Congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro of Sao Paulo – a Brazilian conservative and the son of President Jair Bolsonaro, explained to Breitbart News Daily host Matthew Boyle on Friday that leftists and globalists have launched an assault on the culture of Brazilians as they have against peoples of many other countries.
Bolsonaro spoke to Boyle on Friday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily live from the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, DC. Bolsonaro, elected to Brazil’s Congress with the highest number of votes in history, is attending the conference in part as a representative of the burgeoning conservative movement in his country that brought his father to power last year after over a decade of socialist rule. The elder Bolsonaro won the presidency on a campaign of family values, individual freedom, and divorcing Brazil from malevolent international forces such as the governments of China and Venezuela.
Bolsonaro noted to Boyle that Brazil has a rich history of immigration and that its diversity is “a very good thing,” but the state has a responsibility to prevent “terrorists and bad guys” from exploiting the immigration system. He also noted that many of today’s immigrants, unlike those of the past, have begun insisting that Brazil adapt to their culture rather than respecting their host country’s identity.
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“Our country is our house; not everyone enters our house. Before entering my house, it’s necessary to know who these people are,” Bolsonaro told Boyle. “This is nothing against any country, or whatever – it’s just to check the background of who is coming with you.”
“Brazil, if you take a look at our history, we receive people from everywhere in the world. If you look at me, I look pretty Italian. If you look at my team, there are guys that look Arab, others are black people, and this is, I think, a very good thing,” Bolsonaro continued, “But we have to take a look at the background because, sometimes, you have terrorists and bad guys together, they infiltrate themselves in those groups and they try to come to Brazil. And sometimes they can use Brazil to try to come to the U.S.”
Bolsonaro attributed the successful history of a diverse Brazil to the mutual respect between immigrants and locals.
“In Brazil, black slavery ended in 1888. After that, we started to receive in Brazil workers to [replace] the black slaves. It was a time when, in Brazil, we were receiving people from Italy, Germany, Spain, and usually they were poor European people,” he said. “But when they arrived in Brazil at the time, they kept their culture, and they didn’t try to change the culture of Brazil. The difference is that nowadays we are receiving people and they want to force us to have their same culture, and this is how we start all of the fights. And sometimes what you see is the globalists blaming us because of these conflicts when, at the end of the day, it is not up to us, it is up to them that they are coming in[to] our country.”
“We have a right to keep Brazil speaking Portuguese, as a Christian culture, loving soccer, and all of those things that we have as our culture, as our identity,” Bolsonaro asserted. “And this is also why you can see the globalists usually trying to delete our history.”
Bolsonaro applauded Americans for being aware of their history, lamenting that he could not say the same for many of his compatriots.
“In Brazil, if you go to the streets, asking people, ‘who are the Brazilian founding fathers?’ I can guarantee for you, 90 percent of the people won’t know how to answer this question,” he predicted. “So this is something that we have to rescue and the conservative movement that is getting strong and stronger in Brazil, we are trying to improve, trying to rescue, because a people without memory is a country without culture.”
Bolsonaro also spoke of the improvements that Brazil has seen in the past year under his father’s presidency, including a 20-percent drop in the homicide rate and a marked economic improvement. He attributed these things to the elder Bolsonaro stripping Brazil of years of onerous socialist policies, selling off unwieldy public companies, and making it easier for middle class Brazilians to seek economic prosperity.
“We reduced by 20 percent the number of murders [in the country] and, last year, we gave easier access to the people to buy their own guns,” Bolsonaro noted. “And another example is the economy is going great. We are growing again, a little more than one percent last year, and also we created 1 million jobs.”
In contrast, he noted, Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro has largely nationalized the entire Venezuelan economy and made it impossible for Venezuelans unconnected to the regime to attempt to make money.
“We are giving freedom to people to make it easier to open your own business. In Venezuela, they control everything. In Venezuela, they are doing so bad, when you talk about their public oil company, the amount of oil they are producing a year is going down,” he noted. “In Brazil, we are on the other side, we are opening our oil fields to foreign companies.”
Bolsonaro also condemned Maduro for silencing unfriendly press, noting that the Bolsonaro administration has to deal with plenty of “fake news,” but does not interfere in allowing journalists to work.
“We have all the press working in Brazil, even those that are producing a lot of fake news,” he said. “We don’t care about it, it is not up to the government to control that. It is up to the people to choose what they want to consume.”
Bolsonaro even admitted to having “some fun” mocking the fake news press in Brazil.
Bolsonaro, who represents Sao Paulo, one of Brazil’s largest cities, thanked Boyle and applauded “the legacy of Andrew [Breitbart]” in alerting conservatives to think of culture in addition to mere Washington politics. He also urged listeners to join him on social media, where he is very active.
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