Brazil saw its largest demonstrations since June 2013 take place this month against the government’s 30 percent cut in education budgets. Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who was elected on a wave of resentment against the country’s failing institutions, might have thought he could mobilize his base against the universities he describes as dens of “cultural Marxism.” Yet not only is the electoral coalition that brought him to power fraying at the seams, leaving him to rely on a sizable but politically extreme core base, the magnitude of the response suggests he may have picked the wrong target.

To call the Bolsonaro government anti-intellectual would be an understatement. Its ideological core is composed of wannabe alt-right ideologues, religious conservatives, conspiracy theorists, Holy Crusade LARPers, and figures who, despite disparaging universities, are frequently caught lying about their academic credentials. Their guru is a flat-earther-curious United States-based astrologer who fancies himself a great philosopher and claims to have refuted Copernicus and Einstein.

Even the most qualified of its members — Finance Minister Paulo Guedes, who holds a PhD from the University of Chicago — bears a grudge against his peers for never seeing him as worthy of a permanent position at the country’s foremost neoliberal economics school. This ragtag band of misfits found a way of squaring personal failure with a belief in free competition in the conspiracy theories about communist-globalist plots favored by the likes of Viktor Orbán and Stephen Bannon. They are historical revisionists in regard to the military dictatorship in Brazil, and even the Holocaust, and are unabashed climate denialists.