Fux's vote: an X-ray of an agent of imperialism.

In one of the darkest moments in the history of the Supreme Federal Court, Luiz Fux signed a ruling that not only broke with his own trajectory but also threw his peers to the wolves, handing the far-right and external interests the perfect narrative to erode Brazilian democracy. 

Introduction

Luiz Fux's vote in the January 8th trial was not merely a legal disagreement. It was a political act with historical consequences, a watershed moment that starkly reveals how Brazilian institutions continue to be permeated by the logic of hybrid warfare. What we witnessed was not a technical exercise in constitutional law, but the signature of a minister who decided to position himself as an antagonist to his peers, to the Supreme Court itself, and above all, to democracy.

Fux abandoned the silence he had always cultivated behind the scenes and, with a vote longer than that of the rapporteur, monopolized the scene. He demanded not to be interrupted, transforming the session into a monologue—a pact of silence that dissolved the dialogical nature of the court. More than presenting theses, he sought protagonism: every word, every metaphor, every irony seemed calibrated to circulate on Bolsonaro's networks and reinforce the far-right narrative.

This is not a technical detail. It is a calculated move by a man who, until yesterday, endorsed the Supreme Court's punitive stance and now, suddenly, dons the mantle of selective guarantor of rights. The same minister who accepted the charges against Bolsonaro in March is the one who today requests their annulment. The contradiction is not accidental: it is the mark of someone acting with political and strategic intent, jeopardizing not only the coherence of the Court, but the very credibility of the Brazilian democratic system.

The pact of silence and the monologue of betrayal.

The Supreme Federal Court is, by its very nature, a space of dialectics. The court's tradition has always been marked by the clash of ideas, by the interventions of justices who, through disagreement, build the legitimacy of decisions. In opening his vote, Luiz Fux demanded an unprecedented pact: that he not be interrupted, that his words be heard in absolute silence, without asides, without counterpoints. The result was a monologue disguised as a legal opinion, but which in practice functioned as a performative act, calculated to impose itself on the Court.

This compulsory silence reveals more than a ritual detail—it is the manifestation of an authoritarian logic. When a court ceases to be a space for dialogue and becomes a stage for one person only, there is a rupture with the essence of justice as a synthesis of plurality. The pact that shielded Fux from any intervention was, in practice, a strategic error by the institution, as it gave him the conditions to produce a long, contradictory, and politically calibrated opinion without immediate resistance.

From the perspective of historical-dialectical materialism, this scene illustrates the inversion between form and content. The form—a solemn and “technical” vote—conceals the real content: a political act of institutional destabilization. The Supreme Federal Court, by accepting silence as the rule, abandoned its function of providing a counter-argument to give way to a monological act of cultural warfare. What should have been a synthesis of divergences became the triumph of unilateral imposition.

The content of the vote

Luiz Fux's vote was presented as a technical piece, but its content reveals a carefully articulated political construction. Three central axes structured his speech: the declaration of the Supreme Court's absolute incompetence, the argument of curtailment of the right to defense, and the decision to acquit the defendants of the crime of criminal organization.

First, by arguing that the Supreme Court lacked jurisdiction to judge the accused due to the absence of special jurisdiction for high-ranking officials, Fux requested the complete annulment of the proceedings from the moment the indictment was received. This not only contradicts his own previous position, when he voted in favor of accepting the accusation, but also means discrediting all the work of the Attorney General's Office and the ministers who had been conducting the case until then.

Next, he brought up the image of the "data tsunami," an expression borrowed from the American jargon "document dumping," to assert that the defense did not have a reasonable timeframe to examine the evidence. Under the guise of due process, the argument served as a secondary line to justify the annulment of the entire process, shifting the debate from the substance—the attempted coup d'état—to a procedural detail.

Finally, he rejected the classification as a criminal organization, stating that there was insufficient evidence of hierarchy and stability. Thus, he removed the symbolic weight of the coup plot and diluted the acts into scattered episodes, as if there were no centralized project of democratic rupture. To reinforce this narrative, he even compared the attacks of January 8th with the 2013 protests and MST occupations, ignoring that this was not a diffuse social protest, but a coordinated attack on the democratic rule of law.

Each of these axes served as a tool of hybrid warfare: transforming political crimes into procedural flaws, rewriting recent history as if it were mere public disorder, and offering ready-made slogans — "absolute incompetence," "data tsunami," "trivialization of organized crime" — to be amplified by the Bolsonaro ecosystem.

Historical inconsistency

The most striking feature of Fux's vote is its historical inconsistency. The minister, who for years built a career marked by punitivism—to the point of inspiring the slogan "In Fux we trust" at the height of Lava Jato—now presents himself as a selective guarantor of rights, willing to tear up his own biography to serve an immediate political purpose.

In March 2025, the same Fux unanimously sided with the First Panel in accepting the charges against Bolsonaro and other defendants from the central core of the coup. There, he rejected all the preliminary arguments he now invokes: he saw no incompetence on the part of the Supreme Court, did not point out any procedural irregularities, and did not question the procedure. He accepted the case, made the accused defendants, and validated the actions of the Attorney General's Office.

Months later, in this week's vote, he reverses everything: he calls for the annulment of the charges from the outset, declares the Court's absolute lack of jurisdiction, and accuses the prosecution of obstructing the defense due to excessive evidence. The same minister who previously upheld the rigor of the Supreme Court in similar episodes now decides to erase his previous signature, leaving his colleagues and the Attorney General's Office in a difficult position.

This inconsistency is not merely a detail of institutional memory. It demonstrates that voting does not stem from legal coherence, but from political expediency. Fux abandons the line that consolidated him as a punitive advocate to opportunistically embrace a more instrumentalized, guarantor-oriented stance. The result is the erosion of public trust: if the Supreme Court itself changes its position according to the pressures of the moment, how can democratic stability be sustained?

Calculated protagonism

Luiz Fux's vote was not only lengthy: it was deliberately constructed to take center stage in the trial. With more speaking time than the rapporteur himself, Alexandre de Moraes, and under the pact of silence that shielded his presentation, the minister transformed the session into an exclusive stage for his speech.

Every detail was meticulously planned. The absence of asides, the theatricality of expressions like "absolute incompetence" and "data tsunami," the decontextualized comparisons with the Black Blocs of 2013 or the MST (Landless Workers' Movement), the irony of calling the ballot boxes "toasters"—everything was calculated to escape the realm of legal formalities and gain life on social media, where slogans are worth more than sentences.

This prominence cannot be explained solely by personal vanity. It serves a larger logic: that of offering the far-right a robust narrative, signed by a Supreme Court Justice, capable of being exploited both in digital disputes and in political pressures inside and outside Congress. Fux thus positions himself as a direct antagonist of Moraes and as a symbol of resistance against the line that had been consolidating the accountability of the coup plotters.

In the cultural and hybrid war, occupying center stage is as important, or even more important, than the immediate result. Fux knows this: by monopolizing the session and generating ready-made phrases to go viral, he inscribed his name as a reference point for the far-right, even if as a minority vote. The gesture of prolonging his speech, of overshadowing the rapporteur, is not accidental. It is the mark of someone seeking to become a political leader, more than a technical judge.

Fux, hero of the far right.

While Fux's vote in the Supreme Court plenary session sounds like a rupture and an isolated act, outside of it, it was immediately received as a triumph by the far-right. On pro-Bolsonaro social media, hashtags like #AnulaTudo (Annul Everything) and #FuxÉJustiça (Fux Is Justice) exploded, transforming excerpts from his speech into campaign slogans. The irony regarding the ballot boxes, the talk about the "freedom" of the encampments in front of the barracks, and the criticism of the "trivialization of organized crime" are already circulating as memes and "proof" that Bolsonaro and his allies were persecuted.

This reception is not spontaneous. The vote was calibrated to provide exactly what the digital activists needed: short, easily replicable phrases with strong symbolic appeal. By offering this ready-made material, Fux became a hero to a political field that has always declared war on the Supreme Court, but which now finds an unexpected ally in one of its ministers.

The impact is immediate: defense lawyers are already talking about overturning convictions; Bolsonaro-supporting parliamentarians are echoing the expressions from the plenary vote; influencers are digitizing every metaphor as ammunition to discredit the Supreme Court. In a matter of hours, Fux went from being just a magistrate to becoming a political figure of reference within the far-right, something he himself had never experienced in his career.

Herein lies the true dimension of hybrid warfare: it doesn't matter if the vote is won by a majority, what matters is that his speech becomes a symbol. The far-right has already consecrated him as a hero, and his signature now forms part of the arsenal of narratives that seek to erode confidence in the Supreme Court and rewrite the history of January 8th as if it were mere political persecution.

The role of "other hands"

Luiz Fux's vote was too lengthy, too articulate, and too carefully crafted to be solely the product of his pen. The density of foreign references, such as the importation of the concept of document dumping from American law, coupled with the choice of simple and viral metaphors — "data tsunami," "toaster," "freedom of the encampments" — indicate the presence of other invisible hands in the drafting of the text.

The hypothesis is not one of mere technical advice, something commonplace in higher courts. What we saw was a document designed to directly engage with the digital activism of the far-right, to resonate in parliamentary rhetoric, and even to be heard in the corridors of Washington and Brussels. The opinion was drafted not only as a legal statement, but as a political-informational document of hybrid warfare, with phrases ready for the Bolsonaro ecosystem and, at the same time, for international conservative think tanks.

Fux's pursuit of prominence was not an isolated incident. Behind the scenes, sources indicate that his shift surprised his peers and undermined the Attorney General's Office itself, exposing colleagues to embarrassment. This type of move doesn't stem solely from personal vanity: it reflects pressure from business networks demanding "legal certainty," from political groups needing a narrative loophole, and from external interests operating lawfare as a tool of control.

By becoming Moraes' antagonist, Fux assumed a role that the far-right had been clamoring for for years: that of a minister capable of destabilizing the Court from within. It is this confluence of interests—national and foreign, digital and institutional—that transforms his vote into more than just a dissenting opinion. It is a piece fabricated at the crossroads of power, where the invisible hands of the culture war and imperialism meet.

Fux's networks

Luiz Fux's vote cannot be read merely as an isolated act of a magistrate. It is an expression of a circuit of political, business, and institutional networks with which the minister has always maintained close ties. His trajectory reveals a continuous dialogue with sectors of financial and business capital that demand legal predictability, with political elites that orbit around the logic of "institutional security," and with military groups that have historically praised his actions.

In 2025, for example, Fux was a central figure at Conseguro, the largest insurance event in the country, promoted by CNseg, where he spoke in defense of legal certainty and regulatory predictability. He was also honored with awards such as the Order of the National Congress and military decorations—symbols of the intersection between his work in the Judiciary and the expectations of political and military elites. These relationships are not merely protocolary: they are clear signs of a minister who moves on the chessboard as a trusted piece of groups that defend the maintenance of the economic status quo and openness to external pressures.

This shift is reinforced by the adoption, in his vote, of categories originating from North American law, such as "document dumping," which indicate a discursive affinity with external references and a perspective beyond the Brazilian legal context. Thus, the vote becomes yet another indication of how Fux acts not only as a magistrate, but as a node in a broader network that connects business interests, international pressures, and internal political projects.

By aligning himself discursively with global conservative sectors and the digital activism of the national far-right, Fux reveals that his actions are not merely the result of legal hermeneutics, but of the confluence of multiple vectors of power. Voting, therefore, is not just an act of individual incoherence, but a reflection of networks that find in it a strategic agent.

Hybrid warfare in action

Fux's vote is a hybrid warfare manual in full swing. Every argument, every metaphor, and every silence imposed in the plenary session operates not only in the legal field, but above all in the symbolic and informational field. By declaring the absolute incompetence of the Supreme Court, he not only weakens the Court, but also provides the far-right with the discursive ammunition to support the thesis of persecution and lawfare. By speaking of a "tsunami of data," he creates a media jargon that transforms the excess of evidence against the coup plotters into a weapon against the prosecution.

This movement is not neutral. In hybrid warfare, the central objective is to erode institutional trust from within, using the very rules of the game to delegitimize the arbiter. Fux's vote shifts the focus of the discussion: what was at stake was no longer the attempted coup, but the procedural rite, the amount of evidence, the penal classification. This strategy generates cynicism and disorientation, exactly as predicted by manuals on psychological operations.

Furthermore, Fux's performance was designed for the digital ecosystem. The phrases "ballot box as a toaster" and "freedom of the encampments" are already circulating as memes, reinterpreting coup-supporting spaces as legitimate demonstrations and mocking the electoral system. This transformation of legal pronouncements into internet slogans is the central cog in the culture war: offering ready-made symbols to go viral, even if they distort reality.

Thus, the vote operates on three levels of hybrid warfare: lawfare (the use of formalism to nullify political substance), psyops (the production of cynicism and doubt in society), and info-ops (the digital amplification of narratives). It was not merely a legal act—it was a systemic attack on institutional trust, aligned with interests that transcend procedural disputes.

Multiple consequences

Luiz Fux's vote triggers a chain of consequences that go beyond the legal sphere. In the Judiciary, it creates a dangerous precedent: if a minister can reverse the unanimous acceptance of an indictment months later, the predictability of the system dissolves. The Supreme Court, which should be the guardian of democratic stability, comes to be seen as a stage for legal uncertainty, eroding its internal authority and its image before society.

In domestic politics, the gesture strengthens the Bolsonaro camp. The vote has already been appropriated as proof of persecution, fueling the amnesty narrative and providing ammunition for parliamentarians who are trying to limit the Supreme Court's power in Congress. Every phrase from Fux, from "absolute incompetence" to "tsunami of data," is already circulating as a rallying cry, reorganizing the far-right forces around a legal banner.

On a social and digital level, the consequence is the legitimization of toxic narratives. By calling the coup-supporting encampments "free demonstrations" and by mocking electronic voting machines, Fux provides ammunition for disinformation campaigns that downplay the events of January 8th. The public sphere is contaminated by cynicism: if even a Supreme Court Justice downplays the events, then everything can be rewritten.

Internationally, the impact is immediate. Conservative sectors in the US and Europe are already using the vote as "proof" of lawfare, reinforcing the idea that Bolsonaro is a victim of persecution. At the same time, Brazil's democratic allies find themselves facing a weakened narrative: how can institutional solidity be maintained if the Court itself produces contradictory discourses?

In every dimension, Fux's vote acts as a vector of instability. It opens space for the far-right to regain momentum, for imperialism to find new loopholes to exert pressure on Brazil, and for the Supreme Court itself to be corroded from within. More than a legal disagreement, it is the introduction of a political virus into the heart of Brazilian democracy.

Final summary

Luiz Fux's vote is not merely a legal disagreement. It is a historic act of betrayal, more profound than any other ever recorded in our democracy. By declaring the absolute incompetence of the Supreme Federal Court, by downplaying the crimes of January 8th, and by offering ready-made narratives to the far-right, Fux has become an agent of imperialism, someone who not only abandons his peers but exposes and weakens them before the whole of society.

In the logic of hybrid warfare, his intervention fulfills multiple roles: it weakens the Supreme Court from within, legitimizes fascist discourse on social media, creates slogans that go viral within the Bolsonaro ecosystem, and provides material for international pressure. By mocking electronic voting machines, calling coup-mongering encampments legitimate demonstrations, and accusing the prosecution of obstruction due to an excess of evidence, Fux transforms the liturgy of justice into a spectacle of institutional corrosion.

History will record that, at a crucial moment for the defense of Brazilian democracy, Fux chose the side of instability, doubt, and betrayal. No other figure—not Bolsonaro, nor his sons, nor extremist generals or pastors—had the audacity to deliver such a profound symbolic blow against sovereignty and popular trust from within the Court itself.

That is why his mark is inscribed as that of a greater traitor than Silvério dos Reis. If the former sold out the Inconfidência Mineira in exchange for privileges, Fux is handing over Brazilian democracy in the midst of a cultural and hybrid war era, serving as an instrument of foreign capital and digital fascism.

Your vote will be remembered as a watershed moment: not because of the strength of the majority, but because of the corrosive power of betrayal. A dark milestone that exposes the vulnerability of institutions to imperialist manipulation and that will require redoubled vigilance from society and democratic forces to ensure that democracy is not once again thrown into the flames.