By Jacob Mchangama
Last Friday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio went on X to announce the immediate revocation of the visa of Brazilian Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes, as well as “his allies on the court [and] their immediate family members.”
What drove Rubio to take such a drastic step against leading members of the Federal Supreme Court in the largest democracy in Latin America? Rubio invoked President Trump’s policy of holding “accountable foreign nationals who are responsible for censorship of protected expression in the United States,” pointing in particular to Moraes’ central role in what he called a “witch hunt” against former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who was placed under house arrest and banned from social media earlier this month. According to Rubio, this campaign has produced “a persecution and censorship complex so sweeping that it not only violates basic rights of Brazilians, but also extends beyond Brazil’s shores to target Americans.”
There is great hypocrisy in Rubio’s actions, given his own zealous and unapologetic efforts to monitor, detain and deport green card and visa holders in the United States for speech protected under the First Amendment—not to mention President Trump’s recent $10 billion lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal over what he claims were “false, defamatory, and malignant statements” linking the president to Jeffrey Epstein. But as with Vice President Vance’s much-debated criticism of increasing European censorship, the Trump administration’s failure at home to live up to the principles it preaches to (some) foreign governments abroad does not invalidate the accusations of censorship and suppression.
In fact, Brazil—from which I just returned after promoting the Portuguese translation of my book Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media—offers a troubling but instructive lesson in why censorship is a cure worse than the disease when confronting the illiberal populism that tempts voters and alarms elites across the democratic world.
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Jacob Mchangama is the Founder and Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech. He is also a research professor at Vanderbilt University and a Senior Fellow at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).