RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – After criticizing what he called “climate-ism” and arguing that there is a “climate alarm” used by the press during a speech made on Wednesday, September 11th, at the Heritage Foundation – one of the main conservatives think tanks in the United States , Brazil’s Foreign Minister Ernesto Araújo was harshly criticized by Ishaan Tharoor, columnist for The Washington Post.
After listening to the Chancellor – who, according to Tharoor, “believes that climate change is a Marxist conspiracy,” the journalist said in his Twitter account that it was “an endless stream of victimization by someone in power.”
“Araújo says that [President Jair] Bolsonaro is creating ‘a liberal-conservative amalgam’ based on ‘nation, family, traditional ties’ and opposed to ‘globalism’,” said Tharoor. “This is incredibly ideological for a chancellor abroad.”
The columnist stressed that he had never heard Araujo before and was impressed to see how inconsistent his observations were. “Now he is talking about the 21st-century socialism being [Antonio] Gramsci knowing about the drug cartels. And now he’s quoting [Herbert] Marcuse and all the members of the Frankfurt School,” Tharoor said. “This is incredible. We don’t know if he has ever read about critical neo-Marxist theories beyond what is written in Wikipedia,” he added.
“In addition to being angry with university leftists, the American right-wing would never care about these people or involve their ideas (even if absurdly) in a foreign policy speech. Araújo showed a distinction between Leninism and Stalinism as if someone at Heritage cared.”
Tharoor ends by quoting an interview he did with the Brazilian vice-president, Hamilton Mourão, in April of this year and emphasizing that the general “seemed very angry with Araújo.”
Reactions and criticism
Shortly after publishing his criticisms of Araújo, the journalist said that he was heavily criticized on social networks. “The mentions to me are full of the word ‘shame’ (…), which seems predominant on Brazilian Twitter in the Bolsonaro era, while ‘resist’ was on American Twitter in the first year [of Donald Trump’s administration],” he said.
One of the posts, in response to Tharoor, said that the columnist “is a leftist” and that “Ernesto Araújo is a brave man who exposes the dirt of communism”.
Another said the Washington Post is a “fake news machine” and that “everything Ernesto Araújo said is true, which is why you are trying to ridicule him, just like the newspaper you work for often does with President Donald Trump.”