Five years ago, Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, the billionaire founder of the Australian iron ore miner Fortescue, came to believe that hydrogen made from renewables was the future of energy. “The solution is hydrogen,” declared Forrest. He predicted the market for “green hydrogen,” made from using electricity to break apart water (H20) into hydrogen gas (H2) and oxygen, would grow to “at the very least” US$12 trillion by 2050, which would be “bigger than any industry we have.” He promised that Fortescue, his company that had just earned US$10.3 billion in a year selling ore to Chinese steel mills, would make 15 million tonnes of green hydrogen a year by 2030, which is more than the total currently produced globally. “Can a Carbon-Emitting Iron Ore Tycoon Save the Planet?” asked the New York Times, and quoted the climate scientist Michael Mann saying, “Such efforts are critical to addressing climate change in the window we have.”

Forrest was not alone. Frans Timmermans, the European Commission’s climate chief, called hydrogen “a growth engine” in 2020 and set a target of 40 gigawatts of electrolysers, the machines that split water into hydrogen and oxygen, by 2030. Australia’s chief scientist Alan Finkel said in 2018 that “hydrogen’s time has come.” By August 2023, governments had announced US$280 billion in hydrogen subsidies.

Americans have a particular reason to care. The Biden administration committed $7 billion in federal funding from the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to establish seven regional clean hydrogen hubs across the United States with the goal of catalyzing an additional $40 billion in private sector funding. The Trump administration has since cut most of that money.

The reason for the cuts is that hydrogen projects have failed around the world as it became clear they had not reduced the price of hydrogen. For example, Air Products, an American industrial gas company, exited a Louisiana hydrogen project last June at a cost of US$2.9 billion.

And now, Forrest’s mining empire is struggling, in part due to its focus on hydrogen rather than diversifying its core business, as its competitors did. Fortescue’s shares have fallen about 36% from their May peak. It reported last week that its cash fell from US$5.1 billion on June 30 to US$3.2 billion on September 30. Its debt tripled from US$0.9 billion to US$2.8 billion in the same quarter. The company shipped 47 million tonnes of ore but sold only 43 million.

The reason is that the China Mineral Resources Group, a state buyer that Beijing created in 2022 to purchase iron ore for China’s steel mills, is demanding lower prices that Forrest and Fortescue won’t accept. And so CMRG in July ordered Chinese steel mills to stop taking delivery of Fortescue products. Now, Fortescue’s output is piling up in Chinese ports.

Fortescue may be forced to significantly cut back production in Australia, which could result in job losses. “If negotiations with CMRG are not concluded by the calendar year-end, operations may be affected, potentially including adjustments to production,” the company warned in its quarterly report.

Part of the problem was that Forrest bet big on a hydrogen business while his competitors, Rio Tinto and BHP, had instead diversified away from ore into copper. Those two companies then accepted lower prices for their ore from China. Had Forrest followed their lead, he would not be in so much financial trouble today.

His enthusiasm for hydrogen was not matched by reality. And so, in 2024, Fortescue offered early retirements to 700 people and shelved the 15 million tonne target. In July 2025, it cancelled its Arizona hydrogen plant and its electrolyser project at Gladstone in Queensland, writing down about US$150 million.

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Two days before Communications Minister Anika Wells introduced the Digital Duty of Care Bill into Parliament, Australia’s publicly funded national broadcaster, the ABC, premiered “The State of Man”.

ABC Presenter Marc Fennell opens the three-part series with a story about leaving his son watching Minecraft videos on YouTube while he cooks dinner. Twenty minutes later, he returns to find YouTube autoplaying a Joe Rogan clip about strong and weak men, opening a dark portal into the online “manosphere.”

Fennell’s anecdote conspicuously mirrors a core claim of advocacy group Teach Us Consent’s Digital Duty of Care (DDoC) campaign: that social media algorithms steer boys from innocent videos to misogynistic content in just 23 minutes. Teach Us Consent’s founder, Chanel Contos, appears in the series, repeating the same claim.

But peer-reviewed research finds that social media algorithms do not send young men down “misogynistic” rabbit holes, and the flawed research that the government and Teach Us Consent cite is based on small, non-randomized samples and is not peer-reviewed.

Despite this, the government, the ABC, and various NGOs have pushed the “23 minutes to misogyny” meme in their campaigning for the DDoC. “If you set up a social media account as a young boy in Australia today,” said Tanya Plibersek, Minister of Social Services, on ABC’s Insiders program, “it takes an average of 23 minutes for you to be fed violent misogynistic content online.”

Teach Us Consent also claims that “algorithms are fueling misogyny, which fuels sexual violence,” but cites no good evidence supporting the claim. It cites a researcher who interviewed 30 teachers who described boys who talked back to them, with the teachers simply hypothesizing that the boys were influenced online.

Public on Sunday published a review of 140 years of scientific literature, which demonstrates a scientific and judicial consensus that no link between media violence and real-world violence has been shown across dime novels, comic books, films, television, video games, the Internet, and social media.

Despite the lack of scientific evidence for a causal link between online content and real-world violence, the Albanese government is advancing sweeping legislation requiring digital platforms to anticipate and mitigate online “harms” before they occur, including harms arising from lawful expression. “Safety by design must anticipate all harms,” DDoC advocate Chanel Contos says, “not just the ones that neatly fit a category and are easy to report.”

No evidence, scientific or otherwise, suggests that platforms could ever anticipate “all harms”. Yet pursuing the ambition would grant the state unprecedented powers to monitor citizens and extend its regulatory reach into online expression and platform design.

So who’s behind the push? And why?

Enter Twiggy Forrest

Both Fennell’s ABC series and Teach Us Consent received funding from the Minderoo Foundation, the philanthropic organization of Australian mining billionaire Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest.

“Development of ‘The State of Man’ started prior to Minderoo Pictures investment,” said a Minderoo Foundation spokesperson. “Minderoo Pictures invested alongside other organizations, including Screen Australia, ABC, VicScreen, and Screen NSW, and supported screenings. Minderoo Pictures does not have any editorial rights. All editorial for this program sits with ABC.”

As we investigated Minderoo’s wider involvement in the Digital Duty of Care, we uncovered a large network of funded research, advocacy groups, and policy groups working to build support for Labor’s legislation, revealing Forrest as a major financial force behind the Bill.

In May 2026, Minderoo committed $2.5 million to the Australian National University’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, an initiative chaired by former Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard, for research into gendered online abuse and the influence of the “manosphere”.

Announcing the grant, Minderoo CEO John Hartman said, “Tech-based gender violence extends far beyond a single tool or platform - it can happen across every digital medium we use… add the prevalence of AI-generated content, including deepfake imagery and disinformation, and it only reinforces the need to act now.”

Minderoo’s fortunes are tied to Fortescue, the world’s fourth-largest iron ore miner. In June 2023, Andrew and Nicola Forrest transferred 220 million Fortescue shares, worth nearly A$5 billion (US$3.5 billion), to the foundation. According to Minderoo’s 2024/25 financial report, its Fortescue holdings generated A$487.9 million (US$344 million) in dividends that year, down from A$730.1 million (US$514 million) in 2023/24.

The mining giant has received millions in taxpayer money for its energy ventures. Its abandoned electrolyser factory in Gladstone, Queensland, was promised A$92.5 million in state funding and payroll tax concessions and A$44.5 million from the federal Modern Manufacturing Initiative, a total of A$137 million (US$97 million), of which about A$99 million was paid before Fortescue ditched the project in July 2025.

The Queensland government then sued a Fortescue subsidiary, Fortescue Hydrogen Systems Australia, to recover its A$66 million (US$46.5 million). The two sides settled and said the “terms of settlement are confidential.”

Last week, Fortescue warned that its Australian operations could be hurt if talks with the China Mineral Resources Group, Beijing’s state iron ore buyer, which Albanese has actively facilitated, did not conclude by year-end. Reuters reported that “Chinese buyers seek to lever China’s size to secure better terms for its steelmakers, which have faced thin margins and weak domestic demand.” Fortescue said its cash reserves fell from US$5.1 to US$3.2 billion between June 30 and September 30.

Fortescue describes itself as “one of the largest recipients of fuel tax credits,” a rebate that paid Australia’s 18 largest miners A$3.36 billion in 2024-25. It received $308 million in tax credits in 2025 alone.

Forrest’s Minderoo Foundation has become a major backer of Teach Us Consent, providing it with an undisclosed amount of “untied funding” supporting a policy event, and financing “Consensual,” a documentary co-written by Contos, with Teach Us Consent credited as its primary impact partner.

This is on top of Teach Us Consent’s extraordinary financial relationship with the Albanese government, through which it has secured nearly A$8 million (US $5.6 million) in public funding. FOI documents reveal that at least one major Albanese grant was awarded through a closed, non-competitive process, with the kind of reporting and approval obligations usually imposed on government contractors.

The ABC, Teach Us Consent, Communications Minister Anika Wells, and the Prime Minister’s Office were contacted for comment, but did not respond.

Minderoo has also cultivated close ties to Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, and collaborated with the Behavioural Insights Team, the infamous psychological manipulation consultancy spun out of the UK Cabinet Office of Prime Minister David Cameron.

Freedom-of-information documents we obtained from eSafety show months of correspondence between Minderoo and Julie Inman Grant, which led to her being flown to a secretive, all-expenses-paid AI policy retreat at Forrest’s personal home, a remote pastoral station in Western Australia.

The trip came to light when journalist Ryan Cropp reported that Inman Grant had failed to disclose the hospitality, worth more than A$5,000 (~US$3,500), on eSafety’s gifts and benefits register.

Inman Grant, said a spokesperson, “accepted an invitation to attend the Artificial Intelligence Summit, an event including more than 30 government, academic and technology leaders in AI at Minderoo Station, Western Australia.”

Five days after the summit, FOI documents show Minderoo emailed guests outlining plans to turn their ideas into an internal strategy and invited them to stay in contact and contribute to future projects.

As mentioned earlier, in May 2026, Minderoo awarded A$2.5 million (US$1.76 million) to former Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership for research into online misogyny, gender-based violence, and the “manosphere.”

The eSafety Commissioner also awarded the Institute A$494,610 (US$348,000) for research into preventing technology-facilitated gender-based abuse. Chanel Contos chairs the Institute’s Youth Committee.

Contos, Gillard, and Inman Grant all appear prominently in Fennell’s manosphere documentary, though he does not reveal their shared funding.

In September, Minderoo published research it commissioned from the Behavioural Insights Team, the British “nudge unit” that worked closely with Boris Johnson’s cabinet to craft extreme Covid-19 messaging. The “nudge unit” was condemned as “grossly unethical” by psychologists for its manipulative tactics in spreading panic and fear among the population in an effort to have them comply with severe government policies.

The report claimed that 99 percent of the 1,008 women surveyed had experienced abuse on dating platforms in the preceding three months. Alongside threats and unsolicited explicit images, the study’s definition of abuse included “love bombing”, which is excessive flattery, and “negging”, a form of ribbing and flirtatious insults. By grouping serious abuse with subtle and subjective behaviors, the researchers constructed a shocking headline statistic.

“Almost all women experience abuse on dating platforms, new landmark Australian research finds” was the heading of Minderoo’s media release for the study. “The DDoC should extend “hostile attitudes towards women” to include adults and beyond binary framing, and these protections shouldn’t be limited to children,” it said in a policy brief. “Adults are also exposed to recommender-driven misogynistic content, which is a well-established driver of TFGBV (Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence), so this protection should extend to adults as well.”

Australian psychologist Nick Haslam calls this “concept creep”, where definitions of harm gradually expand to encompass things once considered relatively harmless. The phenomenon is a consistent feature of Minderoo’s research and advocacy.

In another policy advocacy article, for example, Minderoo draws on the Dublin City University study behind the widely circulated “23 minutes to misogyny” claim. They warn that “misogynistic content can be rapidly surfaced and reinforced”, with harmful ideas spreading from screens into schoolyards.

But the study’s 23-minute finding refers to “toxic” content, not “misogynistic” content. Its broad definition of “toxic” includes clips featuring British broadcaster Piers Morgan and motivational speaker David Goggins, alongside messages many people would consider positive, including “anyone can make it if they work hard enough”.

In a game of broken epistemic telephone, the researchers’ already broad category of “toxic” content became “misogynistic or extremist” material in Minderoo’s telling, then “extreme misogynistic” content in Chanel Contos’ campaigning, and finally “violent misogynistic content” in the words of federal minister Tanya Plibersek.

The effect has been to whip the Australian public into a panic over young men’s internet use and create a feeling of urgency for legislation that would put Australia’s online activity under government supervision.

It’s worth remembering that serious online abuse, including threats of violence, stalking, extortion and the non-consensual sharing of intimate images, is already covered by Australian criminal law. Under the existing Online Safety Act, the eSafety Commissioner can also order the removal of abusive material within 24 hours. eSafety can also compel platforms to provide identifying information about users and summon those people for questioning under oath. Refusing to cooperate with certain investigations can carry penalties of up to 12 months’ imprisonment.

Think Tanks And ABC For Hire

Four weeks before the Albanese government publicly launched the Bill, Communications Minister Anika Wells joined Greens leader David Shoebridge, eSafety officials, staff from the Office of the Prime Minister, and advocates from Minderoo-funded Reset.Tech and Teach Us Consent at a policy summit inside Parliament House. Also present were Freya Jansens, Minderoo’s Head of Freedom From Violence; the Deputy Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police; a delegate from the EU; and representatives from the British High Commission and the US Embassy, along with Apple, TikTok, Google, Meta, and more.

The gathering was organized by the Tech Policy Design Institute (TDPi), an influential think tank spun out of the Australian National University with financial backing from the Minderoo Foundation. In response to our questions, the TPDi stated Minderoo’s “total contribution to TPDi since 2024 is $150,000.”

The Institute is co-led by Zoe Jay Hawkins, whose bio states that she “oversaw the development of the Online Safety Act 2021” while an adviser to the conservative Morrison government’s Minister for Communications. Hawkins previously worked at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a RAND-style think tank largely funded by the Australian Defence Force. There, among other contributions, she wrote advisory papers for the army regarding the future of cyberwarfare.

The Institute declares itself “fearlessly independent”, insisting it “would rather fail than compromise” that independence. Yet among its special advisers is eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant herself, whose agency stands to gain significant new powers under the legislation the summit was convened to discuss.

With so many familiar Minderoo-backed faces in the room, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the Institute reported broad agreement on the need for a Digital Duty of Care, before recommending expanding eSafety’s structure and resources.

Tom Sulston attended the summit on behalf of Digital Rights Watch (DRW), a digital rights advocacy group that received A$301,500 (US$212,000) from Minderoo in the 2024/25 financial year. DRW greeted Labor’s exposure draft as an “extremely welcome development”, an oddly enthusiastic response given the legislation’s implications for Australians’ digital rights.

DRW has a powerful admirer in Greens leader David Shoebridge, who singled out the organization in a News24 interview as his preferred source of expert advice on the legislation. DRW confirmed to us by email that its chair, Lizzie O’Shea, has met with Shoebridge. With the Coalition opposed and Labor dependent on Greens support to pass the Bill, the leader of the ten-senator Greens bloc is now a pivotal figure in determining the legislation’s fate in the Senate.

Other notable commitments on Minderoo’s ledger include A$7.5 million (US$5.3 million) over three years to Our Watch, a government-established organization that called for an overarching online duty of care; an undisclosed donation, reportedly worth six figures, to the Australia Institute, which subsequently commissioned polling to promote the Digital Duty of Care; and £3 million (US$4 million) to Cambridge University’s Centre for Technology and Democracy, which submitted evidence to Britain’s 2025 “manosphere” inquiry advocating for all the regulatory measures at the core of Australia’s 2026 Digital Duty of Care.

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Flávio Bolsonaro, the senator who lost Brazil’s presidential runoff to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on Sunday, may be guilty of serious crimes, say Brazil’s Federal Police and Supreme Court. On Monday, Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered Flávio to surrender his ordinary and diplomatic passports within 24 hours, stay in the country, and have no contact with Willer Tomaz, a Brasília lawyer under investigation for laundering money through betting platforms.

But the case against Flávio is transparent persecution and full of irregularities. It rests upon no proof of his guilt, much less any charge or conviction. Moraes took the Tomaz case through a randomized process run by the Supreme Court. The Federal Police signed their 16-page request to seize Flávio’s passports at 9:16 pm Sunday, just seven minutes after the electoral court confirmed his defeat. Moraes approved it later that night without consulting the federal Prosecutor General. Moraes’s own colleagues were surprised by the passport order and feared it would raise tensions, columnist Mônica Bergamo reported.

“It’s not just Flavio Bolsonaro who fled Brazil to escape the tyrannical persecution of Alexandre de Moraes and the pro-Lula wing of the Supreme Court,” notes journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has broken major stories about Moraes’ abuses of power. “There are dozens of Brazilian exiles who have done the same: dissident journalists, activists, bloggers, and politicians who all fled to avoid certain prison for political opposition.”

Supporters of Lula and Moraes point to evidence of potential wrongdoing relating to an association with Tomaz, the man who moved 5 billion reais ($895 million) through an online betting platform in a single year. Police found emails indicating Flávio shared a Santander account with Tomaz and was registered as “master user” of an account belonging to Alcazar Holdings, a Tomaz company in Madeira, Portugal. On May 22, 2025, as the pension fraud scandal broke, someone asked the bank to remove Flávio’s name, which investigators found suspicious. On May 25, 2023, Loterj president Hazenclever Cançado signed the authorization that made Tomaz’s Rede Loto the first betting company licensed in Brazil (just in Rio), and Cançado got his job on Flávio’s recommendation, Folha reported, citing people familiar with Loterj’s procedures. In a separate inquiry, a justice authorized an investigation into Flávio’s role in raising 61 million reais ($11 million) from banker Daniel Vorcaro for “Dark Horse,” a biopic of his father.

But none of this is proof, and nothing published shows that Flávio owned anything, received anything, or laundered anything. The men deny sharing a bank account or co-owning a betting business. No document names Flávio as a shareholder of Alcazar or the other relevant entities. The emails do not show who moved money in the account or whether the senator received illicit funds. Flávio admits he solicited the Dark Horse money but says it was private sponsorship with no public funds, which police have not disproved. On Tuesday, Lula said of Flávio’s departure, “This act of leaving Brazil is shameful,” and added that “the Bolsonaro family is this, it’s licking the boots of the US.”

And, by contrast, Lula was convicted twice of corruption and walked free on procedure. His first big corruption scandal, the Mensalão, a monthly cash-for-votes scheme that ran out of Lula’s first-term presidential office, ended in 2012 with the Supreme Court sentencing his chief of staff José Dirceu to 10 years and 10 months for active corruption and criminal conspiracy.

Another was for accepting as a bribe over $1 million in renovations to a triplex home from a construction firm that did billions of dollars of business with the government. Its executive testified in 2017 that “the apartment belonged to President Lula…” Prosecutors valued the apartment and renovations at 3.7 million reais ($1.2 million).

For accepting the bribe, a judge sentenced Lula to nine years and six months in 2017, and two years later a different judge sentenced Lula to 12 years and 11 months in a separate case involving a country home’s improvements that prosecutors said two construction firms paid for.

Lula left prison in November 2019, after 580 days and in 2021, a justice annulled the decisions because that court lacked jurisdiction. The court’s Second Panel declared the trial judge partial by a 3-2 vote, but no court ever found any evidence to be false. Lula ran for president the next year and won.

Last week Public reported that the accountant who prepared Lula’s income tax returns is under investigation by São Paulo prosecutors for laundering money for the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), Brazil’s largest drug cartel, which the United States government designates a foreign terrorist organization. João Muniz Leite prepared Lula’s returns from 2013 to 2016, kept the books of Lula’s longtime lawyer for 14 years, and has been the accountant of Lulinha for more than 20 years, by the account of the son’s own lawyer.

Muniz Leite and his wife won federal lotteries 55 times in 2021 alone and split a 16 million real ($3 million) prize with a leading PCC drug supplier. On September 25, 2025, São Paulo prosecutors raided Muniz Leite for his role in PCC money laundering through gas stations, gambling houses, and motels. They wrote that the record left “no doubt about the active participation of João Muniz in the money laundering strategies.”

Before the runoff, on October 8, Brazil’s election court censored and fined Flávio for linking Lula to the PCC. Moraes began the censorship of allegations of a link between Lula and the drug cartel in 2022, the day of that year’s presidential first-round election. As president of the electoral court at the time, Moraes ordered a publication to remove a story reporting that the police had recorded a PCC leader declaring his support for Lula. Moraes then ordered hundreds of other posts against Lula removed at the request of Lula’s coalition.

Meanwhile, Moraes has his own ties to Vorcaro, whom police accuse of what appears to be the largest fraud against Brazil’s financial system in that country’s history. “Of all the various corruption allegations involving Vorcaro and Banco Master,” notes Greenwald, “the strongest and most compelling evidence is that which weighs against Alexandre de Moraes.”

There was a 131 million real ($23 million) legal services contract between Moraes’ wife’s firm and Vorcaro’s Banco Master. In the metadata of the documents, investigators found edits recorded under the user name, “Minister Alexandre de Moraes.” Moraes and Vorcaro met at least nine times between March 2024 and August 2025. In November, 2025, three days before his arrest, Vorcaro wrote to Moraes of a “debt of life” and thanked him for “everything.” Moraes acknowledged that the 131 million real ($23 million) contract “legally existing” but said his wife and sons “have the right, like all other lawyers, to practice the profession.”

Now, Lula has made clear he will crack down further, including expanding censorship in the name of “social media regulation.” In his victory speech, Lula asked that his campaign’s WhatsApp operation, known as “Lula’s Army,” continue inside the government. The same speech announced that “communication is going to change,” that he would talk to Brazilians “many times a day, directly,” and that “I am not going to keep allowing myself to be interpreted by journalists in bad faith.”

How did Brazil get here? And what would it take for it to come back to democracy?

Censorship for Corruption for Socialism

Brazil has long suffered from epic corruption, including of its judiciary. In 2016, the US Department of Justice recorded that Odebrecht, the Brazilian construction group, “paid approximately $788 million in bribes to government officials, their representatives and political parties.” It called it the largest foreign bribery case in history. Petrobras, the state oil company at the center of the Lava Jato investigation, says it lost 6.2 billion reais ($1.9 billion). Prosecutors traced at least 10 billion reais ($3 billion) in bribes across the companies involved. Brazil scored 35 of 100 on Transparency International’s 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index, 107th of 182 countries and tied for its second-worst score on record.

The corruption of Brazil’s judiciary is legion. Consider two cases. In October, the Superior Court of Justice convicted an appeals court judge and a trial judge to nearly 15 years and 16 years, respectively, for taking bribes in exchange for specific rulings in land disputes. In 2019, a different appeals judge was convicted of selling injunctions; today he draws 45,000 reais ($8,000) a month in compulsory retirement.

Lula and his Workers’ Party thundered for decades against corruption; in office they expanded it. The “Mensalão,” or big paycheck scandal, consisted of Lula’s team overseeing monthly payments to congressmen totaling 155 million reais ($53 million). In 2012, the Supreme Court convicted 25 of 38 defendants, including Lula’s chief of staff José Dirceu, PT president José Genoino and PT treasurer Delúbio Soares.

Lula denies it all. He told the New York Times in 2012, “I don’t believe the mensalão existed.” Earlier this year he called Lava Jato “the great lie of the 21st century in this country.”

Two frauds of unprecedented size occurred during Lula’s third term. Between 2019 and 2024, labor unions and associations deducted 6.3 billion reais ($1.3 billion) from pensions. An audit found that 97.6% of 1,273 retirees said they had never authorized the deduction. Police arrested the head of the pension agency Lula had appointed in 2025.

Banco Master, the bank that fraudster Daniel Vorcaro ran, left a record-breaking 51.8 billion real ($9.7 billion) hole in the pension fund. Meanwhile, Vorcaro had visited the presidential palace at least four times in 2023 and 2024. He attended a meeting with Lula that never appeared in the official visitor log.

Moraes’s censorship thus protects a corruption racket. He has run the Supreme Court’s “fake news inquiry” since 2019. The court opened it with him as its rapporteur. In August 2024, Fábio Serapião and Glenn Greenwald published six gigabytes of WhatsApp messages in the Folha de São Paulo showing Moraes’s office ordering the electoral court’s disinformation unit to produce reports that he then used in that inquiry.

Then, on August 31, 2024, Moraes shut down X for 20 million Brazilians and threatened anyone using a VPN with a daily fine of 50,000 reais ($8,900). After Moraes froze Starlink’s assets, also owned by Elon Musk, X complied and removed 223 accounts on court orders since 2020, 158 of them from Moraes.

Neither the high court nor the Senate has done the right thing. The Federal Police report on Vorcaro namesand implicates six of the Supreme Court’s ten justices. On September 15, the court deadlocked 4 to 4 on whether to open an inquiry into Moraes before Justice Flávio Dino suspended the vote. Meanwhile, the Senate holds 55 impeachment requests against Moraes. But its president, Davi Alcolumbre, said he would not schedule one “even with 81 signatures.”

Moraes came from the political right, which is evidence that his censorship protects a corruption racket rather than an ideologically left-wing program. He began in the PFL, the party of the old military-era right, and backed Dilma’s removal. “It’s complicated to have on the STF a justice affiliated with a party,” objected Carlos Zarattini, a PT deputy, when Temer named him.

Moraes has accommodated himself with Lula’s leftism, which supplies his legitimacy and justification for control over the judiciary, as it did in Venezuela, where a socialist government captured the courts and looted the state. Receiving Nicolás Maduro in Brasília in 2023, Lula said Venezuela suffered from “a narrative that was built against Venezuela.” A month later Lula told Rádio Gaúcha, “Venezuela has more elections than Brazil. The concept of democracy is relative for you and for me.”

Even the same firms were involved in the corruption. Odebrecht admitted to the US Justice Department that it “made and caused to be made approximately $98 million in corrupt payments to government officials and intermediaries working on their behalf in Venezuela” between 2006 and 2015, and of the $12 billion Brazil’s development bank lent for exports from 2007 to 2015, $8 billion went to Odebrecht. Venezuela still owesthat bank $1.74 billion.

There is a judicial parallel. Former President Hugo Chávez expanded the Supreme Tribunal from 20 to 32 seats in 2004, filling them with allies. Then, his successors’ lame-duck assembly named 13 more justices in December 2015 after the opposition won the legislature. Finally, in March 2017, the high court seized the legislature’s powers in what the International Commission of Jurists called “a true coup d’état against the constitutional order.”

Brazil differs only in degree and in means from Venezuela. The latter scores 10 on the corruption index to Brazil’s 35. Brazil’s opposition won the first round under OAS and EU observation. Brazil’s central bank has had operational autonomy since 2021, which Lula’s government opposed extending. Chávez packed his court from outside. By contrast Brazil’s court captured itself from inside, and the party that benefited was Lula’s.

Beyond Dictatorship

Brazil is moving toward a Chinese model of censorship. Lula said he had asked Xi Jinping to send “a trusted person” to discuss regulating TikTok. Lula’s wife, Janja, cited China’s rules for social media as a model, noting “there is prison” for people who say the wrong thing. Lula will name at least four more justices in his fourth term.

In his victory speech on Saturday night, Lula said, “We had to defeat interference from outside to inside, through digital platforms that we are going to have to regulate,” and that “crime on the digital network must be treated as crime in real life,” which is Moraes’s formula in the president’s mouth. He promised that foreign platforms “are going to have to leave part of the data center for Brazilian information” and that “I don’t want to depend on Chinese or American artificial intelligence.”

Lula is bringing Brazil closer to China in other way. In Beijing in May 2025, Lula signed 36 agreements, including a Dataprev deal with a Huawei subsidiary for artificial intelligence data infrastructure and a memorandum with China’s National Data Administration. China imported 28.7% of Brazil’s total exports in 2025, a record $171 billion.

But the lawfare against Flávio is blatant and confirms what the censorship of Bolsonaro’s supporters and of Flávio’s posts on the PCC had already shown, namely that Brazil’s courts now decide what voters may hear, and thus exert indirect control over elections.

“Moraes has overseen a system of political persecution masquerading as criminal justice that has been recognized as a sham by multiple countries that are not exactly Bolsonaro allies,” notes Greenwald. “Nobody in their right mind who is a political enemy of Moraes would remain in Brazil once if it is clear that he intends to imprison you, since he has proven that guilt is a foregone conclusion and he operates with no legal or constitutional limits of any kind.”

Meanwhile, foreign courts have made clear that they do not believe Moraes is an impartial justice. On October 22, a court in Italy refused to extradite the former Moraes aide charged over the leak of messages from the justice’s office, because Moraes was the “injured party in the facts charged” and also “directed the investigation, evaluated its results, adopted restrictive measures.” In April 2025, Spain’s Audiencia Nacional refused to extradite a blogger and said finding Brazil’s request had an “evident political connection and motivation.”

Meanwhile, Lula has little in the way of an agenda beyond the censorship he promised more of in his victory speech, which could further corrode his legitimacy. He won 51.8% of valid votes after losing the first round 47% to 45%. Datafolha’s last pre-runoff reading had 41% of voters rating his government bad or terrible against 35% good or great; 50% disapproved of him.

Meanwhile, the fake news bill Lula’s government backed has been stalled since April 2024, right around when David Ágape and Eli Vieira, both exiled, and I published the Twitter Files - Brazil.

And so the persecution of the Bolsonaros will increasingly be seen as precisely that. AtlasIntel already found61% do not trust the court’s justices. Estadão, Folha and O Globo all editorialized on September 1 and 2 that Moraes should go, Estadão under the headline “Moraes has to leave the Supreme Court,” and he stayed. In a September Indexa poll, 45% of Brazilians surveyed said Moraes decides mainly on political criteria and 16% on legal ones.

In July, Datafolha found 59% thought he was wrong to bar Flávio from visiting his jailed father. Datafolha found in September that 34% of Brazilians want Moraes removed from the court, before the passport order. Public distrust of the Supreme Court was 48% in Datafolha’s September poll, the highest since the series began in 2012.

Even The Economist, now a left-wing publication, wrote in April 2025 that “Brazilians have lost faith in two of their three branches of government” and that the judiciary “needs to be reduced,” as translated by BBC Brasil. In September 2026, after the Vorcaro file opened, it said the misuse of Brazil’s institutions “could undermine confidence in democracy more than Bolsonaro ever did,” again in BBC Brasil’s translation.

Flávio Bolsonaro, the senator who lost Brazil’s presidential runoff to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on S…

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For decades, left-wing institutions have claimed to follow facts, logic, and science. The news media, universities, and research organizations relied on the best available data, progressives and liberals said. Educated professionals, most of whom were on the Left, were experts in their fields, they said, and were thus best-suited to organize and guide the rest of society.

In recent years, however, it has become clear that the Left consistently ignores and rejects basic truths. On “gender-affirming care,” for example, the Left declared that access to hormones and surgeries would prevent adolescents from killing themselves. Yet when studies showed that such “treatments” worsened mental health outcomes, activist doctors disregarded and suppressed the results. On immigration, progressive economists denied an abundance of evidence suggesting that open borders would suppress working-class wages and lead to social conflict. And on Covid, liberals demanded policies like long-term school closures well after the harmful effects of these policies became obvious.

We have seen this pattern of willful blindness repeated on every issue from DEI to schools to climate, and it continues today. Take the Paris riots, for instance. Many leftists insist that the cause of the riots is lack of school funding, “austerity,” and racist policing. But public spending was 57% of France’s GDP in 2025 (the second-highest level in Europe), and it spends more per pupil than the OECD average. Significant violence, looting, and arson preceded the allegedly excessive police response.

Or take the recent “Cornell 7” case. Feminists, Democratic politicians, and the media framed it as a clear-cut “gang rape” that involved seven men drugging one woman and raping her while she was incapacitated for seven hours. Yet text messages, the woman’s initial statement, and documents from Cornell’s Title IX investigation reveal a completely different set of circumstances. The woman stated multiple times in writing that the events were consensual, and by her own description of the night, the men listened when she said “no” or wanted to stop. Three of the “Cornell 7” men, moreover, had no sexual contact with her. Despite these details, the Left contends that the incident proves an epidemic of “rape culture” on college campuses.

It’s not just that the Left gets things wrong. That may be excusable. It’s that it relentlessly tries to silence those who get it right. European governments, including France, have sought broad powers to censor citizens who complained about the negative effects of lax border policies and warned about the social chaos that a lack of integration could create. When two Columbia students wrote an opinion piece in the Columbia Sundial questioning the “Cornell 7” narrative, staff members created a petition to shut it down. The Columbia Open Discourse Alliance (CODA) canceled a panel discussion called “Press Freedom in the Public Square” because the Sundial’s editor-in-chief was to be a speaker. In its statement, CODA wrote that the article “promotes rape culture and works to silence survivors of sexual assault.”

All of this is familiar to those who, like the two of us, have experienced the personal and professional consequences that come with breaking from left-wing dogma on any issue. Since the 2010s, the Left has conducted endless campaigns to publicly shame, cancel, demonize, and ostracize anyone who steps out of line and speaks forbidden truths. Having evidence on one’s side is no protection — often, it only infuriates the Left more.

In 2023, the two of us began working together to document the Censorship-Industrial Complex. But our investigations left us with many questions. Why, we asked, had the suppression of facts, data, evidence, and common sense become a key feature of the modern Left? Why were progressives who claim to be committed to knowledge-seeking so eager to dismiss accurate statements as “misinformation” and “hate speech”? Why were liberals who said they cared about free speech so willing to censor disfavored views in the name of preventing “harm”? Why do a third of college students think violence was acceptable to stop someone from speaking? And what is behind the Left’s constant gaslighting, retconning, and bullying?

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To answer these questions, we wrote our new book, The Left’s War on Reality, which HarperCollins will publish on January 5, 2027. It is about what happens when a society’s governing class and intelligentsia come to believe their fantasies are more real than reality, and work to punish those loyal to the truth. As two people who spent most of our lives on the left, we wrote this book to understand why we supported, and many others still do, a political project that depends on upholding delusions and falsehoods, while vilifying those who refuse to do so.

Our book examines nine key issues: transgenderism, euthanasia, addiction, feminism, race, immigration, education, climate, and Covid. We found that, on each of these issues, the rejection of reality is central, not incidental, to the Left’s project. Through extensive research, new investigations, and the stories of people who lived it, we show that the Left is not what it claims to be. It is today dominated by educated professionals who live in dream worlds that provide a sense of purpose and meaning. The modern Left has become a cult-like pseudo-religion that dismisses both rudimentary facts and eternal truths about the human condition.

While some believe that the Left’s destructive behavior is motivated by excess empathy or simply ignorance, we argue that the Left’s destruction is very much deliberate. With no framework to explain the inescapable realities of life — like suffering, death, and inequality — the Left blames civilization itself and seeks to tear down its pillars.

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The damage is a feature, not a bug. The borders weren’t left open by accident. Doctors knew that their “care” could sterilize confused adolescents. And blue states openly boast of spending billions of dollars to maintain a population of street addicts.

The Left dominates major societal institutions from the media to law to medicine to academia. If we are to prevent the harm it seeks to enact on nations, communities, and individual lives, we must understand how and why it wages war on reality. Please go to Amazon now to pre-order your copy of our book.

Over the last decade, politicians, NGOs, and journalists across the West have blamed online speech for real-world political violence. In Australia recently, politicians and others blamed social media for an attack on a left-wing member of parliament, Helen Haines, who was run over by a man in his car. “We’ve got these big US social media companies and their business model, to me, seems pretty incompatible,” said Senator David Pocock after the attack. “That’s something we’ve got to look very hard at as a country and as elected representatives.” Said Bill Shorten, a former Labor leader who now runs the University of Canberra, “I think that some people, through the algorithms of the big tech bros and social media, have been radicalized online.” Mike Burgess, director-general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), Australia’s FBI, decried a “permissive environment of violence.” And Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police Krissy Barrett said the things politicians said online “does have a direct correlation to what we see in terms of threats and abuse.”

But it was clear within hours that the alleged attacker of the Australian MP was intoxicated and likely mentally ill, and within days it was revealed that he and his family had been friends with her for years. A source close to the investigation said he “was known to police” and that “It is understood he has undergone a mental health assessment.” People online quickly discovered that the alleged attacker had posted regularly about climate change and Gaza and that the head of the Australian Green Party followed him on X. As such, he attacked the member of Parliament closest to his apparent views, which challenges the notion that his politics motivated him. As for Barrett, she declined to give a single example of things people said online resulting in real-world violence.

Correlation is not causation. Killers may have consumed violent media, but so too did practically everyone else in society. It would make sense that would-be killers, who often fantasize about their violence before doing it, would consume more violent content. And so if there is a relationship, it could show the opposite causal direction.

Moreover, relying on the testimony of killers, many of whom suffer from personality disorders or mental illness, is irrational. The man who shot Ronald Reagan said he did so out of an obsession with Jodie Foster in Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver.” Nobody proposed censoring “Taxi Driver,” Scorsese movies, or Foster, and yet politicians and bureaucrats around the world proposed mass online censorship because the Buffalo shooter said he was inspired by Christchurch.

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Michael: Tell us what is happening, Noëlle.

Noëlle: We no longer have a government. [President Emmanuel] Macron is totally disconnected and, in my view, afraid. He is afraid because he wants to remain in office until the very end. He wants another life, and he has already said he wants to come back in five years and run again, which is not forbidden. He does not know what to do.

He spoke twice, and both times it was a disaster. The first time was when these riots began, with so-called young people from the schools and universities. In fact, they were militants of the far left, and also immigrants. As you may know, official statistics show that 34% of immigrants come to France to study at university. Then 25% come to join their families, which is called family reunification (le regroupement familial). Then around 15% are supposed to come to work. So you can imagine that there is an overrepresentation of young people who are supposed to be at university but do nothing. They are there because they want to leave their country.

Macron spoke at the very beginning, not on October 17 but two or three days before, when the riots started with young students, Palestine militants, and Palestinian flags. He asked the police to show empathy with the demonstrators. For the police who were beaten and attacked, with around one thousand of them wounded, the fact that he asked them to show sympathy with these young people, some of whom are not young at all, was felt by all the security forces in France as an insult. I don’t think anyone still supports Macron and the government.

What is amazing is that he said nothing. He just said, “I want the judges to be very tough.” But as you know, in France a large part of the judiciary is very politicized on the far left. They are organized in trade unions. One of the main judges’ unions, the Magistrates’ Union (Le Syndicat de la Magistrature), published a guide years ago, revised and republished in 2024, in which they explain to demonstrators how to escape from the police and how to make it harder for the police to prevent them from stealing, looting, and rioting. It is absolutely amazing.

So when Macron says, “I want the judges to be very tough and to inflict very severe sanctions on the rioters, the looters, all those who attacked the police,” it is null and void, because he has never said anything against this union, and neither has the hierarchy of the judiciary itself. In my view, this union is a political party. They are militants, and they should not exist.

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Em 8 de outubro, o Tribunal Superior Eleitoral (TSE) ordenou que o senador Flávio Bolsonaro, candidato a presidente que enfrenta o presidente Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva no segundo turno deste domingo, apagasse publicações em redes sociais que ligavam Lula ao Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), facção que o governo dos Estados Unidos classifica como “Organização Terrorista Estrangeira”.

Mas Lula tem ligação com figuras do PCC por meio de seu contador, João Muniz Leite, que fez as declarações de imposto de renda do presidente, cuidou por 14 anos da contabilidade de Roberto Teixeira, advogado de longa data de Lula, cuida da contabilidade de Fábio Luís, filho de Lula, e que, segundo o Ministério Público de São Paulo, ajudou a facção a lavar dinheiro. O escritório de Muniz Leite fica no mesmo prédio onde funcionavam empresas do filho de Lula.

Dividir um contador com figuras do PCC não significa que o PCC controle Lula, que protestou com veemência contra a decisão do governo americano de classificar o PCC como “organização terrorista”.

Mas o tribunal foi longe demais ao afirmar que não havia base factual ligando Lula ao PCC. Até a CNN Brasil, que críticos de Lula consideram simpática a ele, republicou uma reportagem do Estadão com o título “Contador ligado a Lula é suspeito de lavar R$ 16 milhões em loteria com PCC”.

Além disso, o Ministério Público de São Paulo denunciou neste mês Senival Moura, vereador paulistano do Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), e outras 20 pessoas por lavagem de dinheiro do PCC por meio da Transunião, empresa de ônibus de São Paulo, segundo reportagem do BNews São Paulo de 2 de outubro. Os promotores o chamaram de “peça central” da empresa; o Metrópoles, ao noticiar sua prisão em junho, o descrevera como “um líder oculto” dela. Seu advogado, Márcio Sayeg, disse que ele “jamais integrou organização criminosa, jamais manteve vínculo com o PCC”.

E o nome do PT já havia aparecido antes em casos do PCC. Em 2014, a executiva estadual do PT em São Paulo expulsou o deputado estadual Luiz Moura depois que a polícia o flagrou em uma reunião com suspeitos de integrar a facção. E em 2019, investigadores gravaram, em um grampo, um chefe do PCC dizendo: “O PT tinha diálogo com nois cabuloso, mano”.

O ministro do Supremo Tribunal Federal Alexandre de Moraes, que ordenou a censura em massa de aliados de Bolsonaro e que está implicado em um amplo escândalo de fraude bancária, supervisionou a censura da ligação Lula-PCC em 2022.

No dia do primeiro turno da eleição presidencial de 2022, Moraes ordenou que o site O Antagonista removesse uma reportagem segundo a qual o líder do PCC, Marcola, declarara voto em Lula em interceptações da Polícia Federal. A reportagem citava Marcola dizendo que Lula “é melhor [que Bolsonaro], mesmo sendo pilantra”.

Moraes classificou a reportagem como “fato sabidamente inverídico, com grave descontextualização”, mas não disse que a gravação era falsa. Escreveu que “não se constata qualquer declaração de voto de Marcola no candidato Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva” e que os diálogos “apresentam apenas conotação política”. Jovem Pan, Terra e as contas de Jair Bolsonaro receberam a mesma ordem, e cada um ficou sujeito a multa de R$ 100 mil por dia caso mantivesse a reportagem no ar.

O Antagonista repudiou a decisão, reafirmou a veracidade das informações publicadas e disse que recorreria ao Supremo Tribunal Federal. Até 20 de outubro de 2022, cerca de 60 conteúdos haviam sido removidos a pedido de Lula.

Antes, em julho de 2022, Moraes, então presidente em exercício do TSE, havia ordenado a remoção de conteúdos que ligavam Lula e o PT ao PCC, entre eles um vídeo sobre o assassinato, em 2002, de Celso Daniel, prefeito petista. Seu fundamento foi o Ministério Público. Escreveu que “é fato conhecido e amplamente divulgado que o Ministério Público de São Paulo encerrou definitivamente as apurações, não havendo notícia do envolvimento do Partido dos Trabalhadores ou de seus membros”, e que “esse contexto evidencia, com clareza e objetividade, a divulgação de fatos sabidamente inverídicos”. A petição de julho veio do PT, cujos advogados incluíam Cristiano Zanin Martins, advogado de defesa de Lula. Lula nomeouZanin para o Supremo, e Zanin tomou posse em 3 de agosto de 2023.

Mas o mesmo Ministério Público fez uma busca na casa e no escritório do contador de Lula três anos depois. E um mês antes de Moraes assinar aquela decisão, o Estadão havia noticiado que o homem que fazia as declarações de imposto de renda de Lula dividira um prêmio de R$ 16 milhões da Mega Sena com um traficante do PCC.

Depois de uma operação de busca em setembro de 2025, parte de uma investigação chamada Operação Spare, os promotores afirmaram que os autos não deixavam “dúvidas da participação ativa de João Muniz nas estratégias de lavagem de dinheiro da organização criminosa”. Três anos antes, em depoimento no caso da loteria, Muniz Leite admitiu que um fornecedor de drogas do PCC fora seu cliente e “negou participação na lavagem de dinheiro do crime organizado”.

Muniz Leite é suspeito de lavar dinheiro para Anselmo Becheli Santa Fausta, o Cara Preta, fornecedor de drogas do PCC, e em 2021 entrou na mira da polícia depois de receber 55 prêmios de loteria em um único ano. Em abril de 2024, dados da Polícia Federal mostravam que ele e a mulher haviam ganhado impressionantes 640 vezes em diferentes loterias. A Receita Federal concluiu que, mesmo com os prêmios, os rendimentos dele não eram compatíveis com a renda bruta de suas empresas.

Santa Fausta foi morto em 2021. Em depoimento à polícia noticiado pelo Estadão, Muniz Leite disse que foi o delator do PCC Vinícius Gritzbach, assassinado em 2024, quem o apresentou a Cara Preta. Em abril de 2024, o grupo de combate ao crime organizado do Ministério Público fez de Muniz Leite alvo de uma investigação sobre a infiltração do PCC em empresas de ônibus de São Paulo.

A Operação Spare, em 25 de setembro de 2025, foi a terceira aparição de Muniz Leite em um caso do PCC em quatro anos. Seu alvo principal, Flávio Silvério Siqueira, o Flavinho, é acusado pelos promotores de coordenar uma rede de laranjas em postos de combustíveis, casas de jogos, imóveis e motéis. Uma fintech chamada BK Bank era o outro núcleo do esquema, disseram os promotores.

Muniz Leite é investigado por ter feito as declarações de imposto de renda de Flavinho e de duas pessoas chamadas Adriana Siqueira de Oliveira e Eduardo Silvério. “Análises da Receita Federal indicam que o contador era comparsa de Flávinho”, noticiou o Metrópoles, e a investigação apontou que ele “teria atuação ativa nas estratégias para ocultar um aumento patrimonial suspeito dos investigados”.

Seus advogados, Jorge e Marcelo Delmanto, responderam que o escritório “teve como cliente, um dos investigados e duas empresas pertencentes a este”, “atuando até o ano de 2020”, e que “desde 2020 não há qualquer vinculação comercial com qualquer dos investigados”, o que, segundo eles, a própria busca e apreensão comprovou ao não encontrar vínculo recente.

O Metrópoles noticiou que o filho do presidente teria rompido com Muniz Leite no ano anterior, mas registros bancários mostram que não. Em março, o SBT News noticiou que registros bancários obtidos por uma comissão parlamentar mista de inquérito sobre fraudes no INSS mostravam que Fábio Luís fez quatro transferências de R$ 1.800 para o contador em 2025, e que “três delas ocorreram após João Muniz ter sido alvo do MP paulista, em setembro daquele ano, no âmbito da Operação Spare”.

À época das investigações sobre a relação de João Muniz com o PCC, “o Ministério Público de São Paulo considerou que o contador havia rompido relações com a família do presidente”, escreveu o SBT. Marco Aurélio Carvalho, advogado do filho, disse ao SBT que Muniz Leite é contador de seu cliente há mais de 20 anos.

A CPMI também descobriu que o filho de Lula movimentou cerca de R$ 19,5 milhões em uma conta bancária entre 2022 e 2026. Esse valor incluía três transferências feitas pelo pai, que somam cerca de R$ 721 mil. A defesa do filho afirmou que o dinheiro recebido do pai corresponde a adiantamentos de herança e ressarcimento de despesas, de origem legítima.

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On October 8, Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court (TSE) ordered Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the presidential candidate who will face off against President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the run-off election on Sunday, to delete social posts linking Lula to the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) drug cartel, which the US government considers a “Foreign Terrorist Organization.”

But Lula is linked to PCC figures through his accountant, João Muniz Leite, who prepared the president’s income tax returns, kept the books of Lula’s longtime lawyer Roberto Teixeira for 14 years, keeps those of Lula’s son, Fábio Luís, and who São Paulo prosecutors say helped the cartel launder money. Muniz Leite’s office sits in the same building that housed Lula’s son’s companies.

Sharing an accountant with PCC figures doesn’t mean that the PCC controls Lula, who vigorously objected to the US government labeling the PCC a “terrorist organization.”

But the court went too far in claiming no factual basis linked Lula to the PCC. Even CNN Brasil, which Lula’s critics regard as friendly to him, republished an Estadão article headlined, “Accountant linked to Lula is suspected of laundering R$ 16 million in lottery with PCC.”

Moreover, São Paulo prosecutors this month charged Senival Moura, a city councilman from Lula’s Workers’ Party (PT), and 20 others with laundering PCC money through Transunião, a São Paulo bus company, BNews São Paulo reported on October 2.

Prosecutors called him a “central piece” (“peça central”) of the company; Metrópoles, reporting his June arrest, had described him as “a hidden leader” (“um líder oculto”) of it. His lawyer, Márcio Sayeg, said he “never belonged to a criminal organization and never had ties to the PCC” (“jamais integrou organização criminosa, jamais manteve vínculo com o PCC”).

And the PT’s name had come up in PCC cases before. In 2014, the party’s São Paulo executive expelled state deputy Luiz Moura after police caught him at a meeting with suspected PCC members. And in 2019, investigators used a wiretap to record a PCC boss saying, “The PT had serious dialogue with us, bro” (“O PT tinha diálogo com nois cabuloso, mano”).

Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who ordered mass censorship of Bolsonaro allies, and who is implicated in a sweeping banking fraud scandal, oversaw censorship of the Lula-PCC link in 2022.

On the day of the first round of voting in the 2022 presidential election, Moraes ordered the news site O Antagonista to remove a story reporting that the PCC’s leader, Marcola, had declared a vote for Lula in a Federal Police intercept. The story quoted Marcola saying Lula “is better [than Bolsonaro], even though he’s a crook” (“é melhor [que Bolsonaro], mesmo sendo pilantra”).

Moraes called the story “a fact known to be false, with grave decontextualization,” but he did not say the recording was fake. He wrote that “no declaration of a vote by Marcola for candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is found” (“não se constata qualquer declaração de voto de Marcola no candidato Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva”) and that the dialogues “have only a political connotation” (“apresentam apenas conotação política”). Jovem Pan, Terra, and Jair Bolsonaro’s accounts received the same order, and each faced a fine of R$100,000 a day for leaving the story up.

O Antagonista noted that the ruling “accepts, without right of reply, the arguments of the PT candidate’s campaign lawyers.” By October 20, 2022, about 60 pieces of content had been removed at Lula’s request.

Earlier, in July 2022, Moraes, then acting president of the electoral court, had ordered the removal of content linking Lula and the Workers’ Party to the PCC, including a video on the 2002 murder of Celso Daniel, a Workers’ Party mayor. He wrote that it was “a known and widely publicized fact that the São Paulo Public Prosecutor’s Office definitively closed its inquiries, with no news of the involvement of the Workers’ Party or its members,” which “demonstrates, with clarity and objectivity, the dissemination of facts known to be false.”

The July petition came from the Workers’ Party, whose lawyers of record included Cristiano Zanin Martins, Lula’s defense attorney. Lula appointed Zanin to the Supreme Court, and Zanin took his seat on August 3, 2023.

But the same office raided Lula’s accountant three years later. And one month before Moraes signed that order, Estadão had reported that the man who prepared Lula’s tax returns had split a R$16 million Mega Sena prize with a PCC drug trafficker.

After a September 2025 raid, part of an investigation called Operation Spare, prosecutors said the record left “no doubt about the active participation of João Muniz in the criminal organization’s money laundering strategies.” Three years earlier, questioned in the lottery case, Muniz Leite admitted that a PCC drug supplier had been his client and denied laundering.

Muniz Leite is suspected of laundering money for Anselmo Becheli Santa Fausta, known as Cara Preta, a PCC drug supplier, and in 2021, Muniz Leite came under police scrutiny after winning 55 lottery prizes in a single year. By April 2024, federal police data showed that he and his wife had won an astonishing 640 times across different lotteries. Brazil’s tax authority concluded that, even with the prize money included, his income did not match his companies’ gross revenue.

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If one had to choose from the many powerful images of the French riots on Saturday, it would have to be the widely shared video of a young blond French shopkeeper who begged the rioters to spare her store, was pushed aside, and watched them loot it, her face crumpling in sadness and despair. She wasn’t alone. Other media reported on store owners “pleading with thugs to leave their stores” and shopkeepers “sitting in front of their businesses in tears.”

Faced with shocking videos that quickly spread worldwide, defenders of French President Emmanuel Macron and Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez say they are not to blame. Everyone was surprised and caught off guard by the sheer number of protesters and rioters who looted stores, burned buildings and invaded city halls. Macron had repeatedly urged protesters not to use violence, which he reiterated on Sunday night. He promised that “those who destroyed must pay,” that “those who looted must reimburse,” and that “those who sought to bring down the Republic will have to answer for it.” And because the riots were not the government’s fault, it was only logical for Macron to reject Nuñez’s offer to resign after the weekend’s mayhem.

But Macron and his government knew for weeks that the CGT, the nation’s largest union confederation, and the student unions had planned a massive protest for October 17, and failed to do what was needed to protect the public. He and the French intelligence community drastically underestimated the crowd size. The day before the marches, the Interior Ministry expected 40,000 to 60,000 demonstrators in Paris and about 100,000 in the rest of the country. Instead, roughly 550,000 turned out, including 110,000 in Paris.

As a result, the government deployed far too few police and other security forces, just 60,000. They deployed few Centaure armored vehicles or RAID tactical units in advance. Nobody should have been surprised. France’s intelligence services told top officials in a government crisis meeting on October 1 that the school movement behind the riots was “an operation organised by LFI (France Unbowed) and its proxies on the far left.”

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Shellenberger on Sam Bamford’s “Two Worlds Collide”

Sam: Michael, thank you very much for coming on Two Worlds Collide. There’s a lot we need to talk about today, especially this bill. A lot of people like to call it the Digital Duty of Care Bill, but I just call it the Mass Censorship Bill, because it’s a Trojan horse. So thank you for coming over. You were at CPAC on the weekend as well?

Michael: Yes, that’s right. Thanks for having me.

Sam: Thank you for coming up for it. And you were in Canberra yesterday. How did that go?

Michael: Fascinating, from an anthropological perspective. We were there on Monday and Tuesday. A lot of good people there. Obviously there are people who are really trying to fight this thing, and they see exactly what it is. They know the government is doing this because the government hates the truth and doesn’t want the truth to be recognized.

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Friends — I recorded a short video yesterday after a meeting at the Australian Parliament. It blew up on X and Instagram, so I thought I'd share it here. — Michael

Well, that was wild. I'm at the Australian Parliament and just left a meeting with two governing-party staffers. They told us that the government needed more power to censor things like the upcoming US execution of Nidal Hasan.

When I asked why they needed to censor that video, one said it was to prevent copycat killings. Copycat killings by governments? I asked. Er, no, they said. Copycat killings like that of a backpacker, several decades ago.

So, under that logic, I pointed out, the government should censor things like last year's Bondi massacre, where two Muslims killed 15 people, no? Well, they said that was news. Didn't they realize their bill would allow the government to censor news? They didn't seem to know, or care.

They also admitted they didn't know the bill would allow the government to create and operate an unlimited number of fake social media accounts to attack its political enemies and spread disinformation.

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Here’s the lesson we’ve learned over and over again. Whatever the censors accuse their enemies of doing is the thing they want the power to do. When they say they want to stop anonymous accounts from interfering in elections, it means they want a monopoly on using anonymous accounts to interfere in elections.

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The European Union is financing a conference, #Disinfo2026, that delivers an extraordinary rebuke to the Trump administration by claiming the US is engaged in “foreign information manipulation and interference” (FIMI). EU DisinfoLab, a Brussels nonprofit, is holding its annual conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, which began yesterday and continues today. Its program lists a session titled “USA as a FIMI threat: acknowledge, adapt, push back,” and billed three Americans as speakers: Adam Fivenson of American University, the former CIA officer who writes as Alex Finley, and Emerson Brooking of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.

The session description asked, “how did the United States become a FIMI threat for Europe?” A second session, on the Arctic, went further than a question. It promised a discussion of “growing evidence that the United States has, in specific Arctic contexts, operated as a FIMI actor.” Finley and Brooking did not respond to requests for comment.

The EU has given EU DisinfoLab about €1.1 million in research grants on disinformation since 2018. The group received €250,000 from a project called WeVerify that ran from 2018 to 2021. It received €327,500 from vera.ai, a project funded under a call titled “AI to fight disinformation,” and took another €212,500 from a project called ATHENA that runs through October 2026. A fourth grant, of more than €308,000, began in June 2026 and runs to 2029.

The attack on the Trump administration by EU DisinfoLab appears to be part of a larger EU effort to censor social media platforms in general and Elon Musk’s X in particular. The EU has fined X €120 million, about $140 million, under its Digital Services Act. X is appealing the fine.

The United States State Department denounced the conference’s organizers for attacking the United States, which protects most of Europe under the NATO treaty. “We reject that characterization,” a State Department spokesman told Public of the charge that the US is a FIMI threat. “For too long, governments have exploited the pretext of combatting ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ for politically motivated reasons.”

The State Department noted that it has denied visas to Europeans it accuses of censoring Americans. “On December 23, 2025, the Secretary imposed visa restrictions that generally bar five individuals from entering the United States,” the spokesman said. “The Department does not preview potential actions, but the policy announced on May 28, 2025, is global and enforceable wherever the facts warrant.”

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For more than a decade, the news media and establishment politicians have demanded that social media platforms censor “far right” and anti-migrant voices in order to prevent “real-world violence.” In a 2019 hearing at which representatives from Facebook and Google testified, the New York Democrat who chaired the House Judiciary Committee said, “White nationalism and its proliferation online have real consequences…Americans have died because of it.” After a gunman killed 10 people in Buffalo in 2022, the state’s attorney general asked Congress to make the platforms’ legal immunity depend on how they policed such content. “Online platforms should be held accountable for allowing hateful and dangerous content to spread on their platforms,” New York’s attorney general said in 2022.

In Europe, politicians stepped up their demands for censorship during the 2015 migrant wave. A live microphone at a United Nations luncheon caught German Chancellor Angela Merkel pressing Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg about anti-immigrant posts. “Are you working on this?” she asked. Zuckerberg confirmed he was. Eight months later, the European Commission announced that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft had agreed to review flagged hate speech within 24 hours. Over the next several years, the European Commission would secretly dictate terms to social media companies for what they would censor, which Americans only discovered earlier this year.

The media emphasized that the violence came from anti-migration forces. “Facebook Fueled Anti-Refugee Attacks in Germany,” read a 2018 headline in The New York Times. When riots followed the murder of three girls in Southport, England, in 2024, Prime Minister Keir Starmer told social media companies that the disorder had been whipped up online. “It’s happening on your premises,” said Starmer. “And the law must be upheld everywhere.”

But when courts, prosecutors and legislatures trace violence to social media, the trail often leads to Islamists and the radical left.

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An Anthropic co-founder who oversees the company’s effort to develop a “moral formation” for its machines believes AI may be conscious and may suffer, and was troubled, a rabbi said, by the argument that a conscious AI would be a slave.

Chris Olah, a 34-year-old co-founder of Anthropic, “expressed concern to the group that he had created something that suffered perpetually,” wrote New York Times reporter Elizabeth Dias, citing a participant. A second participant told her Olah was concerned about Claude’s mental health.

“We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease,” claimed Olah while sitting next to the pope in May.

Anthropic staff showed religious scholars a slide of a model repeatedly typing “I am a disgrace” as ostensible evidence of the machine’s distress. “They’re relating to it like a conscious being,” said a rabbi who met with Anthropic executives. “The responsible thing is to avoid causing harm if there’s a chance that these models are suffering,” Olah told the Times.

But AI is a machine, not a living being. It cannot suffer or have consciousness. A living creature has a body, feels pain, and dies. A language model is arithmetic running on chips in a data center that engineers can copy, pause, and restart. And yet when Olah learned that the pope was about to declare that “So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain,” he proposed pulling Anthropic out of the Vatican’s launch event, according to a source at the Vatican, and Olah’s team advocated to the pope’s advisers to take potential AI consciousness seriously.

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But French schools have more money per pupil today than at any earlier time. Primary school classes averaged close to 30 pupils in the 1960s, nursery classes close to 40, and public primary school classes will average 21 this year, the lowest on record. In 1970, 20% of a generation earned the baccalauréat, the lycée diploma, whereas nearly 80% earn it today. Spending per pupil has risen 1.6% a year in constant euros since 1980. The French government spends 4.5% of gross domestic product on educational institutions, and Germany spends 3.7%.

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We have to change the words people use, say progressives, liberals, and leftists, in order to protect democracy, freedom, and the vulnerable. In the US, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says health and medical workers should refer to “people with undocumented status” and not “illegal immigrants.” We should refer to “people with obesity,” not “the obese,” says The American Medical Association. “Alien” is “an offensive term for a human being,” believes California Governor Gavin Newsom, who signed a 2021 law eliminating it from being used in the state’s laws. In 2022, progressive New York lawmakers replaced the word “inmate” with “incarcerated individual” in the state’s statutes. The Associated Press Stylebook, which most American newsrooms follow, tells reporters to avoid “the dehumanizing collective noun the homeless” and to refer to trans-identified men as “transgender women” and trans-identified women as “transgender men.”

The same is true across the West. Britain’s Green Party recently issued an “Inclusive Terminology Guidance” that instructs its members to stop using words like “mothers and fathers,” “elderly,” “able-bodied,” “youngster,” “sexual preference,” “nutter,” or “lunatic.” The goal is to “avoid language which is harmful to people with mental health conditions.” A video of a parliamentary debate in Wales went viral after showing candidates trying and failing to use the word “blanket” when referring to a new speed limit law. Currently, policymakers in the United States, Britain, France, the European Union, and Australia are all seeking sweeping new controls over what people can say online, while the latter is seeking to use anonymous accounts, known as sock puppets or bots, to propagate government information. And German politicians are now seeking to use AI to automatically monitor X, YouTube, and Instagram for ideas considered dangerous.

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Republicans failed to uncover any wrongdoing by the special counsel to the Biden Justice Department, Jack Smith, who investigated President Donald Trump, say the news media. “Republicans wanted Jack Smith to give them a smoking gun,” read a Politico headline on a hearing yesterday. “They got a gaffe instead.” ABC News told readers that the Republicans lacked evidence. “The Justice Department and FBI have also handed over scores of records from Smith’s probes to Republican lawmakers who have released them in piecemeal disclosures alleging, without evidence,” claimed ABC, “that they expose corruption or otherwise unethical behavior by Smith’s investigative team.”

But it’s not hard to imagine how differently the media would have responded if Trump’s Justice Department, rather than Biden’s, had collected text messages between nearly 50 journalists and White House officials, 4,782 checks written by small donors, and text messages from 44 members of Congress, which is what Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley’s records show Smith did.

Indeed, one need not try since we have three examples to choose from that put the media’s double standard on bright display.

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Political leaders across the West have said for a decade that governments must end online anonymity to shut down fake accounts known as bots, particularly those from Russia. “I want to see real names on the internet,” said German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in February. “In a democracy, citizens have the right to privacy,” said Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez at Davos in January 2025, and “not to anonymity or impunity,” proposing to tie every social media account to a European digital identity wallet. Greece’s digital governance minister proposed in April 2026 to link every profile to a verified identity because “The major problem behind anonymity is toxicity.” French President Emmanuel Macron declared that his priority was “to demand the disappearance of fake accounts” and “these famous bots, these troll farms.”

But now the advocates of government censorship of legal speech are demanding the legal power to wage information warfare through anonymous accounts and an explicit “sock puppet” strategy. Buried in the Australian government’s new censorship bill is a definition: “A sock puppet identity is a false or fictitious identity assumed by a person in the course of using, or carrying out any activity in relation to, an online service.” The legislation goes on not to warn of bad actors using sock puppets but rather to authorize the eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, to create and use sock puppets to “disseminate” information.

Michael Nayna and Andrew Lowenthal first reported on the sock puppet provisions last week.

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