The social media commentator has the depth of a saucer and a chronic inability to digest any idea that challenges their certainties. They don't get past the headline, they don't weigh things up, and they react from the gut. If the lede and a single paragraph of the text rub them the wrong way, the shortest path is never to reflect on the argument, but to completely discredit the idea or whoever signed it.
I don't look at politics with passion, but with an almost sociological curiosity from someone trying to decipher its movements. To this day I still can't swallow the fact that a crude character like Jair Bolsonaro was elected president, nor that his son now appears, after everything, technically tied with Lula in the polls.
But my interest goes far beyond repulsion: it is a genuine search to understand what leads voters to make that choice without resorting to the arrogant clichés of those who ridicule the "poor right-winger" or treat evangelicals and Black people within that spectrum as a mass devoid of discernment. Analyzing reality requires detachment and observation, not that kind of rather lazy prejudice.
But go ahead and ask for measured thinking from someone who only sees the world through the cracks of their own feed. When stumbling upon a text that clashes with their convictions, the internet user whips out statistics from their living room, the bar they frequent, or their WhatsApp group. "But I don't think that way. I never believed that. Around me, I haven't seen anyone agree with such a thing." And that's it: thesis refuted. Brazil has more than 200 million inhabitants, but the creature's sample size amounts to themselves and their drinking buddies.
It's worth explaining the basics. Any analysis of the current situation generalizes. Collective phenomena can only be described through broad trends, not through the exceptions of small groups. Saying that a particular political camp adopted a certain stance is not the same as accusing each of its followers of carrying a placard in the street. The reaction to my last column laid bare that blindness in an almost childish attempt to rewrite recent history. No shortage of people swore there is no support for Alexandre de Moraes. Since when?
The left supported him, yes, tooth and nail and with insults on social media. And for good reason at a certain moment. When trucks were blocking highways, coup-plotters' encampments were surrounding military barracks, and there was a plot to kill authorities, it was the Supreme Court, in the figure of Moraes, that held the line. I supported the minister's tough decisions and I take back not a single comma. It was democratic survival.
The problem is that it didn't stop there. That support extended to everything that the press had been investigating, until it was no longer possible to maintain that Moraes is anything but thoroughly corrupt — with all due respect to the chickens. And it continues, in a certain way steadfast, as seen in the shameful fireworks display by lawmakers and activists celebrating Flávio Dino's request for more time to review the case, as if he had emerged victorious from last Tuesday's session. Victorious at what? At sitting on the process that would examine Moraes's conduct and pushing it past the election? That was the perception I addressed, and that was what drove so many people up the wall.
The refusal to accept the facts borders on insanity. When Malu Gaspar revealed in O Globo the private conversations between Moraes and the leadership of the Central Bank regarding Banco Master, part of the left's response was not to demand transparency, but to tear the journalist apart. They demanded the breaking of source confidentiality, spread doctored images, and unleashed misogyny, copying the very same playbook they always condemned in their opponents.
The citizen who is genuinely interested in politics analyzes the board based on what actually happens, rather than through the biased filter of what they would like to believe, understanding how each move reverberates in the polls and flows into the ballot box. But go ahead and ask that maturity of the social media activist, who will always prefer the comfort of their bubble to the work of understanding why the ballot boxes persist in defying their wishes.
