Julio Brant

One of the most remarkable yet revealing spectacles is taking place in Brazil, just 8 days before its national elections. It's astonishing to watch, even though it's also unsurprising. The Brazilian left (with Lula's support) spent the last 6 years building and cheering an extremist and oppressive censorship regime. They came to revere the Supreme Court judge who oversaw this censorship regime and aggressively silenced, banned (and sometimes even arrested) their critics and opponents -- the globally notorious Alexandre de Moraes -- including during the 2022 presidential election, where Moraes constantly ordered the mass removal of posts critical of Lula while protecting the posts supporting him. Lula won by a tiny margin in 2022. But now Brazil's Supreme Court has a Bolsonaro-appointed judge, and he's on a spree, using the regime built by the left (though using just a fraction of what Moraes did) to order hundreds of posts critical of Flavio Bolsonaro removed on the ground that it is spreading "Fake News" (the story they are spreading is, in fact, false). And the Brazilian left is going apeshit. Overnight, they all sound like ACLU lawyers from the 1970s. They are all running around shrieking that it is only in tyrannies where censorship is used, and are extolling the virtues of free speech as if they're Voltaire.😂 All you have to do is a quick search of the tweets of almost every prominent left-wing Brazilian politician and lawyer who is screaming about the evils of CENSORSHIP, and you'll immediately find that they spent years explicitly defending Moraes' censorship system and insisting that free speech must be limited to prevent Fake News and hate speech. Even though some of us warned them over and over that one day this would be used against them, I guess they never believed it because they believe themselves to be so noble and truthful that nobody would ever try to similarly censor them (some on the Right now sound exactly like the leftists sounded for years: insisting that this new censorship from their judge is justified and the censorship used against them was tyranny, but most on the Right understand the tit-for-tat nature of what is being done). Yet again: even if you don't object to state censorship on ethical and moral grounds, you should always object to it just out of self-interest. If you build a Frankenstein, you'll lose control of the monster at some point. Best not to build monsters, but if you chose to, you have only yourself to blame when it turns against you.🤷‍♂️ The only thing worse than endorsing censorship is believing that only one side should get to do it.