Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has spent more than two months denying the results of last year’s Brazilian presidential election, helping to lay the groundwork for the attacks on government buildings over the weekend carried out by supporters of defeated former President Jair Bolsonaro. The mob violence from Bolsonaro’s supporters bore a striking resemblance to the attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol two years ago, which Bannon also helped to foment.

The day after the pro-Bolsonaro, anti-democracy riot, Bannon defended the protesters’ perceived grievances on his War Room podcast. “The key is legitimacy, you must show you are legitimate,” Bannon said. “There were millions and millions — tens of millions of people in the street, working class people, and particularly … Evangelical Christians that are not prepared to sit there and let an atheistic, Marxist, communist criminal like Lula steal the election and steal their country.”

Bannon has been questioning the legitimacy of the Brazilian election process since former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, was declared the winner on October 30. In the immediate aftermath of Bolsonaro’s loss, Bannon baselessly claimed on his podcast that the vote totals couldn’t be trusted and urged Bolsonaro to fight on. He was frequently joined by Matthew Tyrmand, a conservative activist who has claimed to discover mathematical anomalies that call the Brazilian election results into question. (An analysis from the Brazilian military did not find evidence of fraud in the election.)

Despite Bannon’s pleas, Bolsonaro ultimately acknowledged the results on November 2, 2022, although he didn’t technically concede. In late December, Bolsonaro traveled to Florida, where he remains, while still facing mounting investigations in his home country.

Bannon and Tyrmand continued to cast doubt on the vote totals even after Bolsonaro had at least nominally accepted defeat. On November 3, Bannon invited Tyrmand on War Room to discuss the pro-Bolsonaro street protests following his electoral defeat. “The piece was amazing,” Bannon said, referring to an article Tyrmand had recently published. “You can see how they stole this.”

The pro-Bolsonaro forces are “up against a transnational criminal class that has both partnerships with the party of Davos, the World Economic Forum, and the Chinese Communist Party. That’s what’s trying to take over Brazil,” Bannon continued. Those remarks echoed an argument also put forward by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson claiming that the CCP is using Lula to turn Brazil into a de facto Chinese colony.

“What you see in the streets is the people of Brazil saying, ‘We don’t want that,’” Bannon concluded.

Tyrmand then speculated about a military audit in the case of fraud, “which you and I certainly believe there is, based on what we’ve seen with our own eyes,” he told Bannon.

Later that month, Tyrmand returned to the show to discuss the ongoing protests, which he described as “the largest street demonstrations in human history.”

“This brings back memories of the people in the streets fighting Soviet communism in the late ‘80s, when the Berlin Wall was coming down,” Tyrmand claimed. “You know what, this is orders of magnitude bigger.”

“It’s the Brazilian Spring,” Bannon added.

Tyrmand then claimed that social media posts showed voting machines had been improperly transported from their storage areas and insinuated that it was evidence of potential tampering or fraud.

“The election was stolen,” Bannon replied.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.