Olavo de Carvalho


Olavo Luiz Pimentel de Carvalho is a Brazilian polemicist, self-promoted philosopher, political pundit, former astrologer and journalist living since 2005 in Richmond, Virginia.
While publishing about politics, literature and philosophy since the 1980s, he made himself known to wider Brazilian audiences from the 1990s on, mainly writing columns for some of Brazil's major media outlets, such as the newspaper O Globo. In the 2000s, he began to use personal blogs and social media to convey his strongly conservative and anti-communist ideas. In the late 2010s, he rose to prominence in the Brazilian public debate, being dubbed the "intellectual father of the new right" and the ideologue of Jair Bolsonaro, a label that he has rejected.
As a polemicist, Carvalho has been praised for not complying with political correctness and criticized for often resorting to obscene ad hominem attacks. His books and articles have spread conspiracy theories and false information, and he has been accused of fomenting hate speech and anti-intellectualism. He positions himself as a critic of modernity. His interests include historical philosophy, the history of revolutionary movements, the Traditionalist School and comparative religion. His views are rejected by many philosophers.

Professional career

Carvalho acted as an astrologer in the 1980s. From the 1970s to the 2000s, he wrote for several Brazilian magazines and newspapers, such as Bravo!, Primeira Leitura, Claudia, O Globo, Folha de S.Paulo, Época and Zero Hora,
In 2002, Carvalho founded the website Maskless Media. It presents itself as an observatory of the news media. He was the host of the show True Outspeak on BlogTalkRadio, which aired from 2006 to 2013. As of 2019, he writes a weekly column for the Brazilian newspaper Diário do Comércio and teaches philosophy in an online course to over 2,000 students. He is said to have introduced to Portuguese-speaking readers works of important conservative philosophers of the 20th century, such as Eric Voegelin. In addition to newspaper articles and many blog and social media posts, he has authored 32 books, many of them collections of previously published texts.
Carvalho founded the Inter-American Institute for Philosophy, Government, and Social Thought in 2009, and serves as its president. He collaborates with Ted Baehr, Paul Gottfried, Judith Reisman, Alejandro Peña Esclusa, and Stephen Baskerville through the Inter-American Institute. The institute closed down in 2018, possibly due to complaints made by Olavo's former students to the Institute's board that, among other complaints, he never concluded the secondary education, and was not, like his profile in the Institute claimed, a former senior lecturer in the Catholic University of Paraná.

Role in the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro

Carvalho has become one of the most influential individuals in the administration of Jair Bolsonaro. According to one account, Bolsonaro got interested in Carvalho's ideas in 2013. In 2014, Bolsonaro and Carvalho started transmitting their live video chats through politically conservative YouTube channels. In 2017, Carvalho was depicted as the "ideologue" of Bolsonaro, a title he has refuted.
In his first live speech on Facebook after being elected, Bolsonaro was pictured next to one of the books written by Carvalho, in what was interpreted as a sign of his influence over the newly elected President. It was claimed that Carvalho influenced the nomination of two prominent Ministers by Bolsonaro: Ricardo Vélez Rodríguez and Ernesto Araújo.
In November 2018, after the Brazilian presidential election, Carvalho declared that, if nominated by President-elect Jair Bolsonaro, he would accept the role of Brazilian ambassador to the United States. However, in February 2019, Carvalho clashed with some key figures of the Bolsonaro administration, including the Vice-President, Hamilton Mourão, whom he has accused of being a "traitor" and an "idiot" who is "pro-abortion, pro-disarmament and pro-Nicolas Maduro." Mourão has dismissed the criticisms.

Controversies

Carvalho is widely known as a polemic figure in Brazil who has supported several controversial views.

History of science

Carvalho has propagated controversial information about prominent ideas and figures of modern science. He has contested ideas of physicists Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, and mathematician Georg Cantor. He said Newton introduced a self-contradictory thesis and spread the virus of "formidable stupidity". Olavo also said Einstein's theory of general relativity was plagiarized. He stated that the special theory of relativity was invented by Einstein merely to obfuscate the fact that Copernicus was wrong and that the Earth does not, in fact, revolve about the sun. Carvalho has criticized Georg Cantor's work on transfinite numbers, accusing him of confusing "numbers with their mere signs", seeing his work as a "play with words" and a "false logic".
He also said that there are no proofs of heliocentrism and that geocentrism was as valid as heliocentrism "since you can use different points of reference." In 2018, on Facebook, he stated that he had no "definitive answer" to many "questions", such as whether the Earth is spherical or flat.
Carvalho also spread the hoax of Pepsi using cells from aborted fetuses to sweeten soft drinks, which has been debunked for many years.

Climate change

Carvalho claims that global warming is a hoax produced by a global conspiracy. He bases his claims on the Climategate episode in which hackers, on the eve of the Copenhagen Conference, disseminated thousands of e-mails from University of East Anglia climatologists in order to undermine the credibility of the conference. Carvalho claims Climategate to be the work of a conspiracy led by the Rockefeller family, the Council of Foreign Relations and the Bilderberg Club, indicating them also as leaders of the "global abortion campaigns of the new global religion, and of the Obama administration's proposal for universal control of the movement of capital."

Health

In a 2016 Twitter post, Carvalho stated, citing Dr. Carlos Armando de Moura Ribeiro, that "vaccines either kill you or drive you crazy. Never vaccinate your children."
He has also falsely declared that AIDS does not pose a risk to heterosexuals, basing his arguments on journalist Michael Fumento's book The Myth of Heterosexual Aids.
On March 22, 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, a disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, he stated during a livestream in YouTube that there was no confirmed case of death from the virus in the world and that the pandemic would be "an invention" and "the most extensive manipulation of public opinion that has ever happened in human history". At that date, according to the World Health Organization, there were more than 294,000 cases of the disease and 12,784 deaths from it.

Politics

Carvalho spread the debunked conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Furthermore, he has claimed that Foro de São Paulo "is the largest political organization that has ever existed in Latin America and undoubtedly one of the largest in the world." He also made up the fake information that a book written by Fernando Haddad, the opponent of Jair Bolsonaro during the 2018 Brazilian general election, promoted incest.
On 17 March 2019, Carvalho criticised the presence of military personnel in Bolsonaro's administration, stating: "He didn't choose two hundred generals. Two hundred generals chose him. Those people want to restore the 1964 regime under a democratic aspect. They're ruling and using Bolsonaro as a condom . I'm not saying that it is the reality, but it is what they want. Mourão said that they would return to power democratically. If it is not a coup, it is a coup mentality."

Religion

Carvalho advocates a revisionist view of the Inquisition, claiming it is a myth spread by Protestants.

Litigation

In 2020, Carvalho was ordered to pay 2.8 million brazilian reais in libel charges after accusing musician Caetano Veloso of sexual crimes against children.

Views on science

Olavo strongly criticizes several figures who occupy a prominent place in the history of the sciences, such as Isaac Newton, and Giordano Bruno, who according to him "did not make any discoveries... He did not even study modern sciences, physics, astronomy, biology or mathematics, he was not condemned for defending scientific theories, but for practicing witchcraft, which at the time was a crime". The criticism extends to Galileo, of whom he writes:
A background of charlatanism appears to have already been introduced into physics by Galileo, when he proclaimed that he had overturned the notions of ancient science, according to which an object not propelled by an external force stands still—an illusion of the senses, he said. In fact, he pontificated, an object in such conditions remains stationary or in uniform and rectilinear motion. But, after having thus overthrown the old physics, he discreetly clarified that rectilinear and uniform movement does not really exist, but is a fiction conceived by the mind to facilitate measurements. Now if the object not moved from without stands still or has a fictitious movement, it means, strictly speaking, that it stands still in every case, just as ancient physics said, and that Galileo, by means of a new system of measurements, could only explain why it stands still. That is to say, Galileo did not dispute ancient physics, he merely invented a better way of proving that it was correct, and that the testimony of the senses, being true enough, does not have in itself proof of its veracity, which was well known since the time of Aristotle. It was this episode that inaugurated the craze of modern scientists to take simple changes of methods as if they were "proofs" of a new constitution of reality.

Personal life

His eldest daughter, Heloisa de Carvalho Martins Arriba accused her father of occasional maltreatment of his children. All content was wrapped in a letter that was later shared on Facebook. According to the letter, Olavo had even pointed a gun to the head of one of his children. She made other accusations including that Olavo kept a polygamous relationship living with three wives at the same time. The accusations were denied by her siblings and by Olavo himself, who initiated a lawsuit against her citing that she "distances herself from any contact to the reality by spread of outrageous lies and vile curses".

Works

Essays