Olavo de Carvalho

Olavo Luiz Pimentel de Carvalho (29 April 1947 – 24 January 2022) was a Brazilian polemicist, self-proclaimed philosopher, political pundit, former astrologer, journalist, and far-right conspiracy theorist.

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 (starting in February 1977 with an article about The Magic Flute in the "Folhetim" literary supplement ), Época and Zero Hora.

Carvalho acted as an astrologer from 1979 to 1982, having learned it from, among others, the Argentine psychologist Juan Alfredo César Müller.

In 1979, he founded the "Revista de Astrologia Júpiter" ("Jupiter: Astrology Review"); around this time, he introduced himself in his business card as the "scientific director of the Brazilian Astrocharacterology Society", headquartered at his home.

"Astrocharacterology" (astrocaracterologia) is Olavo's own pseudoscience, "whose task is to separate poetic language from symbolic language, showing the objectivity of astrological language".

While publishing about politics, literature and philosophy since the 1980s, he made himself known to wider Brazilian audiences from the 1990s onwards, 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 conservative and anti-communist ideas.

In 2002, Carvalho founded the website Maskless Media (Mídia Sem Máscara).

It presents itself as an observatory of the news media.

From 2005 until his death, he lived near Richmond, Virginia, in the United States.

He was the host of the show True Outspeak on BlogTalkRadio, which aired from 2006 to 2013.

Carvalho founded the Inter-American Institute for Philosophy, Government, and Social Thought in 2009, and served as its president.

He collaborated with Ted Baehr, Paul Gottfried, Judith Reisman, Alejandro Peña Esclusa, and Stephen Baskerville through the Inter-American Institute.

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 which he rejected.

As a polemicist, Carvalho was criticized for often using obscene ad hominem attacks.

His books and articles spread conspiracy theories and false information, and he was accused of fomenting hate speech and anti-intellectualism.

He positioned himself as a critic of modernity.

His interests included historical philosophy, the history of revolutionary movements, the Traditionalist School and comparative religion.

His views were rejected by some philosophers.

He died in 2022 several days after reportedly testing positive for COVID-19.

Olavo de Carvalho's father was a lawyer and his mother worked in the printing industry.

They divorced while he was a child.

His first name, which he claimed meant "survivor" in Norwegian, was chosen by his grandmother.

He told an interviewer that he was born sick and spent seven years bedridden.

He had heart problems and Lyme disease.

He was in school up to the fourth grade of "gymnasium" (ginásio), which was the name of elementary school in Brazil at the time.

In 2011, Carvalho had a written debate online with Aleksandr Dugin in 2011 on "The USA and the New World Order".

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 refused.

Carvalho believed that the 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".

Partido dos Trabalhadores, the party of Bolsonaro's opponent Fernando Haddad, is a member of Foro de São Paulo.

A list of his books published by one of his students in 2018 included 32 books.

The institute closed down in 2018, possibly due to complaints made by Carvalho's former students to the institute's board that, among other complaints, he never concluded the secondary education, and was not, as his profile in the Institute claimed, a former senior lecturer in the Catholic University of Paraná.

As of 2019, he wrote a weekly column for the Brazilian newspaper Diário do Comércio and taught philosophy in an online course to over 2,000 students.

In his online classes, he often wore a cowboy hat or smoked a pipe.

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 authored a number of books, many of them collections of previously published texts.

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.

Carvalho became one of the most influential individuals during the administration of Jair Bolsonaro.