A Special Guest Post 

Today, we have a very special guest post from one of the best accounts on X, the pseudonymous journalist, travel writer, and keen (and often hilarious) social observer, Drukpa Kunley (@kunley_drukpa). He recently sat down with Brazilian Presidential candidate Renan Santos. 

Before we get to that, a quick housekeeping note. We had another profitable trade exit today on the Portfolio Armor Substack, as the most-hated bull market rally continues:

• 3-leg combo on Riot Platforms (RIOT 0.00%↑). Entered at a net debit of $1.36 on 12/9/2025; exited the April 17th, 2026 $13/$9 put spread at a net debit of $0.20 on 4/8/2026; sold the June 18th, 2026 $18 call for $9.00 on 5/27/2026. Profit: 547% (return on max risk: 139%). Signal: PA Top Names.

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If you're waiting for the sky to fall, we've got you covered there too 

Now on to Drukpa's insightful post. 

Authored by Drukpa Kunley on X

MEETING BRAZILIAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE RENAN SANTOS

Renan Santos is a Brazilian politician currently running to become President of Brazil. At the time of writing (May 2026) he is third on Polymarket's betting odds to win this year’s presidential election, behind the incumbent Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro; ex-President Jair Bolsonaro’s son. Politically, Renan is considered to the right of the Bolsonaro family. He wants to replace the Bolsonaros as the face of ‘Ring Wing’ politics in Brazil on the grounds that - as he sees it post Jair Bolsonaro’s 2022 defeat - they are incompetent, corrupt and squat in the political space an actually capable politics should exist in. Renan doesn’t consider himself ‘Right Wing’ in the traditional sense though, more a ‘Beyond Left and Right’ ‘Lee Kuan Yew-style' technocratic pragmatist where the what codes him as politically ‘Right Wing’ element is that he believes certain ‘Right Wing’ policies like Bukele-inspired mass incarcerations for criminal gangs are needed in order to rescue Brazil from its current dysfunctional malaise.

The main pitch he and his party - the Missão or Mission Party - make is that they will ‘Fix Brazil’; ie go beyond ‘Bolsonarism’ (because, they argue, when Bolsonarism wasn’t being stupid it never went far enough on the issues that matter) to actually properly ‘fix’ Brazil and elevate it to a respectable, as close as you can reasonably get to First World nation. This means ending the crime, the favelas and the social chaos that are at present inextricable features of a dominant 'certain idea of Brazilian-ness’ and re-developing Brazil into a safe and prosperous country.

In this way, Renan sells himself as being in the mould of other recent consequential Latin American leaders like Bukele and Milei whose big revolutionary trick has been to point at the one giant very obvious problem their countries have - in El Salvador gang violence and in Argentina hyperinflation - and say “why don’t we fix that?” and / or “why are we pretending we can’t fix that?”. Renan very self-consciously wants to flip the ‘Fix Everything Easily’ switch.

“Why are we wasting our time and energy on all this bullshit we have around us in Brazil today? Why are there giant slums everywhere, why can’t I walk on the streets at night without being paranoid someone is going to mug me?” Etc.

This is the abridged version of the Renan Santos Missão platform:

• Destroy the gangs / cartels à la Bukele
• Significantly reduce crime levels à la Bukele
• Eliminate corruption to degree it is culturally realistic
• Demolish the favelas (defavelaisation)
• Major industrial and economic development, including major development in the currently underdeveloped North-East of Brazil
• Significantly more competent and meritocratic government
• Rewrite the law wherever necessary to enable these things if there are currently nominally legal obstacles to doing so
• Particular focus on reclaiming and redeveloping Rio de Janeiro as ‘one of the best and most beautiful cities in world’ to symbolically represent the creation of a new Brazil
• Broadly, the de-thirdworldification of Brazil

Renan sent me a message in a very stereotypically Brazilian ‘come to Brazil’-type way saying “I like your stuff, I see you’re in Brazil come visit and check us out”. So I went and we met and got on well and had a few nice talks together. Might be wondering why a Brazilian Presidential candidate would bother speaking to an anonymous X account like @kunley_drukpa. Another big part of Missão’s MO is that they self-consciously exist in a so-called ‘Extremely Online’ ecosystem, they openly acknowledge that their main support base is the local version of the ‘Extremely Online’ (sensitive) young-ish men demographic that 'dreams big' and has been a major cultural driver of ‘Right Wing’ populist movements globally. Generally speaking aspiring politicians are advised to not associate themselves too closely with the extreme fringes of their online bases for respectability purposes but (and this is the Milei-like idiosyncratic gamble) Missão by contrast are quite happy to embrace their ‘Extremely Online’-codedness. Renan’s streams, rallies, tweets, articles, reels, tiktoks etc have always been very popular within these ecosystems first and a major driver of his profile growth and he isn’t going to retroactively disavow.

Will he win? Two of the main criticisms Missão gets are that they’re so-called ‘chuds’ and that they’re unrealistic, maybe borderline delusional about their prospects of both entering government and then ‘fixing Brazil’ if (long shot) they ever do get into government. Probably there is an element of truth to these criticisms. ‘Extremely Online’ types are not commonly known for being always closely in touch with reality and Brazil for various reasons is as close to an intractable mess as you can get. Also, if it were ‘that easy’ to ‘fix Brazil’ someone would have tried and succeeded before right? Better just to have Bolsonaro Jr in because as much of a corrupt nepo tard as he is at least he’ll hold back the worst excesses of even more Lula and maybe hopefully too he’ll pass some of the tough-on-crime policies his father - now in jail - had originally promised to enact.

Perhaps you agree with these critiques and want to dismiss Renan and his party. You definitely could. And yet… I think it’s very difficult not to find the platform compelling, the idea of ‘fixing Brazil’, of ‘de-thirdworldification’ etc. You want to believe anyway and, you know, if you believe in something hard enough sometimes very occasionally you can ‘manifest’ it. Missão keeps growing regardless - even if they very probably won’t clinch the 2026 election there’s nothing to stop them being far bigger by the time of the 2030 election barring self-implosion. Also it’s not as if you have much to lose trying your luck with the ‘chud’ party either, it isn’t like you only have a few electoral cycles left to ‘save’ the country, Brazil isn’t going to go anywhere. No reason not to give them a punt unless you either think they’re genuinely electorally unviable with the broader public or that the Bolsonaro Jr settlement is Basically Fine. Decide for yourself, at the very least I think you have to admit their platform is an interesting one.

Look I’m biased because Renan told me he likes my writing and in conversation we would agree a lot. Talked about our worldviews and political philosophies etc and they were pretty similar so naturally I thought, “oh yeah this guy is great.” Sounds like I’m ‘shilling’ a politician here I realise - yes kind of but I will admit I am happy to do that for someone who buys you a bottle of wine and then says directly to your face that he wants 'Lee Kuan Yew-inspired Basically Fineism with Lusotropical Characteristics' for Brazil. What objection would I possibly have to that? Comment below the ways in which you think I am being insufficiently critical. Maybe he is secretly corrupt himself, who knows?

Time I spent with him at least I found it hard to dislike him, I didn’t find anything where I thought ‘oh hang on this guy is a fraud.’ He seems completely sincere in his beliefs and has a slightly manic infectious energy where he explains things very passionately and hooks you into his frame, you find yourself convinced and nodding along a lot. He is quite charismatic (in English at least) and is obviously a smart guy - well-read, thinks about his politics at a high level etc. He clearly has a hyper-focused autism brain too - he once described himself to me as "too busy with his work to have a proper girlfriend" - and almost for that reason alone I don’t see any reason to believe he won’t try to do the things he says he'll do if he ever wins political office.

“Brazil when it has had the right in power has generally been governed by a retard right - people with dumb priorities who are either too self-serving or too stupid to make the kinds of reforms Brazil would actually need to become prosperous.”

He dislikes the so-called ‘Retard Right’ almost as much as the far left. He wouldn’t call himself a conservative. He likes leaders like Charles de Gaulle, Park Chung-hee, Paul Kagame, Nayib Bukele and, of course, Lee Kuan Yew. He seems to both genuinely want change and believe that that change is possible. There’s an endearing ‘slightly autistic but in a good way’ quality a lot of the best politicians, artists, writers etc often have where they genuinely take their occupation seriously and (and I'm not just saying this) Renan has it I think. For me the exact moment when I really thought ‘oh yeah he has the good autism you need to do this stuff properly’ was when after speaking to him for a while he casually mentioned he has a giant tattoo of Mithras in Phrygian cap slaying the bull on his back. It’s really something, you have to be a certain type of person to get a tattoo like that. You get what I mean, it made me laugh. Hopefully Brazil is not so Brazilian that it is immune to this kind of autism.

I don’t speak Portuguese fluently and while I consider myself fairly well-educated on Brazil, its history, politics and culture, I’m obviously not going to know as much as a Brazilian native. If you are Brazilian my judgement might seem to be coming from an uninformed place but I can only tell you how it all seems to me. Brazil isn’t my country, I 'Brazil-watch' as a spectator sport - my nominal support for the Missão platform then is a sort of vicariously lived power fantasy where I get to imagine a failing country can actually be fixed through competent technocratic politics, no matter how bad things may have already gotten.

Long shot to be sure but imagine if it was actually possible to fix Brazil, of all places. Not just Denmark or Switzerland with the relatively smaller-scale problems they have today but Brazil, the perennial ‘Country of the Future’. Entertaining idea. Would be a real political paradigm shift, not just for Brazil but for the entire world.