The sex, money and evangelism scandal tainting Brazil’s RIGHT WING political elite

Adrian Blomfield
Sat, October 3, 2026 
The Telegraph

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the Brazilian president, has been a target of voters' anger at a 'rotten system' - AP/Silvia Izquierdo

The man tearing Brazil's establishment apart came dressed as Dracula.

He was ostensibly a devout man. Before becoming the country's most notorious banker he had presented a gospel music show on an evangelical television station. His family had even helped fund, build and lead a 2,000-seat mega church.

But it was at Madame Satã's nightclub, with its crystal chandeliers and velvet chaises longues, that Daniel Vorcaro was alleged to have been in his element.

The guest list had been carefully selected. The women, 120 of them, were all beautiful and all paid. According to a police report leaked to Brazil's Piauí magazine, his instructions were specific: "Only young girls. Half from abroad."

Madame Sata's nightclub was the venue for a party where Brazil's elite mingled with beautiful women flown in from abroad, according to police reports

But it was the men at his São Paulo Halloween party that Mr Vorcaro really cared about. There were just 20 of them, but they represented the cream of Brazil's political, judicial and corporate elite.

From senior senators and supreme court justices to corporate heavyweights, everyone on the guest list held a key to what the arriviste banker wanted most: insider access and protection that gave him the cover to perpetrate what investigators say was the biggest banking fraud in Brazil's history.

Day after day for months, a remorseless drip-feed of allegations has implicated almost every political party and national institution in South America's largest country, shocking a society that has experienced so many scandals it thought itself inured to them.

It is against this backdrop that Brazilian adults, legally required to vote, will troop sullenly to the ballot box on Sunday.

The daily drip feed of scandal has taken the shine off election campaigning - Eduardo Soteras for The Telegraph

There are multiple names on the presidential ballot, but only two matter: Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the 80-year-old incumbent known as Lula, and his right-wing challenger Flavio Bolsonaro, whose father Jair ruled Brazil from 2018 to 2022 but now languishes in prison.

Victory for the younger Bolsonaro would cap a near clean sweep for pro-Trump right-wing populists in South America's "blue wave".

Lula's campaign team has accused Mr Trump of meddling in the election to secure victory for his rival, yet most Brazilians care less about outside interference than the scandal that has tarnished both candidates.

Their anger perhaps explains why the raucousness of past elections has vanished. The campaign has been almost invisible, with few posters evident or rallies held, as though Brazil's politicians had slunk away in shame to hide themselves from their people.

As well they might.

Mr Vorcaro's alleged Banco Master fraud enriched an already privileged few, but the price was borne by those at the bottom of society.

The Ponzi scheme Mr Vorcaro is accused of constructing was built, campaigners and investigators say, on the misery of hundreds of thousands of poor pensioners and state employees who watched as money was syphoned from their accounts every month without their permission.

"I am the anarchy of the system," Mr Vorcaro boasted in a leaked WhatsApp message to his former fiancée Martha Graeff, a fitness influencer. In that, if on little else, a divided nation agrees.

A leak from Martha Graeff's WhatsApp revealed her former fiancé Mr Vorcaro boasting he was 'the anarchy of the system' - Getty/Rodrigo Varela

See no evil

The women he hired for his Halloween bash and other parties were allegedly forced to hand over their phones before entering. Mr Vorcaro's messages show he insisted on foreign women, often flown into Brazil on his fleet of private jets, because they could not understand the Portuguese used by the VIPs.

Mr Vorcaro could afford it. Paintings by Picasso and Basquiat hung on the walls of his properties, including a £64m waterfront villa in Miami, according to court documents submitted by Banco Master's liquidators.

Even by the standards of Faria Lima, São Paulo's Wall Street, his lifestyle stood out. His Halloween party at Madame Satã's cost £3.5m, the documents claim – yet that paled beside the £28m party featuring Coldplay, Andrea Bocelli and other A-listers in Taormina, Sicily.

As Mr Vorcaro splashed out, Banco Master's assets soared 23-fold to nearly £13bn in the six years after he bought it in 2019. Despite red flags raised by auditors and junior staff, no one in authority at Brazil's central bank, its security regulator or its state-backed deposit insurance fund – which has now paid out more than £8bn in compensation since the bank's collapse last year – asked any questions.

The collapse of Daniel Volcaro's bank has led to £8bn in compensation payments

In fact, the only people doing any real probing were Brazilian journalists, most notably Piauí's Consuelo Dieguez, who was tipped off in late 2024 about severe anomalies on Banco Master's balance sheet. Inspecting the bank's documents, she concluded it was completely insolvent, and that the deposit insurance fund faced losing a third of its holdings bailing it out.

"When I saw the documents, I said, 'my God, how can the central bank see this and not liquidate the bank?' It was obviously a risk to the system."

The more she dug, the more she realised the problem was more than just complacency. Police investigators later alleged central bank officials had turned a blind eye after receiving payments, gifts and holidays. The officials, who have since been suspended and remain under investigation, deny wrongdoing.

Yet Mr Vorcaro's influence-peddling net was cast far wider. Allegedly luring judges and politicians with lavish parties, monthly kickbacks and hefty contracts with family firms, he is claimed to have woven layers of official protection around his bank.

Even as he conjured up fantastical returns out of nothing for those duped into buying its instruments, no one in Brazil's establishment said anything.
Bolsonaro and the banker

As the scandal gathered momentum in the wake of Banco Master's closure in November, it was the Bolsonaro campaign that suffered most.

The alleged fraud took root when Jair Bolsonaro was president. Fabiano Zettel, Mr Vorcaro's brother-in-law and the man accused by police of being Banco Master's primary off-the-books financial operator, had been the single largest private donor to the senior Bolsonaro's failed re-election campaign in 2022. He denies the accusations.

More embarrassing disclosures were to come. In May, it emerged that Flavio Bolsonaro had sought and secured £8m from Mr Vorcaro to make a film portraying his father, serving a 27-year prison sentence for attempting to mount a coup after his 2022 defeat, as a persecuted hero.

Flavio Bolsonaro's campaign suffered most from the allegations at first, but disillusionment spread - Reuters/Alexandre Meneghini

Even after the Banco Master scandal broke, Flavio sent the disgraced banker messages of support, according to phone records unsealed by Brazil's supreme court.

He wrote: "Brother, I am and will always be with you." Until the messages were published, he had always denied personal links with Vorcaro. With months to go before the election, Lula opened up a commanding lead in the opinion polls.

However, it soon became clear that the rot was not confined to the right.

By June, Operation Compliance Zero, the police investigation into the scandal, had turned its attention to some of Lula's key allies, including Jaques Wagner, government leader in Brazil's senate, and Rui Costa, the president's chief of staff. Both men deny the allegations and Lula himself has not been implicated.
Blind justice

As the election has neared, the allegations have grown more damaging.

Brazil's supreme court had already been implicated in the scandal. Dias Toffoli, the justice overseeing the judicial side of the investigation, was forced to recuse himself after police alleged that funds linked to Banco Master had bought shares in a luxury resort owned by his brothers.

At least three of the court's 11 judges have been implicated in one way or another, all of whom deny the allegations, but the most startling revelations have centred on Alexandre de Moraes, who oversaw the case that led to Jair's conviction.

Alexandre de Moraes (centre) is one of three supreme court justices implicated in the case - Shutterstock/Andre Borges

Mr Moraes is revered on the Brazilian Left as the single most indispensable champion of the country's democracy. That Mr Trump imposed sanctions on him last year over the Bolsonaro trial only bolstered his reputation.

Yet documents unsealed last month by André Mendonça, the judge now overseeing the investigation, suggest an uncomfortably close relationship between Mr Vorcaro and Mr Moraes.

His wife, a lawyer, had a vague but expensive contract to represent Banco Master, a deal that included access to Mr Vorcaro's private jets and helicopters. She denies wrongdoing.

The judge kept up regular WhatsApp correspondence with the banker, the frequency of which increased shortly before Mr Vorcaro was arrested trying to flee the country in November, raising fears about what kind of advice Mr Moraes was giving.

Mr Moraes denies wrongdoing. His allies on the bench accuse Mr Mendonça, a right-wing evangelical appointed to the court by Jair, of pursuing a political vendetta against his fellow judges in order to sway the election.

"Mendonça's report about Moraes reads like a political pamphlet – like he is pursuing a political mission," Gilmar Mendes, a supreme court justice seen as close to Mr Moraes, told The Telegraph.

"His directions seem driven by the electoral process. The result is a very divided court, with consequences for its legitimacy. I have been here for 24 years and I have never seen anything like this."

A plague on all your houses

Whatever the truth, Brazilian anger against the Bolsonaro campaign is now equally directed at the president, whose lead in the polls has evaporated. With recent surveys showing a statistical dead heat, the momentum, if anything, is with Flavio.

"There's only one candidate clearly involved with the scandal, which is Flavio Bolsonaro, yet ironically the scandal is damaging Lula more," said Thiago Amâncio, an associate director at Control Risks, a consultancy. "In the eyes of voters, the system as a whole is rotten and so they want change."

Protesters at the Banco Master headquarters demand prison for Daniel Vorcaro, the banker at the heart of the scandal - ZUMA Press/Alamy/Oslaim Brito

Yet the election, whatever its outcome, is unlikely to be the end of the saga. While the headlines have focused on extravagant parties, establishment corruption and the behaviour of the political and judicial elite, the foundations of the alleged Ponzi scheme were built on money syphoned from the accounts of low-paid state workers and pensioners.

Exploiting regulatory loopholes and buying leaked databases of public workers, Banco Master is accused of generating unauthorised contracts with workers and pensioners holding so-called payroll loans, an instrument that allows banks to lend money to low-income earners and deduct payments directly from their wages.

Often without their knowledge, victims found that Banco Master, acting through intermediaries, had switched their existing loans into credit instruments carrying exorbitant interest rates with no fixed end-date, campaigners and investigators say.
Rob the poor, feed the rich

The human cost of this systemic drain is embodied by victims such as Suzana Rodrigues, a 65-year-old São Paulo pensioner. In 2024, while attempting to resolve a minor dispute over a loan with another bank, rogue brokers intercepted her data and fraudulently registered an unauthorised Banco Master contract in her name, she says.

Suddenly, her monthly repayments soared to £150, more than a sixth of her pension. At almost the same time, she was diagnosed with severe intestinal cancer. Drained of money for food and medication while enduring severe physical pain, she spent eight months fruitlessly appealing to police and consumer bodies before a lawyer secured a court injunction to halt the payments.

"I had to cut back on food just to survive," she said. "And in all that time, no one showed an ounce of mercy."

Ms Rodrigues is more fortunate than most. While richer Brazilians who bought Banco Master's high-interest instruments have largely been compensated by the deposit insurance fund, that has not been the case for those with payroll loans from the bank.

Many still continue to pay the instalments to its administrators, trapped in a cycle of debt not of their own making.

Suzana Rodrigues spent eight months fighting for compensation before a lawyer halted the payments draining her pension - Eduardo Soteras for The Telegraph

Worse may yet emerge. Both Susanne Schaefer, the lawyer representing Ms Rodrigues and 500 other victims, and Maria Paula Bertran, an academic at the University of São Paulo who has been investigating payroll scams, say illegal schemes were perpetrated by many other financial institutions, not just Banco Master.

That scandal is brewing but has yet to come fully to light. If the allegations prove true, Banco Master and other banks have systematically robbed many of Brazil's poorest people in order to benefit its richest.

It is a conclusion that sits at odds with Mr Vorcaro's loudly proclaimed Christian beliefs. Christ generally favoured giving succour to the poor rather than fleecing them.

Mr Vorcaro, who remains in custody with Mr Zettel and nine others linked to the bank, faces a slate of charges, all of which he denies, claiming he has been set up by competitors. There may be some truth in this, campaigners say, although so far there has been little appetite from authorities to investigate.

"Banco Master is only the most exuberant face of a more widespread problem," said Prof Bertran. "It's only the visible part of a much bigger iceberg."

Brazil on the Brink: Why Lula Is Down Against Bolsonaro Jr.

There are still three weeks until the next round, and Lula could still win, but it’s gonna take a massive fight. Part of that fight is changing how the international media covers things.


Brazil’s former President (2003-2010) and then-presidential candidate for the leftist Workers Party (PT) Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva waves a national flag during a campaign rally in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais state, Brazil on October 9, 2022.
(Photo by Douglas Magno / AFP via Getty Image)

Mike Elk
Oct 05, 2026

Payday Report

With the Brazilian presidential election headed to a runoff, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is down 47% to 45% and faces a massive fight ahead. I wanted to give a quick analysis of what happened and where things are going next.

Lula Could Still Win if He Can Consolidate Support from Third Parties

Lula lost by only 2%, and several third-party candidates, who took a combined 8% of the vote, have publicly indicated they would not endorse Flávio Bolsonaro in the second round.

Likewise, 29 million Brazilians did not vote in this round of the runoff and may be persuaded to vote for Lula in the second round if they fear Bolsonaro.

While Brasil defeated Jair Bolsonaro narrowly in 2022, it swung right again, much like the United States. Voters are upset, and they are taking it out on the party in power.

On Tuesday, the Brazilian Senate is scheduled to vote on a measure that would shorten the Brazilian workweek from six days to five days. Bolsonaro has opposed this measure, and Lula could use the vote to mobilize workers’ support against the Bolsonaro team.

It’s a tough road ahead for Lula, but not impossible.

What Hurt Lula in the First Round?

Three primary factors hurt Lula in the first round. First, Lula’s age and the fact that the Workers’ Party (PT) has held the presidency in Brazil for 18 of the last 24 years.

The second is that the Brazilian corporate media constantly manufactured scandals against Lula.

Finally, the role that US President Donald Trump played in training and validating the right-wing in Brasil, while not decisive, provided critical support. Here’s what went wrong for Lula.
1. Lula is 80 & His Party Ruled Brasil for 18 of the Last 24 Years

Like former US President Joe Biden, one problem Lula faces right now is that he is 80 years old. He doesn’t look as sharp as he used to, while Flávio Bolsonaro is nearly half his age—45 years younger.

Additionally, Lula’s party, the Workers’ Party (PT), has held the presidency for 18 of the last 24 years. Lula and Dilma, both members of the Workers’ Party (PT), held the presidency from 2002 to 2016. Lula was reelected in 2022 for his record third term. No Brazilian has ever won a third term.

Although the PT has rarely controlled Congress, it is seen as the ruling party because it has held the presidency for 18 of the last 24 years. Voters are likely to associate any problems in the country with the PT, which has held the presidency for so long.

While Brasil defeated Jair Bolsonaro narrowly in 2022, it swung right again, much like the United States. Voters are upset, and they are taking it out on the party in power.

Even worse, Lula failed to recruit young candidates, who may have excited voters to turn out in tight races. In what should have been a competitive Senate election in Rio de Janeiro, the PT recruited 84-year-old Bendedita da Silva, who lost in a landslide to Bolsonaro allies.

Last week, Lula skipped the presidential debate; so did Bolsonaro and its unclear how much this decision might have hurt him.

Lacking excitement, nearly 29 million Brazilians did not vote despite it being obligatory in Brasil.
2. Brazilian Media Manufacturing Scandals Against Lula

The Brazilian media market is extremely consolidated, and the heads of major networks like Globo have been going after Lula hard. They have been accused of manufacturing scandals against Lula.

Last November, the financial institution Banco Master collapsed amid allegations of massive fraud. The bank was being run like a Ponzi scheme, resulting in the largest financial collapse in Brazilian history, with nearly $8 billion in investors’ funds lost.

Despite Banco Master CEO Daniel Vorcaro being a very vocal Bolsonaro supporter, the Brazilian media has repeatedly tried to link the scandal to Lula’s Workers’ Party, as Vorcaro cultivated political ties on both sides of the aisle.

Every attack on Lula by the Trump administration generated headlines in Brasil and validated the wild claims made by Bolsonaro allies of a flawed Brazilian justice system.

Lula’s son, businessman Fábio Luís da Silva, commonly known as “Lulinha,” was scrutinized over large bank accounts worth millions of dollars. For months, Lulinha has offered to open his books and has claimed that he received no special favors from Banco Master. Still, the media repeatedly raised questions about Lulinha’s alleged impropriety.

At one point, media giant TV Globo made a giant infographic web with arrows, showing a complex network linked to Lula. Other reporters widely ridiculed the conspiracy theory map, and TV Globo eventually had to apologize publicly on air.

Then, in May, The Intercept Brasil released a WhatsApp message from Flávio Bolsonaro to Vorcaro, asking him for more than $26 million to fund a strange English-language biopic named Dark Horse, about his father. In the film, Jair Bolsonaro is portrayed by right-wing American actor Jim Caviezel, who played Jesus in the controversial 2004 film The Passion of the Christ.

Polling throughout the spring and summer showed Lula leading as the scandal remained fresh in people’s minds. Then, the Brazilian corporate media went into high gear to attack Lula. They went after Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who led the prosecution that jailed Bolsonaro.

Moraes has accused Brazilian Supreme Court Justice André Mendonca, a Bolsonaro appointee, of failing to follow proper procedure in his handling of the Banco Master scandal, leaking information to the press on Lula’s political allies while hiding information on Bolsonaro’s allies.

Moraes asked the Brazilian Federal police to investigate Mendonça’s violation of federal investigation procedures and for selectively leaking information to the press that would make Lula allies look bad while suppressing information on Bolsonaro allies.

Moraes accused Mendonça of attempting to “steer the production of evidence toward falsely accusing Supreme Court justices of crimes, expressly naming Justices Gilmar Mendes, Dias Toffoli, Luiz Fux, Alexandre de Moraes, and Nunes Marques, as well as the prosecutor general and the director-general of the Federal Police.”
3. Trump Trained and Emboldened Bolsonaro Allies

While I don’t want to underestimate the strength of fascists within Brasil, it’s important to note that Trump and his operatives did help the Bolsonaro family pull off an impressive comeback.

In March 2025, Eduardo Bolsonaro fled to the United States rather than face prosecution in Brasil for his role in trying to orchestrate a coup, and he was granted permanent residency status in July. While in the United States, Eduardo Bolsonaro has worked closely with Trump officials, including Special Presidential Envoy for Special Missions Richard Grenell, to oust Lula from power.

“It was a privilege to speak with Ambassador Richard Grenell at President Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago,” Eduardo Bolsonaro wrote on Instagram following a meeting with Grenel in 2025. “The conservative movement is global—and we are just getting started.”

Eduardo Bolsonaro worked closely with top Trump aides like Brad Parscale, Trump’s director of digital strategy, to learn the social media strategy that led Trump to win reelection.

As president, Trump worked hard to attack Lula. He placed punitive tariffs on Brazil for convicting Jair Bolsonaro, Eduardo’s father, for attempting to assassinate Lula and overthrow his government in 2022. These tariffs hurt Brasil’s economy.

More importantly, Trump’s constant denunciation of the jailing of Bolsonaro validated conspiracy theories of right-wingers that the justice process was flawed. When Alexandre de Moraes, who led Bolsonaro’s conviction, was implicated in the Banco Master scandal, it only reinforced these conspiracy theories.

Ahead of the Brazilian presidential election, the Trump administration has labeled Brasil as a major distributor of cocaine and attempted to paint Lula as weak on taking on drug gangs.

In June, the Trump administration labeled two gangs as “terrorist organizations,” something which the Lula administration has repeatedly resisted because of fears of how the Trump administration could intervene in law enforcement and military matters in Brasil.

Still, every attack on Lula by the Trump administration generated headlines in Brasil and validated the wild claims made by Bolsonaro allies of a flawed Brazilian justice system.

On Friday, the Trump administration closed its embassy in Brasil and all of its consulates in a move that many saw as a scare tactic designed to interfere once again in the Brazilian presidential election.

The same day, the Brazilian federal police and intelligence service ABIN were warning of a possible US coup attempt. It was already known that Trump operatives were training operatives in Brasil, and the Brazilian federal police report described in depth how much Trump’s intervention had shifted things in Brasil.
International Media Failed to Check Brazilian Media

Finally, the international media completely ignored the Brazilian presidential election, allowing corporate media within Brazil to dominate the conversation without any accountability from the international media.

There are still three weeks until the next round, and Lula could still win, but it’s gonna take a massive fight. Part of that fight is changing how the international media covers things.

Payday Report can help play a small role in getting the US press more involved. The Washington Post once cited Payday Report in a front-page story for changing the way the pandemic strike wave was discussed, and maybe we can play a small role in getting American reporters to pay attention.

Donate to help Payday Report cover the fight ahead.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License


Mike Elk
Mike Elk is the senior labor reporter at Payday Report and member of the Washington-Baltimore NewsGuild. He previously served as senior labor reporter at POLITICO and at In These Times Magazine.
Full Bio >

Lula Heads to Presidential Runoff Against Bolsonaro’s Son as Trump Accused of Election Meddling

Ahead of Sunday’s contest, Brazil’s government and Lula’s presidential campaign called for investigations into alleged Trump administration efforts to interfere in the Latin American country’s politics.


Supporters of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva react after the first results of the presidential election in São Paulo, Brazil on October 4, 2026.
(Photo by Luis Robayo/AFP via Getty Images)

Jake Johnson
Oct 05, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

Brazil’s presidential election headed to a runoff on Sunday after neither incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva nor challenger Flávio Bolsonaro—the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro and ally of US President Donald Trump—received enough votes to win outright.

The younger Bolsonaro, whose father is serving a 27-year prison sentence under house arrest for orchestrating a coup attempt in 2022, led Lula by two percentage points in the first round, with the final tally standing at 47% to 45%. The runoff will take place on October 25.

Sunday’s results—which included major conservative wins in down-ballot contests—heightened fears of another far-right victory in Latin America, where candidates backed by Trump have swept to power in recent elections, including in Colombia, Peru, and Chile. Ahead of Sunday’s contest, Lula’s campaign, Brazil’s intelligence agency, and outside observers accused the Trump administration of meddling in the high-stakes election in an effort to oust Lula and return an ally to the nation’s presidency.

Just days before the election, Lula’s team called for an investigation after the Trump administration halted US consular services in Brazil, citing “security concerns.”

Additionally, Lula’s government is calling for a probe of “alleged efforts by the United States to interfere in the country’s domestic politics through the diversion of funds to far-right causes,” Al Jazeera reported last week.

“Attorney General Jorge Messias called for the probe on Thursday, one day after the British newspaper The Guardian published a story suggesting that the administration of United States President Donald Trump planned to award $1 million to right-wing civil groups opposing the Brazilian Supreme Court,” the outlet noted. “Messias stated in a social media post that foreign meddling ‘cannot be tolerated’ and that the report represented ‘an important alert for Brazilian sovereignty.’”

Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the US-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, called the Trump administration’s interference “another US regime change operation,” pointing to the aggressive tariffs Trump imposed on Brazilian goods last year and the US State Department’s attempt to send two top officials to “cast doubt on the fairness and integrity of the country’s electoral system,” as The Washington Post reported earlier this year.

Trump, who hosted Flávio Bolsonaro at the White House in May, said last week that he was following the Brazilian election “very closely” and described the contest as “very important.” A key Trump ally in the region, Argentine President Javier Milei—whose austerity agenda has fueled an increase in poverty in his country—traveled to Brazil in July to support Bolsonaro’s campaign against Lula.

Flávio Bolsonaro, a sitting senator, wasn’t the only member of the Bolsonaro family seeking greater political power in Sunday’s elections. Jair Bolsonaro’s wife, Michelle, and his second son, Carlos, both won seats in Brazil’s Senate.

The Guardian reported that “of the 54 senators elected, 34 were from the right or far-right.”

Following the results, Lula told supporters in Sāo Paulo on Sunday that “we have just had a lesson in Brazilian democracy.”

“The result is often unexpected. We can never get everything we wanted. I confess to you that I was convinced I was going to win the election in the first round,” said Lula. “But we have a second round.”

“From tomorrow we will launch a new campaign,” Lula added, “a campaign with only two candidates [where] we will be able to show the difference between our proposals for Brazil.”

Lula Campaign Asks to Probe Sudden US Shutdown of Consular Services as ‘Interference in Brazilian Elections’

“Often at the request of the Bolsonaro family, the US has engaged in a pressure campaign to weaken the Lula government,” explained one analyst.


Brazil’s President and presidential candidate Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (C) addresses supporters during a campaign rally on the eve of the general election, in Sao Paulo, Brazil on October 3, 2026.
(Photo by Luis Robayo/AFP via Getty Images)

Stephen Prager
Oct 03, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

Just two days before Brazil’s closely watched presidential election, the campaign of its left-wing president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has asked the nation’s top election court to examine the sudden shutdown of US consular services as part of a broader investigation into alleged election “interference” by the Trump administration.

On Friday night, the US suspended in-person consular services at its embassy and consulates across Brazil on Friday and advised Americans to avoid US diplomatic facilities, citing unspecified “security concerns.”

In a petition filed to Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court, Lula’s campaign said taking such an action just days before Brazilians vote “projects instability over the electoral environment,” something it said was part of a larger “infrastructure of external intervention in the Brazilian electoral process.”

In recent days, Brazil’s intelligence agency said it confirmed the existence of interference by the US in Brazil’s election to support Sen. Flavio Bolsonaro, the son of former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro—who is currently serving a 27-year prison sentence under house arrest for orchestrating a coup attempt in 2022.

“Although Trump has not formally endorsed him, Bolsonaro is undoubtedly Washington’s preferred candidate,” explained Nick Cleveland-Stout, a research associate at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, on Friday. “Often at the request of the Bolsonaro family, the US has engaged in a pressure campaign to weaken the Lula government, sparking fears of further interference.”



Trump responded with hostility to the prosecution of the disgraced ex-president—imposing tariffs of up to 50% on Brazilian imports in retaliation, sanctioning the Supreme Court justice overseeing the case, and threatening to use American “military might” against Brazil.

He’s also designated two Brazilian crime groups as “narcoterrorist” organizations, invoking a similar pretext Trump used to justify his invasion of Venezuela to kidnap its leader Nicolás Maduro in January.

As the election has approached, Trump has appeared to put his thumb on the scale in an effort to stop Lula from achieving what would be an unprecedented fourth term.

In July, the US consulate in São Paulo invited right-wing pro-Bolsonaro social media influencers to a closed-door roundtable meeting to discuss “freedom of expression and the digital environment.”

The Guardian reported on Thursday that the State Department was also diverting $1 million from its human rights fund to oppose “judicial overreach and censorship” by Brazil’s Supreme Court, an apparent reference to the court’s actions against Bolsonaro and his allies.

The Brazilian government has denied visas to two State Department officials whom it said were seeking to discuss “election integrity,” which it perceived as an effort to “undermine the electoral system.”

Trump and his allies have previously spread baseless conspiracy theories to cast doubt upon Lula’s victory in 2022, which helped to fuel the failed coup. They’ve done the same with the victories of other left-wing candidates in Latin American elections—including Bolivia’s Evo Morales in 2019 and Guatemala’s Bernardo Arévalo in 2023.

Lula’s campaign said the sudden US suspension of consular services was “yet another extremely serious development in the interference in Brazilian elections by the US government,” alleging that it was “coordinated, by all indications, directly by the brothers Flávio and Eduardo Bolsonaro.”

The filing noted that even “the legislative branch of the foreign state itself… recognizes the pattern of external pressure.” It pointed to a letter sent earlier this week by Democratic US Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (NH), Peter Welch (Vt.), and Tim Kaine (Va.) to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, which said that “the administration’s most recent actions point toward an effort to interfere with, and potentially undermine, Brazil’s general election in October.”

A man wearing a mask depicting US President Donald Trump attends a rally of Brazilian right-wing presidential candidate Flavio Bolsonaro in Goiania, Brazil, on September 27, 2026. (Photo by Sergio Lima/AFP via Getty Images)

The first round of Brazil’s election will begin on Sunday. Should neither candidate receive 50% of the vote, a runoff between the top two candidates will be held on October 25. Several major polls show Lula with a narrow first-round lead entering Sunday, although others have the race effectively tied or Bolsonaro slightly ahead.

But Lula has also seized upon Trump’s meddling to portray Bolsonaro as a tool of foreign powers, drawing on a history of US-backed coups and election interference that have undermined Brazilian democracy.

“Flávio Bolsonaro is Trump’s candidate and what Trump wants is to colonize Brazil, take our riches, steal our future and leave us in the dust,” said a campaign ad that began airing last week.



The Trump administration, for its part, has continued to double down on public overtures toward imperialist ambition. On Thursday, an official US State Department social media account reposted a video created in August glorifying the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine and declaring that “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.”

Dov H. Levin, a political scientist at the University of Hong Kong who recently published research on the effects of foreign election interference, told the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S. Paulo that, if too overt, Trump’s intervention could backfire.

“There are cases of failure,” he said, “and cases where the reaction provoked by the intervention harms precisely the side it intended to help.”

Why Canada is preparing for a (long shot) US invasion

Nadine Yousif; Robin Levinson-King - in Toronto
Sat, October 3, 2026 
BBC


[Getty Images]

Prime Minister Mark Carney admitted last week that he has prepared for a once-unthinkable scenario - a US invasion.

Noting the risk was low and the likelihood highly improbable, he told the New York Times he had a responsibility to consider all possibilities as the US-Canada relationship is redefined under the Donald Trump presidency.

"That's just risk management," Carney said.

Trump's global tariffs and his often-repeated desire to make Canada the 51st state has led Canada to war game an attack by the Americans.

In 2025, the US president said it was "highly unlikely" that the US would ever use force against Canada. Instead he said, he would continue to exert economic pressures to obtain political aims.

"President Trump has done more than anyone to protect the great people of Canada," the White House told the BBC in a statement this week.

Military experts who spoke to the BBC also think an invasion is a long shot, pointing to the multiple ways the two countries work together on defence.

But the issue is clearly weighing on Canadians' minds.

In January, after the US captured Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, a Leger poll suggested that over 30% of Canadians believed that a US invasion was likely.
Why it is unlikely to happen

A war between Canada and the US would be complicated and almost difficult to imagine, said Lt-Gen Christopher Coates, a former military officer of 34 years with the Royal Canadian Air Force who held various senior positions

"I was involved in military operations for my whole career, and we never considered the possibility that there would be a military attack coming from US territory," he told the BBC.

Coates, who had served on Nato missions, noted that Canada and the US collaborate on many aspects of military defence.

They are both members of the north Atlantic defence alliance, which mandates members to defend a fellow member-nation should they be attacked.

The two countries also conduct joint Arctic defence missions under the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD), and frequently share intelligence.

Because of this, Coates said he believes an attack by the US on Canada would not begin with an armed assault, but rather with more discreet means like cyberwarfare.

After President Trump shared an AI meme with gun-toting geese, the BBC's Jessica Murphy asks how Canada could hit back economically
Not always the best of friends

After World War II, Canada and the US became natural allies for the latter part of the 20th Century, and have become heavily integrated economically, militarily and culturally.

But it wasn't always this way. In fact, a core tenet of Canada's identity is its resistance of US expansionism in the 18th and 19th Centuries, said Tim Foran, a researcher with the Canadian War Museum.

"Fear of the United States is foundational to the political project that is Canada," he said.

Canada was formed as a collection of British North American colonies who remained loyal to the British Crown when the colonies in the modern-day US rebelled.

Before the formation of Canada, the US had attempted to invade British North American colonies, taking control of Montreal in 1775 and nearly conquering Quebec City.

In the war of 1812, the Americans invaded what was known then as Upper Canada, Lower Canada and the maritime colonies repeatedly, resulting in a stalemate. During that war, British troops famously burned down the White House in retaliation.

Foran said that at the time, the colonies that later became Canada relied on Great Britain and its Royal Navy for its defence, as well as indigenous peoples who served as generals in major battles.

Canada again contemplated war with the US post-World War I in response to its growing power and influence.

It drafted a plan that was informed by secret trips to border cities made by Canadian army generals, who would pose as tourists and snap photos of bridges and highways for intelligence.

They also spoke to local residents to better understand their enemy.

A war was an unlikely scenario then, said Andrew Burtch, a researcher with the Canadian War Museum with expertise on Canada in the 20th Century, but the Canadians still wanted to be prepared.

"That's part of what militaries do," he said. "They envisage all sorts of different scenarios."

Canada-US relations have deteriorated under the second Trump presidency. [Getty Images]

What a US invasion could look like

Even if a US invasion is extremely unlikely, Matthew Schmidt, an associate professor of national security at the University of New Haven in Connecticut, said the fact that Canadians were preparing was a sign of just how drastically the global order has shifted.

He added Canadian leaders do have hard questions to ask about how closely they want to continue working with the American military - a partnership that gives them valuable information should they want to harm Canada in any way.

"It's really doing harm to relationships with the United States, and there's a certain amount of legitimate fear," he said.

Americans might not take Trump's comments about making Canada the 51st state seriously, he said, but Canadians clearly do - and are prepared to defend themselves if needed.

So what would it be like if it happened?

The first phase of a war could be quite short.

According to the model used by the Canadian military, as reported on by the Globe and Mail newspaper earlier this year, a US attack would see Canada's strategic positions overwhelmed within a week

Its military would quickly be outnumbered, forcing Canadian forces to resort to guerilla-type warfare to try to suppress their enemy.

Allied nations like France and Britain would be called on to provide support and defence for Canada, the newspaper reported in January, citing senior government officials.

The theoretical model is believed to be the first time in a century that Canada planned for an American assault.

The modelling is on the lighter end of military combat planning, Coates said.

He said that Canada, unlike its Nato allies, was lagging behind when it came to having a response plan in place in the event of any ground invasion, and that it was now playing catch-up in this era of unpredictable geopolitics.

Part of that, he said, was made evident by a recent call by Canada's defence chief to drastically increase the size of its military, including the addition of as many as 300,000 lightly trained citizen soldiers.

An invasion of Canada might not be straightforward from the US point of view either.

Even with its outsized military, the US would have a difficult time getting buy-in for a fight with Canada, said Schmidt.

"I think you would have a large number of American officers who would resign if given the order to invade Canada," he said.

"They would see it as an illegal and immoral order."

Schmidt said Canadian soldiers and American soldiers routinely train together, and share a mutual respect.

But in the unlikely scenario that relations would deteriorate to the point of combat, Schmidt said the US would likely focus on acquiring valuable Canadian resources like oil and minerals, and political decapitation.

"You would see a a kind of operation that would mirror perhaps what you saw in Venezuela," he said, referring to US military action earlier this year to capture former Venezuelan President Maduro.

Although he acknowledged the US has greater military capacity, he said that "pound for pound" Canadian soldiers would be able to put up a fight.

‘Spit on our sacrifice’: Canadian veterans fume after Trump and allies take jibes at military

John Semley
Tue, October 6, 2026 


Canadian troops launch their assault on the Whale's Back in Eastern Afghanistan 13 March 2002.Photograph: Canadian Press/ShutterstockMore

On the morning of 11 September 2001, Perry Chalmers was running drills for the Royal Canadian Regiment's specialised mortar platoon in New Brunswick when he heard the news: America was under attack. Word quickly spread across the base. "I went inside to watch the news," the former corporal recalls. "And there was a huge feeling of – and you're going to have to excuse me – holy shit. What the fuck just happened?"

Chalmers called his wife, who informed him that, just before 10:30am, the second of the World Trade Center towers had fallen. With that, his battalion was put on notice: dispatched to nearby airports to assist in the forced landings of commercial aircraft after the shutdown of North American airspace.

The Canadian troops went to retrieve their rucksacks and any other necessities, should they need to spring into action at a moment's notice. As Chalmers recalls: "Things started to happen really quickly."

Chalmers would deploy to Afghanistan, on a nine-month tour of combat duty, where he saw combat alongside US troops. He put his mortar platoon training to good use, as a counter-IED engineer, dealing with the threat of improvised explosives in conjunction with the US army's 10th Mountain Division.

He was one of more than 40,000 members of the Canadian armed forces who served in Afghanistan, supporting US and Nato operations. The Canadians lost 158 lives. In 2007, a stretch of Ontario's highway 401 was rechristened the "Highway of Heroes" to commemorate the convoys of fallen soldiers ferried between the military base in Trenton, Ontario, and the coroner's office in Toronto.

This response to 9/11 was consistent with the longer history of Canadian-US military cooperation. About 14,000 Canadians landed on Juno Beach in Normandy on D-day during the second world war. More than 26,000 Canadians served in the Korean war. While Canada did not officially participate in the Vietnam war, an estimated 30,000 Canadians headed across the border to volunteer for the US military.

Over the course of the war in Afghanistan, Chalmers can count 35 fellow Canadian troops who lost their lives. But he never really brooked any regrets, or bad feelings, about his role in the US-led war. "My experience was that we were participating in an operation to help our brothers and sisters in the United States," he says. "None of them ever snubbed their noses at us. We were treated as equals, and respected, for what we brought to the table."

But no longer. While calling Canada "a state", US vice-president JD Vance recently commented that it "had underinvested in its military that quite literally would get invaded by a foreign country were it not for the umbrella of protection provided by the United States of America".

Going one step further, Donald Trump's transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, told Fox News that Canada "doesn't have a military".

Self-styled "secretary of war" Pete Hegseth has spent time on X, mocking Canadian cadets and criticising a Canadian coast guard detachment for taking part in a Pride celebration. Trump himself was criticised earlier this year for claiming that Canadian and other Nato forces in Afghanistan were "never needed", claiming these allies "stayed a little back, a little off the frontlines".

The remarks have been condemned at the highest level of the Canadian government. The defence minister, David McGuinty, described Hegseth's social media posts as "below the dignity of the office he holds". Amid a serious diplomatic dispute between the two nations, the prime minister, Mark Carney, accused Trump and Hegseth of "doing memes".

"It's disrespect and betrayal," Chalmers says. "It makes me very angry."

"It's really hard to hear how ungrateful they are, especially Vance, who served," said Chris Banks, a retired Canadian army sergeant with nearly two decades of experience. "To hear him spit on our sacrifice is insulting, it's hurtful, and it's disrespectful to the dead. On the other hand, these men have proven themselves nothing more than children. So when I heard JD Vance say it, it's like, 'Oh, good. Dumbass said something else'".

Banks deployed to Afghanistan in 2008, where he was part of a Canadian platoon that laid down cover fire for Americans under attack from the Taliban. To this day, he still has vivid memories of taking cover in a ditch near Pashmul, alongside an American platoon, looking up as the trees overhead were shredded by shrapnel.

He says he was proud to serve. But when he came home to Ontario in 2009, he felt something had changed. He began drinking heavily – sometimes as much as a litre of vodka a day – and struggling with suicidal thoughts. All hallmarks of PTSD. He received treatment, and now advocates for the mental health and wellbeing of other Canadian veterans. Still, a tinge of bitterness remains, when he thinks back on fighting on behalf of the US.

"I lost a part of myself," he says. "In that war we fought, for them."

***

Nancy Payne still remembers exactly where she was when she found out her son had died. Cpl Randy Payne served with a military police unit, stationed in Wainwright, Alberta. He was part of a specialised close protection team, charged with safeguarding high-ranking officers, government officials and other VIPs, in war zones.

On 22 April 2006, an armoured vehicle triggered a roadside bomb outside Kandahar airbase, killing Payne and three other Canadian soldiers. It was the deadliest attack on Canadian forces since 2002 – when four Canadian soldiers were killed by a US bomb after a disastrous friendly fire incident at the Tarnak Farms training facility in Afghanistan.

Nancy was at home, alone, when the phone rang in the dead of the night. It was her son's commanding officer. "When you get a call at three in the morning from Randy's boss, you know it's not good news," she recalls, speaking over the phone from her home in Lansdowne, Ontario. "I just kept saying 'Not my Randy … not my Randy'."

In 2025, the Royal Canadian Legion awarded Nancy a Silver Cross, a commendation for Canadian military mothers. She laid a wreath at the national war memorial during the Remembrance Day ceremony in Ottawa.

More locally, she has commemorated her son with a prize – "the Captain's Award" – bestowed to students who distinguish themselves in athletics and leadership at his former high school. She, too, is unnerved by the US attacks on the Canadian military and veterans like her son. "What they're saying is not right," she says. "We were neighbours for so long. That's all changed, now."

Nancy is not the only military mother who feels this way. Earlier this year, Jane McKay, mother of deceased Master Cpl Tim Wilson, penned an op-ed for the Toronto Sun newspaper taking aim at the Trump administration. "Trump has no respect for any soldier – American, or Canadian, or those from the Nato alliance," she wrote. "He owes them all an apology."

Some US politicians have tried to make amends. On 1 September, Arizona Democrat senator Rueben Gallego travelled to Ottawa on an official congressional trip. The goal was to strengthen the weakening trade relations between the two nations. But Gallego made a point of singling out Hegseth's anti-Canadian military tweets as "deeply disrespectful to the men and women of Canada that have died fighting with us".

For veterans like Chalmers, such lip service may be too little, too late. He used to play tabletop strategy games with a group of civilian friends in the US, via the online social platform Discord. That all ended when they laughed off his concerns about Trump's talk of Canada becoming the "51st state". Banks used to routinely take his family across the border for vacations and stateside shopping trips. No more. "I loved working with Americans, I loved training with them," he says. "But now it's hard to have that same level of empathy."

Would he eagerly enlist to help the US again?

"What would happen if there was another hypothetical 9/11?" he says. "I hate to say it, but why would any nation, ever again, partner with the United States, if this is how they treat their closest neighbour and ally?"

 

  

Warmongering Putin Accused of Massive Plague Cover-Up

Vic Verbalaitis
Sun, October 4, 2026


Ramil Sitdikov / REUTERS


Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has been accused of concealing an alarming pneumonic plague outbreak as nearly 200 people have been forced into quarantine.

Authorities reported on Friday that 28-year-old Darya Shipilova, a lab tech at a research facility in Siberia, had died at the Shelekhov Hospital in a suspected case of the plague, according to The Moscow Times.

She had been hospitalized with acute pneumonia symptoms on Tuesday and was placed on a ventilator, with reports saying she died two days later on Thursday.

The incident prompted Shelekhov Hospital to quarantine, soon followed by several others in the Irkutsk region, even as health authorities reassured residents everything was fine, the outlet reported. The Irkutsk Aluminum Smelter in Shelekhov also instituted a mask mandate for "preventative measures," according to its director, Artem Fominykh.

Putin visited an aviation facility in the Irkutsk region in July. / VYACHESLAV PROKOFYEV / POOL/AFP via Getty Images

Residents told local outlet People of Baikal that doctors in the region were "openly talking about the plague." A local maternity hospital blocked family from visiting birthing mothers, citing the "plague," the outlet reported.

"If [federal health officials] said everything is fine, then why are the hospitals closing for quarantine?" one resident was quoted asking.

"Unfortunately, they don't consider us human beings," another told the outlet.

Public health officials, meanwhile, have insisted the epidemiological situation in the region is "stable" and walked back their earlier statements. The federal health watchdog said Sunday that Shipilova died from a case of "pneumonia of an undetermined origin." Kremlin-controlled media deleted their earlier reporting on pneumonic plague.

On Saturday morning, the local government for the town of Baykalsk advised residents to avoid traveling to Shelekhov and other nearby towns because of a plague-related death, but the post was taken down shortly after, according to the Times.

Lake Baikal is in the Irkutsk region in southern Siberia. / Xinhua News Agency / Xinhua News Agency via Getty Ima

Igor Kobzev, the governor of the Irkutsk region, did not identify the illness as the plague and referred to it only as "a dangerous infectious disease," but shut down all public events in the region, according to the New York Post.

After meeting with Anna Popova, who leads Russia's public-health watchdog, to organize safety measures, Kobzev urged residents to remain calm.

"All identified contact persons have been placed under medical observation. As of today, the contacts show no signs of illness, and their laboratory test results are negative," he wrote on Telegram on Friday, without mentioning Shipilova's death.

People of Baikal reported that Shipilova had been exposed to the disease after she had accidentally broken a test tube containing live bacteria on Sept. 25. She first developed symptoms during a work expedition near the Russian border with Mongolia, according to the outlet.

Troops under Ukraine's 3rd Army Corps have liberated five key settlements, in a headache for Putin. / Alexander Kazakov / via REUTERS

However, Russian epidemiologist Mikhail Favorov, who now lives in the U.S., alleged that the broken test tube story is a government cover-up.

"It's laughable," Favorov said, according to the Post. "Someone working at the anti-plague Institute in Irkutsk wears a protective anti-plague suit. If you break a test tube, the likelihood of infection is actually very low. In short, it doesn't matter to the general public — they'll believe the 'dropped test tube story.'"

The 14th Century's Black Death pandemic wiped out 25 million people in Europe. / Pictures from History / Pictures From History/Universal

The plague has three main forms: bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic. Symptoms include fever, chills, and eventual respiratory failure, but it can be treated with antibiotics if started within 24 hours of symptom onset.

Pneumonic plague is the deadliest form and the only one that can spread from person to person via airborne respiratory droplets.

Jimmy Kimmel Mocks Trump’s Promise to Help Russia Amid Siberia Plague: ‘The Gang Who Brought Polio Back’

"Sounds like the plot of one of those horror movies you can only get on Tubi," the late night host adds

Alyssa Ray
Mon, October 5, 2026 


(Photo credit: "Jimmy Kimmel Live!"/YouTube)


Jimmy Kimmel took aim at Donald Trump after the president promised to send aid to Russia amid a plague outbreak in Siberia, joking that "the gang who brought polio back is on the case."

During Monday's monologue for "Jimmy Kimmel Live!," the comedian weighed in on the situation in Siberia, which saw a 28-year-old laboratory worker at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute die of severe pneumonia. Dozens more are currently in quarantine.

"We took 200 members of our staff to Brooklyn. I am pleased to announce that only half of them came back with the flu," Kimmel said. "Everyone is out sick. Everybody is sick today. Although, I guess we're lucky to just have the flu."

He added: "You know, today the governor of New York declared a state disaster emergency because of a measles outbreak there. So now we've got the flu, we've got measles, we've got rabies, we've got West Nile virus, we have flea-born typhus, all on the rise. And now we are hearing that in Russia there has been at least one death from a suspected case of the plague, the pneumonic plague."

After mentioning that around 200 people are in quarantine, Kimmel said of the White House's response: "The White House says they are monitoring the situation and assessing options to figure out if there is any way they can make money off of it."

"Jimmy Kimmel Live!" editors then played footage of Trump answering questions about the supposed plague, with the president noting that "we'll help them."

"Well, everybody, they'll help [them]," Kimmel responded. "No worries. The gang who brought polio back is on the case."

"So, this outbreak, which is scary, is reported to have originated with a lab leak at the Anti-Plague Institute of Siberia," he added. "Which sounds like the plot of one of those horror movies you can only get on Tubi."

Before moving on, Kimmel sarcastically noted that he felt "glad we have a president who is a doctor and also Jesus," poking fun at Trump's past AI-generated religious memes.

For Kimmel's full monologue, watch the video above. A representative for the White House did not immediately respond to TheWrap's request for comment.

"Jimmy Kimmel Live!" airs weeknights at 11:35 p.m. ET on ABC.

 TheWrap.

Trump says US will help Russia after Siberia plague institute death

Reuters
Mon, October 5, 2026 


US President Donald Trump speaks with media before boarding Marine One as he travels to Grand Island, Nebraska, on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, D.C., US, October 5, 2026. REUTERS/Eric Lee

WASHINGTON, Oct 5 (Reuters) - US President Donald Trump on Monday at the White ‌House told reporters that the United States ‌will help Russia after a laboratory worker died at ​a plague research institute in Siberia.

Trump told reporters as he left the White House for a trip to Nebraska that the outbreak ‌is a "big problem ⁠for Russia."

A laboratory worker at a plague research institute in Siberia ⁠fell ill and died in undisclosed circumstances, prompting authorities to quarantine dozens of people.

The death ​has sparked ​public health fears ​on social media, but ‌Russian authorities said on Monday the situation was under control.

"Well, I hate to see them having it," Trump said. "It's a rough disease."

He said the US would do what it ‌could to help Russia. ​Trump has said he considers ​Russian President ​Vladimir Putin someone whom he can ‌work with despite tensions over ​Russia's war ​against Ukraine.

"We'll help," Trump said. "Anybody that has that kind of a problem, we're ​always will ‌to help."

(Reporting by Steve Holland, Trevor Hunnicutt ​and Bo Erickson; editing by Michelle ​Nichols and Caitlin Webber)

'New nightmare fuel dropped': Frenzy as MIT researcher picks apart Russia's plague story

Daniel Hampton
October 6, 2026 

RAW STORY


A view of the Medical Assistance and Rescue Centre, an infectious diseases hospital, in the town of Shelekhov in the Irkutsk region, Russia, October 5, 2026. REUTERS/Stringer

A thread from MIT biosecurity researcher Kevin Esvelt arguing that Russia's response to a suspected plague death doesn't match a routine lab accident drew a wave of reaction from prominent scientists and physicians Monday.

Russian authorities have been responding since late September to the death of a 28-year-old lab technician at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East. Nearly 200 people were placed under medical observation, according to The Moscow Times.

Esvelt wrote that the scale of the response is "inconsistent with a lab-acquired plague infection, which would have been treated with prophylactic antibiotics," citing quarantines across several hospitals, reported FSB involvement, and hazmat use. He added that Russian authorities "have surely sequenced the Irkutsk pathogen, but refuse to identify it," and said a physical lockdown implies either engineered pan-resistance or that the pathogen is not plague at all.

He also wrote that none of it means a pandemic is coming.

Russian officials have confirmed none of that. Rospotrebnadzor says the worker was diagnosed with pneumonia of unknown origin, that expanded testing found no microorganisms linked to her work, and that no accident occurred at the institute. The World Health Organization says no cause of death has been officially confirmed. RFE/RL reported there is no public evidence the lab was developing plague as a weapon, and that Russia says such facilities are defensive.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday the reports were not cause for alarm, but "for focus."

Even so, Esvelt's thread sent the internet into a frenzy.

Ashish Jha, the former White House COVID-19 response coordinator, vouched for Esvelt as one of the smartest people in the world on engineered pathogens: "Kevin's tweets are worth your time."

Mathematical biologist Alex Washburne called him a "biodefense brother from another mother."

Physician Brian Goldman had a message for skeptics: "To the pooh-poohers, read this."

Journalist Annie Jacobsen, who writes on national security, simply wrote one word: "This."

Activist Drew Pavlou, who is not a scientist, went furthest, writing that there is a "disturbingly high possibility" the outbreak is an escaped pandemic weapon and calling for Russia's borders to be sealed.


And environmental justice advocate Jay C. Ford reacted, "New nightmare fuel just dropped."

When is the right time to compare US politics to the Nazi era? This expert on Christian nationalism says: now

David Smith in Washington
Sat, October 3, 2026 

THE GUARDIAN


Donald Trump delivers the keynote address at the Faith & Freedom Coalition's Road to Majority Policy Conference on 22 June 2024 in Washington DC.Photograph: Samuel Corum/Getty Images

The lawyer Mike Godwin famously came up with the "law" that, as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one (or 100%).

Robert P Jones thought long and hard about whether to go there in his latest book. But the more he studied US demographic numbers, considered the rise of Christian nationalism and heard Donald Trump use the language of racial purity, he found the conclusion inescapable. "This is our 1933," he writes.

So it is that Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy begins with the rise of the Nazi party and the complicity of the German people, including German Christians and churches.

Jones cites Martin Niemöller, a Lutheran pastor imprisoned for opposing Hitler, remembered for the poem First They Came. But for the first four years of Hitler's reign, he notes, Niemöller did not fully oppose the Nazis. He later regretted that he and the Protestant German church did not speak out sooner.

Backslide returns to the analogy in its epilogue. He writes: "Just as God asked Niemoller where he was between 1933 and 1937, God will ask us where we were between 2025 and 2028. Just as Germans who backed Hitler and the Nazi Party after 1933 were fully aware of what they were joining, so Christians who have backed Trump and the MAGA movement a second time know and bear responsibility for what they are now endorsing."

Sitting in his downtown Washington office, the president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) contends that US democracy is experiencing a severe "backslide" that is directly aided and abetted by an "apostate" white Christianity, including Trump's language on the campaign trail.

"This dehumanising language, talking about immigrants as vermin, and this racial purity language, like they're 'poisoning the blood of our country'. What does that mean? If they're poisoning the blood, what's the pure blood? We know where that story goes," he said.

Trump has repeatedly used the concept of genetic inheritance. In 2020, addressing a mostly white crowd in Minnesota, he declared: "You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn't it, don't you believe? The racehorse theory, you think we're so different? You have good genes in Minnesota."

Normalisation is a perennial danger.

"If don't want to live in a place where we have a thuggish police force that's kidnapping people off the street in masks and killing US citizens in the streets, now's the time to speak up," Jones said.

Backslide cites historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt's 1950 The Aftermath of Nazi Rule report for Commentary magazine based on interviews with postwar Berliners: "A great number of Germans, especially among the more educated, apparently are no longer capable of telling the truth even if they want to."

Jones grew up a Southern Baptist in Jackson, Mississippi, went to church five times a week and earned a master of divinity degree. His previous books include The End of White Christian America in 2016, White Too Long in 2020 and The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future in 2023. He called this one Backslide very deliberately.

Related: The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy review: necessary chronicle of US racist history

In international political science, "democratic backsliding" has become the established academic term for the systematic erosion of democratic norms, judicial independence and voting rights. Yet Jones recognises that the term carries an even older resonance.

"In the evangelical world I grew up in, backslide was a word we heard all the time – a theological word about the fear of falling away from the faith," he says, tracing the word's history back through the Oxford English Dictionary to the 16th-century Protestant reformer John Knox.

In Jones's diagnosis, white American Christianity has committed a profound act of apostasy by trading its spiritual core for political dominance. By endorsing anti-democratic tactics, white Christian institutions have become the primary engine behind the country's autocratic slide.

To understand how a major religious tradition arrived at this moral impasse, Jones turns to the arithmetic of demographics. When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, white Christian Americans still constituted 54% of the US population. By 2014, that figure had dropped to 47%. Today, white Christians account for 41% of the country.

The decline among white evangelicals, long considered a bedrock of conservative politics, is even steeper. At the turn of the 21st century, white evangelicals represented a quarter of all Americans; today, they make up barely 13%. The Southern Baptist Convention, the country's biggest evangelical denomination, has lost more than 3 million members since its 2006 peak.

Faced with shrinking numbers and cultural marginalisation, white evangelicalism embraced not spiritual renewal, but existential panic – creating fertile ground for Trump's demagoguery.

"Trump loves to talk about the art of the deal and, in many ways, there's been a massive quid pro quo deal struck between a declining white evangelical population and Trump," Jones observes. "His big appeal to them was less about policy and more anti-immigrant: I'm going to restore an America that looks like you, and I'm going to restore power to the Christian churches.

"He was literally saying on the campaign trail: this is a quid pro quo deal. Give me your votes and you won't even have to vote again. I'll fix it so you don't have to vote again.'"

This transactional alliance marks a complete departure from the religious right of the late 20th century, which wrapped its political ambitions in the language of morality.

"You don't hear those words any more," says Jones, contrasting today's movement with Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority or the "Values Voters" summits of the George W Bush era. "What we have now is an overtly anti-democratic Christian nationalism flying under the banner of: 'We believe this country belongs to us, and we're going to use the power we can to claim it.'"

This Faustian bargain relies purely on power rather than shared theology – a dynamic starkly highlighted by the contrast between Trump and his running mate, JD Vance. While Vance recently discussed the End Times with 22-year-old evangelical podcaster Bryce Crawford, awkwardly reflecting on his evangelical upbringing and subsequent conversion to Catholicism, Trump operates largely without theological pretence.

Jones continues: "He makes straight appeals to self-interest: if you're for me, I'll be for you. Evangelicals are willing to forgive a whole host of sins for the idea that he is going to bring them back into power as their numbers are dwindling."

The real world manifestation of this transaction plays out every Sunday across thousands of congregations. While high-profile megachurches such as First Baptist church in Dallas make their political allegiance explicit, Jones contends that overt political sermonising is rarely needed.

"Once you have churches that are largely segregated by race and increasingly segregated by partisanship, all you really have to do is keep out any critique. It's reinforced by Fox News, Christian radio and going home to people of like mind. You don't have to overtly teach Christian nationalism; you just keep it from being critiqued."

PRRI's extensive empirical data undermines the widespread belief that religious attendance automatically fosters civic tolerance or democratic values.

Jones says: "Particularly among white evangelicals, on several measures around Christian nationalism, anti-immigrant views, anti-Black views, and anti-Muslim views, going to church actually makes your views more extreme. It's not the case that more church is the answer to democracy."

The dangerous potential of this theological radicalisation materialised dramatically during the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. Christian symbols were displayed prominently throughout the insurrection, including wooden crosses set up on Capitol grounds and rioters holding "Jesus Saves" banners alongside Confederate flags.

Yet official investigations largely overlooked this central element, influenced in part by political figures like Congresswoman Liz Cheney on the House select committee. "I was stunned to see very little of it in the House select committee report," Jones recalls. "It was a huge loss and a huge skewing of public perception that we didn't take those Christian symbols at the riot seriously."

Today, this blend of Christian nationalism and military authority reaches into the upper echelons of the national security apparatus. The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, sports tattoos featuring Crusader iconography – including the medieval battle cry Deus Vult ("God wills it") next to a Jerusalem cross – while renaming the Department of Defense as the "Department of War". Hegseth has welcomed vocal Christian nationalists such as Pastor Doug Wilson to lead a worship service at the Pentagon.

Jones comments: "I can't imagine much more dangerous than somebody who thinks, 'I am the instrument of God, I alone understand how the forces of good and evil are aligned,' while holding the power to deploy the most powerful military force the world has ever seen. While George W Bush took care after 9/11 to explicitly state that the US was not at war with Islam, today we are making radicalisation propaganda films for extremists by presenting ourselves as a Christian nation at war with Islam."

Behind the public spectacle of rallies and political theatre, ideologues such as Russell Vought, a key architect of Project 2025 and advocate of the "unitary executive" theory, are laying the groundwork for a government rooted in Christian nationalist principles. "They are building an apparatus designed to institutionalise this worldview across the federal government," Jones warns. "It is an intentional, long-term project to reshape American democracy in their own image."

Despite the alarming trajectory detailed in Backslide, Jones resists total pessimism. The central message of his book is that "backsliding is not irreversible" and that national recovery remains possible through honest confrontation with history and sincere repentance.

Across the country, alternative Christian voices are beginning to organise against Christian nationalism. Figures such as James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian running for the US Senate in Texas, and Methodist pastor Adam Hamilton in Kansas are offering a pro-democracy theological vision.

"For a long time, mainline Protestants were taught propriety and politeness, leading to a reticence to speak out," Jones notes. "If we don't want the public and future face of Christianity to be only Christian nationalism, we have to present a public version of Christianity that is compatible with democracy – one that leans into care for the orphan, the widow and the immigrant."

Ultimately, Jones argues, neither sacred texts nor historical precedents will dictate the future of US democracy. He hopes his book will make white Christians realise they face a decision similar to the one that confronted the establishment Christian church in Nazi Germany in 1933.

"It's a wake-up call to see the bright lines that are being crossed, to be clear-eyed about how dangerous that is, and for those readers who are Christian – particularly white and Christian – to realise we have a particular responsibility to offer a different version of faith. Because it is our faith that's been hijacked and used to legitimise this illiberal, anti-democratic, authoritarian movement that's running rampant and taking over in the US."