October 11, 2026
On Sunday, Westminster Free Speech Courage Award winner Marcel Van Hattem was elected Senator for Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil!
At our Westminster Free Speech Forum in June, I awarded Van Hattem the inaugural Westminster Free Speech Courage Award for outstanding bravery. At the award ceremony, Van Hattem discussed his ongoing risk of prosecution and incarceration, and why he continues to defy the Brazilian police. He is among the most important free speech advocates in the world, not just in Brazil.
This victory belongs to the Brazilian people. After years of censorship and prosecutions, they showed up anyway, and they won.
2026 Westminster Free Speech Courage Award Recipients: Senator-elect Marcel van Hattem, Eli Vieira and David Ágape of FSU Brazil
Van Hattem presented the dire conditions of Brazil’s democracy at the 2024 Westminster Free Speech Forum. He was a national free speech leader before CW’s Twitter Files - Brazil, which documented his own censorship at the hands of the Brazilian Supreme Court. Van Hattem then joined me to travel to Brazil to speak on the illegality and immorality of the censorship efforts led by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. Since then, the Supreme Court has sought his prosecution.
THE FULL STORY: MORAES AND BRAZIL’S CENSORSHIP
Brazil, the largest and most important nation in Latin America, came dangerously close to totalitarianism, and the threat isn’t over. A significant share of the Left, including Brazilian President Lula himself, wants to incarcerate their political enemies. Respected Brazilian journalists say with a straight face that the government must engage in mass censorship in order to protect democracy. President Lula has run nothing short of a dictatorship for years, with a central goal to control public debate, meanwhile working alongside top global censors to implement regulations to control American tech companies and speech. In 2024, CW researchers documented the U.S. government’s role in promoting Brazil’s censorship policies.
But the Brazilian people refuse to be silenced. On Sunday, they voted.
On October 4th, more than 150 million Brazilians were eligible to vote for president, governors, senators, and national and state representatives. Flávio Bolsonaro finished first in the presidential race, ahead of incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The two face a runoff on October 25th. Lula’s key ally, Justice Moraes got the message. He just closed a lawsuit against two pro-Bolsonaro journalists.
Standing With Brazil
Our Brazilian allies, alongside the team at CW and our sister company Public News, have worked tirelessly to expose the censorship and lawfare happening in Brazil.
At the end of 2024, I traveled to Brazil with Van Hattem to support their fight against censorship and speak at one of the largest free speech events in history. You may remember I was under formal criminal investigation there for publishing the legal and accurate Twitter Files Brazil and testified before both the Brazilian House and Senate and the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee. Sustained public pressure shifts media and elite opinion. After the Twitter Files Brazil, the country's two largest newspapers — which had spent a week attacking the disclosures — editorialized against censorship.
In 2025, our January 8th Files investigation, partnered with our Brazilian allies, drove a national censorship debate, reaching 7 million views in a week, earned CNN coverage, and was cited by 40 Brazilian lawmakers (in photo below).
At the 2025 Westminster Free Speech Forum, Van Hattem presented me with a "Legislative Merit Medal," the highest honor given by Brazil's Congress, in recognition of my reporting on censorship and advocacy for free speech.
One year later, presenting Van Hattem and Eli Vieira and David Ágape of FSU Brazil with the Westminster Courage Awards was an incredible honor. Each recipient has done extraordinary work exposing censorship in Brazil at real personal and professional risk.
The Censors Aren’t Done
Van Hattem warned at our forum this year that we must look to Brazil to see where censorship is headed in the West. I wrote in 2024, “Brazil is everything that George Orwell feared and worse. Brazil is an inspiration for European totalitarians who have weaponized government intelligence agencies to spread disinformation about their political enemies and are implementing a censorship system to control the entire Internet.”
The censors aren’t slowing down. Since our last newsletter, even more threats have emerged. New legislation being field tested in Australia would give the government, including their “eSafety Commissioner,” who says she was recruited to work for the CIA, the power to run AI bot networks/sock puppets, apparently to secretly influence & manipulate online debates. I’m heading to Australia this week to report on the proposal and the people fighting it.
In the US, UK, Germany, France, Australia, and other Western nations, censors want to mandate the use of some words and prohibit the use of others.
Last year, the French government launched a criminal investigation into Elon Musk's X over evidence of "foreign interference." But now the man who sent the letter that triggered the investigation admitted to me that he was targeting Musk's politics, not any foreign interference.
And now, the EU has taken the extraordinary step of working with a former CIA officer to label the US government a "foreign information threat," dramatically escalating its war on free speech.
Brazil showed us where censorship is headed. Now it’s showing us how it gets defeated. As we saw with the AfD in Germany last month and in Brazil on Sunday, the censors, despite their best efforts, are losing to the will of the people.
Brazilians won a major victory. They did it at real personal risk, against a government that tried to silence them. Our job is to expose the censorship machine they’re fighting — because the same one is rapidly being built here and in Europe. That is why we investigate the pathology behind censorship, as well as the censorship itself. Courts, legislators, and platform owners can overturn censorship but can’t remove the desperate drive that keeps demanding it.
A scholar of the psychology of totalitarianism once argued that it’s imperative to identify its pathological roots. That’s what we need to do now. If we can spot and name the motive, we can reduce its power.
Your gift today funds this work, including rapid-response reporting like my trip to Australia.
Join us.
Michael
