Javier Miley and Flavio Bolsonaro. Wikimedia Commons, Gobierno argentino, CC-BY-4.0
by Silvio Canto, Jr.
It’s getting nasty down in Brazil in front of Sunday’s election. As you probably know, President Lula is behind in polls against Flavio Bolsonaro, the former president’s son. Did I tell you that the former president is under house arrest for challenging the election results?
We have not seen a son going after his father’s critics since George W. Bush took out Governor Ann Richards in Texas. Remember “Poor George, he can’t help it — he was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” That was sweet back in 1994, and I hope that Flavio can share the stage with father Jair on Sunday night when he wins, as expected.
Now Lula has a serious problem. What was supposed to be one more cakewalk to another duly regime-engineered term as the country’s ersatz democratically elected president has turned into a dogfight that has the eyes of the world on it. And worse — Lula under the harsh scrutiny of the United States and its president.
He is reacting badly.
The run-off election is three days from now, on Sunday the 25th.
This past Sunday’s debate between the two contenders was a fiery, raucous affair, during which Lula threw threats around like Carnival confetti.
Yes, Lula is getting desperate. I guess that he doesn’t want to join the long list of Latin American leaders thrown out by voters. Lula looks around, and he sees Chile, Argentina, Colombia, and it’s a different planet than it was a few years ago.
Many fear that President Lula will play the legal card and cancel Bolsonaro’s victory. Many fear this, but Brazilians won’t stand for it. It will throw the country in total chaos, and the streets will have more people than their famous carnivals.
So let’s hope for calm. At the same time, I wouldn’t be surprised if Lula runs an ad using Bolsonaro’s mother, even if they have to use AI to make it happen.
Mohamed Abotaka was charged after the victim was found partially stuffed in the bin | GOOGLE
A man, believed to be from Syria, has been charged with murder after a body was found in a wheelie bin.
Mohamed Abotaka was charged after Ali Barzai, 52, was discovered partially stuffed in the bin in a service lane off Grand Parade, Plymouth Hoe.
Mr Barzai, who is believed to be of North African heritage, was pronounced dead at the scene on Wednesday evening.
Devon and Cornwall Police have said they are currently working to locate the victim’s next of kin.
“A suspect is due to appear in court charged with murder, and we would urge people not to speculate on this case, especially on social media, and risk prejudicing these ongoing proceedings,” Detective Inspector Chris Lithgow said.
“A heightened police presence will remain in the area in the coming days.
“We understand this incident has caused concern within the local community, and I would encourage any members of the public with concerns to contact us.”
Grand Parade is a picturesque street in Plymouth’s West Hoe area, overlooking Plymouth Sound and close to the city’s famous waterfront green space, Plymouth Hoe.
The area is known for its attractive Victorian terraces, some dating back to the 19th century, and its coastal views, giving it a traditional seaside character.
Nearby attractions include Smeaton’s Tower lighthouse, the historic Royal Citadel, and the Art Deco Tinside Lido.
Firearms dealers in Paris have reported a massive surge in sales of non-lethal deterrents, including high-powered pepper spray guns, as shopkeepers reportedly stock up on telescopic batons, baseball bats, and iron bars ahead of anticipated trouble on Saturday.
Protests turned to rioting and widespread looting in several French cities last weekend, with the government now accepting it moved too slowly and allowed police to lose control of the streets in some areas. With faith in the state to protect private property at a new low, sales of defensive items are surging ahead of “act II” protests promised for Saturday in Paris and other cities.
City newspaper Le Parisien states shopkeepers in the Ile-de-France are arming themselves ahead of feared violence and more looting, with the president of the National Trade Association of Gunsmiths telling the publication: “Everyone feels they could be looted—and, more importantly, shopkeepers feel that the police haven’t protected them. They want to defend themselves rather than being looted ten times over.”
The association said it was advising its members to remain “upstanding, law-abiding citizens” but added that, ultimately, “If the police don’t restore order, we’re going to have a problem”.
Comparing the rush on defensive items at its members’ stores to the demand for air conditioning units this last sweltering summer, the association spokesman said: “It’s the same story at every gun shop—there’s going to be no stock left.”
The telephone is said to be ringing off the hook in central-Paris gun shops where customers are seeking out legal, no-licence-required defensive items like pepper spray, pistols that fire rubber balls with compressed gas, and tear-gas projectors.
Other popular items include the ‘JPX’ — a four-shot pistol loaded with cartridges of irritant and compressed air — with a sales sheet declaring: “The JPX6 magazine contains 4 pepper rounds. Each round contains approximately 10 grams of a very dense Oleoresin Capsicum blend… an extract of cayenne pepper that in the patented PIEXOL blend has a stinging capacity measured at 400 thousand SHU on the Scoville scale, one of the most powerful on the market today.”
Another Paris gun store owner cited by the paper said their sales were up tenfold and that shopkeepers are feeling “traumatised”.
Owning actual weapons for self-defence is absolutely illegal, but reports state some shopkeepers are willing to take the risk, even with the simplest of weapons. The paper cites the remarks of one shopkeeper who acquired an iron bar as a last-ditch anti-looting device, who said: “People are going to end up dead, and we are going to defend ourselves… Because enough is enough. We’ve warned everyone.”
Germany’s Die Welt newspaper notes the President of the French Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCI), Alain Di Crescenzo, said of the mood among French business owners: “People are exhausted, shop owners are arming themselves”, and that shopkeepers feel “a twofold fear: fear for one’s economic survival and fear for one’s physical safety”.
Such surges in demand for simple self-defence and non-lethal deterrent items like pepper spray in Europe’s disarmed societies where firearms licenses are generally rare and exclude self-defence as a legitimate reason for ownership are frequently tied to attacks on indigenes and world events. Paris gunsmiths record similar demand after the massive November 2015 terror attacks in the city, and after the October 7th attacks in Israel.
Breitbart London also reported identical developments in Germany a decade ago, in 2016. After the mass migrant rapes on young women in the city of Cologne on the first night of that year gun shops in that city reported massive demand. As reported then:
Shops selling self defence products have seen an run on their stores. German gun-shop owner Katja Triebel told Breitbart London “the sale of pepper spray has risen, as has sales of blank firing guns which can be loaded with pepper spray cartridges and other paralysers. “Other means of self defence are prohibited for ordinary citizens in Germany.”
The pepper-spray guns are illegal in the United Kingdom but are freely available in Germany and can be bought without a licence. Ms. Triebel said her regular customers had also reported a sudden surge of interest among their friends and colleagues in visiting a firearms range to try out shooting.
“We are completely sold out. We sold our last pepper spray on Wednesday. We order new supplies every day, but we always exceed the supply… mostly it is women demanding the products. They buy them for themselves, or for their daughters or girlfriends.”
The following month, gun shops in another German town, Flensburg on the Danish border, saw the same. As reported in the Migrant Crisis Livewire:
While a city spokesman would not comment on why demand was rising, the gun shop owner interviewed by Flensburger Tageblatt confirmed from speaking to his customers they were afraid of being robbed, of their children “being the victims of abuse”.
“After the recent incidents, many concerned parents come to us to equip their daughters”, he said. Even a police officer had come to buy pepper spray for his wife and daughter. Officially local police condemned the trade, remarking that people preparing to defend themselves would cause others to be provoked.
In 2019, Breitbart News reported that pepper spray sales were up in Sweden as the country experienced a surging crime wave.
In Duisburg, leaflets containing quotations from the Qur’an are currently turning up in several letterboxes. Among other things, they state that non-believers will be “punished by Allah in the fires of Hell”. The police have filed a complaint against the sender of the leaflet – because the imprint was missing. The police confirmed this to Apollo News. The leaflet opens with the words: “Whoever is an enemy of Allah and His angels and His messengers and Gabriel and Michael, Allah is their enemy. Allah is an enemy of the unbelievers”.
In the leaflet, the author addresses unbelievers directly and warns them: “I am merely a clear warner to you: any person who denies Islam until his death and has not accepted it will be punished eternally by Allah in the fires of Hell,” the leaflet states. The Islamic God is “the true King” and there is “no god but Him, the Lord of the Noble Throne”.
As early as the summer, the same leaflet from a then-unknown sender had appeared in several districts of Duisburg, as reported by the newspaper WAZ. However, the police classified the leaflet as not constituting a criminal offence. Nevertheless, the State Security Department was informed about the leaflet at the time.
According to a spokeswoman for the Duisburg police, they have since been able to identify the sender of the leaflet. A complaint has now been lodged against the sender – on the grounds of an administrative offence. This is because the sender had not included a legal notice on the leaflet. Under North Rhine-Westphalia’s press law, all printed material that is reproduced and intended for public distribution is subject to the legal notice requirement. The complaint has been forwarded to the relevant authority in the city of Duisburg.
There are numerous mosques and Muslim organisations in Duisburg. In the 2024 European elections, the result in electoral district 1001 caused a stir nationwide. According to the results, the DAVA party – considered Islamist and close to Erdogan – secured a relative majority with 41.10 per cent of the vote. The AfD came second with 14.16 per cent, followed by the SPD with 10.96 per cent. The CDU achieved 8.68 per cent.
While France, Belgium, Italy and Albania saw rioting, the protest wave reached Portugal, Spain, Greece and Austria through union marches, housing encampments and student tent camps. Established communist parties are openly participating in these protests.
The parties’ own documents show cross-border coordination, including a Greek communist delegation marching in Paris and plans for a Europe-wide youth strike on November 20.
In Portugal, the CGTP, the country’s largest union confederation, called the October 17 demonstrations in Lisbon, Porto and Coimbra. The Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) announced that its general secretary, Paulo Raimundo, would join the Lisbon march with a PCP delegation.
Two days earlier, Raimundo was asked about the housing encampments in Porto. He said the party supports all such actions expressing indignation over housing. Left Bloc coordinator José Manuel Pureza and Livre spokeswoman Isabel Mendes Lopes also spoke at the march.
Popular assemblies run the housing encampments in Lisbon’s Rossio square and Porto. The Lisbon assembly voted unanimously to ask union confederations to call an “Iberian general strike” on November 11.
In Spain, housing protests began alongside the French movement, including an encampment in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol. After Congress rejected two housing decrees, the tenants’ union Sindicato de Inquilinas called marches in about 50 cities on October 3. The government delegation counted 70,000 participants in Madrid, while organizers claimed 500,000.
Izquierda Unida, a coalition that includes the Communist Party of Spain, announced on September 29 that it would participate in the mobilizations on October 3 and 4. It said its members were active in the tenants’ unions, platforms and assemblies organizing against evictions.
Under pressure from the Sindicato de Inquilinas and the anarcho-syndicalist CGT, the CCOO and UGT agreed to a 24-hour general strike over housing and wages. It will be the first since 2012 backed by both confederations.
On October 14, the first day of an indefinite education strike in Madrid, police charged a student picket at Complutense University and detained five students. The Organización Estudiantil Socialista (OES) and the Coordinadora Juvenil Socialista (CJS) demanded that the charges be dropped and called for the government delegate’s resignation.
In Greece, Athens student associations set up tents in Syntagma Square on October 13 to protest housing and study costs. They announced plans for a second encampment on October 20 and a rally with high school students, teachers and parents on October 21. The Communist Party of Greece (KKE) announced that a delegation from its youth wing, KNE, marched in Paris on October 17 behind banners of the two organizations’ branches in France.
Thodoris Kotsandis, secretary of the KNE Central Council, led the delegation. He linked the French protests to a Greek general strike planned for November 25 and the October 21 student and teacher rallies. On October 18, he spoke at a KKE event in France that included a greeting from the Union of the Communist Youth and the Communist Revolutionary Party of France.
In Austria, the national student union ÖH continued protests against university budget cuts that began in May. On October 13, it held a “Ring lecture” on Vienna’s Ringstraße, drawing about 8,000 people, according to the union. ÖH vice chair Selina Wienerroither is a member of the Socialist Students association, VSStÖ.
The next coordinated date is November 20. A coalition of student and youth organizations across Europe has called an International Youth Strike under the slogan “Fight for Our Future, Not Their Wars.” The campaign calls for walkouts, assemblies, blockades and occupations.
The national chair of Britain’s Socialist Students cited the French school blockades and Spanish housing protests as part of the campaign. He also said German students who walked out against conscription will strike again on November 20. Fox News Digital reported that 28 communist and socialist youth organizations in 12 countries are behind the strike.
The strike was announced in August, so its planning predates the French riots and October violence. Communist parties in Portugal, Spain and Greece also documented their participation in the October protests on their websites, while KNE leaders traveled to Paris to march.
I live in Reggio Emilia, a town of 150,000 inhabitants located in Northern Italy between Parma and Modena, just about 40 miles west of Bologna.
Reggio Emilia is famous for Parmesan cheese. It’s also known as a town with a very efficient early childhood education, to the point that its kindergartens are said to be the best in the world, visited every year by delegations from all over the planet.
At the same time, it’s a town where most people are politically on the left. Ever since the end of World War Two, which gave democracy back to Italian childhood education, the mayor has always been from that political area.
Recently, a local foundation named Reggio Children invited a delegation of American kindergarten teachers of Jewish faith to a meeting whose only subject was to have been early childhood education — nothing else. However, the local far left protested strongly, stating that those teachers should not have set foot in town without signing a declaration condemning the alleged genocide going on in Gaza. Reggio Children sided with them and drew up a document the American teachers would have had to sign to be allowed to take part in the meeting. Of course, they refused, and the meeting did not take place.
This unheard-of event received considerable coverage in the Italian and American media. All the American teachers discriminated against were deeply disappointed, because they were treated so badly by authorities of a country they have always regarded as a friend of the United States.
As a citizen of Reggio Emilia, I’m ashamed of the disgraceful behavior of my town’s authorities. I think the mayor and the city councilor for education should resign; of course, they haven’t, since in this country, nobody hands in his resignation unless compelled to do so, not even politicians convicted at first instance by a court of law.
I hope I will never again see something so shameful in my country. Personally, I’m not under the impression that a genocide is going on in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli army is there to defeat a terrorist organization, not to exterminate the Palestinian people. I would rather call genocide what Hamas did in the south of Israel on October 7, 2023, when they butchered thousands of innocent and defenseless Israelis, including many women and children.
Of course, in a democracy, you are quite free to hold the opinions you wish. But under no circumstances may you impose your opinions on anyone else or politicize everything. We are in the West, not in Iran, Afghanistan, China, or North Korea.
Police in Paris have extended the night curfew covering two parts of the city centre until the morning of October 26, keeping the restrictions in force through a weekend of planned protests.
The order bars anyone, adult or minor, from the central esplanade of the Place de la République and from a section of the Halles district between 11pm and 6am.
The city’s police prefecture said it had acted on instructions from Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu and Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez. Metro and RER stations serving both areas have been closing at 10pm at the prefecture’s request.
The measures follow the worst disorder France has seen in years. Protests on October 17 drew more than half a million people and ended with shops looted, the town hall in Limoges burnt out and almost 2,400 people arrested.
President Emmanuel Macron said demonstrations not called by trade unions would be banned wherever possible in the coming days, adding that his general advice was for none to be held at all. Prefects would examine requests from unions and could move march routes away from commercial districts, he said.
Bans have been announced in Marseille, Nice, Montpellier and Nantes, as well as in parts of Saint-Étienne and Roanne. Lyon, where hundreds of shops were damaged, and central Toulon are also covered.
The culture ministry said the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, the Picasso museum, the Orangerie and the Grand Palais would shut on October 24. Institutions under its supervision were told to safeguard visitors, staff and collections.
Police numbers on the day are to be about 20 per cent higher than on October 17, with leave cancelled and Sentinelle soldiers deployed alongside the GIGN and RAID units. Armoured vehicles are to be used in the capital.
Two routes have been declared for the Paris march, one by the yellow vests and one by the CGT union, with the prefecture still to rule on them. The capital had already seen marches banned across much of the city for 12 hours on October 22.
The unrest began in September with school protests over overcrowded classrooms and decaying buildings, and later merged with yellow vest anger over living costs and fuel prices.
Unions have called a further national strike and day of protest for November 5. The disorder has added to the pressure on a minority government already struggling to pass a budget that must satisfy European Union deficit rules, with French borrowing costs rising and a presidential election due in the spring. brusselssignal
Afsar Safi was jailed earlier this year| MET POLICE
An asylum seeker who sexually assaulted a seven-year-old in an immigration hostel has had his jail sentence increased by 18 months.
Afsar Safi pulled the girl into his room, grabbed her by the waist and kissed her on the cheek at a London hostel on September 6 last year.
Safi, who entered the UK via a small boat in 2021, denied the charges but was convicted of kidnapping and sexual assault of a child during a trial in April.
He was jailed for two years and six months, but the Court of Appeal has now ruled the sentence was “unduly lenient”.
On Friday, Lord Justice Jeremy Baker, sitting with Mr Justice Swift and Mr Justice Kimblin, increased his jail term to four years.
Lord Justice Baker said the sentencing judge had not taken the kidnap offence seriously enough.
He added: “It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the reason he selected his victim was her age and inability to resist.
“We are satisfied the sentence that was passed in this case did not adequately reflect the offender’s criminality.”
“We are satisfied the sentence that was passed in this case did not adequately reflect the offender’s criminality.”
The court heard how the girl had noticed Safi staring at her before he offered her an apple and invited her into his room, which she refused five times.
He then pulled her into his room, forced the apple into her bag and assaulted the child before allowing her to leave.
She no longer feels safe around single men and has recurring nightmares, the court was told.
During the hearing, Ben Lloyd, representing the Solicitor General, argued the sentencing judge was wrong to reduce the term due to Safi’s youth, his claims of a difficult childhood and the fact he had limited English.
Safi says he came to the UK from Afghanistan in 2021 after being taken from his family to be a slave for the Taliban at the age of 10.
Speaking through a Pashto interpreter during the hearing earlier this year, Safi told the court: “I like children, and she was a child. I asked her where she was going.
“She said she was waiting for her mother to go shopping. I kissed her to the face. I kissed her out of the love for children. Back home, all the people do that.”
His asylum claim has been refused but he is awaiting the outcome of an appeal.
Jai Patel, for Safi, argued that the details of the sexual assault should place it in a category resulting in a sentence on the lower end of the scale.
France is in chaos and the government imposed a curfew in certain areas, after Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez resigned: “In some cities we have lost control”.
Pascal Bruckner speaks of a “silent coup d’état” in Le Figaro:
“What is striking is the good humor of the participants who shout ‘Wallah, Wallah!’. They are cheerful, they are the masters. Everywhere the same slogan on the walls and shop windows: ‘Bismillah the darkness’: the promise of a dark period of looting and violence, the consequence of a long series of abandonments that some of us have been denouncing for twenty years, from the tolerance of internal rot to the eruptions of violence in the banlieues explained by ‘racism.’ A silent coup d’état.”
To understand the intensity and scale of what is happening one must not look at Paris, but at Marseille.
The population of Marseille is 886,040 inhabitants.
According to the authorities, about 30,000 residents of Marseille took part in the lootings on 17 October.
30,000 people are 3.4 percent of the total population of Marseille. Three inhabitants out of a hundred who took part in the devastation of their own city.
This is why Pierre-Henri Tavoillot, president of the Collège de philosophie at the Sorbonne, no longer hesitates to evoke the term “civil war.”
And yet Emmanuel Macron, in his ridiculous address to the nation, blamed the “French.”
The last time I was in Marseille two years ago, after a few hours I already felt the physical need to leave.
A city is not an aggregate of inhabitants. It is an order, fragile and continuously renegotiated, in which the majority recognizes certain rules as its own and enforces them. When a significant portion of the population-3 percent according to the authorities themselves-participates in organized looting, when the addresses of shops belonging to a specific community are known in advance, and when the damage is concentrated on those targets while others remain intact, we are not facing “disturbances,” but an act of war that distinguishes between “us” and “them.”
Let’s start then with this article from Algérie Matin. A little dialogue between friends, reported by the journalist. “How many Algerians are there in Marseille? 200,000. Marseille has 800,000 inhabitants; that means one inhabitant out of four is Algerian.” No, there are not 200,000 but 300,000, says the journalist, before getting excited about the fact that one inhabitant out of three is “DZ” (the name given to Algeria on license plates).
And the rest of the Maghreb, Moroccans and Tunisians? The latter number 60,000. Who says so? Radio France. For Moroccans, the figure is 40,000. The total reaches 400,000, a figure that does not take into account the proliferation of illegals. But there are also the Comorians, right? From 50,000 to 80,000, not counting the Senegalese, Malians, etc.
Therefore, over 50 percent of the Marseille population is African.
The president of the Jewish community of Marseille, Zvi Ammar, has asked his co-religionists not to wear Jewish symbols. Too dangerous. The Jews of Marseille go to synagogue in groups of ten, for security. Many mothers, when they go to kosher shops, leave their children in the car with someone else. Parents have organized patrols around the schools. One synagogue has been bought by Muslims to turn it into a mosque.
In some neighborhoods of Marseille the insecurity is such that (from Le Figaro) postal services have been interrupted. Journalist Philippe Pujol writes that “there are more Kalashnikovs in Marseille than in Kabul.”
Marseille illustrates what happens when a society stops defending the material and symbolic conditions of its own continuity. The city empties of meaning, street by street, and those who have lived there for generations no longer recognize it.
A group of tourists taking a boat trip on the Seine found themselves filming images of fires and devastations.
We are not even noticing that the European Titanic is sinking.
Federal prosecutors in Brazil are seeking to put a veterinary student back on trial for “transphobic” social media posts despite a unanimous court ruling earlier this year stating that she had committed no crime. Isadora Borges faced up to ten years in prison before the prosecution was halted in March, and prosecutors are still pushing for her criminalization.
Borges was first charged in November of 2020 after being reported to authorities by Erika Hilton, a trans-identified male politician from the left-wing Socialism and Liberty Party. Hilton had been monitoring the Twitter account of a women’s rights advocate named Isabella Cêpa, whom he had also reported to police for referring to him as a “man.”
A male politician who identifies as "female" has been elected to lead Brazil's top Women's Rights Committee.
Erika Hilton had previously attempted to have a women's rights advocate imprisoned for 25 years for "misgendering" him.https://t.co/ZzHo2TGKAY
On her Twitter account, Cêpa had retweeted two posts made by Borges, one of which stated that trans-identified males were not women because they had been born male, while the other discussed Simone de Beauvoir’s distinction between being born female and the social expectations imposed on women. It argued that identifying as transgender, taking synthetic hormones, undergoing surgery or changing clothing did not alter a person’s DNA.
For her two posts, Borges was charged with aggravated prejudice under the classification of “social racism,” an offense created by Brazil’s Supreme Court in 2019 when it found that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity was in fact covered under already pre-existing anti-discrimination laws relating to race or national origin. Cêpa was charged under the same law.
Court records show that federal prosecutors filed the charges on February 17, 2025, and that a judge accepted them on April 29. Borges’ lawyers sought to have the prosecution stopped, arguing that the posts expressed philosophical and scientific views without any intention to incite discrimination.
On March 12, 2026, the Third Panel of the Federal Regional Court of the Fifth Region unanimously ordered the criminal proceedings closed. Its written judgment found no attack or threat against trans-identified people, individually or as a group, and no call for violence, hostility or discrimination.
The ruling warned that criminalizing dissenting philosophical or scientific opinions about sex and gender would suppress intellectual debate, and that criminal law could not be expanded to turn legitimate disagreement into an offence.
Before the dismissal, prosecutors argued that a trial was necessary to establish whether Borges intended to discriminate. The panel rejected that position, finding that the absence of discriminatory intent was apparent from the posts themselves.
But prosecutors are unsatisfied, and are now seeking to revive the case through a special appeal.
In their latest filing, prosecutors argue that the court focused “too narrowly” on incitement to hostility or violence, overlooking discrimination committed through the statements themselves. They contend that the “systematic denial of gender identity” could itself constitute discrimination, independently of any actual harm or incitement.
They also argue that the judges prematurely decided Borges lacked discriminatory intent and exceeded the scope of the procedure used to halt her prosecution. They ask for the dismissal to be overturned or, alternatively, for the court to address their argument about discrimination independently of incitement.
On October 21, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) International, a freedom of speech-oriented law firm providing legal support to Borges, announced the renewed attempt to prosecute her.
If prosecutors are successful, Borges could again face two charges of “social racism,” each carrying a prison term of two to five years.
“It is terrifying to know that my case could reopen and that I may once again face time in prison, but it is important to me that I always speak the truth,” Borges said in ADF’s statement.
Isadora Borges
“Too many Brazilians have been criminalised or bullied into silence out of fear they will be punished for ‘transphobia’. When we say men cannot become women, we are not spreading hate or targeting anyone; we are stating a biological fact,” she added.
“I hope the court will uphold its previous decision and that my case will go on to stand for our right to speak freely,” Borges concluded.
“Earlier this year, the court rightfully found that Isadora did nothing unlawful by expressing her beliefs on X,” said Julio Pohl, ADF’s legal counsel for Latin America. “By attempting to reopen this case, the state is showing once again that it will go to great lengths to silence speech it doesn’t like.”
Pohl further criticized the use of transphobia allegations to silence dissent.
“Accusations of ‘transphobia’ are being rampantly used to censor and scare Brazilians into silence. Isadora’s case is one of many living proofs of this. Brazil’s ongoing crackdown on free speech must stop. The Court’s initial ruling set an important legal precedent that opinions are not grounds for criminal charges for the so-called crime of ‘transphobia’,” Pohl continued. “We urge the Court now not to backpedal on its decision and uphold freedom of expression.”
On X, women’s rights advocate Isabella Cêpa denounced the renewed efforts to prosecute Borges.
“The psychological and procedural violence perpetrated by [Erika Hilton] against me and Isadora knows no bounds. Someone needs to stop this individual. Isadora has already suffered TOO MUCH!!!!”
A violência psicológica e processual praticada por EH contra mim e a Isadora não tem limites.
As previously reported by Reduxx, Cêpa herself was aggressively pursued in a lengthy criminal investigation after she made a social media post about Erika Hilton – a male politician who “identifies” as a woman. Hilton was elected to São Paulo’s municipal government in November of 2020, winning his seat by a landslide that gave him the title of the most voted-for ‘woman’ in Brazil.
At the time of his victory, Hilton was celebrated in international media as being a “symbolic triumph” for transgender people. Hilton was amongst the top 10 most-voted for candidates in all of Brazil, and was touted as the “only woman” to make the list.
Hilton later reported Cêpa, an outspoken feminist activist, to the police for referring him to a “man” in her social media reaction to his electoral victory, prompting a criminal investigation. In January 2022, authorities summoned Cêpa to a station for questioning.
After speaking with police, Cêpa remained unaware of any further developments in her case until June 2022, when a reporter from a major Brazilian newspaper contacted her for comment on an article about the charges. It was only after the article was published that Cêpa discovered she was being charged with five counts of “social racism.” From the news article, Cêpa discovered that she was facing up to 25 years in prison for the supposed “crime.”
Later on that same year, Cêpa’s case reached the Supreme Court of Brazil, which ultimately handed down a ruling in her favor.
It’s official: my case has now reached res judicata in Brazil. From today, September 9th 2025, it sets a binding precedent – the attempt to criminalize radical feminist speech has failed.
Speaking to Reduxx, MATRIA Brasil spokeswoman Clarice Saadi condemned the renewed efforts to prosecute Borges, and noted that it was part of an anggressive effort to chill free speech in Brazil.
“The amount of time and effort the State is wasting to try to convict a woman for quoting Simone de Beauvoir and saying that trans women aren’t women, is simply unbelievable,” Saadi says.
“Brazil has so many problems and this is what the Public Prosecutor’s Office is worried about? The judicial system has already stated that Isadora Borges should never have been prosecuted, that she committed no crime, but the State insists on having her punished for so-called ‘transphobia.’ It’s infuriating. A woman’s life has been upheaved, with terrible consequences for her mental health, for nothing. Or better yet, to satisfy the whims of Erika Hilton, who dreams of having women who say that no one can change sex arrested.”
