Covid Denialist and Bolsonaro Ally Olavo De Carvalho Died of Virus, Says Daughter
Covid Denialist and Bolsonaro Ally Olavo De Carvalho Died of Virus, Says Daughter
Bolsonaro is still talking about these Olavista ideas in a Brazil where people just want solutions to the pandemic, hunger, and unemployment, said AS/COA's Brian Winter to The Guardian.
Olavo de Carvalho, the coronavirus-denying mentor of Jair Bolsonaro and Brazil’s radical right, has died in the United States, with one of his children citing Covid-19 as the cause.
“The family … asks for prayers for the professor’s soul,” relatives said on Twitter after announcing the death of the 74-year-old polemicist – a towering figure in contemporary Brazilian politics who was adored and abhorred in equal measure by millions of followers and foes…
Brian Winter, a Brazil specialist who interviewed Carvalho at his rifle-filled Virginia home, said Bolsonaro’s guru had helped import “a kind of tropicalized Fox News culture focused on gender, guns and anti-globalism”.
Winter said during the first decade of this century – as Brazil flourished under the leftist government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – Carvalho was widely considered a “crazy crank”. However, during the 2010s, as the country sank into profound recession and political turmoil, his intellectual-sounding “profanity-laced vitriol” against the left suddenly gained traction. Bookshops sold hundreds of thousands of copies of his most famous work, The Least You Must Know to Avoid Being an Idiot – a tome Bolsonaro promoted after winning power.
Winter remembered first seeing Carvalho’s name at a 2013 anti-government protest on a poster reading: “Olavo was right.”
“He and Bolsonaro were products of the titanic trauma that Brazil endured during the 2010s: the worst recession in a hundred years, the collapse of the political establishment, corruption scandals everywhere you looked, 70,000 homicides a year. Out of this despair, he and Bolsonaro happened to emerge as the winners because they sounded so radically different from anything that happened before. That was their appeal.”
Many believe that appeal is now fading, with former president Lula seemingly poised to trounce Bolsonaro in October’s election.
“Part of the struggle Bolsonaro is having now is that he’s still going around talking about gun rights and gender and these other Olavista ideas in a Brazil where people just want solutions to the pandemic, hunger and unemployment,” Winter said.
“Bolsonaro is playing the Olavista oldies and most Brazilians want to be hearing something else.”
