RECAP: Day one of Brazil's massive pro-free speech rally

Ezra Levant
  |   September 07, 2024   |   Be the first to comment

This morning I arrived in Sao Paolo, Brazil, to attend a giant rally in support of freedom of expression.I wanted to see how Brazil would react to a shocking new censorship ruling and to see if there were any lessons to be learned by people back home in Canada and other places where the government is bringing in new censorship laws. 

As you may have heard, a crusading Brazilian judge named Alexandre de Moraes has been waging a secret war against Elon Musk’s social media platform, Twitter. Moraes would routinely order Twitter to suspend political opponents of the ruling president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, usually just called “Lula”. 

It wasn’t just that the judge was silencing Lula’s critics, including elected political opponents and journalists. Moraes often went further, demanding that Twitter make those suspensions but ordering Twitter to keep the judge’s role a secret. A secret trial with a secret punishment. That’s against Brazilian law, but that didn’t seem to bother this judge.

And since Musk refused to comply, Moraes simply banned the entire social media platform from Brazil, silencing millions of citizens. When Musk made a fuss about it, the government went even further, seizing property belonging to other companies owned by Musk, including the Internet service, Starlink. 

That was one of the main themes of the protest: how Brazil is quickly becoming an authoritarian dictatorship again, as it was as recently as the 1980s. 

I couldn’t count accurately, but we sent our drone up to take some pictures from on high, and there must have been hundreds of thousands of rallying on the streets. I’ve never been to a political gathering anywhere close to this one, in size. 

I don’t speak Portuguese, and I was surprised by how few Brazilians spoke English. But everyone I met spoke from the heart about freedom. I had expected more partisan answers, or more “talking points”. But most people truly seemed authentically worried about the future of civil liberties in Brazil and shocked that the rot was coming from the courts themselves. 

An interesting side-note: while the big free-speech rally was going on in Sao Paolo, led by former (and perhaps future) president Jair Bolsonaro, the current president, Lula, had his own rally in Brasilia, the capital. But almost no one attended — the streets were empty. What a contrast. 

I’m worried about Brazil. It’s a huge country that is at a fork in the road — one path is towards freedom, and the other is back to the bad old days of Brazil being a military dictatorship. 

We’ve posted some videos already to www.TheTruthAboutBrazil.com and we have a few more in the works, including a few that we need to put English subtitles on (I asked questions in English, but some guests answered in Portuguese.) So make sure to check back on the website tomorrow. 

If you think our journey was worth it — and you noticed that the mainstream didn’t cover this freedom rally at all — please consider chipping in to help crowdfund our travel costs. Our head of production, Efron, and I flew on economy-class tickets and stayed in a modest hotel. Our total costs are about CAD$4,000.

I loved the freedom-loving Brazilian people I met. They were friendly and warm and glad to have some media coverage. They’re used to being censored and smeared by the establishment so we were very welcome. But the whole time I was thinking: would hundreds of thousands of Canadians, or Brits, or Aussies, or even Americans, come out to rally for freedom of speech online, like the Brazilians did?

 

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Ezra Levant

Rebel Commander

Ezra Levant is the founder and owner of Rebel News and the host of The Ezra Levant Show. He is the author of multiple best-selling books, including Ethical Oil, The Libranos, China Virus, and most recently, Trudeau's Secret Plan.

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