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Brazilian President Claims Leonardo DiCaprio is the Leading Cause of Amazon Forest Fires

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

If you missed the news over summer, Brazil had a particularly bad season for forest fires. These fires were primarily set by humans looking to clear the land for farming and logging and kill off the indigenous people in the area. This had previously been illegal in Brazil, but the far-right lunatic they elected in the last election, Jair Bolsonaro, has essentially said that genocide and exacerbating catastrophic climate change is okay in his book.

Still, people are obviously not happy with gigantic wildfires in their backyard and so Bolsonaro has been looking for a scapegoat since he clearly doesn’t want to stop the massive deforestation. The scapegoat he found is Leonardo DiCaprio.

CNN reported that Bolsonaro, on a webcast last Thursday, blamed DiCaprio’s support of NGOs working to protect the environment from his destructive agenda for the fires.

“The NGO people, what did they do? What’s easier? Set fire to the bush,” he said, providing no evidence to support the accusation.
He continued, “Take photo, film, send it to an NGO, the NGO spreads it out, does a campaign against Brazil, gets in touch with Leonardo DiCaprio and Leonardo DiCaprio donates $500,000 to this NGO. One part went to the people who were setting the fire, right?
“Leonardo DiCaprio, you are assisting with the burning of the Amazon, that can’t be,” Bolsonaro said.

DiCaprio responded to the comments on Instagram.

DiCaprio didn’t even find the groups in question here, and Bolsonaro’s claims are outlandish and false. But he seems on continuing the “Leonardo DiCaprio burned down the rainforests” line for as long as it works politically. Imagine living in a country where your leader would just repeat outlandish lies to cover up for his failures hoping people would believe any crazy thing if he said it enough. Sounds awful, glad I’m in America where that could never happen.

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