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Genuinely I don't know that it comes across to people who haven't been here to watch how almost unbelievable this was, just people taking something that looked impossible and dragging it kicking and screaming all the way to inevitability.

I live in a downtown area of São Paulo so I see every march and every protest up close and they had more people on Avenida Paulista two weeks ago than I have ever seen. And then they did that again yesterday. *Right now,* spontaneously, just celebrating, there's a huge crowd.

The mobilization itself was already not something I ever expected to see, but to actually win? Hell, to double the winning margin from the 2022 runoff? Genuinely surreal. Maybe child raping billionaires *don't* have to run the world with a shit-eating grin. Maybe that can stop.

I spent all day writing the thread in my head about how Bolsonaro's win was the culmination of a 20-year project to end Brazilian democracy, with the participation of both domestic elites and foreign actors like the US state department and Meta. This is all true, of course, except he didn't win.

Maybe the fascists overplayed their hand; both domestic news media and foreign social media didn't so much put a thumb on the scale as elbow it from the rafters, and maybe people finally saw that. I don't know.

What is true is that this was a conflict—and make no mistake, this was a conflict; this was a protracted battle in a hybrid war, more than anything—that was largely fought by large numbers of people laboriously working to unfuck the nation's informational environment.

Probably the guy who's going to come out of this one looking like a hero is André Janones, a deputy (congressman) from Minas Gerais who just kind of... decided to take the reins of the situation, more or less, and people were feeling so aimless after the first round that they went along with it.

And credit to him, it worked. A sort of digital levee en masse, literally raising an army to counteract the forces that artificially amplify far-right messaging. He did that through organizing and messaging, both on the streets and online, that was so relentless that he put himself in the hospital.

At one point he had a Whatsapp group with 10 million people in it, coordinating action. Which I didn't even think whatsapp was infrastructurally designed to support. And yes, whatsapp is of course a meta network, but the strategy was to be everywhere, to act redundantly, to be unbannable.

If Lula doesn’t build up an energize his party with young leaders the party is doomed. That should be the top priority.