Hey, Andrew.

Hey, Tyler.

Welcome back to the political scene from the New Yorker and to our special series, How Bad

Is It, where Andrew and I sit down for a monthly checkup on the health of our democracy.

Yeah, this week, obviously, we're all thinking about the killing of Charlie Kirk and how horrible and scary that was and how it feels like a kind of potential of an inflection point for a lot of what we've been talking about in this series.

Yeah, I mean, his killing highlights how far political violence can go, given that we're not just seeing a politician

being targeted, but seeing someone being targeted ostensibly just for their speech and for being

an incredibly effective activist. And we're also seeing how an active violence like this can be seized upon

to potentially justify new waves of retaliation or

political repression. Yeah, so we were wondering in this moment what to watch for in terms of

could this accelerate threats to democracy? And to do that, we wanted to talk about not only the

U.S., but also Brazil, which is, I think,

of all the democratic backsliding places, at least that I've been to, the place that comes

to mind when you think about not only high-level political assassinations, but also street clashes

and threats of street violence and how that can warp and color the ability for people to do democratic politics.

So today we're really happy to have Brazilian filmmaker Petra Costa on. Her documentaries, The Edge of

Democracy and Apocalypse in the Tropics, trace Brazil's slide into authoritarianism and what that history can teach us about the dangers of this moment and how we might be able to escape that cycle.

And also just the granularity of what it feels like to be in a place where the ambient threat of violence is kind of part of everyday life.

This is the political scene. I'm Tyler Foggett and I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker.

I'm Andrew Morantz and I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker. I'm Andrew Morantz, and I'm a staff writer at The New Yorker.

I mean, yeah, let's get right into it.

You have chronicled the far right, the far left, and everything in between, even young people who don't feel connected to either party.

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