“It’ll be a journey,” said Santos, 31. “Like Lord of the Rings.”
A modern political party is only one arm of a larger system. Donors seek to have their interests met, and to that end the party - working through marketing agencies and think tanks - tries to cultivate ideologies that will tie voters’ identities to the candidates. This cynical and opaque mechanism may notch victories on specific issues, but it will never spark a massive enough movement capable of achieving the hegemony needed for unscrupulous, cruel reforms.
The solution, however, came from the place you would least expect: Brazil. The same cohort of early zoomers who spearheaded the protests that led to President Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment in 2016, sobered by a decade of dashed hopes, decided to build not merely a new party but an entirely new political machine.
At the center of this new enterprise is a droopy-eyed 40-something year old with an obsession in Ancient Persia and Mithraism. Renan Santos and his Free Brazil Movement (MBL) have done what may well become the standard for (non-violent) revolutionary politics - they've built a full-stack, hermetically-sealed party.
They write their own theory, train their own cadres, produce their own media, and now field their own candidates - software, hardware, and product, all coordinated through a command structure that would make both Bolsheviks and Sequoia Capital execs nod in approval.
The Mission Party is the party for megalomaniacal young men. Their express goal is to train and empower the 99th percentile of Brazil’s Bell Curve.
Breaking through Brazil’s political game, however, is no easy task. Latest attempts, such as the right‑wing project of Bolsonaro, became captive to Brazil’s entrenched Big Center (Centrão).This amorphous blob of non-ideological parties controls more than half of Congress - essentially a permanent deep‑state machine - manipulating budgetary flows and bureaucratic appointments while trading public funds for votes.
Brazilian political scientist Raimundo Faoro elucidates this in Os Donos do Poder (1958). The Portuguese Crown brought a patrimonial state to Brazil, merging public authority and private gain since the very beginning. For Faoro, this patrimonial DNA explains why scandals recur, reforms stall, and coalitions form around spoils, not ideology.
But how can an honest candidate still get elected within this system? There's a limit to vote-buying and feudal bondage. Many poor voters will trade their ballot for $200, yet the middle class won’t - especially in big cities. In times of crisis, a revolt by the people who truly sustain the country can trigger full-scale political shifts; the Bolsonaro phenomenon was one example of that. Brazil isn’t trapped in an irreversible paternalistic scenario - though avoiding that path is extremely difficult.
Believing politics works according to a bottom-up logic is wrong. A party is not a popular institution; it is an aristocracy. If the objective is hegemony, the entire process must be approached from a military perspective: a solid chain of command that oversees and manages every sector of political activity.
MBL understood that this dynamic would never solve the country's glaring problems and that playing at democracy in a feudal, oligarchic system would bring nothing but defeat. They decided to create, within the party itself, all the institutions that make up a good government, prioritizing self-sufficiency and independence above all else - essentially, a state within a state.
Steve Jobs was a staunch advocate of the “closed ecosystem” model. His idea was to build hardware and software as one inseparable package, refusing to license its operating systems to rival manufacturers or permit sweeping third-party tweaks. Jobs insisted on owning “the whole widget” - industrial design, OS, even the app-delivery pipeline - because only total control, he argued, could guarantee an unmatched user experience. Under this strategy, Apple’s products formed a cohesive stack (often called a “walled garden” family of products) where each component is optimized to work seamlessly within Apple’s environment, even if that means shutting out everything beyond it.
Every political movement dreams of exercising that same level of command: financing itself, generating its own ideas, and mobilizing a dedicated network of activists to project those ideas outward.
To that end, the Free Brazil Movement founded Valete Magazine in January 2023. The publication aims to be at the forefront of “culture, art, and dissident politics.” The magazine, which is less than two years old, has already become the country’s second-best-selling culture publication. Valete offers political analyses outside the Brazilian third-worldist consensus, popularizing underdiscussed subjects in the country, like Bukele’s criminal reform, Milei’s plan for reinvigorating Argentinian markets, and Trump’s desire to reorient America’s supply chain around AI infrastructure. They have published cultural opinion pieces that explore themes such as Europe’s immigration-fueled Real Estate bubble, the need for immediate de-favelization, and even the creation of a hellenic republic in the Guanabara Bay.
Their videos and podcasts attract mostly Zoomers. In fact, it’s safe to say they’re the only ones actually reaching that audience. While the traditional right peddles a Boomer-driven, cult-like adoration of Bolsonaro and his colostomy bag, MBL’s network of channels delivers content with contemporary memes and commentary that actually resonates with the youth. For younger men, the idea of building a mega-prison in the middle of the Amazon with capacity for 1 million inmates is way more engaging than any other type of political pitch.
Valete’s authors and researchers have developed their own ideological compendium. The “Yellow Book” addresses every conceivable domain: health, war, economy, education, and even breeding. The solutions are meticulously precise and extend over 500 pages of text.
Most still fail to recognize the memetic (and potentially electoral) power of a think tank. Unlike other major political groups, MBL now has its own idea‑production tool, over which it has complete control. It no longer needs to turn to large institutes or universities. Its intellectuals, paid with money from the publication itself, spend their time drafting policies to be enacted by the Mission Party.
The staff of MBL comprises the most well-organized network of activists in Brazilian politics. They even have a designated software department - responsible for both an in-house streaming app and regularly scheduled cyberraids on online gambling platforms.
Having mastered social media viral cycles, policies forged by the movement’s intellectual C-suite are streamlined to the base and executed by strategically located activists.
In typical early-20th-century revolutionary fashion, the most popular figures in the MBL are its executive directors. Although Valete is the movement’s intellectual flagship, the most-watched content comes from Renan Santos’s daily livestreams. This format - a sharp, charismatic, and controversial leader speaking directly to the public - creates a sense of collective struggle among rank-and-file members. By contrast, could anyone imagine the chairman of the Republican Party as the primary voice of the American right?
They also profit from the fact that their opponents are old and out of touch with reality. MBL’s use of data analytics to map audience profiles, together with an ecosystem of information products with ever-expanding subscriber bases, gives them a clear technical edge over their boomer opponents.
This advantage proved crucial during party formalization. The deliberately onerous process requires 547,000 signatures, submitted to registry offices and electronically verified against voter records. Even Bolsonaro, at his peak popularity, failed to meet this threshold. The MBL developed proprietary signature-tracking software to streamline logistics, dramatically accelerating the process. When the federal electoral court confirmed the Mission Party's signatures in late June 2025, Brazil's political establishment was stunned. Despite requirements designed to be prohibitively difficult, the MBL not only met but exceeded the quota, collecting nearly 800,000 signatures.
The Mission serves as the MBL's political arm, translating the movement's intellectual framework into concrete policy. It was set up as a last-ditch effort. While the party was being set up, Renan Santos warned,
“We’ll act with all the force we can, but if we see that this isn’t what Brazilians really want, I’ll drop everything and leave the country. I have opportunities abroad.”
This all-or-nothing stance would seem absurd in conventional party politics. Robert Michels, in his book Political Parties, warns that revolutionary movements often calcify when their oligarchies prioritize self-preservation over continued struggle. The Mission's unyielding mentality guards against such stagnation. Moreover, the group's recent confrontational tactics have made any merger with Brazil's right-wing establishment impossible.
In an almost corporate approach to party politics, only those who have completed the Mission’s paid leadership-training program may run under the party banner. During the course, activists learn how to act in parliamentary politics, are placed within the party’s local chapter, and receive mentoring - sometimes from Renan Santos himself - on the conduct expected of a Mission member. Candidates must pass exams and conclude group projects while their performance undergoes continuous evaluation, creating a modern vetting system for future leaders.
This emphasis on strategic training has already produced striking results. In Pouso Alegre, Minas Gerais, councilman Israel Russo executed a tour de force against Big Center geriatrics.
In May 2025, he proposed slashing the city's commissioned positions from 33 to 7, then voted against his own amendment alongside another opposition member. Meanwhile, the floor leader - the strategic mind who typically directed the establishment votes - was sitting in county jail after MBL interns from the Pouso Alegre chapter had provoked him into attacking them. The headless governing coalition, reflexively opposing whatever the opposition supported, voted in favor - and lost their own patronage positions despite holding a five-to-one majority. Napoleon at Austerlitz.
This was neither the first nor the last time they asymmetrically influenced much larger governing bodies.
Kim Kataguiri, 29, stands as the sole MBL-affiliated federal congressman, yet ranks among the chamber's most prolific legislators. His command of parliamentary procedure has drawn Big Center members into the MBL's orbit, voting for his proposals and gradually aligning with the movement's agenda.Most importantly, the Mission considers loyalty to be non‑negotiable. In May 2025, an MBL city councilman in Curitiba - elected under a different party because the Mission still lacked official registration - disobeyed the movement’s leadership by refusing to investigate a corruption scandal at the city hall. The state MBL chapter expelled him on the spot, and his entire staff resigned in solidarity: nine young aides gave up comfortable salaries and went jobless to uphold the movement’s principles.
The party's cohesion, leaders argue, stems from doctrine rather than personality. Its internal structure - echoing democratic centralism - treats elected positions not as individual property but as party assets. Officials face evaluation based not on popularity but on adherence to the handbook that underpins the movement.
One hundred and fifty researchers and writers crafted the party’s official compendium - the Yellow Book - abrutally pragmatic blueprint for Brazil’s future. Drawing on specialists from every field, the text offers unflinching diagnoses and human-rights-agnostic solutions to the nation’s problems.
Problems such as crime. Brazilian criminals are infamous for their brutal violence - from gunning down enemies with 100 rounds of 7.62 mm ammunition on Facebook Live to burning victims alive in tire stacks (the "Microwave" method). But their power extends far beyond drug trafficking and executions.
In Rio's tropical hills, gangs like CV and TCP rule over favelas as independent states, imposing taxes, holding trials, and monopolizing utilities. Meanwhile, São Paulo's PCC operates more professionally - bribing judges and police to secure logistics networks and running operations inside Latin America's largest port, Santos, from where 80% of Europe's cocaine originates.
The Yellow Book believes the answer rests in the work of Gunther Jakobs and his Feindstrafrecht. The German jurist argues that the laws that apply to the dutiful citizen should be separated to those that address the enemies of society - terrorists, organized criminals, or other systemic threats. Cartels already see themselves as independent polities - they levy their own taxes, control territory, field standing militias, and run parallel courts - maybe, he posits, we should treat them accordingly: Not as citizens, but as foreign bodies destroying the nation.
Brazil's elite police units possess the tactical expertise and intelligence capabilities to dismantle organized crime within months. Swift, decisive action on public safety would strip the progressive judicial establishment of its power to shield criminal organizations.
Consider the psychological impact of such lightning-quick triumph. Nayib Bukele's El Salvador experiment made this clear: politics is about emotions. Where crime reigns, working-class communities live in perpetual anxiety. Eliminate crime, and that fear transubstantiates into political capital.
This "public safety trigger" is Latin America's Mandate of Heaven. In February 2025, Renan Santos addressed São Paulo's City Council, calling for authorities to declare war on cartels. Under the slogan "Arrest and Kill," the Mission Party promises - once elected - to launch a military campaign lasting "until organized crime controls not one square centimeter of our territory.
This sweeping campaign, paired with urban planning for “de-favelization”, would be the prerequisite for addressing any other problems.
Dismantling the cartels addresses only half of Brazil's productivity crisis; the other half lies in systemic bureaucratic decay.
Brazil's administrative apparatus remains grotesquely bloated, haunted by the labor legacy of Getúlio Vargas, who ruled as dictator from 1930 to 1945. His policies, designed to modernize the state, have calcified into obstacles to reform. Public employees enjoy lifetime tenure, judges and prosecutors collect astronomical salaries and benefits, while merit and performance remain alien concepts throughout the bureaucracy.
Local governments compound the dysfunction. Of Brazil's 5,418 municipalities, 2,978 spend beyond their means, draining R$56 billion (US$10.4 billion) annually in federal and state transfers. The pattern repeats at the state level: only 8 of 27 states balance their books, while the remaining 19 survive on Brasília's life support. The Yellow Book proposes not another bailout, but radical cartographic surgery for the twenty-first century.
Insolvent municipalities would merge with their nearest viable neighbors. Chronically dependent states would consolidate into larger administrative regions capable of achieving economies of scale in policing, healthcare, and infrastructure. The goal is fewer layers of government and fewer states. Federal funds will be allocated not according to need, but ROI.
Reforms that would tackle these problems have been on the public agenda for quite some time.
However, the Big Center sees no benefit in changing the system, since its power rests on the very existence of an inflated, corrupt bureaucracy. The Mission Party's doctrine recognizes that mounting public discontent against provincial oligarchies creates an opening - a moment when their stranglehold can be broken with decisive action, clearing the path for a geographic-administrative system built for the twenty-first century.
At the heart of the Yellow Book’s economic theory lies the re-industrialization of Brazil. The country, which once saw its economy emerge as a rising manufacturing powerhouse, now finds itself in a financialized landscape, paying its bills through agricultural exports to make ends meet. Simplistic, protectionist models for spurring industry have been tried in the 1970s and only yielded low-quality products and concentrated capital. To truly bring industry back, it is essential to focus on what already works.
Embraer is the third-largest aircraft manufacturer in the world. In addition to leading global production of regional jets, the company has also achieved success in the military sector, suchas the A-29 Super Tucano trainer aircraft - used in 15 countries - and the C-390 Millennium, a transport plane that is putting the price and quality of the Lockheed Martin C-130 to the test.
Embraer has succeeded not because of Brazil, but in spite of it. The country’s draconian labor laws, low defense budget, and hostility to enterprising young engineers have created a barren ground for the development of high-tech industry. That is why some of Embraer’s largest plants are located in Portugal and the United States. A serious national defense policy, drastic debureaucratization of the business sector, and brutally competitive procurement frameworks could introduce the country as one of the leading manufacturers of modern drones and missiles.
But this is impossible under the current regime.
While Brazil struggles to maintain its traditional defense industries, it possesses an underutilized asset that could revolutionize its position in the global aerospace sector. The latitude of the Alcântara Space Center (2.3°S) gives launches up to a 30% payload efficiency boost compared with Florida's Cape Canaveral.
Developing this space base and opening it to international agencies could turn northern Amazonia into a global aerospace hub, particularly because institutions like ITA (Technological Institute of Aeronautics) are capable of supplying the human capital for large infrastructure projects. A high-volume spaceport - for smallsat launches, geostationary satellites, and international customers - could anchor a domestic space industry.
Another pillar of Brazil’s economy is Petrobras, the national oil company. The offshore reserves off the coast of Rio propelled the country to become the world’s eighth-largest oil producer.
However, these convenient sources of profit will reach peak output in 2030, forcing the company to shut down part of production so it can recover at a sustainable rate.
The solution lies in the Brazilian Equatorial Margin. Located in the far north and sharing Venezuela’s basin system, it offers superior oil quality: lighter feedstock with lower sulfur content. This also addresses a critical bottleneck, as Brazil’s current production consists mainly of dense, impurity-laden oil that the country cannot process domestically due to lack of specialized refineries.
Environmental regulations pose the main obstacle to expansion. While Brazilian law treats theft and robbery leniently, environmental violations face harsh penalties. Foreign-funded NGOs, backed by international conglomerates, drive much of Brazil’s ecological lobbying. The Mission Party advocates for both Drill Baby Drill natural resource exploitation and a complete ban on foreign funding for domestic NGOs.
This is not an article about a corrupt Latin American country. It is an article about modern governments. Unfortunately, all modern governments have been Brazilified - so the glove will fit just as nicely. In the 19th Century, the gas-lit avenues along Guanabara Bay, the elegant cafés with classical piano music, and the city's warm climate enchanted the foreigners who strolled through it.
Today, as you walk through the streets of Rio de Janeiro, you'll see, amid the green and mountainous landscape, traces of a once-glorious and ambitious Empire striving toward modernization. Throughout the old city center, faded yet striking Parisian-style buildings bear witness to that past inaugurated by Emperor Pedro II - The Magnanimous - a man of science, a lover of progress, who corresponded with Pasteur, Wagner, Victor Hugo, Gobineau, and Charles Darwin. The Bay once known as the “City of Pianos” is now a war zone.
San Francisco, Chicago, and Paris are no different. Occupied, crippled shadows of their former selves. What distinguishes Rio de Janeiro from London is simply the degree of paralysis and rot.
By design, our liberal democracies have removed expediency from the political calculus. Every measure must be endlessly negotiated because no one social vector has the level of coordination necessary to idiosyncratically push for policies on cultural, legal, and operational fronts all at once. Rarely, a man of genius will be able to rouse the masses into a frenzy and, with a few bureaucrats and intellectuals, be able to rebuild his nation from the ground up. These specimens are, however, exceedingly rare. One day we might find ourselves bereft of them.
The MBL’s great contribution to mankind is the notion that politics is recursive. The state is supposed to mirror the party; the party is supposed to mirror the designs of its leaders; think tanks must flow directly into public policy; and likewise your activist group must be the only talent pool you are recruiting from.
Do this and you will have the ingredients for a non-hereditary aristocracy that can propagate itself for millennia.