One Minister Does Not Get to Humiliate Another and Call It Liberty
By Hotspotnews
Flávio Dino’s Sunday order was not a humble defense of speech. It was a monocratic slap. Sitting at the Supreme Court, he canceled André Mendonça’s Electoral Court ruling, restored the posts, lectured the country on “certainty of illegality,” and notified the TSE and the platforms as if a colleague’s decision were disposable paperwork.
That is the core offense. Not that a joke about Our Lady of Aparecida came back online. The offense is the method: one minister appointing himself censor of another minister’s work, in the middle of a presidential campaign, without a chamber, without a full Court, and with the tone of a man who already knows which side of politics deserves oxygen.
Mendonça acted inside the Electoral Court on content the campaign treated as a false attack on a candidate. Reasonable people can argue he went too far. Conservatives should be the first to say prior censorship is dangerous. That argument does not require Dino to treat a fellow justice as a junior clerk. A monocratic cassation is not “the Constitution speaking.” It is one man speaking for the Constitution when it is convenient.
Look at the pattern. When speech hurts the right, the Court discovers urgency, platforms, fines, and silence. When speech hurts a Bolsonaro in an election season, Dino discovers nuance, religious liberty, and the sacred duty not to presume what “família miliciana” means. The standard is not freedom. The standard is who holds the pen.
The viral claim that this ruling “annuls all January 8 cases” is still wrong, and repeating it weakens the real indictment. Those convictions were not a pile of tweets. Many already passed through the First Chamber. Individual sentences exist. Criminal review is narrow. Dino’s Sunday paper does not empty the prisons. Pretending it does lets the Court laugh and change the subject.
The serious charge is different and stronger. Dino showed that monocratic power is now a political weapon inside the Court itself. He did not merely disagree with Mendonça. He publicly voided him, extended the effect to other posts “on the same ground,” and dressed the override as principle. That is institutional contempt. If this is allowed when Dino dislikes a TSE order, the Court has admitted that single-judge warfare is the operating system.
A conservative Court would have done the opposite. It would have sent speech disputes to a collegiate vote. It would have applied the same suspicion of prior restraint to every faction. It would not let one minister use Sunday as a stage to discipline another. Brazil does not need more philosophers of liberty with a gavel. It needs ministers who refuse to rule alone when the target is a colleague.
Dino did not free the January 8 defendants. He confirmed why so many no longer trust the sentences that put them there: the rules bend toward the minister who writes last.
Sources: STF monocratic decision of September 27, 2026, in Reclamação 95.295; same-day accounts by CNN Brasil, Folha, UOL, and Gazeta do Povo on the cassation of Mendonça’s TSE order and the restoration of Antonio Tabet’s post and similar content; the Court’s public record of First Chamber judgments in the January 8 cases and the restricted path of criminal review.
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