Subscribe now

With that boilerplate definition of dehumanization, we began this work.

In Part 1 of this series, author and philosopher David Livingstone Smith gave us a masterful overview of how dehumanization works, its utility in fascist movements, and why he knew in 2015 the danger that Trump presented to the US and the world.

Smith spoke about a 1941 paper by a British author that documented how Hitler’s speeches used three techniques: depression, othering, and the ‘manic solution.’ So after Hitler depressed the audience about how bad things were, then told them they were not responsible — Hitler blamed the ‘communists and the Jews’ — they were then invited to join the Nazi party, the ‘manic solution.’

“Trump’s first speech, and many of his subsequent rally speeches, followed that pattern to the letter,” David explained.

He also spoke about how when ‘experts’ include criminal propagandists, think Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Goering, they have the power then to define reality. US Media has spent a decade giving propagandists air time, that’s 10 years of malicious liars defining reality for us.

In a book I’m reading which I will tell you about the moment I am given the greenlight, I just learned that if a leader is already operating in a world where truth no longer matters, lies then function as acts of dominance. (More on that soon).

In Part 2 of Understanding Dehumanization, we focus on beliefs about race and the reason why dehumanized people are often portrayed as monsters.

Yeah, read that quote twice.

Another of his quotes from Part 2 include:

In Part 2, he also explains why dehumanized people are portrayed as monsters.

Before our Part 2 interview, which took place June 23, 2026, I told David that I’m on strike from pull quotes. I was adamant that people read every word of my reports, and no longer rely on me bolding their way to the most salient points. By the end of our interview, I’d flagged the three pull quotes above, determined to preview them in advance of putting out the print version of the podcast. That’s how important I think this work is — my strike lasted less than 24 hours lol.

In addition to the podcast series, you can read my first report featuring David’s work in my recent Hot Type column, which focuses on the White House’s cruel and malicious ‘They Walk Amons Us’ propaganda video.

Byline Times

Hot Type: 'They Walk Among Us' — Trump's Dehumanizing Propaganda

Read more

12 days ago · 61 likes · 4 comments · Heidi Cuda

In Part 3 of our series, we will be focusing on ways to resist dehumanization.

Thank you to the thousands of Bette community members who took the time to listen to this podcast and to share the series with your networks.

A print report featuring excerpts from Understanding Dehumanization, Part 2 to follow.

And save the date: Smith will be our guest at Bette’s Happy Hour on June 30, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern. Look for that invite in coming days.

Guest Bio:

Described as “a philosopher seeking not just to interpret the world, but to change it” by the Times Literary Supplement, Smith is the author of 10 books. He won the 2012 Anisfield-Wolf Prize for nonfiction (awarded jointly with Yale historian David Blight), the 2023 Joseph B. Gittler Prize awarded by the American Philosophical Association for outstanding contributions to philosophy of the social sciences, the 2024 Dr. Martin R. Lebowitz and Eve Lewellis Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement and Contribution, awarded by Phi Beta Kappa and the American Philosophical Association (awarded jointly with Cornell philosopher Kate Manne), and was shortlisted for the Nayaf Al-Rodhan Prize for Transdisciplinary Philosophy, awarded by the Royal Institute of Philosophy in the UK.

All of these awards were for his work on dehumanization. He is frequently interviewed in the national and international media on dehumanization, race, racism, national and international affairs, and related topics. He has given presentations at such venues as the 2012 G20 economic summit, where he spoke on dehumanization and mass violence.

Before transitioning to philosophy, Smith was a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and Freud scholar, and director of the MA program in psychotherapy at Regent’s College in London, England. Smith is a professor of philosophy at the University of New England in Maine, and he will be spending the 2026/27 academic year as the Tage Danielsson Professor at Linköping University, in Sweden.

You can find links to his books and published works here and for his Substack, go to Dehumanization Matters.

More links here related to Part 2’s topics:

Race

https://newlinesmag.com/argument/the-trouble-with-race-and-its-many-shades-of-deceit/

Dehumanization Matters

The Terrible Stickiness of Race

When I was a child, growing up in south Florida, my grandmother, Bertha, used to tell me a story that her mother, Rosa Firester, told her. One day, when Rosa was walking along the pavement in her home town of Iași, Romania, a gentile soldier approached her, barked “Get off the sidewalk, Jew!” and shoved her off the sidewalk and into the gutter…

Read more

3 months ago · 13 likes · 3 comments · David Livingstone Smith

MAGA dehumanization

Dehumanization Matters

"This is not retribution. This is fumigation."

In a recent interview on Fox, senator Ashley B. Moody (R-Florida), who is also a member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, insisted that the FBI investigations into former agency directors James Comey and James Brennan “is not retribution. This is fumigation. You have had radicals roaming in these institutions like termites." She also asserted t…

Read more

a year ago · 5 likes · 2 comments · David Livingstone Smith

Dehumanization Matters

Trump's Latest Dehumanizing Slur

Yesterday afternoon, Donald Trump referred to New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman as “Maggot” in a post on Truth Social, apparently in response to her recent criticism of him in an interview with Caitlin Collins. Trump wrote…

Read more

3 months ago · 9 likes · David Livingstone Smith

Dehumanization Matters

"These Inner-City Rats...."

In a recent interview US Senator from Alabama Tommy Tuberville praised Donald Trump’s aggressive deportation policy and his promise to withdraw federal funding from cities that harbor undocumented immigrants. He said…

Read more

a year ago · 6 likes · 2 comments · David Livingstone Smith

Dehumanization Matters

"These are savage monsters"

Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote, “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster…

Read more

2 years ago · 9 likes · David Livingstone Smith

Monsters

Dehumanization Matters

From Human Animals to Bloodthirsty Monsters

In my last essay, I explained that when Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant said “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly” it was tantamount to characterizing them as monsters. Some readers wrote to me in private, suggesting that I was going too far. The description of Hamas killers as animals, they said, was nothing more than an…

Read more

3 years ago · 13 likes · 5 comments · David Livingstone Smith

Dehumanization Matters

Human Monsters

When I began researching dehumanization around 20 years ago, I believed that when we dehumanize people we think of them as nonhuman animals—as vermin, predators, and so on. This is the picture that I presented in Less Than Human, my first book on dehumanization. It was a commonplace view then, and it stil…

Read more

a month ago · 10 likes · 6 comments · David Livingstone Smith

Dehumanization Matters

Donald Trump Is Not a Monster

Today, I got a message from a friend, Dan Steinberg, about a recent Substack essay by Robert Reich that’s titled “Decency in a time of monsters.” I can’t speak for Dan, but I generally like what Reich says. I believe that in criticizing the likes of Trump, he is on the right side of history. Our broader political views are more similar than not. But Dan…

Read more

a year ago · 40 likes · 17 comments · David Livingstone Smith

Thank you to everyone for supporting this work.

****

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 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

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.

🤍

🤍

Subscribe now

Author’s note: Thank you to the hundreds of Bette Dangerous subscribers who took the time to listen to my new podcast series, Understanding Dehumanization, with David Livingstone Smith, and to share it with your networks.

Below, is a transcript from that interview, Part 1 in the series, edited lightly for brevity and clarity. Smith will be our guest at our next community event, Tuesday, June 30, 11 am Pacific, so please look for that invite. To understand the context for the beginning of our conversation, please review these reports:

If you find this work valuable, please share widely with your networks and consider supporting. Thank you.—hsc

Subscribe now

‘The Power to Define Reality for Us’

A Bette Dangerous interview with David Livingstone Smith from the podcast series, Understanding Dehumanization, Part 1

by Heidi Siegmund Cuda

Heidi Siegmund Cuda: Can you please begin by introducing yourself to our audience and explaining how you came to be an expert on dehumanization.

David Livingstone Smith: I am a professor of philosophy at the University of New England in Maine. Formerly a psychotherapist, I changed careers midlife. In fact, I did my PhD in philosophy when I was middle-aged. The dehumanization story — there are two components to this — one is autobiographical. I grew up in the deep South in the 50s and 60s, and I wasn’t born in the deep South.

I was born in New York City, but the family moved down to southwest Florida when I was just a small child, three or four years old, and I grew up in an extended family with my maternal grandparents, both of whom were Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe.

Their families came over long before the Holocaust, they were fleeing the pogroms in the Russian Empire and Romania. So growing up in the deep South in those days, if you’re someone who was not acculturated to the rawness of the racism and the dehumanization of African Americans — it was palpable, the poverty, the hostility, of course, this was the tail end of the Jim Crow era on the assumption that Jim Crow has ever entirely ended in this country.

As a young child, I was appalled, really, and puzzled by the world around me. My grandmother helped me make sense of that world. She was a brilliant, self-educated woman. She had to leave school as a teenager, I believe around the age of 14, because her father had abandoned the family. She needed to go to work, but she educated herself, and she had a particular interest in in the history of genocide and racism and mass violence, and really helped me understand the world that I was living in back then.

Those experiences stuck with me. I didn’t do anything with them for a very, very long time, but they stuck with me. Now, round about, 2005 - 2006 I was researching war. I was working on a book about war, and I came across all of this wartime propaganda, which represented enemies as vermin to be exterminated, or bloodthirsty predators, or animals to be shot for fun, game animals, and I began consulting the literature, and I discovered that virtually all of it, like 99.9% of it, was done by social psychologists.

Philosophers, like myself, were not doing hardly anything on this topic…and "that inspired me to write my first book on dehumanization, which was the first, as far as I know, single-authored book in the English language on dehumanization.

I realized that there’s so much work to do on this, largely because I don’t think that the social psychologists have really gotten it right, and it seems to be a topic that is so vital for us to understand if we’re to have any hope in intervening in the kind of mass violence that dehumanization brings in its wake.

Heidi (I speak about my childhood, as a German-American youth, and my desire to understand what happened during World War II. And I ask him to comment on a documentary, where a German soldier who murdered Jewish people in cold blood said he’d been propagandized to think he was doing the right thing): As an expert on dehumanization, how can you explain what goes on in the mind of someone like that?

David: That’s really been the focus of my work. The best way to start is for me to make it clear what I mean by dehumanization, and that’s really important, because the word is used in a variety of senses and often casts more heat than light. Even in the academic literature, there are at least eight different senses in which the word is used, and many of them are incompatible with each other.

So, what I mean by dehumanization is the attitude of conceiving of others as less than human creatures. So, let’s break that down a little bit. I take a fundamentally psychological view of dehumanization. So, your question about what goes on in the mind of dehumanizers is actually very appropriate for me to address — it’s psychological, but it cannot be understood in exclusively psychological terms — and this is one of my gripes with the social psychologists. To understand dehumanization, we have to understand the forces acting on human minds, we have to understand the political and social ecology that human minds are situated in.

To come back to my definition, it’s the attitude of conceiving… whole groups of others, particularly but not exclusively groups of people who have been racialized — that is, who have been represented as belonging to an alien and inferior race, this is very standard.

The Holocaust was a racialized genocide. A lot of Americans don’t understand that to the Nazis and to Europeans generally of that period, the category ‘Jew’ is a racial category, not a religious category. Nazis didn’t care about one’s religion. This was entirely racial, so this is a collective kind of thing, normally.

Conceiving of others as less than human — what do I mean by less than human? Well, I mean less than human in a particular sense, actually in the same sense that the Nazis use the term Untermensch, subhuman, with reference to Jews and Roma people, primarily, but also to Slavs, and what that means is ‘of lesser intrinsic value.’

So the phrase that became popular during the Black Lives Matter era — Black Lives Matter — to think of someone as less than human in this specific sense means their lives don’t matter as much as other lives do, so they can be farmed and and exterminated without compunction, treated as less than human creatures.

Now notice, I didn’t say animals, I said creatures, and the reason for that is very, very important. It was something I didn’t understand when I wrote my first book on dehumanization, titled Less Than Human, which came out in 2011, but I have come to understand that when people are dehumanized, although it might begin with characterizing them as simply as vermin, simply as non-human predators, it virtually always morphs into conceiving of them as monstrous, demonic beings, and that’s very, very important, both if we’re going to look at the origins, how this comes about, but also for understanding the immense cruelty that is inflicted on dehumanized populations.

Psychological Essentialism

So how does dehumanization happen? Dehumanization relies on, in my view, two psychological tendencies. One has been studied very, very extensively and it’s called psychological essentialism. Basically, this is the idea that we human beings are psychologically disposed. We tend to divide the world of living things up into discrete categories, like by biological species, and this is the core of it, to assume that what makes any individual a member of one of these biological categories is not how it appears, but what it is, in some mysterious sense, on the inside, so the psychologists who coin the term psychological essentialism refer to that wholly imaginary property as an essence, so we attribute these essences.

Now, part of the logic of psychological essentialism is that a being’s essence, which again, I want to emphasize, is a totally unscientific notion, has no real empirical standing at all, but is really the product of robust psychological bias that we find all over the world, the essence and the appearance can come apart now. Why is that important?

Well, consider this: suppose you’re, you are a Nazi, a dyed in the wool Nazi, and I’m a Jewish guy, which I am. If you were dyed in the wool Nazi, you would think of me as an Untermensch, as a subhuman, as this dangerous, monstrous kind of being. But how does that work?

I mean, I am outwardly indistinguishable from anyone you would consider to be a genuine human being. Actually, my case is pretty good. I’m over six feet tall, I have blue eyes. When I had hair, it was blonde. I was a better outwardly representative of the so-called Aryan race than any of the Nazi high command. But still, I would be considered a subhuman. Well, why? The idea would be I might look human, but on the inside, I’m something else, I’m subhuman, monstrous. So, in a sense, I’m a counterfeit human being. Now, that’s one bit of the psychological puzzle.

Hierarchical Thinking

The other factor is hierarchical thinking. This has been much less extensively studied by psychologists. In fact, when I speak to psychologists, I say someone looking for a really good research project, this is it. Hierarchical thinking is the tendency to situate kinds of beings on a hierarchy of value…. referred to by historians as the idea of the great chain of being, which was very popular in the European Middle Ages.

The thinkers who promoted this notion conceived of the whole universe as a hierarchy with the most perfect at the top and the least perfect at the bottom, so you know God was at the top, perfectly perfect, and then there were the archangels and the angels and human beings modestly placed themselves just below the angels, and then ranked lower were various kinds of animals, plants, right down to almost the bottom.

Demons were off the tree, because the tree, the hierarchy, the great chain of being, is supposed to describe how the whole realm of the demonic was supposed to be unnatural. They were supposed to offend against the natural order — I’m mentioning this because this is very, very important for understanding dehumanization.

There is one authoritative book on this, written in the 1930s called The Great Chain of Being. It’s a brilliant book by a man named Arthur Lovejoy, philosopher and intellectual historian. It is truly a brilliant book, but I think it has a number of very significant errors — two crucial errors that I think are widely and uncritically accepted by historians of ideas, and which appear in Lovejoy’s books. One is that Lovejoy claims this was really a distinctively European way of thinking about the universe, that it was sort of cobbled together in antiquity out of elements from the work of Aristotle and Plato. That’s just not right. We find traces of it all, literally all over the world. So it’s much more ancient and more widespread than Lovejoy thought. Second, Lovejoy basically says it arose in antiquity, enjoyed a career through the Middle Ages, died out during the Enlightenment era with the rise of scientific biology. I think that’s incorrect. It has never died out.

Because our continued existence requires us to kill and exploit other living things, even if they’re just vegetables, that’s still an act of killing, so we need some way to justify the fact that, like many lives, our lives feed on other lives, so these two psychological biases — cognitive biases — working in unison make dehumanization possible. So when we dehumanize others, then we attribute to them the essence of a creature ranked lower on the hierarchy than the human.

Heidi: What I hear in this is something that then becomes very useful in the rise of authoritarian, very useful in fascism, and two things come to mind. One of them is in Bella Fromm’s book, Blood and Banquets.

She was a Jewish reporter, who kept a diary on the rise of the Nazis, because she was a reporter in Berlin at the time. She did such an incredible job of giving us firsthand reporting on people like Hitler, who was described as looking like an out of work hairdresser; she described Goebbels as ‘that raging dwarf,’ she said that you could hear Herman Goering’s medals clanking on his chest before you could actually see him enter a room. Goering would say, ‘I decide who’s Jewish.’ In other words, if there were people that were useful to him who were Jewish, then he could decide who was in and who was out. And Hitler actually could give a metaphorical hall pass if somebody was useful, he would write some decree. And then combine that with this book I read about an Armenian American man who went undercover in Nazi America in the early 40s.

He would pretend to be one of them, he was pretending to be a fascist, and when he would talk to the people who were radicalizing people in rallies and the Madison Square Garden, when he would talk to the worst of them, one of them in particular told him, ‘I don’t really believe this stuff, I’m just using it to bait the masses,’ just using it to gather people together. I bring that up because you’re describing something that is so evil, and yet that type of evil and that type of cruelty is used by people, because it has some utility for their ends, so I don’t know if that’s something you can comment on.

The Role of ‘Expert’

David: That really takes us to the third of the three components. Dehumanization does not spontaneously arise in the human mind, it is a product, invariably of ideology and propaganda of one sort or another, and let me explain how that works, so one of the really important features of human life for untold 1000s of years is a division of cognitive labor, so we place certain individuals in the role of expert.

Now I describe this as a role because I want to be neutral about whether the attribution of expertise is justified or not. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. But that’s what we do. The expert is someone who is supposed to know, and we endow them with the power to define reality for us, and this is really, really important. We simply could not have the quality of life that we have unless we deferred to those in the role of experts, so for instance, I’m sitting at a chair in my study at home, and the chair looks to me perfectly without gaps in it, but if I talk to an expert, a microphysicist, in this case, that microphysicist will tell me, ‘David, it’s mostly empty space.’

Now this contradicts what my eyes tell me, but I accept it. Why do we accept it? Because the physicist is supposed to know.

The problem arises when the expert is someone like Joseph Goebbels or Hermann Goering, right? They, too, were placed by very many people in that social role of expert, and they could say to the populace, ‘Jews might seem to be human, but they’re really subhuman,’ and that carries weight because of their social role as experts. So although some propagandists, like the fellow you mentioned, who went undercover in the United States, and spoke to a particularly repulsive American fascist — some people like that fascist cynically promote dehumanizing propaganda, but others certainly believe it. I think Goebbels pretty much believed a lot of the stuff that he distributed to the German public. People need to be ginned up in order to dehumanize others.

Heidi: You’re absolutely right. This sort of discourse is used particularly by people on the far right, but not exclusively, to promote their political agendas. This is a perfect place to bring up the reports that I would love your comments on.

As a reporter, I don’t like responding to the Daily Awful of the Trump regime. Seems too many smart investigative reporters waste their talent just basically playing whack a mole with lie after lie or outrage after outrage. So I always try to go above the headlines, under the headlines, and see what the overarching stories are, and where the most useful solutions are. But there are times when something so truly heinous happens that I think it’s very important to draw people’s attention to it, and I find that you actually, in your writing, kind of had a similar experience and reaction to the video that we’re going to talk about. Anybody who studied anything from the fascist playbook will know that the White House ‘alien’ video is as dehumanizing and as othering as I’ve ever seen, and it’s coming from the White House, which, in a time when nothing is really shocking anymore, this still was something that… no words.

Why did that video require such triage from somebody with your background?

David: I’d like to begin my response with an account of a backstory, and this goes back to 2015 when Trump came down the escalator and threw his hat into the ring. I watched Trump’s first speech in the run up to the Republican nomination, and I followed pretty closely what was going on. When I heard that first speech, I was really scared and I was really scared, because I study fascism, and there is a particular paper that has influenced me very, very profoundly, which was published in 1941. It was based on observations made in Germany in 1932. It was written by a man named Roger Money-Kyrle. He came from an aristocratic English family. He was a fighter pilot during World War I, he was shot down, so it ended his military career.

But he went off to Cambridge University to do graduate studies in philosophy in 1932. He got his PhD in philosophy, and also a PhD in anthropology, and became a practicing psychoanalyst 1932.

A diplomat invited him to visit Germany. 1932 was a crucial election year immediately preceding Hitler’s rise to power, and Hitler and Goebbels were campaigning furiously, flying from one city to another. Hitler would sometimes be making six speeches in a single day, and Money-Kyrle observed some of these rallies that Hitler and Goebbels held, and he said in this paper published 1941 that they always did the same thing, and it involved three steps.

One, the first step is counterintuitive: they began by making their audience depressed, which was pretty easy in interwar Germany. Germany was suffering tremendously in consequence of its defeat in the First World War and the Great Depression, which followed. So they would go on about how ‘our great nation has been brought to its knees and humiliated, and we’re the laughing stock of the world,’ and so on, and Money-Kyrle says once they’re rolling around in an orgy of self-pity, Hitler would change his tune and switch to inducing paranoia. ‘Oh, it’s not you, it’s not your fault. We were stabbed in the back. It’s the communists and the Jews. It’s the enemy within that’s destroying Germany.’ So, when the audience is then worked up into a state of panic-fear, then we get the magical solution, with what Money-Kyrle calls the ‘manic solution.’ ‘Join the Nazi party, we will initiate a 1000-year Reich of unprecedented glory,’ and so what Hitler would do then is offer salvation from the terrors that he had invoked in the hearts of his audience.

Now, why am I talking about all this? Because Trump’s first speech, and many of his subsequent rally speeches, followed that pattern to the letter, and that’s why, from the beginning, I was worried. I wrote about this, I gave talks about this, and all of my well-meaning friends would metaphorically pat me on the head and say, ‘Silly boy, this is just amusement. Trump will never get the nomination. We get nomination. Oh, Trump can never win.’ I was even assured it was mathematically impossible. ‘No you don’t get it. This is powerful stuff. This is dangerous,’ I explained.

So I had Trump pegged as working from the fascist playbook from the beginning, and given that, his subsequent trajectory, his blatant dehumanization of primarily racialized immigrants, has not been surprising in the least. The video that that you began speaking about and invited me to speak about is simply the latest and most disturbing example of this, It’s ostensibly humorous, which is grotesque in itself. There’s this X-Files music playing in the background, and it’s talking about aliens walking among us, and it’s quite clear these are not human beings, they’re described with by the pronoun ‘it.’ And the idea is they will be captured and released into their natural environment, here they’re really, really, represented as subhuman creatures. It’s unthinkably dangerous,

Heidi: Right, and combined with what we know about the methodical, meticulous job they are doing of demolishing all the structural integrity of our democratic institutions, while building what look like camps for housing people, none of this is to be taken lightly.

David: These are concentration camps.

Heidi: Yes, I believe so. I’ve written about this — what else would be the intent? I’d like to wrap with for this Part 1: I would love for you to comment from your decade of writing and warning about the rise of Trump in America to the people who still continue to say, ‘Oh, he’s just a clown, oh, Robert Kennedy Jr. is just a weirdo, oh, Tulsi Gabbard’s just a cultist, and Pete Hegseth is just a talk show host’ — I’m sure that you have seen these people before in history, and I think that there has always been this kind of underestimating of the danger that we are facing.

David: Yes, that’s absolutely right. In the early days, people spoke of the Nazi regime in precisely that way. Hitler was a clown, he could be kept in control, particularly the business people, who sucked up to Hitler because they thought he could aid them in combating the Social Democrats and the Communists. They thought, ‘We can control him,’ or ‘this is just talk, you know, this is just his antisemitic stuff. Yes, just talk, he’s just using it to get political traction. This will fall away.’ And ‘Goering is a buffoon,’ and so on.

This was quite standard, right? So I think people do not understand the power that fascist regimes when they’re successful, and most fascist movements fail, but there are enough of them that succeed for this to be a real worry. And fascism is able to harness powerful, powerful, powerful psychological forces, and these people should not be dismissed. It’s fine to laugh at them, but while laughing at them, we have to understand how dangerous they are. They’re not clowns, they’re not ridiculous. They have an agenda, and they have, initially, the rhetorical means, and then, secondarily, the structural means of enforcing that in that agenda.

(Part 1, Understanding Dehumanization, from Bette Dangerous podcast Ep94 interview, June 16, 2026)

****

More about David Livingstone Smith:

Described as “a philosopher seeking not just to interpret the world, but to change it” by the Times Literary Supplement, Smith is the author of 10 books. He won the 2012 Anisfield-Wolf Prize for nonfiction (awarded jointly with Yale historian David Blight), the 2023 Joseph B. Gittler Prize awarded by the American Philosophical Association for outstanding contributions to philosophy of the social sciences, the 2024 Dr. Martin R. Lebowitz and Eve Lewellis Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement and Contribution, awarded by Phi Beta Kappa and the American Philosophical Association (awarded jointly with Cornell philosopher Kate Manne), and was shortlisted for the Nayaf Al-Rodhan Prize for Transdisciplinary Philosophy, awarded by the Royal Institute of Philosophy in the UK.

All of these awards were for his work on dehumanization. He is frequently interviewed in the national and international media on dehumanization, race, racism, national and international affairs, and related topics. He has given presentations at such venues as the 2012 G20 economic summit, where he spoke on dehumanization and mass violence.

Before transitioning to philosophy, Smith was a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and Freud scholar, and director of the MA program in psychotherapy at Regent’s College in London, England. Smith is a professor of philosophy at the University of New England in Maine, and he will be spending the 2026/27 academic year as the Tage Danielsson Professor at Linköping University, in Sweden.

You can find links to his books and published works here and for his Substack, go to Dehumanization Matters.

Thank you to everyone for supporting this work.

****

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 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

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.

🤍

🤍

Subscribe now

When I interviewed Professor David Livingstone Smith for my recent Hot Type column in Byline Times, I knew I had hit a rich vein and that there was much more work to be done.

Byline Times

Hot Type: 'They Walk Among Us' — Trump's Dehumanizing Propaganda

Read more

10 days ago · 61 likes · 4 comments · Heidi Cuda

Thankfully, the philosopher and writer on the subject of dehumanization agreed to allow me to interview him for what is turning into my next vital series: Understanding Dehumanization.

The subject matter is so important, I am rebooting the Bette Dangerous Podcast. In Ep94, we debut Part 1 of the series, where Smith lays out in very clear language what dehumanization is and how it is weaponized.

To center yourself in advance of listening to the podcast, I asked him for his boiler plate definition of dehumanization:

When I asked him how he defines fascism, he said he thinks “it’s wrong to think of fascism as an all-or-nothing affair. Political movements can be fascistic to a greater or lesser degree. That said, there are various typical features of fascist movements/regimes. I set these out in my substack essay: ‘Just how fascist is the Trump regime?’”

Dehumanization Matters

Just How Fascist is the Trump Regime?

Ten years ago when I began to say that Trump is fascist, most of my friends thought I was being silly. Times have changed. Nowadays it’s very common for opponents of the regime to call Trump and his enablers. Still, some demure, and those who invoke the fascist label often don’t have an accurate understanding of what fascism really is. They conflate fa…

Read more

4 months ago · 14 likes · 4 comments · David Livingstone Smith

Please take 40 minutes and listen to our podcast interview.

A print report featuring excerpts from Understanding Dehumanization, Part 1 to follow.

And save the date: Smith will be our guest at Bette’s Happy Hour on June 30, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern. Look for an invite next week (there will be no Happy Hour on June 23).

Guest Bio:

Described as “a philosopher seeking not just to interpret the world, but to change it” by the Times Literary Supplement, Smith is the author of 10 books. He won the 2012 Anisfield-Wolf Prize for nonfiction (awarded jointly with Yale historian David Blight), the 2023 Joseph B. Gittler Prize awarded by the American Philosophical Association for outstanding contributions to philosophy of the social sciences, the 2024 Dr. Martin R. Lebowitz and Eve Lewellis Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement and Contribution, awarded by Phi Beta Kappa and the American Philosophical Association (awarded jointly with Cornell philosopher Kate Manne), and was shortlisted for the Nayaf Al-Rodhan Prize for Transdisciplinary Philosophy, awarded by the Royal Institute of Philosophy in the UK.

All of these awards were for his work on dehumanization. He is frequently interviewed in the national and international media on dehumanization, race, racism, national and international affairs, and related topics. He has given presentations at such venues as the 2012 G20 economic summit, where he spoke on dehumanization and mass violence.

Before transitioning to philosophy, Smith was a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and Freud scholar, and director of the MA program in psychotherapy at Regent’s College in London, England. Smith is a professor of philosophy at the University of New England in Maine, and he will be spending the 2026/27 academic year as the Tage Danielsson Professor at Linköping University, in Sweden.

You can find links to his books and published works here and for his Substack, go to Dehumanization Matters.

Thank you to everyone for supporting this work.

****

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 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

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.

🤍

🤍

Subscribe now

At the 2025 Byline Festival, I was introduced to the Mayor of Greater Manchester, England, Andy Burnham. Byline Times co-founder, Peter Jukes, told me, “You have to go hear him speak.” Whispers in that July heatwave that Burnham could be the future leader of the Labour Party and even Prime Minister.

Byline Times

Hot Type: Musings from the Green Room

“You still didn’t answer my question,” said Peter Jukes, over dinner at the Sneyd Arms pub near Keele University in Staffordshire last Saturday night…

Read more

a year ago · 31 likes · 7 comments · Heidi Cuda

I recall the goodness of his speech — the themes of truth and democracy, decency and the ‘duty of candour’ for public servants. Words as balms on ears weary of ugly division.

So when I woke up to a flurry of headlines from my colleagues at Byline Times about Makerfield voters rejecting ‘Nigel Farage’s Politics of ‘Pure Cold Rage’ I heard Marci Shores’s words in my head: “it’s time for the good guys start winning.” One down.

Makerfield voters chose their new MP — they chose Labour’s Andy Burnham.

As Byline Political Editor Adam Bienkov wrote in today’s Byline Times:

In the end it wasn’t even close.

After a campaign in which the British press focused relentlessly on the question of whether or not Rupert Lowe and the far-right would somehow “gift” the result to Labour, Andy Burnham won the Makerfield by-election by a massive majority of over 20 points.

The result marks not just a clear rejection of the politics of “pure cold rage” called for by Nigel Farage during the campaign, but also a rejection of the cosy media consensus that his party is somehow inevitably heading for Government…

Reform’s candidate was an ill-prepared bigot whose long history of misogynistic comments played terribly amongst voters in the constituency…

Byline Times columnist Peter Oborne’s headline read:

Oborne wrote:

Andy Burnham’s return to Westminster creates a new political arithmetic. It opens a fresh set of political horizons. It gives hope not just to Labour but to Britain…Andy Burnham will be in Downing Street soon. He can succeed and anyone who loves Britain will hope he does so.

But he can only succeed by adopting a new kind of politics. And that means turning the clock back 50 years.”

Labour MP Clive Lewis wrote in today’s Byline Times:

At the last Constituency Labour Party meeting, I told members that the future of Labour hinged on Makerfield. Not just the party. The Government too.

If Reform UK won this heartland seat, a place Labour had already been told it had lost, its victory would not stop there. It would harden the story Reform wants the UK to believe: that the old Labour towns have gone; that the ‘Red Wall’ has collapsed; and Nigel Farage’s party is no longer a protest vehicle but the next force in British politics.

That is why the by-election mattered.

In his victory speech, Burnham pledged to “lay out a new path for Britain,” a speech largely seen as a pitch to become the next Prime Minister.

I think often about the power of the independent press — how the Byline Times effectively ended the career of Boris Johnson by relentlessly reporting on the PartyGate scandal, until his lawbreaking excesses during Covid could not be ignored.

In a post-election Substack live with Byline Podcast host Adrian Goldberg, he called it: ‘A triumph over hate.

I immediately adjusted my headline.

****

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 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

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.

🤍

🤍

Subscribe now

The promise of utopia never came. The cult of the genius tech bro delivered surveillance and despair, while we make monthly payments for our walled tech prisons.

Byline Times

Suspended from X.Com: The Cult of the Genius Tech Bro

The author of this article was permanently banned from the site formerly known as Twitter for this comment on the basis it may “threaten, incite, glorify or express a desire for harm or violence”. In light of this ludicrous decision we are reposting the art…

Read more

3 years ago · 85 likes · 3 comments

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. We were promised a connected future, which would be a great equalizer for humanity. And maybe it still could be, in different hands. Elon Musk is openly a Nazi, openly throwing his arm in the air, while throwing elections on behalf of authoritarian cells. And because laws were written for a different era, instead of being on trial at The Hague, he becomes the first trillionaire.

But an interesting thing happened on the way to technofeudalism. Europe is fighting back, which explains why the EU and UK are the target of billionaire owners of social media companies cruelly using their algorithms to spread disinformation about immigration and crime in Europe, with the hope of stirring civil unrest so voters kill their democracies.

Europe, however, continues to punch technofacsists in the face.

Not only is France the first country to arrest a tech CEO, but its recent raid on Twitter’s Paris office reveals they are not playing games.

The reports above reveal the myriad ways Europe is reigning in tech, including countries banning social media for users under the age of 16. This is important because, despite the clever youth who will find away around the ban, it makes a statement that this is something that is bad for you.

Germany’s Google Smackdown

But it’s the latest ruling out of Germany that offers the potential to profoundly thwart tech’s free rein of disinformation terror, waged with no restraint since the beginning of the internet.

Judges in Bavaria just drew a clear distinction between typical search engine results and AI-generated overview summaries.

They ruled that tech giants themselves are responsible for the content of answers provided by AI.

On Friday, a Munich court ruled that Google can be held directly liable for false answers generated by its AI overview, a feature that began appearing recently and led to an apocalyptic decline in news site hits.

According to DW:

“The legal dispute had centered on whether the service should receive the same legal treatment as conventional search results. The court firmly rejected Google’s argument. It ruled that the AI ​​summary does not merely display or link to search results but constitutes distinct content attributable to the search engine operator.”

Google’s defense pointing to case law, which had traditionally protected tech companies from direct liability from third-party content.

But the German court found previous case law did not apply to Google’s new AI tool, “because AI ​​summarizes results in its own words, evaluates their content, and presents them in a structured format, the judges ruled that Google creates entirely new, independent statements that go beyond mere links,” DW reported.

Google attempted to argue that users could verify the sources and that users should know that “AI-generated information should not be trusted blindly.”

The judges also rejected that defense, suggesting that AI overview comprised “a self-contained statement with independently comprehensible content.”

Google is filing an appeal in the Germany court.

The case was sparked by two Munich publishers, which were falsely identified as being tied to scams and fraud without any evidence links. Google’s AI Overview had conflated the publishers with real scam companies, and when the publishers sent Google a cease-and-desist letter, Google was unresponsive.

Another key outcome from the court ruling is the judges determined that AI-generated content does not have free speech protection, declaring that it’s “not the expression of an acquired conviction of the persons expressing it, but the result of an algorithm.”

Germany has strong laws against hate speech, an anti-fascist police force, and its pro-Russian extremist party could be banned.

As I recently reported:

In Germany, the far-right Europe of Sovereign Nations party, the home of the pro-Russian extremists Alternative for Germany, could be outlawed for failing to uphold EU values.

Politico reported that the Brussels-based “watchdog that oversees European political parties triggered a process that could result in the ESN being stripped of its right to be a political party and losing its funding… The watchdog monitors whether political parties and foundations comply with the EU that rules require parties to uphold the Union’s core values — including “respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and human rights, including the rights of minorities” — as enshrined in Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union.”

In an accompanying 300-page letter, the watchdog spotlights Bulgaria’s Revival, saying it cooperates openly with Putin’s United Russia party, as well as accusing it of being behind violent protests in Sofia and attacks against the European Commission delegation in February 2025.

The letter also highlights a decision by the German intelligence services in May 2025 to classify the AfD party as a right-wing extremist organization.

The days of inaction for hate peddling and disinformation could be coming to an end, as the Google ruling has the pontential of creating a tsunami of action in other lawful countries.

According to a Decoder report on the ruling:

“Even a 91 percent accuracy rate means millions of wrong answers. The Munich ruling goes far beyond this one case. An analysis by AI startup Oumi for the New York Times found that Google’s AI Overviews with the current Gemini 3 model answered correctly 91 percent of the time.

That’s solid enough for everyday use by most people. But at Google’s scale, it still means millions of wrong answers every hour. If enough of that wrong content defames companies or individuals, it could become a serious legal problem not just for Google but for other providers of similar services like ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity. The Oumi analysis also found that 56 percent of the correct Gemini 3 answers couldn’t be backed up by the sources Google linked. The AI is giving answers whose origins users can’t trace.”

In this fight for the very survival of democracy moving into the future, we need this kind of thinking, resulting in updated laws for a new era.

This ruling isn’t just about Google — it puts every AI company on notice.

****

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 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

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.

🤍

🤍

Subscribe now

I woke up this morning to a message from Marci Shore with the following quote from Czech philosopher Ladislav Hejdánek:

Here is the English translation:

The liars who are earth’s scourge today are already sealing their fate.

This quote was the perfect introduction to what I had in mind to write this morning: that those who are still denying Russia’s attacks on the democratic world may have an incentive.

In Part 1 of my Q&A with Russia watcher and author Keir Giles, he explained that those who continue to maintain a fiction about Russia may do so “because it is the guarantee of (their) livelihood.”

He told Bette Dangerous:

“Well, there is, of course, a long tale from Moscow’s very successful efforts to paint themselves as different from the Nazis, through the efforts of the international left, which had an interest in pretending that they were not associated with the totalitarian regime. And so it would buy into the fictions, that these were two different places, that the Soviet Union was benign, and did not have concentration camps. Whereas anybody that cared to look knew perfectly well that they were each as bad as each other.

But, of course, when you have a strong interest in maintaining a fiction, because it is the guarantee of your livelihood, or because, if you don’t, you will challenge the basic principles that you claim that you are standing up for, then, of course, you’re going to turn a blind eye to anything which contradicts the narrative that you bought into.”

Keir is based in the UK, where a Russian warship just fired shots at a retired British couple on a yacht in the English Channel.

This happened on Tuesday, a day after the BBC broke the news that Russia was behind the multiple assassination attempts in the form or arson attacks on Keir Starmer’s properties.

These are just two headlines in thousands, that expose Russia’s ongoing provocations against the West.

Byline Times

The Rolling Insurrection: How Putin is Waging a Covert War Against the West

Russia knows it can’t win on the battlefield with the West, so is engaging in covert activity to present the message that liberal democracies are failing, according to a Byline Supplement analysis…

Read more

3 years ago · 69 likes · 2 comments · Heidi Cuda and Matt Bernardini

On Sunday, British forces seized a sanctioned Russian-linked oil tanker in the English Channel, dealing with Prime Minister Keir Starmer described “another blow to Russia and reminds those fuelling Putin’s war in Ukraine that we will not let them hide.” Just two weeks earlier, France intercepted a sanctioned oil tanker — part of Russia's shadow fleet — with UK support.

These latest events come on top of ongoing Russian sabotage — the deliberate cutting of undersea data and electricity cables in the North Atlantic, Baltic Sea, and near Taiwan — hybrid warfare aimed at testing Western vulnerabilities and response. This, in addition to the drone attacks in EU countries like Poland and Romania, and the increasing use of gig worker espionage.

The upside to the increasing exposés on Russian attacks is there is now enough evidence for even the casual observer that Russia is targeting all remaining democracies — most evident in the war in Ukraine, where soldiers take direct aim at civilians, but also increasingly evident in the Kremlin-aligned regime in the US, which continues offering Moscow and Beijing once undreamed of favors as it behaves like a drunken brawler.

So when you encounter not only denialism of the Russian menace, but also politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene appearing on RT or Anna Paulina Luna giving tours to the Duma, you might want to consider if their livelihoods are some how reliant on Moscow.

When I decided to go with An ‘Extraordinary Passivity’ as the title of Part 1 of my Q&A with Keir, it was because I wanted to challenge those who are sleepwalking.

The Bette community is a community of action — of doers and defenders. But the enormity of America’s destruction — systematic, methodical, comprehensive, and meticulous — must be met with a scaled up response.

In part, that will include neutralizing the efficacy of Russian propagandists — and not just the obvious ones — Andrew Tate, Candace Owens, Benny Johnson, and Tucker Carlson.

But let’s also take a hard look at JD Vance, Elon Musk, Robert Kennedy Jr, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, and of course, Donald Trump.

The moves they are making are knocking the foundation out from under the US, which is profoundly beneficial to Moscow.

****

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 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

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.

🤍

🤍

THIS EVENT BEGINS IN 30 MINUTES.

Subscribe now

An innate adventurous spirit defines our next guest, Lorenzo Turchi, who joins us today, Tuesday, June 16, 11 am Pacific for Bette’s Happy Hour (our bi-monthlyish Sunday Speakeasys will resume later in summer, when my travel schedule slows). Members will find the registration below the paywall. If you are not yet a member and would like to join our conversations, please do so here:

Subscribe now

I met Lorenzo at a restaurant in the famed Piazza della Signoria in Florence, Italy, a lush town square adorned with statues that live outside the Uffizi — a museum where you can study Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and epic Caravaggios, including his famed Medusa. Among the statues in the Piazza is a reproduction of Michelango’s David — you can see the real one in the Galleria dell’ Accademia di Firenze just a short distance away.

I believe the waiters of Europe are the official ambassadors for each of their countries, and my husband and I struck up a conversation with Lorenzo, a sommelier at a restaurant in the square overlooking the David repro.

He told us about how two broken feet (from two separate scooter accidents) led him to writing a book about Tibetan genocide and our friendship formed from there.

Lorenzo writes a travel blog at lorenzinoontheroad. I invite you to scroll through his site — the photos are stunning and you can easily translate it into English.

He writes:

As I listened to his stories, his travels from country to country to seek out indigenous tribes and learn from their cultures — a desire he gained from his dad who traveled the US to seek out Native American tribes — I knew I had to bring him on Bette.

He set about to translate his Tibet book in English for us (you can find a link below), and I also asked him to tell us about his travel writing from Tuscany. You can find a link to his book The Wineries of Tuscany, also below.

On the back cover, he writes:

Forget the guides that send you where everyone already goes.

This is the Tuscany of wine seen by someone who lives it every day: a Florentine sommelier who takes you to the small producers, at the end of the gravel roads, where the person filling your glass is the very one who made that wine with their own hands.

Eight territories - from Dante’s Vernaccia to Brunello, from the two Chianti to the Super Tuscans of Bolgheri - with the stories no one tells you, the producers chosen one by one, and how to reach them from Florence.

No cold lists, no invented experiences.

Just real wine and the honest voice of someone who lives in this land.

And here is a summary about his “Tibet & The Lama” book:

At twenty-three, Lorenzo left Italy alone. No plan, no group, no safety net. China first — Beijing, Xi'an, Lijiang — then deeper, always deeper, until the Tibetan plateau.

This is not a travel book. It is a testimony. A raw, unfiltered account of a young man walking through one of the most politically charged places on earth, trying to understand what he sees without pretending to have answers.

He writes about Tiananmen's engineered silence, about monasteries turned into tourist attractions, about pilgrims praying to a broken god. About the Panchen Lama's empty golden throne — a six-year-old child kidnapped in 1995, never seen again. About a people already divided by centuries of internal wars, then finished off by tanks.

But this is also a deeply personal book. Two broken feet, years later, forced him to finally write what he had been carrying since that journey. The result is something between a diary, a political essay, and a confession — intimate and brutal at the same time.

"A people imperfect, massacred by invaders who believed themselves perfect."

Here, he describes himself:

Solo traveler. Writer. Thirty countries, always off the beaten path — Tibet, Palestine, Colombia, Vietnam, tribes of Africa. I write what I truly see, what most people would rather not look at. No filters. With a deep honesty toward myself and toward those who read.

You can find links to his work here:

Tibet book in English: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H2HWTTCR

Tuscany Wineries book: https://www.amazon.it/dp/B0H2Y831ST

His blog: https://lorenzinoontheroad.com

Support/Donate: https://buymeacoffee.com/lorenzinoontheroad

Look forward to seeing many of you today. Please keep scrolling to register.

****

Subscribe now

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 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

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.

🤍

🤍

REGISTER BELOW

Read more

Subscribe now

An innate adventurous spirit defines our next guest, Lorenzo Turchi, who joins us on Tuesday, June 16, 11 am Pacific for Bette’s Happy Hour (our bi-monthlyish Sunday Speakeasys will resume later in summer, when my travel schedule slows). Members will find the registration below the paywall. If you are not yet a member and would like to join our conversations, please do so here:

Subscribe now

I met Lorenzo at a restaurant in the famed Piazza della Signoria in Florence, Italy, a lush town square adorned with statues that live outside the Uffizi — a museum where you can study Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and epic Caravaggios, including his famed Medusa. Among the statues in the Piazza is a reproduction of Michelango’s David — you can see the real one in the Galleria dell’ Accademia di Firenze just a short distance away.

I believe the waiters of Europe are the official ambassadors for each of their countries, and my husband and I struck up a conversation with Lorenzo, a sommelier at a restaurant in the square overlooking the David repro.

He told us about how two broken feet (from two separate scooter accidents) led him to writing a book about Tibetan genocide and our friendship formed from there.

Lorenzo writes a travel blog at lorenzinoontheroad. I invite you to scroll through his site — the photos are stunning and you can easily translate it into English.

He writes:

As I listened to his stories, his travels from country to country to seek out indigenous tribes and learn from their cultures — a desire he gained from his dad who traveled the US to seek out Native American tribes — I knew I had to bring him on Bette.

He set about to translate his Tibet book in English for us (you can find a link below), and I also asked him to tell us about his travel writing from Tuscany. You can find a link to his book The Wineries of Tuscany, also below.

On the back cover, he writes:

Forget the guides that send you where everyone already goes.

This is the Tuscany of wine seen by someone who lives it every day: a Florentine sommelier who takes you to the small producers, at the end of the gravel roads, where the person filling your glass is the very one who made that wine with their own hands.

Eight territories - from Dante’s Vernaccia to Brunello, from the two Chianti to the Super Tuscans of Bolgheri - with the stories no one tells you, the producers chosen one by one, and how to reach them from Florence.

No cold lists, no invented experiences.

Just real wine and the honest voice of someone who lives in this land.

And here is a summary about his “Tibet & The Lama” book:

At twenty-three, Lorenzo left Italy alone. No plan, no group, no safety net. China first — Beijing, Xi'an, Lijiang — then deeper, always deeper, until the Tibetan plateau.

This is not a travel book. It is a testimony. A raw, unfiltered account of a young man walking through one of the most politically charged places on earth, trying to understand what he sees without pretending to have answers.

He writes about Tiananmen's engineered silence, about monasteries turned into tourist attractions, about pilgrims praying to a broken god. About the Panchen Lama's empty golden throne — a six-year-old child kidnapped in 1995, never seen again. About a people already divided by centuries of internal wars, then finished off by tanks.

But this is also a deeply personal book. Two broken feet, years later, forced him to finally write what he had been carrying since that journey. The result is something between a diary, a political essay, and a confession — intimate and brutal at the same time.

"A people imperfect, massacred by invaders who believed themselves perfect."

Here, he describes himself:

Solo traveler. Writer. Thirty countries, always off the beaten path — Tibet, Palestine, Colombia, Vietnam, tribes of Africa. I write what I truly see, what most people would rather not look at. No filters. With a deep honesty toward myself and toward those who read.

You can find links to his work here:

Tibet book in English: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H2HWTTCR

Tuscany Wineries book: https://www.amazon.it/dp/B0H2Y831ST

His blog: https://lorenzinoontheroad.com

Support/Donate: https://buymeacoffee.com/lorenzinoontheroad

Look forward to seeing many of you on Tuesday. Please keep scrolling to register.

****

Subscribe now

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 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

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.

🤍

🤍

REGISTER BELOW

Read more

Subscribe now

Author’s note: I introduced the Bette and Byline community to an important voice this weekend, Professor David Livingstone Smith, who helped me with my recent Hot Type column on Trump’s dehumanizing propaganda video:

Smith, a philosophy professor at the University of New England in Maine, has written about Dehumanization for two decades. I urge you to follow his Substack — Dehumanization Matters. I am crossposting his most recent report, On Pogroms, for you to gain in-depth knowledge from an expert on dehumanization on how a single violent event is exploited and weaponized for racial targeting against entire communities, often immigrants, as was the case in Belfast last week.

On a side note, I have been to Belfast, Northern Ireland. I love the people, their passion for justice, and how history feels so present you can touch it. I also see how that passion for justice can be weaponized by hostile foreign states and bad actors working for hostile foreign states. I am grateful for David’s insights, which feel right on time, when we need them most.—hsc

On Pogroms

“Gender, mob violence, and the logic of race”

By David Livingstone Smith, originally published on 11 June 2026

This week, Belfast erupted in an orgy violence, as marauding gangs, egged on by far-right influencers in Britain and abroad, attacked immigrants—or rather people whom they regarded as immigrants—that is, people whose skin has a darker hue than the average resident of Northern Ireland. Victims’ homes were set on fire, with whole families huddling inside for safety. Police intervened, clad in riot and armed with water canons, only to have projectiles hurled at them.

This xenophobic fury was sparked by a knife attack on an Irish man by Hadi Alodid, a Sudanese refugee. The Guardian newspaper reported, “The stabbing happened at about 10.30pm on Monday outside a block of flats in north Belfast. Video shared on social media showed a man straddling another man on the ground and striking at his head and neck. A kitchen knife was recovered from the scene. The victim, Stephen Ogilvie, in his 40s, lost his left eye and had deep lacerations to his face.”

Although it was just one man who committed this vicious crime, the mob’s fury targeted anyone and everyone marked by their appearance, language, or attire, as racially other.

It was a pogrom.

The word “pogrom” is Russian for “wreaking havoc,” and refers to attacks on “alien” communities.

It was first used to describe attacks on Jewish communities in the Russian Empire during the late 19th and early twentieth centuries. It was one such assault that moved my family to to seek safe haven in the United States. My maternal great grandparents, Benjamin and Rivka Eskin, along with their eight children, arrived at Ellis Island in the fall of 1906, with little more than the clothes on their backs. They had fled the city of Gomel (also spelled “Homel”), in present-day Belarus.

There had been a pogrom in Gomel in 1903. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia:

Anti-Jewish outbreaks occurred in Gomel in Sept., 1903. Rumors of impending riots had been circulated in the latter part of the previous month. The trouble arose on Friday, Sept. 11, when a watchman wished to buy from a Jewish woman a barrel of herring worth six rubles for one ruble fifty copecks. In the fight which followed between the Jewish peddlers of the market-place and the Christians who came to the aid of the watchman, one of the Christians was injured and died the same day. The riot was renewed on the following day, and when it had been quelled the town was practically under martial law. Meanwhile a number of anti-Semitic agitators, probably executing the orders of the authorities, inflamed the passions of the mob, exhorting them not to leave their fellow Christians unavenged. On Monday, Sept. 14, about 100 railway employees gathered and began to break the windows and to enter and plunder the houses of the Jews in the poorest quarters of the town, one of which is called “Novaya Amerika” (”New America”). A number of Jews armed and began to defend themselves, but the soldiers prevented them from entering the streets where the plundering was going on, and forced them back to their homes, beating and arresting those who resisted. According to a reliable report, other soldiers and the police looked on in an indifferent way while the mob continued its plundering and committed all kinds of excesses. The shrieks of children could be heard in the streets which the soldiers had blocked against the Jews without; and when some of the Jews tried to force their way down the side-streets, the soldiers fired on them, wounding several among them and killing six….The total number of Jews killed is given as 25; seriously injured, 100; slightly injured, 200. Three hundred and seventy-two Jewish houses and 200 stores were plundered and destroyed.

There have been many pogroms since then. One was in Rosewood, Florida, in 1923. It was sparked by the false accusation by Fannie Taylor, a “White” woman, that she had been assaulted by an escaped African American convict. More than two hundred men attacked the African American town Rosewood, Florida. They killed dozens of its residents—women, men, and children—and burned the whole town to the ground.

The best-known pogrom is the Kristallnacht pogrom (the “Night of Broken Glass”), which convulsed Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland in November, 1938. It was ignited by a homicide.

A seventeen-year-old Jewish boy named Herschel Feibel Grynszpan, a stateless person illegally living in France, lethally shot German diplomat Ernst vom Rath five times in the stomach. Grynszpan was stateless because Polish Jews, including his parents, had been expelled from Germany by the Gestapo. But because Poland had also stripped them of their citizenship, they were in limbo, confined to a makeshift concentration camp cobbled together just across the Polish border.

The Nazi state was quick to take advantage of the situation by orchestrating a mass pogrom, falsely presented as a popular uprising, in which Jewish homes and businesses were vandalized, over a thousand synagogues were set on fire, and twenty-six thousand Jewish men were hauled off to concentration camps.

In 1993, a pogrom erupted in the town of Hadareni, Romania.

Like this week’s Belfast pogrom, this one began with a stabbing. During an altercation, a Roma man stabbed a local non-Roma man. He and two others fled into a nearby house, while a six-hundred strong mob gathered outside, armed with pitchforks, whips, sticks, and other makeshift weapons. The house was doused with gasoline and torched. Two of the men were clubbed to death while trying to flee. A third was burned alive. Their bloodlust not yet sated, the crowd made the rounds of Roma homes, setting fire to at least thirteen of them and vandalizing four more.

You may have noticed a pattern in these four examples. It is not exceptionless, but it is very robust.

Pogroms are triggered when a racialized male commits a real or imagined violent act against a member of the dominant group.

Here’s a puzzle. Pogroms are collective. They target entire communities.

Why does rage against an individual perpetrator trigger violence against a whole group? Why, if an individual perpetrator is the object of their wrath, does the mob extract vengeance on innocent bystanders—men, women, and children who have done nothing wrong?

The answer lays in what is called “the logic of race.”

When a group of people is racialized, every member of the group is assumed to possess a racial essence that makes them a member of a subordinate race. The racial essence is imagined to be an inherent, unchangeable fact about them, located in their “blood” or in their genes.

When a group is racialized in this way, it is almost always the case that the racial essence is supposed to include a disposition to criminality and violence—in other words, members of the racialized group are supposed to be essentially criminal. Jews, Blacks, and Romani people, as well as many others, have been tarred with this brush by their persecutors.

The belief that members of a racialized group are essentially criminal is compatible with they’re never having committed a criminal act. Such people “have it in them” to behave criminally, but whether they actually do so is immaterial in the eyes of their racist overlords. According to the compelling fiction, the disposition is there, simmering right below the surface, poised to burst out if given half a chance.

Because all of the victims of pogroms are deemed to possess a criminal racial essence, they are fungible in the minds of their persecutors. The locus of their criminality is not in what they do. It is in who they are. Their crime is, to paraphrase the title of Michael Berkowitz’s book about the Nazi criminalization of Jews, the crime of their very existence.—David Livingstone Smith for Dehumanization Matters

****

As I reported yesterday in Part 1 of my Q&A interview with Keir Giles,

****

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 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

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.

🤍

🤍

Subscribe now

Author’s note: I had just finished threading a 50-part breakdown of Robert Mueller’s indictments of the Russian nationals who attacked the American election in 2016. This was July 2019, when it was still relatively psychologically safe for me to keep Twitter comments open. I had pulled an all-nighter reading the indictments and when I was finished, I noticed a comment with a link from an account titled “dog_in_clouds”.

Exhausted, I began reading the attachment — The NATO Handbook Of Russian Information Warfare — and knew I had a duty to make this my next thread. What I didn’t know is I was going to meet my next great ally in the fight.

Keir Giles — the author of that handbook — is a Russia watcher, who has authored multiple books on information warfare, including Russia’s War On Everybody: And What it Means for You (Bloomsbury, 2022). Keir is an associate fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House, and worked with the BBC Monitoring Service and the UK Defence Academy.

I have been interviewing Keir ever since that July day, when a Twitter rando (who turned out to be cybersecurity writer) commented on my work, and I gained another incredible source.

This is Part 1 of a two-part interview series with Keir. The interview took place on 11 June 2026. Part 2 will be released when I have the greenlight to report on his upcoming bombshell book.—hsc

An ‘Extraordinary Passivity’ — A Q&A with Keir Giles, Part 1

At our semi-annual pub meeting, author Keir Giles explains why he knew in July 2024 how the American election would turn out, what it would mean for Europe, and why people should be alarmed at the ‘extraordinary passivity’ in the US

Heidi: Great to see you again, in some lovely pub, in an undisclosed location in the United Kingdom.

Keir: We are allowed to say we’re in Rutland, because it doesn’t exist (he points to a ‘Rutland’ map on the wall).

Heidi: Okay, good. Here we go. So I’ve been thinking about the time we met, in July 2024, and we chatted about the long screwdriver.

I found that article recently and was gobsmacked at your prediction. Here’s a quote from that article:

“The nightmare scenario, of course, for Europe is that in the not too distant future, with the return of a Trump presidency, and Trump enacting all of the things that he and his coterie have said they want to do, Europe is actually going to be even more beleaguered because they will be confronted, not with two main authoritarian hostile powers, Russia and China, but three because the United States will actually join them going down that track and following the same principles that drive Beijing and Moscow.”

So, when you said those words, it was before Biden had dropped out of the race, and I suppose I was still in the hopium phase. I thought, for sure, people would wrap their heads around the fact that their choices were an imperfect democracy or some form of fascism, authoritarianism, whatever you want to call it. And that’s not what happened, but you knew that. You predicted that. So let’s start there.

Keir: Yes, I felt quite cruel trying to puncture your bubble, because you were optimistic that things would not go the way they appeared to be going.

You thought that people would see sense and vote against the obvious downsides of a return to Trumpism. But unfortunately, I think that was optimism. And I think it was fairly plain that the system had been captured to such an extent — on top of the millions of Americans who see Trump and like what they see, wanted more of the same, and listened to his promises, and were not dismayed by them — that the chances of any alternative were fairly slim.

Heidi: In that interview, you called it America’s ‘collective amnesia.’ Why do you think there was such amnesia around the fact that Trump appeared to be working in the Kremlin’s interests in his first presidency? What caused the amnesia?

Keir: I’ve had a brief discussion with Craig Unger about this, and his hypothesis, one of his hypotheses, is the taboo about mentioning it in American media, because it has to be pegged to some kind of event.
It has to be pegged to legal proceedings. It has to be overtaken through an investigation. If none of those things is actually happening, then the simple underlying fact of a group of individuals who appear to be pursuing the interests of a hostile power, rather than the United States, is not something that gets reported on it.

And my own theory is that it does appear to be quite difficult from within the United States to get an idea of the totality of what is happening. You see the isolated reporting, the isolated incidents. You see the things that affect you directly, yourself, like the prices, like, if you see an ICE raid, but the actual entirety of it is a very different matter, and that appears to be hard to discern from within the United States.

And even if people do discern it, it’s hard to grasp because of the enormity of it, because of the upending of all of the assumptions that people have held for so long about the nature of the country that they live in. The rug has been pulled from under all of that, and it takes a big mental leap to actually recognize that. I think the amnesia is indeed part of it, but then, of course, that’s not just amnesia of voters, that’s amnesia of the political system. It’s amnesia of the media.

And this was something you might recall I wrote about in the previous book, Who Will Defend Europe, pointing out that one of the reasons why Trumpism was normalized as a political choice was because all of those aspects of it, all of the things that were dangerous for national security, were constrained by the adults in the room in his first term were somehow not being mentioned.

So it was a willful denialism of what the implications of a return to Trump would be, and now we see the result.

Heidi: I have a theory that I actually adopted from a friend in Prague that because the Trump regime does three awful things a day — truly awful things a day, heinous, grotesque, sometimes more than three — people have an inability to even recall what happened the week before or even a day before. I think it’s intentional, and I’d love to know your thoughts on that, because there is this inability to not only grasp the overall picture, but to even remember the horrible thing that happened a week ago.

Keir: Absolutely.

Heidi: Have you seen that before, or what do you think about that?

Keir: We may not be able to know if this is an intentional strategy, or just a by product of the drive to change and to break so much in such a short space of time. They have this side effect that people can’t remember what happened yesterday. But yes, it’s a very discernible pattern. The numbing, the normalization to things which previously would have been outrageous, has been very fast. Think back to the first reporting of the strikes on small boats in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific. There was outrage. Now it’s normalized. It’s on page seven, in a footnote, if it’s mentioned at all.

And that is just one of the many different aspects of things which ought to have been completely unacceptable, but because they happen so fast, and in such volume, they are superseded, they’re swept aside by the latest new thing that shocks people, and so the boundaries are shifted. The parameters for what is normally acceptable expand rapidly.

Heidi: I’m glad you brought that up, because, Rodrigo Duterte is in a cell at The Hague, awaiting trial on November 30, 2026, because of a similar, so-called ‘war on drugs,’ where he’s been accused of thousands of extra-judicial murders.

And you’re right, we’ve pretty much forgotten the fact that Trump did the same thing — illegal killings in a so-called ‘war on drugs.’ But do you think, especially with the Special Tribunal that may be formed — three dozen countries just signed on for the forming of a Tribunal at The Hague for Russian war crimes, and you see Duterte, being tried by the ICC.

Do you think international law has any ability or there’s any promise there that these crimes, which clearly appear to be crimes against humanity, will ever be prosecuted?

Keir: Well, not as a result of any international body of justice. After all, there’s a very good reason why the United States is seeking to neutralize the work of the International Criminal Court, because it brings criminals to justice. And that is not what the United States wants to happen at the moment, particularly if they are Israeli or American. So that’s the reason why these sanctions have immobilized the lives of these ICC judges.

And there won’t be an external means of bringing anybody to account for what’s happening in the United States now.

Whether there’ll be an internal means, of course, depends if there will be a political shift back to where crimes against humanity were outlawed.

Heidi: So that’s pretty much laying it at the feet of the American people, or some sort of opposition party. And I’m not seeing it.

Keir: No.

Heidi: What do you see?

Keir: I see extraordinary passivity. From individuals, from voters, some of whom are protesting, some of whom understand, but in the broad mass, we don’t seem to see a recognition or a response, again, to the enormity of what is happening. We don’t see an appropriate and to scale response. Now, ordinary people may have an excuse for that, particularly if they are already aware of the consequences, the very real and damaging personal consequences that come from speaking up against the regime. However, that does not excuse Democrat politicians. It doesn’t excuse people in positions of authority. Unless, of course, they are among those people who have already been targeted and silenced by threatening their benefits, their welfare, their families, even just their jobs. So that can provide a rationale for keeping your head down and pretending it’s not happening. But it’s no excuse for politicians, who have been elected to safeguard the interests of the country, but are failing utterly to do it.

Heidi: It just seems so cowardly to me. I am sorry. I will be in trauma over the enormous passivity for a very long time, especially because those of us who tried to warn people, as independent reporters, for the last decade, were just abandoned on the battlefield on November 5th, 2024. We were left on our own. They didn’t care. No reinforcements in sight.

Okay, so you wrote Russia’s War on Everybody. I think that you have bravely continued to stay the course from 2016, writing the NATO Handbook of Russian Information Warfare, continuing to be a Russia watcher, putting out Moscow Rules, and Russia’s War on Everybody. And I believe that there is still this terrible veil about Russia in America. But every day, there’s a new headline about Russian spies being caught here in France, or Russian spies in the Netherlands, and all their statecraft and all of their techniques. Why is there not a big movement within Europe looking at what happened in America to actually do something about it? And Estonia, which I wrote about yesterday, thanks in large part to your guidance and Toomas Ilves’ guidance —
they have a blueprint for anybody to follow.

In Estonia, if you’re an RT reporter and you are working with the FSB, you’re in prison. If you are a propagandist politician doing Russia’s work in Estonia, you’re convicted of high treason and you’re in prison.

What is the problem and the disconnect in Europe and European leaders? Why are they not taking this more seriously?

Keir: Well, some are trying. It is not just the front line states that recognize there’s a problem. But it is the front line states that are best equipped legislatively, socially, constitutionally, to deal with it. Other countries still have a long way to catch up, and that is one of the weaknesses of the system, because in Europe, you do have this patchwork of not only different attitudes to threat, but also different fundamental criteria or attributes that you need for dealing with the threat.

And we think back to the so-called Russia report from the UK, Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament back in 2020 — the report that the then conservative government tried very hard to bury. One of the things that was quite startling that the MPs discovered on looking into this, was how wide the loopholes were in British legislation to allow people to act as an agent of a hostile state power against the UK.

So there was no National Security Act. There was no mechanism through which you could prosecute somebody who was working as a propagandist for a hostile country and was being incentivized to carry out subversion. Even the Official Secret Sect, which is the key Espionage Act, had loopholes. It was actually perfectly legal to conduct espionage against the UK on behalf of a foreign power, until you succeeded. But everything up to that point is unprosecuted.

So now that they do have the National Security Act, which came into force in 2024, it’s had an effect. It’s had a visible impact. Some people that we were observing before, who were operating as agents of hostile foreign powers — Russia, China, Iran — have gone quiet. Others have gone abroad. But it’s an indication of how once the gaps are plugged, but that is an inconsistent process across Europe.

So you have a number of different things that are working against this. First of all, recognition of the threat. Only those people in those countries that are actually paying attention and willing to recognize and draw attention to the problem are equipped to deal with it. Second, what do you then do about it? And that is, in terms not only of prosecuting within your country, and dedicating political, capital, and resources to actually tackling the problem, but also the consideration of how you try to make it stop. Is there a way of attempting to deter Russia from doing it anymore?

And that’s where the role of the supernational organizations comes in, NATO and the EU, because any one of these individual countries, be it Estonia, be it Poland, be it the UK, they can only do things about this that are defensive within their own countries. All the Estonian prosecutions you mentioned, if they want to have a deterrent conversation with Moscow, along the lines of ‘stop this or bad things will happen to you,’ they can’t do it on their own. They need to have the backup from the major allies, from NATO, from the EU.

Even if in an ideal world from the United States, which they’re not now going to get, without that, they can’t take on the job of challenging Russia as individual nations. So, there were reasons why things are not happening in response. None of them is a particularly good reason. None of them is unresolvable, but all of them together have held back Europe’s ability to deal with the problem.

Heidi: You see your long screwdriver thesis really playing out in the immigration narratives, the riots that are happening, anywhere you see inflammatory situations that involves race, you see it happening and firing up throughout Europe. And looking at the UK and looking at France in particular, how do you see Russia putting that long screwdriver in and cranking things up through its various proxies? For example, Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk’s father are currently in Moscow. Andrew Tate’s in Moscow. Candace Owens — these obvious propagandists, conspiracy flamethrowers — in France, you have an election coming up, where both far left and far right are pro-Russian. You see what’s going on. You know how these moves work.
Maybe you can kind of guide us on what people could be looking for. I’m very worried about France and, of course, worried about the UK.

Keir: This is not something I’m following very closely lately, so I only see it when it is the most obvious and clear demonstration that the propagandists are not deterred by the fact that they’re being directly associated with Russia.

So, Tommy Robinson, sitting in Moscow, apparently, not seeing this is a problem. which means plainly it isn’t for the followers of his who agree with him. They don’t see associating with the country’s primary adversary to be an issue, which is obviously going to erode his credibility with any broader audience, but if it is totally accepted within the people that already listen to him, that is alarming.

But we shouldn’t also underestimate, of course, the anger at politics and the results of immigration that is entirely homegrown and does not need encouragement from the outside. Anger at the British government and successive British governments, let’s not forget, always, over decades, for the things that they have done to the country, which nobody would have accepted if they were given the option (but) if Russia sees an opportunity to make something worse than it is likely to take it.

Heidi: As a longtime Russia watcher, why do people not know that Russia was essentially, participating in slavery from the very beginning of the Soviet era in that they had these forced labor camps where people were working 10 to 14 hour days and being starved and dying — for decades. I just finished reading Gulag Archipelago, and it seems to me that there’s an awareness of what happened in Nazi Germany. And yet, there’s almost no awareness of what was happening under Stalin to people.

Whether we’re talking about manmade famines, or, the Executed Renaissance, or these forced labor camps. Why does Russia always seem to get a pass, particularly on the left, which still sees it as some sort of counterweight to American imperialism. I don’t understand.

Keir: Well, there is, of course, a long tale from Moscow’s very successful efforts to paint themselves as different from the Nazis, through the efforts of the international left, which had an interest in pretending that they were not associated with the totalitarian regime. And so it would buy into the fictions, that these were two different places, that the Soviet Union was benign, and did not have concentration camps. Whereas anybody that cared to look knew perfectly well that they were each as bad as each other.

But, of course, when you have a strong interest in maintaining a fiction, because it is the guarantee of your livelihood, or because, if you don’t, you will challenge the basic principles that you claim that you are standing up for, then, of course, you’re going to turn a blind eye to anything which contradicts the narrative that you bought into.

Heidi: Wow, thank you, you always have just such a way about you. My last question for Part 1 relates to a Tom Stoppard quote from Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead:

“There must have been a moment - at the beginning - where we could have said no, but somehow we missed it.”

If you could just kind of give an overview on where the West entirely went wrong on underestimating the threat from Russia, because I believe the loss of America is just such a terrible sorrow, a crisis for the world, and it may be that the way of life we’ve known is over. And I think it’s because of a lack of response to Russia’s threat. When did we take our eye off the ball with Russia?

Keir: 1991. The assumption that ‘this was now a different country, inhabited with different people, all of whom held different ideas, and a different understanding of what their country was and its relationship with the West, and, therefore, everything would have changed,’ this assumption persisted long after the evidence started to become undeniable that this was not the case.

And if you think back to what a lot of people treat as a turning point in Russia’s relationship with the West, the Putin speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, where people were surprised, but only if they hadn’t been paying attention to anything that Putin had been saying or doing over the previous seven years he’d been in power. And this was already 16 years after the West had bought into the idea that Russia was now a friend, a partner, a different country, you could work with. So the amount of time that has gone by, during which anybody that was paying attention, was warning of what was going to happen, shouldn’t be underestimated. It is decades over which this has been playing out. And because that is decades of inaction, we’re now in a very, very much worse situation than if the problem had been recognized much earlier.

Heidi: Is there any Deus ex machina (God from the machine)? Anything you can think of that could get the Democratic world out of this jam?

Keir: No, it’s going to take long, hard work, and be expensive, and difficult, and lives will have to change, and all of those are part of the reasons why no action has yet been taken.

(End Part 1)

****

2016 Election Attack — The Book!

American Monsters — The Book — Buy Here!

Donations Welcome

****

Related:

****

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

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.

🤍

🤍

Subscribe now

Our hosts this month have books stacked floor to ceiling, in every room of their house in the country. They are, of course, brilliant, because in every conversation, regardless of the topic, they say: “So and so wrote a book about that, you should really read it.” And their wisdom spans centuries. In the evening, over a home-cooked meal, candlelight, and a vinyl spinning folk or jazz, I learn.

Walking past one pile of books, stacked on the seat of a bay window in a hallway landing, I grabbed a copy of “The Daily Henry James: A Year of Quotes.” By the second sentence of the first entry in January, which contained the phrase, “dusky undulations,” I began to wonder if I am actually a writer.

In life, you are only in competition with yourself, a lesson I learned a quarter century ago. Nevertheless, James is a master.

Here is the quote for January 1, from Ivan Turgénieff, 1878:

His sadness has its element of error, but it has also its larger element of wisdom. Life is, in fact, a battle. On this point optimists and pessimists agree. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night; we wake up to it again forever and ever; we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it. We can welcome experience as it comes, and give it what it demands, in exchange for something which is idle to pause to call much or little so long as it contributes to swell the volume of consciousness. In this there is mingled pain and delight, but over the mysterious mixture there hovers a visible rule, that bids us learn to will and seek to understand.—Henry James, 1878

Oh the glory of words on a page! Words on a page! Celebrate them!

I wrote last week how the authoritarians have a distinct advantage in the US, because people stopped reading books. The fastest way to overthrow the grotesques currently in power is to read, and read, and read… and then read some more. Any day now, I will have a report on Keir Giles’ new book, and I will then beg you to read it!

The Bette Dangerous community is more literate than most — our community events are actually a book club, as this Tuesday’s Happy Hour can attest.

But due to the unfolding tragedy of our times, I am forced to turn my pen toward the ugly and the cruel, in my duty to warn against and document the crimes against humanity unfolding in front of our eyes.

I take this duty seriously, which is why I dedicated my Hot Type column in Byline this week to the dehumanizing propaganda video delivered by Trump’s White House.

Byline Times

Hot Type: 'They Walk Among Us' — Trump's Dehumanizing Propaganda

Read more

12 days ago · 50 likes · 3 comments · Heidi Cuda

It is always an honor to do this work with the great team at Byline Times and Byline Supplement, among the last of the independently owned newspapers.

It’s an honor to make the front page and to have a voice in this time, where I can share the wisdom of the scholars and experts, whose words I mine so we can all better understand the implication of current events.

Below, I am cross-posting Saturday’s column. Please share the original report from Byline and thank you as always for your support of the Byline team and my work here.

Hot Type: ‘They Walk Among Us’ — Trump’s Dehumanizing Propaganda

Heidi Siegmund Cuda reports on how a truly shocking official video released by the Trump White House conflates undocumented workers with ‘aliens’ – a horrifying new twist on an old fascist playbook

Published originally in the Byline Times and Byline Supplement magazine, June 13, 2026.

I apologized in advance as I sent the new White House ‘Alien’ video to a group of thinkers I’ve come to rely on as I do this work. I generally don’t spread Donald Trump’s vicious propaganda, and I view US Government websites now as I view .ru sites – with caution.

But when intellectual historian Dr Marci Shore sent the video to me, I understood the urgency to get out ahead of it and warn viewers of the dehumanizing strategy being launched by the White House in plain sight.

Here is a sampling of the horror-wording from the video, which mimics the style of vintage SciFi:

“For 60 years, the US government has kept a closely guarded secret. Aliens have been walking among us, living in our neighborhoods, and interacting with us in our daily lives. They’ve shopped in the same stores, attended the same classes as our children, and lived seemingly normal human existences. With one exception — they do not belong here.

“Millions arrived under the cover of darkness and embedded themselves directly into our society. Countless presidents, congressmen, and senior officials knew exactly what was happening. Instead of protecting American citizens, they chose to cover it up and even accelerate the invasion. Until one man finally had the courage to tell the truth. Bold. Unapologetic. Unafraid. President Trump was the first to call out the real danger Aliens pose to every American family, every community, and the future of our nation.”

“Trump and his lackeys have been indulging in dehumanizing rhetoric for years, but his latest atrocity takes things to a new level, one that Hitler would be immensely proud of,” wrote David Livingstone Smith, a professor of philosophy at the University of New England in Maine.

Smith’s work focuses on dehumanization, particularly in relation to race and genocide. He told Byline Times he sees this latest push from the White House as “every bit as frightening as the propaganda that was churned out by past fascist regimes to justify and motivate genocidal violence.”

Clearly, the push by Trump’s Government to “declassify” information about UFOs and aliens is part of an operation to conflate immigrants who are being targeted by the regime with alien life forms.

“It was all to pave the way for the Trump regime’s newest and vilest dehumanization of another kind of ‘alien’—not little green men, but brown and black ones,” said Smith, who has warned of Trump using the Nazi playbook since 2015.

“It feels like the postmodern internet version of Mein Kampf: playing on Unheimlichkeit, fears of aliens slyly disguising themselves as humans, hiding among us,” Dr Marci Shore told Byline Times.

“During the Great Terror, Stalin also liked to talk about ‘enemies of the people masking themselves.’ There’s nothing subtle about the fearmongering and the dehumanization here — including the use of the impersonal pronoun ‘it.’ It’s so over-the-top as to be absurd — and yet somehow here we are, this is an official White House website.”

A prominent theme from the video — written in horror green lettering — reads: “They walk among us.”

“This immediately conjures up the prototypically dehumanizing image of dangerous subhumans disguising themselves as humans to infiltrate our world,” said Smith. “We find it in both anti-Black and Nazi antisemitic ideology. The 17th century English cleric Morgan Godwyn reported that apologists for slavery confided to him that ‘the Negros, though in their Figure they carry some resemblances of Manhood, yet are indeed no Men.’ Likewise, the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt remarked ‘Not all of those who appear human are in fact so. Woe to him who forgets it!’”

And the dehumanizing money shot can be found in these final words from the video:

“If you’ve witnessed an Alien abduction, do not be alarmed. The Alien is in good hands. We will take care of it… and return it safely to its place of origin.”

As Shore and Smith noted, the ‘alien’ is now an “it” — a subhuman.

“The tormentors of undocumented immigrants – the ICE thugs – are pictured as benign caretakers, who want only to capture and release the subhuman creature—the invasive species—back into its natural environment,” explained Smith.

Craig Unger, America’s premiere investigative reporter on all things Trump-Russia and Trump-Epstein-Russia, told Byline Tmes : “‘Dehumanizing’ is precisely the right word and that it is deliberately dehumanizing with the intention of making you see immigrants as other than human, it’s offensive on so many levels. I just watched the site after reading Paul Krugman’s column in which he reports that one of the great problems with funding social security is that the Government has kicked out so many immigrants, who were gainfully employed taxpayers, who were paying into social security but who are now gone.”

For a decade, Trump’s rise in America was often misdiagnosed as a clown show, but the cruelty of his actions and words cannot be misconstrued anymore – he is normalizing genocidal rhetoric as he ‘disappears’ our neighbors.

“There is no arguing with the fascism of the Trump regime,” political philosopher Dr Michael MacKay told Byline Times. “There’s no point in talking about how immigrants and refugees built the United States. It’s useless to demonstrate that the ‘othering’ of a group of people is inhuman and un-American… Immigrants and refugees are not alien to the American body politic – Trump and the MAGA cultists are.”

Vienna-based disinformation analyst Dietmar Pichler told Byline Times that the “‘Alien’ Hollywood-style colors and fonts are intentionally deployed to conjure a sense of extraterrestrial life forms that attack Earth. The dehumanizing submessage is quite obvious.”

But he pointed out how the design reminds him “of the early Internet days, conspiracy theory websites and ‘tinfoil hat’ news pages, which were always very anti-Government.” He noted the style is commonly associated with “a small far-right populist opposition party in Europe,” and how he sees it as fundamentally designed to create further polarization in US society, with the storytelling element thwarting the ability to have “fact-based, objective discussion.”

In other words, as with the QAnon conspiracy, it’s a psychological operation designed to break reality. That the ‘Alien’ operation is being run on the American people from the highest office in the United States shows a “degraded” White House culture, according to religious scholar Dr Matthew Taylor, author of the forthcoming book Defying Tyrants.

“This reeks of the sort of casually cruel, mirthless humor that has become standard in right-wing propaganda,” he said. “Put simply, the White House is legendarily a realm of sobriety and consequential decision making. That it could be weaponized as a platform for this sort of xenophobic trolling signals just how degraded the internal culture of the second Trump presidency has become.”

David Livingstone Smith, who has written three books on dehumanization, is sounding a global alarm: “I cannot begin to convey to you how dangerous this is. It’s not just some political bad weather that future elections will dispel. We are locked into a precipitous descent into the worst kind of fascist depravity.”

Michael MacKay said the video makes clear the following mandate: “The only task of people of good conscience is to fight the evil of the Trump regime and all its nefarious works.”

****

As always, I am so grateful to the pool of thinkers who offer their time and expertise to help us wade through the suck and as Dr MacKay said, it’s up to us to fight this evil.

An astute reader left this comment on this latest Hot Type report:

There are opportunities to make this backfire quite spectacularly.

After all, Trump, Musk, RFK Jnr & co don’t look exactly “normal”, do they?

Has the US GOVERNMENT been taken over by aliens? It does always seem that they accuse others of their own crimes...—JS

I like this idea, very much.

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

And as Henry James noted:

In this there is mingled pain and delight, but over the mysterious mixture there hovers a visible rule, that bids us learn to will and seek to understand.

Seek and learn! Seek and learn!

Onward and upward.

****

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.

🤍

🤍

Subscribe now

I have a prominent friend who has been very effective at exposing and defeating the worst and cruelest of the far-right policies in her community. She’s managed this for decades. During a speaking engagement, a local blogger came up to her and said: “I was just offered an enormous sum of money to trash you in the media. I turned it down, but someone else is going to take that money.”

As someone with full-time cyber stalkers taking aim at me for a decade, I often wondered why our laws for online abuse were so limply enforced. Online harms are real world harms, sustained psychological abuse and tortious interference are debilitating, but those like me, on the receiving end, learn to simply endure. Our enforcement agencies have gone to the dark side.

When the rare prosecution does occur, it generally involves a high-profile target, as with the case of Fred Gutenberg, whose tormentor was successfully prosecuted.

It was Gutenberg who encouraged me to go the FBI with my file, which I did, more than three years ago.

But the director of the FBI, who sued my podcast partner, is a troll writ large, a Russian propaganda superspreader more comfortable on QAnon podcasts and at keggers, than in halls of justice.

I recall watching JD Vance in the VP debated in 2024, horrified by the deference he was shown by Tim Walz, who normalized the Peter Thiel replicant. Vance was such a grave danger to democracy and in the debate, as he argued that the biggest danger to democracy was censorship, I was documenting how many people were streaming RT in that moment on his Rumble platform.

In a long ago forgotten headline in the Wall Street Journal, it was noted that “Peter Thiel and JD Vance invest in Rumble Video, a platform popular on political right”. Understand, Rumble was transformed into a venal Russian propaganda site. RT, banned in democratic nations for being an arm of Russian military intelligence, was free to stream on Rumble.

Rumble platforms Nazis. Literal Nazis.

And there was JD Vance, in front of the nation, minimizing Russia’s attack on America in 2016 as just “$500,000 worth of Facebook ads.” There he was, repeatedly claiming VP Kamala Harris is censoring free speech.

Why would he do that? What could he possibly have to gain? Why after a month of bombshells on Russian interference would he take the side of Russia? He did so just days after the US State Department declared that “covert influence activities are not journalism.”

Perhaps because on the very day he made that statement, while spitting lie after lie after lie to tens of millions of amnesiatic Americans, RT on Rumble had 23.9 million views of its livestream.

And what did we learn about the internationally banned RT, formerly Russia Today? According to the US State Department, the “Russian government embedded within RT an entity with cyber operational capabilities and ties to Russian intelligence. This cyber entity has focused primarily on influence and intelligence operations all over the world.”

That quote comes from a State Department fact sheet from September 13, 2024 titled: Alerting the World to RT’s Global Covert Activities.

So there, playing nice in front of America, was an enemy combatant, who platforms the most venal elements in society, while offering a safe harbor for Russian intelligence operations.

Estonia Prosecutes Pro-Kremlin Blogger

So as America enabled its freedoms to be exploited by Russian military intelligence and its useful idiots proxies, Estonia took a different approach.

As I wrote yesterday, Estonia offers a profoundly important blueprint — a “total defense” plan — on how to fight Russian aggression.

Estonians know that not only is national security jeopardized when Russian propagandists enter the body politic, but their very democracy is at risk.

Unlike the UK, US, and EU, Estonia doesn’t dither with its pro-Russian politicians, spies, and operatives. It doesn’t give its pro-Russian agitators a pass.

The Baltic country adopted a “zero tolerance for collaboration” policy, which means the state enforces strong anti-collaboration laws and indicts individuals — including financial backers — found to support Russian military forces and interests.

Not only does Estonia prosecute pro-Russian politicians for high treason, but the country also goes after Kremlin-aligned media operatives.

In 2025, an Estonian court sentenced a journalist with ties to Russian state media to six years in prison for treason. A Harju County District Court found that Svetlana Burceva collaborated with a reserve officer from Russia’s FSB security service in actions that threatened Estonia’s “independence and sovereignty.”

In investigating this, I also learned that Estonia is prosecuting a pro-Kremlin blogger.

In November 2025, Estonian authorities prosecuted and detained pro-Kremlin blogger and propagandist Oleg Besedin.

“Detained by the Estonian Internal Security Service (KAPO), Besedin is accused of engaging in activities against the Estonian state, cooperating with Russian intelligence services, participating in information influence operations, and violating international sanctions,” according to a United 24 report. The charges include: non-violent actions directed against the Republic of Estonia — a state crime harming independence and sovereignty and the violation of international sanctions. Investigators said he “operated as a Russian propagandist, repeatedly distributed content from EU-sanctioned Russian media outlets, and cooperated with Russian intelligence starting in 2022.” His trial is set to begin September 15, 2026.

To me, this is a fascinating development that the West must pay attention to. France continues to allow a pro-Russian billionaire to push Kremlin operatives on French citizens, including a former RT propagandist.

The world’s latest trillionaire spent the weekend stoking racial tensions abroad. If you are unfamiliar with Elon Musk’s backstory as useful idiot, start here:

Moldova prosecuted its version of Elon Musk — Ilan Shor — who interfered in the country’s election on behalf of Moscow, and who now is forced to live in Moscow in exile.

We just need to look further over the shores, always, for a way out of fascism taking root in America.

This never was about free speech. It was about whether or not we have the will to defend ourselves from threats to national security and sovereignty.

****

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 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

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.

🤍

🤍

Subscribe now

I will never forget that moment on RadPod, when interviewing political philosopher Dr. Michael MacKay, when he said that America has a really hard time “dealing with actual treason.”

America’s failure to prosecute its domestic traitors is now the world’s problem, as criminals who should have been in prison are free to try to overthrow other democratic nations.

Paul Manafort was just in Albania.

Steve Bannon is taking aim at Ireland.

Donald Trump is taking aim at the whole of Europe by starting wars that benefit Putin, and back European leaders into a corner.

And the thing is, we’ve known this is treason for a decade.

Do you recall when an astute protestor, Ryan Clayton, threw Russian flags at Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump, yelling:

“Trump is treason! Trump is treason! Trump is treason! Why are we talking about tax cuts when we should be talking about treason! This president conspired with agents of the Russian government to steal an election! We should be talking about treason in Congress, not tax cuts!”—Ryan Clayton, Oct. 24, 2017

And Trump kept burying the truth under his minimizing mantra: “Russia! Russia! Russia!”

Even though, Bob Mueller told us different.

I understand that millions of Trump supporters want to be lied to — they want their biases confirmed, and they’d rather lose all their democratic privileges than admit their Orange King is a fraud.

As always, I look for solutions to America’s troubles, which are now the world’s troubles. And I find them always in Estonia, which knows how to prosecute treason.

Estonia has so many lessons for the US, but are we willing to listen?

Estonians know that not only is national security jeopardized when Russian propagandists enter the body politic, but their very democracy is at risk.

Unlike the UK, US, and EU, Estonia doesn’t dither with its pro-Russian politicians, spies, and operatives. It doesn’t give its pro-Russian agitators a pass.

While the UK does nothing to stop Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage, Elon Musk, and JD Vance from stirring up a race war, Estonia counters Russian aggression through what it calls a “total defense” strategy, which includes massive military spending, strict border security to thwart hybrid threats, and closed borders to Russian tourists. Estonia spends about five percent of its GDP on defense, and goes all in on its support of Ukraine.

While France dithers about a pro-Russian media billionaire platforming an RT director, in 2025, an Estonian court sentenced a journalist with ties to Russian state media to six years in prison for treason. A Harju County District Court found that Svetlana Burceva collaborated with a reserve officer from Russia’s FSB security service in actions that threatened Estonia’s “independence and sovereignty.”

The Baltic country adopted a “zero tolerance for collaboration” policy, which means the state enforces strong anti-collaboration laws and indicts individuals — including financial backers — found to support Russian military forces and interests.

High Treason Convictions

In January, an Estonian court sentenced pro-Russian politicians to prison terms for high treason. One of the leaders of the pro-Russian party Koos, Aivo Peterson, was sentenced to 14 years in prison, while Dmitry Rootsi and Russian citizen Andrei Andronov received 11 years. Peterson and Rootsi were found guilty of high treason, while Andronov was convicted of participating in non-violent activities against Estonia.

According to DW Russian, “the court found it proven that Peterson and Rootsi maintained contact with Russian authorities, discussed political cooperation and the creation of a party capable of changing Estonia’s political course. This could have given Russia the opportunity to covertly influence Estonian politics in the future, the court decision states. In addition, Andrei Andronov was involved in organizing press tours to territories of Ukraine occupied by Russia, while Peterson participated in trips and the creation of propaganda materials aimed, in particular, at weakening support for Ukraine in Estonia.”

So, let’s unpack that a bit: Estonia prosecutes Russian subcontractors, because the country understands that they represent a threat not only to national security but its very ability to remain a sovereign nation.

This is important because in the US, we know that Elon Musk communicated with Vladimir Putin in the run up to the 2024 election. We also know that Musk communicated with the Russian agent tasked with running operations to infiltrate Western media. Musk himself operated as a Russian subcontractor in advance of the 2024 election, just as the Congressional representative, Anna Paulina Luna is doing, as she whitewashes Russian war crimes, something that in Estonia could earn her a prison sentence.

Recall how Trump invited Putin on American soil to whitewash his crimes, and then launched an illegal war, which benefits Putin in myriad ways, all this a direct challenge to what remains of international law.

Such acts of out and out treason could never have happened in a place like Estonia, because democracy’s heart is still healthy.

Estonia’s former prime minister, Kaja Kallas, is among the true leaders of the free world.

In addition to prosecuting pro-Russian politicians for treason and not allowing real estate transactions to occur through shell companies where the beneficial owner is unknown, which would have put Donald Trump out of business a long time ago, Estonia takes additional precautions to thwart Russia’s overthrow of its government.

Estonia, which shares a border with Russia, is actively pursuing legal and security measures against Russian nationals responsible for the war crimes in Ukraine, including lobbying for prosecution of Russian leaders for their crimes against humanity.

And rather than give members of the Duma tours like Rep. Luna, Estonia restricted entry for Russian citizens, particularly targeting ex-combatants, and is among the countries at the forefront of battling Russian active measures aimed at tearing apart the fabric of their democracy.

When Estonia stopped issuing visitor visas to Russian citizens in 2022, it helped Estonian security services focus on preventing a Fifth Column from growing inside their borders.

Estonia is among the dozens of countries that joined the ‘Enhanced Partial Agreement on the Management Committee of the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Russia’s Aggression against Ukraine,’ and remain constantly vigilant about Russian threats.

Currently, Russia is pushing propaganda about annexing the border city of Narva, duplicating its 2014 actions in the Donbas region of Ukraine.

According to multiple reports, Narva’s population is largely Russian speaking, making it vulnerable to Russian propaganda, worrying Estonians that “Moscow might succeed in weakening NATO by making the cost of protecting Estonia too high,” according to a report in News Line Magazine that calls Estonia the front line in the new Cold War.

As it pushes for a tribunal that could make rulings even in the absence of the accused, Estonia also took the additional step to ban the entry of 261 Russian nationals who fought in Ukraine, citing national security concerns.

Estonia’s Interior Minister Igor Taro explained that the banned individuals were hostile to Europe, with combat experience and military training, often criminal backgrounds, psychological damage, and that “the threat they pose is not theoretical.” He also warned of their potential ties to organized crime and possible cooperation with Russian security services.

Taro also said that those who committed violence in Ukraine “have no place in the free world.”

Because America did not deal with treason from within, the free world is shrinking, with 74% of the world’s population now living in an autocracy.

Estonia is very small, with a population about the size of San Antonio, Texas, but it knows how to fight these Russians.

They had a lot of practice — it was ground zero for Russian hybrid warfare, when in April and May 2007, Estonia became the target of a coordinated cyber attack. Over a three-week period, government, media, internet providers, banks, and businesses were targeted, predominantly by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS).

It was retaliation for Estonia removing Soviet-era statues.

The attacks prompted the creation of the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Center of Excellence (CCDCOE) in May 2008.

Estonia is a NATO country, at a time when Trump is actively sabotaging NATO and Russia is hinting at annexing Narva.

There is very little time to prosecute these regimes for their crimes against humanity, and prevent the worst from happening.

Other European countries are putting up a fight against Russian aggression: Moldova beat the latest round of Russian interference with unity. It also helps that they convicted their version of Elon Musk — billionaire criminal election meddler, Ilan Shor — for fraud, forcing him to flee to Russia. Moldova even doubled his original sentence to 15 years, for good measure. Romania, too, managed to stop Russia’s TikTok candidate in its latest election. Perhaps enough Romanians still recall the brutality of Ceaușescu. Hungary finally ousted Viktor Orbán, and I do so hope Péter Magyar proves to be who he appears to be. Only time will tell.

In addition to the examples above, the Czech Resistance founded a unit of volunteers called Czech Elves, citizens with military training who monitor and analyze disinformation. They constantly measure the Czech infospace and report on disinformation campaigns.

In Georgia, people facing brutal treatment continue to protest against Russia every night for more than 500 days.

Democracies are supposed to defend their populations from threats, within and without, and instead, it fell on the shoulders of citizens and journalists, forced to do a job that was meant for the military.

For my part, I will keep pushing to grow a movement to get Trump and Putin and their allied thugs to The Hague, which becomes more real with each passing day, as dozens of countries have now signed on for the creation of a new Special Tribunal for Russian war crimes.

The prosecution of Rodrigo Duterte for the same types of crimes Trump committed in the Caribbean also offers a beam of hope. His trial in The Hague is set for November 30, 2026.

We don’t have to continue to be at the receiving end of all this treason if we don’t want to be.

Where are the leaders who will stand up to treason? Right now, they’re in Estonia, lighting the way.

****

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 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

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.

🤍

🤍

Subscribe now

I have multiple strikes against me. I’m a woman, which means that even if I report better and earlier than my male counterparts, it only becomes news when the Big Manly Men report same.

I’m used to it and bear no ill will. It’s just a fact. It really only matters, in that, it makes it more difficult to earn a living. But truly, I’ve always been grateful to simply be in the game, and over the years, I’ve felt a certain comfort flying under the radar.

Another strike is I’m independent. No matter that I spent decades in corporate media — print, television, and even dabbled in radio — winning numerous awards I’ve long since forgotten. But unless you have three all-cap letters after your name — you’re relegated to ‘fringe.’

Personally, I understood that those three letters in the rise of Trump meant a gag order on reality, and I think we are seeing that play out in the demolition of CBS, CNN, etc.

I also understand that being independent is a superpower — I’ve been able to speak truth bluntly to power for a decade unshackled by a corporation or a billionaire’s whims, while my corporate colleagues had to maintain neutrality when fascism was clearly on the march and neutrality only served the oppressor.

I could call it ‘fascism’ from the beginning, and I did.

Here’s me on November 12, 2016, in the first full-scale protest, post-election, calling it fascism.

I could see the parallels in the U.S. to Berlin in the 1930s, and wrote about it, prolifically.

I found women reporters who warned people about the rise of Nazism — most were written out of history, overshadowed by their male counterparts — so I wrote them back in.

Too many of my former colleagues, rather than dig in and do the work, sat politely on their hands, or worse, they put propagandists on camera and called it news. Or even worse than worse, they are now MAGA. I shudder when I see tweets from old colleagues, who went all in on propping up the current criminal occupants of the White House.

Another strike against me is I’m no longer an ingénue — I don’t stare wide-eyed into the camera on TikTok, and I barely have any presence on Instagram. I don’t hold rallies for myself with mega sparklers and zombies like Erika Kirk, and I don’t spew conspiracy theories for profit like what’s her name in Russia.

I’m rapidly approaching the age of the free bus pass and looking forward to grandchildren, which makes me awesome, but the experienced woman is often undervalued, whereas the chippy fluent in yoga babble is exalted.

This was not the post I had planned to write today — that post is coming later — but it’s been on my mind ever since Dr. Marci Shore asked me my opinion on something during our recent Bette’s Happy Hour. Rare is it in my experience that scholars ask an opinion, and I was elated to find out that I had a strong answer — mostly because I’ve interviewed a million experts and read a million books and retained the knowledge. But she is that rare scholar, generous, humble, and awesomely brilliant.

The second amazing thing that happened this week is I got an advance copy of a new Keir Giles book (I promise you’ll be the first to read about it as soon as I have the green-light to report on it). Just for disappointment value, I googled my name in the pdf copy on the off chance I’d been cited. And there it was, a footnote, citing my work in Bette Dangerous. That was a moment, following a moment.

We are so deep in this fight that I am reminding my readers to go out of their way and support the women warriors. Support the men who support the women warriors. Support each and every human willing to stick their necks out and do this work in this grave hour. And as you do, be especially on the lookout for the independent women, who’ve always been there, and cherish them extra.

****

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 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

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.

🤍

🤍

THIS INVITATION INCLUDES A NEW REGISTRATION LINK, SO IF YOU ALREADY TRIED TO REGISTER, PLEASE RE-REGISTER WITH CORRECT LINK BELOW. THANK YOU!

Subscribe now

On a recent visit to Florence, I excitedly told Monique Camarra I had met an Italian author in the Piazza della Signoria, who travels the world in search of indigenous tribes. She told me: “I’m not surprised. Every Italian thinks they’re Christopher Columbus.”

When I recovered from rotfl, she explained how there’s a keen sense of adventure that is inherent in so many Italians.

That innate adventurous spirit defines our next guest, Lorenzo Turchi, who joins us on Tuesday, June 16, 11 am Pacific for Bette’s Happy Hour (our bi-monthlyish Sunday Speakeasys will resume later in summer, when my travel schedule slows). Members will find the registration below the paywall. If you are not yet a member and would like to join our conversations, please do so here:

Subscribe now

I met Lorenzo at a restaurant in the famed Piazza della Signoria, a lush town square adorned with statues that live outside the Uffizi — a museum where you can study Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and epic Caravaggios, including his famed Medusa. Among the statues in the Piazza is a reproduction of Michelango’s David — you can see the real one in the Galleria dell’ Accademia di Firenze just a short distance away.

I believe the waiters of Europe are the official ambassadors for each of their countries, and my husband and I struck up a conversation with Lorenzo, a sommelier at a restaurant in the square overlooking the David repro.

He told us about how two broken feet (from two separate scooter accidents) led him to writing a book about Tibetan genocide and our friendship formed from there.

Lorenzo writes a travel blog at lorenzinoontheroad. I invite you to scroll through his site — the photos are stunning and you can easily translate it into English.

He writes:

As I listened to his stories, his travels from country to country to seek out indigenous tribes and learn from their cultures — a desire he gained from his dad who traveled the US to seek out Native American tribes — I knew I had to bring him on Bette.

He set about to translate his Tibet book in English for us (you can find a link below), and I also asked him to tell us about his travel writing from Tuscany. You can find a link to his book The Wineries of Tuscany, also below.

On the back cover, he writes:

Forget the guides that send you where everyone already goes.

This is the Tuscany of wine seen by someone who lives it every day: a Florentine sommelier who takes you to the small producers, at the end of the gravel roads, where the person filling your glass is the very one who made that wine with their own hands.

Eight territories - from Dante’s Vernaccia to Brunello, from the two Chianti to the Super Tuscans of Bolgheri - with the stories no one tells you, the producers chosen one by one, and how to reach them from Florence.

No cold lists, no invented experiences.

Just real wine and the honest voice of someone who lives in this land.

And here is a summary about his “Tibet & The Lama” book:

At twenty-three, Lorenzo left Italy alone. No plan, no group, no safety net. China first — Beijing, Xi'an, Lijiang — then deeper, always deeper, until the Tibetan plateau.

This is not a travel book. It is a testimony. A raw, unfiltered account of a young man walking through one of the most politically charged places on earth, trying to understand what he sees without pretending to have answers.

He writes about Tiananmen's engineered silence, about monasteries turned into tourist attractions, about pilgrims praying to a broken god. About the Panchen Lama's empty golden throne — a six-year-old child kidnapped in 1995, never seen again. About a people already divided by centuries of internal wars, then finished off by tanks.

But this is also a deeply personal book. Two broken feet, years later, forced him to finally write what he had been carrying since that journey. The result is something between a diary, a political essay, and a confession — intimate and brutal at the same time.

"A people imperfect, massacred by invaders who believed themselves perfect."

Here, he describes himself:

Solo traveler. Writer. Thirty countries, always off the beaten path — Tibet, Palestine, Colombia, Vietnam, tribes of Africa. I write what I truly see, what most people would rather not look at. No filters. With a deep honesty toward myself and toward those who read.

You can find links to his work here:

Tibet book in English: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H2HWTTCR

Tuscany Wineries book: https://www.amazon.it/dp/B0H2Y831ST

His blog: https://lorenzinoontheroad.com

Support/Donate: https://buymeacoffee.com/lorenzinoontheroad

Look forward to seeing many of you on Tuesday. Please keep scrolling to register.

****

Subscribe now

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 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

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.

🤍

🤍

REGISTER BELOW

Read more

Subscribe now

The post below was originally published September 14, 2024 — 10 days after the bombshells documenting Russian interference globally and exposing domestic Russian subcontractors.

I am republishing it today so you can memorize the six words we were gifted by the U.S. State Department under President Biden when correcting people on the difference between journalism and tools of war.

Here they are once again:

Currently, French citizens are fighting back against the platforming of a former RT director — RT was banned in France — who was hired by a pro-Russian media mogul, who I spotlight here:

Despite propagandists insisting it’s a free speech issue, French people have the advantage of seeing what has happened in the U.S. when you give hostile foreign nations direct access to your citizens and they are pushing for the RT director’s expulsion.

In Ireland, Steve Bannon is being exposed for exploiting divisions through media. That is foreign influence — not journalism.

In Germany, the far-right Europe of Sovereign Nations party, the home of the pro-Russian extremists Alternative for Germany, could be outlawed for failing to uphold EU values.

Politico reported that the Brussels-based “watchdog that oversees European political parties triggered a process that could result in the ESN being stripped of its right to be a political party and losing its funding… The watchdog monitors whether political parties and foundations comply with the EU that rules require parties to uphold the Union’s core values — including “respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and human rights, including the rights of minorities” — as enshrined in Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union.”

In an accompanying 300-page letter, the watchdog spotlights Bulgaria’s Revival, saying it cooperates openly with Putin’s United Russia party, as well as accusing it of being behind violent protests in Sofia and attacks against the European Commission delegation in February 2025.

The letter also highlights a decision by the German intelligence services in May 2025 to classify the AfD party as a right-wing extremist organization.

I am prefacing my original post with these global operations because we are going to see an increase in foreign influence activities as elections approach — and we will also hear the likes of JD Vance calling it “freedom of speech” — which is an obfuscation of the war for our minds.

Finally, a friend sent me a publication by the Harvard Law Review that can only be interpreted as obfuscation. Its authors concluded that Douglass Mackey, who was sent to prison for interfering with the 2016 election, was dealt a miscarriage of justice citing 1A. Mackey was part of a vast covert influence operation and all you have to do is look at his defenders — a long list of billionaire criminals — to see this had nothing to do with journalism.

We knew better two years ago — when we were gifted the six words to cut through the propaganda. Since then, the U.S. has invited the propagandists to the White House.

I hope the world takes a lesson from what we missed.

Here is my original brief from September 2024:

TUMBLEWEED BLUES: ‘Covert Influence Activities Are Not Journalism’

And other things I’ve learned in four decades of being an investigative reporter

Finally, the words arrived.

Six perfect words.

Six perfect words to cut through the noisy mob of billionaires, felons, and useful idiots.

The US State Department must have a helluva writer on its team to have summed up in six words what a girl like I has written thousands of reports on — that we are under attack and the attacks are ongoing. The weapon’s grade psychological warfare targeting our nation has nothing to do with free speech and everything to do with subverting truth, reality, and our ability to defend and cherish our democracy.

As Antony Blinken explained yesterday, RT — Russia Today — is tied to Russian intelligence, and the operations produced by Russian intelligence services is not journalism and in fact, linked directly to Russian military activities.

As you know, I have written comprehensively on information laundering, so to hear those words come from the Secretary of State was meaningful to me. Here are his remarks in their entirety:

Last night, I spent time with a family member who was watching a 1994 film called The Paper, an all-star cast directed by Ron Howard.

It was a nostalgic look back for me of an industry that no longer exists: the newspaper business, pre-interweb.

I reflected on all the newsrooms I’ve been in — from the Point Reyes Light, to the Los Angeles Times, to Fox 11 News, to Al Jazeera America, to Byline Times, and a million magazines and publications in between.

I am a relic from another era, when journalists got into the business like firefighters and cops, to serve and protect.

Billionaire-funded, hedge fund, and corporate media does not serve and protect the people — their products are, at best, simp rags for oligarchs, at worst, sleeping with the enemy.

The Tumbleweed Blues

I recall the moment I looked around a once vibrant newsroom that had bustled with life and energy, where smart people did their best to outwit the bean counters in the front office so truth could make air, and I got an acute case of the tumbleweed blues. All I saw was dead air — a metaphorical tumbleweed blowing through a desolate wasteland.

Oh well. Here we are.

I am now an army of ever fewer, typing in defense of democracy, 40 years of experience, using my words to the best of my ability to cut through the lies, a P.I. for the people, praying we keep this ship afloat…

… in service of truth, which I desperately believe in.

Originally published September 14, 2024.

****

Donations Welcome

****

Related:

Byline Supplement

The Rolling Insurrection: How Putin is Waging a Covert War Against the West

Russia knows it can’t win on the battlefield with the West, so is engaging in covert activity to present the message that liberal democracies are failing, according to a Byline Supplement analysis…

Read more

3 years ago · 66 likes · 2 comments · Heidi Cuda and Matt Bernardini

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…

Read more

3 years ago · 61 likes · 1 comment · Heidi Cuda

****

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.

🤍

🤍

Subscribe now

On a recent visit to Florence, I excitedly told Monique Camarra I had met an Italian author in the Piazza della Signoria, who travels the world in search of indigenous tribes. She told me: “I’m not surprised. Every Italian thinks they’re Christopher Columbus.”

When I recovered from rotfl, she explained how there’s a keen sense of adventure that is inherent in so many Italians.

That innate adventurous spirit defines our next guest, Lorenzo Turchi, who joins us on Tuesday, June 16, 11 am Pacific for Bette’s Happy Hour (our bi-monthlyish Sunday Speakeasys will resume later in summer, when my travel schedule slows). Members will find the registration below the paywall. If you are not yet a member and would like to join our conversations, please do so here:

Subscribe now

I met Lorenzo at a restaurant in the famed Piazza della Signoria, a lush town square adorned with statues that live outside the Uffizi — a museum where you can study Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and epic Caravaggios, including his famed Medusa. Among the statues in the Piazza is a reproduction of Michelango’s David — you can see the real one in the Galleria dell’ Accademia di Firenze just a short distance away.

I believe the waiters of Europe are the official ambassadors for each of their countries, and my husband and I struck up a conversation with Lorenzo, a sommelier at a restaurant in the square overlooking the David repro.

He told us about how two broken feet (from two separate scooter accidents) led him to writing a book about Tibetan genocide and our friendship formed from there.

Lorenzo writes a travel blog at lorenzinoontheroad. I invite you to scroll through his site — the photos are stunning and you can easily translate it into English.

He writes:

As I listened to his stories, his travels from country to country to seek out indigenous tribes and learn from their cultures — a desire he gained from his dad who traveled the US to seek out Native American tribes — I knew I had to bring him on Bette.

He set about to translate his Tibet book in English for us (you can find a link below), and I also asked him to tell us about his travel writing from Tuscany. You can find a link to his book The Wineries of Tuscany, also below.

On the back cover, he writes:

Forget the guides that send you where everyone already goes.

This is the Tuscany of wine seen by someone who lives it every day: a Florentine sommelier who takes you to the small producers, at the end of the gravel roads, where the person filling your glass is the very one who made that wine with their own hands.

Eight territories - from Dante’s Vernaccia to Brunello, from the two Chianti to the Super Tuscans of Bolgheri - with the stories no one tells you, the producers chosen one by one, and how to reach them from Florence.

No cold lists, no invented experiences.

Just real wine and the honest voice of someone who lives in this land.

And here is a summary about his “Tibet & The Lama” book:

At twenty-three, Lorenzo left Italy alone. No plan, no group, no safety net. China first — Beijing, Xi'an, Lijiang — then deeper, always deeper, until the Tibetan plateau.

This is not a travel book. It is a testimony. A raw, unfiltered account of a young man walking through one of the most politically charged places on earth, trying to understand what he sees without pretending to have answers.

He writes about Tiananmen's engineered silence, about monasteries turned into tourist attractions, about pilgrims praying to a broken god. About the Panchen Lama's empty golden throne — a six-year-old child kidnapped in 1995, never seen again. About a people already divided by centuries of internal wars, then finished off by tanks.

But this is also a deeply personal book. Two broken feet, years later, forced him to finally write what he had been carrying since that journey. The result is something between a diary, a political essay, and a confession — intimate and brutal at the same time.

"A people imperfect, massacred by invaders who believed themselves perfect."

Here, he describes himself:

Solo traveler. Writer. Thirty countries, always off the beaten path — Tibet, Palestine, Colombia, Vietnam, tribes of Africa. I write what I truly see, what most people would rather not look at. No filters. With a deep honesty toward myself and toward those who read.

You can find links to his work here:

Tibet book in English: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H2HWTTCR

Tuscany Wineries book: https://www.amazon.it/dp/B0H2Y831ST

His blog: https://lorenzinoontheroad.com

Support/Donate: https://buymeacoffee.com/lorenzinoontheroad

Look forward to seeing many of you on Tuesday. Please keep scrolling to register.

****

Subscribe now

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 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

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.

🤍

🤍

REGISTER BELOW

Read more

Subscribe now

Go Armenia!

Armenia joins Moldova, Romania, and Hungary in defeating Putin and his proxies in their recent elections — despite massive operations by Russia to get people to vote against their own rights.

“Great news from Armenia, I’m desperately hopeful that the tide is finally turning and the good guys are starting to win,” our upcoming guest Dr. Marci Shore told Bette Dangerous.

As always, we celebrate the good news wherever we find it, and I look forward to doing so at our next community event — open to all levels of paid membership — at our Tuesday Happy Hour with Marci — Tuesday, June 9, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern — the intellectual historian and author of The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution.

Along with a tribute to the Armenian results, our focus will be the topic:

The theme comes from a recent Der Standard interview with Shore, who just returned from Kyiv, where she took part in the Ukrainian literary festival “Book Arsenal.”

She explained: “Everyone here is forced to live to the rhythm of air alarms. I listened to poetry readings in the bunker, signed copies of my books in the bunker, participated in conversations about feminism. During the night there were two air alarms, one around midnight lasted about an hour and another was around three o’clock. And then there were three alarms today (Friday, May 29, note) - which unfortunately interrupted all the panels I participated in.”

She sent me this screenshot from her phone:

When she was asked by the reporter from Der Standard “what does it say about the Ukrainian way of thinking about holding such a festival in the midst of heavy air raids?”

She responded: “It was Haris Pašović, the founder of a film festival in Sarajevo, who was asked in the mid-1990s, during the siege: ‘Why a film festival in the middle of war?’ And he replied, ‘Why a war in the middle of a film festival?’ I think that also captures the Ukrainian attitude quite well, and I love that. I feel a considerable awe for this attitude, and it is one of the reasons why I am always drawn to Ukraine.”

As she has told me many times before: “These are people who refuse to be broken.”

In addition to hearing her first-hand experiences from Kyiv, she will also update us on her trip to Tbilisi, where a student was arrested on the way to hear her lecture.

More on our guest here:

Dr. Marci Shore is an intellectual historian formerly of Yale University, who is now the Chair in European Intellectual History at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. She is the author of The Ukrainian Night, Caviar and Ashes, and Taste of Ashes

If you would like to take a crash course on some of Shore’s work, here are some links:

Is This Autocracy?

Kyiv: Death & Other Borders - NY Books

• Links to Shore’s books:

The Ukrainian Night

Caviar and Ashes

The Taste of Ashes

Look forward to seeing many of you on Tuesday. Please keep scrolling to register.

****

Subscribe now

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 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

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.

🤍

🤍

REGISTER BELOW

Read more

Subscribe now

Our next community event for all levels of paid membership is Tuesday Happy Hour with Dr. Marci Shore — Tuesday, June 9, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern — as the intellectual historian and author of The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution, discusses the topic:

The theme comes from a recent Der Standard interview with Shore, who just returned from Kyiv, where she took part in the Ukrainian literary festival “Book Arsenal.”

She explained: “Everyone here is forced to live to the rhythm of air alarms. I listened to poetry readings in the bunker, signed copies of my books in the bunker, participated in conversations about feminism. During the night there were two air alarms, one around midnight lasted about an hour and another was around three o’clock. And then there were three alarms today (Friday, May 29, note) - which unfortunately interrupted all the panels I participated in.”

She sent me this screenshot from her phone:

When she was asked by the reporter from Der Standard “what does it say about the Ukrainian way of thinking about holding such a festival in the midst of heavy air raids?”

She responded: “It was Haris Pašović, the founder of a film festival in Sarajevo, who was asked in the mid-1990s, during the siege: ‘Why a film festival in the middle of war?’ And he replied, ‘Why a war in the middle of a film festival?’ I think that also captures the Ukrainian attitude quite well, and I love that. I feel a considerable awe for this attitude, and it is one of the reasons why I am always drawn to Ukraine.”

As she has told me many times before: “These are people who refuse to be broken.”

In addition to hearing her first-hand experiences from Kyiv, she will also update us on her trip to Tbilisi, where a student was arrested on the way to hear her lecture.

More on our guest here:

Dr. Marci Shore is an intellectual historian formerly of Yale University, who is now the Chair in European Intellectual History at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. She is the author of The Ukrainian Night, Caviar and Ashes, and Taste of Ashes

If you would like to take a crash course on some of Shore’s work, here are some links:

Is This Autocracy?

Kyiv: Death & Other Borders - NY Books

• Links to Shore’s books:

The Ukrainian Night

Caviar and Ashes

The Taste of Ashes

Look forward to seeing many of you on Tuesday. Please keep scrolling to register.

****

Subscribe now

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 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

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.

🤍

🤍

REGISTER BELOW

Read more

Subscribe now

I was changing a suet feeder last week, my mind ruminating on a passage I’d just finished reading in The Gulag Archipelago. In an explosion of rage-absurdity, the book’s author explained why the Soviet forced labor prison camps were unprofitable — malnourished prisoners working 10 to 14-hour days, walking four miles to and from job sites in sub zero weather, aren’t models of efficiency.

“All they were on the lookout for was ways to spoil their footgear—and not go out to work; how to wreck a crane, to buckle a wheel, to break a spade, to sink a pail—anything for a pretext to sit down and smoke. All that the camp inmates made for their own dear state was openly and blatantly botched.”

But it was the following passage that I couldn’t shake:

“In the fifties they brought a new Swedish turbine to Steplag (special camp No. 4). It came in a frame made of logs like a hut. It was winter, and it was cold, and so the cursed zeks crawled into this frame between the beams and the turbine and started a bonfire to get warm. The silver soldering on the blades melted—and they threw the turbine out. It cost 3,700,000 rubles.”

I kept picturing prisoners trying to stay warm, huddled in this makeshift log hut, and as I’m thinking about that profound image, I open the suet feeder, and there at the top curled up in the lid, are four snails huddled in a row — improvising their own shelter.

I don’t know if it was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn whispering from the grave to keep reading his words, to keep plowing on no matter how painful, but it felt like a moment of serendipity, and so I forged ahead.

Authoritarians have an advantage because too few people read books. To know history is to gain armor against lies. I will forever be grateful for the tutelage of Ukrainian historian Tetiana Boriak, who spent many hours offering the Bette Dangerous community free history lessons on Russian imperialism.

Once I began reading The Gulag Archipelago — a three-volume work that describes life in Soviet prison labor camps in grave detail, I felt a solemn duty to report Solzhenitsyn’s words back to you.

Slavery occurred in the Soviet Union throughout the 20th Century and no one talks about it. But Solzhenitsyn words remain, and it’s time to remind the world of the truth, and pull all Russian propaganda out by its poisonous roots and set it on fire for eternity.

The author was born in 1918 and grew up in the port city of Rostov-on-Don. He graduated in physics and math from Rostov University. He also studied literature by correspondence course at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History. He was an artillery officer in World War II, earning the rank of captain and awarded multiple medals of valor. In 1945, after making derogatory remarks in letters to a childhood friend about Stalin for “betraying the cause of the Revolution”, as well as for his treachery and cruelty, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and sentenced to eight years in forced labor prison camps, followed by internal exile. In 1957, he was allowed to teach in Ryazan and Moscow, where he wrote the novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which describes a single day in a forced labor camp. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev personally authorized its publication in the journal, Novy Mir, in 1962, during a period of de-Stalinization. In 1956, Khrushchev had publicly denounced Stalin’s atrocities and cult of personality, resulting in a brief period of relaxed censorship.

Khrushchev was warned not to allow the publication of One Day. Two decades after its release, Solzhenitsyn said “the 1962 publication of my tale in the Soviet Union is akin to a phenomenon defying physical laws, something like objects falling upwards.” It was a literary earthquake, with people crowding newsstands and ultimately, millions of copies sold.

The unknown writer had submitted his manuscript using as a working title the prisoner’s badge number — the dehumanizing way prisoners were referred to. He also had a poet’s way with words — laconic, unforced — as he described the grim cruelty of daily existence in the camp. This would prove problematic for Khrushchev.

Not only did Solzhenitsyn receive hundreds of letters from former prisoners sharing their own experiences, which would provide the foundation for Gulag, but One Day was translated into dozens of languages.

He had stripped the Soviets of their masks, and the world could see the savage inhumanity that had been there from the very beginning.

Khrushchev’s so-called thaw was short-lived. By the mid-’60s, every copy of One Day was pulled from libraries, and by 1974, the Central Administration for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press (insert screwface emoji here) banned all of Solzhenitsyn’s works. But that was four years after he’d won the Nobel Prize for Literature. And one year after the publication of The Gulag Archipelago, which sped up the collapse of empire.

No longer could French or German intellectuals ignore the totalitarian component of Communist-Totalitarianism. The Soviets built a system of slavery and lies, and with the publication of Gulag, Solzhenitsyn made it impossible to defend that system. Lenin had endorsed it and Stalin expanded it, but it was always part of the Soviet Union. As Solzhenitsyn says, Hitler was Stalin’s disciple, building his camps on Stalin’s model.

No one knows how many millions of people died in the camps — the numbers vary wildly because the Soviets covered it up — but Solzhenitsyn describes the vast number of forced labor prison camps as an archipelago, like an island chain, hiding in plain sight. He dismisses the literature that was written during the era he covers, from the 1910s until 1956, because it doesn’t include references to the prison camps.

The word gulag comes from an acronym of the Soviet government agency that supervised the network of labor camps. Solzhenitsyn used the word archipelago as metaphor — camps scattered through the sea of the society.

Often people were arrested on minor or made-up charges, tortured, starved, and held in camps for decades, where many of those unknown millions were worked to death. After Solzhenitsyn received his eight year sentence, it became common to receive a tenner or 25 years.

In One Day, he describes a teenager who received a 25-year-sentence for offering food and milk to starving men, who turned out to be Ukrainian nationalists. When you read the literary non-fiction of Gulag, you learn how the young people who are arrested become feral in the camps, and how they worship the thieves. In this context, it’s not surprising that thieves now run the country.

Gulag’s detailed accounts of human rights abuses by Soviet officials, blew up decades of carefully constructed propaganda.

If a government a century ago was using violence, lies, and fear to exploit their citizens, they will try it again.

This is why I feel the urgency to bring you his words in a report, as I did before the 2024 US election, when I brought you the words of Bella Fromm. I only wish people would have heeded the warnings so clearly sounding from the past.

The Gulag Archipelago was first published in Paris as Arkhipelag GULag in three volumes (1973–75). This report is based on an edition published originally in 1985, which compiled all three volumes together, and my copy was printed by Penguin Random House UK in 2024. The translators are Thomas P. Whitney and Harry Willetts. It was abridged and introduced by Edward E. Ericson, Jr., who saw its publication “as the first crack in the Berlin Wall.”

While the book covers Solzhenitsyn’s own eight years in Soviet prison camps, it also includes 227 fellow prisoners’ stories — some that he’d committed to memory, as well as stories from the letters he received — and any historical sources he could find.

The first two volumes describe the arrest, conviction, transport, and imprisonment of the Gulag’s victims from 1918 to the mid-’50s. Solzhenitsyn is a unique combination of poet, pragmatist, humorist, philosopher, and keen-eyed observer. He is an overuser of exclamation points — admittedly, I have an allergy to the excitable bang — and it took some time to get past the constant interjection (sometimes three in a sentence!).

It felt trivial to complain, like, there but for the grace of god, etc… so I surrendered to its excess and by the third volume, where he describes attempted escapes and camp insurrections, he eased off on the punctuating point altogether. Or maybe I'd become immune, so captivating were the stories of heroism in the darkest of circumstances I no longer cared.

Solzhenitsyn, who was arrested and exiled from the Soviet Union in February 1974, dedicates the book “to all those who did not live to tell it” and even today, proceeds from its sale go to the fund he set up, the Russian Social Fund for Persecuted Persons and Their Families.

The book was written in secret, and in draft form, it never existed in its entirety anywhere, he was constantly smuggling pages, and hiding his writings where he could.

As I was reading it, it reminded me in some ways of the book Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account, the memoir of Dr. Miklós Nyiszli, the Hungarian Jewish physician who made a deal for his family to survive the Holocaust as he was forced to act as a forensic pathologist and performing medical experiments for Dr. Josef Mengele. It wasn’t because of the content, although cruelty and violence always offer parallels, but because both men can describe scenes of unfathomable evil with calm, but each would explode periodically with rage.

You can sense the agony dripping from Solzhenitsyn’s pen when he describes in detail what happened to the bodies of prisoners, the different scientific phases of starvation, particularly when he describes how women were treated. Upon arrival, they were “examined like merchandise.” He describes how “attractiveness was a curse” — how savagely they were treated.

I still can’t shake the fact they never had a chance to get really clean — warm water was rare, and he describes how people bathed only every ten days. And of course, along with frequent sexual assaults, there was the starvation.

He writes of the women enslaved in labor camps:

“The body becomes worn out at that kind of work, and everything that is feminine in a woman, whether it be constant or whether it be monthly, ceases to be. If she manages to last to the next ‘commissioning,’ the person who undresses before the physicians will be not at all like the one whom the trusties smacked their lips over in the bath corridor: she has become ageless; her shoulders stick out at sharp angles, her breasts hang down in little dried-out sacs; superfluous folds of skin form wrinkles on her flat buttocks; there is so little flesh above her knees that a big enough gap has opened up for a sheep’s head to stick through or even a soccer ball; her voice has become hoarse and rough and her face is tanned by pellagra.”

He described pellagra: “If your face grows dark and your skin begins to peel and your entire organism is racked by diarrhea, this is pellagra.”

The jailers were terribly inconvenienced by the magnitude of corpses, and the deceased were often defiled by bayonets and with mallets, before “the big toe of the corpse’s right foot with his prison file number. Corpses were tossed into pits in their underwear until a new regulation ruled that they should be buried naked — clothing shouldn’t be wasted on the dead. Stalin knew how to economise.”

As I wrote in my initial preview of Gulag, Jailer in Chief, the “tsars of the Archipelago” had to be cruel and merciless. Anyone who exhibited any spiritual training or a ‘minimally circumspect conscience’ — even a speck of kindness — were eliminated.

The jailers had to be “constantly a weapon of violence, a constant participant in evil,” as they tried to turn people into slaves, systemically and sadistically. The aim was to demoralize and dehumanize the occupants, who while being starved and worked to death, were also being starved of any humanity.

The reading of the volumes of this book are so unbearably grim, so relentlessly cruel, I want to tell you that it has a fairytale ending, and that the people rise above and the Soviets repented of their evil, and that monuments begging forgiveness were built to those enslaved and that Lenin and Stalin’s names were forever tarnished, associated with the level of atrocities that one associates Hitler and the Nazi leaders with, but that is not the story.

There are moments where the prisoners triumph briefly — a three-day hunger strike results in jailers begging the prisoners to eat on day two, and they hold out for another day — and there are some incredible acts of defiance and escape. There are stories of people who refuse to become informants, who refuse to give up their humanity — even if it’s simply in the secret life of thought.

But overall, this is an inside account of horror events of the twentieth century for which there has been no accountability. The Russians celebrate the defeat of the Nazis, while refusing to liberate their own history.

I have hundreds of highlighted pages, and I find it difficult to go back and revisit — there is too much evil on those pages.

But I return out of duty. I am writing this having not slept all night, because I know we will be faced with another day of soul manipulation, of liars on camera, and reality being buried under propaganda rubble, and I can’t put it off. News delayed is news denied, and his words call out to us today.

I met a friend in Paris, who saw I was reading Gulag.

He tells me his father is in a Russian prison.

I say, “That means he must be an honest, decent man.” I learned that from Solzhenitsyn, who relays how a 14-year-old said: “Every honest man is sure to go to prison.” His father was in prison, and he was certain he would be forced to go to, and he was.

My friend tells me police found evidence on his father’s phone of support for Ukraine. For that, he received a seven-year sentence.

As I read his words, I see that the jailers are sometimes prisoners, too. They may be allowed outside the barbed wire, but they are not free men.

Pages and pages and pages of pages of torture techniques — “not by one scoundrel, alone in one secret place only, but by the tens of thousands of specially trained beasts standing over millions of defenseless victims” and how it was all being “practiced in the flowering of the twentieth century in a society based on socialist principles” with a “revolver on the desk.”

“How medieval! How primitive!”

He is writing in a previous century, the events of a previous century, so why do his words cry out with urgency?

Like, this line: “Things repeated on the radio day after day drill holes in our brains.”

As he writes of the “permanent twilight in the cells,” I keep thinking about an interview I just did with a survivor of Russian captivity. To survive is to win, she said. That Solzhenitsyn survived is one of our best weapons in this moment. It’s not too late for his words to bring Russia back to its knees.

“It is a rare zek who has not known from three to five transit prisons and camps; many remember a dozen or so, and the sons of Gulag can count up to fifty of them without the slightest difficulty. However, in memory they get all mixed up together because they are so similar: in case files the illiteracy of their convoys, in their inept roll calls based on; the long waiting under the beating sun or autumn drizzle; the still longer body searches that involve undressing completely; their haircuts with unsanitary clippers; their cold, slippery baths; their foul-smelling toilets; their damp and moldy corridors; their perpetually crowded, nearly always dark, wet cells; the warmth of human flesh flanking you on the floor or on the board bunks; the bumpy ridges of bunk heads knocked together from boards; the wet, almost liquid, bread; the gruel cooked from what seems to be silage…

“Shut your eyes, reader. Do you hear the thundering of wheels? Those are the Stolypin cars rolling on and on. Those are the red cows rolling. Every minute of the day. And every day of the year. And you can hear the water gurgling—those are prisoners’ barges moving on and on. And the motors of the Black Marias roar. They are arresting someone all the time, cramming him in somewhere, moving him about. And what is that hum you hear? The overcrowded cells of the transit prisons. And that cry? The complaints of those who have been plundered, raped, beaten to within an inch of their lives. We have reviewed and considered all the methods of delivering prisoners, and we have found that they are all . . . worse. We have examined the transit prisons, but we have not found any that were good. And even the last human hope that there is something better ahead, that it will be better in camp, is a false hope. In camp it will be . . . worse.”—A.S.

He writes about those invited to tour the camps, and how they created Potemkin scenes for the reporters, who then wrote about the greatness of forced labor prison camps, yes, these same camps where corpses were bayoneted and buried without underwear.

And I think, how much this sounds like today, this very day, when American and British born propagandists are telling the world how nice Russia is, how pretty and clean and churchy. The same Russia that assassinates reporters and dissidents, and refuses to come clean about its medieval actions in the twentieth century, as it savages Ukraine, again, as it savages the democratic world — the poison of its propaganda trees flowering death.

Bonfire of the Zeks

I opened with the image of the fire that melted the turbine, as people just tried to stay warm. The book is filled with images of survival, by every means possible. It is populated with not only political dissidents, the innocent who got picked up to fill quotas, thieves, and children — until the children, continuously outwitting and humiliating the guards, become too much of a liability and they stop putting them in camps. But it also populated by priests and nuns, who often share cells with sex workers. The workers get a three-year-sentence. The nuns get a tenner.

In “that savage world,” the prisoners began to savage the informants — the “stool pigeons.” Sometimes, the informants didn’t wake up, like the unfortunate character with a throat mishap found lying on his bunk in the opening scene of One Day.

And those who refused to become informants were often sent to penal colonies.

“The majority died there and naturally cannot speak about themselves,” he writes. “And the murderers from State Security are even less likely to speak of them.”

The Soul and the Barbed Wire

It’s in the Gulag, the thief sees his crimes as a mark of valor, and he dreams of bigger and better feats.

“The only place where one can steal on a big scale is from the state,” he writes.

I think of both Putin and Trump and their large-scale gluttonous thievery. They can steal on a big scale because they have the state, and both were stealing from the very beginning.

But the innocent, they “see with the eyes of truth” — Solzhenitsyn calls it their “secret weapon” against the Gulag. “Survive at any price” becomes a vow.

Here he paints another unforgettable scene:

“At the Samarka Camp in 1946 a group of intellectual had reached the very brink of death: They were worn down by hunger, cold, and work beyond their powers. And they were even deprived of sleep. They had nowhere to lie down. Dugout barracks had not yet been built. Did they go and steal? Or squeal? Or whimper about their ruined lives? No! Foreseeing the approach of death in days rather than weeks, here is how they spent their last sleepless leisure, sitting up against the wall: Timofeyev-Ressovsky gathered them into a ‘seminar,’ and they hastened to share with one another what one of them knew and the others did not—they delivered their last lectures to each other. Father Savely—spoke of ‘unshameful death,’ a priest academician—about patristics, one of the Uniate fathers—about something in the area of dogmatics and canonical writings, an electrical engineer—on the principles of the energetics of the future, and a Leningrad economist—on how the effort to create principles of Soviet economics had failed for lack of new ideas. Timofeyev-Ressovsky himself talked about the principles of microphysics. From one session to the next, participants were missing—were already in the morgue.”

He speaks on how only those who are liberated in their own soul can actually become liberators.

“What sort of a country it was that for whole decades dragged that Archipelago about inside itself?” he asks. “It was my fate to carry inside me a tumor the size of a large man’s fist. This tumor swelled and distorted my stomach, hindered my eating and sleeping, and I was always conscious of it (though it did not constitute even one-half of one percent of my body, whereas within the country as a whole the Archipelago constituted 8 percent). But the horrifying thing was not that this tumor pressed upon and displaced adjacent organs. What was most terrifying about it was that it exuded poisons and infected the whole body. And in this same way our whole country was infected by the poisons of the Archipelago. And whether it will ever be able to get rid of them someday, only God knows. Can we, dare we, describe the full loathsomeness of the state in which we lived (not so remote from that of today)? And if we do not show that loathsomeness then we at once have a lie.”

This is why he disregards the literature of the ‘30s - ‘50s. “Because without the full truth, it is not literature,” he states.

I go back and scan the photos in the book, his face as a young officer, and his face upon release from the Gulag chain. I see scorched sorrow. I see a warning from the grave. Do something before it’s too late for your country! For the world!

And yes, the exclamation points are mine, a gift from him.

As he describes the mutinies that occurred as his stretch wore on, he writes: “Like all embarrassing events in our history—which means three-quarters of what really happened—these mutinies have been neatly cut out.”

But they happened, and it began in earnest when they started to kill the stoolies.

“Make knives and cut stoolies’ throats—that was it,” he writes.

The tormentors took notice. Although they were still “stuck in the quagmire of slavery,” a shift had taken place, in part, because a “nauseating indifference” on how things played out led to an impromptu hunger strike that led to the beginning of the collapse of the “special camp” system.

“Everybody knew how easy it was to make knives, and easily they sunk home between the ribs.”

This created an “earthquake on their little island.”

From that tremor, Solzhenitsyn was expelled out of the camp and into internal exile.

The Devil Was Unclenching His Jaw

On his first night outside the barbed wire, he writes: “I cannot sleep! I walk and walk and walk in the moonlight. The donkeys sing their song. The camels sing. Every fiber in me sings: I am free! I am free!”

He takes a private lodging in a hen house, a happy man, only to wake up and find out that Stalin is dead.

He wants to howl with joy and “dance a wild jig! But alas, the rivers of history flow slowly. My face, trained to meet all occasions, assumed a frown of mournful attention.”

I pause and think about all the elderly Russians who lived in my West Hollywood neighborhood in the ‘90s. They never smiled, not once. I feel closer to understanding.

I read about how he adjusted to life without his “comrades in misfortune” in “special camps” that produced only “industrial goods and corpses.”

He thought for certain many historians would begin the heavy lift of documenting the labor camps, revealing them to the world, but it never happened. A few books survive, but mostly, “grief grew forgetful,” the mists of time cloud the memory.

But his work remains, and that’s what’s important.

In his final chapter, he writes repeatedly, presciently: “There Is No Law… There is no law.”

No exclamation points. Just the observation.

“The same treacherous secrecy, the same fog of injustice, still hangs in our air… there is no law.”

Due to the raids on his archives, he kept “traveling from place to place with these bits of paper” that became the foundation for Gulag, and he explained:

“The jerkiness of the book, its imperfections, are the true mark of persecuted literature. Take the book for what it is.”—written from a hiding place in 1967

In that same 1967 passage, from the Author’s Afterward he writes:

“I am finishing it in the year of a double anniversary… it is fifty years since the revolution which created the Gulag, and a hundred since the invention of barbed wire (1867). This second anniversary will no doubt pass unnoticed.”

****

2016 Election Attack — The Book!

American Monsters — The Book — Buy Here!

Donations Welcome

****

Related:

****

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

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.

🤍

🤍