Mike Benz joined Human Events Daily on Tuesday to break down the results of the recent election in Brazil, in which family members of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro won across the country.
“The Brazilians are breaking free of the USAID mold that was constructed around it,” Benz said. He said that while a runoff election will take place at the end of the month, it is unlikely that the results will differ as voting is mandatory for all residents. “If anything, they’re much more likely to break towards Bolsonaro.
“So things are looking really beautiful right now to be able to change what has been a very, very dark time both for Brazil and for US-Brazil relations over the past four years."
Posobiec said “we have to dig in here a little bit further,” noting that “there’s this huge shift” not just in Brazil. He said that Benz came under fire for the shutdown of USAID, which had been backing “the global left, particularly in Latin and southern America, and specifically in Brazil.”
Benz said his investigation began as one into “the censorship industrial complex,” and that he kept seeing USAID “everywhere.” He said it became clear “that what you had here was a kind of switch player that could rotate between diplomatic, military, and intelligence-related activities, depending on whatever it needed to be. It was a kind of ultimate shapeshifter, chameleon-type entity.”
“If you think about it, there’s no single thing that USAID does that any other agency doesn’t do,” he added, later saying, “USAID does everything and nothing, so much to say that there’s no reason for USAID to exist unless there was something else going on with everything it does.”
“For example, take Brazil. USAID was funding the labor unions around the Workers’ Party of Lula. Now it was doing that under the banner of providing humanitarian assistance to bolster the labor unions’ ability to organize. It was funding the LGBT groups. It was funding the constitutional law advocates to create fake news bills in the parliament.
"It was funding two dozen different disinformation flagging groups around the Brazilian Supreme Court. It was funding the think tanks, like FGV DAPP. It was funding the universities. It was funding the youth movements. It was funding the identity—the Afro-Brazilian identity groups. It was funding environmental activists.”
“I mean, you're talking about on the order of a third of a billion dollars between USAID and State in funding during that I believe, four-year period between the 2018 and 2022 elections, there the cycle that Bolsonaro led.”
