I've Seen this Show Before

And I did not like it, not one little bit.

In Brazil, we are seeing yet another right wing riot culminating with a takeover of government buildings.

It looks like the usual suspects, including Steve Bannon, were tied up in all of this: (Link)

The attack — the most significant threat to democracy in Latin America’s largest nation since the 1964 military coup — came a week after the inauguration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to succeed Bolsonaro. It suggested a spreading plague of far-right disrupters in Western democracies, as hard-liners radicalized by incendiary political rhetoric refuse to accept election losses, cling to unfounded claims of fraud and undermine the rule of law.

Bolsonaristas occupied the congress building, many of them sitting or lying on the ground. A flag placed in front of the building read “intervention” — a reference to calls for the military to depose Lula, who defeated Bolsonaro in October.

………

Police in the capital meanwhile appeared to relax security measures that had been imposed for inauguration day. Anderson Torres, the secretary of public security in the Brasília Federal District, was Bolsonaro’s justice minister. On Sunday, he condemned the rioters on Twitter, but was fired by the state governor. Brazilian media reported that Torres was in Florida, but he said he was not with Bolsonaro. The Post could not independently confirm his whereabouts.

………

Later Sunday, the president’s legal team called on the Supreme Court to issue a warrant for Torres’s arrest, and demanded an investigation into the organization of the riots on social media. They called on cellular phone companies to keep records so geolocation could be used to identify rioters. They demanded the investigation and prosecution of all involved, including any members of the police. Ibaneis Rocha, governor of the Brasília Federal District, tweeted Sunday night that at least 400 people had been detained.

………

The incident amounted to another uncanny parallel between Bolsonaro and Trump, his political lodestar. Pundits have warned for months of the possibility of a Jan. 6-style action here. For months before the election, Bolsonaro called Lula a corrupt “thief” and claimed without evidence that Brazil’s electronic voting machines were untrustworthy. Since his loss, he has condemned violent protest, but called the election result unfair and encouraged the protest camps outside military installations.

Yeah, "Uncanny Parallels," like having the same organizers.

This is a dress rehearsal for the next time in the United States, or maybe the UK, or Sweden, or Germany, or Japan.

I'm not sure what can be done to stop this once and for all, but a good first step would be to find and identify right wing extremists at all levels of the state security apparatus, whether in the US, Brazil, or wherever, and purge them from their positions.