Ideological patrolling

Patrulhamento ideológico(tm) is a Brazilian term that can be roughly translated as "Political Correctness Enforcement" in English. It is the act of patrolling the expression of ways of thinking of other people, for guaranteeing that the "correct ways" prevail in the patrolling group's social control sphere.

The Patrulhamento is usually done by a social group roughly known as the "Patrulha" (The Patrol), a group of self-righteous people who view themselves as a kind of elite who reserve for itself the right of defining what is and what not is good for "democracy", "free expression", and "equality" in Brazil, usually from a left-wing or left-leaning perspective.

Historically, the Patrulhas existed in Brazil during the military dictatorship, when some left-wing intellectuals practicesed their own form of censorship and social control inside the cultural and academic circles they controlled, for banning content they viewed as contrary to their own partisan or factional interests. As such, the term is used mainly by the liberals and conservatives to decry the leftist "monopoly" of academic and cultural prestige, but also some leftists themselves use the term to define attempts of political control by internal cliques. As thus, the term always had a connotation that is not just political, but also cultural.

The Patrolling Posses that do exist in most Brazilian cultural and political scenes are deeply disliked by thinking people both in the right and left, despite being used by some left-wing politicians as a sort of environmental control against conservative and/or religious (protestant) politicians: even if they themselves don´t agree with the Patrols' extremist or merely self-serving agendas, they would accuse adversaries (or, as Brazilian politics work, political allies of the opposite ideological spectrum) of being against whatever the Patrulhas stand for, gaining relative power over these adversaries/problematic allies, as they get distracted trying to solve the resultant media outcry in place of exerting more demands over the politician who unleashed the dogs on them in the first place.

With religious politicians, this tactic has mixed results, as many of them are associated with or directly control, as church ministers, equivalent pietist Patrulhas that are as vicious as the "Progressivist" ones, having, if not so much support from academic intellectuals and trade union insertion, the affiliation of reborn Christian drug dealers, thugs, and local ministers that can make votes in the favelas and comunidades disappear very quickly from the politician whom their boss should classify as an "enemy of God".

The existence of so many overcrossing Patrulhas created a situation of virtual civil war among Brazilian intelligentsia, which is one of the factors of Brazil's current political crisis.

References https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrulha_ideol%C3%B3gica