Brazil has made international news over the weekend. If you haven’t seen it yet, the Supreme Court here has decreed a ban on Twitter nationally. The decision was taken by a single judge, the villain of our story, Alexandre de Moraes.
Since the race for President of Brazil in 2018, won by Jair Bolsonaro, Moraes has used his supreme authority to investigate, judge, and punish members of society that he deems are guilty of “anti-democratic” acts. His campaign intensified with the 2022 election when Lula Inácio da Silva, who had been convicted of corruption and eventually released by order of the Supreme Court, defeated Bolsonaro and won the Presidency for the third timee.
Without going into detail, his victims have included elected officials who support Bolsonaro, media outlets and individual journalists, and a range of private citizens whose transgressions include posting “aniti-democratic”tweets on Twitter, now known as “X.”
Moraes issued secret judicial orders obliging X to censure and even remove profiles (users) from the platform without giving any reasonand holding the company to secrecy. The targets were not given the opportunity to defend themselves.
Ironically, these measures were taken by Moraes in the name of “defending democracy,” and the Brazilian elite - the press, the artist class, and of course establishment, left-wing Lula-leaning politicians - patted Moraes on the back and even gave him an award as the “Guardian of Democracy.”
Moraes steamroller bumped into a wall when X, led by Elon Musk, decided not to follow the secret judicial orders. Again making a long story short here, Moraes threatened to arrest Twitter staff in São Paulo, causing Musk to preemptively disband the office.
X no longer had any employees in Brazil so Moraes upped the ante. Last Friday, absurdly using X as his medium of communication, he posted a threat:
Either X produced a legal representative for the company in Brazil or Moraes would order the internet and phone companies to take the platform down.
I went to bed on Saturday night living in a democracy; I awoke Sunday morning living in an autocracy.
Not only had Moraes made X impossible to access on Brazilian territory, he also forbade Brazilians from accessing X using a VPN connection (VPN is a very widely used technology that “hides” the location of the internet user). Moreover, he imposed a fine of $10,000 a day on those who used the VPN to access X.
$10,000 is about two and a half times the annual earnings of a minimum wage worker in Brazil.
Moraes reached even further by freezing the bank accounts of Starlink, the satellite-based internet provider of which Must is a partial owner. Imagine what the other non-owners of Starlink must be thinking of judicial security in Brazil: Their assets have been impaired by an out of control Supreme Court Judge for minding their own business.
It is not suprising that hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman tweeted on Sunday that Brazil is not an investable country anymore.
I wish Brazil had made international news because of its first class agricultural technology, because of its secure banking system with the best payment system in the world, because of its natural diversity - not just the Amazon, but biomes from savannah to swamp lands.
Instead, Brazil is now known as the country that X-communicated democracy overnight.
Disclaimer: The content of this post reflects only the views of the author and not those of Armor Capital.