The Biden administration spent over $322 million in taxpayer money to subvert Brazil’s conservative President Jair Bolsonaro — bankrolling censorship, lawfare, and political persecution that ultimately landed Bolsonaro in prison.
Now President Trump is exposing the scheme.
As Brazil heads toward an October election likely to pit Lula against Bolsonaro’s son Flávio, Trump’s pressure campaign against the Brazilian government could help unravel one of the Left’s most insidious foreign operations — one that weaponized U.S. agencies to crush a conservative ally abroad.
“THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION CHANGED POLICY SPECIFICALLY ON BRAZIL — USAID DISBURSEMENTS MORE THAN DOUBLED AFTER BOLSONARO’S 2018 VICTORY.”
The paper trail is damning. Under the guise of combating “misinformation,” Biden officials used the U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy, the U.S. Embassy in Brasilia, and the National Science Foundation to fund Brazilian media, academia, and political agents working to undermine Bolsonaro.
The revelations came to light through the Twitter Files scandal — evidence Elon Musk released after acquiring the platform — and investigations by the Department of Government Efficiency into federal spending.
Cyber-forensic analysis by Mike Benz and Michael Shellenberger revealed the scale: enormous flows of U.S. money and political interference targeting pro-Bolsonaro networks, conservative influencers, and right-wing social media.
The strategy mirrored what the Left attempted against Trump — censorship and discrediting first, then lawfare and cancellation. In the U.S., it failed. In Brazil, it succeeded.
Bolsonaro is imprisoned. His top influencers and aligned journalists are in exile. His policies have been almost completely reversed.
The trigger was a false-flag operation on inauguration day — the same playbook used against Trump on January 6. Both Biden and Lula officials feigned outrage over election protests after decades of justifying far worse violence from their own side.
The American Left has a record: BLM riots that killed dozens and caused billions in damage, assassination attempts on President Trump and Charlie Kirk, the Congressional baseball shooting, ANTIFA attacks on federal facilities, lawless autonomous zones, university riots targeting conservative speakers, and the hounding of Supreme Court justices during confirmation hearings.
Brazil’s Left has its own: illegal property occupations by the Sem Terra movement, violent censorship of conservatives in universities (turning campuses into Marxist sanctuaries), and legal protection for inner-city gangs involved in organized crime and drug trafficking.
Neither country’s Right has anything remotely comparable. Yet both were scapegoated for single protest events.
The pandemic was the initial weapon. The Democratic Party and Brazil’s Workers’ Party used COVID to police speech and censor the online Right.
The National Science Foundation took the academic route — subsidizing U.S. universities researching “pandemic misinformation” in Brazil, then partnering them with Brazilian fact-checkers and Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court.
These entities had a vested interest in silencing independent social media and right-wing narratives. Mainstream media saw social platforms as competitors. Civil servants feared budget cuts under Bolsonaro that could threaten their tenured positions.
The greatest purveyors of misinformation turned out to be the mainstream media themselves — backtracking on masks, vaccine efficacy, virus origins, side effects, lockdown harms, and the necessity of vaccinating children (still recommended by Brazilian health authorities today).
NSF grants ran into the millions and included racial and ideological hiring clauses — “Minority-Led Partnerships” — ensuring projects skewed non-white and anti-right-wing. Purpose statements explicitly painted Bolsonaro supporters as spreaders of dangerous disinformation.
The National Endowment for Democracy funded think tanks and social media influencers directly. Some publicly called for ending online dialogue between Bolsonaro and Trump supporters. Mission statements targeted the “malicious use of false information” — but scrutiny never fell on mainstream media or left-wing politicians.
“A FOREIGN EMBASSY BANKROLLING THE POLITICAL ACTORS RESPONSIBLE FOR CENSORSHIP AND POLITICAL PERSECUTION — NOT A GOOD LOOK.”
The U.S. Embassy engaged directly with superstar YouTuber Felipe Neto through his Instituto Vero. Neto ended up with an official role in Lula’s Ministry of Human Rights, running a task force against “hate speech” and “extremism.”
His institute briefs Supreme Federal Court judges — the same judges who imprisoned Bolsonaro, tried to ban Twitter, and arbitrarily arrested journalists without jurisdiction.
Neto had direct access to Twitter executives in the pre-Musk era and requested arbitrary bans and account suspensions for ideological reasons — just like Brazil’s infamous judge Alexandre de Moraes.
The International Republican Institute, National Democratic Institute, and Stanford University collaborated with a Brazilian fact-checker to create a guide advocating backdoor, opaque connections between governments and social media executives to monitor and fight “false information” and “hate speech.”
Over time, the language became more extreme. One NDI-funded report in Brazil called for a “zero-tolerance policy for gendered, sexualized, racist, and other forms of hate speech.”
Led by ultra-partisan Supreme Federal Court Justice Moraes, Brazil’s judiciary carried out a campaign of intimidation by inquest, active censorship, proscription by arrest without habeas corpus, and forced exile.
A Brazilian jurist described the situation as one in which the “judge abandons institutional inertia to assume functions that should belong to the police and the Public Prosecutor’s Office, forming judgments incompatible with impartiality.“
The right-wing newspaper Gazeta do Povo recently listed 104 rule of law violations by Moraes: disrespect for legal deadlines, ignoring impartiality standards, conflicts of interest, partisan censorship, carte blanche investigations, bypassing official procedures in arbitrary arrests, illegal accumulation of functions (acting as investigator, judge, and even plaintiff simultaneously), abusive bail fees, sealed proceedings, arrests en masse without individual legal proceedings, interference outside his jurisdiction, arbitrary removal of defendants’ legal representatives, punitive measures against relatives of defendants, unlimited jurisdiction, partisan censorship during campaigns, submission of evidence gathered after the fact, and court-mandated violations of freedom of speech and press.
In some cases, imprisoned Bolsonaro supporters face physical danger — Brazilian prisons are controlled by organized crime, which favors left-wing parties. Others end up in solitary confinement for protection, contributing to physical and mental degradation.
Filipe Martins, a former Bolsonaro adviser, remains in solitary confinement.
Will any federal official ever be held accountable?
