Henry Giroux: Some Good News To Share

I have been reading and following Henry Giroux for many years now. And it is so good to hear good news from him and from around the world! — Molly

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the Workers' Party (PT) candidate for presidential re-election, celebrates with his wife, Rosangela "Janja" da Silva, and Vice President Geraldo Alckmin after winning the presidential runoff election, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, October 25, 2026. © Brian Snyder, Reuters

Some good news in an age of political barbarism and moral rot.

Lula has won reelection in Brazil, delivering a major defeat to the fascist politics of Flávio Bolsonaro and the global far-right movement that Trump has helped embolden.

As the campaign drew to a close, Bolsonaro exposed the full savagery of his political agenda: chemical castration for convicted rapists, lowering the age of criminal responsibility for serious crimes to fourteen, and building prisons modeled on the machinery of mass incarceration championed by El Salvador's authoritarian president, Nayib Bukele. These proposals reveal the culture of cruelty, repression, and organized violence that has become the political lifeblood of the global far right. It is precisely this machinery of disposability, austerity, and authoritarian domination that young people across Europe and elsewhere are rising up against.

Bolsonaro's vision belongs to the same political universe as Trump's: a world in which the state becomes an instrument of terror, punishment replaces justice, prisons displace social protections, and the suffering of the vulnerable becomes a spectacle of political power. This is the fascist imagination at work, nourished by gangster capitalism, contempt for human dignity, and a pathological worship of violence and domination. It is zombie politics without apology, a politics of moral rot in which demagogues with blood in their mouths turn cruelty into a governing principle and human disposability into a measure of political strength.

Lula's victory offers a moment of hope, but the struggle is far from over. The forces of fascism have been defeated at the ballot box, but the economic, political, and cultural conditions that nourish them remain. The task now is to transform this victory into a wider struggle for economic justice, radical democracy, and a future liberated from the death-dealing machinery of gangster capitalism.

— Henry Giroux

https://www.counterpunch.org/author/giroux-henry/