#my mother loves to send me things she found on lgbt facebook groups

[weatheredcopper]

thank you trans rights miku from my mom...

[gllded]

*exhales into the mic* what’s up miles nation --- my name is mac, short for macaroni and cheese. i live on the west coast, i’m of legal drinking age in the US and i go by she / they pronouns !  this rp honestly looks so cute that i had to bring madeline, a character i indie’d for a hot second but really loved writing. take a look under the cut to know more about her and drop me a dm either here or on discord ( 𝖎𝖈𝖊𝖉 𝖔𝖚𝖙 𝖒𝖞 𝖜𝖗𝖎𝖘𝖙, 𝖙𝖎𝖙𝖆𝖓𝖎𝖈#3596 ) if you wanna plot !! 

THE GOOGLE SEARCH

⋆ ° ⟡ ( LEE SUNG KYUNG, twenty-eight, cis female, she/her ) i saw HYEJEONG “MADELINE” BAEK at the winter palace. did you know that the HEIRESS is originally from SOUTH KOREA? i heard they can be quite BRATTY, but also LOYAL. there’s rumours they’re at the winter palace because HER PARENTS WANT HER TO SETTLE DOWN, but you never know. FRONT SEAT AT FASHION WEEK, RED LIPSTICK STAINS ON WHISKEY GLASSES, and A PRIVATE JET READY TO FLY TO THE NEAREST LUXURY RESORT always remind me of them. 

THE WIKIPEDIA PAGE

you’ve seen the dramas. the young and disillusioned chaebol heirs, with their noses turned up at the common folk they toy with. their mothers, a cold and manipulating force with a check ready to ward off any suitors unfit for their children. their fathers, distant and perpetually too busy with work to spend an ounce of their time with their families. they live in their own world, untouchable and impenetrable to the public as they live their lives planned out to the second, all before they’re even given the chance to think for themselves. and maybe it was true, for some people, but it wasn’t true for madeline.

growing up in one of the most important families in south korea, madeline never wanted for anything she couldn’t have. toys, sweets, even spontaneous trips to amusement parks were always given to her without hesitation by the people who were raising her. of course, she still saw her parents at dinnertime: but her parents weren’t as cold and distant like you would expect. sure, they were busy – they were running one of the biggest companies in the country – but they still managed to take an hour out of their busy schedule to spend some time with their children. it was a loving household as much as it could be, with madeline and her older brother being raised by the au pairs and house keepers around their countryside villa, spending most of their time in their own little bubble. madeline just thought this was how all families were, how all childhoods were. she didn’t even realize how much her name was worth, or how important her family was until she entered school.

she enrolled in private school at around eight years old, having been tutored privately before that. it was a change from her old ways, suddenly immersed in an environment where everyone had everything to say. there were children of similar high social, economic, and political status, who weren’t afraid to sharing who they were related to and what their parents did.

madeline felt uneasy by it all, not used to talking about how much her family made, or how much more privileged she was than other students. but she still fell into a group, out of fear of loneliness. they were kids like her, children of extremely wealthy business owners, who became some of her closest friends.

madeline wasn’t so much the sweet girl she once was. being around those kids who knew the power of their wealth turned her sour. she was, for lack of a better word, a brat, then on; pushing the limits of what she could do to those around her and what those around her could do for her. she was the ice queen, the mean girl, the rich bitch. she was superficial, demeaning, demanding. she put up the front of who these people wanted her to be, and excelled at it.

but she was also one her circle of friends could come to. she was their confidante, their shoulder to cry on, someone they could trust. she held her friends’ hands as their parents went through divorces, defended them as scandals poured out into the public, and offered a place to stay when things at home turned nuclear. madeline ended up caring for the people who were compensating for the lack of compassion and intimacy in their earlier years because she understood what lives they lived.

she considered herself lucky that her parents still cared. and that they allowed her to do what she pleased so long as she was safe and didn’t jeopardize the family name. she couldn’t say the same for her friends. it dawned on her early on that their lives were not theirs to live, that every detail, from what they would study in school to how many children they would have, was decided for them. they were heirs, after all. and the fact that madeline didn’t have that expectation on her eventually drove a wedge between her and the others. so she was left in the dust, with the people in her social circles moving on with their lives, leaving madeline to find something – anything to occupy her time. 

as the youngest child and only daughter to the ceo of one of south korea’s largest and most established conglomerates, there wasn’t a place for her in the company like there was for her older brother. so after university, she decided she had the freedom to do whatever and whomever she wanted, leaving a trail of broken glass and broken hearts behind her in the prime of her twenties. she became a social media influencer -- getting paid to go to events, to frequent resorts and hotels, to be merely photographed with a designer handbag -- and traveled the world meeting new people and paving her own way apart from the corporate image her family had cultivated. 

madeline’s life was a mile high until about two months ago when her father was hospitalized from a minor heart attack. her brother had finally gotten a hold of her after hours of her being awol, partying up in dubai with her latest girlfriend. he had been furious when she answered, nearly forgetting to tell her why he had called in the first place, and summoned her back to seoul. her father had turned out to be okay, in the end, but it was still scary to think she could have missed him had it been more severe and had she actually been unreachable. 

her brother and mother ganged up on her while her father made a decision. it was time for madeline to settle down; time for her to be serious about her life and to start being worthy of her family name. no matter how much she would kick and scream about it, she knew it was futile. she cut down on plain disappearing for months at a time and started to receive possible betrothals, though it was plenty difficult to find one in a country as socially conservative as south korea on account of madeline being a “big fat lesbian”. 

her parents had just begun to widen their radius, researching bachelorettes from around the world, when the news of crown princess mignonette’s search for a spouse. madeline thought it was a joke that her parents wanted her to throw her hat into the ring until she was seated onto a plane bound for genovia. madeline thinks it’s a long shot to court the crown princess, but at least she’s getting a vacation out of it. 

THE MATCH.COM PROFILE

- madeline is a partial heiress to one of south korea’s largest and most established conglomerates, baek100. founded a short time after the korean war, baek100 has a stake in nearly every aspect of people’s lives: apartment complexes, motor engines for public buses, kitchen appliances, cosmetics, department stores, flash-frozen foods, and several branches of entertainment. accumulating a worth of over 10 trillion won ( approx. 9 billion usd ) -- not including the family’s own separate private investments -- the company has contributed greatly to the mass boom in south korea’s gdp in the last three generations. 

- while madeline had most of her schooling done in south korea, she spent her university years in the united states, graduating in public relations from usc in southern california. it is in university when she started going by madeline because she was tired of her professors butchering her given name.  ( “is there a hi-jung here ? a hi-jung bake ?” ) 

- she gay. if that wasn’t clear in her being in genovia to court the princess, i’m saying it now. she came out to her parents when they tried to arrange a marriage to the son of a family friend when she was sixteen. they have been surprisingly supportive of her being a lesbian and have made her the poster child of their lgbt campaigns during pride month.  ( evidently her mother has also been sending her articles about the emerging science behind two women being able to have a baby without a sperm donor ) 

- because of her status as a social media influencer, she’s been able to make her own money separate from what she gets from her family. although her endorsement deals are not a match from what her trust fund provides for her, it still fills her with pride when her personal bank account adds on another digit to it’s overall balance. she can easily live a humble life off it, but the influencer gig is really just for fun and only started because someone offered to pay her to show up to their birthday party. 

THE FACEBOOK FRIENDS 

- close friends. madeline is the type to offer up her life for the people she loves and her tight knit group of friends know this. it could be that they grew up knowing each other or just ended up falling into the same circles, but her life is better because of you and vice versa. 

- enemies / frenemies. as loyal and compassionate as she can be to those she’s close to, she can be equally bratty and materialistic to just about anyone. madeline’s personality is not for everyone and she can get a little catty if she feels she needs to be on the defensive. 

- exes. first love or passing fling, madeline has always found herself someone to keep herself from feeling lonely. now that she’s trying to buckle down and find a wife, that may irk you considering she was never one to be in a serious committed relationship when you were together. 

- social circle. not quite ride or dies, but you see each other at events often enough to know one another well. she respects you and your family enough to walk up to you first, to invite you to places, and to argue about picking up the dinner tab with you. 

- brother (wc). while madeline is a bit of the black sheep, she is still considerably close with her family and this is especially true with her brother. on the outside madeline and her older brother are opposites but they are more complimentary than people might think. she respects her brother and knows he wants the best for her. 

- mother’s assistant (wc).  one of her mother’s many assistants tasked with accompanying madeline to genovia to keep tabs on her. y/m basically reports things back to her mom if she’s misbehaving but she’s constantly trying to go off and do things she’s not supposed to.

[chickenstuffedwithmozzarella]

Holiii!! I saw the pic of Liam and Honey😍😍😍 Asdfahs. They are so cute! And also, i love Liam's eyes. It'a such a nice colour!! And i also saw the gifs!! I love that gif of Louis.  HE LOOKS SO SOFT. I could cry. And Harry😂😂😂 Its such a mood. I always flip people off like that. Jajajaja. AND THE GIF OF HARRY WITH THE PINK JACKET. 😍He is dancing funny and i love hiiim.  Oh, and i havent read that fic but i'll read it asap and then i'll tell you about it. Promise. Thanks for the rec💖 (1)

Hiiii, Love!!!! I’m so sorry it took me so long to answer! but yesterday I was busy, and when I came home my head hurt like a b*tch, 😖😖. Liam’s eyes very pretty, aren’t they? Everyone likes him better (poor honey). I always flip people like that too, jajaja, that’s why I needed a gif, and I found the best, jajajaja. I couldn’t resist. I’m already rereading that fic,😅. I love re reading things I read a long while ago, bc my English has improved a bit since I came to tumblr, and it’s like reading things for the first time again, so cool.

It wasnt hard being updated bcs OT was everywhere, but yeah. I always try to engage in my friend’s hobbies. & some of them do the same. One of my friends used to be a 1D fan before i met her, and though she is not longer in the fandom she tries to be updated. She sends me memes or things that remind her of 1d. She even watched a video of BG without me knowing/telling her about it. I dont deserver her. Ay, and last week she watched freddieismyqueen videos with me on a free period. I 💖 her (2)

HOW DID YOU FRIEND MANAGE TO QUITE?!?!?! Jajajajaja It feels imposible (not that I have tried…). And she sees things and isn’t intrigued about what is happening?? She should write a self help book,jajajaja. “How to suite one direction: the guide”,jajajaja. But she sounds cool and supportive of you, so keep her, jejeje.

Well, you just described me. Talking in public always end up in one of those two options. I have always wanted to do a road trip!!! You are totally invited of course. JAJAJAJA. Well, it just…happened? Our friend was having a very bad time and he was going through a lot of things and we didnt know how to cheer him up. And then one night we just starting watching a video of AuronPlay reading a fic, and he was happy for the first time in months. (3)And so my cousin said “what if we write him a fic?” And i said “omg, yes”. And thus was born. Its a crack fic. We just put in there his family, his biggest celebrity crush, our friends, ourselves and a couple of animals and started writing nonesense. He hasnt read anything yet, bcs we want to finish it first, and me and my cousin (and our siblings, bcs they wanted to help) only hang out alone sporadically. But we laugh a lot writing it. I hope he laughs too when he finally reads it. (4)

You, your sister and your cousins sound so cool. And your friends too. I’m gonna have to migrate and adopt you all, jajajaj. I’m sure your friend is gonna love it. It’s a recipe for success. Keep me updated when you show him and his reaction,please!!

“How does a gay look like?” Like someone with no toxic masculinity. But i see your point. Judging on looks is not cool. (And i dont usually do it. I watched their behaviour or their words. When someone doesnt ever use gender pronouns and just say “they” “parter” “somebody” im just👀👀👀 i see what u are doing). Yes yes. What you said makes sense. I understood. Dont worry. I have never heard that quote, but i think i could marry whoever wrote this. So much truth!! 😱 (6)

Tbh I never payed attention to that, :/ (heteronormative mind and all that). If I had, maybe I had known about a lot of my high school friends’ sexuality. Looking back, we were just a group of friends, boys a girls, nobody cared about boyfriends/girlfriends (we were friends from 12-16). Then we went our separate ways, and we lost touch. And now I see in Facebook that they are gays and lesbians, and I’m like… :/ we didn’t know much about those things back then. And I hope I didn’t make any comments who could offend/affect them. But it makes me so happy to see them being themselves and living with they’re boyfriends and girlfriends… 😊 I just wish I could have been a better friend back then 🤷🏻‍♀️. But now I pay attention to that. And I always try to show support in a non invasive way. And try to educate people about who they’re been homophobic, or make not appropriate comments… like there’s this boy (around 16) that likes to paint his nails. And I love everything to do with nails. And, at the shop, I comment on people’s nails (if I know them enough, lol). And I always try to say something nice to this guy. To normalize the fact that he has his nails painted (and no make a statement that I approve of it, if someone else is listening, so they don’t make rude comments around me). And then my friend’s sister is Lesbian. But their mother is so ancient-minded… like, my friend has a dit of fat, and she’s always making comment about how she should be skinnier bc she won’t ever find a husband 😒. And her sister is very thin. And once, she was working as cleaner in a /cuartel de la guardia civil(?)/. And their mother was always: hmmm, I hope she finds a good guy there, bc she’s never had a boyfriend. And I always thought: I wonder why, lol. Well, she finally came out to her parents, and while they don’t treat her different (which I don’t know if it’s good or no), they’re like “waiting” she changes her mind. And hoping she finds a boyfriend. Anyway, her mother is friends with my mom, and she comes to visit at the shop sometimes, and she always has a comment to make about what people do or don’t do. And I get so angry 😡. I’m always correcting her. But she doesn’t listen. And I feel sorry for my friend and her sister. So whenever I have the chance I saw her my support, and always talk about these things, lol. (I talk so much about lgbt+ things, that my family associates me with it, to the point that every time they see a rainbow or whatever they tell me: look look! And I just satisfied with it. At least they don’t make so much homophobic comments anymore 😒)

YOUR MOM IS AN ANTI? How? “Why would they fake a baby?” Thats a good question with awful answers. I miss RBB&SBB.😍 (I havent explained that to anybody, yet. But once while playing a game my cousins choose Rbb as his nickname so i choose Sbb and our friends started making questions and we where like? 1d things? Long story, leave it for another day? I’m glad they dont remember it bcs i wouldnt know how to explain that😂😂). Was your friend a fan of 1d too? (7)

Well, she isn’t a nasty anti, jajajja, but she doesn’t think they’re together. Not for nothing special, just that she thinks they would say it if they were together. And since they haven’t say it, they aren’t together. But I’ve shown her the famous Christmas pic, and she doesn’t Thing B was ever pregnant. And I show her pics of F to ask for an outsider opinion, and she doesn’t think the kid looks like Louis at all, lmao. So, I think if they ever come out, she wouldn’t care at all. Bahhh, I’ve talked about RBB/SBB with my friend sometimes, but it’s so bad of a thing, that we don’t come to a conclusion. She isn’t a fans, sadly. But she likes celeb gossip, and I like to talk, so… yesterday she came to visit/ to get her arms waxed (bc that’s my other unofficial job) and she ended up staying for 2 hours. Bc we had see each other briefly lately, couldn’t sit and talk properly in a while. And she always asks me about 1d, bc she knows I love to talk about it,jajaja. And I have a sideblog where I reblog things to show her. And well, yesterday we talked a little about BG, and I showed her the no-belly pic, and she was… 😳. And she thinks louis and Harry must be together, at least at some point, bc the way the touched wasn’t in a friendly way. She now has a boyfriend, and she kept saying: I’m not a very touchy person with my friends or my family, but when I’m with him I always want to touch him or kiss him, and that’s what those two were always doing. And I’m always: do you think that for real, or are you just saying it so I stop talking?? Jajjaja. And yes, she’s convinced they are/were together. She asked me if I think they’re still together, and I told her that now more than ever, but it’s a long story, so we should talk about it another time, bc lol, we were just talking about it for a couple of hours, and we both had things to do. So, we’ll keep talking another time.

Of course, I dont share that info with everybody, but I dont mind my friends knowing. I have this one friend that i bother everytime i get frustated bcs of a fic. I tell him the plot, and what is happening and i cry about it (and he laughs at me but at least he listens). Sometimes i make him choose which one should i read next when i cant decide. (9)

I almost did a fic reference yesterday talking with my friend, and I stopped myself midsentece, and laughed (I thought of you,jajaj) and she was so confused!! But she’s used to my weirdness, so we just laughed it way. And I kept talking, jajajajaj.

Girl, i have 6 dioptres😂😂 Thats what i have forbid myself from reading on the phone. No, i havent read that one, but its now on the list. I’ll tell you when i do! Though it make take a while :( (I understand you. Dont worry). (10)

😳 6?!!?! Please take care of your eyes!!! Stop reading… everything!! Jajaja. No, I’m kidding. I know about people who has 8… so you’re still ok,jajajaj. I have 1, but my ophthalmologist told me I’m very sensitive to change, bc I thought I had 27463 diopters, bc I saw so poorly 🙄🙄.

Yes, i also like IDGAF more than New Rules. They have overplayed that one. Have you heard Blow Your Mind? I love that one. It’s also a single so…i guess you have heard it? You’ll get amazing shots, i’m sure. Honey was sleeping on you? ���😭😭😭 I love hiiim (11)

I listened today Room for 2 and Homesick, and I think I like them. I’ll have to listen this new one two. For me, to like a song, I have to heard /a lot/ (not as much as Despacito, please). It has to have a catchy tune. That’s why I think a like Carolina, or Woman, or Kiwi, and I don’t understand why people is so fidyfvbure about the lyrics, jajjaja.Honey is always sleeping on me. The other day Liam was sleeping between my legs, and Honey came and just laid on top of my poor limo. And I wanted to kill him, bc liam never comes to sleep with me. They’re so different… but I love them both.

Oh, my little sister. I just wanted to tell you that yesterday was her birthday. She almost cried when she saw that me and my older sister had brought her Flicker deluxe as a present. (We hadnt bought it yet. Dont judge us). She was freaking out just bcs of that and i was laughing so hard thinking that she’s gonna pass out when she sees the rainbow flag her friends have gotten her for Nialls show. And also another pair of Cds. She wont survive the show. Poor thing. But she was so happy 😍😍 (12)You start next week? Okay. I’ll ask again next wednseday. Have a nice daaaay!!

Not judging, you’re amazing sisters!! Awww, poor thing!! She will have an amazing time at Niall’s concert, for sure. And, yes, please, tell her to bring the flag. I’m so happy seeing how people are starting to bring rainbow flags to niall concerts too. And have you seeing that he has taken pics with rainbow flags?? He even brought one to the stage the other day!! It makes me inexplicably happy to say everything covered in rainbows. There was so much at Harry’s show too, my sister said it looked like a pride parade. Hey, Dunkirk it’s about to start khbkhdfbvkjdnfvkjndfv. But, have YOU SEEING THE NEW ROYAL BABY WAS NAMED AFTER LOUIS?????? AND HIS TWEET?!?!?  IM SCREAMED!!!! Dijffvjkbdded. Bye love. I have to feed my cats before the movie starts!!! Aaaahhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!

[theconservativebrief]

Brazil elected far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro in its presidential runoff on Sunday, breaking a nearly two-decade-old tradition of almost exclusively electing leftist presidents.

Bolsonaro, a Congress member and ex-military officer, started off his campaign as a fringe candidate from a fringe party who was mostly known for his streak of racist, misogynistic, and anti-LGBT remarks and for his professed fondness for the country’s brutal military dictatorship.

But his promises to restore security amid endemic violent crime and to stamp out the country’s rampant political corruption won him support among voters looking for a change.

Many in Brazil have grown frustrated with the status quo due to a slew of political and economic crises that have gripped the country in recent years. The current center-right president, Michel Temer, is deeply unpopular in the wake of a struggling economy and a massive corruption scandal that has engulfed all levels of government.

Temer took over for former leftist President Dilma Rousseff, who was impeached in 2016. Her leftist predecessor, Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, is serving a 12-year sentence for corruption charges. But while Lula himself is still very popular in Brazil, his handpicked successor Fernando Haddad was soundly defeated by Bolsonaro.

On the eve of the Brazilian elections, I called up Benjamin Junge to get a deeper understanding of voters in Brazil supported the far-right candidate. Junge is an anthropology professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz and a Fulbright fellow at the Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil who studies working-class and middle-class families in Brazil.

Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

Jen Kirby

Are the Brazilian voters you talk to mostly rejecting the leftist Workers’ Party — or are they actively choosing Bolsonaro?

Benjamin Junge

My observation is that actual ideological, hard-right voters within working class communities — which is to say people who are voting for Bolsonaro because they love him, and they’ve analyzed his plans, and they think they’re great — are a small minority.

I would say the same about the old-school Workers’ Party supporters, too. They’re still there. I see them marching around with T-shirts that have images of Lula from four years ago.

The issue is the mass of working-class voters in between those two poles. The question is why is it that so many of them seem to be open to a guy who has expressed a disregard for democracy and said such foul things.

People are definitely talking a lot about security and violence in their neighborhoods, and they’re genuinely fed up with that they perceive as a failure of the state to take care of security issues. And that’s a real thing.

Jen Kirby

But doesn’t Lula still have a lot of popular support?

Benjamin Junge

Let me give you a quick little anecdote: Right before Lula was found guilty and went to prison last January, the matriarch of a family that I’ve been following very closely, who is a widow and is 66 years old, she’s was watching TV. At one moment she said, “Oh my god, is there any way I can still love this man [Lula]?”

When he went to prison, she posted something on Facebook, saying she was indignada — fed up. She alternates between a deep love for Lula and a kind of hate for him because he seems to have screwed everything up. The guy who did a lot of good and could have done much more but didn’t.

Jen Kirby

So they love Lula the man, but don’t love the system around him.

Benjamin Junge

Yes, very strongly. This is what political scientists are all scratching their heads about, and anthropologists maybe not quite so much. Political scientists say, “Wait, that’s very irrational, if they love Lula so much, why don’t they just vote for the other guy whom Lula anointed, Fernando Haddad?” But that’s not happening.

Jen Kirby

Can you explain exactly why that disconnect is happening?

Benjamin Junge

This woman I mentioned is typical in another respect, which is she has never really taken politics seriously. So she came to love Lula. She would definitely be voting for him if he were on the ballot, but it wasn’t for what he represented — it was just for the kind of man he presented himself to be.

She’s in her mid-60s and she has five grown children who are all in their 30s and 40s, most of whom have children of their own. They all live in the same building in different households, and what is creating stress in this family — and it’s playing out in the family’s WhatsApp group, which is the way that it’s happening across Brazil.

This family’s WhatsApp group was set up for social events and to send memes. But the oldest son is a Bolsonaro supporter. He’s that rare, and somewhat uncommon variety of very ideological serious supporter. He posts stuff about Bolsonaro in the family WhatsApp group. There’s a grandson who’s 18 years old, in his first year of college, and he responds with, “What what are you talking about? That doesn’t make any sense.”

The matriarch has become infuriated — not because she agrees more with her oldest son versus her grandson or vice versa — but because politics has contaminated her family and that’s almost unendurable for her. She doesn’t lose sleep about corruption because she hasn’t had high expectations of the state in a long, long time.

She’s just upset that her family, which is the most important thing in her life, is now this base of disputes and intergenerational tensions. I think that sets her up for an inclination to vote for Bolsonaro. Because his weird discourse is that he will restore order to society.

Jen Kirby

How does Bolsonaro’s image as a strongman factor in here? He has praised the military, and expressed some nostalgia for the military dictatorship. Is that the kind of order people are yearning for, or is it more nuanced than that?

Benjamin Junge

Among people who study cultural memory in Latin America — so places like Brazil that had some kind of authoritarian regime in the 1970s and 1980s, like Argentina, Chile, Uruguay — there is a broad consensus that Brazil did not really do a very good job in the first 20 years after the dictatorship ended in 1985 in promoting cultural dialogue about what that meant, and how it could be avoided, in contrast with places like Chile and Argentina.

Brazil didn’t really get on that bandwagon until later. These days, public high schools typically have modules about the military dictatorship. So in this family that I was mentioning to you, the person who knows the most about the dictatorship is the grandson because he did a whole year-long module on remembering the dictatorship in school.

Whereas his father and his mother, they’re in their 40s, and they were alive during the very tail end of the dictatorship, but they don’t have any real living memories of it, they have a much more idealistic — and from my perspective, problematic — way of remembering that period.

Jen Kirby

When it comes to Bolsonaro, how strong is his support among working-class people?

Benjamin Junge

One of the hypotheses is that the Workers’ Party prioritized social assistance programs but failed to link those incredible welfare benefits to any kind of political position or policy position among the beneficiaries; that the Workers’ Party failed to bring into being a kind of new citizen consciousness — they just created this new middle class of consumers.

I hope that by the time we’ve analyzed all of our data, we’ll be able to chime in on that hypothesis and see if our data supports it or not.

It’s too early for me to do that, but I think there’s something there. That certainly bodes well for Bolsonaro. He’s trying to make his appeal to voters who, when they reflect on having risen above the poverty line during the years the Workers’ Party was in power, they don’t connect it to that policy paradigm, they connect it to their own individual discipline and efforts — it’s more of a meritocracy.

Or if they’re evangelicals, which is a whole another set of issues, they explain it in terms of their religious beliefs.

Jen Kirby

But what about the actual economic situation? Are the working-class and middle-class families you’re studying significantly worse off economically than they were even a few years ago, or it more a perception because of everything that’s happening around them?

Benjamin Junge

We know that around 2014, unemployment rates started to go up and household family income started to go down, after having gone up for several years. We know that the number of people who have private health insurance policies, which is considered a class marker of middle class, started going down. We know that experiences with crime started going up.

So there are certainly objective markers that people who had experienced some kind of upward socioeconomic mobility during the Workers’ Party years have seen those patterns either stall or actually reverse.

Jen Kirby

How does Bolsonaro’s controversial rhetoric fit in? I know race is a complicated issue in Brazil, but his racially charged comments, his sexism, his anti-LGBT statements — how do voters ignore or justify those? I hate to make the comparison, but is it similar to Trump where some of his supporters say, “I don’t love all the things he says, but I’m willing to give him a chance”?

Benjamin Junge

There is something similar to the US, but there’s also something distinctively Brazilian. Brazilians have a kind of cultural image of themselves as playful, lovable troublemakers. It’s a recognized kind of cultural trait that people reflect on and talk about, and sometimes they talk about it in a loving way: “We’re romantic but you can’t really count on us to show up on time, oh well, that’s Brazil.”

When Brazilians — the people that I’m hanging out with in this working-class neighborhood — when they see in Facebook clips or WhatsApp clips that are circulating or on the television news, when they see these of Bolsonaro saying just saying horribly nasty, problematic things about blacks, gays, Indians, and plenty of other groups down the list, one way of interpreting that is to say, “You know all Brazilians are like that, he’s just being honest.”

And that sounds a little bit like the way people were talking about Trump, but I don’t think in the US we have a sense of “Well, we’re all actually playful like Trump, he’s just being a little more extreme and more honest.” Whereas Brazilians have this idea that it’s all playful.

Having said this, I know some people who can’t get beyond it, who will not vote for Bolsonaro. I’m thinking of someone who has a gay father, specifically because of that one statement that Bolsonaro said about how if he had a gay son, he’d rather die in a car accident. That alone they cannot get beyond. There are Brazilians who are reacting to a specific statement that they view as irredeemably problematic, and that includes plenty of Afro-Brazilians.

And here enters the thorny topic of fake news. Because if you were a Bolsonaro supporter you might respond to me by saying, “Wait a minute, let me show you a clip of some black Brazilians telling us how much they like Bolsonaro,” which are circulating. I would immediately say it’s maybe not fake, but it sure is a minority because most Afro-Brazilians in the popular class — lower-middle class or working-class — I think are quite offended by the way he talks about race.

Jen Kirby

You mentioned fake news. It seems that’s played a huge role in the election. How have you seen that play out?

Benjamin Junge

Facebook and WhatsApp are [where we see] the fake news issue. A couple of weeks ago this matriarch who I’ve been talking about, we bumped into each other, and I’m always bugging them with questions about the election. This was before the first round of elections. She showed me a picture of this clip that was circulating of some woman in some public space who took her shirt off and bared her breasts.

She shows this to me and says, “I don’t want this kind of a society, is this what we want?” And I said, “Wait a minute, who is this person?” And she says, “This is what we would get if we support the [Workers’ Party], or at least this is what will be fixed if Bolsonaro gets elected.” And it was just some ridiculous fake news thing, who knows if it was actually the Bolsonaro people who put it into circulation, but it was circulated by Bolsonaro supporters.

Jen Kirby

You’ve mentioned WhatsApp a lot — as something used by the family to communicate, but also to get information about the election. How important is it in influencing the vote?

Benjamin Junge

I don’t even fully appreciate just how pervasive WhatsApp groups are — I think that every family in Brazil has a WhatsApp group that has more than one cellphone user in it. And I believe that that cuts across class in a big way. The way that it might be a little different is that working-class families tend to be bigger than elite families.

Every kind of like religious community, every evangelical church, every individual kind of Catholic church has a WhatsApp group. Uber drivers in different neighborhoods and cities have WhatsApp groups, taxi drivers, students, groups of friends, teachers use WhatsApp,

I’m teaching two classes — one graduate and one undergraduate — at the university here this semester, and I have a WhatsApp group for both classes. I can’t even really imagine what this election would look like without WhatsApp.

And secondarily, Facebook. Facebook is also hugely important, but my intuitive sense is that WhatsApp is where the real frictions and kind of circulation of content is happening. And possibly where opinion formation, the actual congealing of voter sensibility, is concentrated.

Original Source -> Corruption, fake news, and WhatsApp: how Bolsonaro won Brazil

via The Conservative Brief