Far-left Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said on Monday that his government’s authoritarian crusade against the social media platform X and its owner, Elon Musk, is setting an example that the entire world should emulate.
“The world is not obliged to put up with Musk’s far-right ideology just because he is rich,” Lula said in an interview with CNN Brazil on Monday.
Lula has been harping on Musk’s personal wealth a great deal lately, attempting to paint himself as the underdog in his feud with the Tesla CEO, even though Lula commands a vast state treasury and the machinery of a repressive state.
At a press conference in August, Lula snarled that “just because the guy [Musk] has a lot of money doesn’t mean he can disrespect” the Brazilian state.
“He is a citizen of America, he is not a citizen of the world. He cannot keep offending the presidents, the deputies, the senate, the Supreme Court,” Lula fumed, completely missing the point that being a citizen of the United States does indeed mean Musk has the freedom to offend any government officials he pleases, American or otherwise, and Musk’s lowest-paid American employee has exactly the same right.
Lula did jail time for corruption before getting a surprise annulment from the Brazilian Supreme Court in 2019 so he could run for president, so he might not be the best person to sit in judgment over other people’s fortunes.
The UK Guardian, clearly uncomfortable with throwing penalty flags against a left-wing authoritarian president, gingerly pointed out on Tuesday that Lula might be strengthening the Brazilian opposition by attempting to choke off its social media platform of choice:
Thousands of supporters of the former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro are expected to take to the streets on Saturday for an independence day rally some believe will be turbocharged by anger over the supreme court’s stance.
Musk has unabashedly aligned himself with Bolsonaro’s radical political movement, just as he has championed the former president’s most important international friend, Donald Trump, ahead of November’s US election.
On Tuesday, the rightwing tech billionaire shared an invitation to Saturday’s demo with his 196 million X followers. It claimed Brazilians would turn out to “march for freedom, protesting judicial overreach and defending free speech”.
The Guardian quoted Brazilian columnist Pedro Doria criticizing Musk for seeking to “portray himself as a free speech torchbearer” but then warning that Lula and his officials are making it much easier for Musk to present himself that way since their latest move to wallop Brazilian citizens with gigantic cash penalties for accessing banned X content through virtual private networks (VPNs) is patently “absurd.”
For his part, Lula is, himself, becoming a torchbearer for the worldwide authoritarian left’s vision of tightly regulated free speech doled out as a “privilege” by the State, as U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris put it.
Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, is currently the governor of Minnesota. On Monday, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison applauded Lula and his government for banning X from Brazil.
