Tucker Carlson reacted sympathetically to rolling anti-government riots Sunday in Brazil’s capital, claiming—without any evidence—that voters ousted far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro in what was “very clearly a rigged election.”
Instead of offering information to back up any of the widely debunked claims of fraud, the Fox host simply assured viewers that “millions of people in Brazil understand exactly what happened. They know that their democracy has been hijacked, possibly forever.”
Pro-Bolsonaro protesters, Carlson continued, “are angry because the new Lula government has eliminated their most basic civil liberties. Lula is working to turn Brazil into a Chinese-style dictatorship”—again, offering little evidence for the sweeping claims.
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In addition, Carlson did not follow up when his guest, journalist Matthew Tyrmand, asserted that “there were many an agent provocateur” causing damage at the riots and made the stunning claim that “it looks like this is turning into a Reichstag fire,” in reference to the 1933 arson at the German parliament that Nazi leaders exploited to further their rule.
After rioters made their way into Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court and presidential palace, authorities made at least 400 arrests as of early Sunday evening. “There is no precedent in the history of the country [for] what they did today,” current president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva wrote on Twitter in response. “For that they must be punished.”
Bolsonaro, an ally of Donald Trump, fretted to Carlson in an interview just last summer that if he were to lose re-election, the left would remain in power permanently.
After Bolsonaro refused to acknowledge his loss in October, he arrived in the U.S. earlier this month and has reportedly been living in the Florida home of an MMA fighter, perhaps to avoid corruption charges in Brazil.
Over the weekend, he was admitted to an Orlando-area hospital over “abdominal pain”—but posted Monday evening that he had since been discharged.
