“My fears grew upon arriving in Brazil,” wrote Michael Shellenberger, a disinformation merchant from Northern California known for harassing his critics. “What if I were kidnapped on the way from the airport to my hotel?” In the real World, nobody cared.

Shellenberger first gained notoriety in Brazil in April 2024 when he doctored an email from São Paulo’s District Attorney’s office threatening to file criminal charges against X if it didn’t de-platform a leader of the PCC, Brazil’s most powerful cocaine trafficking organization. He inserted the text into an internal X email complaining about Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, falsely claiming the Court had threatened criminal charges if X didn’t de-platform “political enemies.” When confronted by Brazilian journalists, Shellenberger admitted to lying in Portuguese but continued pushing the false “Twitter Files Brazil” narrative in English, amplified by Elon Musk. After rounds of podcast appearances, he announced his trip to Brazil for a major anti-Supreme Court protest on September 7 in São Paulo, organized by multimillionaire prosperity gospel pastor Silas Malafaia and the Bolsonaro family. It would be the Bolsonaro’s first demonstration after the Supreme Court banned Elon Musk’s X platform in Brazil.

Screenshot from smartphone video posted on Shellenberger’s blog. Tight cuts like this are often used to mask real crowd size

It flopped. According to the University of São Paulo’s Digital Political Debate Monitor, which uses AI to measure crowd sizes, Bolsonaro’s February 25 protest drew 185,000 people. Despite being hyped by Elon Musk and allies like Glenn Greenwald online, the September 7 event only drew 45,000, a drastic decline. The sea of Brazilian and Israeli flags on February 25 had shrunk to a lake, marking one of Bolsonaro’s smallest rallies in years.

Though 45,000 may seem large to outsiders, Greater São Paulo has nearly 25 million people and Paulista Avenue, in down town, regularly sees crowds of over 100,000 on Sundays and holidays when it closed to traffic for pedestrians, food kiosks, and street performers, even when no type of protest is going on. Furthermore street demonstrations organized by labor unions and social movements regularly bring crowds over 50,000 to the streets of São Paulo, often receiving little or no press coverage at all.

In August 16, 2023, over 100,000 women farmers took to the streets in Brasilia for the Marcha das Margaridas – an event that was ignored by Greenwald and Musk (photo by author)

Adding to the event’s troubles, infighting among far-right politicians marred the protest. Pablo Marçal, a right-wing extremist self-help coach who recently surpassed Bolsonaro’s candidate Ricardo Nunes in São Paulo’s mayoral polls, was barred from speaking, despite the presence of many supporters wearing his “M” merchandise. Congresswoman Carla Zambelli, frequently described as a kind of Brazilian Marjorie Taylor Greene, was also blocked from the stage.

Michael Shellenberger, who used to call himself an environmentalist, sucking up to two of Brazil’s biggest promoters of slash and burn monoculture production: SP Governor Tarcisio de Freitas and Jair Bolsonaro

Despite the poor turnout, social media influencers allied with Musk have posted tightly cropped images of the event to disguise its failure. While Musk shares this disinformation with his 195 million X followers, even Brazil’s most conservative newspapers, like Estado de São Paulo, are calling it a failure.

The bottom line is that X isn’t as popular in Brazil as Musk and Shellenberger seem to have believed, and Brazilians support their 1988 Constitution’s definition of free speech, which excludes behavior that infringes on other important human rights – behavior including apologies for pedophilia and the neo-Nazism that seem so cherished by American libertarians.