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As I make my through Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, I paused in Part III: The Destructive Labor Camps; Chapter 20: The Dogs’ Service.

I realized the Nobel Prize winner, who spent 11 years in Soviet forced labor prison camps and in exile, was describing the current occupant of the White House. The chapter was about the qualities required to run a forced labor prison camp in the USSR, and they mirrored the character qualities of Donald Trump, who was identified by a spotter agent for the KGB in the ‘80s before being installed into the White House in 2016 with the help of the Russian military intelligence.

The qualities that one should lack when being chosen for the position of prison camp leader are empathy, and the ability to distinguish good from evil.

The “tsars of the Archipelago” — the word he used to describe the USSR’s prison network — had to be cruel and merciless. Anyone who exhibited any spiritual training or a “minimally circumspect conscience” — even a speck of kindness — were eliminated.

They had to be “constantly a weapon of violence, a constant participant in evil.”

He writes how the camp keepers passed through a severe negative-selection process—both in morality and mentality—and how they were universally selected for the following traits, excerpted from his book:

• Arrogance — no limits are set to his power, and he admits to no mistakes

• Stupidity — always follows on the heels of smugness. Deified alive, each knows everything inside out, doesn’t need to read or learn, and no one can tell him anything worth pausing over

• Autocracy — autotyranny — in this respect the camp keepers were fully the equals of the very worst of the serf owners of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

• Greed and money-grubbing — among the camp keepers this was the most widespread trait of all. Not every one was stupid, and not every one was a petty tyrant—but every last one was engaged in attempting to enrich himself

• Malice, cruelty — there was no curb, either practical or moral, to restrain these traits. Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty. An oaken cruelty is etched into their faces, and they always have a gloomy, dissatisfied expression. They could possess no decency

Upon reading this section, I had to pause and dash this report off to you because I was shocked at how well this defined Donald Trump, and how we need to be viewing him as a Soviet forced labor prison camp jailer rather than a president.

The Gulag Archipelago is the book that brought down the Soviet Union. Published in Paris in 1973, Solzhenitsyn exposed the systemic horrors of the camps, and in one book, snuffed out decades of Soviet propaganda.

After its publication, intellectuals who bought into the communist myths were forced to wake up to the cruel totalitarian reality. The Soviet forced labor camp system was baked in from the very beginning — a violent, cruel, murderous weapon, sanctioned by Lenin and refined by Stalin. People were turned into slaves, systemically and sadistically, and the archipelago was designed to demoralize and dehumanize its occupants, who were starved and often worked to death, while also being starved of any humanity.

In reading Part III, Chapter 20, I am thoroughly convinced that I am correct in my thinking that Trump is the chosen jailer for America, for the decent qualities he lacks and the evil qualities he possesses.

As I reported, he is building a concentration camp system in the US, while masking its intent by distracting with three awful things a day along with bread and circus.

There is no question in my mind he has to be physically removed from power, along with his violent stooges, to prevent the forced labor prison system that is coming for Americans.

It’s a good thing that 25 countries have now signed up to prosecute Putin’s regime for war crimes.

It’s a good thing that France is standing in the breach against technofascism.

But it’s not enough.

Trump, a violent grim reaper building a gulag system in America, has to be seen for who he really is, what he lacks, and swiftly removed from power.

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I found it profoundly disturbing that Linda Yaccarino was brought in to normalize the Nazi soup that Twitter became under Elon Musk’s ownership.

As the CEO of X, Yaccarino was paid $6 million annually as an accessory to an influence operation to throw the 2024 election to Trump — influence operations are not journalism and therefore not covered under the First Amendment.

In the alternate reality she inhabited, she made videos about free speech, attempts to whitewash the fact that she and Musk had brought all the Nazis and Russian subcontractors back on the platform.

But justice keeps on happening.

French prosecutors are now seeking charges against Elon Musk and Linda Yaccarino and his social platform X for child sexual abuse images on the platform, deepfakes, disinformation and complicity in denying crimes against humanity by the platform’s artificial intelligence system, Grok.

The Paris public prosecutor’s office said Wednesday it officially opened an investigation into X on the following charges:

• complicity in possessing and distributing child sexual abuse images

• unlawfully collecting personal data

• disseminating non-consensual images or other content

• and denial of crimes against humanity

As I reported in April, Musk and Linda Yaccarino — the former CEO of X — were summoned to Paris for “voluntary interviews” to discuss the allegations and both were no shows.

At the time, the French authorities said this wouldn’t stop the investigation.

In February, X’s French offices were searched as part of an investigation that began in January 2025 by the cybercrime unit of the Paris prosecutor’s office.

According to France 24:

“French authorities opened their investigation after reports from a French lawmaker alleging that biased algorithms on X likely distorted the functioning of an automated data processing system. It expanded after the AI system, Grok, generated posts that allegedly denied the Holocaust, a crime in France, and spread sexually explicit deepfakes.

“It’s looking into alleged “complicity” in possessing and spreading sexual abuse images of minors, sexually explicit deepfakes, denial of crimes against humanity and manipulation of an automated data processing system as part of an organized group, among other charges. Grok, which was built by xAI and is available through X, sparked global outrage this year after it pumped out a torrent of sexualized nonconsensual deepfake images in response to requests from X users.

“Grok also wrote in a widely shared post in French that gas chambers at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp were designed for “disinfection with Zyklon B against typhus” rather than for mass murder — language long associated with Holocaust denial.”

The Showdown

In March, the Paris prosecutor’s office alerted the U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission, “that the controversy surrounding sexually explicit deepfakes generated by Grok may have been deliberately orchestrated to artificially boost the value of the companies X and xAI — potentially constituting criminal offenses.”

Musk and Yaccarino, by not showing up for the interviews, are likely betting on cover from the White House, but the French — beginning with the arrest of Telegram’s Pavel Durov — are making it clear that platform owners do not have total immunity from the crimes committed on their sites.

During the X office raid in February, cybercrime investigators seized information on how the X algorithm is manipulated specially on French soil. They are investigating whether the platform’s “For You” feed amplifies disinformation during specific political cycles.

The DOJ reportedly sent a letter to Paris prosecutors accusing the investigation of being politically charged and attempting to “wrongfully regulate” a US company.

A clear line is emerging between French law and American lawlessness.

Now that the French public prosecutor is requesting judges place ⁠X.AI Holdings Corp, X Corp and xAI, Musk and Yaccarino under formal investigation, the next phase won’t be voluntary.

If they fail to appear, ⁠judges could issue a warrant.

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A private link to an annual membership discount for older adults, those on fixed incomes or drawing disability, as well as activists and members of the media is available upon request at bettedangerous/gmail. 🥹

More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.

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I recently wrote about how we counter Trump’s recipe of doing three awful things a day by platforming the good things happening around the world:

Rather than spend each day mired in the suck, I try to always do at least one beautiful thing a day and often more.

One of the things that helps me a great deal during this time is the community we’ve carved out here at Bette Dangerous.

This Tuesday, May 5, Noon Pacific, I invite guests to bring their stories and reports of something beautiful happening in their communities or globally — small offerings and large.

Our Happy Hour will be populated by surprise guests and a birthday party for our good friend Dietmar Pichler, a Vienna-based disinformation analyst who brings us the news on the regular.

I hope you can make it.

To new members, the Happy Hour began two years ago, when I noticed many Bette members in despair. I thought a weekly wellness checkin for newsies was in order, and it evolved into a session where global guests offer news from around the world. The title was always meant to be ironic, but I know I feel better when our community comes together.

Lastly, a heartfelt thank you to those of you who are renewing your memberships and are new to the Bette community. Super grateful!

Keep scrolling to register.

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2016 Election Attack — The Book!

American Monsters — The Book — Buy Here!

Donations Welcome

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Bette Dangerous is a reader-funded magazine. Thank you to all monthly, annual, and founding members.

I expose the corruption of billionaire fascists, while relying on memberships to keep the light on.

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

• Upgrade to Paid Member

• Upgrade to Founding Member

• Gifting memberships

• Share my reporting with allies

• Buying my ebooks

• Donating to the ko-fi fund or directly to venmo

Heidi’s Ko-Fi Fund

Heidi’s Venmo

A private link to an annual membership discount for older adults, those on fixed incomes or drawing disability, as well as activists and members of the media is available upon request at bettedangerous/gmail. 🥹

More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.

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“The inevitable fate of all tyrants.”

That is how I quote-tweeted the new investigation by Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) in conjunction with its Russian partner, Important Stories, about how security is tightening around Putin “amid coup and assassination fears.”

According to OCCRP:

Security measures of unprecedented severity have been instituted in the Kremlin in recent weeks as Russian President Vladimir Putin anticipates a possible coup or assassination attempt.

Those and other sensitive details are described in a report compiled by an intelligence agency of an EU country.

Reporters from Important Stories, a storied Russian investigative outlet and longtime OCCRP partner, were provided the document by a government source close to the agency and have independently corroborated several of its claims.

The report describes “high alert” in the Kremlin “since the beginning of March 2026” about “the risk of a plot or coup attempt against the Russian president.”

“In particular,” it reads, “[Putin] fears the use of drones for a possible assassination attempt by members of the Russian political elite.”

Important Stories published the text of the document here — among the findings:

• Visitors to the Presidential Administration undergo two levels of screening, including a full body search by FSO officers.

• The FSO has significantly reduced the list of locations regularly visited by the president; neither he nor his family visit their usual residences in the Moscow region and Valdai anymore.

• Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Putin has often taken refuge in renovated bunkers, particularly in the Krasnodar region, where he may work for weeks, while Russian media continue public communication using pre-recorded footage.

• No visits to military infrastructure have been organized this year, in contrast to frequent trips in 2025.

• Communication networks in certain districts of Moscow are periodically shut down.

• FSO officers conduct large-scale checks using canine units and are also deployed along the Moscow River, ready to respond to possible drone attacks.

• The FSO now controls and approves any informational or media publication involving the president, relying on a secret presidential decree (apparently referring to announcements of Putin’s trips and participation in various events — R.A.)

• Personnel working near Putin are now prohibited from using mobile phones; they must use devices without internet access.

• These employees are also banned from using public transportation and move exclusively using FSO transport; surveillance systems have been installed in the homes of cooks, photographers, and bodyguards.

As with anything Kremlin-related, take it with a grain of salt spiked with a shot of hopium, but Russia watchers see indicators of an increasingly paranoid Putin: missing from Moscow’s Victory Day parade — military vehicles, due to drone strike fear. The May 9 event includes a low number of foreign leaders. This, in conjunction with a new emboldening of Russians publicly complaining on social media about mobile internet shutdowns.

Elite defection from Putin’s inner circle will be the strongest indicator of whether or not he’s truly facing a palace coup, and the OCCRP reports Sergei Shoigu, former Defense Minister and current Secretary of the Security Council, as a “potential destabilizing actor.”

I turned to Bette experts for their hot take on this report, and here are the highlights:

Joni Askola, geopolitical analyst, Finland:

I doubt that a coup is imminent. I also don’t think there is anything new in Putin’s paranoia, despite recent reports. He became extremely paranoid during COVID and hasn’t even dared to visit troops near the front in over four years of full-scale war. Ukraine’s deep-strike capabilities, combined with the war not going well, must make it difficult for him to sleep at night. He is taking his security seriously, but that is to be expected of a dictator in his situation.—Joni Askola for Bette Dangerous

Dr. Michael Mackay, political philosopher and geopolitical analyst:

I have long said Putin’s fatal flaw is belief in his own propaganda. I wrote this on Twitter in 2014, six months into russia’s invasion of Ukraine:

“Michael MacKay @mhmck 31 Aug 2014

#Putin is shocked that his troops invading #Ukraine are not welcomed as liberators. He makes the mistake of believing his own propaganda.”

Putin projects his hopes and fears into the propaganda of the Moscow empire, and then lives within that false projection as if it is the world.

Because Putin lives an unquestioned life he is also subject to conspiratorial thinking. He has this in common with the vatniks of russia: a belief that nothing is what it seems to be and there are unseen forces at work.

Conspiracists like Putin cannot believe there is a shared human experience, a reality independent of human will, or a truth to events that transcends individual perception. Incidentally, Putin shares this character flaw with his servant Trump.

Here’s an example. Putin cannot wrap his head around the fact the Internet has become an indispensable tool of daily life for russians as it has for people around the world. All he can see is a potential weapon that can track his movements to target him for assassination.

Putin is a dictator who sends body doubles in any situation of risk. Believing his own propaganda and prone to conspiratorial thinking, of course Putin shut down the Internet and conducts a hopeless war of aggression against Ukraine. Putin is doomed and russia is doomed, but that is the consequence of giving a man with a diseased mind unchecked power. Americans should take note!—Dr. Michael MacKay for Bette Dangerous

And we are. My latest report reveals justice keeps on happening.

Byline Times

Hot Type: 'Justice Keeps on Happening' — Russian Aggression Tribunal Gains Momentum

Read more

4 days ago · 49 likes · 1 comment · Heidi Cuda

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Bette Dangerous is a reader-funded magazine. Thank you to all monthly, annual, and founding members.

I expose the corruption of billionaire fascists, while relying on memberships for support.

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• Share my reporting with allies

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A private link to an annual membership discount for older adults, those on fixed incomes or drawing disability, as well as activists and members of the media is available upon request at bettedangerous/gmail. 🥹

More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.

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While much of the media seems content to maintain the illusion that Trump and Putin are always winning, I report on what’s being done to hold these criminals to account and remove them from any position of power.

For Sunday’s Hot Type column in Byline, I write how 24 countries are now backing a Special Tribunal to investigate and prosecute the senior political and military leadership of Russia, specifically for the criminal decision to launch and wage a war of aggression against Ukraine. Special thanks to the Commander of the Georgian Legion, Ukraine — Mamuka Mamulashvili — for his sharp insights.

Byline Times

Hot Type: 'Justice Keeps on Happening' — Russian Aggression Tribunal Gains Momentum

Read more

6 days ago · 42 likes · 1 comment · Heidi Cuda

I am cross-posting the column below — Byline did not paywall this report — and I thank you as always for supporting Byline Supplement and Byline Times, as well as Bette Dangerous.

Independent investigative journalism is crucial to the survival of truth.

Hot Type: ‘Justice Keeps on Happening’ — Russian Aggression Tribunal Gains Momentum

Byline Times’ political columnist Heidi Siegmund Cuda reports on how the formation of a new Special Tribunal to prosecute Russia could be a turning point

Published on May 3, 2026, Byline Supplement and Byline Times

While Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin were chatting on the telephone, engaging in war theatrics for headlines, another two countries signed up to push for a Special Tribunal for Russia’s crimes of aggression in its invasion of Ukraine.

As the media parroted Thursday’s phone call with a recap from “Putin’s foreign policy advisor”, real things are happening to hold criminals to account.

Twenty-four countries have officially joined the “expanded partial agreement” necessary to establish the tribunal, according to Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha.

Syhiba wrote on X/Twitter: “This is a strong step toward ensuring accountability for Russian aggression against Ukraine. Belgium became the 24th state to express its intent to join the Tribunal. We urge all states to become part of our historic accountability effort. Justice is essential for a comprehensive and lasting peace.”

The agreement is scheduled for a vote by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe on May 14-15 in Chișinău, Moldova.

“Those who unleashed the war against our country and continue to wage it must know that justice for the crime of aggression against Ukraine is inevitable,” said Syhiba.

Along with Belgium, Greece and Finland are the latest to join what’s officially being called the “Extended Partial Agreement on the Establishment of a Special Tribunal”. This stage of the process began back in January, when Alain Berset, the Secretary General of the Council of Europe, reported that the Council of Europe together with the EU, had created a task force to develop a “model for the future tribunal for the crime of aggression against Ukraine”. Other supporting countries include: Estonia, Spain, Costa Rica, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Moldova, the Netherlands, Germany, Norway, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, Croatia, Sweden, Portugal, France, Iceland, Poland, Austria, and Ukraine.

What this indicates is that ongoing attempts to kill international law — including Trump’s sanctions on the judges of the International Criminal Court — may be failing.

Croatian sociologist and politician Vesna Pusić, who served as First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign and European Affairs in the cabinet of Zoran Milanović, told Byline Times she sees it as “a small sign that we are transitioning from complaining about big powers not respecting international law, to doing something about it.”

Pusíc, who documented the war crime trials of the former Yugoslavia at The Hague, added: “If you are a potential war criminal, international tribunals are a tricky thing: you never know who or when they are going to indict.”

According to a statement issued by President Volodymyr Zelensky, the Special Tribunal aims “to hold the senior political and military leadership of Russia accountable, specifically for the criminal decision to launch and wage a war of aggression against Ukraine.”

He explained that a new Special Tribunal is needed because “the International Criminal Court cannot fully consider the specific crime of aggression against Ukraine. Therefore, a separate Special Tribunal is needed to close this gap in international law. It is the first tribunal for the crime of aggression since World War II and the third in history — after Nuremberg and Tokyo.”

Since February 2026, an advance team has begun its work in The Hague and Strasbourg, preparing the tribunal’s launch, with the EU already approving €10 million to support the advance team.

Once the May vote in Moldova is confirmed, the tribunal is expected to become fully operational as early next year.

Testing the Limits

Getting to this point, where a vote is imminent, was a years’ long process, beginning on November 21, 2022, when the NATO Parliamentary Assembly recognized the Russian Federation a terrorist state, supporting a resolution to create a Special Tribunal, with EU leadership approving its launch in May 2025.

“The creation of a tribunal is not about politics — it is about responsibility,” Mamuka Mamulashvili, Commander of the Georgian National Legion — Ukraine, told Byline Times. “For years, Russia has tested the limits of the international system, and every time it avoided real consequences, it moved further. What is happening in Ukraine today is the result of that impunity.”

Mamulashvili has been fighting in Ukraine against the Russian invaders for more than a decade, surviving multiple assassination attempts, three poisonings, and 33 years of war. At the age of 14, he took part in the Georgian-Russian war in Abkhazia. Towards the end of the conflict, he and his father were taken prisoner. He spent three months in captivity and was later released through a prisoner exchange program.

He said “keeping pressure on Russia is not only about Ukraine. It is about preventing the same scenario from repeating elsewhere — in Georgia, in Moldova, or in any country that values its independence. If aggression is not punished, it becomes a model.”

Justice Keeps On Happening

With Trump and Putin constantly trying to hog the headlines, important developments like this go largely ignored – their goal is to always appear as if they’re winning and in control.

But justice keeps on happening.

Just ask Trump ally Rodrigo Duterte, who learned last week that, at 81, he will stand trial for crimes against humanity.

On April 23, the ICC confirmed charges against the former President of the Philippines, who is accused of the extrajudicial killing of thousands during his violent so-called “war on drugs” between 2011 and 2019.

In a statement, the ICC said charges were unanimously confirmed by pre-trial judges, who had “substantial grounds to believe” that Duterte had committed the alleged crimes.

According to the ICC, more than 500 victims will be taking part in the trial.

Duterte’s lawyers attempted multiple appeals, suggesting he has cognitive impairment. But ICC judges — after conferring with medical experts — determined he was fit to stand trial.

Among the judges presiding over the trial is Nicolas Guillou, who is one of the 11 judges and prosecutors at the ICC who were sanctioned under Trump’s State Department, treated like the criminals and terrorists they prosecute.

Mamulashvili, who spent a lifetime dealing with real criminals and terrorists, said he sees the cost of this war every day on the front line.

“Without sustained pressure — political, economic, and legal — there will be no real deterrence, and no lasting security. That is why accountability matters. A tribunal is one of the steps the international community can take to show that there are consequences, and that international law still has meaning.”

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Thank you again to those of you who support me here and support our Byline team.

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2016 Election Attack — The Book!

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Bette Dangerous is a reader-funded magazine. Thank you to all monthly, annual, and founding members.

I expose the corruption of billionaire fascists, while relying on memberships to keep the light on.

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

• Upgrade to Paid Member

• Upgrade to Founding Member

• Gifting memberships

• Share my reporting with allies

• Buying my ebooks

• Donating to the ko-fi fund or directly to venmo

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A private link to an annual membership discount for older adults, those on fixed incomes or drawing disability, as well as activists and members of the media is available upon request at bettedangerous/gmail. 🥹

More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.

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I recently wrote about how we counter Trump’s recipe of doing three awful things a day by platforming the good things happening around the world:

Rather than spend each day mired in the suck, I try to always do at least one beautiful thing a day and often more.

One of the things that helps me a great deal during this time is the community we’ve carved out here at Bette Dangerous.

This Tuesday, May 5, Noon Pacific, I invite guests to bring their stories and reports of something beautiful happening in their communities or globally — small offerings and large.

Our Happy Hour will be populated by surprise guests and a birthday party for our good friend Dietmar Pichler, a Vienna-based disinformation analyst who brings us the news on the regular.

I hope you can make it.

To new members, the Happy Hour began two years ago, when I noticed many Bette members in despair. I thought a weekly wellness checkin for newsies was in order, and it evolved into a session where global guests offer news from around the world. The title was always meant to be ironic, but I know I feel better when our community comes together.

Lastly, a heartfelt thank you to those of you who are renewing your memberships and are new to the Bette community. Super grateful!

Keep scrolling to register.

****

2016 Election Attack — The Book!

American Monsters — The Book — Buy Here!

Donations Welcome

****

Bette Dangerous is a reader-funded magazine. Thank you to all monthly, annual, and founding members.

I expose the corruption of billionaire fascists, while relying on memberships to keep the light on.

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

• Upgrade to Paid Member

• Upgrade to Founding Member

• Gifting memberships

• Share my reporting with allies

• Buying my ebooks

• Donating to the ko-fi fund or directly to venmo

Heidi’s Ko-Fi Fund

Heidi’s Venmo

A private link to an annual membership discount for older adults, those on fixed incomes or drawing disability, as well as activists and members of the media is available upon request at bettedangerous/gmail. 🥹

More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.

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In last week’s Bette’s Happy Hour, as I listened to religious scholar Dr. Matthew Taylor describe the religious extremists surrounding Donald Trump and their competing objectives, I thought it sounded so Medici, the Italian banking family and political dynasty that first rose to power in the 15th century. Surely, there must be some utility in that, some divide and conquer opportunity for pro-democracy forces when we have a White House with so much palace intrigue.

To familiarize yourself with Taylor’s work, please read my recent column in Byline Times, where he explains false prophets are attempting to turn Trump into a messiah:

The following raw transcripts, edited for brevity and clarity, are from our April 28, 2026 Happy Hour interview with Taylor. Special thank you to Monique Camarra, who joined me as co-host.

Medici White House and the Pseudopropheta

Heidi: Matthew, can you please reintroduce yourself to our community.

Matthew: I grew up in Southern California, in the Los Angeles area. I grew up Evangelical, and actually went into Evangelical ministry for about seven years after I graduated from college, and then I just fell in love with academia again, and went and got my PhD in Theology and Religious Studies specializing in Muslim-Christian dialog. I had every intention of becoming a specialist in building bridges between religious traditions, especially between Muslims and Christians, and in finding ways to live together and work together in the world. And that’s really what my first book was thinking about… and it’s a very hopeful story. And I was just wrapping up that book when January 6 happened, and given my background — I’ve been kind of following the developments in Christian nationalism, kind of as a side project, and I saw so much that resonated with my own background.

On January 6, I had spent all this time in the years leading up to that, thinking through the eyes of Muslims and how they experienced 9/11 and its aftermath, and seeing their religious tradition weaponized against their country.

And I experienced January 6 as a kind of Evangelical 9/11 — seeing my faith tradition, the songs and the Bible references and the types of prayer that I grew up participating in, weaponized, mobilized in an attack on our democracy. And I was also kind of befuddled by some of the theology I saw on display that day, and so I just started digging, trying to understand who were the leaders behind January 6, what were the ideas that they were using to mobilize Christians for that day? How did Christians get so wrapped around the axle with Donald Trump. And that led to, first a podcast series called Charismatic Revival Theory, and then my book that was published in 2024, The Violent Take It By Force, where I argue that a particular network of Christian supremacist leaders from the kind of Pentecostal charismatic world — the network called the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) — was central to the events of January 6, and I call them the principal theological architects of January 6, both in orchestrating and helping to organize Christian mobilization around Donald Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections, but then also in very direct involvement in garnering or gathering Christians, galvanizing Christians, really trying to create the context in which something like January 6 could happen. And so that was the background in which I first met Heidi.

Heidi: Yes, and you actually were kind enough to bring a PowerPoint for us helping explain why people would support such an ungodly man as Trump.

Matthew: When we talk about Evangelicals, we use that terminology as though we are speaking about a single thing. And the reality is, there are a lot of different kinds of Evangelicals. It’s an amalgam of a movement. It is a big tent under which there are a lot of different kinds of identities and practices. And my argument in The Violent Take It By Force is that there was a mainstream evangelicalism that gave rise to the religious right as we knew it from the 1980s up until the Trump era, but that the leadership, the elite of that movement, the religious right, did not want Donald Trump. They were very much opposed to him in the 2015 and 2016 primaries, and it was this group of fringy outsiders, these non-denominational, charismatic kind of think of Pentecostal style leaders centered around Paula White Cain, who is Donald Trump’s closest religious advisor.

She brought in the people that she knew to be kind of the nucleus of advisors around Donald Trump, including a number of the leaders from the New Apostolic Reformation. And they brought with them a variety of new radical theologies, including things like the Seven Mountain Mandate, including things like the leadership of apostles and prophets, spiritual warfare and prophecy and mobilizing for spiritual warfare within politics. And those things all kind of converge around Trump in the first term and become the foundation on which something like January 6 is built.

I was very much trying to sound a warning about the types of leaders who surround Donald Trump, the theologies that they carry. And I think one of the most important things to understand, especially in the present moment, is that these leaders have functionally enshrined Trump with a certain kind of holiness, with a narrative that he is a prophesied figure, quite literally, many of the people who surround Donald Trump as advisors would also identify as prophets and not in the “Martin Luther King was a prophetic figure” kind of way.

They literally say they hear from God, direct messages for leaders, for individuals, for nations. And there are now hundreds, maybe even 1000s, of prophecies about Donald Trump, many of them that have been spoken directly to him, and I don’t think you can even make sense of the way that Donald Trump is operating in office in the second term, apart from the ways that these prophecies have impacted his existing megalomania and shaped it into a kind of Messianic narrative, and the way that he phrases that narrative is — especially in reference to the Butler, Pennsylvania assassination attempt — as “God saved me to save America.”

They’ll use all kinds of biblical imagery and talk about him as a Cyrus or as a Jehu, they talk about him as if he’s anointed by God for a purpose. But all of this is created — this kind of propaganda bubble around Donald Trump — that has drawn in many evangelicals and other kinds of Christians that always is rationalizing and justifying the decisions that he is making.

And it’s a very active process of rationalizing what is fundamentally irrational and offering for Trump, a framework that he can use to situate his very chaotic personality and frankly, kleptocratic instincts of enriching himself. But it all gets wrapped up in this narrative of holiness and prophecy and anointing, and that still is what is really holding a lot of these Christians in their connection to Trump.

Heidi: Incredibly valuable information. They made a bit of a Faustian deal.

Matthew: The fundamental bargain for a lot of Trump’s advisors, maybe the shorthand for it would be, “He’s not a godly man, but he’s God’s man.” They’re not deceived in the sense that they imagine that Trump is deeply moral or deeply pious. That’s not what they think. They see him up close, they know that’s not true, but they believe that God has anointed Donald Trump for a particular purpose, that he is accomplishing God’s purposes in the world. And so that is how they managed to overlook all these other things, and they’ll use these different images from the Bible. I mean, the primary one in 2016 and 2020 was this comparison of Trump to Cyrus, this emperor who played a very pivotal role in sending the Jews back from exile in Babylon and then leading to the rebuilding of Jerusalem and rebuilding of the temple, very important figure in the Hebrew Bible narrative. And so they would invoke this Cyrus image to say, Well, Donald Trump is an outsider. But paradoxically, God can use an outsider like that, and maybe you need someone who’s kind of rough around the edges to throw some punches that Christians aren’t willing to throw, and to be a bully on behalf of these meek and mild Christians in the ‘24 election. That narrative shifted some in part because Trump was adopting these things, and they adopted a different figure, this kind of obscure Israelite king In the Bible named Jehu, one of the more violent characters in the Hebrew Bible, and using this image of Jehu — and they really liked Jehu because Jehu is the one who presides over the execution of Jezebel, the wicked queen, kind of paradigmatic of the Hebrew Bible. And they were using this Jezebel language in reference to Kamala Harris. But Jehu as a figure, is a kind of divine avenger. He’s violent and taking out God’s enemies. And I think that very much is the way that they think — that Trump is hated by the right people, and that means that, therefore, and because he beats up on the right people, his cause is bathed in righteousness. And this is a pattern in Christian history, really, of Christians surrounding tyrants, and that is part of what inspired me to write the next book.

Heidi: Thank you again for that. It’s always with a bit of horror that I have to face this stuff, but it’s incredibly important… let’s jump into Defying Tyrants. What I find most hopeful is you actually offer an off ramp to people who may be waking up to the huge mistake they made in listening to whoever encouraged them to believe in Trump. And I say that with a headline today. The New York Times did a focus group, and the overwhelming majority of the people in the focus group who voted for Trump regret that decision.

Matthew: In my past work, I was sounding a more civic and democratic warning to say, however you evaluate this theology, it is actively participating in a real degradation of our democracy and the fabric of our society… I then began working on another ongoing project that actually became a podcast series called American Unexceptionalism, that aired in the fall of 2025 that I worked on with my colleague Susan Hayward… we’re interviewing experts in religious nationalism from outside the United States, people who had expertise in Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka and Myanmar, or Hindu nationalism in India, or Russian Orthodox Christian nationalism in Russia, or Korean evangelical Christian nationalism, and inviting people who, either as activists or scholars were on the front lines of defending democracy against other forms of religious nationalism to speak to our situation, to share the wisdom that they had gained from years of doing this work, of trying to resist religious nationalism.

And one of the things that we heard over and over and over again in that series, whether it was from Jewish people talking about religious Zionism in Israel, to people talking about Hindu nationalism, was they kept saying theology is really important in resisting this stuff, again, not only from Christian sources, but across these different traditions. In part, the reality is, if you have one movement that has kind of claimed the name of religious orthodoxy or of righteousness, and they are putting forward their arguments in the public square saying ‘Donald Trump is God’s anointed king over America.’ And then on the other side, you’ve got this kind of pluralistic center to left coalition that comes along and says, ‘no, no, we need to uphold the principles of the Enlightenment. We need to stand up for the rule of law and democracy, this is really, really important, and a particular kind of democracy is really important.’

And when you think about the balance of powers, all of those are abstractions for a lot of people, or it feels very concrete for many people. Religion is their mother tongue. It’s what they grow up knowing. It feels very tangible to them, and it’s a vocabulary and a set of symbols that is very meaningful to them, and when you mix that with nationalism or with imperialism or with tyranny, that becomes a very powerful propaganda tool.

And part of the challenge is, if those of us who want to resist Trump are not using theological language, are not engaging with religious symbolism, if we’re only doing these kind of abstracted secular arguments or civic arguments, then we’re ceding the field to the people who are really actually bad actors and often bad interpreters of religion.

What I’m trying to do in Defying Tyrants is offer a theological response to Christian nationalism, to Christian supremacy, to Christian imperialism, but one that is actually rooted in what I think — my view of what Jesus was about. And the argument that I make there is that, yes, Christian history has been awful. And if we look throughout Christian history, and I have a whole section of the book. Where I run through the history of the awfulness of Christianity, the abuses of power, the colonialisms, the slaveries of Christian history, the Crusades and pogroms and inquisitions and all the litany of things that Christians have done that has been awful. But I contrast that with Jesus and the early church and what Jesus actually taught. Because while you can find a ton of authoritarianism in Christian history, I think that Jesus was one of the most anti-authoritarian human beings who ever lived, not only because he died the death of an insurrectionist resisting the imperial regime of the Pax Romana, but also because of the way that he lived and the way that he taught his followers to live.

Jesus, in his teachings on the kingdom of God, was not saying, ‘let’s substitute a heavenly tyranny for our earthly tyranny.’ He was saying, ‘God is not a tyrant. God is not like Caesar. God is not someone who imposes God’s Will on people and coercively demands that everyone abide.’

Instead, God comes in the form of a peasant preacher on the outskirts of empire who’s teaching his followers how to humanize each other and how to humanize everyone else, how to care for the least… a person who serves all… so Jesus teaches an anti-authoritarian vision that I think the early church very much embraces and is trying to live out.

No one gets to have a claim to be the intermediary between God and humanity. God is among us. God is with us. God is teaching us the character of God here and now, and that actually liberates us from this need to dominate, and also from the ways we’ve been taught to be dominated. And so Jesus defies tyranny, again, not out of some political agenda and not using violence, but a form of theological resistance to empire and to tyranny, and to the logic of empire that says some human beings are better than other human beings and are therefore entitled to rule over them…

I’m calling Christians back to the message of the teaching of Jesus.

Heidi: That’s so beautiful, just the way you explain and remind people of those early church teachings, and that was what I recall growing up with. And Monique also grew up Catholic, and we share that background. And it’s interesting how there’s been a huge split in the Catholic church that I can see over a lot of the things that you talk about, but I actually just wrote a letter to Pope Leo today thanking him for his bravery. He’s the person we need in this moment offering a very, very powerful counterweight to this growing authoritarianism…

The headline that we came up with for our previous interview with you was a quote from you, ‘false prophets are making false messiahs out of tyrants.’ Can you speak a little bit about that?

Matthew: You know, in the passages in First John where it talks about these antichrists, at one point, I think it’s in First John, Chapter Four, it references this phrase from Jesus of false prophets, ‘pseudopropheta’ — these people who are proclaiming a false message and pretending it is prophecy… Jesus warned us about what his followers would be like, right? I mean, Jesus is the one who warned us that many false prophets would come in his name, many false messiahs, false Christs, would come in his name.

He’s the one who warned us about the wolves in sheep’s clothing, right?

You see this very cynical collaboration between some of these Silicon Valley figures and people like JD Vance with his hard line Catholicism. I think they more see him as an avatar of of their corporate interests and of their tax interests, and would be very supportive of him advancing their ideological project in other ways, right?

Right-wing politics today is a motley crew of different anti-democratic forces united around Donald Trump, because Donald Trump is anti-democratic. But Lord help us if any of the those factions actually win and want to take and actually take power, because they’re all pushing in very different directions, actually, right? A lot of the far right is anti-semitic. A lot of the far right is philo-semetic, very pro Israel, right? And right now, they’re in a war with each other.

The Tucker Carlsons and Candace Owens of the world versus the Paula White Cains of the world, right? So this is where I think we need to get past simply talking about, like, ‘Oh, this is Christian nationalism, right?’ Fine, right? That, yeah, that phrase works. But underneath that, there’s all these other currents that are pushing in different directions.

We need to pay attention to the tensions within that, because underneath that is a whole boiling cauldron of fighting and controversy and different agendas that actually lead to very different outcomes for the nation.

We are seeing this real fracture within Trump’s base. Trump is one of these paradoxical figures who contains anti-semitism and philo-semitism within himself… Philo-semitism is love and kind of smothering support of Jews because they’re different than the rest of humanity, the opposite of how we understand anti-semitism. Philo-semitism is what we often will call Christian Zionism today, Christians who support the State of Israel, because they have a Christian theological agenda, they’re trying to enact through Israel, and that’s really the New Apostolic Reformation, the Paula White Cain’s of the world. They’re very extreme Christian Zionists, and they have given cover to the State of Israel to do pretty awful things in the last few years. I don’t know that Netanyahu and the Likud coalition in Israel could have prosecuted the war in Gaza the way that they did, and to the extent that they did, without cover from some of the Christian Zionist advisors around Trump.

But now there’s a counter reaction. Within the Trump coalition, from some of the MAGA anti-semites, the Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens crowd, and those folks, as this war in Iran is ongoing, have been overtly breaking with Trump and saying they do not support Trump anymore. And I mean Nick Fuentes is encouraging his followers to vote Democrat in the midterms, right? So that fracture within Trump’s base, I think, is quite significant. The anti-semites just want the violence to be more inflicted on migrants at home instead of abroad, right? They’re equally dehumanizing in their vision of society, but they have real tensions with the Christian Zionists. And I mean, they’re all Christians, they’re all Christian nationalists, but their visions of what that Christian nation should entail are quite different.

Heidi: Such Palace intrigue, so Medici… One of the things that those now in power have been so good at is dividing every pro-democracy group there is, whatever it is, they found a way to wedge people apart. So I’m always looking for weaknesses within the current power structure on how they can be wedged apart. This sounds like the place to apply pressure, because they’re now dividing themselves.

Matthew: It’s important for those of us who do inhabit a faith tradition to use the language of that faith tradition to stand up right now and to gather people of that faith tradition to stand against this stuff… creating space in the resistance for theology, for God talk and for religious leaders to exercise their religious leadership in protest against Trump, I think, is one of the most important things for building an anti-Trump coalition. So that’s the theology side.

Strategically, my read on the United States today is not that we are a nation divided in half. We’re actually a nation divided in thirds, and if you look at the lead up to the ‘24 election polls, we’re consistently finding that roughly 32 or 33% of the country was saying in the lead up to the ‘24 election that Donald Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 election, and it was stolen from him. 1/3 of Americans bought into that lie, bought into that propaganda. And from my perspective, those folks are immersed in MAGA propaganda bubbles, right? They are not accessible in terms of democratic persuasion — that is Trump’s base and that they might fracture or break off from Trump for other reasons, economic or anti-semitism or whatever it is, but they’re not persuadable to people on the left coming to them and saying, ‘hey, you know, Trump’s really not a good guy.’ They are inhabiting a world of propaganda, so I don’t think they’re worth trying to persuade right now.

Then you have the blue third, and they need to get out of their bubble too, because the entire battle for American politics is about who can persuade the middle third in the ‘24 election. Donald Trump, quite brilliantly, went around and sold as many people as possible a set of lies. I think people in the middle who voted for Trump are recognizing that he is not out for their good. And so what we need to do now is build a coalition that unites the blue third and the middle third into a coalition that says ‘we are going to protect this democracy. ‘That’s what we just saw happen in Hungary — a mass, big tent coalition, not with purity tests, not with ideological tests, but that says ‘we need to protect and restore a democracy.’ And then all the other arguments that we have between the center and the left and the right about abortion and about gay marriage and about charter schools and the whole gamut, those are important debates that you can have within a democracy. If you don’t have a democracy, you can’t have those debates.

Heidi: Preach brother.

****

More about Matthew here:

Dr Matthew D. Taylor is the author of The Violent Take It by Force, Defying Tyrants, and Scripture People, and his work has appeared or been featured in the New York Times, Weekend Edition, On the Media, Rolling Stone, The Bulwark, Politico, Sojourners, and Religion News Service. A religious studies scholar who specializes in American Islam, Christian nationalism, and Christian extremism, he is also the creator of two podcast series: Charismatic Revival Fury and American Unexceptionalism. Taylor holds a PhD from Georgetown University and an MA from Fuller Theological Seminary. He is currently a visiting scholar at the Center on Faith and Justice at Georgetown University. You can follow his substack here and preorder his latest book here.

You can also order his previous book at any of the links below:

• The Violent Take It By Force:

Bookshop.org

Broadleaf Books

Barnes & Noble

Amazon

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I recently wrote about how we counter Trump’s recipe of doing three awful things a day by platforming the good things happening around the world:

Rather than spend each day mired in the suck, I try to always do at least one beautiful thing a day and often more.

One of the things that helps me a great deal during this time is the community we’ve carved out here at Bette Dangerous.

This Tuesday, May 5, Noon Pacific, I invite guests to bring their stories and reports of something beautiful happening in their communities or globally — small offerings and large.

Our Happy Hour will be populated by surprise guests and a birthday party for our good friend Dietmar Pichler, a Vienna-based disinformation analyst who brings us the news on the regular.

I hope you can make it.

To new members, the Happy Hour began two years ago, when I noticed many Bette members in despair. I thought a weekly wellness checkin for newsies was in order, and it evolved into a session where global guests offer news from around the world. The title was always meant to be ironic, but I know I feel better when our community comes together.

Lastly, a heartfelt thank you to those of you who are renewing your memberships and are new to the Bette community. Super grateful!

Keep scrolling to register.

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Bette Dangerous is a reader-funded magazine. Thank you to all monthly, annual, and founding members.

I expose the corruption of billionaire fascists, while relying on memberships to keep the light on.

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A private link to an annual membership discount for older adults, those on fixed incomes or drawing disability, as well as activists and members of the media is available upon request at bettedangerous/gmail. 🥹

More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.

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Yesterday, I read a Wikipedia page for a book I’m about to review. I am still unsettled.

The page was stripped of reality, and in its place was a sanitized fairytale where Putin is good and the book — a brutal and damning historic account of Soviet abuses — is subtly and not so subtly undermined from every direction.

Once I got over the shock of what I had just read — it was like being forced into an alternate reality — I began investigating Russia’s relationship to Wikipedia. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Russian state has been steadily distorting truth, exploiting the platform’s crowd-sourcing architecture to influence public knowledge.

Malign Activity

In a report by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue titled Identifying Sock Puppets on Wikipedia, its authors used a ‘semantic clustering’ approach to focus on the “English-language Wikipedia entry for the Russo-Ukrainian war, and 48 other pages about Ukraine that link directly to it.”

The authors wrote:

Malign activity has targeted a number of information environments, including every major social media platform: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, standalone websites and many others. This paper, however, is dedicated to possible platform manipulation on a venue that tends to be much less researched than mainstream social media: Wikipedia.

This report presents work that set out to create, trial and evaluate a method to try to detect covert and organised manipulation of Wikipedia at scale.

As I quickly learned, multiple reports have explored “organized manipulation” on Wikipedia’s entries on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Portal Kombat

Between September and December 2023, the French defense agency Vigilance and Protection Service against Foreign Digital Interference (VIGINUM) analyzed “information portals” disseminating pro-Russian content and targeting several western countries, including France.

In the VIGINUM report, PORTAL KOMBAT: A structured and coordinated pro-Russian propaganda network, researchers investigated a network of 193 sites that initially covered news from “Russian and Ukrainian localities.”

According to the research, the coverage changed the day after Russia invaded Ukraine and began to target occupied Ukrainian territories and western countries supporting Ukraine and its population.

The sites in this network produce “no original content but massively relay publications from sources that are primarily three types: social media accounts of Russian or pro-Russian actors, Russian news agencies, and official websites of local institutions or actors.”

“The main objective seems to be to cover the Russo-Ukrainian conflict by presenting positively ‘the special military operation’ and denigrating Ukraine and its leaders. Very ideologically oriented, this content repeatedly presents inaccurate or misleading narratives. As for the portal targeting France, pravda-fr[.]com, it directly contributes to polarize the Francophone digital public debate.”

VIGINUM caught an insertion of the site pravda-fr[.]com being used as a source for a Wikipedia article about a “geopolitical situation” in the Red Sea.

In a footnote, they wrote: “The Wikipedia article titled ‘Operation Guardian of Prosperity’ created on December 22, 2023, was edited the next day by user ‘@ Lataupefr,’ who inserted two articles from pravda-fr[.]com with sources being Russian-pro Telegram channels ‘@ BrainlessChanel’ and ‘@ kompromatmedia.’”

See modifications: https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Opération_Gardien_de_la_prospérité&diff=prev&oldid=210810683

Foreign Digital Interference

Those words — foreign digital interference — are very important.

The West has neglected to fight on the battlefield that has been right in front of them the entire time — the internet.

This week, we learned JD Vance and Marjorie Taylor Greene promoted a fake story by the Russian disinformation network — Storm-1516 — which is linked to the GRU and believed to employ workers from the Internet Research Agency, the St. Petersburg operation that attacked American minds to help install Donald Trump in 2016 and whose output was promoted by members of Trump’s 2016 campaign, which I recap in this series:

The story Vance and Greene promoted was an obvious fake — a lie about yachts being purchased with military aid to Ukraine. It’s important to never forget that Vance is Peter Thiel’s replicant and together, they backed Rumble, which is a full-throated Russian propaganda network.

A decade after the 2016 US election, we are watching the escalation of information warfare as new tools are weaponized.

AI Models, Rewriting Wikipedia, and Laundering Content

As Atlantic Council reports in Exposing Pravda: How pro-Kremlin forces are poisoning AI models and rewriting Wikipedia:

“Russia has expanded, developed, and tailored an influence campaign targeting much of the world, spreading its content in Wikipedia articles and in popular artificial intelligence (AI) tools. As election campaigns in Romania and Moldova took place, or as political discussions between US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy unfolded, a network of inauthentic pro-Russian portals ramped up its activity, laundering content from sanctioned news outlets and aligning global information sources with the Kremlin narrative machine.”

The Atlantic Council referencing the French report notes that much of the fakes are coming from the Pravda network, which it calls a “collection of fraudulent news portals targeting more than eighty countries and regions throughout the world, launched by Russia in 2014. In 2024, the French disinformation watchdog Viginum reported on the operation, identifying the malicious activity of a Crimea-based IT business, findings that the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) later confirmed, which showed direct Russian involvement with the network.”

The Atlantic Council report identifies this organized manipulation as global — “a Russian online influence operation that has taken root across the global internet.”

Think of this in terms of transnational organized crime, except instead of drugs, or human trafficking, or arms trafficking, we’re allowing unfriendly foreign powers to manipulate our collective reality — history, culture, our shared narrative.

The Atlantic Council also notes that Russia’s strategy, “in a likely attempt to evade global sanctions on Russian news outlets, is now poisoning AI tools and Wikipedia. By posing as authoritative sources on Wikipedia and reliable news outlets cited by popular large language models (LLMs), Russian tropes are rewriting the story of Russia’s war in Ukraine. The direct consequence is the exposure of Western audiences to content containing pro-Kremlin, anti-Ukrainian, and anti-Western messaging when using AI chatbots that rely on LLMs trained on material such as Wikipedia.

“As AI chatbots continue to advance, Russia is infecting them with Kremlin-manipulated content tailored to influence the global internet, distorting the public’s understanding of facts and ability to make well-informed decisions. This operation opens the door to questions regarding the transparency of the training of AI models and the moderation of content emanating from known Russian-manipulated sources that have persistently divided the West on its support for Ukraine.”

It always comes back to Ukraine.

But it doesn’t stop with Ukraine.

Russia won’t stop until Russia is stopped.

Through these assaults, they are disarming what should be the only substantive resistance to their rebuilding the former Soviet bloc.

They have no right to dictate our will, and it’s pathetic that we’re letting them.

The Sum of All Human Knowledge

In a report titled Characterizing Knowledge Manipulation in a Russian Wikipedia Fork, the authors used a dataset of “1.9 million Russian Wikipedia articles and its fork,” which they call “an organized effort to manipulate knowledge.”

Its authors note that “knowledge on Wikipedia has a major societal impact” and identity multiple authoritarian countries such as China and Turkey which simply block the platform altogether.

In a section of the report titled “Relevance,” researchers explain how “national identity and public opinion can be influenced by the information citizens are finding online about their history… Wikipedia was ranked the 6th most important information about history, passing museum visits, college courses, and social media (Burkholder and Schaffer 2021). Therefore, attempts to manipulate Wikipedia content, even if they happen in other platforms, could have a significant societal impact.”

They warn that Wikipedia content is frequently used for training Large Language Models (LLMs) and that “manipulated versions of Wikipedia used as training data for LLMs can encourage AI-powered systems that promote ideas with specific biases.”

Immediately after its debut, Elon Musk’s Grokipedia was exposed for pushing extremist ideology and publishing Russian propaganda.

Last year, Musk called for a boycott of Wikipedia and continues to call it Wokepedia, spreading his own propaganda. Trump’s regime has threatened to revoke the tax-exempt status of the non-profit, which turned 25-years-old this year.

Trump, whose alternate reality lie factory, Truth Social, is a fun-house mirror of the name Pravda, which means ‘truth’ and ‘justice’ in Russian, and was the name of the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

While Trump helps Putin rebuild the Soviet empire, I’ll be over here publishing a report on the book that took it down.

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2016 Election Attack — The Book!

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Donations Welcome

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Bette Dangerous is a reader-funded magazine. Thank you to all monthly, annual, and founding members.

I expose the corruption of billionaire fascists, while relying on memberships for support.

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

• Upgrade to Paid Member

• Upgrade to Founding Member

• Gifting memberships

• Share my reporting with allies

• Buying my ebooks

• Donating to the ko-fi fund or directly to venmo

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A private link to an annual membership discount for older adults, those on fixed incomes or drawing disability, as well as activists and members of the media is available upon request at bettedangerous/gmail. 🥹

More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.

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On March 12, I filed this report:

It’s an investigation into Trump ally Rodrigo Duterte, the former president of the Philippines. Since I wrote that report, multiple good things have happened.

First, the International Criminal Court (ICC) confirmed his charges. Duterte will stand trial for crimes against humanity.

The 81-year-old is accused of the extrajudicial killing of thousands during his violent so-called “war on drugs” between 2011 and 2019.

In a statement, the ICC said charges were unanimously confirmed by pre-trial judges, who had “substantial grounds to believe” that Duterte had committed the alleged crimes.

The second bit of good news: according to the ICC, more than 500 victims to take part in the trial.

At 81, right about Trump’s age, Duterte’s lawyers attempted multiple appeals, suggesting he has cognitive impairment. But ICC judges — after conferring with medical experts — determined he was fit to stand trial.

In the weeks since I reported on Duterte’s pre-trial hearings, I have been collecting Trump’s “killer” and dehumanizing language. You can compare his words to the words I reported from Duterte.

In this column, I reported more of Trump’s killer words:

I wrote:

On Easter, Trump wrote on his social media site: “Open the fucking strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah,” referring to the Strait of Hormuz that has been closed since the US and Israel launched strikes on Feb 28.

Two days later, he posted that Iran would see its “entire civilisation” destroyed if it did not comply within 48 hours. And then, on Wednesday, he reposted and subsequently deleted an image of himself as Jesus with Satanic iconography in the background.

I’m sure if you take a moment to review my Duterte report, which I am including again below, you will see the parallels and likely, understand why Trump would prefer people not to know about his friend’s current plight, which could explain why it’s being underreported.

It’s also important to note that the ICC opened an investigation into “crimes against humanity” by the government of Belarus led by dictator Alexander Lukashenko. The ICC prosecutor’s office said the probe was launched over alleged crimes that began after Belarus’s 2020 presidential election, including politically motivated deportations carried out as state policy.

“There is also a reasonable basis to believe that these crimes were committed as part of a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population, considering their large scale, the number of victims, and the organised nature of the acts,” the ICC said in its statement.

Not only has the ICC issued arrest warrants for Putin and Netanyahu, Trump’s close allies, but the number of countries participating in the agreement on the special tribunal for the aggression of the Russian Federation has swelled to 22.

Greece will officially join what’s being called the “Extended Partial Agreement on the Establishment of a Special Tribunal” to investigate the crime of aggression by the Russian Federation against Ukraine. Finland also announced its intention to join. The process began back in January, when the Secretary General of the Council of Europe, reported that the Council of Europe together with the EU, had created a task force to develop a model for the future tribunal for the crime of aggression against Ukraine. Other countries include: Estonia, Spain, Costa Rica, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Moldova, the Netherlands, Germany, Norway, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, Croatia, Sweden, Portugal, France, Iceland, Poland, Austria and Ukraine.

All of this indicates that attempts to kill international law — including Trump’s sanctions on the judges of the ICC — appear to be failing.

I believe the ICC will convict Duterte, and the families of all the murdered poor — because of course he didn’t go after the drug lords — will finally get some justice, and hopefully some relief.

Who will be next?

Although former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte was not in court in The Hague, his words were. Video after video was played of Duterte promising he would enable death squads to murder with impunity.

Deemed by his lawyers as too frail and old to attend his pre-trial hearing for crimes against humanity, the hearing concluded without him.

Prosecutors laid out evidence for the charges: three counts of crimes against humanity for murder and attempted murder. The court now has 60 days to determine if the evidence is sufficient for him to stand trial.

Duterte faces the charges for crimes against humanity in connection with his so-called “war on drugs” that began when he was mayor of Davao City, and later, when he became Philippine president — he is estimated to have killed at least 6,200 people in police operations by May 2022 — human rights groups now estimate the total may reach 30,000.

Prosecutors, however, narrowed the case down to 49 incidents of alleged murder and attempted murder, including 78 victims, between 2011 and 2019.

In Deputy ICC prosecutor Mame Mandiaye Niang’s opening statement, he quoted from Duterte to show that his “criminal plan and his intent were no secret.”

For his part, Duterte claims he was “kidnapped,” while his defense counsel, Nicholas Kaufman, admitted that his language was vulgar and cruel, but dismissed it as “bluster” and “tough tongue of the street.”

Duterte’s tough tongue “kill order” targeted the young and poor. According to court records, his death squads aimed at the disenfranchised, who were least likely to be able to defend themselves.

As Patricia Evangelista wrote in Rappler:

As it happens, Rodrigo Duterte is not in detention at Scheveningen Prison because he punctuated sentences with son of a bitch. Neither is he there because he considered fuck a reasonable alternative to a number of everyday verbs. Rodrigo Duterte said, “Do not fuck with my country, because I will really kill you.” Kill was the operative word. It was not fuck. And when he said kill, he was not a drunken uncle holding court at a kitchen table, “rambling on in his own uniquely colorful and crusty language.” When he spoke of what Kaufman called “homespun theories on crime control,” he spoke as President of the Republic and Commander of the Armed Forces, the man who held executive control over more than 200,000 police officers equipped with lethal weaponry.

The president, in fact, had many words for killing. “Slaughter these idiots,” he said. They would “have to perish,” he said. Wipe them out “from the face of the earth,” he said. Hang them with wire. Drown them at sea. Push them off helicopters. Cut off their heads. Ambush them, poison them, stab them, shoot them in the vagina, kill them all. “I am telling everyone, the criminals, the druggies, the rebels. Do not destroy my country because I will kill you, period,” he said in 2019. “No excuses, no apologies, no nothing.”

In addition, Duterte said publicly: “I’ve always told you, that if you have to shoot, shoot them dead… I’d prefer they’d shoot them in the heart or in the head. That’s the end of the problem.”

And in 2017, he said: “If you kill criminals, it is not a crime against humanity.”

His dehumanization earned accolades from Donald Trump, who championed the Duterte murders, which parallel Trump’s escalating extrajudicial murders.

In a transcript from a 2017 phone call, Trump applauded Duterte’s murderous rampage.

“I just wanted to congratulate you because I am hearing of the unbelievable job on the drug problem,” Trump told Duterte, according to the transcript.

In addition to Duterte, ICC judges issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Israeli defense chief Yoav Gallant, and Hamas leader Ibrahim al-Masri last November for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity during the Gaza conflict, which prompted the retaliation against the ICC officials, according to Trump.

And after the ICC issued arrest warrants for Putin and five other Russian officials over their war crimes in Ukraine, including illegally deporting children, Trump invited Putin on US soil, while punishing ICC judges with abusive sanctions.

Killer ‘Bluster’

As I read the words that Duterte is quoted as saying, I think about the words that Putin said about Chechens, according to investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya, how he promised to “wipe out” the bandits after they’re cornered “in the shithouse.”

Typical rhetoric from the gangster from St. Petersburg.

I’ve lost track of the venal, dehumanizing words that come out of Trump’s mouth, he’s moved the Overton Window so far, but “animals,” “vermin,” “garbage,” and “scum” come to mind, not to mention how he liberally deploys the vocabulary of misogyny… ie “quiet, piggy.”

The words of Duterte, who admitted paying troll farms to boost fake popularity online, were a main focus of the hearing.

In multiple 2015 interviews, the ICC quoted Duterte as saying:

“When I become president, you should hide. That 1,000, it would become 50,000. I would kill all of you who make life miserable for Filipinos. I will really kill you. I will win because of the breakdown of law and order. I don’t want to commit a crime, but if by chance God places me there, watch out. That 1,000 will become 100,000. That’s where you’ll see the fish in Manila Bay get fat. That’s where I will throw them. I don’t want to kill people, so don’t elect me as president.”

“In Davao, I will really kill you. If I become president, you will all get wiped out. I will order your execution within 24 hours.”

“Tell me what my credentials for the presidency are? Then I would say Davao is my Exhibit A. Now, here in Davao, I’m not saying this city is clean. It’s not perfect. So maybe, I said, if I get to Pasig, I can promise you not heaven, but I will promise you a comfortable life. Corruption has to stop. Criminality has to stop. Either I get what I want, or you perish. Let’s just be straightforward. What does that mean? That means killings.”

He also boasted that his “death squad…is organized.”

As Trump and Netanyahu wage an illegal and murderous war in Iran, and Putin wages an illegal and murderous war in Ukraine, following the proceedings at the ICC at a time when remaining democracies are ever so fragile feels almost sacred.

According to courtroom reporters, victims’ families were present as videos were played of Duterte promising there would be death squads and delivering on that promise.

‘In The Hague for Life’

Yesterday, on the first anniversary of Duterte’s arrest, Roman Catholic priest and human rights activist, Father Flavie Villanueva, told his congregation: “Duterte, who ordered the killings, you will be in The Hague for life.”

Villanueva established a center in Manila to help families of death squad victims. He organized the special mass on March 11, the date the former president was arrested upon his arrival from Hong Kong, and then flown directly to The Hague in the Netherlands where he’s been ever since.

In another echo of what America has endured under Trump for more than a decade, a progressive leader in the Philippines noted how the lack of daily “bluster” has been a positive side effect of Duterte’s incarceration.

“For one year now, the Filipino people have been spared the daily spectacle of Duterte’s authoritarian bluster, misogynistic remarks and violent rhetoric that normalized cruelty and killing in our public life,” said Rafaela David, the president of the Akbayan progressive party.

All three ICC judges, tasked with determining whether Duterte stands trial, are women.—Heidi Siegmund Cuda for Bette Dangerous, March 12, 2026

****

CODA: In a new statement this week, after confirming Duterte will stand trial, the ICC reported:

“The Presidency of the (ICC) constituted Trial Chamber III, which will be in charge of the case of The Prosecutor v. Rodrigo Roa Duterte. Trial Chamber III is composed of Presiding Judge Joanna Korner, Judge Keebong Paek and Judge Nicolas Guillou.”

Guillou is among the 11 judges and prosecutors at the ICC who were sanctioned under Trump’s State Department, treated like the criminals and terrorists they prosecute.

****

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As I wrote yesterday, there are beautiful things happening every day.

I happen to think the work of today’s guest is among the good works happening.

I understand that Bette readers are of many faiths, but I do think regardless of what you believe or don’t believe, this is an important event.

It’s been two years since Dr. Matthew Taylor first joined the Bette community to discuss his 2024 book: The Violent Take It By Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy.

I am bringing him back so our community can hear directly from this brilliant scholar on his upcoming book: Defying Tyrants: Following Jesus In a World Full of Antichrists.

To preorder the book, go here.

Some of you may have read my latest Hot Type column, featuring a Q&A with Matthew, based on a recent RadPod:

I recommend reading my column or reviewing RadPod Ep166 as prep for our meeting with him.

Here is an excerpt from my column:

The first time I interviewed Dr Matthew Taylor, based on his book, The Violent Take It By Force, I finally understood the deal that religious leaders had made with Donald Trump and how they sold it to their flocks. The religious scholar explained that Trump was viewed as someone who had conquered mountains – media, business, government, arts and entertainment, among them – and that Christian supremacists felt their objectives could be met by supporting him, regardless of his flagrant unChristianlike behaviors.

It was a Faustian deal, and quite frankly, Trump delivered. He delivered the judicial coup that led to the overturning of Roe v Wade, denying women bodily autonomy and health care rights – a longtime objective of the religious right. He gave them all they asked for – even moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to satisfy both evangelicals and his orthodox Jewish supporters.

As his Catholic base is forced to do some soul-searching over the fight he’s waging with Pope Leo, his Protestant Christian supporters must grapple with his recent blasphemy…

In a new interview with Matthew Taylor, who just released his latest book Defying Tyrants: Following Jesus in a World of Christian Antichrists, he offers Christian believers an off-ramp to safely turn away from supporting any global tyrants – from Trump to Putin – by explaining that Jesus was radically anti-authoritarian.

Matthew Taylor: My second book, The Violent Take It By Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy, was focused on this movement called the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) that I argue were the principal theological architects of January 6 and of Christian Trumpism.

These are the folks who were serving as that point of interface between American evangelicalism and the Trump-MAGA movement. And a very important figure in there is Paula White-Cain, who is now the Director of the White House Faith Office – literally the gatekeeper for religious leaders trying to get access to Donald Trump. And the New Apostolic Reformation, this network of leaders, has supplied the theological rationales for evangelicals to support Trump…

HSC: Thank you… Let’s jump right into Defying Tyrants. What a perfect topic for this moment in time.

MT: Defying Tyrants is different in that I am trying to speak Christianly. Here, I am trying to use Christian theology. I have training in Christian theology. I can do both of those voices. And I’m trying to argue against the worst excesses of these theologies…

So the central argument of the book is that Jesus was deeply and profoundly anti-authoritarian. I mean, I think Jesus Christ might have been one of the most anti-authoritarian human beings to ever live. Right? He’s living under the Roman Empire where, literally, the Caesars proclaimed themselves to be gods that everyone has to bow and worship.

And they don’t really care whether you actually believe that they are a god. They want to see you bow, because that tells them that you are in line, that you are submissive…

And then the second sub-argument of that, and this is where the subtitle comes in – “following Jesus in a world of Christian antichrists” – I think we have, throughout the Christian tradition, largely misunderstood and misconstrued this concept of antichrist, even just at a biblical exegetical level.

I think people have just run roughshod over this biblical concept. So the word antichrist only occurs in two small epistles in the New Testament, First and Second John, and in those epistles, it’s as often plural as it is singular.

The very important pivotal passages in First John, chapter two, where the author says “you’ve heard that antichrist is coming, but now many antichrists have come”... and so clearly there’s a plural dimension to this word. And if you read those texts carefully, I argue in the book, the way it’s using this term antichrist is referring to Christians who are abusing power and claiming that they are superior to other people, superior to their fellow Christians, and superior to people outside of the church, and that therefore they are entitled to power. And from the perspective of the other church, this was antithetical to the teachings of Jesus.

And so you have this dynamic of people claiming to be aligned with Jesus, to be following Jesus, but doing the opposite, doing harm in the name of Jesus. And those are the people that get called antichrists in the New Testament. And so I think that’s actually a very valuable concept…

I think this is actually a meaningful theological concept that can help us make sense of how awful Christianity has been throughout history, because it’s a mixture of people who genuinely want to follow Jesus and who are doing good in the world, and many people who are there for just the power and the exploitation. And I think that when you use that lens to think about Christian history, I think it gives a new vigor to those of us who want to claim the way of Christ, to lay hold of the gospel and to actually defend the gospel, and not always be defending Christianity, because Christianity is a very mixed bag in its history…

‘There Are No Oligarchs In the Kingdom of God’

You see Jesus pushing for this egalitarian vision, that in the economy of God, all human beings are equalized before God, and there is no hierarchy. There are no oligarchs in the kingdom of God. There are no princes in the kingdom of God. There’s God who is the king, the king who serves, the king who sacrifices, the king who becomes one of us, who walks among us, and then there’s the rest of us who are dignified in God’s presence with us, and who then go and serve each other and care for each other.

So I think all attempts at creating Christian states and Christian governments are deeply, deeply misbegotten, and in fact, are violations of the ways that Jesus talked about and thought about politics and thought about humanity in the world. What we are seeing today is a rebellion against some of the insights of the Enlightenment.

HSC: Anywhere I go, I seek out the oldest churches, the oldest cathedrals. Last week in London, I was in a church that was initially built in 1123. And I went to a church that had laid its first stone in 675 AD, and I got to look at a preserved Roman sidewalk and a Roman arch discovered in the Blitz. And I just love feeling close to the history in these really incredible spaces. And never in my lifetime did I think that an American president would pick a fight with the Pope, put out images of himself as Christ, and of course, lie about it. But what I’d like to get a comment from you about is his behavior forces those in his camp who wear the cross, like press secretary Karolyn Levitt, who acts holier than thou, and Speaker Mike Johnson, who acts holier than thou, to have to back him and make sense of his actions and what is wrong with them? Why at the risk of everything that allegedly they may believe, do they get up there and lie for this tyrant that everybody needs to resist, regardless of their faith?

MT: I think for a lot of these Christians, they have made a cynical bargain. The simple way of putting it is, “Trump is not a good man, but he’s God’s man for this moment”. This is the idea behind the kind of Cyrus anointing prophecy that is very popular in NAR circles equating Trump to Cyrus. This is the kind of rationalization that you sometimes hear from the more Calvinist crowd that inspires people like Pete Hegseth, that he’s the Christian Prince – “He is the one who is put atop the society by the hand of God”.

Like Pilot Fish Around a Shark

And so the goal is then to kind of help shape and inspire that Christian Prince towards a particular vision of Christianity. This is nothing new in Christian history, there’s been a long legacy of Christian tyrants, people like Henry VIII, people like Constantine, who have manipulated and claimed religion for the furtherance of their own political ends and personal power. And I think part of what happens when you have a new tyrant emerging, a new Christian tyrant emerging, whether it’s Vladimir Putin, whether it’s Victor Orbán, whether it’s Jair Bolsonaro, whether it’s Donald Trump, is that almost like pilot fish around a shark, there are these theologians who emerge. They are predators who are symbiotically tied to that tyrant and feel that they need to justify and continue to frame that tyrant as a means to their own power, as a means to their enacting their vision on the world. And to put it in the terms that Jesus used, false prophets are making false messiahs out of tyrants, right? That is what we see. That’s the pattern we see throughout Christian history. And I think that those of us who are Christians, who identify as Christians, who identify as followers of Jesus, and I recognize not all of your audience would necessarily identify with that, and that’s fine, but those of us who do identify as Christians, I think it is our theological duty to call this stuff out, to confront this stuff with the gospel of Jesus…

I think that part of the problem is that so many Christians throughout history have embraced the gospel of Caesar and rejected the Gospel of Jesus while claiming that it was the gospel of Jesus. And that is this Antichrist dynamic that I’m trying to get at in the book.

I think that this is a huge problem today, because, again, it’s not just Trump. We see this happening around Vladimir Putin. There are these Russian Orthodox priests and prelates today who are who are telling the Russian people that Vladimir Putin is God’s man on the throne, and that if you go and fight in Ukraine and go slaughter innocent Ukrainians that we invaded, that is part of a holy war and part of your redemption, using the old logic of the Crusades that is still going on today right now.

It’s a different manifestation, because it’s being filtered through a Russian Orthodox tradition, but it’s the same logic. It’s what we hear from Paula White-Cain and from Pete Hegseth and from JD Vance. And so yes, it is shocking to see a US President beefing with the Pope over theology and over his own megalomania. But it is not new in Christian history. In fact, it fits a very long and old pattern.

HSC: In your book Defying Tyrants, you write: ‘If those of us who choose to follow the narrow path of Jesus Christ are true to our calling, we will incubate an entirely different way of being in the world from the way of being that supremacy offers. If we have no need to dominate, then we are indomitable.”

And that’s what I want to leave people with. I think that’s a beautiful summation of where we should be heading. Jason Stanley, the great political philosopher, who understands very much how fascism works, believes faith leaders have to lead us out of this together. And I think you’ve just made a strong argument for that…

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More about Matthew here:

Dr Matthew D. Taylor is the author of The Violent Take It by Force, Defying Tyrants, and Scripture People, and his work has appeared or been featured in the New York Times, Weekend Edition, On the Media, Rolling Stone, The Bulwark, Politico, Sojourners, and Religion News Service. A religious studies scholar who specializes in American Islam, Christian nationalism, and Christian extremism, he is also the creator of two podcast series: Charismatic Revival Fury and American Unexceptionalism. Taylor holds a PhD from Georgetown University and an MA from Fuller Theological Seminary. He is currently a visiting scholar at the Center on Faith and Justice at Georgetown University. You can follow his substack here and preorder his latest book here.

You can also order his previous book at any of the links below:

• The Violent Take It By Force:

  Bookshop.org

  Broadleaf Books

  Barnes & Noble

  Amazon

Thank you for everything always and see many of you on today!

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Bette Dangerous is a reader-funded magazine. Thank you to all monthly, annual, and founding members.

I expose the corruption of billionaire fascists, while relying on memberships to keep the light on.

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A private link to an annual membership discount for older adults, those on fixed incomes or drawing disability, as well as activists and members of the media is available upon request at bettedangerous/gmail. 🥹

More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.

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I keep revisiting my archives because I am finding clues to where we can correct course. Why America chose to ignore information warfare as it flooded its shores — the border that needed protecting was the internet border — is a question I will continue to ask. Instead of defending us, we were handed over to hostile foreign powers, who were given direct access to our minds.

The shameful fact is, truth wasn’t profitable.

I think America needs to own that.

Trump is a fifth columnist, but for four years under Joe Biden, we did nothing to stop foreign enemies — with assistance from MAGA and tankie influencers — from manipulating us.

I know I tried.

Europe, however, is punching back.

In an update to the report above, France’s Secretariat-General for National Defence and Security (SGDSN) recently absorbed an additional €131 million to address the “significant and rapid increase in hybrid attacks, particularly cyber and information-based attacks, against France.”

And Macron has been among the most vocal leaders in the EU in addressing the constant barrage of hybrid attacks.

So in order for the US to get its sea legs, I am republishing this Q&A with Peter Pomerantsev from September 21, 2025 — he offers a diagnosis of what went wrong and how we can fix it:

Byline Supplement

Hot Type: 'America Has Chosen to Destroy Itself' — A Q&A with Peter Pomerantsev

“What we're dealing with, whether historically or now, is the construction of identities and stories that lead to the destruction of democracy and ultimately, terrorism, war and violence.”—Peter Pomerantsev…

Read more

8 months ago · 21 likes · Heidi Cuda

It’s tough medicine, but it’s all vitally important — and solutions are there if we reach for them.

Among the core themes:

• America could have — at any time — chosen to fight back against the onslaught of narrative warfare but didn’t. It simply wasn’t profitable;

• Thinking that lies were the problem was a misdiagnosis — it was about the construction of identities then used to dehumanize the ‘other’;

• When there’s no market for truth and no shame in lies, conspiracy takes on as great a value as scientific fact;

• Destroying the concept of truth with cynicism paved the way for unbridled aggression and toxic tribalism;

• The way out requires collaboration among nation states, some businesses, and a few brave philanthropists. Polling suggests ‘big interventions’ and working together is actually what people want.

Below is an excerpt:

Hot Type: 'America Has Chosen to Destroy Itself' — A Q&A with Peter Pomerantsev

Heidi Siegmund Cuda interviews the propaganda expert Peter Pomerantsev on how the echoes of Russian information warfare are now reverberating across America

An Excerpt from Byline Supplement

Author Peter Pomerantsev spent a decade working in Russia during its rise into a modern propaganda powerhouse. In his books about contemporary and historical propaganda, he warned democratic nations that this stuff was poison. He literally handed over the recipe of how propaganda bombs were made and told us what their devastating impacts would be when detonated in target nations.

So we can’t say we weren’t warned. But we did ignore those warnings. In the US, a country where large swaths of the population have completely lost interest in truth, no one at a government level put up a fight, because it simply wasn’t profitable, says Pomerantsev.

In this Q&A derived from a podcast interview with Pomerantsev last Sunday, he breaks down how democratic nations misdiagnosed the Great Propaganda Wars, but how any billionaire who wants to fund the fight back, can still do it.

---

Heidi Siegmund Cuda: Can you summarize your unique background that positioned you to understand narrative warfare so well?

Peter Pomerantsev: I work at Johns Hopkins University now, teaching courses about propaganda and how we should fight it or do it better. I've written three books now about contemporary and historical propaganda, really focused on authoritarian propaganda — Russia, and all sorts of violent extremist movements across the world, and now about the Nazis. I'm working on my fourth book, but my background is deeply rooted in the history and presence of Eastern Europe.

My parents are from Soviet Ukraine. They were dissidents. My father was arrested by the KGB in 1978 and exiled. I grew up in London. My dad worked for the BBC World Service and then Radio Free Europe. So I was very much born… into the middle of the great propaganda wars between dictatorships and democracies, and part of my books are about that historical context and what's changed.

After university, I lived in Russia for 10 years. I worked for part of that time in the burgeoning Russian entertainment industry making entertainment shows for Russia… There were many Western companies there at the time making the Russian version of The Apprentice, or Come Dine with Me, and all these wonderful products of Western culture. It gave me a kind of a ringside seat to watch the emerging propaganda model of Putinism, which I wrote my first book about, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible. I try to capture this new strain of propaganda, which is less about convincing with some grand ideology, but more about destroying the concept of truth. It’s really embedded in cynicism, which paves the way for unbridled aggression and a kind of very, very toxic tribalism.

So that was a decade ago, and I've literally just written the afterword for the third edition. The book has become depressingly relevant over and over again, because what I saw in Russia has multiplied.

I think Putinism caught a certain Zeitgeist. And the afterword I wrote to the latest edition of the book was all about how it continued to be relevant for today's America.

---

The End of History

Right now in America, there's a focus on how the latest violent extremism movements are really nihilistic, rather than left or right, and that so echoes what I saw in Russia already over 10 years ago.

I was describing this kind of nihilistic violence that I saw in Russia as really a product of the end of history, in many ways, in the first decade of the 20th century. And now, the same phenomena are prevalent here. So yeah, in some really weird, warped way, Russia, by losing the Cold War, became a prophet of the future, because now we're all losers.

The politics of resentment is everywhere, and I suppose Putinism managed to create a propaganda model based purely on believing in nothing — cynicism, anger and resentment — because they were resentful before anybody else was resentful, but now everybody is.

Heidi Siegmund Cuda: Thank you for that introduction. We need your help figuring out how to claw our way back to truth.

Peter Pomerantsev: I think America is going through a sort of personality breakdown, and that is now reflected in its foreign policy. There's like three or four foreign policies happening at the same time, depending on who controls a bit of it. This is what happens to empires when they fall apart, they stop being coherent.

But so we might see multiple Americas. We might see a bit of America still doing its old thing of fighting dictatorships together with Europe, and then another bit of the system will be undermining liberal democracy and boosting very different movements. So the ‘we’ is very problematic right now.

Heidi Siegmund Cuda: For me, the ‘we’ is the pro-democracy contingency of those who still would like to see democracies — imperfect as they are — continue, and I think that we've seen quite a recession in democracies recently… And as a pro-democracy person who is allied with pro-democracy people around the world, I would like to reprioritize truth. And again, I don't exactly know how to do that when lies are so well funded and so well coordinated.

Peter Pomerantsev: The question is complicated, because, well, firstly, the problem isn't lies. I think that's a misdiagnosis of the issue — lies are a part of democracy. Disinformation is part of democracy. We don't, frankly, care very much when the lies are on our side, let's be honest.

So I don't think lies are the issue. Lies are part of the fabric of life. I think what we're really talking about is the construction of identities, political identities, which dehumanize the “other”, which led to the rise of a type of discourse that makes the collaborative conversation that you need for democracy impossible, and then, because it becomes impossible, you start to look for authoritarian solutions.

So it's a system of propaganda that leads to basically saying, “Well, democracy doesn't work. We need a cult-like leader”. So I think that's the problem we've actually missed…

And what we're dealing with, whether historically or now, is the construction of identities and stories that lead to the destruction of democracy and ultimately, terrorism, war and violence.

And I think that's the issue. And as long as we're talking about this in terms of lies versus truth, I think we've misdiagnosed the situation. The most effective extremist propaganda doesn't even need to use lies. It creates feelings, and you can do that by taking bits of evidence that are real.

So I'd be very careful about making this about lies versus truth.

---

No Market for Truth

And the fact that people don't care about the truth, now that is a very interesting thing. There's no market for it — that I think is very, very important. And we need to think about why that is.

How do we create contexts where we can agree on what facts are. That's very important for democracy, for us to be able to say, you know, like the court of law, we admit this as evidence in our debate — that is very important.

That has broken down, where a conspiracy theory can be as important as a piece of scientific evidence.

The fact that consensus has broken down starts to make democratic debate impossible because we can't agree on what constitutes evidence in a debate. So that's very important.

---

Giving the Middle Finger to Reality

When politicians are called out lying, no one seems to care — shame has disappeared. I think that’s a very important symptom. I don't think it's a cause. It’s a very important symptom of a certain type of society that doesn't want to confront reality, where reality has no value, and where almost purposefully giving the middle finger to reality is deemed a virtue…

Think of fact checkers as like monks during the Dark Ages, you know, like keeping together the grail of faith in some sort of objective truth.

In the First World War, in the Second World War, in the Cold War, America and its allies were able to create vast institutions that would prioritize fighting Nazi propaganda and then Soviet propaganda, and it was very much part of a larger strategy…

Now that seems to have disappeared, any kind of organizational level. Sadly, that's clearly not going to come from America anymore. If anything, the risk is that America is going to push for the opposite…

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There Is No ‘West’ Anymore

The EU at the end of the day is about aligning laws and regulations. There's something they may do in the regulatory space, but frankly, the way they're approaching that at the moment is deeply self-destructive, and they're allowing themselves to be framed as if they're destroying freedom of speech in Europe.

So then you have individual countries, and there's, frankly, very little they can do. They're not really graduating to seeing this as a threat in any kind of coherent way. Britain is taking away its funding for this space. All I'm trying to get at is I don't think there's any chance really on the horizon right now for any type of response, like we saw in the Second World War or the Cold War, in the West coming together.

There is no “West” anymore, like American allies coming together in any kind of coherent policy making or institutional thing. So what we're left with is partisans of the public sphere… that means thinking completely differently. That means thinking about what are the vulnerabilities in the authoritarian political warfare network?

And I wouldn't just think about media content, I would think about cyber attacks, media corruption, the whole way they try to spread influence, analyze that as a system, and start to essentially do this kind of partisan political warfare that looks to subvert it.

So where can we attack its money source? Where can we attack its various covert networks? Where are they doing something blatantly illegal? So you can use law enforcement and in terms of the information space, how can we select the audiences that really, really, really matter and do very targeted strategic communications towards them?

---

The Vestiges of Democratic Forces

The most realistic thing that I could see happening would be the vestiges of democratic forces, which would be a certain number of countries, a couple of companies, maybe some brave philanthropists coming together to create a kind of Special Operations executive in World War Two… Overall, that's probably the best that we can hope for right now.

Heidi Siegmund Cuda: I want to offer this quote from you — this comes from Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: “With no idea of the future left, facts become unnecessary. They are, after all, unpleasant things, reminders of one’s mortality and limitations… The process occurred in Russia harder and faster because cynicism and disillusionment set in earlier… everything turned into a dark carnival more rapidly. The Russian president turned politics into a reality show, remaking authoritarianism with the logic of twenty-first century entertainment.”

I bring that quote up because A, it's brilliant, and B, I feel like we are living under the tyranny of Reality TV fascism, and I don't like it. I want to unplug it. I worked in entertainment. You worked in entertainment. I just feel like there's got to be a way where we can make facts sexy again.

Peter Pomerantsev: How this would work at a kind of structural level, is not hard to imagine at all. People in America are full of great ideas about how you would remake the tech sector. How would you remake the media? America is full of great ideas about this, whether it's creating social media platforms that further collaborative debates, which are ironically developed in the US, but actually implemented elsewhere, like in Taiwan, because the US has no system of then taking these good ideas and growing it. It has no public sector. Civil society doesn't seem to activate itself for these grand media projects.

We know how to do this. The problem in America is not that nobody knows the technology of how to do this. The problem in America is that none of this brings instant profit...

Usually in societies, you have some space for things that are good for society. Often that's done through the church, through all sorts of civic institutions that foster common space, where we can actually practice democracy and America has chosen, for reasons that I am not clever enough to analyze, to destroy itself.

And that's a choice. That's not because nobody knows how to do something else — they do. That's not because the talent is not here — it is. That's not because the history of how to do this is not here — it is. This has been done before in America. But America has chosen to have non-stop, cognitive civil war.

Maybe this is because America’s been so successful, it can allow itself this. As somebody from Eastern Europe, obviously I'm very worried, because this sort of playing about with constant dehumanizing of each other, this playing about with throwing facts out the window, this playing about with all these sort of authoritarian experiments haven't historically ended very well.

So it is very worrying. But I do a lot of polling in America, and everybody says about how they yearn for the return of truth, how they yearn for overcoming division, how they yearn for D Day and the moon landing and building the Hoover Dam and all these great things that Americans did together.

---

Big Interventions

And that tells me that there is actually a demand in America for that. So if somebody were to say, “Look, I'm creating a social media company that is based on finding collaborative solutions… instead of riling hate against each other”… the polling suggests that actually there is a huge market for it. There is a huge desire for it. But these are big interventions. They don't work on the micro level, but historically, they've been done…

Heidi Siegmund Cuda: You taught me how to talk to MAGA, to find the connections we agree on, and I found that really helpful.

Peter Pomerantsev: I’m not talking about hugging a fascist, but when it works, we can get all these different people and attitudes, talking together, stepping over their instincts, sometimes stepping over their prejudices, getting to something. The collective power of getting stuff done is awesome and when it goes wrong, it leads to Civil War, so the stakes are very high.

Interview transcripts edited lightly for clarity and brevity.

More on Peter Pomerantsev:

Peter Pomerantsev is a Senior Fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University where he co-directs the Arena Initiative.

Between 2017-2020, he was a Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science where he was the director of the Arena Initiative, a research project dedicated to overcoming the challenges of digital era disinformation and polarisation. His book on Russian propaganda, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, won the 2016 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and was nominated for the Samuel Johnson, Guardian First Book, Pushkin House and Gordon Burns Prizes. It is translated into over a dozen languages and was dramatized on BBC Radio 4. His book, This is Not Propaganda, was released in August 2019, was shortlisted for the Gordon Burns Prize and was a Times Book of the Year. His latest book, How to Win an Information War, focuses on a British propagandist in World War Two who beat the Nazis at their own game.

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He told us how we fix this, so let’s get to work.

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Empathy trumps cruelty, every time.

We just don’t see much of it, because of the constant flood of awful.

As I wrote in the report above, Prague-based technologist Josef Holy clued the Bette community into the fact that Trump and his pack of criminals will do three awful things a day, designed to always force our focus and cameras on them.

Those of us who write for a living are spending the best years of our lives writing about Ugly Fascists. That in itself is a crime.

But as a veteran reporter, I took the ‘duty to warn’ oath seriously, and so, for a decade, I’ve been among the journalists investigating and exposing the transnational criminal network.

I realized today that pro-democracy forces are far more powerful than they they know — fascism is cruel and unpopular — but because of the Three Awful Things a Day, they are always taking one step back to react to the constant chaos, violence, and cruelty coming out of the Russian influence coterie in the White House.

It’s not normal. None of this is normal.

I was very grateful on January 21, 2017, when I made it to the Women’s March in Washington, DC, to document the events as a member of the independent press, to the person who added this cardboard sign on the base of this statue of Ben Franklin:

This is NOT normal.

I read a bunch of lousy reports today in major publications about the hot takes on social media after Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, admonishing people for not trusting the official version of events.

Authoritarian regimes always lie, so even if events prove to be real, they will always be spun to the advantage of the regime. Truth is an inconvenience.

There are very few things that kleptocrats can’t spin.

“January 6 is the very pinnacle of American patriotism!”

That, of course, not true, but it’s the Official Falsehood of MAGA.

Understandably, Americans aren’t used to this. It’s not normal.

I am very worried that being confronted with the daily horribles will do permanent damage to our memory, collectively and individually, so I’m workshopping a solution.

What if we follow the example of Pope Leo and put out beautiful messaging each day.

Headlines that read:

US To Allow Firing Squads, Gas, and Electrocution for Federal Execution

Will then get buried by:

Pope Leo Condemns Death Penalty

Both happened on the same day. One is designed to be cruel and to terrify. The other puts goodness into the universe.

Here is another example:

Ireland Pays Artists a Basic Income. Could Scotland Be Next?

On that same day, in America, ICE murdered Alex Pretti.

People in America were unlikely to learn that Ireland decided to make its basic income for artists permanent, because Trump’s brownshirts were murdering people on the street.

I’m not suggesting we become Pollyanna — and just flutter on writing about rainbows and unicorns.

That’s not it at all.

But beautiful things are happening every day, and we need to honor them and platform them until they become louder and more resonant than the sleazy, glitz delirium we are mired in daily.

As I wrote in the report above:

As long as war porn, news porn, and trauma porn are served up in prime time, in what I call ‘Reality TV Fascism’, a coherent and cohesive Resistance is difficult to mount.

I took it seriously when Ruth Bader Ginsberg said: “Fight for the things you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”

There are amazing women leaders — Kaja Kallas, Maia Sandu, Salome Zourabichvili, who should be on the front pages above the fold every day, as they are the true leaders of the free world.

How difficult would it be to find three beautiful things a day happening in the world and amplify them?

By being forced to focus on the GOP-Putin cabal, we are in serious danger of our memories being wiped, because cruel, criminal leaders want to stay out of jail as they continue hoovering up all earth’s and our resources.

The cruelty will have no bottom, and we can’t spend all our good days and years just reacting to it.

France’s Emanuel Macron just said: “Europe must stop doubting itself.”

I take that a step further and suggest those who believe in democracy throughout the world, stop doubting their power.

We have to somehow rise above.

I do think Pope Leo is showing us the way, offering a beacon of light right now.

We have to hold on to the light.

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Bette Dangerous is a reader-funded magazine. Thank you to all monthly, annual, and founding members.

I expose the corruption of billionaire fascists, while relying on memberships for support.

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

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A private link to an annual membership discount for older adults, those on fixed incomes or drawing disability, as well as activists and members of the media is available upon request at bettedangerous/gmail. 🥹

More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.

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For a decade, I’ve been writing about gaslighting, real fake news, theater craft, and more recently, clickbait fascism and reality TV fascism.

Reading books by reporters in authoritarian countries, it is understood that governments run by dictators always lie — they never tell the truth. So when other world leaders react, they often are furthering unreality.

I have warned repeatedly about the damage inflicted on the world when a nation as powerful as the United States has a regime devoted to lying, constantly manipulating reality to serve their own kleptocratic thirst and that of their masters.

We have a real, malignant problem when we can’t trust whether events are real or staged, when we no longer have a shared narrative of truth.

Trump’s regime functions like a KGB Charm School Grads Community Theater Group, presenting chaos, violence, cruelty, grievance, and always angling for ratings.

It’s a tragedy presenting as an incompetent village production.

In order to remain rooted in truth, you just have to assume they are always lying.

********

2016 Election Attack — The Book!

American Monsters — The Book — Buy Here!

Donations Welcome

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Related:

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Bette Dangerous is a reader-funded magazine. Thank you to all monthly, annual, and founding members.

I expose the corruption of billionaire fascists, while relying on memberships to keep the light on.

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

• Upgrade to Paid Member

• Upgrade to Founding Member

• Gifting memberships

• Share my reporting with allies

• Buying my ebooks

• Donating to the ko-fi fund or directly to venmo

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A private link to an annual membership discount for older adults, those on fixed incomes or drawing disability, as well as activists and members of the media is available upon request at bettedangerous/gmail. 🥹

More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.

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I hope everyone is having a restful Sunday, despite the ongoing chaos, violence, and fog of unknowability swirling around the KGB Charm School Grads Community Theater Group in the White House.

Our next event is Tuesday and the timing is perfect.

It’s been two years since Dr. Matthew Taylor first joined the Bette community to discuss his 2024 book: The Violent Take It By Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy.

I am bringing him back so our community can hear directly from this brilliant scholar on his upcoming book: Defying Tyrants: Following Jesus In a World Full of Antichrists.

To preorder the book, go here.

Some of you may have read my latest Hot Type column, featuring a Q&A with Matthew, based on a recent RadPod:

I recommend reading my column or reviewing RadPod Ep166 as prep for our meeting with him.

Here is an excerpt from my column:

The first time I interviewed Dr Matthew Taylor, based on his book, The Violent Take It By Force, I finally understood the deal that religious leaders had made with Donald Trump and how they sold it to their flocks. The religious scholar explained that Trump was viewed as someone who had conquered mountains – media, business, government, arts and entertainment, among them – and that Christian supremacists felt their objectives could be met by supporting him, regardless of his flagrant unChristianlike behaviors.

It was a Faustian deal, and quite frankly, Trump delivered. He delivered the judicial coup that led to the overturning of Roe v Wade, denying women bodily autonomy and health care rights – a longtime objective of the religious right. He gave them all they asked for – even moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to satisfy both evangelicals and his orthodox Jewish supporters.

As his Catholic base is forced to do some soul-searching over the fight he’s waging with Pope Leo, his Protestant Christian supporters must grapple with his recent blasphemy…

In a new interview with Matthew Taylor, who just released his latest book Defying Tyrants: Following Jesus in a World of Christian Antichrists, he offers Christian believers an off-ramp to safely turn away from supporting any global tyrants – from Trump to Putin – by explaining that Jesus was radically anti-authoritarian.

Matthew Taylor: My second book, The Violent Take It By Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy, was focused on this movement called the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) that I argue were the principal theological architects of January 6 and of Christian Trumpism.

These are the folks who were serving as that point of interface between American evangelicalism and the Trump-MAGA movement. And a very important figure in there is Paula White-Cain, who is now the Director of the White House Faith Office – literally the gatekeeper for religious leaders trying to get access to Donald Trump. And the New Apostolic Reformation, this network of leaders, has supplied the theological rationales for evangelicals to support Trump…

HSC: Thank you… Let’s jump right into Defying Tyrants. What a perfect topic for this moment in time.

MT: Defying Tyrants is different in that I am trying to speak Christianly. Here, I am trying to use Christian theology. I have training in Christian theology. I can do both of those voices. And I’m trying to argue against the worst excesses of these theologies…

So the central argument of the book is that Jesus was deeply and profoundly anti-authoritarian. I mean, I think Jesus Christ might have been one of the most anti-authoritarian human beings to ever live. Right? He’s living under the Roman Empire where, literally, the Caesars proclaimed themselves to be gods that everyone has to bow and worship.

And they don’t really care whether you actually believe that they are a god. They want to see you bow, because that tells them that you are in line, that you are submissive…

And then the second sub-argument of that, and this is where the subtitle comes in – “following Jesus in a world of Christian antichrists” – I think we have, throughout the Christian tradition, largely misunderstood and misconstrued this concept of antichrist, even just at a biblical exegetical level.

I think people have just run roughshod over this biblical concept. So the word antichrist only occurs in two small epistles in the New Testament, First and Second John, and in those epistles, it’s as often plural as it is singular.

The very important pivotal passages in First John, chapter two, where the author says “you’ve heard that antichrist is coming, but now many antichrists have come”... and so clearly there’s a plural dimension to this word. And if you read those texts carefully, I argue in the book, the way it’s using this term antichrist is referring to Christians who are abusing power and claiming that they are superior to other people, superior to their fellow Christians, and superior to people outside of the church, and that therefore they are entitled to power. And from the perspective of the other church, this was antithetical to the teachings of Jesus.

And so you have this dynamic of people claiming to be aligned with Jesus, to be following Jesus, but doing the opposite, doing harm in the name of Jesus. And those are the people that get called antichrists in the New Testament. And so I think that’s actually a very valuable concept…

I think this is actually a meaningful theological concept that can help us make sense of how awful Christianity has been throughout history, because it’s a mixture of people who genuinely want to follow Jesus and who are doing good in the world, and many people who are there for just the power and the exploitation. And I think that when you use that lens to think about Christian history, I think it gives a new vigor to those of us who want to claim the way of Christ, to lay hold of the gospel and to actually defend the gospel, and not always be defending Christianity, because Christianity is a very mixed bag in its history…

‘There Are No Oligarchs In the Kingdom of God’

You see Jesus pushing for this egalitarian vision, that in the economy of God, all human beings are equalized before God, and there is no hierarchy. There are no oligarchs in the kingdom of God. There are no princes in the kingdom of God. There’s God who is the king, the king who serves, the king who sacrifices, the king who becomes one of us, who walks among us, and then there’s the rest of us who are dignified in God’s presence with us, and who then go and serve each other and care for each other.

So I think all attempts at creating Christian states and Christian governments are deeply, deeply misbegotten, and in fact, are violations of the ways that Jesus talked about and thought about politics and thought about humanity in the world. What we are seeing today is a rebellion against some of the insights of the Enlightenment.

HSC: Anywhere I go, I seek out the oldest churches, the oldest cathedrals. Last week in London, I was in a church that was initially built in 1123. And I went to a church that had laid its first stone in 675 AD, and I got to look at a preserved Roman sidewalk and a Roman arch discovered in the Blitz. And I just love feeling close to the history in these really incredible spaces. And never in my lifetime did I think that an American president would pick a fight with the Pope, put out images of himself as Christ, and of course, lie about it. But what I’d like to get a comment from you about is his behavior forces those in his camp who wear the cross, like press secretary Karolyn Levitt, who acts holier than thou, and Speaker Mike Johnson, who acts holier than thou, to have to back him and make sense of his actions and what is wrong with them? Why at the risk of everything that allegedly they may believe, do they get up there and lie for this tyrant that everybody needs to resist, regardless of their faith?

MT: I think for a lot of these Christians, they have made a cynical bargain. The simple way of putting it is, “Trump is not a good man, but he’s God’s man for this moment”. This is the idea behind the kind of Cyrus anointing prophecy that is very popular in NAR circles equating Trump to Cyrus. This is the kind of rationalization that you sometimes hear from the more Calvinist crowd that inspires people like Pete Hegseth, that he’s the Christian Prince – “He is the one who is put atop the society by the hand of God”.

Like Pilot Fish Around a Shark

And so the goal is then to kind of help shape and inspire that Christian Prince towards a particular vision of Christianity. This is nothing new in Christian history, there’s been a long legacy of Christian tyrants, people like Henry VIII, people like Constantine, who have manipulated and claimed religion for the furtherance of their own political ends and personal power. And I think part of what happens when you have a new tyrant emerging, a new Christian tyrant emerging, whether it’s Vladimir Putin, whether it’s Victor Orbán, whether it’s Jair Bolsonaro, whether it’s Donald Trump, is that almost like pilot fish around a shark, there are these theologians who emerge. They are predators who are symbiotically tied to that tyrant and feel that they need to justify and continue to frame that tyrant as a means to their own power, as a means to their enacting their vision on the world. And to put it in the terms that Jesus used, false prophets are making false messiahs out of tyrants, right? That is what we see. That’s the pattern we see throughout Christian history. And I think that those of us who are Christians, who identify as Christians, who identify as followers of Jesus, and I recognize not all of your audience would necessarily identify with that, and that’s fine, but those of us who do identify as Christians, I think it is our theological duty to call this stuff out, to confront this stuff with the gospel of Jesus…

I think that part of the problem is that so many Christians throughout history have embraced the gospel of Caesar and rejected the Gospel of Jesus while claiming that it was the gospel of Jesus. And that is this Antichrist dynamic that I’m trying to get at in the book.

I think that this is a huge problem today, because, again, it’s not just Trump. We see this happening around Vladimir Putin. There are these Russian Orthodox priests and prelates today who are who are telling the Russian people that Vladimir Putin is God’s man on the throne, and that if you go and fight in Ukraine and go slaughter innocent Ukrainians that we invaded, that is part of a holy war and part of your redemption, using the old logic of the Crusades that is still going on today right now.

It’s a different manifestation, because it’s being filtered through a Russian Orthodox tradition, but it’s the same logic. It’s what we hear from Paula White-Cain and from Pete Hegseth and from JD Vance. And so yes, it is shocking to see a US President beefing with the Pope over theology and over his own megalomania. But it is not new in Christian history. In fact, it fits a very long and old pattern.

HSC: In your book Defying Tyrants, you write: ‘If those of us who choose to follow the narrow path of Jesus Christ are true to our calling, we will incubate an entirely different way of being in the world from the way of being that supremacy offers. If we have no need to dominate, then we are indomitable.”

And that’s what I want to leave people with. I think that’s a beautiful summation of where we should be heading. Jason Stanley, the great political philosopher, who understands very much how fascism works, believes faith leaders have to lead us out of this together. And I think you’ve just made a strong argument for that…

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More about Matthew here:

Dr Matthew D. Taylor is the author of The Violent Take It by Force, Defying Tyrants, and Scripture People, and his work has appeared or been featured in the New York Times, Weekend Edition, On the Media, Rolling Stone, The Bulwark, Politico, Sojourners, and Religion News Service. A religious studies scholar who specializes in American Islam, Christian nationalism, and Christian extremism, he is also the creator of two podcast series: Charismatic Revival Fury and American Unexceptionalism. Taylor holds a PhD from Georgetown University and an MA from Fuller Theological Seminary. He is currently a visiting scholar at the Center on Faith and Justice at Georgetown University. You can follow his substack here and preorder his latest book here.

You can also order his previous book at any of the links below:

• The Violent Take It By Force:

  Bookshop.org

  Broadleaf Books

  Barnes & Noble

  Amazon

Thank you for everything always and see many of you on Tuesday!

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2016 Election Attack — The Book!

American Monsters — The Book — Buy Here!

Donations Welcome

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Bette Dangerous is a reader-funded magazine. Thank you to all monthly, annual, and founding members.

I expose the corruption of billionaire fascists, while relying on memberships to keep the light on.

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

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• Upgrade to Founding Member

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• Share my reporting with allies

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A private link to an annual membership discount for older adults, those on fixed incomes or drawing disability, as well as activists and members of the media is available upon request at bettedangerous/gmail. 🥹

More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.

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American Monsters — The First 15 in My Series on the Network of US Criminals Accelerating Global Fascism

It’s stunning to me as I review this series — exposing and documenting the network of US criminals accelerating global fascism.

Look at them — some of those photos are mugshots, many are convicted felons — some deserve to be in prison, others served time, still others avoided prison because Trump committed pardon fraud. Some write billion-dollar checks to cover for their crimes or to remove the regulatory agencies charged with protecting us from their crimes. They all have ties to Russia, and actively promoted the theft of the 2016 election.

The Monsters and Propagandists in this series are serving some kind of evil, and it’s important to expose them.

For America to survive whole, these Monsters must be neutralized. Clearly, we must have the ability to prosecute them for their crimes against humanity.

We are a decade into the Great Information War, and these men I profile are engaging in menticide, when they’re not engaging in ecocide.

An orchestrated mind war is not free speech.

Monsters are less scary in daylight. Why I do this… to expose and defang them, and because someone has to do it. I only made it to the first 15, there were many more I intended to expose, before the election of 2024 created an urgency to focus on how to dismantle Trump’s kleptocratic regime. But it all goes back to these collaborators in the global decline of democratic freedoms, criminals all.—Heidi Siegmund Cuda, August 8, 2024, updated April 25, 2026

No. 1 — Paul Manafort

No. 2 — Roger Stone

No. 3 — Roy Cohn

No. 4 — Donald Trump

No. 5 — Steve Bannon

No. 6 — Mike Flynn

No. 7 — Rudy Giuliani

No. 8 — Robert Mercer

No. 9 — Elon Musk

No. 10 — Erik Prince

No. 11 — Alex Jones

No. 12 — Tucker Carlson

No. 13 — Peter Thiel

No. 14 — Rupert Murdoch

No. 15 — The Kochtopus

Thank you for supporting Bette Dangerous and independent investigative journalism.

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2016 Election Attack — The Book!

American Monsters — The Book — Buy Here!

Donations Welcome

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Related:

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Bette Dangerous is a reader-funded magazine. Thank you to all monthly, annual, and founding members.

I expose the corruption of billionaire fascists, while relying on memberships for support.

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

• Upgrade to Paid Member

• Upgrade to Founding Member

• Gifting memberships

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It’s been two years since Dr. Matthew Taylor first joined the Bette community to discuss his 2024 book: The Violent Take It By Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy.

I am bringing him back so our community can hear directly from this brilliant scholar on his upcoming book: Defying Tyrants: Following Jesus In a World Full of Antichrists.

To preorder the book, go here.

Some of you may have read my latest Hot Type column, featuring a Q&A with Matthew, based on a recent RadPod:

I recommend reading my column or reviewing RadPod Ep166 as prep for our meeting with him.

Here is an excerpt from my column:

The first time I interviewed Dr Matthew Taylor, based on his book, The Violent Take It By Force, I finally understood the deal that religious leaders had made with Donald Trump and how they sold it to their flocks. The religious scholar explained that Trump was viewed as someone who had conquered mountains – media, business, government, arts and entertainment, among them – and that Christian supremacists felt their objectives could be met by supporting him, regardless of his flagrant unChristianlike behaviors.

It was a Faustian deal, and quite frankly, Trump delivered. He delivered the judicial coup that led to the overturning of Roe v Wade, denying women bodily autonomy and health care rights – a longtime objective of the religious right. He gave them all they asked for – even moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to satisfy both evangelicals and his orthodox Jewish supporters.

As his Catholic base is forced to do some soul-searching over the fight he’s waging with Pope Leo, his Protestant Christian supporters must grapple with his recent blasphemy…

In a new interview with Matthew Taylor, who just released his latest book Defying Tyrants: Following Jesus in a World of Christian Antichrists, he offers Christian believers an off-ramp to safely turn away from supporting any global tyrants – from Trump to Putin – by explaining that Jesus was radically anti-authoritarian.

Matthew Taylor: My second book, The Violent Take It By Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy, was focused on this movement called the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) that I argue were the principal theological architects of January 6 and of Christian Trumpism.

These are the folks who were serving as that point of interface between American evangelicalism and the Trump-MAGA movement. And a very important figure in there is Paula White-Cain, who is now the Director of the White House Faith Office – literally the gatekeeper for religious leaders trying to get access to Donald Trump. And the New Apostolic Reformation, this network of leaders, has supplied the theological rationales for evangelicals to support Trump…

HSC: Thank you… Let’s jump right into Defying Tyrants. What a perfect topic for this moment in time.

MT: Defying Tyrants is different in that I am trying to speak Christianly. Here, I am trying to use Christian theology. I have training in Christian theology. I can do both of those voices. And I’m trying to argue against the worst excesses of these theologies…

So the central argument of the book is that Jesus was deeply and profoundly anti-authoritarian. I mean, I think Jesus Christ might have been one of the most anti-authoritarian human beings to ever live. Right? He’s living under the Roman Empire where, literally, the Caesars proclaimed themselves to be gods that everyone has to bow and worship.

And they don’t really care whether you actually believe that they are a god. They want to see you bow, because that tells them that you are in line, that you are submissive…

And then the second sub-argument of that, and this is where the subtitle comes in – “following Jesus in a world of Christian antichrists” – I think we have, throughout the Christian tradition, largely misunderstood and misconstrued this concept of antichrist, even just at a biblical exegetical level.

I think people have just run roughshod over this biblical concept. So the word antichrist only occurs in two small epistles in the New Testament, First and Second John, and in those epistles, it’s as often plural as it is singular.

The very important pivotal passages in First John, chapter two, where the author says “you’ve heard that antichrist is coming, but now many antichrists have come”... and so clearly there’s a plural dimension to this word. And if you read those texts carefully, I argue in the book, the way it’s using this term antichrist is referring to Christians who are abusing power and claiming that they are superior to other people, superior to their fellow Christians, and superior to people outside of the church, and that therefore they are entitled to power. And from the perspective of the other church, this was antithetical to the teachings of Jesus.

And so you have this dynamic of people claiming to be aligned with Jesus, to be following Jesus, but doing the opposite, doing harm in the name of Jesus. And those are the people that get called antichrists in the New Testament. And so I think that’s actually a very valuable concept…

I think this is actually a meaningful theological concept that can help us make sense of how awful Christianity has been throughout history, because it’s a mixture of people who genuinely want to follow Jesus and who are doing good in the world, and many people who are there for just the power and the exploitation. And I think that when you use that lens to think about Christian history, I think it gives a new vigor to those of us who want to claim the way of Christ, to lay hold of the gospel and to actually defend the gospel, and not always be defending Christianity, because Christianity is a very mixed bag in its history…

‘There Are No Oligarchs In the Kingdom of God’

You see Jesus pushing for this egalitarian vision, that in the economy of God, all human beings are equalized before God, and there is no hierarchy. There are no oligarchs in the kingdom of God. There are no princes in the kingdom of God. There’s God who is the king, the king who serves, the king who sacrifices, the king who becomes one of us, who walks among us, and then there’s the rest of us who are dignified in God’s presence with us, and who then go and serve each other and care for each other.

So I think all attempts at creating Christian states and Christian governments are deeply, deeply misbegotten, and in fact, are violations of the ways that Jesus talked about and thought about politics and thought about humanity in the world. What we are seeing today is a rebellion against some of the insights of the Enlightenment.

HSC: Anywhere I go, I seek out the oldest churches, the oldest cathedrals. Last week in London, I was in a church that was initially built in 1123. And I went to a church that had laid its first stone in 675 AD, and I got to look at a preserved Roman sidewalk and a Roman arch discovered in the Blitz. And I just love feeling close to the history in these really incredible spaces. And never in my lifetime did I think that an American president would pick a fight with the Pope, put out images of himself as Christ, and of course, lie about it. But what I’d like to get a comment from you about is his behavior forces those in his camp who wear the cross, like press secretary Karolyn Levitt, who acts holier than thou, and Speaker Mike Johnson, who acts holier than thou, to have to back him and make sense of his actions and what is wrong with them? Why at the risk of everything that allegedly they may believe, do they get up there and lie for this tyrant that everybody needs to resist, regardless of their faith?

MT: I think for a lot of these Christians, they have made a cynical bargain. The simple way of putting it is, “Trump is not a good man, but he’s God’s man for this moment”. This is the idea behind the kind of Cyrus anointing prophecy that is very popular in NAR circles equating Trump to Cyrus. This is the kind of rationalization that you sometimes hear from the more Calvinist crowd that inspires people like Pete Hegseth, that he’s the Christian Prince – “He is the one who is put atop the society by the hand of God”.

Like Pilot Fish Around a Shark

And so the goal is then to kind of help shape and inspire that Christian Prince towards a particular vision of Christianity. This is nothing new in Christian history, there’s been a long legacy of Christian tyrants, people like Henry VIII, people like Constantine, who have manipulated and claimed religion for the furtherance of their own political ends and personal power. And I think part of what happens when you have a new tyrant emerging, a new Christian tyrant emerging, whether it’s Vladimir Putin, whether it’s Victor Orbán, whether it’s Jair Bolsonaro, whether it’s Donald Trump, is that almost like pilot fish around a shark, there are these theologians who emerge. They are predators who are symbiotically tied to that tyrant and feel that they need to justify and continue to frame that tyrant as a means to their own power, as a means to their enacting their vision on the world. And to put it in the terms that Jesus used, false prophets are making false messiahs out of tyrants, right? That is what we see. That’s the pattern we see throughout Christian history. And I think that those of us who are Christians, who identify as Christians, who identify as followers of Jesus, and I recognize not all of your audience would necessarily identify with that, and that’s fine, but those of us who do identify as Christians, I think it is our theological duty to call this stuff out, to confront this stuff with the gospel of Jesus…

I think that part of the problem is that so many Christians throughout history have embraced the gospel of Caesar and rejected the Gospel of Jesus while claiming that it was the gospel of Jesus. And that is this Antichrist dynamic that I’m trying to get at in the book.

I think that this is a huge problem today, because, again, it’s not just Trump. We see this happening around Vladimir Putin. There are these Russian Orthodox priests and prelates today who are who are telling the Russian people that Vladimir Putin is God’s man on the throne, and that if you go and fight in Ukraine and go slaughter innocent Ukrainians that we invaded, that is part of a holy war and part of your redemption, using the old logic of the Crusades that is still going on today right now.

It’s a different manifestation, because it’s being filtered through a Russian Orthodox tradition, but it’s the same logic. It’s what we hear from Paula White-Cain and from Pete Hegseth and from JD Vance. And so yes, it is shocking to see a US President beefing with the Pope over theology and over his own megalomania. But it is not new in Christian history. In fact, it fits a very long and old pattern.

HSC: In your book Defying Tyrants, you write: ‘If those of us who choose to follow the narrow path of Jesus Christ are true to our calling, we will incubate an entirely different way of being in the world from the way of being that supremacy offers. If we have no need to dominate, then we are indomitable.”

And that’s what I want to leave people with. I think that’s a beautiful summation of where we should be heading. Jason Stanley, the great political philosopher, who understands very much how fascism works, believes faith leaders have to lead us out of this together. And I think you’ve just made a strong argument for that…

****

More about Matthew here:

Dr Matthew D. Taylor is the author of The Violent Take It by Force, Defying Tyrants, and Scripture People, and his work has appeared or been featured in the New York Times, Weekend Edition, On the Media, Rolling Stone, The Bulwark, Politico, Sojourners, and Religion News Service. A religious studies scholar who specializes in American Islam, Christian nationalism, and Christian extremism, he is also the creator of two podcast series: Charismatic Revival Fury and American Unexceptionalism. Taylor holds a PhD from Georgetown University and an MA from Fuller Theological Seminary. He is currently a visiting scholar at the Center on Faith and Justice at Georgetown University. You can follow his substack here and preorder his latest book here.

You can also order his previous book at any of the links below:

• The Violent Take It By Force:

  Bookshop.org

  Broadleaf Books

  Barnes & Noble

  Amazon

Thank you for everything always and see many of you on Tuesday!

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2016 Election Attack — The Book!

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Fresh Hell

When Prague-based technologist Josef Holy told the Bette community that Trump and the pack of criminals he calls an administration will do three awful things a day, I began to look for it. Once you can spot the strategy, it takes away the shock.

This allows me to return focus to how to oust this criminal regime — other sitting criminal leaders faced and are facing prosecution. Yesterday, for example, the International Criminal Court rejected Rodrigo Duterte’s appeal for release, confirming they have jurisdiction to prosecute the former president of the Philippines for extrajudicial murders in his so-called war on drugs.

To examine the pattern of ‘three awful things’ — a sort of daily fresh hell — I documented yesterday’s events. There were at least six shock events on April 22, but three embody Holy’s thesis.

• RACIST RANT: On the heels of acting AG Todd Blanche and FBI director Kash Patel’s presser announcing an 11-count indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center, Trump attacked Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — a double Harvard graduate and the first Black woman on the Supreme Court — as “that new, Low IQ person, that somehow found her way to the bench.” The “low IQ” slur, while obviously a lie, is rooted in overt racism. That his screed came a day after the indictment agains the SPLC reveals his “clickbait fascism” scriptwriters are increasing the volume on racist attacks.

• PENTAGON CHAOS: The Pentagon announced that the Secretary of the Navy, John Phelan, was leaving the administration “effective immediately,” with reports suggesting he was fired — another chaotic and significant turnover in an already chaotic regime. Just three weeks ago, the Army’s top officer, General Randy George, was forced out, all this in the middle of an illegal war benefiting Putin and sabotaging the US.

• MAKE AMERICA SICK AGAIN: As weekend anchor Pete Hegseth announced on Twitter that he removed mandatory flu vaccine requirements for the US military, anti-vaxxer and Health and Human Services secretary Robert Kennedy Jr — intent on making Americans sick again as evidenced in the return of measles epidemic — put on his tin foil hat to do bad maths and spread conspiracies while being questioned by Congress about vanity projects.

Turning Fascism Into Entertainment

I have written a lot about clickbait fascism and how the illegal war in Iran is the world’s first kayfabe war.

Those watching RFKj at the Congressional hearing, got to see him shirtless, in provocative stances, the appearance of winning, even as he’s being grilled. The point is, the propaganda is further spread, and people like me who have investigated RFKj understand he is another Russian propaganda superspreader but instead of that takeaway, he is given a platform to blather on about how AI will save us and to lie about fiscal and scientific reality.

The most egregious example of this type of provocative fascist strategy is Kristi Noem posing in front of shirtless prisoners.

So I return often to a quote by NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen:

“Clown car hearings exploit a weakness in mainstream journalism’s source code, which gives no clear instructions for how to report truthfully on events that are themselves false, meaning they spring from a propagandistic intent and taking them seriously just furthers the scam.”

He was writing during the era of QAnon Marge-led hearings over Hunter Biden, which were done clearly for provocation. Making media’s wall to wall coverage complicit in the scam.

I’ve been developing and refining this theme for years.

But when Josef Holy tipped us off on how we can follow the daily deluge of awful in threes, it disables the shock value to see it as cold strategy.

So what to do about a regime that turns fascism into entertainment?

Apply pressure to international law to indict Trump and his regime of criminals for their myriad crimes against humanity.

Even they would find that a more pleasant alternative to Old West justice or the guillotine.

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2016 Election Attack — The Book!

American Monsters — The Book — Buy Here!

Donations Welcome

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Bette Dangerous is a reader-funded magazine. Thank you to all monthly, annual, and founding members.

I expose the corruption of billionaire fascists, while relying on memberships for support.

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More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.

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American Monster — Tucker Carlson

‘The Enforcer’

Italian fascism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat referred to Tucker Carlson as ‘The Enforcer.’

A party’s enforcer is the one who keeps everyone in line. “When Ted Cruz called the January 6 insurrection ‘a violent terrorist attack’, he had to appear on Carlson’s show and apologize to him for telling the truth,” she said.

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz was criticized by Carlson so he had to quickly walk back his remarks on Carlson’s then-primetime show on Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, in a series of embarrassing apologies — engaging in what’s known as the political walk-back.

As the Official Voice of Trumpism while internal messages revealed he hates Trump “passionately”, Carlson had publicly criticized Cruz for his truth, and Cruz had to prove he was an obeisant party apparatchik by eating dirt on national TV.

‘Spittle-Flecked Mouthpiece of Fascism’

“There is no circle of hell deep enough for this morally decrepit, ethically bereft, spittle-flecked mouthpiece of fascism,” High Fidelity, the co-host of RADICALIZED Truth Survives podcast, told Bette Dangerous. “Tucker Carlson is to Putin what Lord Haw Haw was to Hitler — a rust needle injection of poisonous propaganda flowing through the veins of an unsuspecting public, collapsing the very building block cells of civilization and decency wherever his vile utterances find purchase.

“Every word that plummets from this man’s puerile mouth has the methane whiff of gaslight and is singed with the blackest carbon of hate. He embodies the absolute worst in us — a craven, self centered, toddler angst — spoiled brat, brow furrowed, diaper soiled, howling in fury at a lost sterling rattle, the silver spoon fallen from his fishstick heir mouth. Tucker’s feigned outrage at a world that has the sheer audacity to not conform to his myopic bowtied homogenized lily white world view envenoms every ear it drips into, and woe unto the family who has a member ensnared by his bilious lies.

“For far too long he has been smeared across America’s screens like a greasy handprint, leaving nothing behind but minds fouled by his grime and hate. I will be honest, I rejoiced at his removal from the national stage. But now, a second act raises for this most malignant actor. Bolstered by the support of the world’s richest shite tier Nazi troll, Elon Musk, and pockets fat from Russia’s favorite billionaire alleged money laundering family, the Mercers, Tucker shall attempt once again to ascend to relevance as the champion of all that is mayonnaise mediocre male with his new sewage streaming service. Yes, the fascists are well-funded in their quest for world domination, while those of us left standing in the breach for democracy have to scrounge pennies for a needle with which to lance such a pustulant boil as the propagandist Tucker Carlson, but scrounge we must. The abscess of fascism must be excised, and Tucker’s poison, drained.”

Carlson proved too much of a liability for even one-billion short Rupert Murdoch, who unceremoniously decoupled from his Chief Propagandist after the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit discovery revealed Carlson didn’t believe the lies he was telling his many millions audience.

Part of the $787.5 million dollar settlement in the lawsuit brought by Dominion against Fox News and Fox Corp was the admission by the network that it had lied. 

Rupert Murdoch testified under oath that he knew Fox anchors ‘endorsed’ lies about the 2020 election ‘fraud’, and did nothing to stop it.

The media empire was forced in the settlement to acknowledge that claims it had made about Dominion were lies. Not only did anchors spread the lies to millions of viewers, but according to court documents, they did so knowingly. That lie inflamed people to violence.

Dominion had alleged Fox spread lies that its machines had helped rig the 2020 election in Joe Biden’s favor.

It’s worth revisiting some of the discovery:

• Carlson wrote that lawyer and Trump aide Sidney Powell was lying. “It’s insane.”

• Fox host Laura Ingraham responded: “Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.”

And yet, they platformed them. Internal messages also revealed that he hates Trump “passionately”.

Yet Carlson pushed election lies, according to those internal messages, knowingly. Those lies were weaponized and then detonated on the Capitol on January 6, when thousands of people showed up to demand Trump’s victory, resulting in a bloody, violent, lethal, and quite frankly — horrifically embarrassing day in US history.

Despite the Big Reveal that he cynically knew he was lying, which in a pre-Trump world would have banished him to the Island of Lost Fox Souls where Bill O’Reilly and Kimberly Guilfoyle channel the ghost of Roger Ailes, remembering the good times when they could sexually harass colleagues with impunity, he found another racist to prop him up in primetime — Elon Musk.

‘Ultimate White Supremacist’

“Tucker Carlson is the ultimate white supremacist,” Julie DeLaurier told Bette Dangerous. DeLaurier is the lead organizer of Truth Tuesdays — a group of activists who protest in front of Fox News’ New York headquarters each Tuesday to try to put an end to Fox’s lying culture of harms. “Born rich, white, obscenely privileged and entitled, nothing horrifies Tucker more than the spectre of non-white people — especially immigrants — achieving through hard work a fraction of the wealth he lucked into by accident of birth.

“The important thing to remember about Tucker and other right-wing propagandists: the fear, paranoia and outrage they stoke is always, always rooted in white supremacy.”

The Washington Post referred to Carlson as the “leading voice of white grievance politics”, and due to his then-nightly barrage of sexism, racism, xenophobia, and myriad conspiracy theories, Fox often lost advertisers, which didn’t stop his show from being one of the most watched on cable news.

The Making of a Monster

Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson — a 54-year-old extremist TV personality who’s Big In Russia — was born in San Francisco and must have suffered a terrible loss when his wealthy boho artist mother left the family when he was six-years-old and never returned. Three years later, his father — a former gonzo reporter turned Orbán lobbyist — married an heiress to Swanson Enterprises frozen food fortune — and she legally adopted him.

Through nepotism and birthright, he was always going to be a some variation of conservative politico, but even former colleagues closest to him ask, just what exactly happened to him?

A 2018 CJR report tries to unravel the ‘mystery’:

Jon Lovett of Crooked Media and Pod Save America, noted, “Tucker Carlson’s transition from conservative serious-ish writer to blustery CNN guy to Daily Caller troll to race-baiting Fox News host is like ice core data on what led to this moment in our politics.”

In June, Conor Friedersdorf wrote in The Atlantic, “Carlson squandered his considerable God-given talent for scrupulously true commentary, opting instead for clickbait at The Daily Caller or dumbed-down demagoguery at Fox.”

There’s something to all the liberal hand-wringing. In a speech Carlson gave to CPAC in 2009, he pleaded with conservative journalists to focus on reporting rather than punditry. He held up The New York Times as a standard bearer, begging writers “to go out there and find what is happening….not just interpret things they hear in the mainstream media.” His pleas were met with boos.

But just six years later, Carlson was calling out The New York Times for pro-Clinton advocacy, and in June 2018 accused the paper of blatantly lying to the American people about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, Bashar Al-Assad, and Russian interference in the 2016 elections.

If we can figure out how an intelligent writer and conservative can go from writing National Magazine Award–nominated articles to shouting about immigrants on Fox News, perhaps we can understand what is happening to this country, or at least to journalism, in 2018.

Alas, it’s been five years, and a billion-dollar settlement later, and still, no answers.

‘Foxmania’

As yet another Fox viewer pleads guilty today to a felony charge related to his attack on the Capitol on January 6, his attorney said he had ‘Foxmania’ — he said the 29-year-old Delaware man “was hooked on Fox and started believing what was fed to him”.

Which we know by Murdoch’s admission and Carlson’s messages were poisonous cynical lies.

So this newly minted felon is one of millions addicted to the Outrage Factory of White Grievance flamed by Carlson — another life destroyed by propaganda.

When tallying up the casualties of this propaganda war, it’s important to not forget that Fox viewers were sent to an early Covid death.

A University of Chicago study titled Misinformation During a Pandemic reported Fox News viewers experienced greater numbers of COVID-19 deaths.

“Media outlets often present diverging, even conflicting, perspectives on reality — not only informing, but potentially misinforming audiences,” its authors wrote. “Through both a selection-on-observables strategy and an instrumental variable approach, we find that areas with greater exposure to the show downplaying the threat of COVID-19 experienced a greater number of cases and deaths.”

Evidence in the study suggested a higher viewership of Fox News’ “is associated with a greater number of COVID-19 cases and deaths during the early onset of the coronavirus pandemic.”

In a Kaiser Family Foundation study, Fox News’ COVID-19 lies were documented, and the study determined Fox watchers were more likely to believe Covid lies than people who take in other sources of news.

So shouldn’t non-brainwashed Americans breathe a sigh of relief that the Enforcer and Chief Propagandist Tucker Carlson — lost his big platform? Not really. He’s still out there on the hellscape formerly known as Twitter with Tucker on X, reputation washing American Monster Alex Jones, and internet felons like Douglass MacKey, whose felony conviction for interfering in the 2016 election poses a threat to Carlson, who ‘knowingly’ spreads lies that result in violence and death.

But it’s not just the white grievance and lies, and the ensuing violence and death that occurs when white grievance and lies are broadcast into millions of homes nightly, Carlson became a malignant liability to the Murdoch clan when they were sued for his culture of misogyny.

The Fox News anchor had been serving up misogyny and white grievance for so long, radicalizing so many of our fathers beyond recognition as I wrote in How I Lost My Father to Fox News, it becomes an endless trauma loop. Many of us can never get our fathers back. There is no lower rung of hell low enough for those who poison good people’s minds for a living.

So when I read former Fox producer Abby Grossberg’s lawsuit, with its claims of sexism, anti-semitism and bullying, I thought, sounds about right.

The former talent booker for Carlson’s Fox show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, said in a legal complaint that she experienced abusive behavior, misogyny, and harassment.

Of the two lawsuits Grossberg filed, the one aimed at her work environment on Carlson’s show described a frat-house mentality. 

The preliminary statement reads: “This case is as troubling as it is familiar; it is yet another in the long line of cases chronicling the misogynistic environment that permeates Fox News and fosters a toxic workplace where truth remains a fugitive while female workers are verbally violated on almost a daily basis by a poisonous and entrenched patriarchy.”

It’s worth noting Carlson remained employed at the network after recorded conversations surfaced from an interview where he revealed a voyeuristic lust for teen sex.

When the show host described 14-year-old girls at Carlson's daughter's school sexually experimenting with each other, he said: "If it weren't my daughter, I would love that scenario."

The network remained nonplussed when it was reported in Byline Times that Carlson’s dad headed up a lobbying firm paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to reputation-wash Viktor Orbán’s administration – including a clause in the contract for one of Orbán’s allies to appear on Tucker’s show.

I only know this fact because I woke up one morning wondering what kind of father he had, only to learn I had shared a cubicle with one of Dick Carlson’s former reporting partners, and that’s when I learned of the family’s ties to Orbán.

In that report, I wrote:

I often try to figure out how people became who and what they are. I look at someone like John Lewis and think, his parents must have been such good people. Sure enough, he was raised by sharecroppers, who married a year after they met, had ten children, and inspired John to make good trouble.

So when examining the Republican Party’s Enforcer and Chief, Tucker Carlson, I decided it was time to take a look at his father - to see what kind of man could raise such a monster.

Well, once I got over the shock that I used to share a cubicle with one of Dick Carlson’s former reporting partners - yeah, that happened - I noticed that Tucker Carlson’s dad lobbies for Viktor Orbán.

I could just end this report here…

But I felt important to keep going.

Tucker Carlson’s dad, 82-year-old Richard Carlson, is the director of a Washington-based firm that lobbied for Orbán in the United States, according to the firm’s website.

Orbán, you might recall, is Hungary’s authoritarian leader, whose anti-human rights actions are being modeled by the Republican party.

You might also recall, Tucker Carlson broadcast his show from Hungary in 2021, in advance of attending an extremist conference in Budapest. 

The bottom line - Tucker met with Putin’s man Orbán after a firm where his father is a director received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Hungarian Government to help reputation wash the Orbán regime.

As my investigative writing colleague Sian Norris reported for Byline Times:

Carlson met Prime Minister Viktor Orbán during his trip, two years after the Hungarian Government paid $265,000 to Policy Impact Strategic Communications Inc (sometimes known as Policy Impact Communications or Policy Impact) to “provide outreach to the U.S. Government and media on behalf of the Embassy of Hungary in support of its ongoing objectives to improve US-Hungarian relations, by coordinating, facilitating, and managing Government affairs, activities and media management.”

The deal included co-ordinating an interview with Peter Szijjártó, Hungary’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, on the Tucker Carlson show. 

Carlson’s father, former US Ambassador to the Seychelles Richard Carlson, is a Director of the Washington D.C-based lobbying firm. Senior advisor William Cowen also has links to Fox News. 

Tucker Carlson, who is currently creating unreality around January 6 to cover for knowingly promoting 2020 election lies, according to Dominion Voting System’s court filings, went to Hungary to promote fascist propaganda and his father, Dick, is a director of a lobbying group that promotes Orbán.

Okay, got it.

Sian also wrote:

This is not the first time Carlson has shown his support to Orbán and his Fidesz Party. 

In 2019 – the same year the deal was struck between his father’s business and the Hungarian Embassy – Carlson delivered a monologue on his Fox News show praising Orban’s family protection programme. 

Norris explained that the programme seeks to incentivise women to have more “ethnic Hungarian children”, awarding women a loan on marriage that is written off should she have three children or more with her husband. 

In his monologue, Carlson explained that Hungary had lost “half a million of its population” due to low birth rates and that the “neoliberals” who “run the European Union” believed the country could fix that problem by importing a “replacement population from the third world”.

In essence, he was doing extremist racist propaganda, Great Replacement, on primetime.

Please read Sian’s full report here.

And for a refresher on why Tucker Carlson is lying through his teeth to get viewers to believe unreality about the Insurrection, please refer to my latest report in Byline Supplement, which offers a comprehensive view of the damage Fox does.

In addition, my series on the scandals unfolding at Fox can be read here.

Lastly, I always found it curious that Carlson’s partner in the extremist rag, the Daily Caller, which he co-founded, was a former Dick Cheney aide named Neil Patel. The Southern Poverty Law Center reported in 2017 that the Daily Caller has “a white nationalist problem” - and received funding from the Koch cadre.

It seemed worth noting that Patel has a disgraced hedge fund partner Paul Konigsberg - who pleaded guilty to falsifying books and records for Bernie Madoff - but was spared prison time. What a relief, because he could then visit his family in Russia.

A CBS report from 2015 noted:

The leniency shown Paul Konigsberg, 79, means he can visit two of his grandchildren in Moscow as soon as he gets a new passport.

Because of course.

Another Day, Another Out-of-Court-Settlement

Carlson has been quite a useful pro-Kremlin propagandist. For a comprehensive thread on the Russian shilling he did nightly on Fox, please follow along at Vatnik Soup.com, where he’s revealed as Vatnik #167 — a Putinist spewing anti-Ukrainian views. Here are some highlights:

In 2017, Carlson said he doesn’t consider Russia a “serious threat against the US”. He also said that Putin doesn't hate America as much as the liberals do and there’s no reason to hate Putin. (Author’s note: Sure, Jan.)

Russian TV propagandists often use Carlson’s segments to support their messaging. Russian leadership allegedly sent a memo to Kremlin-friendly media outlets that it's "essential" to use Tucker's video clips "as much as possible".

He's condemned Putin for the invasion, but initially called it a "border dispute". After the fervent conspiracy theorist Jacob Creech speculated that Russia is targeting "biolabs in Ukraine", Carlson soon started supporting the theory...

After Donald Trump Jr. met with Russian officials, asking for dirt on Hillary Clinton, Tucker came to his defense, saying that he'd only been "gossiping with foreigners".

It seems surreal that such an amoral man as Murdoch would shitcan a money-making show, but perhaps the 90 recordings Abby Grossberg said she has in her possession might have had something to do with Carlson’s mid-season ouster. 

Although Fox initially denied Grossberg’s claims, the network settled for $12 million dollars. That’s a lot of denial. Grossberg had detailed a malignant bro culture, untreated even after the “me too” explosion rocked the network, resulting in the termination of Fox News founder Roger Ailes, and longtime anchor Bill O’Reilly.

I Was a Fox Blonde

It took my feminist daughter to awaken me from the malignant culture at Fox, it had become so normalized. I detailed my experience at Fox in multiple reports for Byline Supplement.

Byline Supplement

Confessions of a 'Fox Blonde'

This year, I am celebrating my 10th anniversary of walking out the door of Fox 11 Los Angeles. I even threw myself a divorce party at a Hollywood nightclub upon my unceremonious uncoupling. I left behind 15 years-worth of Beta and VHS tapes, which are likely preserved in the same newsroom drawers I stored the…

Read more

3 years ago · 42 likes · 10 comments · Heidi Cuda

Byline Supplement

How I Lost My Father to Fox News

I wasn’t in the habit of hanging up on my father, but in 2017 it started happening with alarming frequency. The first time it occurred was when he discussed me attending the Women’s March in Washington DC and my father said it was “the most vulgar display of…” Click…

Read more

3 years ago · 49 likes · 1 comment · Heidi Cuda

Byline Supplement

Tucker Carlson and the Misogyny Epidemic at Fox News

I was running through the Fox 11 newsroom when it still bristled with life, so it must have been about 2006, pre-Great Recession, when the coffers were flush enough to have proper staffing. Within a couple of years, metaphorical tumbleweeds would blow through the LA station, but on that day it was still bustling…

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3 years ago · 11 likes · Heidi Cuda

In my report on Tucker Carlson and the Misogny Epidemic at Fox News, I wrote about a personal encounter, one of many:

I was running through the Fox 11 newsroom when it still bristled with life, so it must have been about 2006, pre-Great Recession, when the coffers were flush enough to have proper staffing. Within a couple of years, metaphorical tumbleweeds would blow through the LA station, but on that day it was still bustling.

A senior producer stopped me mid-flight, hoisted up his pants and said, “I brought something for you from Las Vegas.”

He had just been to an adult entertainment expo in Sin City – likely just in time for a sweeps ratings period –- and my spidey sense said, ‘this is not going to be good’.

I tried to keep on moving, but the producer – who I was quite fond of – said, “Here, take it.”

He attempted to hand me a gadget.

I said flatly, “I’m not taking it, __.”

He said, “It’s a vibrator. I thought of you. Take it.”

I repeated, “I’m not taking it, __!”

He said one more time, “Go ahead, take it. I thought you’d like it.”

I said one more time, “I am not touching that thing. We’re in the middle of the goddamn newsroom. And even if we weren’t, I don’t want it!”

I held my hands up, as if I were under arrest and wanted to show the figurative cops my hands were empty.

He was still insisting I take the damn thing as the elevator was closing on his outstretched hand.

That, my friends, was just another day at the office at the Fox affiliate I worked at for the better part of 15 years.

As I wrote in Confessions of a Fox Blonde it was a man’s world in the news business when I worked there, and I did my damnedest to stay under the radar and just get the job done.

There were so many moments like that. 

Like that time a manager said in the middle of a rundown meeting, “Just because she has a vagina doesn’t mean she doesn’t like sports.”

It’s so cringe it still makes me angry more than a decade later.

I can still hear the echoes of so many smug newsman voices. 

“All she is is a pair of tits,” said a senior reporter about an executive producer. And then he repeated it, to ensure I heard him over the cubicle wall. I studiously ignored him and would continue to do so when he repeated it a third time.

I recognize now what I call post-traumatic news syndrome is a true form of PTSD. When I first read about Tucker Carlson’s demise, my reaction was to shrug. 

The culture of sex abuse and misogyny had been normalized during my 15 years at a Fox affiliate. But I had been exposed to it as far back as my 20s.

I shared my encounter with Bill O’Reilly previously in Byline but it’s worth repeating, if only to illustrate how decades go by before bad behavior by men in television is acknowledged.

I had the displeasure of meeting Bill O’Reilly when I was 24. I was working as the associate editor of Hollywood Magazine, when I was tasked with interviewing the anchorman as he made the jump from ABC to Inside Edition 

We met in a cramped hotel room, and I recall our chairs being so close together that his manspreading created no room for my knees. I had to tuck my legs under my chair. As he swung his long legs back and forth during the interview, knocking directly into mine, he had a lecherous twinkle in his eye. I did the only sensible thing a girl could do in that situation.

I lobbed him three softballs and then went for the jugular. 

“How does it feel going from a real newsman to infotainment?” I asked.

I obliterated that lecherous twinkle with a hardball, and he turned into a viper. He was no longer interested in this young chippie in a pink sweater twinset, and the interview abruptly ended.

As I re-read Abby Grossberg’s complaints for this report, I’m left pondering why anyone would work at Fox News in a post-Trump world. Surely, there must be a less awful way to turn a buck.

I have written volumes about the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit, and with what we know about the cynicism with which Carlson spread lies, the big money settlement felt like a terrible loss for truth. 

Ruth Ben-Ghiat said that Fox is best “understood through an authoritarian lens” and refers to Fox as “a far-right radicalisation machine and the de facto propaganda arm of the GOP.”

In my studies of propaganda, I have come to understand that the damage is done over time through repetition and former CNN anchor Brian Stelter wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed, “the power of cable news is in its reach and repetition, not its ratings.”

He learned that, he said, during his tenure at CNN, where he anchored a program about media that reported on “Carlson’s radicalisation. The people who tuned in to his show… were only a subset of his total audience. When you count all the people who saw him on a TV at a bar or in an airport and all the people who watched a clip on the internet or heard a radio talk-show host quote him”, Stelter noted that the reach was exponentially larger than the ratings.

I suppose there’s something to be said for the ratings tanking in Carlson’s old timeslot. Rupert Murdoch only looks at the right side of ledgers so we’ll see what heinous plot he comes up with next. I remain shocked that there hasn’t already been an announcement that right-wing extremist Candace Owens is to be named as Carlson’s replacement. In addition, I await the GOP nomination of a presidential ticket of Carlson and failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, two telegenic media creatures who embody the unreality of our time. 

We are, after all, living in a post ‘grab ‘em by the pussy’ world – where audio recordings can leak of a reality TV star with a history of shady business deals saying the most disgusting things about women, and he still became president.

The day the Dominion lawsuit settled, I received many phone calls asking me how I felt. Rather than respond, I decided to write a TV news script – the kind I would have written on deadline for Fox 11 news all those years ago.

This just in…

Truth loses, liars win…

As a big phat settlement absolves Rupert of his sins.

Insurrections?

No problem!

Caught on tape?

No big deal!

As long as he can write a check,

Anchor hacks can go on lying!

Warning:

Continuing to consume Fox News

May result in rotting brains

Lower IQs

Lonely holidays

And kids who hate you.

But hey, at least you’ll own the libs.

And that’s not all…

You’ll help Russian propagandists earn their annual bonuses!

Be sure to tune in tonight for more Kremlin propaganda!

With your host - Orbán’s favorite dish! - Tucker Carlson!

Who will he be reputation- washing tonight?!

Mike Flynn? Yevgeny Prigozhin? Beelzebub?

Whatever rates in the 18 to 89 demo.

Funny thing is, that night – which would turn out to be Carlson’s last show — his featured guest was anti-vax presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr., who recited pro-Kremlin talking points about the war in Ukraine.

The malignancy continues.

Whatever rates.

‘Propaganda Kills’

“Propaganda is tremendously powerful. Propaganda creates terrorism. Propaganda kills. Propaganda helped cause the holocaust which resulted in over 11 million people deemed ‘the other’ being murdered,” said Fox critic Jen Senko, who directed the film, The Brainwashing of My Dad.

“Propaganda through the radio drove the killing of over 800,000 Tutsis by their neighbours and family in 1994. The constant drumbeat over the last 40 years of hate propaganda has come to its intended conclusion; disruption in the order of things, chaos and unbridled hatred of ‘the other’ – whoever ‘the other’ is at the time. History can repeat itself and will unless we speak out. Speak out to outlets that push hate. Speak out.”

With Elon Musk now co-signing on every propaganda tweet by every living monster in this series, millions of minds are being poisoned daily. Musk’s Twitter takeover was always a land grab in an information war, and it was always designed to be a psyop cannon to people’s minds.

Byline Supplement

Unmusked: How Elon Musk is Using Twitter to Destroy the Concept of Objective Truth

When Twitter owner Elon Musk Tweeted his support for returning Crimea to Russia, Russian analyst Fiona Hill accused Musk of actively transmitting a message on behalf of Putin. Canadian academic Michael MacKay agreed, describing it as ‘active measures’ - a term used to describe how the Soviet Union used covert disinformation oper…

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3 years ago · 80 likes · 4 comments · Heidi Cuda and Byline Supplement

I asked my podcast partner Jim Stewartson what this week’s Twitter spaces was ultimately about with Elon Musk, Mike Flynn, and Alex Jones — all featured in my American Monster series — along with some of the other worst, damaging propagandists in internet history — people permanently banned from Twitter that Musk reinstated.

He said it was to gather forces, and to rehab Alex Jones, who promoted his appearance on Tucker Carlson’s X show, which is simulcast on Russian state TV.

“It’s an open declaration of war,” Jim said.

Trying to break through the capitalist fortress protecting billionaire owned media networks is the fight of our lifetime. Who is protecting the American people from these propagandists?

As I explained in my conversation with Dr. Steven Hassan last week, we continually allow our freedoms to be used to destroy us from within and without — often by countries that have no freedom. Our First Amendment wasn’t a free pass to radicalize millions and our Second Amendment wasn’t a free pass for mass murder.

Dr. Hassan responded:

There’s no such thing as absolute ‘free speech’ — the law says if there's no fire, you can't yell fire in a crowded theater. Why? Because it will hurt people. People will get injured or die. Telling people that the election was stolen and having a riot, how is that different?

On Tuesday, December 12, 2023, Tucker Carlson — who knowingly spread election lies resulting in violence and death — hosted recently freed J6 convict Owen Shroyer, the right hand of convicted fraudster and negative billionaire, Alex Jones, on his X show.

The attempted murder of America by propaganda poison continues.

As the author of How Fascism Works Jason Stanley said last year, “Tucker Carlson is a Father Coughlin of the current moment — he’s constantly broadcasting coded anti-semitism.”

And as Paul Niland — an investigative reporter in Kyiv who founded Ukraine’s first suicide hotline after the 2014 Russian invasion — told RadPod this year, “What the US has to do is to know your enemy… Russian media was showing clips of Tucker Carlson — if Russia is on your side—you’re on the wrong g-ddamn side. Russia means absolutely no good to the United States. Russia is your enemy.”

And High Fidelity added: “He needs to be fired from public discourse, because he is a propagandist of our enemies. There is no ‘free speech’ when you spread the lies of those who wish us harm.”

I write about monsters, because I want you to see them in daylight. They are less scary when exposed in broad daylight. Some are preppy, in natty shoes without socks, but they are monsters nonetheless.

As Hunter Biden would say, hurt people hurt people.

Some of these monsters hurt, or they would not be destroying our world with their lies. They would not be aligned with a dictator and war criminal — destroyers of empathy and decency.

Truth must be the antidote. We must be the antidote.

****

Donations Welcome

(Illustration courtesy High Fidelity)

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To read the first 13 in the American Monster series, please go here:

To review my comprehensive reporting on Fox, please go here:

To read the first four in my 2016 Series, please go here:

****

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More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.

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Author’s note: I knew when I pressed send on this report, September, 21, 2024, that it was my most important post to date. Through the eyes of a Berlin reporter in the ‘30s, we could see the rise of fascism, and what could have been done to prevent the National Socialists from gaining power. I subsequently wrote multiple other reports — warnings, preventative medicine. Today, as I write this, America is under foreign occupation. I reflect on the words of reporter Anne Nelson how the Berlin Resistance just needed a hundred thousand more people, and I reflect on the words of Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, who asked:

I am republishing my Bella Fromm report today, to inspire each of you to reflect on what you can do to help democracies in their most dire hour.—Heidi Siegmund Cuda for Bette Dangerous, April 22, 2026

The Shadow of Things: A Berlin Diary

I have never buried my head in a book — literally — but on page 55 of Blood & Banquets I collapsed.

I felt the smooth coolness of the pages, written a century ago — warning words, blinking lights, cutting through denial and propaganda and getting to the cold truth.

It can happen here. It is happening here.

Will we be the people who stop it or will future historians see us as enablers of monsters — those of us who resisted lost in the mists of time.

Bella Fromm was a Jewish political columnist in Berlin during the rise of Hitler. She knew these monsters, and published Blood & Banquets in 1943, after escaping to New York. She was warned to leave Berlin for years, but stayed until 1938. She was well-liked and well-connected and was able to save many lives. At one point, she helped 37 people get out of Buchenwald.

Finding her Berlin social diary referenced in a book I’m reading, The Gravediggers, was like being handed a gift from the past to help guide me in this moment.

Fromm’s wit and clarity as she documents her personal reflections of the diplomats, political leaders, wives and mistresses she befriended is a reminder that there is no arc of history, as Timothy Snyder has taught us. It doesn’t bend one way or the other. It’s what people do or don’t do.

In her news print columns, she wrote of events, and who’s who, and where and when. In her personal diary, she wrote of monsters, and of the people who did not stop them. She called it her ‘double pen.’

It’s been a minute since I read a book from cover to cover in one sitting. I burned through 300 pages and three highlighters.

I cried when she was trapped and had to salute Hitler. She had defied him and his gangsters every step, but there was one moment she couldn’t escape, and I could feel decades evaporating between us — I was a witness in that room in that moment, and it was devastating.

She had already sent her daughter to America and knew it was time for her to leave.

She had inherited her family’s wine fortune, and lost nearly everything in 1923, during the inflation that devastated Weimar Germany. She parlayed her connections into becoming a journalist and worked her way up from the society pages to the political pages.

When the Nazis came to power, her newspaper group was crushed, denying her the ability to work, so she went back into the wine business, and then was banned from that business due to her non-Aryan status. Once she could no longer earn a living, she knew she had to get out. She stayed as long as she could to help as many people as she could.

As you read her diary, you will find the banality of evil sewn into its DNA. You will read about the escalation of racism, and how people became comfortable disparaging Jewish people — people she had known her entire life and who never had a bad word to say about anybody until the ‘Austrian psychopath’ appeared on the scene.

She called Goebbels ‘a raging dwarf.’ She knew Hess, and Goering, Heydrich, and Himmler, she knew Leni Riefenstahl — a social climber who put her name on other people’s work. She knew the wives of high-ranking party members, including the one who defied her husband and helped friends escape the carnage.

And all along the way, she watched people fall in line, as a mad cruelty descended over Germany, where her ancestors had lived for 500 years.

I recall the day I understood what so distressed me about the way Trump used words. I have Kim Campbell to thank for that. The former Prime Minister of Canada (and Bette Dangerous charter member) explained in 2016 how Trump spoke in the vocabulary of misogyny. Like the Nazis, Trump violates language.

As a columnist in the Los Angeles Times, in 1996, I referred to Trump as a has-been. As an investigative producer for Fox 11 news, I discovered in 2006 that Trump was a fake rich guy, who profited off of ponzi schemes, stealing from the poor until lawsuits forced out of court settlements.

Too often, women reporters who live in the midst of politics and document what they see, are written out of history, overshadowed by their male peers. Bette Dangerous has been writing them back into history, while also celebrating the work of my contemporary colleagues.

What follows are excerpts from my highlighted sections of Blood & Banquets, interspersed with commentary. I have been reading history books on Nazi Germany since I was ten years old, relatives sent me books from Germany upon my request.

Cruelty must be stopped by humans, we can’t leave it up to the stars.

Born in Nuremberg in 1890, Bella Fromm had kept a diary since she was ten years old. In 1917, she wrote to her childhood friend ‘Rolf’ — later he would become a Nazi party member who assisted her from the inside — that she “saw little hope for the future of civilization… as to the Jews, I dread an era of medieval darkness.”

She often dreamed the future, as do I. Perhaps it’s a writer’s fate.

A Heavy Fog

In 1918, she wrote how a “heavy fog spread over the country. Despair was written in the faces of people.”

On March 20, 1920, she wrote about growing anti-Semitism and “how armed clashes by ‘fighters legions’ with patriotic and chauvinistic names have sprung into being.”

Two years later, in 1922, she said her divorce lawyer predicted “in ten years, the anti-Semites would rule Germany.”

May 20, 1923—Kitzingen: “A strange wind blows from Munich and Nuremberg. National Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei is stirring up plenty of trouble in Munich. It is led by Adolf Hitler. They say he has almost hypnotic power.”

February 28, 1925: “The first president of the German republic is dead… but our Germany remains, and one wonders which direction our country will turn—toward democracy or reaction? Either is possible.”

In 1928, she enters journalism and is told her writing is too flippant.

This is when she adopts the ‘double pen.’

She became successful quickly, employs two secretaries, and her daughter, Gonny, becomes her photographer.

She describes what fun she had in the early months, before the “Austrian psychopath came too close.”

As her entries continue, she documents the frequency she now hears people referencing complaints about Jews. She reminds her acquaintances that she is Jewish, and they fumble for excuses.

In 1929, she documents how a man named Alfred Hugenberg bought and built a publishing house into a “tremendous organ of Nazi propaganda, through newspapers, books, magazines, and films.”

By 1930, Hitler’s National Socialist Workers party gained 107 seats in the Reichstag election.

As I read this, I thought how critical it is to get every single MAGA QAnon Trump appointee out of government and off of our courts.

September 19, 1930: “The Nazi party members arrived at the first session of the newly elected Reichstag wearing brown shirts and shouting ‘Germany awake! Judea perish!’”

It was also in 1930 when she began noticing women wearing swastika pendants made in rubies and diamonds.

At a fashion show in Paris, a friend commented on the similarity between the National Socialists and the Communists. “Their arguments are so alike that you have to wait until the end to see whether the raised hand is open or clenched.”

A Touch of Panic

At the end of 1930, conservative media is floating the idea of Hitler’s inclusion in government, which Fromm calls “the symptom of some very grave disease.”

There’s a touch of panic in the air as the possibility becomes more real.

February 10, 1931: “Attended Reichstag session… we wanted to hear Doctor Joseph Goebbels. He is a Nazi party deputy, and very greedy for power… he hobbled up to the speaker’s desk… the way he uses the language, a kind of combination of Mephisto and Savonarola, sinister and frantic… fanatically obsessed… a raging dwarf.”

By 1932, Hitler has secured the industrialists, and is financed by Fritz Thyssen, who had inherited his father’s coal, iron, and steel business. 1932 is also the year, German president Paul von Hindenberg orders the disbanding of private armies by emergency decree only to lift the ban a few months later.

January 29, 1932: “People from the upper crust are turning to Hitler.”

Fromm floats between presidents and diplomats, foreign correspondents and charity balls, as the “brown plague is becoming more contagious.”

An English diplomat questions why Hitler — the agitator — was naturalized rather than kicked out of the country along with his whole mob.

The radical propaganda escalates to angry mobs, painting swastikas and racial slurs in the streets, and when caught, they blame the communists.

When she tells her publisher her fears about the brown shirt parade she witnessed, he tells her she’s “beginning to hear voices. You should do something about your nerves.”

Allow me to pause to send a resounding “fuck you” to every editor who downplayed the instincts of women reporters.

August 30, 1932: “The inevitable has happened! Hermann Goering, Adolf Hitler’s intimate associate, has been appointed president of the Reichstag.”

August 30, 1932: “The brown shirts strutted around like peacocks, happily unaware of their absurdity… a low murmur filled the lobby and, of a sudden, ‘Manitu,’ their Fuehrer, appeared. His face bearing a seriously warlike expression. Heil boomed.”

She recognized him immediately as an evil shaman that “bodes nothing good for decent people.”

Throughout her diary, she is told things in confidence and proves herself trustworthy, a requirement for columnists.

December 14, 1932: “Party of Ernst Lubitsch, a brilliant, witty motion picture man… I asked whey he’s (leaving). ‘I’m going to the United States,’ he said. ‘Nothing good is going to happen here for a long time.’”

Radical Propaganda

It’s worth noting that the Nazis were scaring the rich by warning of a ‘Red Tide.’

Throughout the diary, we learn that party members were continually erasing their genealogy, as Jewish ancestors often appeared. We also learn that youth indoctrination was occurring en masse.

1933

Hitler becomes chancellor, the Reichstag fire occurs, Goebbels becomes the minister of propaganda and public enlightenment, ‘boycott-Jew day’ organized all over Germany, and Goebbels orders the burning of 20,000 books to “cleanse German literature of alien element.” Hitler declares party and state as one unit.

As you can see by the above, when I write about history haunting the present, I’m not trying to be cute. History is haunting our present moment.

January 19, 1933: “It’s maddening to watch this mass blindness.”

She writes how Hitler “took ten minutes to form his cabinet” and how neither “Hitler and Goering make decisions without consulting their astrologers.”

“Adolf looks more like an unemployed hairdresser than a Caesar,” commented one of his astrologers, who was later murdered by the Nazis.

Fromm noted that the Reichstag fire was the pretext for mass arrests of workers and leftist voters and that a Goebbels collaborator is known to be correcting ‘defective’ ballots.

Among her interesting observations from 1933 was how many of the high-ranking Nazis back-stabbed each other. How Hitler never forgets an adverse word and how women were relegated to breeding machines. She also documents the mass building of concentration camps.

March 17, 1933: “I have never believed the rumors of homosexuality that have been spread about Hitler. I rather believe that he is asexual or perhaps impotent, finding a sexual sublimation through cruelty.”

March 20, 1933: “Rolf said: ‘Goebbels propagandistic method sweeps away the minds. It dopes the masses. It will be too late when they return to their senses. The German people are, tempermentally, made to order for just that kind of mental poison.”

March 29, 1933: “It has become accepted practice for Jewish victims to be dragged from their beds before dawn and taken away. The German states are now ‘coordinated.’ The newspapers are unanimous of their praise of the Fuehrer for this. They are starting to work on the German mind.”

Kissed by Hitler

On March 30, 1933, Hitler kisses her hand at a party thrown by vice chancellor Franz von Papen, causing her nausea. “Weird ideas flashed through my mind. Why did I not have my little revolver with me?”

Among her observations about him: “He did not know what to do with his hands.”

She had to craft a paragraph in her newspaper column that mentioned Hitler was there, which was no easy feat. And when the editor cut it out of her column, she told him he was nuts, and asked if he was trying to get her in trouble.

Cruel But Not Original

The weekly cocktail parties she threw for diplomats were now being threatened by Nazi mobs, and her close associates keep telling her to get out of Germany. It would be another five years before she left.

October 8, 1933: US Ambassador Dodd has been observing the Nazis too keenly for their comfort… ‘The Nazis are cruel, but not original… They did not invent anti-Semitism. They simply were the first to organize it so it could be used as an effective weapon against the state.”

By the end of the year, her friends are starting to kill themselves.

December 13, 1933: “I met Hess for the first time, a gloomy morose individual with an air of intimidating people… Black Grete as his comrades call him… somewhat effeminate looking.”

Jewish Round-Survey

By now, she had gotten used to the ‘Jewish Round-Survey’ — which is when people scan the room before speaking with her.

She is still working as a correspondence for the Ullstein newspapers, because Goebbels decided he’d handle the ‘case of Bella Fromm’ by enmeshing it in red tape. Fromm had given Magda, his wife, ink in the fashion sections.

1934

New Nazi laws, like the forced sterilization of the ‘unfit.’ Hitler is now leader and chancellor, and everyone is taking loyalty oaths to him. A new law regulating writers extends to the working press.

January begins with a Nazi publication trashing Fromm’s work as “the destructive Bella Fromm.”

That hits close to home.

Red Tape and Malice

As she fights for her job and continues to help the oppressed escape, she struggles on in “grim determination, groping (her) way through the tangle of red tape and malice.”

Although she writes that she has always been a lover of peace, she questions why the Germans are not waging war against Hitler, because she sees no other way out.

The Heroic Deeds of Tiny Men

February 2, 1934: “Our new literature describes the heroic deeds of tiny men.”

Her allies in France describe “a wave of insanity going around the world.”

March 5, 1934: At a party: “My stomach slowly turning sour in me at the sight of Fritz Thyssen and other big industrial figures dancing eagerly in a stately and humiliating minuet around their Nazi masters.”

Wholesale Butchery in Full Swing

Her newspaper is forced to close its doors, and she sends her daughter to the US. She notes the tragic brainwashing of the youth is escalating.

For the further details of her writing, I encourage you to read the entire diary, but I just want to flag a bit more by year.

1935

German Jews lose all political rights.

1936

Charles Lindergh tours German airplane plants. Olympic games held in Berlin.

1937

Mussolini’s first visit to Berlin. (Fromm writes of ‘The Roman Imperator’ and the ‘German Imitator’).

1938

Hitler appoints himself Supreme War Lord; German army marches into Austria. Hitler demands Sudetenland. New wave of ‘Jew-baiting.’

As more of her friends take their own lives, and more of her allies urge her to leave, she writes that she is sorry to see her beloved Germany “thrown back into medieval darkness” — just as she predicted in 1917.

New York, New York

Although she initially finds menial work, she writes that dignity comes from within. She is hunted in New York, by Nazis who regret allowing her to leave Germany. Her assailants are captured by New York detectives, assigned to keep her safe. A German spy ring is busted, and she no longer fears what’s around the corner.

I took the time to document Fromm’s work for you, because we are no longer engaged in politics. A party aligned with foreign enemies has declared war on us. They are using a cruel and effective playbook.

We have allowed them to trample on our democracy, and if we continue to allow them to do so, we will not have a democracy.

I’d like to think we can vote our way out of this, but history and the present moment are telling us more must be done.

Now is the time to stop them here.

Originally published in Bette Dangerous September, 21, 2024.

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