Understanding Brazil’s New Right and Its Homosexual Grandfather and Its Occult Father
A Conservative Evangelical Review of “The New Brazilian Right” of Nick Burns
By Julio Severo
Brazilianist Nick Burns has produced a
long essay titled “The
New Brazilian Right” in 2019 addressing the forces controlling the
administration of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.
Burns said,
“Finally, there is an evangelical
presence, including a handful of ministers led by a conspicuously uncharismatic
preacher named Damares Alves, one of two women in the cabinet. Evangelicals,
whose ranks have swollen considerably over the past decades in this historically
Catholic country, now make up some 30 percent of Brazilians, and were the one
bloc that voted decisively in Bolsonaro’s favor in 2018. There is an
influential evangelical caucus in the legislature, but the evangelical figures
in the cabinet do not seem to play a high profile in the government’s internal
negotiations.”
Although I do not agree with Burns in
every point, his essay helps us understand why evangelicals, who were decisive
for Bolsonaro’s election, were largely ignored after his inauguration.
To
make up for the weak evangelical presence in government posts, Bolsonaro has attended services in
evangelical churches to receive prayers as a sign that he cares for his
evangelical constituents.
Yet, posts, especially posts in high-level
government ministries, he gave to the extremist group. For example, before his
inauguration, Bolsonaro appointed a member of the extremist group for minister
of Education, who failed in a few months, and Bolsonaro appointed another
member of this groups. After
this member also failed, at last Bolsonaro appointed a Presbyterian, Milton
Ribeiro. He has appointed evangelicals only when he has no choice, but
usually his first choice was to select a member of the extremist group of the
New Right.
Perhaps Bolsonaro has appointed Ribeiro as
Minister of Education out of respect for evangelicals, who were his main voters
in 2018. But it seems that this respect is not very great. Apparently, he does
not want to let evangelicals influence the Ministry of Education a lot.
Just before appointing Ribeiro, Bolsonaro
appointed several adherents of Olavo
de Carvalho to the National Education Council to ensure that Carvalho’s
influence continues in the Brazilian education.
The
National Council of Education is an agency in the Ministry of Education that
formulates and evaluates the national education policy in Brazil. Thus, the
Ministry of Education will be under the direction of a Presbyterian, but the
formulation of the national education policy will in practice be under the
direction of adherents of Carvalho.
The appointment of adherents of
Carvalho in the National Education Council may indicate that Bolsonaro is
mesmerized by Carvalho’s
esoteric fascism, as all of his
appointments of such adherents were a failure.
There is no justification to continue such failures.
It
is not new that evangelicals, who were considered
vital for Bolsonaro’s election, yearned for a position as Minister
of Education. Early in 2019, televangelist Silas Malafaia
had recommended evangelical Guilherme Schelb to the Ministry of Education, but
his recommendation was defeated under the influence of esoteric guru Olavo de Carvalho,
who chose his adherent Ricardo Vélez.
A
good quality of Velez: he did not like socialism. Two bad qualities about him: He didn’t like Trump, but he liked
Hillary Clinton.
When
Vélez became a disaster at the Ministry of Education, Bolsonaro himself
confessed that he had chosen him blindly. He said:
“I
was wrong at the beginning when I appointed Ricardo Vélez as minister. Was it
an indication of Olavo de Carvalho? It was, I won’t deny it… Then I called him:
‘Olavo, where did you know Vélez from?’”
Despite
Vélez’s failure, Bolsonaro gave a new opportunity to Carvalho, who chose
Abraham Weintraub in May 2019. Without delay, Weintraub announced that one of
his priorities would be to increase the number of daycare centers. My reaction
came in the article “Brazilian Minister of Education
Abraham Weintraub and His Right-Wing Socialism or Right-Wing Statism,”
in which I said:
“The
concept of daycare — to move the child away from the mother as early as
possible — is a concept embraced, defended and widely practiced in socialism.”
In
July 2019, under Weintraub, Brazil’s Ministry of Education launched
astrology campaign for students on the internet, but it deleted posts shortly
after criticism from readers that such a campaign was born of the influence of
Olavo de Carvalho, who has a history of astrologer, on the former Minister of
Education.
Weintraub’s
last problem was in May 2020, where he was criticized by the Israeli
Embassy in Brazil and by Jewish organizations in Brazil and the U.S. for comparing
police raids against allies to Nazi persecution against Jews.
With
Vélez and Weintraub, the tentacles of Olavo de Carvalho’s ideological indoctrination
threatened 57 million children and young people in schools in Brazil.
It
is assumed that Bolsonaro did not give Carvalho the opportunity to make a third
(disastrous) choice because right at the beginning of June 2020, Carvalho called the Bolsonaro administration
“sh*t,” saying he can overthrow it.
On January 2020 Bolsonaro fired
Roberto Alvim, the Brazilian top culture official, after Alvim quoted Nazi
Goebbels while talking about nationalist art in a video as Hitler’s
favorite composer played in the background. Alvim is a hard-core adherent of
Carvalho.
For the National Art Foundation, Bolsonaro
appointed Dante Mantovani, a hard-core adherent of Carvalho. After Mantovani
talked about what he should never talk, he was fired. After intense pressure of
Carvalho, he was reinstalled, and again fired.
Among stupid statements of Mantovani are:
“People who believe that the Earth is a
globe are great at making jokes about the self-evident flatness of the Earth’s
surface, but they are absolutely unable to come up with a single argument or proof
of Earth’s delusional sphericity. The closest they get to an argument
supporting the spinning ball are the computer graphics made by NASA, the Cold
War propaganda and disinformation organization, whose authors themselves have
come out to say that it’s all fake.”
Olavo de Carvalho, the guru of Mantovani,
Alvim and other officials in the Brazilian government, at last recognized that
he did a wrong recommendation in the case of the minister of Education. He
confessed that he recommended Vélez to Bolsonaro even though he had no contact
with Vélez for over 20 years! That was his excuse.
Yet, in the case of Ernesto
Araújo, whom he recommended to Bolsonaro as foreign affair minister, he
said that he hit the bull’s eyes. Araújo has openly praised Julius
Evola, the guru of the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. Evola is the
author of several right-wing, anti-Marxist and occult books. Yes, he
advocated at the same time the right-wing, anti-Marxist ideology and
witchcraft.
I am sure that he hit the bull’s eyes,
because Araújo has the same occult preferences Carvalho has.
The
questions are: Why has Bolsonaro largely ignored evangelicals for government
posts since his inauguration? Why has he privileged Carvalho and his New Right?
Nick Burns’ essay answers the latter question.
Burns contends that Bruno Tolentino is the
grandfather of the new Brazilian Right. This Right, which has been given initially
most posts in the Bolsonaro administration, is not to be confounded with
evangelical conservatism, which effectively elected Bolsonaro.
It is hard to deny Burns’ contention that
Tolentino is the grandfather of the new Brazilian Right in the Bolsonaro
administration, because Olavo de Carvalho, dubbed
Bolsonaro’s Rasputin, has praised Tolentino many times for decades.
In his article “Bruno Tolentino (1940-2007),” Carvalho
confessed that he spent many nights with Tolentino, adding that “Bruno
Tolentino lost nothing. Brazil lost,” meaning that Tolentino’s death was a loss
to Brazil.
According to Burns, Tolentino, who died in
2007, “had been diagnosed with AIDS in 1996.” Burns labels Tolentino as a
“bisexual ex-convict.”
“In 1964 Tolentino left for Europe after a
military coup unseated President João Goulart,” said Burns. Only left-wingers
left Brazil in 1964. In his article Carvalho explains that Tolentino lived
almost 30 years in exile in England. Why he chose England, not Cuba, is a
mystery that Carvalho did not explain.
Burns describes Tolentino as being “a
habitual mythologizer of himself” — a characteristic fully inherited by
Carvalho. So the grandfather of the New Right was a mythologizer of himself who
created in Carvalho a mythologizer of himself. Like
grandfather, like father.
Burns says that Tolentino had a homosexual
“affair with a young Englishman, Simon Pringle,” adding that “Tolentino
compelled his ‘Antinous in skinny jeans’ [his homosexual partner Pringle] to
assist him in an attempt to smuggle hashish from Morocco to England by boat.”
Burns explained how Tolentino and his homosexual partner made their drug
smuggling: “Pringle recalls that Tolentino ran the details of the plot by an
Irish mystic to discover whether the omens would favor it.”
Tolentino was convicted for drug smuggling
in 1987. He was sentenced to eleven years in prison, but he served only
thirteen months.
This
does not seem the only involvement of Tolentino with the occult, because Burns
said, “Tolentino had an occultist streak, too—but he never committed the
indignity of publicizing it.” He is probably alluding that while Carvalho
published several books about his occult practices, Tolentino never published
anything about his occult practices.
Burns
said that Tolentino’s exile in England was ended by deportation. He said,
“In
September 1987, Tolentino was caught at Heathrow with a kilogram of cocaine in
his suitcase. He was sentenced to eleven years in prison and served five…
before being released and deported to Brazil in 1993.”
For conservatives, the life of the
grandfather of the New Right in Brazil was a contradiction. Despite that he was
considered “deeply Catholic” and married to a woman, he had had for several
years a homosexual partner in England and he believed in astrology and
candomblé (a form of African witchcraft similar to Santeria and voodoo) and
regularly he consulted with an Irish mystic.
For Brazilians, it is not strange, because
Catholicism in Brazil is traditionally syncretic. Eventually, Simon Pringle
wrote the book “Das Booty – Bruno Tolentino, candomblé, tráfico e poesia: uma
história real” (Das Booty – Bruno Tolentino, candomblé, drug smuggling and
poetry: a real history).
Even though Burns showed that Olavo de
Carvalho inherited from Tolentino much of his right-wing philosophy, he was
unable to expose or understand another major occult influence on Carvalho: The
Islamic occultist René Guénon — perhaps because today Carvalho has made an
extraordinary effort to hide the fact that he is author of several occult books
published in the 1980s.
Burns explains how Carvalho’s interaction with Tolentino was one of the most important factors for getting him established in the Right. He said,
“Carvalho had been a Trotskyite critic of
the military regime, during which he dabbled in esotericism and astrology and
wrote criticism for the mainstream and alternative press. By the nineties, he
had moved to the Right, and fell in with Tolentino’s circle. Under the
influence of his friend the poet, who was his houseguest for a time, Carvalho
wrote what is regarded as his most sustained intellectual engagement, The
Garden of Afflictions.”
Burns showed that, very different from
American intellectual conservatives, Carvalho
“has decided… to claim to know it all.
Only an autodidact could make such a claim… Although his claim has not resulted
in much intellectual success, it has been quite successful politically. One
need only look up the YouTube video where Carvalho insists that there is
‘absolutely no evidence’ for or against heliocentrism to see how exactly it has
panned out.”
Critics of Carvalho’s “wisdom” are treated
with cruelty and violence, Burns said, adding,
“Everyone who disagrees with him is an
idiot, illiterate, mentally deficient, microcephalic.”
Carvalho
is adamant that the Catholic Inquisition never killed any Jews and Protestants
and that it is a myth and lie created by Protestants, especially U.S.
Protestants. And when you successfully argue that he is on the wrong and lying
blatantly, his “philosophical” counter-argument is to revile anyone challenging
his self-granted status of man who knows everything about it.
The Left, whom Carvalho reputes to be his
greatest enemy, has bothered or attacked him in no way about the Inquisition.
Actually, who has been supremely contesting, and consequently been supremely
reviled by his foul mouth, for presenting historical
facts about the Inquisition is an evangelical conservative. Me.
Even in the United States, where Carvalho
lives in a self-imposed exile since 2005, he
is not attacked and blacklisted as I am, in spite of the fact that he has
received from a hypnotized Bolsonaro massive propaganda.
Carvalho has used the
pro-Inquisition subject to rally radical Catholics around himself.
Despite that Carvalho also sees himself as
a Catholic, his stances on homosexuality are confusing, and Burns has noticed
it. Carvalho believes in a “natural” homosexuality not condemned by God. Burns
thinks that it is strange that as a Catholic, Carvalho does not express clearly
his views on homosexuality, but he seems suspicious about Carvalho’s close
relationship with homosexual Tolentino. He said,
“Perhaps ironically, the way Carvalho
describes the intellectual affair between him and Tolentino during those
sleepless nights in the mid-nineties, while Carvalho wrote The Garden of
Afflictions, seems to echo Socrates’s discussion of same-sex love in the
Symposium: the ‘begetting of a beautiful thing by means of both the body and
the soul.’”
Interestingly,
Steve Bannon, who was influenced by
Guénon just as Carvalho was, has also strange views on homosexuality.
Traditionally, occultists are more likely to
embrace, and more unlikely to condemn, homosexuality than conservative
Christians.
 |
| Olavo de Carvalho and Steve Bannon |
Burns
described the union of Carvalho and Tolentino:
“unlikely
duo of a former Trotskyite astrologer and a bisexual ex-convict, and the story
of how they led a handful of belligerent malcontents with eclectic tastes,
murky biographies, few credentials, and no political connections to craft the
earliest form of what is now the official ideology of the Brazilian
government.”
As an additional evidence that the New
Right in the Bolsonaro administration is directly influenced by Carvalho, Burns
said that Ernesto Araújo, the Brazilian Foreign Minister chosen by Carvalho,
“seems to offer a conservative defense not just of popular superstition [occult]
but also, by proxy, of Carvalho’s penchant for the occult.”
Araújo, an open admirer of Carvalho, is
also an open admirer of René Guénon, for years recommended by Carvalho. Araújo
is also an open admirer of Julius Evola, an Italian philosopher who with his
books advocating occultism and the Right inspired fascism and Nazism.
Burns said,
“One of Araújo’s intellectual low points
was to propound the ‘Nazism was left-wing’ canard, which was subsequently taken
up in public by Bolsonaro, even during a state visit to Israel. The reaction in
the Brazilian and international press was furious.”
Burns is right. How
can Araújo say that Nazism was left-wing if his own right-wing inspiration is
Evola, the same inspiration of fascists and Nazis? Araújo was so
contradictory as any occultist is.
Even though for his election Bolsonaro
depended on evangelicals, he has been careful to grant power to the New Right,
not to conservative evangelicals. Burns said,
“the direct and conspicuous power Carvalho
has exerted on the administration, from picking and choosing ministers to using
his social media presence to sow discord between the military men and his
allies in the government, is surely unprecedented.”
As Tolentino was often praised by
Carvalho, it is necessary to understand how the bad habits of the father of the
New Right are influencing the Bolsonaro administration. Tolentino was an expert
at self-mythologizing. According to an obituary written by literary scholar
Chris Miller, Tolentino was a character “stranger than fiction,” and his claims
about literary friendships had so many exaggerations that made it very
difficult to tell truth from fiction.
Such is the behavior of a self-mythologizing
and mythomaniac. How far is this from Carvalho, who was influenced by
Tolentino?
If Tolentino is the grandfather of the New
Right, can Carvalho be considered the father of the New Right that has
colonized the Bolsonaro administration?
“I do not know what the new right is. I
want them to screw. It’s a bunch of swindlers,” Carvalho said in an interview
with Folha de S. Paulo, a newspaper he loathes as left-wing, but he does not
miss a single opportunity to be interviewed by them. To abhor and accept at the
same time is an opportunistic attitude.
Does anyone doubt that Carvalho’s
adherents are a bunch of swindlers? Carvalho’s answer only confirms what many
have already noticed.
“If the Brazilian right accepts as a
‘leader’ anyone that the mainstream media presents to him as such, the future
of the left is guaranteed,” said Carvalho, whom the Brazilian mainstream media,
including Folha de S. Paulo, presents as the “leader” of the Brazilian right.
His tongue backfired.
To attack and at the same time to embrace
is a typical behavior of adherents of René Guénon. When U.S.
President Donald Trump expelled Steve Bannon, a Guénon adherent, from the White
House, he said,
“Steve pretends to be at war with the
media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White
House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more
important than he was. It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a
one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a
few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books.”
Guenonians are opportunists, and Trump saw
it very well. Carvalho
and Bannon became allies, but Carvalho distanced himself from Bannon as
soon as Bannon
got involved in scandals.
Even though Carvalho’s adherents allege
that he is fighting communism since the 1980s, actually in the 1980s Carvalho
travelled to the United States to attend secret meetings of Martin Lings, an adherent of Guénon.
Bannon
and Carvalho are modern Julius Evolas: Conveniently populists,
right-wingers, Catholics, but occultists. Nick Burns seems to have ignored it.
Where does Tolentino fit in this? He and
Carvalho were together all the time when Carvalho was writing his best-sellers
— O Jardim das Aflições (The Garden of Afflictions) and O Imbecil Coletivo (The
Collective Imbecile) — in the 1990s that eventually inspired the Brazilian New
Right. In fact, they were so together that it is not known if Tolentino was the
real author or inspired most of Carvalho’s ideas.
So, the suspicious origins of the
Brazilian New Right —with Tolentino, Guenon and other occult influences —
furnished the ingredients to transform Olavo de Carvalho in a new
Julius Evola, a syncretic Catholic who became the messiah of the New Right
that passionately advocates the revisionism of the Inquisition. All of this
contributed to make Carvalho Bolsonaro’s Rasputin, highly
awarded and propagandized by Bolsonaro.
If everything goes wrong in the Bolsonaro
administration, Carvalho will be the first to disavow what he calls his own
creation. Probably, he will blame evangelicals.
“The right is full of pure mentally sick
people,” said Carvalho, feigning to forget that these mentally sick people have
a mentally sick, opportunist, occult and deceptive father. This is the Right he
created inspired by Tolentino and Guénon.
"That’s why when I am introduced as a
‘conservative philosopher,’ the only answer I can think of is: ‘Conservative is
the bitch who gave birth to you, who kept you in her belly for nine months
instead of letting you fall into the toilet,’” said Carvalho.
Why Jair Bolsonaro has hindered
evangelicals, who elected him, from have a prominent presence in his
administration, but has let “mentally sick people” and “a bunch of swindlers”
colonize prominently his administration is a mystery that only dark and occult
forces know.
Since the only prominent way Bolsonaro has
allowed evangelicals to contribute for his administration is praying or
appointing them only after massive failures of adherents of Carvalho he had
appointed in the first place, evangelicals should use prayer for the good of
Brazil.
They need to pray, because Bannon’s
Guenonian movement, knowing very well that evangelicals were decisive for
Bolsonaro’s victory, intends to exploit Brazilian evangelicals more for its own
benefit.
The legacy of a homosexual grandfather and
an occult father in the New Right in the Bolsonaro administration is a massive
curse on Brazil.
Conservative evangelicals who prayed for
the defeat of the Left and for Bolsonaro’s victory now have a new challenge: To
pray against the dark and occult forces of the New Right that have prominently
colonized the Bolsonaro administration.
Portuguese
version of this article: Entendendo a nova direita do Brasil, seu avô
homossexual e seu pai ocultista
Recommended Reading:
Astrologer Olavo de Carvalho calls for
Brazilian Federal Police to investigate Julio Severo on the allegation that
accusations against him involving the Inquisition and occultism are collusions
paid by the Russian government that threaten the Brazilian national security
“Idiotic astrologer”: Response from Brazilian
televangelist Silas Malafaia to Olavo de Carvalho, who said that “Every evil
that happens in Brazil comes from evangelical churches”
Supported by Evangelicals Angry with the
Left and Its Anti-Family Attacks, Jair Bolsonaro Is Elected Brazilian President
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