Thursday, March 21, 2019

The Family Values Boyz: Trump and Bolsonaro



Jair Bolsonaro is the Trump Of The Tropics, an openly misogynist and racist guy who is also the current president of Brazil.  Given that, it was such fun to see the two of them together in the Rose Garden:

But what was perhaps most jarring about Bolsonaro and Trump’s meeting was how closely their worldviews seemed to align. This came across most clearly when Bolsonaro vowed that the US would stand against “fake news.”
“Brazil and the United States stand side by side in their efforts to ensure liberties and respect to traditional family lifestyles, respect to God our creator, and stand against gender ideologies and politically incorrect attitudes and against fake news,” Bolsonaro said Tuesday, through a translator.
His statement, made alongside the US president, was striking, and a direct example of how he ran his campaign and his presidency so far. Bolsonaro and the cabinet he appointed often promote so-called traditional values, and Bolsonaro consistently attacks “gender ideology” — a kind of catchall that refers to LGBTQ rights, feminism, and leftist ideals that he sees as undermining the social order.
Bolsonaro also flings the term “fake news” at his critics, including those in media. He stirs fears over “gender ideology” and berates “fake news” to rally his base and distract from scandals in his administration and his increasingly unpopular agenda; in February, his approval rating fell to about 39 percent.
None of what Bolsonaro said about “gender ideology” received endorsement from Trump — but neither did it get any pushback.

So for Bolsonaro "gender ideologies" is anything that would stop heterosexual men from ruling the roost alone.  In fact, Bolsonaro's use of "gender ideologies" covers even worse shit than that, for in the past he has been openly misogynist.*

The bit about respecting traditional family lifestyles is utterly ludicrous:

We saw two men standing in the Rose Garden, each purporting to defend "family values," each on their third wife, each of those wives younger than the previous one, as if wives were cars to be traded in for a more recent model whenever they look a little bit scuffed.  And I'm pretty sure that neither Trump nor Bolsonaro had much to do with the care of their own children.

 
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* From Wikipedia:

In a public speech in April 2017, Bolsonaro said that he had five children, that the first four were male and that for the fifth he produced a daughter out of "a moment of weakness"

And:

Journalist Glenn Greenwald called Bolsonaro "the most misogynistic, hateful elected official in the democratic world".[124] News.com.au wondered whether Bolsonaro was "the world's most repulsive politician".[121] British news magazine The Economist referred to him as a "radical", "religious nationalist", a "right-wing demagogue", and "apologist of dictators".[125]

Note that it doesn't matter if Bolsonaro's statement about his daughter is a joke.  For it to be a joke, the basis must lie in the implicit assumption that daughters are inferior to sons.  That's what the laughter would be about:  a strongman conceived something inferior.