"My God, It Talks!"

Marcel van Hattem on free speech and the fight for Brazil's future

In the summer of 1876, at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, the assembled dignitaries celebrating one hundred years of American independence included an unlikely figure: Dom Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil. The emperor, curious about everything, made his way to the exhibit of an inventor named Alexander Graham Bell. As the story goes, Pedro lifted the receiver of Bell’s strange new machine, heard a human voice come through the wire, and exclaimed, “My God, it talks!”

A century and a half later, in the year of America’s semiquincentennial, Brazil confronts a darker marvel: not that the voice can travel, but that it can be stopped.

This week on Acton Line I welcome back Marcel van Hattem, Brazilian congressman, journalist, and political scientist representing the state of Rio Grande do Sul, to discuss the state of free speech in his country and the perilous state of its institutions.

When Marcel first joined me on Acton Line last year, Brazil was in the midst of a constitutional crisis: a Supreme Court asserting ever-broader powers over the press, over social media platforms, and over the speech of ordinary citizens. Journalists deplatformed. Accounts banned. An entire social network switched off ahead of an election. That crisis has not passed. It has matured, and its fruits are now ripening across Brazilian public life.

Marcel knows this pressure firsthand. He has been investigated, threatened, and, in a scene seen around the world, had his microphone cut on the floor of the Chamber of Deputies. His witness raises questions that reach well beyond Brazil: What does the rule of law require when the guardians of the law become its greatest threat? How does a legislator fulfill his duties under authoritarian pressure? And what do free peoples everywhere owe one another when liberty is imperiled in one of the world’s largest democracies?

Censorship is never just policy, but claim about persons. That some may speak while others must be spoken for. A free society rests on the opposite conviction: that every person bears the dignity, and with it the duty, of bearing witness to the truth as they understand it.

This is why this year’s Brazilian elections matter so much. Marcel explains what change in the Senate would mean for the cause of liberty, why liberty-minded legislators cannot simply wait out the storm, and what ordinary Brazilians are doing to reclaim their constitutional inheritance.

Lord Acton reminds us that “liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.” It is required, he wrote, “for security in the pursuit of the highest objects of civil society, and of private life.” When the state presumes to decide which voices may be heard, it does not merely regulate politics; it forecloses the pursuit of those highest objects for everyone.

Dom Pedro II did not keep his throne; a coup deposed him in 1889, and Brazil’s constitutional history has been turbulent ever since. But his astonishment in Philadelphia still instructs. The human voice carrying farther than it ever had was the wonder of 1876. The wonder of 2026 is that men and women like Marcel van Hattem need to insist, at real personal cost, that their voices be allowed to carry at all.