampment movement, to the wave of repression from the Biden and Trump administrations and from university administrations themselves. Firstly, I wanted to ask y’all if you could just describe for people out there who aren’t living or working on a college campus right now, what is it like to be a student and a student activist in the US in 2026? And what does the emergence of the USM Divestment Coalition say about the evolution of tactics and goals and strategies of the student movements against war and genocide and censorship?

Mohammad:

Yeah, of course. So I think the way that we’ve seen it at USM schools, and I would say College Park is probably the worst campus when it comes to repression, is they’ve done it very sneakily. So the Maryland SJPs didn’t host an encampment on any of their campuses. They participated in the DMV wide one, which was on a DC campus. So our universities didn’t have, I don’t think they had the same pretext as many other universities did to go in and directly suppress or ban any SJPs like we saw at other campuses. So the way that they went about it, as Katija mentioned earlier, was with these time, place, and manner restrictions that they rolled out on all campuses. But like I said before, College Park probably being the worst example. Yeah, I mean, just to give a few examples, amplified sound isn’t allowed at all.

During the week, you can only use it over the weekend. That obviously makes it harder to protest. You can’t have a group of over 10 students gathering together without a reservation made because it’s then considered an event and you need a reservation to be able to do an event. You’re not allowed to talk unless outside of three designated areas on campus, and you’re not allowed to put stickers up on university property. And what’s more disappointing than just the policies themselves is how selectively enforced they are. If you take a walk around the College Park campus, you’ll see stickers for just about everything. Lots of organizations create stickers. You’ll see them all over the place. Political, not political. It is a very casual thing. But I know personally of two students who put up stickers that actually had their faces covered, but were investigated and the university tracked them down just based on their height and their skin color.

So that’s how seriously they take it when it’s a pro-Palestine sticker is they’ll track the person down, give them student conduct charges, but any other type of sticker, it’s not treated as a big deal because it shouldn’t be a big deal. And obviously we’ve called the university out on this. Why did these really strict policies come about around the same time as the encampments were blowing up? And they have claimed that it isn’t indirect response to it, but we know it is. And we see it in other places. Even in my orientation when I was preparing to. I hadn’t even had my first class on campus yet. This was my first time summer before my freshman year. And for context, I was a freshman after the encampments. And we had the police talking to us, again, first day on campus about how they had prevented any of the.

They didn’t use the word encampment, but the chaos that they saw in other campuses, they were bragging about how they prevented it at UMD and how they wouldn’t let it happen. So it was very explicit. There’s also been repression when we actually go to Board of Regents meeting, this was more recently once who created the USM coalition, which I think Tadija can speak to.

Khadeeja:

Yeah, just really briefly, I’ve been attending the Board of Regents meetings since November 2023. I’ve attended eight Board of Regents meetings and these meetings, the Board of Regents are extremely inaccessible. They basically never meet with students, the Board of Regents and the chancellor. Even though that they’re in these public serving positions to serve the students, they never meet with us. But regardless, their meetings have a public portion, the beginning section, and then they have a public comment section. And people are limited to three minutes, which I know people who have attended meetings before we started attending, and they said that they never saw the time limit being enforced. We would go up there and they would stand behind us with a timer. They would cut us off if we spoke on anything that wasn’t explicitly on the agenda for that day. And mind you, again, these are 21 people, 21 adults, grown-up adults who are meant to serve the students.

And these are young 18, 19-year-olds coming with a prepared speech just for three minutes to talk about something that they care about, something that’s an ethical concern, which the USM claims to have a commitment to global justice. So this should be directly aligned with their mission and values, but it’s become increasingly apparent in the way that they have engaged with us at these meetings that it hasn’t necessarily been in good faith. Also, their security measures have amped up. So they always have security, but they have started searching through our bags, requiring us to open any posters that we have, searching through every single pocket, turning students down from speaking just because they got there a few minutes late. Just things like that have definitely been, I wouldn’t say discouraging, but definitely disappointing.

Zyad:

Back in October 2024, the UMDSJP were planning on organizing an AXGA vigil for the martyrs in Ghaza. And that was faced by a lot of backlash from the Zionist community of UMD, which is really large. And even threats were made to the president of the university threatening to lynch him and his family using racial slurs in emails sent to him unless the event was canceled. And again, this is a peaceful vigil that was being held, not even a protest, honoring the martyrs in Ghaza. And the university folded to the threats claiming that it was not safe for the students to organize that event, which in response to that, they created a blackout date to be held instead. So no student organizations were allowed to have any event regardless of what it was about, which is obviously repressive in the sense of the Palestinian organizing, but also repressive in the forms of freedom of speech.

Any other student organization wanted to have an event they were not allowed to. And this has never been done before. There’s never been a day where you’re not allowed to have an event at all. So the response with that was that UMDSGP sued the school and it’s turned out to be the UMDSGP won the lawsuit and ended with a $100,000 settlement with majority of that being donated directly back to Gaza and the people there. And then I also wanted to mention about doxing, which is very prevalent at UMD. It’s happened at UMBC as well. I’m not too sure in terms of Taos and how common it’s there, but doxing is a method used by Zionists students and just general Zionists to target students that are speaking out against the genocide and speaking against the apartheid system. This has been something that’s been done for almost 10 years now.

And students who were on student government like myself voting for divestment were doxed. Actually, I was doxed over a resolution that condemned the university for allowing the university to host three IOF soldiers who participated in the genocide in Gaza. And for the purpose of the event was to talk about their experience committing a genocide, which was appalling. The university claimed that this was not a security threat or safety threat to the students, but having a peaceful vigil was. And it shows you that clear bias that they have against Palestine. And so in response to that, calling for the university to change their policies to not allow people that have been complicit in genocide and war crimes to be banned from university resulted in being doxed. And many other students have been doxed as well. I think actually one of the people that leads the doxxing campaigns on a popular site that is used for doxing called Canary Mission actually was a UMD alumni.

So it kind of shows you those ties that it’s peer malice targeting students who are just speaking against genocide. And I also kind of want to touch upon the Board of Regents meeting. Hadijah touched on a lot of it, but just to say for any other students here, the meetings that they do are held on Fridays at 8:30 AM. I don’t know about you, but most students are not up at 8:30 AM on a Friday, let alone being held at different campuses. So students who want to raise their voices to the Board of Regents, the people that represent them, they have to wake up at 8:30, figure out a way, drive or figure out their own transportation to get to wherever they’re holding the meeting just to speak to them, which even that is limited. Before there wasn’t a time limit, but when in past and we have spoken, we’ve been given three minutes for time limit that actually moved down to two minutes for one of the meetings for no reason at all.

And they block out only 15 minutes to hear from the people that they represent. So that kind of shows you how they use their oppression, the tactics in terms of saying that there’s only 15 minutes allocated to that, that we’re going to only allow those students to speak for that long. And there’s also double standard in terms of any other people testifying to the USM where they have allowed speakers to go beyond the time as allocated for them. Whereas when students speaking out for divestment, speaking out for the university to cut complicity with the occupation and weapons manufacturers, they are not faced with that same opportunity. And

Fi:

Zaya did bring up Towson and the use of doxing over there. Although I can’t off the top of my head name any direct examples of doxxing. During testimonies for a SGA resolution calling for a divestment, an ex-faculty member named Richard Vatz, who actually has an auditorium named after him, testified against the resolution and advocated for doxing of students, which is incredibly. It’s a very bad look for the university to say the least. And the kind of message that it sends that an ex-faculty member who the university holds very dear is willing to advocate for the doxing and potentially putting these students in real harm underlines how unprotected students are who advocate for this cause.

Mohammad:

Yeah. And I think another important thing to highlight is just that as the student movement has been more successful, I think it’s really done a good job just exposing the underlying racism and agenda that the university upholds. As a Palestinian student myself, I can speak to just the double standards in how the university functions in terms of the curriculum that’s offered. There are no classes at UMD talking about the Palestinian experience. The closest thing there is there’s a class talking about the experience of the minority of Palestinians who live under Israeli society and have Israeli citizenship. So the only class even mentioning Palestinians is taught in the context of a very biased pro-Israel perspective of a specific portion of Palestinians who live with Israeli citizenship. We have Israel studies, Hebrew studies, and Jewish studies, but there isn’t anything about. There’s Arabic studies, but there’s no, like I said before, there’s just a lack of coverage of the Palestinian story and then Palestinian voices in the academics and even looking at the guest speakers that departments invite.

The business school has regularly invited. They’ve made it almost an annual thing at this point. They invite Israeli politicians and staunch pro-Israel advocates to come speak. And actually the one time that they did invite Palestinians, it was the two most sellout one in a thousand worst of the worst Palestinians that they could find. So they just have refused to platform Palestinians in academia in general while not just normalizing, but promoting pro-Israel narratives. And then I think the other area that we see a lot of bias is in their response to hate bias incidents. So they created after October of 2023 when they observed a rise across Across the country in both Islamophobia and antisemitic hate crimes. They created one committee to address both antisemitism and Islamophobia, but there was very clear bias. I’ve spoken to people on the committee who’ve talked about this. And also reading the report they published, they published a 60-page report and in it there was a list of antisemitic incidents.

They have a list of all the hate crimes. Of course, none of the many, many instances of Palestinian students being regularly harassed by Zionist students who were listed. Any Palestinian can speak to that. It is unfortunately very commonplace, but you had a long list of incidents that were literally a sighting of a free Palestine sticker or someone hearing someone else chant free Palestine. And students would call the police and report that and label it as an antisemitic hate crime. And the police not only kept a record of that, which was crazy in and of itself, but they published it somewhere in the 60-page report. So the fact that they’re associating these very mundane examples of people expressing their opposition to the genocide and support for Palestinian people with antisemitism is alarming. And when there’s a very real rise in anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia on campus, we see absolutely nothing.

Actually, in the last few weeks of just this past semester, we had two very good examples that highlight just that. So there was an instance of someone who did make an antisemitic post featuring a Jewish student’s face and posting it online with antisemitic symbolism in the back. And the school responded to that very quickly and with heavy condemnation. Within 24 hours, the president of the university had sent an email to everyone. The police department had sent an email to everyone saying that they were actively investigating it. And then not even a week after that, there was a pro-Israel influencer on campus who posted a Muslim girl’s face, visibly Muslim girl. She was wearing a hijab. He posted her face and called her a terrorist and posted it online. This wasn’t an anonymous post like the other one. This was on his personal account. We know who the student is, and multiple people reported this to the administration and were told nothing could be done.

We asked them, why did you just a week ago loudly and openly condemn an antisemitic post featuring a student’s face? But now a very similar incident is happening to a Muslim student and you’re doing nothing. And the explanation was that one was a hate bias incident and one was a hate crime. So it’s using this vague technical language to justify doing nothing when Muslim, Palestinian, Autumn students are being victimized and not necessarily for others. And that same student who posted the Muslim girl’s face went and did it again a week later to another Muslim girl calling her a terrorist and posting it online, which was, I mean, no need to say it is unacceptable, but the university has been unable to condemn or even acknowledge it outside of closed door meeting. So there’s that very clear inequity in how they address that. And aside from the administration, even just the Zionist presence on campus that Zaya talked about before has just got a lot more animalistic in the past two years.

They’ve gotten a lot more bold. There are too many examples to name, but I mean just walking around on campus with a kefia on or being visibly Palestinian or talking about Palestine, I have friends who’ve been shoved, physically attacked. I personally, during my freshman year, a group of friends and I were harassed by a group of 20 Zionists who came up to us because we were playing Arabic music on a speaker and leaving notes on our backpacks, accusing us of having ties to foreign terrorist organizations, even university officials. So for example, the director of Hillel, multiple Palestinian girls specifically have spoken out about being harassed by him at protests to the extent that UMPD, the police department has had to go and talk to him and tell him to stop coming to SJPA events, which to my knowledge he has since, but the fact it got to that point was insane.

And the university allowed him to maintain his position as an adjunct professor at the university. So he still teaches a class. Last semester, there was also a case where a business professor who was organizing an event where she invited some pro-Israel speakers, was confronted. And she actually, to my face and in front of other students, was accusing us of taking money from Iran and then foreign terrorist organizations. So these are people with faculty appointments in the university. It’s not just outside agitators or even random students. These are people who the university has direct ties to going and being able to say whatever they want. And disappointingly but unsurprisingly, the university does nothing, doesn’t treat those incidents the same as they treat others. And it’s really just a general lack of, I can’t even say lack of initiative, just lack of care when it comes to addressing the needs of students who are actually being targeted, whose families are being genocided overseas.

And yeah, I guess that’s just the student experience on campus over the last few years.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, let me ask y’all before we have to wrap up, where do things stand now with this coalition and where do they go from here? What are your ultimate goals and what do you think it’s going to take to achieve them?

Khadeeja:

Yeah, I would say at a broader scale, student organizers across the nation have become increasingly more aware of the university system structures and how they all nationally function as an arm of America’s military industrial complex. And that has created the need for centralized campaigns. I would say this is widely reflected within the USM Divestment Coalition. It was the decentralization of all of our university’s separate divestment efforts combined with a greater understanding of the system itself that revealed the necessity for us to shift our strategy. And that was the motivating effort for us coalescing our efforts. Not only has combined efforts strengthened our campaigns through numbers and resource sharing, but this formation of a coalition has allowed us to begin actively archiving our work. Students are only part of the system for around four years, give or take, and the structures are intentionally complicated. So it’s necessary that we have increased our internal research, we’ve increased our political education, we’ve increased our base building with other USM schools, as well as local Maryland campaigns such as the Break the Bonds campaign, which was recently successful that we were an official endorser of.

We’ve collaborated with unions and the broader community at large. And along with doing that work, we’ve institutionalized all of that. We’ve institutionalized the research, the education, and the relationship so that we are not reinventing the wheel every few years. And this strategic shift has allowed us to progress beyond the post-encampment stall where many student organizers were kind of left picking up the pieces and trying to figure out how to emulate a spark, but we’re not trying to do that. Ultimately, we’re concerned with our university’s material function as financial backers of genocide, and we’re strategizing how to achieve material wins because thus far the winds have been largely symbolic. To build off of that, I think as students, like I mentioned, we understand that our universities, they serve as landlords, they serve as extensions of US capitalist imperial society and to reproduce that. They were built on stolen land and they’re sustained on the extraction and exploitation of the global community.

I think it’s important and necessary that we recognize the systems for what they are and that we reject some of the social norms that come with it. And unless we reject them, we can’t really move forward. So although the material aspect is the most important, I mentioned earlier that the US is also uniquely complicit in the Zionist state and that it’s upholding it in a way beyond material, but also ideologically and culturally. Universities are not exempt for that, and so our complicity is unique as a result. So we recognize that true divestment means a dismantling of many of these structures as we currently know them. It would mean a dissolution of the Board of Regents, for example. It would mean the replacement with a popular elective body. It would mean the end of the university’s current volatile investment structure that prioritizes growth at any cost over human rights.

There was recently a position paper put out by National SJP. It’s only about 70 pages. I recommend anyone and everyone to read it. It’s called The University and the Reproduction of Capitalist Imperial Society. It’s publicly available, but it expands upon this idea of the so-called good student where students accept their own subordination within the system and keep their head down so that they may be accepted and receive the material and social benefits that come from the university. It is ultimately our responsibility to disrupt that structure. We are aiming to empower the student and broader community. We want to understand that there’s power within us. We don’t need to rely on the structures as heavily as we have before. And lastly, I want to mention in part of moving forward is, like I mentioned, empowering the student community, but also the larger, broader community. So if the USM, when we say that they control the universities, that really does affect all of us.

So the USM has recently put forth a proposal for a over $300 million development contract basically to turn the surrounding area of UMB, so University of Maryland, Baltimore, to gentrify, essentially to turn it into a college town. An interesting link is that Steven Sabell, who sits on the Board of Regents, is one of the, I think, main financial partners for, I think it’s called Caves Valley Partners, which is I think the largest gentrifier of Baltimore. That’s not a coincidence. There’s a reason that Lockheed Martin is one of the largest employers of the USM and recruiters, and that simultaneously the chair of the Board of Regents, Linda Gooden, is the retired VP of Lockheed Martin. Lastly, also that relates to Baltimore and the broader community. There was a proposal to spend over $300 million, again, on a COP training facility at Coppin University, which is an HBCU, which just further increases the over-militarization and criminalization of the Black community and marginalized communities in Baltimore.

So divestment truly involves all of us. It’s not just the students. It’s truly all of us, students and non-students alike, and the system benefits from us not interacting with each other and not recognizing that our struggles really are interconnected.

Zyad:

Yeah, to go off of that, like I was mentioned before, we are a coalition consisting of organizations across USM, and we really won’t stop until we reach each school and all types of organizations because we know that our demands are connected and that we will continue until demands a reality. In May, we saw the system-wide student council pass a divestment resolution, which was the first of its kind in the entirety of the US, calling for the divestment of arms manufacturing. And we know that the arms manufacturing that we’re targeting don’t only supply the IOF who have been committing an escalated genocide for the last two and a half years, legally stealing land and creating settlements. But these are the same companies that are supplying the human rights violations in Sudan that are armed by Saudi Arabia and other parties by companies like Lockheed Martin or in the Philippines.

And in the Philippines, we want to name this because of people like Chantal Anikoche, who was a UMBC alumni who was kidnapped by the AFP or the Negros 19 who were murdered by weapons used, weapons made by Lockheed Martin and other manufacturing. The weapons economy that killed them is the same economy that the endowment dollars are financing through the USM Common Trust. When we stay divest, we’re not making a statement about only one particular cause. We’re withdrawing material support from a global system of militarized violence. That is a long-term project, not just resolution. It’s not just one board meeting, it’s not just one disruption, but building a coalition of students, faculty, union, and community members who understand that these struggles are structurally connected and refuse to let our institutions be complicit in any of them.

Fi:

And to piggyback off what Zyad and Khadeeja have been saying about the material consequences of the investments that the USM is making into arms manufacturing, not only does this have international ripples in the human rights violations in Sudan and Palestine and the bombing of Mindoro and capture of Chantal and Akoche by the AFP and the murder of 19 activists in Negros in the Philippines, but even domestically, the USM is making decisions that financially disadvantage their workers and the people that are keeping these institutions going. Divestment is an issue that is for the workers as well. We’re advocating for more transparency of where the money is going. I believe it was AFSCME is a faculty and staff union that just suffered mass layoffs across the USM system. And at Bowie State University, they’re in a huge deficit right now due to a misappropriation of funds that haven’t been going toward upkeeping positions for workers that have been working there for a long time, but the creation of newer higher paid consultant positions that are sort of just replicating that sort of anti-worker pro-capitalist establishment where there’s this whole class of consultants and people who are getting paid these large amounts of money and disenfranchising the people that actually run to keep this university going.

We’re talking about healthcare professionals or students with mental health problems. We’re talking about cultural centers such as Norrenborough at UMD, which has faced ongoing structural issues and has consistently been advocating for reallocation of funds to create a more sustainable university that reflects the future that the students are advocating for. And the Board of Regents as an unelected body consistently again and again with the way they allocate the funds of the USM system show very little interest in representing the people. And yeah, it’s about time that students come together and form these strong coalitions. And we stand in solidarity with unions as well that are also getting screwed over by these same misappropriations and unethical decisions. Yeah, the issue of divestment, it’s very all-encompassing.

Mohammad:

Yeah. And I think just to round that out, you described it very well. When you look at it from a broader view tying in what Zaid and Fi said, when we’re talking about divesting for Palestine, obviously that is a moral obligation in itself. We should not be financing the suffering of any people overseas, but the same endowment that is being used to reinforce the suffering of Palestinians is upholding systems of oppression all over the world. And the same Board of Regents members claiming that they can’t pay their own workers despite being allocated money by the Maryland State legislature to do so are claiming they can’t. And all of this just ties back to the issue of the American universities in general, but we can see it very clearly here in the USM, which is that we have a for-profit university system. Even though these are our public institutions, they’re supposed to serve the people of Maryland.

They do not. If you look at the makeup of the Board of Regents, it’s not made up of academics or former university administrators or leadership. All of them are business people. The head of the Board of Regents, she was the former vice president of Lockheed Martin. The chancellor currently, well, he actually was an academic, but his legacy was a partnership program he established with a medical school in Israel. And all of the Board of Regents members, most of them are really just wealthy people who were appointed not to advance the university’s mission or to benefit the people of Maryland, but just to uphold our university’s corporate ties and make sure that we’re still doing research to help develop weapons for Lockheed Martin and Northrop Garden to make sure that we aren’t divesting our endowment from war profiteers, to make sure that we’re still inviting IDF soldiers and not taking a public stand against the suffering that our university is complicit in.

And that’s just why it’s important for us to fight on the USM level, as we’ve been saying before. We are still very optimistic. I mean, if you look at where the movement is now compared to two years ago, students would’ve been shocked that we passed resolutions at all. But now we’ve passed resolutions at the SGA level. The students have made very clear where they stand. We’ve gotten around all the red tape that was set in place. We’re escalating it at a higher level now. There’s the Break the Bonds campaign that Khadija mentioned. We’re seeing divestment actually happening and taking shape now, which is why it’s just more important than ever for us to continue pushing just as hard, harder than we ever have been and making noise.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Real News Network Podcast. And thank you to our panel of guests, Khadija, Zaid, Mohammed and Fi, who are all student organizers with the University System of Maryland Divestment Coalition. If you want to get more coverage and hear more important conversations just like this, then we need you to become a supporter of The Real News Now. Share this podcast with people in your circles, your friends, your family, your coworkers. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and go to therealnews.com/donate and become a supporter today. I promise you guys, it really makes a difference. For the Real News Network, this is Maximillian Alvarez signing off from Baltimore. Take care of yourselves and take care of each other.