Defeated right-wing Brazil president Jair Bolsonaro railed against "science" and "gender ideology," and is still suspicious he didn't get as many votes as the last election in an angry rant from the stage at CPAC Saturday.
He revved up the previously sleepy crowd with his impassioned speech, which was presented in Portuguese and translated sentence by sentence.
Bolsonaro blasted a push in his nation for COVID vaccines, characterizing it as a constraint on liberty.
“I always defended freedom; I did not force anyone to be vaccinated in Brazil,” Bolsonaro said about his management of the COVID pandemic in Brazil. "They keep saying 'science, science, science,' but what I say is 'freedom, freedom, freedom,'” he added, indicating the two are mutually exclusive.
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He praised guns — and families headed by heterosexual parents.
“When we speak of conservatism, what we fight for are basic things – family. We don’t want gender ideology. We want children growing, looking up to their fathers, boys and girls looking up to their mothers,” said Bolsonaro.
Guns, he insisted, are necessary for freedom.
“I always said in Brazil, an armed people will never be enslaved. And an armed nation will never be subjugated," Bolsonaro noted.
He sounded like Donald Trump when he raised suspicious about Brazil's presidential vote — in his case, handing the victory to his progressive opponent Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
“I thank God…for being the president of Brazil for one term… but I feel deep inside, this mission is not over,” he warned.
Bolsonaro also bragged that his relationship with Donald Trump was "exceptional" — which drew a roar from the crowd.
