USAID's Influence on Brazilian Elections

What's happening in Brazil was a full-on Truman Show.

You had the media funded by USAID.

You had the universities funded by USAID.

You had the

staffers of the Supreme Court and the TSE,

the election court, uh, USAID. You had all the

constitutional law advocates funded by USAID.

You had the LGBT activists funded by USAID.

Uh, it's, it's full spectrum. If you were to walk down a

city block in São Paulo or, or,

I don't know, uh, Brasilia, you would have,

you would have a 360 vision of

institutions funded and puppeteered by

USAID without ever knowing it. And in fact,

USAID, knowing what they were doing...

Now, I need to be careful about what I can

and can't say here.

Um,

let's just say, would anyone be surprised, for example, if

USAID was going around and telling its grantees

in Brazil to remove the USAID logo

so that it doesn't get out that grantee's connection to

USAID?

They knew what they were doing. They knew how sensitive it was.

Would you be surprised, for example, if USAID,

which basically set up the censorship state in Brazil...

And this is actually something, let me quickly pivot to say,

it is true that this is the first

Brazilian election since the 2020 municipal elections

in Brazil

that does not have USAID money slushing

around Lula and his allies.

But it is still an election that is, in many ways,

under the thumb of the ghost of USAID.

There is something I call kind of the,

the clockmaker's dilemma, which is

USAID, even when you remove it, the

institutional and legal changes that a

country goes through

can live on even if you cut USAID funding down to

zero. So for example, in Brazil, you have this

apparatus through the STF and TSE, the,

the Supreme Court and the basically election court that

determines all things around elections.

And in basically after Bolsonaro won in 2018, the

TSE court with Alexandre de Moraes, the famous Voldemort judge,

uh, they declared disinformation a threat to

free and fair

elections. Not just disinformation

during an election season, but disinformation any

time. Misinformation, disinformation, any time about anything because it

could pollute in people's,

I don't know, sense of what's true or false in the information ecosystem.

And so

it could have an impact on an election three years away if this false

information is allowed to circulate online.

That was set up by USAID. USAID

flooded the zone. USAID had contact at every

level with the

TSE court, with the Alexandre de Moraes court.

I testified to the Brazilian Senate Relations Committee and put

pictures from USAID's website of Alexandre de Moraes

being trained by CEPS, the USAID grantee,

by NED, the USAID grantee. He's gotten three billion dollars from

USAID and was created by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Every

as- For example, f- I think it was four or five of the nine

of the inside groups that did all the flagging at the TSE

were funded by USAID or the State Department, which is

the kind of co-companion. Everything USAID is, does is supposed

to help some State Department interest.

It-- The list goes on and on and on, and that institution

is still

weaponized to an unbelievable degree

in Brazil. That now finally has a chance

to be

crushed,

to be blown to smithereens, uh, in the event

of a ultimate Bolsonaro victory during the, the, uh, runoff

election at the end of the month. But what is good to see is

that Brazil has-