How Bad Is It?: Political Violence in the U.S., and What We Can Learn from Brazil

Summary

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

Episode: How Bad Is It?: Political Violence in the U.S., and What We Can Learn from Brazil
Date: September 18, 2025
Host: Tyler Foggatt (A), Andrew Marantz (B)
Guest: Petra Costa (C), Brazilian filmmaker

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Overview

This episode of "The Political Scene" explores the alarming rise of political violence in the U.S. with the recent assassination of activist Charlie Kirk and seeks international perspective by drawing parallels with Brazil’s own descent into democratic crisis. Through an in-depth conversation with filmmaker Petra Costa—whose documentaries chronicle Brazil’s political unraveling—the hosts confront themes of polarization, backsliding democracy, the normalization of violence, and the uneasy tools democracies use to defend themselves.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Killing of Charlie Kirk: An Inflection Point

• Political violence as both a symptom and a catalyst
  • The assassination marks a possible turning point in the health of American democracy, not only by highlighting physical danger, but also by being wielded as a justification for retrenchment and restriction of civil liberties.
  • “It could unleash a cycle of retribution. It could also be a place for people, including people in government, to use it as a pretext for further crackdowns…” —Andrew (02:47)
• Parallel to other countries?
  • While the U.S. has a history of political violence and gun violence, this kind of high-profile political assassination sets off alarm bells similar to those experienced in other countries experiencing democratic decline, particularly Brazil.

2. Political Violence and Democratic Backsliding

• Violence used as a pretext for repression
  • Discussion about Trump allies (Pam Bondi, Stephen Miller) using the Kirk assassination to call for crackdown on leftist groups and speech.
  • “Pam Bondi is saying free speech is one thing, hate speech is another thing. Stephen Miller is talking about cracking down on the groups that foment this sort of thing…” —Andrew (04:01)
  • Readiness of the government to invoke emergency powers in response to violence (“…if that’s what they do in response to a carjacking, what might they do in response to this much more scary and high profile thing?” —Andrew, 04:01)
• Chilling effects on democratic participation
  • Violence and the threat of state retaliation can deter people from participating in politics (“If you feel like participating in political discourse is taking your life in your hands, then how many people are just never going to even consider doing it?” —Andrew, 04:53)

3. America and Brazil: Drawing Parallels

• Brazil as a cautionary tale for political violence:
  • Assassination of city councilor Marielle Franco, January 8th riots (Brazil’s “January 6th”), public pleas for military intervention, election interference.
  • “Brazil…has the most similar mix of a place that was a consolidated democracy for less long than the U.S…then…the ambient threat of violence and the specter of violence…really kind of started to sink back from that consolidated democratic status.” —Andrew (07:50)

4. Petra Costa on Brazil’s Democratic Trauma

• Witnessing democracy's unraveling
  • Costa’s documentaries are deeply personal explorations of democracy’s fragility, tracing Brazil’s trajectory from hope to disillusionment.
  • “I felt that democracy…was my birthright…after 21 years to have established democracy, and then…to see it starting to crumble through democratic processes itself…” —Petra Costa (13:48)
• How Democracies Die—Slowly
  • Democracies today are often eroded from within via the disrespect of unwritten norms, not sudden coups—an erosion of respect for political opposition and normal political contestation.
  • Quote: “Fragile democracies have one advantage over solid ones. They know when they're over. Generals close the congress, occupy the TV stations, and everyone knows what happened. But democracies can also end slowly.” —Andrew (reading Costa’s narration, 16:34)

5. The Role of Violence and Impunity in Brazil

• Bolsonaro’s embrace of violent rhetoric
  • “He became a candidate for Congress and won by defending the return of the military dictatorship…he said, if I win, I will kill 30,000 people…” —Petra Costa (21:27)
• Why Bolsonaro’s conviction matters
  • First time a Brazilian coup plotter has been convicted—marked as a “civilizational threshold” and a sign of possibly overcoming impunity.
  • “After 10 years of successive sad moments…it's one of the most greatest moments of joy for me as a citizen to see that political violence will not continue to go with impunity in my country.” —Petra Costa (23:11)
  • The abundance of evidence combined with the memory and trauma of prior coups enabled accountability: “The trauma…of our last coup…is still a memory that is very alive for many people, for most of the Supreme Court justices…” —Petra Costa (24:05)

6. Limits and Risks of “Emergency” Democratic Defenses

• Judicial overreach as a double-edged sword
  • “A lot of what has happened in Brazil is basically taking power away from Bolsonaro…by giving more power to these other sort of unchecked and unelected branches of government, like the Supreme Court… it's just a very fraught and treacherous model to follow.” —Andrew (32:00–33:10)
• No simple template for the U.S.
  • The U.S. constitutional protections like the First Amendment limit direct crackdowns, yet there is increasing political pressure and “chilling effect” rhetoric (“…the sitting Vice President…levying these kind of threats…we should look out for…I think we might be in kind of uncharted water here.” —Andrew, 35:05)

7. Polarization, Empathy, and the Limits of Repair

• Enduring fragility even with accountability
  • “Democracy is always going to be incredibly fragile if violence is on the table.” —Tyler (44:13)
• Empathy as the only path forward
  • Costa stresses “the only way out of this polarization is empathy, is to try to understand…what has led [some Brazilians] to really align themselves…with religious fundamentalism…” (28:24)
• The normalization of dread
  • From activists in bulletproof vests to apathy around routine violence, the “ambient threat” changes the nature of democracy (“…you can’t vote on a bill without worrying about taking your life in your hands.” —Tyler, 42:32)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Crackdown Rhetoric:
  “We are going to channel all of the anger that we have over the organized campaign that led to this assassination to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks…the organized doxing campaigns…posting people's addresses…It is a vast domestic terror movement. We are going to use every resource…to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie's name.” —Stephen Miller, as recounted by Andrew (05:22)

• On How Democracies Die:
  “Fragile democracies have one advantage over solid ones. They know when they're over…But democracies can also end slowly.” —Petra Costa (via Andrew, 16:34)

• On the Joy—and Irony—of Bolsonaro’s Conviction:
  “So that the southern country, in the southern part of the hemisphere could be now giving lessons of maturity to the rest of the world is quite interesting.” —Petra Costa (24:05)

• On the Normalization of Violence:
  “There's just a certain amount of this stuff that we learn to live with. Another day, another school shooting…now we're talking about maybe everyone in Congress should get an armed guard detail. …we forget how bizarre and depressing it is that you can't vote on a bill without worrying about taking your life in your hands.” —Andrew (42:32)

• On the Enduring Work of Democracy:
  “The job is never totally over as long as violence is on the table…The challenge of liberal democracy is having people coexist without hurting each other, and we suck at it.” —Andrew (45:43)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:17 — Initial reaction to Charlie Kirk's assassination and its implications
• 02:47 — Political violence and democratic backsliding: is violence an indicator or a precursor?
• 07:27 — Why Brazil is the relevant comparison for U.S. politics
• 13:01 — Introduction of Petra Costa; Brazil’s democratic trauma and personal stakes
• 16:34 — "How democracies die" and the “slow end” of democratic norms
• 19:01–21:27 — Political violence in Brazil, Bolsonaro’s rhetoric, impunity, and consequences
• 23:11–24:05 — The significance of Bolsonaro’s conviction and lessons for the U.S.
• 28:24 — Living with the ambient threat of violence, polarization, and empathy
• 32:00 — U.S. and Brazil: Comparing checks and balances, and concerns about unelected power
• 35:05 — U.S. chilling effect and risk of governmental overreach in the name of security
• 44:13 — The unending fragility of democracy in violent societies
• 45:43 — Summation: enduring risks, the cost of politics under threat

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Final Reflection

This episode offers a sobering look at global democratic fragility, showing that even when accountability is achieved (as in Brazil) the shadow of violence leaves democracy precarious. The hosts and Petra Costa emphasize that the only path away from polarization and fear may be empathy and engagement—not repression. But as the U.S. reels from a fresh wound, the specter of repressive overreach, normalized dread, and creeping democratic erosion looms large.

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For listeners seeking a nuanced, first-person account of democracy’s vulnerability—and the dangers and tradeoffs of defending it—this episode is both illuminating and unsettling.

Transcript

[A]

Hey, Andrew.

[B]

Hey, Tyler.

[A]

Welcome back to the political scene from the New Yorker and to our special series, how Bad Is It? Where Andrew and I sit down for a monthly checkup on the health of our democracy.

[B]

Yeah. This week, obviously, we're all thinking about the killing of Charlie Kirk and how horrible and scary that was and how it feels like a kind of potential of an inflection point for a lot of what we've been talking about in this series.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, his. His killing highlights how far political violence can go, given that we're not just seeing a politician being targeted, but seeing someone being targeted ostensibly just for their speech and for being an incredibly effective activist. And we're also seeing how an act of violence like this can be seized upon to potentially justify new waves of retaliation or political repression.

[B]

Yeah. So we were wondering in this moment, what to watch for in terms of could this accelerate threats to democracy? And to do that, we wanted to talk about not only the US but also Brazil, which is, I think, of all the democratic backsliding places, at least that I've been to. The place that comes to mind when you think about not only high level political assassinations, but also street clashes and threats of street violence and how that can warp and color the ability for people to do democratic politics.

[A]

So today we're really happy to have Brazilian filmmaker Petra Costa, on her documentaries the Edge of Democracy and Apocalypse in the Tropics, trace Brazil's slide into authoritarianism and what that history can teach us about the dangers of this moment and how we might be able to escape that cycle.

[B]

And also just the granularity of what it feels like to be in a place where the ambient threat of violence is kind of part of everyday life.

[A]

This is the political scene. I'm Tyler Foggatt and I'm a senior editor at the New Yorker.

[B]

I'm Andrew Morantz and I'm a staff writer at the New Yorker.

[A]

I mean, yeah, let's get right into it. You have chronicled the far right, the far left, and everything in between, even young people who don't feel connected to either party. You've reported a lot on campuses about the debates over free speech. You've reported a lot about kind of like activist movements. And of course, you've written a lot about democratic backsliding, which is something that we've been talking about for a while on this podcast. And given all of that, I am curious what your initial reaction is to the terrible news about Charlie Kirk, given that this is. It's a story, while tragic, that Also kind of combines all of these threads.

[B]

Yeah. I think in addition to the killing of Charlie Kirk just being sad and scary in itself, I think a lot of us felt like it could be a pivot point for this sort of Democratic backsliding stuff we've been worrying about in this series. Political violence and gun violence have existed obviously for a long time in this country. But a really scary, high profile assassination like this can unleash a lot of things. It could unleash a cycle of retribution. It could also be a place for people, including people in government, to use it as a pretext for further crackdowns, which is something I think we should worry about. So, yeah, this definitely felt like a place where we should focus our attention.

[A]

Yeah. So let's dig a little bit deeper on that. So would you say that political violence itself is kind of an indicator of Democratic backsliding, or do you see it as something that could be a precursor to democratic backsliding because of what it could potentially unleash in terms of like a crackdown on free speech, which, as you mentioned, is like something that we're already sort of seeing with people like Pam Bondi indicating that people who have responded to the Kirk assassination with jokes and hateful speech that they might be targeted.

[B]

Yeah, it could definitely be that. It could be. I mean, when there was one carjacking in Washington, D.C. donald Trump sent in the troops to Washington D.C. and declared a crime emergency. So if that's what they do in response to a carjacking, what might they do in response to this much more scary and high profile thing? And yeah, Pam Bondi is saying free speech is one thing, hate speech is another thing. Stephen Miller is talking about cracking down on the groups that foment this sort of thing, whether that is really what these groups are doing or not. Donald Trump is talking about that. Right. So definitely I would worry about it as a precursor, and I also would worry about it as sort of preventing people who want to be part of the political arena from feeling like they're able to do it in the first place. Right. If you feel like participating in political discourse is taking your life in your hands, then how many people are just never going to even consider doing it?

[A]

So let's talk more about the idea of the specter of violence being used to crack down on free speech. On Monday, JD Vance actually hosted the Charlie Kirk show in Kirk's place. And as part of that, he interviewed White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who spoke about how the Trump administration was working on Like a broader strategy to go after left wing groups that were promoting violence in the wake of Kirk's assassination.

[B]

We're going to go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates, and engages in violence. That's not okay. Violence is not okay in our system, and we want to make it less likely that that happens. Walk me through at a high level, like, what you and I have been working on, what the whole administration has been working on to try to make sure that we don't reward and promote this craziness. We are going to channel all of the anger that we have over the organized campaign that led to this assassination to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks. The. The organized doxing campaigns, the organized riots, the organized street violence, the organized campaigns of dehumanization, vilification, posting people's addresses, combining that with messaging that's designed to trigger incite violence, and the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence. It is a vast domestic terror movement. We are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie's name.

[A]

Yeah, um, it's seems like there is kind of like a weird conflation that's going on between, like, organized street violence and then kind of like he's describing, like, online campaigns of dehumanization and vilification. So, like, you would think that would apply to just people who are, like, reposting, you know, like kind of incendiary quotes from Kirk. Like, that's hard to understand.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, literally the only doxxing. I'm not even trying to be disingenuous here, the doxxing I've seen is like friends of Charlie Kirk trying to dox people who are criticizing him after his death. So I don't know what Stephen Miller's referring to, and I don't know what crackdown he is threatening, but I think it's probably not a great sign that the Deputy Chief of staff and chief ideologist of the Trump White House is JD Vance's first guest here and that he's talking about crackdowns on speech in the wake of this. I mean, even if that's just a rhetorical gesture, it's not one that puts me at ease.

[A]

So one of the things that we've been doing with this How Bad is It? Series is kind of trying to draw parallels between what is happening in The US and what is happening in other countries that are experiencing a kind of democratic backsliding or even just kind of like a full on slip into authoritarianism. So we've talked about Hungary a lot, but as we were thinking about this episode, you actually said that you wanted to talk about Brazil. So why is that?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I was actually getting messages from friends in Hungary and elsewhere in the world after the Charlie Kirk thing. And they were totally baffled. They were like, how can you live in a country where things like this happen? So this is not a feature of the Hungarian loss of democracy. And I was thinking about where is this kind of violence part of the mix when we talk about the threats to democracy? And Brazil was the first place that came to mind. I mean, obviously there's a lot of violence in El Salvador, there's a lot of violence in Mexico or the Philippines. But Brazil, certainly of the places that I've reported from and am familiar with, it has the most similar mix of a place that was a consolidated democracy for less long than the U.S. but for a long time. And then through a mix of kind of right wing populist fervor, threats to the independence of institutions like the judiciary, and also just the kind of ambient threat of violence and the specter of violence being used against one's political opponents really kind of started to sink back from that consolidated democratic status. And so, you know, you can look at, we'll get into all this, but, you know, Marielle Franco was assassinated in 2018. She was a city councilor in Rio who was gunned down on the street and killed pretty much, it seems clear for her political views. And it's still being investigated, but it seems like it was a hit that was allegedly ordered by these very well connected political figures.

[A]

And then of course, you have January 8th, which was their version of January 6th, essentially, where Bolsonaro supporters stormed Brazil's Congress, Supreme Court and Presidential Palace. Not only were they trying to overturn the 2022 election, which Bolsonaro lost to Lula, but this was a whole on like, this was like a full on plot to try to assassinate Bolsonaro's political rivals and a Supreme Court justice.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Although interestingly, just last Thursday, Bolsonaro was actually convicted and sentenced to more than 27 years in PR. So it seems like they got some justice there.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I was there. We can talk more about this, but.

[A]

You were there rioting on January 8th.

[B]

I was there. I was gone by January 8th, but I was there for the 2022 election. And I didn't know at the time that, you know, there were people on secret messages threatening to assassinate Lula and Moraes. But I was there when the election results came in, and immediately the Bolsonaro's supporters not only started rioting, but started camping out in front of the army barracks and saying to the military very clearly, please come and do a coup on our behalf and keep Bolsonaro in office by force. So that that was like, the immediate response to the election results.

[A]

Bolsonaro, who was in, like, Florida at.

[B]

That point, he hadn't left yet. He stayed to try to do the coup, and then when it didn't work, he fled. But he never conceded. He waited for 48 hours, and then when he came out, he just said, like, the people who are protesting are very mad, and it's understandable. And then just went back and kept sort of plotting in the shadows. You know, he was trying to stay in office, and he just. Like Trump, he announced ahead of time that the election would only be legitimate if he won. The election was very close. He actually tried to block people from getting to the polls from Lula supporting areas. So all the kind of partial election rigging stuff that we're used to in lots of other places, but with, I think, the added valence of if this doesn't work, we'll just bring in the tanks. And in Brazil, this is not an idle threat, right? I mean, Brazil was under military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985. Bolsonaro campaigned on nostalgia for that military dictatorship. So the US Is a very violent place. We have a history of conflict and civil war. But in Brazil, those threats are even more omnipresent. And so I thought we should talk to a filmmaker who has made a couple of really evocative films about exactly this sort of thing, about what it's like to do politics in a place where violence is kind of omnipresent.

[A]

So when we come back from the break, we'll talk with Brazilian filmmaker Petra Costa, who spent the past decade making documentaries about the state of democracy, which tackle similar questions to the ones that we've been trying to ask in this series. This is the political scene from the New Yorker.

[B]

Right now, we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown, Jackson Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Charlamagne, the God, and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts. So thank you again so much for coming to join us. Do you want to just say who you are and introduce yourself?

[A]

Yes.

[C]

Well, thank you for having me. I'm Petra Costa, Brazilian filmmaker.

[B]

So your previous two films, the Edge of Democracy and then Apocalypse in the Tropics, are kind of bookend pieces, or I've heard you describe them as a diptych. So starting with the Edge of Democracy, if you could just sort of set the stage for what that film was about. You mentioned in the film that you and Brazilian democracy are about the same age. And then a few years ago, there were a series of corruption investigations which were maybe themselves corrupt, which led Brazilian democracy to be under threat. So can you say more about that and why you use the threat to democracy framework to describe those events?

[C]

Yes. Well, Andrew, my films before, even before the Edge of Democracy had been about trauma, but from a personal level. And in 2016, I felt that democracy, which was, I believed, my birthright precisely because I am the age of Brazilian democracy, but also because my parents fought against the military dictatorship. They were in hiding, many of their friends were killed and tortured. And after 21 years to have established democracy, and then when I'm in my 30s, to see it starting to crumble through democratic processes itself, as was the case in many other places of the world, as the United States and Britain, I felt there was a universal phenomena that I wanted to investigate, which is the citizens relationship, affectionate relationship to one's democracy and how the psychological pain, I think, is very understudied one feels when these institutions start to not deliver what they promised to deliver. That was what I wanted to try to understand better. And I embarked in a journey that I thought would last a week and ended up lasting 10 years. Yeah, and during this time it was insane because I was lucky enough to be firsthand with President Lula ex President Dilma Rousseff, the first female president elected in Brazil, Bolsonaro and Pastor Silas Malafayan. I was with them when they were elected, imprisoned, impeached, plotting coups, performing coups, and in the ruins that were left after this coup attempt. So it was a very epic journey.

[B]

Yeah, well, your level of access is crazy and enviable from a journalistic perspective. So how you were able to pull that off is a conversation for another day. But I just wanted to quote something that you a piece of your narration from the edge of democracy. Because I think it goes to. You know, Tyler and I have been talking about this way that democracy can kind of be unraveled from within by people who were given power democratically and then can use it anti. Democratically.

[A]

Yeah. No, when she said watching democracy crumble through democratic processes themselves, it. Yeah, I, like, shuddered because I was like, oh, that's exactly what we've been debating. Like, whether that's a thing or not. Like, is it. Is it technically the demise of democracy if, like, people are voting for people who then bring about the end of democracy? Or is that kind of like, you know, not that it makes it okay?

[B]

Right, right.

[A]

How does that work?

[B]

And that process is kind of the main character of. Of your films, in a way. And you. You actually. You put these words to it. You say, fragile democracies have one advantage over solid ones. They know when they're over. Generals close the congress, occupy the TV stations, and everyone knows what happened. But democracies can also end slowly. So if you could speak to. You can say in the Brazilian case or in the American case or. But you know a little bit about how that happens and also how you can bring to light your view that that is what's happening. Because. Because it's so ambiguous, it's hard for everyone to get on the same page. So how do you kind of show in your films that that's what's happening?

[C]

Well, for me, there was a key moment because when I started investigating, I was very suspicious of myself. I was like, I'm mourning for the end of democracy. I'm feeling that it is really eroding. But maybe it's because the side that I was rooting for is not winning or is losing. So I was very suspicious of my own feeling until I came across a book called How Democracies Die by Stephen Levitsky and Daniel Zibla, which I really recommend because it's almost a manual, a very detached and objective manual of how to judge the health of a democracy and how to also diagnose when it's getting sick. And that quote is very inspired by his analysis and their framing, which is the way you understand that democracies die today. They no longer die with military coups. They die through democratic means itself, but particularly by disrupting, disrespecting, unwritten norms. And one of the most important unwritten norms is to respect your opponent and treat him or her as a legitimate political party, not another party that should be annihilated for the end times to arrive, which is the situation. We are both in the United States and in Brazil with the rise of the far right, a far right that claims that the other side of the political spectrum should be destroyed.

[A]

PETRA One of the biggest stories in the US right now is the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the young right wing activist who was killed on a campus that, you know, he'd been asked to come speak at. This is obviously troubling for a bunch of reasons, but one of them is just kind of the sense, and this is something that you can see both in the statistics, but also as a more qualitative thing, more of a vibe that just that we're living in a country where participating in politics means putting your life at risk. So I'm wondering if you can talk about whether this resonates with what you've seen in Brazil in recent years.

[C]

Well, I'm aware of this really tragic moment that the United States is going through, and it has many parallels with what has been happening to Brazil. Brazil was very different from America until 15 years ago. There was very little polarization we had after the military dictatorship ended. People were embarrassed to say that they were in the political right. Everyone would consider themselves or center or left. And in 2013, that started to change in Brazil when we started to incorporate much of the polarization and also the influence of religious fundamentalism into Brazilian politics.

[B]

Yeah, and this is the subject of your more recent film, Apocalypse in the Tropics. And obviously Apocalypse has many meanings which you explore in the film, some religious, some more having to do with this kind of earthly specter of violence. I mean, one thing that shows up in your footage with Jair Bolsonaro in both films is that it seems like right away he starts invoking violence or the threat of violence. I mean, you know, he says, I want to get a gun in the hand of every landowner, landowner in Brazil, he says. You know, he starts doing finger guns with his followers. And I wonder if you could just talk about the context there, because it's always possible to say it was a metaphor, it was a joke. You know, doing a gun gesture like that is not itself a violent act. But obviously context matters a lot. And, you know, this kind of gesture or kind of potentially ironic thing can create a climate where this is a real specter of violence. So how do you see that happening in the case of Bolsonaro and his followers?

[C]

Bolsonaro made his career around political violence. He became a candidate for Congress and won by defending the return of the military dictatorship in Brazil and saying that if he won an election in 1999, he said, if I win, I will kill 30,000 people. Starting by the president that was treated with impunity. He was not punished for saying such violent things. And in 2016, when our first female president was impeached, he dedicated his vote to her torturer. The fact that he was condemned now, sorry to anticipate, but was a civilizational threshold for Brazil, because Bolsonaro is the result of the years of impunity that we had towards not just this type of violent speech that celebrated the 21 years of state violence, state terrorism that we had, terrorism implemented by the state. The result of that was the rise of Bolsonaro. The fact that Brazil managed to finally change that is a moment of a lot of. Actually, after 10 years of successive sad moments of moments just of grief, it's one of the most greatest moments of joy for me as a citizen to see that political violence will not continue to go with impunity in my country.

[A]

Yeah, I'd love to ask you more about that, because, I mean. So you're alluding to the fact that Bolsonaro was convicted of plotting a military coup to overturn the country's 2022 election and sentenced to 27 years in prison. This is a sentence that came down last Thursday. And, you know, from my understanding, is that there have been at least 15 coups and coup attempts with links to the military since Brazil overthrew its monarchy in 1889. And this is the first time that the leaders of one of those plots has been convicted. And so, as you mentioned, it was this joyous moment. But could you explain why now? Like, why is someone being held accountable now? And has something changed within Brazil to kind of allow for this sort of backlash to a coup attempt to happen? Or was it just a situation where the evidence was so overwhelming that there was nothing that one could do besides convict Bolsonaro?

[C]

I think if the. We had not imitated your January 6th in our January 8th attempt. So, yes, January 6th happened. And two years later, the Bolsonaro supporters, inspired by the fact that Bolsonaro himself was plotting a coup with top military generals and putting the population against the election results, saying that they should not accept the election results and urging them to revolt. So there was an invasion of the three branches of power. But different from the United States here, the police did not resist. The police simply let the invaders and insurgents into these palaces where they destroyed everything, and they filmed it, as in the United States. So, yes, the fact that there was so much evidence around the January 8th invasion, but also of the plotting. And the plotting was not just of a coup. It was a coup where they would kill President Lula, his vice President Geraldo Alchemy, and the Supreme Court Justice Alexandra Jim Moraes. And this plan was printed in the Presidential palace for Bolsonaro to see. So, yes, there was a huge amount of evidence, but also because the Supreme Court, I think many members of the Supreme Court had realized in the process of 2016-2022, the effects that the erosion of democracy was bringing to Brazil. I mean, we had 700,000 deaths during COVID And they started to see that if they didn't respond with agility, with the necessary agility to this new phenomenon of the populist fever of the far right, basically Brazilian democracy would succumb to another coup. And the trauma, and the fact that the trauma of our last coup that lasted from 64 to 1988 is still a memory that is very alive for many people, for most of the Supreme Court justices, they were alive during that time, also helped. For me, it's very interesting. The idea that a country like Brazil that sees itself as underdeveloped, that is trying to catch up, can now succeed where America failed. Right. But it can succeed in condemning a president for a coup attempt and through democracy itself, putting a break into this populist fever that we're all confused on how to deal with. So that the southern country, in the southern part of the hemisphere could be now giving lessons of maturity to the rest of the world is quite interesting.

[B]

Yeah. You mentioned Stephen Levitsky. He just made that argument in the near term.

[C]

Exactly, exactly.

[B]

Yeah. So, I mean, we can just add it to the list of better food, better parties, better football, and, you know, now maybe better tools to get out of democratic backsliding. We'll see. And on that point, I mean, we've been talking about the many parallels between the US And Brazil when it comes to this stuff. And, you know, one obvious difference, right, is the United States is a very violent country. It's a country with a lot of guns, with a very violent history. It does not have this history of military coups and military occupation. And that's something that I think your films help express. The feeling of being in a place where there's this constant undercurrent of violence. And it's something I know from having been in Brazil during the last election. You know, the feeling of being in Sao Paulo when Carla Zambelli was pulling a gun on someone for confronting her in the street, the feeling of what it's like to go to the polls when some candidates have to go vote in bulletproof vests because they're so scared, Those are things that don't always show up in numbers, but they show up in a kind of feeling. So how do you speak to that?

[C]

I mean, it is disheartening and despairing. And when you see I say this in the Edge of Democracy, in both Sonato's cosmology, my parents would have been killed. I would have been killed. And then when you look at your own family member who voted for him, how do you see that? Is that person a friend or a monster who wants. Who desires your death or is indifferent to your death? So it's all very confusing. But I did learn that even though it is extremely despairing and inspires a lot of rage, the only way out of this polarization is empathy, is to try to understand, and I believe it is by understanding the mechanisms, the historical mechanisms that have led us to this place in time, and the economic mechanism, psychological mechanism, the religious mechanisms, and then to try to piece that together and unwind. It seems abstract, but, I mean, I realize as a Brazilian citizen how my secular upbringing, as I say in Apocalypse and the Tropics, didn't give me enough of a language to understand 30% of the population of my country. And now that I. That I spent three years researching the evangelical faith, I believe I can communicate so much better with them and understand what has led them to really align themselves in the past 10 years with religious fundamentalism, which is not necessarily what they. They agree with the principles of religious fundamentalism.

[B]

Yeah. And I mean, I encourage everyone to watch the films because you actually do humanize people with these. I mean, a lot of people say they want to humanize people, but you actually do in the films. So I appreciate that, and I appreciate you joining us here today. It's really great conversation.

[A]

Yeah. Thank you so much.

[C]

Thank you.

[A]

Petra Costa is a filmmaker and actress. Her documentaries include the Edge of Democracy, which was nominated for an Oscar in 2020, and Apocalypse in the Tropics, which was released in 2024. We'll have more of the political scene from the New Yorker in just a moment. America is changing, and so is the world.

[B]

But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.

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I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. i'm.

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Tristan Redman in London, and this is the Global Story.

[A]

Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection where the world and America meet.

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Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

[A]

That was fascinating because I feel like on one hand, the situation that we were describing in Brazil of like, people having to go to the poles and bulletproof vests like that just sounds like apocalyptic, as, you know, Petra says in her film. But then on the other hand, she made the really important point, which is that they have managed to do something that we were not able to do in the US which is hold our president or former president accountable for trying to overturn an election.

[B]

I think we should talk about that. I think it's complicated in two ways. I mean, I think a January 6th and January 8th are not identical. Although, you know, Trump was impeached for being part of a plot to stay in power, and it didn't involve assassination attempts, at least by him, but there were fake elector schemes and all these things that we do know about. And so our Senate did have a chance to make Trump ineligible, which they passed up on. It's also complicated because a lot of what has happened in Brazil is basically taking power away from Bolsonaro and the other attempted coup plotters by giving more power to these other sort of unchecked and unelected branches of government, like the Supreme Court. And that to me is just a very fraught and treacherous model to follow. I understand why it might make sense arguably in their case, but I worry about just totally importing that everywhere, including here. I mean, for one thing, it wouldn't.

[A]

We just never would.

[B]

Yeah, it wouldn't work here. I mean, it's not. The Supreme Court could be checking Trump a lot more than they are, and they do not seem to want to do that. But also, you know, there's basically, I mean, I'm simplifying, but there's basically one guy, Alexandre de Moraes, who's like kind of in charge of whether Bolsonaro can has to go to jail, whether certain social media platforms can be online, whether Elon Musk can operate X in Brazil. But it's obviously also troubling to have any one person or any one body, much less an unelected body, have that much unchecked power. And it kind of puts you in this paradoxical situation where if you want to interrupt a slide of anti democratic or democratic backsliding, you then are using as a backstop this other power center, and you're just hoping that that power center won't use its own unchecked power in anti democratic ways. Right. So it's kind of like, it makes me uncomfortable in various ways.

[A]

Yeah, it's like an extreme version of what we've talked about a couple times on this show, which is the question of whether any Democratic president who follows Trump will be able to kind of undo what Trump has done without also acting in ways that require, like, unitary executive theory. And, I mean, it's still a little bit different, but just like, can you right the wrongs without creating a bunch of new wrongs?

[B]

Exactly. And they don't have a First Amendment in Brazil, so there's a lot of things that, you know, if they happened here, I think would be very, very troubling, you know, investigating people for what they're talking about in a WhatsApp chat or, you know, raiding their house because of, you know, stuff that they've said in private or, you know, so. And not to mention the. The tampering with social media which people accuse the US Government of doing. But it's not at all anything like what's happening in Brazil. So.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, so not our template.

[B]

Not our template. Although it leads into the stuff we were talking about with the J.D. vance's comments yesterday. Because, you know, there are many, many things that people complain about under the banner of assaults on free speech, some of which I think are legitimately troubling, some of which I don't. But the thing that J.D. vance was doing yesterday, particularly by implicitly threatening the funding of media outlets he doesn't like, was, I think, as close to an American government threat to curtail free speech as we've seen in a long time. And so you can say that Elon Musk is or isn't a good champion of free speech. I think he's at best inconsistent, but at least that's all happening in the private sector. But this is the sitting Vice President of the United States levying these kind of threats. And so I think, on the one hand, as we said, we do have a First Amendment here which would curtail the Trump administration from doing a lot of the stuff that the Brazilian government can do willy nilly. On the other hand, I do think we should look out for. I think we might be in kind of uncharted water here. I think, given how on edge the country is after the Charlie Kirk assassination and given how much the Trump base wants action to be taken, I'm pretty concerned about actions that will be taken in the name of something must be done that could be set a really.

[A]

Dangerous precedent, which is really too bad, in part because Charlie Kirk's whole thing was exercising free Speech and encouraging speech and trying to, you know, engage people in speech. And you can argue about, you know, the merits of his speech or whether you liked it, but, like, that is what he was trying to do. And, like, his whole thing was speaking like he wasn't a politician. He was an activist. An advocate.

[B]

Yeah. And you now have Vance, in the name of being Charlie Kirk's friend on Charlie Kirk's show, saying, if you see someone tarnishing Charlie Kirk's legacy, he says, quote, call them out and, hell, call their employer. So, I mean, again, I don't think that's a legal or illegal threat. I just think it makes J.D. vance, like, Chief of the cancel culture mob, I guess.

[A]

And what does that actually look like? You know, like, if someone posts on Twitter, like, I really didn't like that Charlie Kirk guy. I don't think that's a good tweet to post after he's been killed, necessarily. But, like, if someone were to post that, it's like, how does that. Can the government really get that person banned from social media? I mean, maybe our government can because of their relationship with Elon Musk. But, like, how can the government get people fired for posting things about Charlie Kirk that they don't like?

[B]

Yeah. He later goes on to talk about certain NGOs that have tax exempt status that he alleges fund certain media organizations. So, I mean, they could try to cut off that tax exempt status. They could try to launch investigations. I mean, a lot of this stuff, like we saw with Columbia and other universities and law firms, and we've seen this in Hungary and Turkey as well. If you launch an investigation, that can have a chilling effect, whether you end up being victorious at the end or not. So in aggregate, this creates a climate of fear, uncertainty, and doubt and not knowing what you can say without blowback. And so it's not going to hit everyone in the same way, but it's going to make people. It creates a cost and a friction to political speech, which is ironically, the opposite of what they say they're doing.

[A]

One thing that really struck me in the wake of Kirk's death is just kind of the number of people on the right who have suggested or just kind of, like, flat out argued that, like, his death, regardless of, like, the exact political or just like, motivations in general of Tyler Robinson, who's, you know, the alleged shooter, like, regardless of, you know, Tyler Robinson's belief system, the left in general has contributed to a climate that would facilitate someone like Kirk getting murdered, which is that, you know, there's all this rhetoric about, you know, sort of violent conservative speech. And, you know, we saw this after the Trump assassination attempt. You know, like, if you continuously say that someone is a threat to democracy, then how do you not then expect people to respond by protecting democracy, which, like, in the, you know, minds of someone who's, like, you know, really lost it might involve trying to shoot said threat to democracy? And so I guess, like, in the wake of all this, I've just been thinking about, like, how we can continue to have tough conversations where we are critiquing people, you know, whether they be politicians or whether they be activists, you know, people who aren't. Haven't necessarily been elected to office without fueling political violence.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I mean, it sucks to talk like that. You know, like, oh, can we say this without being worried that, you know, the subject of this piece will be shot? But, like, how do you. How do we do it?

[B]

Yeah, I think, look, having tough conversations and attributing really negative things to people is just a tough part of describing reality. And there have been a lot of times when, for example, I've written pieces and I've thought, okay, if I describe someone in a certain way, if I call them a fascist or a racist, am I being unfair and maybe contributing to some kind of climate of threat around this person? And then they'll say to me, I'm a fascist. And I'm like, well, what am I supposed to do at this point? Right. And that would be for someone who's like a activist in Charlottesville or some marcher in some white supremacist rally or something. But the same dilemma also goes for Donald Trump when he says, oh, I really want to terminate the Constitution, or as Trump allegedly said, behind closed doors, I need the kind of generals Hitler had. And then we're stuck trying to describe reality without being unfair or incendiary. It puts everyone in what happens when reality itself is incendiary, breaks Godwin's Law or whatever. So, yeah, I do. Look, I mean, this. This conversation has been going on for years, and like we've said, it's often invoked in these convenient or hypocritical ways. Right. When Trump gives a speech about political violence after Kirk's murder, he only talks about victims of it on the right. And you hear people on the left only talking about the threat that comes from discriminatory or racist or fascist rhetoric and, you know, has no empathy for political violence that befalls people on the right. Obviously, that's not the answer, but I also don't think that the answer is it's off limits to call someone bad stuff if it's justified. Right. That can't be. You can't just sanitize reality. So I think it's sort of like Petra was saying, like, you, you, you can try to understand where people are coming from without excusing what they're saying. And I think that's the way you actually take someone's legacy into account. It's not through hagiography, it's not through making them into a saint, and it's not through demonizing them and making them into a cudgel for your political program is by trying to reckon with what they actually said. And yeah, sometimes that's the cost of free speech, is that people said a lot of really ugly stuff. And so I think it's totally consistent to say, let's not ratchet up the cycle of violent rhetoric or literal violence. And also to say, let's try to see reality for what it is and not just sanitize it because it makes us uncomfortable. So this is part of the goal of talking to people from other places is to kind of denormalize what we see here. There's just a certain amount of this stuff that we learn to live with. And, you know, there's another day, another school shooting, and, you know, now we're talking about maybe everyone in Congress should get an armed guard detail. And it's like, yeah, of course, America might need that. When we normalize this stuff, we forget how bizarre and depressing it is that you can't vote on a bill without worrying about taking your life in your hands.

[A]

And regardless of how high profile you are, I mean, you have like, you know, those, like Minnesota state lawmakers, like, it's not just the president. Yeah.

[B]

Like local poll workers and local. So as long as that stuff is just normal and not even remarked upon, you know, we can talk about whether that means that we don't live in a democracy, but it's certainly we don't live in a. We don't live in a place where there's a costless democracy. Like, it introduces this fear and friction into the system that if you came in, dropped out of the sky, you'd be like, this doesn't seem right.

[A]

One of my takeaways from the. Our conversation with Petra, and I'm curious whether you got this sense too, because she didn't necessarily, like, state this, but it was just kind of like the, the vibe I got was that democracy is always going to be incredibly fragile if Violence is on the table. Like, you know, they just had this, like, kind of, like, astounding conviction of Bolsonaro, and it's like the country trying to, you know, do the right thing and hold him accountable. And, you know, we haven't seen this before in Brazil, and, you know, we still haven't seen it here, and yet it wasn't. Like, you didn't get the sense that she was like, everything's all good now, like, at all. And I don't know if that's just because of, like, the kind of loaded history of, you know, military coups and, like, the idea that, like, even if Bolsonaro is, you know, put away, that he has family members who will run for office, and just like a lot of other people who are willing to resort to similar tactics to either get power or to stay in it. But unlike in, you know, some of these other countries that we've talked about where it's like, you know, you could imagine a situation where it's like, oh, you know, there was this law that was being talked about that would curb the ability for journalistic institutions to get funding, and now that law didn't pass, and so we can feel good about it. It seems like with Brazil, it's just kind of like once political violence is something that is, like, a very real threat, it doesn't really matter if you can notch these smaller individual wins against it.

[B]

I think it matters, but I think you put it exactly right. It's never. The job is never totally over as long as violence is on the table. So I definitely think it matters whether you take the proactive steps and sort of strengthen the democratic norms and institutions and all that stuff. But I don't think the norms and institutions will save us. It's a really long process. That's why the thing we've been talking about in this series, democratic backsliding, is this particular case when you had a consolidated democracy and then you started to lose it. Right. It's not just places where democracy never took root in the first place. So if you have this tradition of democracy and every place is different and every place has longer or shorter traditions of it, that's always something you can try to get back to, but it doesn't happen in one step. And, yeah, the specter of violence. Look, I mean, let's say you, you. You do do something like get a conviction for Bolsonaro, then you have half the country up in arms, literally, in some cases, and that puts everyone more on edge, right? So the challenge of liberal democracy is having people coexist without hurting each other, and we suck at it. So, yeah, as long as the threat is on the table that if I don't get my way, I'm going to come after you, that's not a full, healthy democracy. And so whatever we want to say about courts, whatever we want to say about the First Amendment, if doing politics in this country involves always an ambient threat of violence, even if it's a rare one, then I don't think we're fully there yet.

[A]

Thanks so much, Andrew.

[B]

Hi, Tyler. Hope I don't have to come back anytime soon.

[A]

We'll see you next month.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

This has been the political Scene from the New Yorker. I'm Tyler Foggatt. This episode was produced by John Lamay, with mixing by Mike Kutchman and engineering by James Yost. Our executive producer is Steven Valentino. Chris Bannon is Connie Nass, head of Global Audio. Our theme music is by Allison Layton Brown. Thanks so much for listening and we'll see you next Wednesday. I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's Global Editorial director.

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