Voting only gets you so far

The Brazilian far right had a big day yesterday. Former President Jair Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party (which is not a liberal party) made huge gains in the Senate and Congress. And now incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will face off against Bolsonaro’s son, Flavio, in a second round later this month. A second round Da Silva and his leftist Workers’ Party (PT) are not favored to win.

Brazilian political pundits and the international left are scrambling this morning to make sense of yesterday’s disaster. American journalist Glenn Greenwald, who is based in Brazil, was quick to compare the election to the 2024 US election, writing, “The Brazilian Left — just like the Democratic Party does after they lose — is now attacking the voters themselves, saying they're too stupid to realize how much Lula did for them.” (As always, take everything Greenwald says with a massive grain of salt.)

And in a somewhat baffling move, American activist David Adler, the co-general coordinator of the Progressive International, parachuted into São Paulo yesterday and tried to do his best Hasan Piker impression, which has so far amounted to, uh, writing a real long X post in English about “social media algorithms” and filming a couple videos of a big PT march down Avenida Paulista. I hope he had time to swing by BH Lanches over on Rua Augusta and grab a coxinha.

Anyways, let’s talk about “social media algorithms.” It’s useful to think of Brazil, a long-time test kitchen for Silicon Valley, not as a mirror of America, but as a particularly vulnerable outpost on the frontline of the techno-fascist culture war that’s impacting every democracy on Earth. And, as such, Da Silva’s administration, during the post-Bolsonaro years, was far more aggressive than the Biden administration ever was about clawing back democratic norms. Federal Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes has led a charge against American tech companies, demanding stricter moderation policies. Meta actually briefly blocked Da Silva’s account from running ads last week, which is certainly interesting!

De Moraes was also quick to prosecute Bolsonaro’s supporters — and Bolsonaro himself — after Bolsonarists, or as their called in Brazil, Bolsominions, organized their own insurrection back in 2023. Bolsonaro was sentenced to 27 years in prison for his role in the plot. But there have been signs that the Bolsonaro family, and the far-right conservative movement they currently sit atop, never lost its grip on Brazilian culture and Brazilian social media.

Our research team noticed something troubling in the days leading up to yesterday’s election. The second-fastest-growing Instagram account (in the world) in September belonged to André Mendonça. He’s an evangelical pastor and attorney who currently sits on Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court. To put his Instagram growth in perspective, the only account to gain more followers last month was Macklemore.

Mendonça became a hero of the Brazilian far right after he suspended Da Silva’s head of the federal police earlier this month. So much so that Bolsominions held their own march down Avenida Paulista carrying a big balloon of him. Mendonça has also politically weaponized the ongoing Banco Master scandal, the biggest fraud case in Brazilian history, which has implicated many members of the Supreme Federal Court — including Mendonça. Based on what we currently know, most of the politicians connected to Banco Master are affiliated with Bolosnaro’s Liberal Party. Which is probably why Mendonça is demanding that De Moraes’s connections to Banco Master be investigated.

But Mendonça’s big September on Instagram was not just a one-off thanks to the news cycle. Mendonça’s connections to Brazil’s burgeoning Evangelical community are important here. He still currently preaches at a church in São Paulo! And he’s far from the only Brazilian preacher that’s been getting a massive boost on social platforms. Our research team has seen a massive uptick in Evangelical content in Brazil since 2024, when we first came across preacher and YouTube phenom Bruno Leonardo.

At nearly 80 million subscribers, Leonardo currently has the biggest YouTube channel in Brazil. We first noticed his channel in October 2024 because he was running a growth-hacking scheme on YouTube Shorts, asking users to comment with the name of a person they’re praying for. The growth hack worked shockingly well, he went from averaging between 500,000 and a million new subscribers a month to averaging over 3.5 million new subscribers a month, per Social Blade. In 2025, Leonardo was accused by comedian Jonathan Nemer of buying subscribers or tricking users into following him, as well. Leonardo is still doing weird growth-hack stuff, routinely asking users to comment “Amen” underneath his posts.

Leonardo has yet to publicly endorse Bolsonaro or the Liberal Party, but his account is a useful barometer of how popular Evangelical right-wing content is on Brazilian social media. The rise of Evangelical Christianity in the country has been so intense that Evangelical social content is now ranking among the most popular posts in the world every month. This is astounding for a country that, 30 years ago, was over 80% Catholic. In fact, before the election this week, Da Silva met with both Brazilian and American Evangelical leaders. But the right-wing cultural shift is not limited to just YouTube preachers. As Americas Quarterly Editor-In-Chief Brian Winter pointed out this week, the number one song in Brazil at the moment is a country song. And it’s not an outlier either. The Baffler wrote a great piece in June about Bolsominion cowboy culture sweeping rural Brazil right now. This is probably where American readers start noticing some unsettling similarities. Well, I’ve got one last one for you.

Brazil has been completely hollowed out by online gambling, credit card debt, and Klarna-style buy-now-pay-later services. The country has been a real innovator when it comes to that last one, commonly called parcelado or parcelamento, which is now integrated into the country’s Venmo equivalent, Pix. The New York Times estimates over 80% of Brazilian households are in some kind of debt at the moment. Online gambling was legalized in 2018 and Da Silva’s administration announced last week that they plan to ban it again. It should come as no surprise that Flavio Bolsonaro has already said he won’t ban it if he wins.

It’ll be a few more weeks before we know exactly how bad things are in Brazil, but the lesson seems clear, not just for America, but every other country trying to escape their own Trump at the moment. The criminals and extremists that brute-forced their way into positions of power in the 2010s will not leave quietly. And the algorithmic platforms that built them up have become only more entrenched and more weighted in their favor. We might be able to vote them out temporarily, but unless we disrupt the platforms and networks that helped put them there in the first place, we’ll never be free of them.

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@Howlingmutant0, or HowlingMutant, is an X user that’s been on the platform since 2020. He’s Verified and has around a quarter of a million followers. Vice President JD Vance, Richard Spencer, and Marc Andreesen are among them. Back in April, Decoherence Media revealed that HowlingMutant’s real name was Alex Norden. If you want to click over and read the piece, it gives a good rundown of exactly how awful his posts are. They figured out who he was via his Goodreads page.

Since the unmasking, Norden has gotten increasingly lax about hiding who he is. Which is how, last week, far-right X users and Russian media, stumbled across the fact he has a wife of Trinidadian heritage and a mixed raced son. Norden’s been duking it out in the replies all weekend, trying his damnedest to make it seem like he thinks it’s funny that his followers are now calling him a race traitor. Though, who knows, maybe he likes the fact his fan base is hurling slurs at his son and wife! That’s certainly what he wants people to think.

Based on a cursory glance at his posts, it seems like his engagement is starting to fall off a cliff. Which really couldn’t happen at a worse time because he’s currently promoting a $MUTANT crypto coin that was already worthless and is now beginning to tank even harder.

Last week, YouTube’s Shorts team published a blog post called “Prioritizing original content on Shorts,” which outlines new guidelines for short-form video content on the platform. It’s more or less the same guidelines Instagram announced back in May.

I predicted this would happen last winter, right as the entire world figured out the One Little Trick that launched personalities like Clavicular into the mainstream, seemingly out of nowhere. I knew immediately how dangerous clipping, as a practice, was for social platforms.

Most of the grownups in the room are now acting like they knew Clavicular and his ilk were bad news all along, but for a brief moment clipping accounts successfully convinced a lot of people who should have known better that all of these streamers were actually popular. And once it was revealed that was thanks to paid clipping campaigns, it started to threaten social platforms’ reputation as arbiters of culture. I mean, if Clavicular was a paid psyop, what else could be?

I don’t think creators will suddenly start playing by the rules, though. The appearance of popularity online is way too important now to trust the algorithm. I assume the big new meta is going to be paid views and subscribers now that clipping is dying. And I assume we’ll start seeing inauthentic views on right-wing content starting, uh, probably now actually! Let me know if you see anything fishy.

A bunch of AI losers spent the last week claiming that they had figured out how to use the new Claude model to “mash up” video games. Videos hit my X timeline of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater combined with Kingdom Hearts or Mario fighting bosses in Skyrim. A lot of these “developers” were claiming that they were using AI to literally reverse engineer different video games and then rewrite them, which sounds pretty impressive. Well, there are a few problems with all of this.

The first, is that most of these games don’t seem to actually exist. There are videos of them, but it’s unclear of any of these mods are real. And there have been tests done to recreate these projects which haven’t actually worked. I also came across a decent explanation of how you could fake something like this. It doesn’t seem like how everyone is doing it, but you could basically you run two games simultaneously and have an AI agent build a bridge between them.

Both Pitchfork and The Fader are saying this is a good song and I just… look, I lived through Brokencyde the first time, I refuse to do it again.

P.S. here’s a really good storefront.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***