What Drove a Mass Attack on Brazil's Capital? Mass Delusion.
Unlike other attempts to topple governments across Latin America’s history, the attacks Sunday were not ordered by a single strongman ruler or a military bent on seizing power, but rather were fueled by a more insidious, deeply rooted threat: mass delusion….
Those beliefs are in part the product of years of conspiracy theories, misleading statements and explicit falsehoods spread by Bolsonaro and his allies claiming Brazil’s fully electronic voting systems are rife with fraud….
Bolsonaro’s supporters have been repeating the claims for months, and then built on them with new conspiracy theories passed along in group chats on WhatsApp and Telegram, many focused on the idea that the electronic voting machines’ software was manipulated to steal the election. On Sunday, protesters stood on the roof of Congress with a banner that made a single demand: “We want the source code.”
Walking out of the protest encampment on Monday morning, Orlando Pinheiro Farias, 40, said he had entered the presidential offices on Sunday with fellow protesters to find documents related to “the investigations into the source code, which legitimize that Jair Messias Bolsonaro is the president of Brazil.”
People filing out of the encampment Monday morning, carrying rolled-up air mattresses, extension cords and stools, each had a clear message: Bolsonaro’s supporters had not ransacked the buildings. Rather, they said, those causing the damage were radical leftists in disguise, bent on defaming their movement….
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What Drove a Mass Attack on Brazil's Capital? Mass Delusion.
This sort of madness should seem familiar to all Americans after Jan. 6th! The mixture of a potentially empowering new social media, along with popular ignorance, mass delusion and utterly irresponsible political demagogues like Trump & Bolsonaro … constitutes a new potential danger to the rule of law and to democratic institutions of representative government.
Conservatives in particular have long understood the danger of anarchic “democracy.” Liberals and Independents today need to be equally aware of this threat. Especially now that so many true “Conservatives” are being purged from modern Conservative parties, which in many cases are themselves mutating into movements of nihilistic authoritarianism and proto-fascism.
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