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

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

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Begin each day with a grateful heart.

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TODAY: Bette’s Happy Hour Presents - Dietmar Pichler on "The Channels of Russian Disinformation"

Heidi Siegmund Cuda — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 16:03:21 GMT

***Bette members will find the registration link below the paywall. To join our community events and help support my work during this time of grave deception, please take out a membership. Thank you!***

***THIS EVENT BEGINS IN TWO HOURS.***

Vienna-based disinformation analyst Dietmar Pichler is joining us today, Tuesday — August 4, 11 am Pacific — for a special Bette’s Happy Hour Presents.

He will be giving a slideshow presentation on “The Channels of Russian Disinformation, Propaganda, and Subversion.” This presentation is open to all levels of paid membership. If you are not yet a member, please consider updating your subscription:

Pichler is the head analyst and editor for Inved.eu, where you can find his reporting on Russian active measures and democratic resilience.

Inved.eu

For those new to Bette Dangerous, we began these Tuesday Happy Hours more than three years ago as a weekly wellness session for global newsies. They have evolved into an hour where we hear from international experts at the forefront of the information war, and it’s my way to help us gain clarity and get out of despair and into action.

Each week, we get briefings from members all over the world.

My content at Bette Dangerous is free, but I support myself with your paid subscriptions.

I do hope you join us on Tuesday for our presentation with Dietmar Pichler, and to learn more about his work at the Institute for the Defense of European Democracies.

Keep scrolling to the bottom of this post — the registration link is below the paywall.

Thank you as always for your support.

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

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

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

Upgrade to Paid Member
Upgrade to Founding Member
Gifting memberships
Share my reporting with allies
Buying my ebooks
Donating to the ko-fi fund or directly to venmo

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Begin each day with a grateful heart.

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REGISTER HERE

Hello Bette members!

You are cordially invited to Bette’s Tuesday Happy Hour with Dietmar Pichler — Presentation “The Channels of Russian Disinformation, Propaganda, and Subversion

When: Tuesday, August 4, 2026, 11 am Pacific; 2 pm Eastern (US and Canada)

Please note to register in advance for this meeting. You can register here or cut and paste the link below into your browser:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/4Gz0EDxEQqabJbeNIhRYig

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. Please note: I do not authorize any recordings or any screenshots. If I decide to record the meeting, you will see a notification on screen.

In addition, please register with your email associated with this account. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out at bettedangerous/gmail.com.

Thank you for helping keep our community a safe space!

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Trump Fails Money Laundering Investigations

Heidi Siegmund Cuda — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 14:41:37 GMT

***Please take out a membership to support the light of truth.***

I know that it was naive of me to believe that corporate America would stand up to veteran criminal and Russian asset Donald Trump in 2016, after a perfect storm of fuckery installed him into the White House.

I believed that democratic principles would prevail — and that US business leaders and policy makers would not want to end up like those who supported Hitler in his rise.

From his fascist rhetoric to his Russian kowtowing, Trump made clear who he was, and I was certain corporate America would rebuke him.

I realize, of course, I was wrong.

Bitterly wrong.

I realize that greed had poisoned men’s souls.

I knew I was wrong the moment I saw Mitt Romney dining with Trump on November 29, 2016.

In March of that year, Romney had savaged Trump as a “con man.”

But three weeks after the election, the former Massachusetts governor was gushing over Trump.

As Politico reported, “Mitt Romney showered Trump with uncharacteristic praise, minutes after polishing off a dinner of frog legs, scallops, and lamb chops with the president-elect at the Tony Jean-Georges restaurant in Trump International Hotel in New York.”

“I happen to think that America’s best days are ahead of us,” he said. He also said that he has “increasing hope that President-elect Trump is the very man who can lead us to a better future.”

As I poured through author Keir Giles upcoming book, American Overthrow, I was literally sickened by Trump and his loyalists’ overt corruption and the willingness of corporate America to simply pay the vig.

It’s a very short-sighted view, to pay bribes to do business.

I recall two decades ago, when IKEA was forced to pull out of Russia due to “pervasive corruption and demands for bribes.”

When Apple’s Tim Cook showed up in the Oval Office with a tchotchke made of 24-karat gold — in a performative “USA” promo — what he really emerged with was tariff exemptions.

As Keir notes in his book, this would be perfectly normal if this occurred in Russia.

In the first 18 months of his second administration, Trump and his loyalists are working hard to normalize corruption, so this week’s intrusion to Trump’s alternate reality — that Capital One closed 385 Trump Organization bank accounts in 2021 due to “months-long anti-money laundering review” — is rather refreshing.

We only learned of the money laundering review and account closures because Capitol One asked a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit brought by the Trump Organization, which claimed the closures were politically motivated.

Interestingly, Capitol One wasn’t alone in accusations of “debanking” Trump.

A separate case was filed in January against JPMorgan Chase over accounts also closed in 2021. Trump is suing JPMorgan and its CEO Jamie Dimon for $5 billion over alleged “debanking.”

In its defense, the bank said in a statement that JPMorgan Chase “does not close accounts for political or religious reasons. We do close accounts because they create legal or regulatory risk for the company.”

According to retired IRS criminal investigator Martin Sheil, who led a money laundering tutorial for the Bette Dangerous community over the holidays, “money laundering is defined as engaging in financial transactions with proceeds derived from specified unlawful activity (known as an SUA) with the intent to either promote the SUA or conceal the SUA.”

It’s not unusual for Trump to target banks — recall, nearly two decades he sued Deutsche Bank after he defaulted on a loan, and he also sued Deutsche Bank and Capital One in 2019 to prevent them from turning over documents about the Trumps and their business to Congress.

It’s weird having to report this — like I’m reporting on a dictator in some part of the world where big C corruption is normal.

But in 2016, when corporate America rolled over, when they chose to go along with an obvious fascist, rather than do the right thing — the hard thing — and resist, they are now responsible for the cruelty and brutality of this regime.

I hope they’re enjoying their tax breaks.

****

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

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

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

Upgrade to Paid Member
Upgrade to Founding Member
Gifting memberships
Share my reporting with allies
Buying my ebooks
Donating to the ko-fi fund or directly to venmo

🤍

Begin each day with a grateful heart.

🤍

'AMERICAN OVERTHROW' - A Book Review

Heidi Siegmund Cuda — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 05:15:15 GMT

***Please take out a membership to support the light of truth.***

American Overthrow - Amazon Global

“Anybody that wondered how they might conduct themselves during the rise of Nazism in Germany can experience that directly in the United States as the ruling elite conducts its authoritarian takeover in real time.”—Keir Giles, American Overthrow

Most days, I feel like I’m standing on the shore of a massive ocean trying to stop the waves of lies from crashing all around.

But because I don’t do this work alone, I wake up each day, prepared to do battle.

Few voices have been as consistent and willing to point to Russia as ground zero for our troubles as Keir Giles, who I befriended on Twitter in 2019, when I was sent his 2016 NATO Defense College Handbook on Russian Information Warfare.

With his calm and reasoned approach, he is able to dissect fact from fiction and then relay his findings clearly and succinctly. He has written multiple books on Russia’s war on everybody, including one that is even titled Russia’s War On Everybody, and he has always looked to the future on what could happen if Russia was not stopped.

Well... Russia was not stopped.

In his latest book, American Overthrow: Moscow’s Endgame In Its Long War with Washington, the clue to what happened is in the title.

As I wrote in the intro to Part 2 of my Q&A with him:

Amidst all the noise, emerges the first meticulous, clear-eyed account of how America was killed.

America did not make it to its 250th birthday. It’s something else now, something sinister and worse. Whether or not some semblance of democratic order can be restored depends entirely on what people do or do not do.

As Keir documents in American Overthrow, which focuses on the actions and events of the first year and a half of Trump’s second term, there’s a grim resemblance to what happened in Russia at the turn of the century.

Not only does he identify all the ways in which the Trump regime is brutal and destructive, but he documents the ways in which Trump is actually copying Russia — attacking its neighbors, committing war crimes, mangling truth, reality, and history, replacing public servants with loyalists, sending masked paramilitaries to terrorize the population, and methodically removing any challenges to his power — in exactly the same way as Putin did. Keir calls this a “defining feature of Trump’s second presidency.”

By documenting America’s shocking transformation through what he calls “the prism of Kremlinology,” we can see the enormity of the destruction far more clearly.

What surprised even him, was how much Trump is surpassing Moscow in its overt corruption, theft, and speed of destruction.

From Part 2 of my Q&A with him in June:

“When looking at the parallels with Russia, it’s not just mimicked Russia, it’s exceeded Russia. The North Korea style praise sessions, where everybody in the cabinet goes around and makes ridiculous compliments to Trump, is something that Putin would never put up with because it’s over the top.
The leader’s face on the front of the Department of Justice. You wouldn’t see that in Russia, but you would in North Korea. And the ways in which there is no attempt to conceal the illegal actions within the United States, as opposed to Russia, which pretends it’s a democracy, pretends to legitimate leadership, pretends it isn’t a kleptocracy. In the United States, it’s all in the open.
Russia is still called an oligarchy, but that’s a little misleading, because the few, the oligarchy of the few, the ultra wealthy, they don’t have the influence on the direction of the country. They don’t rule in the way that the word oligarchy suggests. Whereas in the United States, yes, the billionaires have political sway. They can make things happen. They can influence the leader to deliver policies that they want. So, the United States is already far better at fulfilling the definition of an oligarchy than, in fact, Russia is.”

When I read a book, often history and first-hand accounts by journalists of key events, I have an army of highlighters so when I am ready to report my findings to Bette Dangerous I’ve already worked out key narratives.

That’s impossible for American Overthrow, because I highlighted nearly the entire book.

Part of that was therapy — as Keir told me when I started reading it: “None of this should be surprising. This is stuff you already know.”

But the difference was, it was all laid out together, brick by brick, undeniable, all these events happened, and here they are in living gray.

So by highlighting each passage I was reaffirming to myself the reality of events.

As Keir told me four years ago: “‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ was really effective propaganda.”

Those of us who never deviated from the fact that Russia is at war with the West have been served every form of whataboutism — a Soviet propaganda technique of making a counter-accusation or raising a different issue to change the subject — and over time, it does a number on your head.

But American Overthrow is definitive.

Former US National Security Advisor, Fiona Hill, wrote: “As Keir Giles makes abundantly clear in this expertly written and insightful book, Donald Trump’s political template is Vladimir Putin’s.”

The same Fiona Hill who identified that Elon Musk was passing messages for Putin.

American Overthrow

Keir opens the book with a beautiful dedication:

“This book is dedicated to all those Americans, whether in government, the military, or ordinary citizens, who are doing their best every day to hold the line.”

My first highlight appears on page three (it took me three pages to get my sea legs):

“Trump achieved in a year what Soviet and then Russian political agitation had failed to do over decades: to turn European public opinion firmly against the United States and destroy trust in America as a guarantor of security.”

He opens with an introduction that identifies how swiftly Trump and Elon Musk “dismantled or gutted one government institution after another,” finding it difficult to “identify a single department of the federal government that was not targeted”, “eviscerated” or “transformed from apolitical” to “directly implementing Trump’s orders.”

He notes that in all the chaos, what defines the “destructive actions” is how they harm America, Americans, and “aid America’s adversaries, first among them Russia.”

Make It Make Sense

Keir quotes Justin Trudeau. Just six weeks into Trump’s second presidency, when he addressed Canadians in March 2025, the former Prime Minister asked Americans to “make it make sense.”

The answer is clear: it was the destruction of the United States.

In a dozen chapters, Keir documents the “fire ax” used in this demolition blitzkrieg and how the actions benefit Moscow, with Trump’s attempt at coercing Ukraine to surrender to Russia one of the most obvious examples.

From each destructive action, he draws lines to how US adversaries, primarily Russia and China, clearly benefit.

“Trump’s crash programme of state capture was transforming not just America’s relationship with Europe, but the country itself,” he writes.

He continues: “The war on facts and truth, masked paramilitaries operating with impunity, threats against neighbouring countries, consolidation of power in the hands of a tiny self-serving elite, and government for the profit of a narrow circle of oligarchs all mirror Vladimir Putin’s Russia of twenty-five years before. In Russia, the same processes described in this book took place gradually, so that only those watching closely were fully aware of what was changing… By contrast the United States under Trump has moved so fast in the same direction that in some respects it has already matched or even overtaken Russia.”

Keir calls this an “authoritarian takeover speed run.”

Little of the Trump administration’s actions should have surprised anyone who bothered to read Project 2025 — they told you their plans.

As Keir notes, “the surprise and alarm that greeted Trump’s initiatives were entirely unwarranted, since they had been described in detail in the ‘Project 2025’ manifesto for reclaiming the mechanisms of state for a conservative agenda. The early trajectory of Trump’s second administration involved politicisation of the federal bureaucracy, aggressive anti-immigration and deportation measures, and cowing military leadership and academic institutions, reflecting Project 2025’s aspiration to reshape US governance and society ideologically.”

By June 2026, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, was able to claim that of the 1,913 recommendations in Project 2025, 1,055 had already been implemented.

Suppression of Actual Truth

Trump’s “toy media outlet, Truth Social, bears the same name as the former organ of the Soviet Communist Party, Pravda (Truth),” writes Keir.

He loads up the introduction with some phenomenal historic quotes that foreshadow our current troubles. One, from an American diplomat from 1946, George Kennan, who wrote of Moscow’s ongoing hostile intent, that the greatest danger when facing the long-term challenge of Russia is “that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.”

In that respect, the US has already fallen victim.

It appears to be in the mafia state phase, Keir adds, quoting Russia-watcher Ruth Deyermond, who notes that the second Trump administration is “looking like mid-late period Yeltsin.”

The brilliance of each of Keir’s books is that he is not an academic and does not write for academics. He makes “a set of observations” that “tragically, grimly” are familiar in history.

The heartache begins early, when he writes that the “US has decisively stepped away from aspiring to be a force for good, that stands apart from autocracies and dictatorships, and instead of confronting the Russian model of statecraft now seeks to emulate it.”

In American Overthrow, Keir offers a level of detail that describes the totality of what is happening.

That is something we can’t get from the news, which pumps out punishing headline after headline, flooding our minds with the relevant, irrelevant, and often, the irrational.

French thinker Francois Heisbourg calls what’s happening in America a “kind of assisted suicide,” hurried along by China and Russia.

Keir asks you to look at the totality and not the fragmentation, as he writes:

“It is hard to overstate the depth or speed of change in the United States. Media reporting focuses on discrete issues without bringing them together into a coherent picture. But military patrols in US cities, police raids on homes of government critics, mass detentions without due process, the suppression of the media and rights to free expression, masked paramilitaries enjoying impunity for committing murder on the streets, convicted criminals released because the victims of their violence were the President’s enemies, and the evisceration of America’s defences against terrorism, extremism and disease are part of a whole rather than disconnected phenomena.”

Surprisingly Flimsy Guardrails

Installing a Russia-friendly leadership group in power comes down to the fact that the US had “surprisingly flimsy guardrails” — subversion from within was easy when you had no protection and ample denial it was even happening.

As you read the book, he asks you to bear one question in mind: if one or more of the Trump administration “were consciously working for Russia, and their real objective were to hasten the decline of the United States and its global power, what would they have done differently?”

As he describes the long war between Russia and America, he begins with the confrontation between the “American emphasis on individual freedoms and the Russian notion of universal subservience to the state.”

In the Cold War, this meant challenges through proxy wars and ideological subversion. Avoiding direct confrontation, “Russia’s intelligence services focused on undermining American institutions, social cohesion, and governance.”

Those of us who spent the past decade studying how this works and warning about how well it was working, may feel a kind of catharsis reading his words. The US has been a target nation of long-term psychological warfare to destroy us from within, and the fact that a hot mind war is being waged throughout Europe should be obvious.

Cue up the migrant caravans.

The US is what can happen when a population stops defending its democracy, when it allows foreign invaders to weaken trust in institutions by mangling reality — suddenly democracy becomes “the enemy” and not Russia.

The rise of conspiracy is no accident, but an important primer to reduce trust in government. Trump posting an image of himself with an alien on 17 May 2026 is the apex of this.

Early in the book, Keir makes the important point that “America’s divisions were not invented by Russia, but Moscow has found them to be a vital weapon with which to attack its enemy.”

Paralysis is induced by making “victims unsure what if anything can be true,” with both Russia and Trump aligned in the mass destruction of truth.

Keir notes that the Iran war presented an economic lifeline to Moscow, as the US unsanctioned Russian oil. And as the price of eggs went up, the US began importing Russian eggs. Keir offers examples of those pardoned and rewarded by Trump who were working with Russian intelligence against the US — Alexander Smirnov, the fabricator of Hunter Biden conspiracies, and Lauren Chen, the founder of Tenet Media, covertly Russian-funded in exchange for promoting Russian narratives to US audiences. Trump’s DOJ released Smirnov from prison just six-months into his six year sentence, and Chen was rewarded with a new visa to re-enter the US and even received an invite to spend Easter 2026 at the White House.

Nice Little Putin Romance

Keir takes us back in time to 2016, reminding us the #TrumpWon hashtag on Twitter originated in St Petersburg, Russia, and recites a litany of data points as a refresher on how Trump worked towards Moscow’s “preferred outcomes on every available issue.”

He writes:

“While there have been persistent allegations by former Soviet intelligence officers that Trump was a long-standing agent for the KGB, with the code name Krasnov, most of these claims do not specify whether Trump was a conscious and active recruit or merely a person whom the KGB sought to exploit. Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa has stated plainly that Trump is ‘objectively, a Soviet or Russian asset.’”

While it may be difficult within the US to grasp the totality of Trump’s destruction in his first year in office, a poll from the EU that Keir cites shows that Europeans are increasingly aware.

“Before 2025, when international polls asked people globally where they could move to if they could, the consistent top answer by a long margin would always be the United States. America’s appeal derived not only from its prosperity, but also from its freedom and democratic values. Today, that image of the United States has collapsed. The change is particularly dramatic in the European Union. A Politico poll in April 2026 found that three times more EU citizens see the US as a threat than as an ally, with Washington regarded as a greater threat than Beijing in Spain, Italy, Belgium and Germany.”

By April 2026, almost two-thirds of the countries around the world had no US ambassador, and assignments that had been made since 2025 were to Trump loyalists, giving China an open field, he writes. Same for US media cuts globally and cuts to USAID, all opportunities for China and Russia to step in to vacated American soft power.

It’s hard to overstate the damage done to US institutions by the propagandists Trump assigned in each position. “Targeted purges and indiscriminate sackings” eliminated expertise throughout government.

US governmental agencies are under sustained attack from Trump and his loyalists, who then turned their federal might on US cities, something very familiar from history and authoritarian regimes.

“I have the right to do anything I want to do.”—Donald Trump

And thanks to the judicial coup, Trump believes he is above the law, despite judges repeatedly finding his actions illegal.

“Organised extrajudicial murder by the armed forces was previously a hallmark of Russia and other authoritarian aggressors, rather than of the United States,” writes Keir, who reminds us of the lethal strikes on small vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific that began in September 2025, resulting in at least 180 extrajudicial killings to date.

That, of course, preceded Trump’s public threat that Iran’s “civilization will die tonight” if it did not comply with US demands.

The kill-threat, the boat killings, all blatant war crimes, made more clear by my recent visit to the International Criminal Court at The Hague, currently under attack by Trump and his loyalists.

As you’re reminded of the damage to the US military with a TV talk show host in charge, and the damage to the nation’s health with a conspiracy peddler in charge, and the damage to US intelligence with a cultist in charge, the totality of destruction comes into sharper focus.

When Keir reminds us of the Greenland campaign, the Russian methods are easily spotted.

Separatism! Annexation! Save Greenlanders from Danish Oppression!

I am momentarily uplifted when he notes that the Greenland lesson reveals “the appropriate response to Trump threats was to demonstrate resolve and face them down.”

There’s a lesson there for resistance.

But as Keir noted in Part 1 of our Q&A, he is concerned by what he sees as an “extraordinary passivity” particularly among Democrat politicians.

In American Overthrow, he claims that “some external observers attribute the dearth of visible resistance to the transformation under way in the United States not only to the fear of repression, but also to a failure to grasp the enormity of the changes—or reluctance to recognise and acknowledge them.”

He quotes disinformation expert Nina Jankowicz, who was hired to lead the Disinformation Governance Board under Biden, whose administration buckled and withdrew support when she was attacked, threatened and vilified:

“Burying your head in the sand today will not save you or your future career… by the time you choose to fight, you might be standing over the smoldering ruins of the US government. What about your career prospects then?”

It’s a fair question, and one that I hope prompts a soul check.

As he shows how Trump is exceeding North Korea by putting his glowering face everywhere, he pointed out how an “American humourist” suggested “it was about six months before Trump would print his face on his own face.”

In a section of the book, with the subhead, “Corruption, Russian Style,” Keir writes: “Trump has monetised his position as president in a manner that would previously have been unconscionable in the United States, although normal for Russia.”

Trump has faced no consequences, he notes, and has “benefited from functioning in an ethical vacuum.”

“I found out that nobody cared, and I’m allowed to.”

That quote, from Trump, explains his deviation from norms.

As his sons follow the autocratic offspring enrichment pattern, so do those close to him — the clown show a distraction front for high-level corruption, made to appear normal and natural, like in Russia.

Around the point of corruption — diverting state funds, extorting money from corporations, his “coin-operated pardons machine” — Keir has a difficult time understanding why Trump’s behavior is triggering so little outrage in the US, particularly as his government has become a “refuge for criminals.”

Gold and Flattery

Even “reputable” CEOs show up with gifts of gold looking for tariff exemptions, and the donors to Trump’s “ballroom” miraculously received billions of dollars in federal contracts.

Royalty payments made their way to the Trump family — estimates range from $40 to $75 million – for the Amazon “Melania” hagiography that few even saw.

The “normalization of unethical practices” under Trump appears infinite — the Board of Peace, anyone? And here again, we say, “just like Russia.”

“Trump and his inner circle are rapidly creating an American replica of krugovaya poruka, a system that relies on maintaining its essential figurehead at the top of the pyramid, without which everybody risks going to jail.”—Keir Giles, American Overthrow

Performative Inhumanity

Chapter 6, Autocracy In the USA, is a blur of highlighted passages — I scan it quickly rather than having to read it again, because it’s a brutal reminder of each action taken to march America toward totalitarianism — including retribution against perceived enemies and ICE’s “performative inhumanity,” causing writer Masha Gessen to note that “state terror has arrived.”

Keir recalls writing in his previous book, Who Will Defend Europe, how we “can now understand what our great grandparents experienced when they watched the drift toward conflict in Europe in the late 1930s.”

As Keir compares fact checking to “catching snowflakes in a blizzard,” because “the speed at which the lies come tumbling over each other leaves anybody trying to follow and disentangle them disoriented and unable to keep up,” I finally understand for the first time why autocrats lie so often and without shame.

It’s a demonstration of power.

Regarding the January 2026 murders in Minneapolis of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents, Keir writes:

“The murders thus marked a further milestone in the administration’s abandonment of truth and even plausibility, with the normalisation of federal officials not just concealing the truth, but lying even when everybody knows they are lying. Multiple news outlets published frame-by-frame video analyses showing the official accounts of the murders were false; and yet, the administration continued to assert the same false claims anyway.
“In a Russian context, this display of disregard for plausibility and not even bothering to pretend to tell the truth reflects that the speaker is already operating in a society where the truth no longer matters, and furthermore that they can use falsehood as an exercise of power and a display of dominance—the listeners know they are being lied to, but can do nothing about it.”

The US Constitution was not designed to cope with a challenge like Trump, the damage to America has been deep and will be hard to undo, Keir writes.

The facts he outlines on concerted election threats is sobering, and people should be prepared rather than surprised by staged attacks Trump might arrange to try to remain in power.

He does not end the book with any conjured optimism.

“As I have discovered with each of my previous books, artificially-inserted optimism is a shortcut to false predictions.”—Keir Giles, American Overthrow

But as I round out this review, I realize that what Keir has done is offer a comprehensive document of Trump’s unbridled criminality. And if history is to offer any suggestions, one may be that each of his loyalists also risk an encounter with international law. Trump and his loyalists are trying to kill international law, but it is, in fact, still alive.

I think of the “gravediggers” of Hitler’s inner circle and how they ended up.

I often think of that.

I think of how a French general who evacuated to England in 1940 refused to consider defeat, even after Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands had fallen, and even after Germans had entered Paris unopposed.

And France was restored — with substantial help from the United States.

Today, I think often of Europe and its late awakening.

“For some in Europe, both Russia and the US now represent what the West came together to overcome: imperialism and authoritarianism under-pinned by unbridled aggression,” writes Keir.

The only remaining questions I have: will Europe defend itself from a similar fate and will Americans surprise Keir?

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KEIR GILES has advised governments worldwide on the Russian threat. A former senior fellow with Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia Programme, he regularly comments for the BBC and international media. His prescient books include Who Will Defend Europe?, a Financial Times Politics Book of the Year.

More about American Overthrow:

AMERICAN OVERTHROW — HAS RUSSIA BROUGHT ABOUT REGIME CHANGE IN THE USA? The maelstrom following Donald Trump’s 2025 return to the US presidency left many bemused and disoriented. But for Russia-watchers, what unfolded was grimly familiar. So many of the Trump administration’s destructive actions have precisely aligned with the Kremlin’s own objectives; and to a startling extent, Trump’s America is beginning to mimic Russia itself.

Abroad, Trump has demanded the annexation of neighbours, and embraced war crimes in Iran and the Caribbean. At home, the war on truth and history, purges and the weaponisation of justice, the deployment of masked federal paramilitaries to the streets of major cities and more all mirror Vladimir Putin’s own consolidation of power. Dismantling obstacles to Russia’s ambitions, whether they threaten Europe or America itself, is a defining feature of Trump’s second presidency. And just like Putin, Trump shows no intention of departing at the end of his presidential term. Keir Giles examines America’s transformation through the prism of Kremlinology. What he reveals should alarm us all.

Quotes on American Overthrow:

‘Keir Giles draws direct parallels between the Trump oligarchy’s consolidation of power in the United States and Vladimir Putin’s rule in Russia. This is not a bizarre or far-fetched comparison, and it should make readers of all political persuasions think twice about American politics.’—ANNE APPLEBAUM, author of Autocracy, Inc.

‘As Keir Giles makes abundantly clear in this expertly written and insightful book, Donald Trump’s political template is Vladimir Putin’s.’—FIONA HILL, former US National Security Council advisor

‘Giles highlights Kremlin method in Trump’s madness. A must-read.’—EDWARD LUCAS, former senior editor, The Economist

‘A meticulous forensic examination of how the Trump administration’s objectives precisely match those of the Kremlin.’—TOOMAS HENDRIK ILVES, former president of Estonia

‘For the last decade, I’ve chronicled how Moscow cultivated Donald Trump as an intelligence asset. In American Overthrow, Keir Giles—a Russia specialist at Chatham House—takes that story into the second Trump administration, where the payoff for Russia is finally revealed.

By assembling the scattered scandals of the Trump era into a single, coherent, and chilling whole, Giles does what the daily flood of headlines cannot: he shows how Trump doesn’t merely emulate Russia but often outdoes it—creating his own set of “alternative facts,” activating masked paramilitaries, threatening neighboring allies, and consolidating power in the hands of his billionaire friends.

The picture that emerges—a fractured Europe, a hobbled NATO, a White House at war with its own intelligence agencies—amounts to dividends beyond Putin’s wildest dreams. This is the rare book that says exactly what has happened: Russia has effected regime change in the United States with the active support of millions of Americans—and most of them still don’t even know it.’—CRAIG UNGER, author of House of Trump, House of Putin and American Kompromat.

To pre-order American Overthrow (Hurst Publishers), follow this link or click this button:

To order outside of Amazon, the book is also available from Bookshop:

Bookshop.org - UK/Europe

Bookshop.org - US

American Overthrow worldwide publishing dates:

September 3, UK and Europe
November 15; Available for purchase October 15, US

Keir Giles, photo credit: Munira Mustaffa

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Related:

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

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

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AMERICAN OVERTHROW: A Q&A with Keir Giles, Part 2

Heidi Siegmund Cuda — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 05:00:53 GMT

***Please take out a membership to support the light of truth.***

“It does appear that it is hard for many Americans to discern the totality of what is happening.”—Keir Giles for Bette Dangerous

I spent much of June staggering around in a blues-induced stupor.

Keir Giles had given me an advance copy of his upcoming book, American Overthrow: Moscow’s Endgame In Its Long War with Washington, and I burned through all my highlighters, taking breaks to stare at the walls in a mild fugue state.

Seeing the enormity of the damage wrought in the US during the first year of Trump’s second term — in stark black and white — was soul destroying.

I kept sending him screenshots of page after page highlighted, in cheery pinks and greens and lavenders. But even happy colors could do little to diffuse the grimness of the content.

Amidst all the noise, emerges the first meticulous, clear-eyed account of how America was killed.

No fluff, no happy horseshit, just a blow by blow accounting of each action undertaken by the Trump administration in its first year and how the actions benefit, emulate, and even surpass Moscow. (As I note in my next post — a book review of American Overthrow — whether or not US democracy will be reanimated is up to the people, what they do or do not do.)

I met with the veteran Russia watcher in June to interview him about the book, when I was only a few chapters in.

On June 14, I released Part 1 of our interview, which focused on why the UK-based author knew in July 2024 that Trump would return to the White House and what his return would mean for Europe. He also explained why people should be alarmed by the “extraordinary passivity” in the U.S.

It’s an important companion interview to Part 2, which focuses exclusively on American Overthrow. Both interviews took place on 11 June 2026, in a pub in England.

Here is Part 2:

AMERICAN OVERTHROW: A Q&A with Keir Giles, Part 2

AMERICAN OVERTHROW: A Q&A with Keir Giles, Part 2

Heidi Cuda: Thank you for the advanced copy of American Overthrow. I would like you to tell our readers why you had to write this book. It has a tremendous urgency to it, of course, but it’s also brilliantly and methodically written from what I’ve read so far.

Keir Giles: Well, I’m glad you like it so far. It gets worse. It’s another one of my books that has been a decade or more in the making. During the first term in office of Donald Trump, I started collecting material, thinking that I would write something about the way in which he was so determined to drive through the policy objectives for the United States that Russia wanted, rather than those that would actually benefit U.S. security.

Eventually, he left office, and I let those sources sit. And then he returned, and when he did come back into power, of course, as you know from the previous book, Who Will Defend Europe, the expectation was that he would once again immediately attempt to further Russia’s interest at the expense of the United States and the United States’ allies, including in Europe and in East Asia.

And, of course, he would find it easier to do so, because he’d taken preemptive measures to remove the adults in the room who previously constrained him, and to remove democratic constraints on him, as well, by neutralizing the Supreme Court as a curb on his power.

So all of that was anticipated, and all of that meant that I dusted off the old material about it — how this worked, and what it meant, and what the implications were for Europe and for the United States itself. And I started writing again.

But during the first year of Trump being in office again, watching all of the processes that were playing out within the United States, I noticed that there was something else happening. There was something different, something deeper, than just having an individual at the top of the White House, surrounded by like-minded other individuals who were promoting the policies of Russia rather than the United States. And that deeper something seemed to be effecting a transformation of politics and society and the economy within the United States, to not just promote Russian policies, but actually to emulate and mimic Russia itself.

And so many things happened which were grimly reminiscent of the exact same processes that took place at the very beginning of this century, when Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia. So many of the examples of things which were previously unprecedented, but now normalized, were immediately recognizable from what Russia had done before. And as you read through the book, you will see, time and again, it’s hard to resist the temptation to say “like in Russia” before you describe every new astonishing incident that has happened in the United States.

Like murders by masked paramilitaries on the streets of major cities, like the death squads that are killing the alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific, rather than arresting them or bringing them to trial. Like the institutionalization of corruption, the monetization of office. All of these different things, which are unheard of for the United States within living memory, but perfectly normal for Russia.

Heidi: Right, incredible. I remember right after Trump was reinstalled in 2024, I wrote an article, Welcome to West Russia, because it seemed so reminiscent of oligarchs running politicians, everybody in the inner circle obviously being criminals and corrupt, and there seems to be absolutely no shame in any of that. And part of what’s happening when I’m reading your book is I continue highlighting and highlighting and highlighting, because you’re saying all the things that I know to be true, but there’s been so much pushback over it. And you reference the quote about Trump being, like, “late-stage Yeltsin,” and can you speak on that a little bit? It was so spot on, perfect framing.

Keir: Well first of all, going back to what you were saying just before about the way in which there is no shame. It’s one of the ways, and this is very striking when looking at the parallels with Russia, that it’s not just mimicked Russia, it’s exceeded Russia. It’s done more than you see within a Russian context. The North Korea style praise sessions, where everybody in the cabinet goes around and makes ridiculous compliments to Trump, is something that Putin would never put up with, because it’s over the top.

The leader’s face on the front of the Department of Justice. You wouldn’t see that in Russia, but you would in North Korea. And the ways, and this comes to another point that you said, the ways in which there is no attempt to conceal the illegal actions within the United States - as opposed to Russia, which pretends it’s a democracy, pretends to legitimate leadership, pretends it isn’t a kleptocracy. In the United States, it’s all in the open.

You mentioned the oligarchs, for example. Russia is still called an oligarchy, but that’s a little misleading, because the few, the oligarchy of the few, the ultra wealthy, they don’t have the influence on the direction of the country. They don’t rule in the way that the word oligarchy suggests. Whereas in the United States, yes, the billionaires have political sway. They can make things happen. They can influence the leader to deliver policies that they want. So, the United States is already far better at fulfilling the definition of an oligarchy than, in fact, Russia is.

Heidi: Ugh. So why did you title it American Overthrow?

Keir: Well, American Downfall would immediately make people think of Bruno Ganz in a bunker pointing at a map, which was not quite the image that we’ve got to yet within the United States. However, if the bunker complex with the sniper posts and the drone ports underneath Trump’s magical ballroom comes to pass, and if it is to be used as a command center for directing civil unrest within the Washington D.C. area, then maybe we’ll need to retitle it Downfall after all.

Heidi: Can you help explain the urgency for people to read this book? I feel a great urgency.

Keir: We are rushing it to publication. The idea is that it should emerge in good time before the U.S. midterm elections at the end of 2026, partly because of doubts over whether they will actually happen. Because there’s a substantial element of the book which is about consolidation of power by the current ruling elite by means of making sure that there will not be a democratic challenge to it. And that is, in terms of seizing control of electoral processes, from the devolved local level that you have in the United States. It’s redistricting to make sure of the outcome of elections. It is the prospect of intimidation, that systems seem to be being put in place for. It is the preparations for disputing the outcome of a vote. So even if a vote is held and is free and fair, there’s no indication that it will necessarily be accepted by the current ruling elite and all those people that they can persuade to protest against it.

Heidi: Did you ever expect to have to write this book? Thinking Americans have been predicting and warning and passionately trying to get people to see what was happening in front of their eyes but to no avail.

Keir: There are parts of this book that were expected, and you know that, because I described it in Who Will Defend Europe, I described what was going to happen, and now it is happening. But that is only part of the question.

I was expecting that there would be policies pursued by the United States that favor Russia. The extent of the transformation of the United States into Russia, I was not expecting. And the extent to which the United States would constrain its own power, to decide no longer to be a global power, but to retreat to a sphere of influence that if we believe Russia has been negotiated with Moscow in a form of a Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, to follow so precisely the policy instructions of Alexander Dugin, writing 30 years ago, to pursue a new Monroe Doctrine and retreat to influencing solely the Western Hemisphere. All those things were unexpected.

But you asked me a while ago about who comments meaningfully on what is happening in the United States, and why that is not always necessarily people inside the country.

It does appear that it is hard for many Americans to discern the totality of what is happening. They see things that affect them. They see things that may or may not come through in their local media coverage. They understand that there’s a difference between Trump saying that gas prices are under three dollars a gallon, but they are paying six. They understand that something is different, and it’s changed, but grasping the enormity of the change overall appears to be easier from outside the country.

And it is particularly easy if you are an expert on Russia, and therefore recognize the patterns. And that’s why, as I think I mentioned in the introduction to the book, it is the people that have spent their lives studying and explaining Russia that are emerging as some of the most coherent and convincing explainers of what is happening in the United States today. That quote that you mentioned, comparing the current Trump presidency to the mid to late Yeltsin period... because you have somebody with visibly diminished cognitive faculties being directed by undisclosed interests, enriching the family, presiding over a descent into chaos. That quote was actually from a Russia watcher — a professor at King’s College in London named Ruth Deyermond, who has been one of the most trenchant commentators on what is happening in the United States, and also one of the most convincing because she sees the parallels. And so, there is a framework within which all of this makes sense.

Heidi: The quotes in the book’s introduction are shocking. The one from 1856, from Naval Officer Matthew Perry, saying there is gonna be a showdown between democracy and slavery. You wrote that he predicted “that a clash between the two irreconcilable systems—the ‘antagonistic exponents of freedom and absolutism’—would be inevitable. The outcome of that clash, Perry wrote, would determine ‘the freedom or the slavery of the world—despotism or rational liberty must be the fate of civilized man.’” And here we are, on that precipice now. Okay, so as I continue reading the book, what are some of the grim low lights we can expect?

Keir: Where do we start? Well, let’s start with one of the parts that readers might find a little more challenging to tie into the overall program of what it is that Russia wants the United States to do. And that is the way in which the changes that are being driven through by the administration make the lives of ordinary Americans worse. All of the things that are being done to make them poorer, less healthy, less safe. And all of this you can tie back to Russia’s interest in setting Americans against each other, which is a core part of their objectives.

And not only against each other, which Russia has always been practicing, but sponsoring groups of extremists on right and left, and then setting them at each others’ throats. But also increasing the divide between ordinary Americans who are not among the ultra wealthy, and the ruling elite which has now devolved to a tiny, tiny group. [There are] Not the previous policy structures that you might have had for determining what the United States should do about a given problem and avoid some of the worst possible outcomes that we’ll come onto in a moment. But instead, a small clique of the ultra wealthy, of the billionaires, who are influencing policy and are set apart from the broad mass of the population.

So, wherever you look, wherever you see new social phenomena emerging in the United States, it is possible to map that to something that Russia set in process a long time ago. So the temptation is to overdo it, and to see Russia behind everything. And it is actually quite hard sometimes to step back, maintain that objectivity, decide which of these things would have happened without encouragement, and which are plainly the result of a campaign that Russia put in place 50 years ago.

Heidi: I often return to a NATO slide that I received in 2019, that lists every one of Putin’s objectives that Trump was checking off his list. Every single objective was being met. So as the author of American Overthrow, what should thinking Americans do right now? And I say thinking, because there are plenty of people who live in a mangled reality.

Keir: Sadly, Americans today, like Russians 20 years ago, are faced with a choice, whether to resist and to incur the inevitable personal costs for themselves and their families that would be involved in doing that, or to submit, surrender, comply, and see their country being changed into a very different and very much worse place. There is no easy option other than those two. What we see so far is, as we’ve discussed previously, the extraordinary passivity, not just of ordinary people who might not necessarily realize fully what is being, in the end, done to their country, but also of the well informed, like Democrat politicians, who are apparently accepting this, rolling over and allowing themselves to be steamrolled, and for their country to be taken away from them.

That has to change if anything is to be stopped. Ordinary Americans, some of them, have bravely stood up, but the broad mass appears not to recognize what is happening, and if they do recognize it, then, just like in Russia, they seem not to be able to take the step to resist it.

Heidi: Yeah, I think that’s probably the final word. If a true Resistance builds and the numbers are there, people could change the course of history. Keir, you’ve written book after book after book, Russia’s War On Everybody comes to mind, and unfortunately, you’re right every time. Any comment on being so right about so many horrible things.

Keir: Well, there’s a very depressing pattern. I think I mentioned it in the conclusion of this book, that whenever I write something, it usually comes out first in hardback. And it’s usually a set of predictions, and the pattern is, I say, “Here’s a situation. It is very bad. Unless action is taken to remedy it, it is going to get very much worse.” And then, no action is taken and it gets very much worse. But a year after the hardback edition, there’s the paperback edition, for which I always write a new foreword. The new foreword usually consists of a list of, “Well, here’s everything that I said was going to happen, and we didn’t do anything about it, and then it happened.”

So here we are in a new situation. What I would greatly look forward to at some point, and I really do hope that it happens with this book because it hasn’t happened with any previous ones, is that I might be wrong.

Heidi: I hope you are wrong, too, Keir. For humanity’s sake.

(End Part 2, Q&A)

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More about American Overthrow:

Quotes on American Overthrow:

‘Giles highlights Kremlin method in Trump’s madness. A must-read.’—EDWARD LUCAS, former senior editor, The Economist

‘A meticulous forensic examination of how the Trump administration’s objectives precisely match those of the Kremlin.’—TOOMAS HENDRIK ILVES, former president of Estonia

To pre-order American Overthrow (Hurst Publishers), follow this link here or click the button below:

American Overthrow

American Overthrow worldwide publishing dates:

September 3, UK and Europe
November 15; Available for purchase October 15

Keir Giles, photo credit: Munira Mustaffa

****

****

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

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

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

Upgrade to Paid Member
Upgrade to Founding Member
Gifting memberships
Share my reporting with allies
Buying my ebooks
Donating to the ko-fi fund or directly to venmo

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Begin each day with a grateful heart.

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PRESENTATION REGISTRATION: Bette’s Tuesday Happy Hour with Dietmar Pichler on "The Channels of Russian Disinformation"

Heidi Siegmund Cuda — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 23:28:42 GMT

Vienna-based disinformation analyst Dietmar Pichler is joining us this Tuesday — August 4, 11 am Pacific — for a special Bette’s Happy Hour Presents.

Pichler is the head analyst and editor for Inved.eu, where you can find his reporting on Russian active measures and democratic resilience.

Inved.eu

Each week, we get briefings from members all over the world.

My content at Bette Dangerous is free, but I support myself with your paid subscriptions.

I do hope you join us on Tuesday for our presentation with Dietmar Pichler, and to learn more about his work at the Institute for the Defense of European Democracies.

Keep scrolling to the bottom of this post — the registration link is below the paywall.

Thank you as always for your support.

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

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

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

Upgrade to Paid Member
Upgrade to Founding Member
Gifting memberships
Share my reporting with allies
Buying my ebooks
Donating to the ko-fi fund or directly to venmo

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Begin each day with a grateful heart.

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REGISTER HERE

Hello Bette members!

You are cordially invited to Bette’s Tuesday Happy Hour with Dietmar Pichler — Presentation “The Channels of Russian Disinformation, Propaganda, and Subversion

When: Tuesday, August 4, 2026, 11 am Pacific; 2 pm Eastern (US and Canada)

Please note to register in advance for this meeting. You can register here or cut and paste the link below into your browser:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/4Gz0EDxEQqabJbeNIhRYig

In addition, please register with your email associated with this account. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out at bettedangerous/gmail.com.

Thank you for helping keep our community a safe space!

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An Awakened France

Heidi Siegmund Cuda — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 13:48:20 GMT

***Please take out a membership to support the light of truth.***

In the past 18 months, I’ve traveled to many countries and observed how each is faced with daily electronic lobotomies, courtesy of Russia and now the US.

Deriving inspiration from Victor Rud, who uses words like “mangled” and “lobotomy” when writing about the constant churn of information chaos, I continue my quest for better words to describe the well-funded attempts to sabotage any memory of what came the day before, therefore obscuring where the threads of truth may lie. This information chaos is then maestroed by the Usual Suspects — the billionaires and traitors in every country, who get their talking points in Russian and English, with their morning shot of whatever substance enables them to blithely commit treason.

So it pleases me greatly that France is experiencing an awakening of sorts, as it makes positive steps to thwart these daily electronic lobotomies of information chaos.

France Expels Russian Propagandist

After much public pressure by independent journalists and pro-democracy activists, on July 29, France ordered the expulsion of Russian propagandist Xenia Fedorova, former head of France’s division of Russian-state media, RT, which was banned in France in 2022. RT has been linked to Russian military intelligence.

Today, a French court rejected her appeal and upheld the order to leave.

French authorities accused her of spreading pro-Kremlin propaganda to “undermine the fundamental interests of the nation,” and last week, the 45-year-old received an “emergency order” to leave France and her assets were frozen for six months.

This decision revokes her 10-year residency permit and bars her from working in France.

Despite the banning of RT, Fedorova was hired as a commentator for outlets owned by French billionaire Vincent Bolloré, including CNews television channel, France’s equivalent of Fox News. Bolloré has been compared to a Rupert Murdoch-type figure and his media network has been repeatedly identified as pushing pro-Russian content. Fedorova was hired in advance of France’s upcoming presidential election in 2027, and Bollore’s networks advocate and normalize the extremist party of convicted embezzler Marine Le Pen, a French politician who received Russian-funding and whose father formed the National Front in 1972 with Nazi collaborators.

Although Fedorova, whose real name is Ksenia Borchik, has claimed she is being denied free speech, French authorities call the order for her to leave “thoroughly justified.”

“(The order) refers to numerous statements she has made which systematically repeat Kremlin propaganda regarding France’s involvement, what is happening in Ukraine, and the reasons and motivations behind Russia’s aggression in Ukraine,” France’s Interior Minister Laurent Nunez told French media.

Geopolitical analyst Joni Askola, who lives in Finland and France, told Bette Dangerous: “When RT France was finally sanctioned by the EU and taken off the air, Vincent Bolloré stepped in and filled the gap with something even worse. Instead of letting Russian state media disappear from the French information space, he brought in Xenia Fedorova, the former head of RT France, and gave her a direct platform across his channels. She continued pushing the same Kremlin narratives she had been broadcasting before the ban, and she gained enough influence to shape editorial lines and even decide who gets fired. If the rumors about their relationship ever turn out to be true, it would be one of the most successful honeytrap stories Europe has seen in years.”

Whether or not rumors of honey potting are ultimately proven, Fedorova appears right out of central casting — if you’re casting red sparrows. Like Maria Butina, Anna Chapman, and Masha Drokova — the girl who kissed Putin and wound up working for Jeffrey Epstein — Fedorova has a pleasant face and a soft voice, perfect for making Russian propaganda go down easy.

“What happened on these platforms was not a debate between pro‑Ukraine and pro‑Russia voices,” said Askola, who along with his brother, supports Ukraine through fundraisers to help deliver vehicles and first aid. “It was pure, unchallenged Russian state disinformation delivered by a Russian citizen whose entire career is built on serving her state’s information strategy. Once RT was shut down, she should never have been allowed to stay in France. Freedom of speech protects citizens expressing controversial or even traitorous opinions, but it does not cover state‑sponsored propaganda aimed at destabilizing a country. There is a clear difference between an average French person having a misguided, traitorous pro‑Russian opinion and a state envoy pushing official disinformation in a country her own government claims to be at war with.”

RT was banned in France after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and Fedorova used the time to write a book titled, Banned.

In America in 2024, we learned six important words that most chose to ignore but not me: “Covert influence activists are not journalism.”

“Deporting Fedorova is a necessary first step (but) Bolloré will not stop promoting Russian narratives just because she is gone, and he is far from the only one doing it. France has a long road ahead in dealing with Russian state disinformation coming from other platforms like Sud Radio and Omerta.”

But like Estonia, which prosecuted and convicted a pro-Russian journalist and blogger, both with links to Russian security services, France — by ordering the expulsion of Fedorova — sent a message that these types of foreign influence activities should not be confused with journalism.

In addition to Fedorova’s order to leave, France just became the first EU country to ban children under the age of 15 from social media access. In July, French parliament approved the bill, backed by President Emmanuel Macron, who said: “France is leading the way in Europe when it comes to protecting our children and teenagers.”

With now decades of warnings over the harmful effects on children, France took the warnings seriously.

Just like it’s taking threats from propagandists seriously. And taking its digital sovereignty seriously.

As French elections approach, subthreshold attacks will escalate.

May France’s resolve continue.

****

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

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

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

Upgrade to Paid Member
Upgrade to Founding Member
Gifting memberships
Share my reporting with allies
Buying my ebooks
Donating to the ko-fi fund or directly to venmo

🤍

Begin each day with a grateful heart.

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Estonia Shows How to Resist

Heidi Siegmund Cuda — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 14:37:45 GMT

***Please take out a membership to support the light of truth in this era of grave deception.***

I recently learned two numbers: according to Cloudflare data, bots account for more web traffic than humans for “the first time in the internet’s history” — representing about “57 percent of all http requests as of late April 2026.”

The other number I recently learned: only one to three percent of any population participated in Resistance efforts in World War II. But a Harvard researcher determined that once a Resistance effort engages 3.5 percent of the population, that’s the threshold when non-violent campaigns can achieve their goals.

I start this post with those two numbers, because as we navigate the online world, we need to train ourselves to avoid self-cyborgization — don’t waste time tilting at anonymous windbags online. And don’t lose faith in Resistance efforts. I am shocked that such a small portion of the population has the courage to resist obvious fascist capture, but as it turns out, it takes fewer people than we think.

I often reflect on a lesson from author Anne Nelson, who wrote a book about the Berlin Resistance in the 1930s, Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler.

In an interview with Anne, she quoted a member of the Berlin Resistance against Hitler, Greta Kuckhoff, who said:

“We did what we could, and a lot of us gave our lives for it. And if there had only been a couple 100,000 more Germans out of our millions who did the same, we could have stopped Hitler, it wouldn’t have taken that much more.”

That has always stuck with me.

“A couple 100,000 more.”

How many of us can educate and recruit a couple dozen more people to understand the influence operations blanketing the democratic world and to then fight hard in defense of democracy and human rights? How quickly we could get to a couple 100,000 more until it multiplied into millions, and we reached that 3.5 percent rule.

And so, I keep returning to Estonia, where I document the myriad ways it kneecaps Russian sub-threshold aggression to infiltrate and topple its democracy.

Look at this headline for example:

Estonia prosecutes its traitors with a deftness that should be a blueprint for the remaining democratic nations.

Estonia has strong human rights and free speech, but it also has a backbone — if someone is working for Russian interests, they don’t waffle. They prosecute. And they keep updating their defense, now targeting religious charlatans and working to defund an Olympics committee weakening its stance on Russia.

In my first report, I documented the many lessons Estonia offers for US Resistance efforts:

In that report, I wrote:

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

In addition, 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.

So in my previous reports, I identified the many ways Estonia prosecutes treason and thwarts Russian aggression, including my report on Estonia’s prosecution of a pro-Kremlin blogger.

I wrote:

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.

All of the above is pretty impressive, but in recent days, Estonia has taken two more important steps.

Hard Line In Sand Against KGB’s Patriarch Kirill

Estonia just gave the Russian Orthodox Church six months to sever all its ties with Patriarch Kirill, a KGB spy and Putin crony who sits atop Russia’s church, which is widely documented for its radicalization operations.

According to a statement from the Ministry of the Interior, the Estonian Christian Orthodox Church, which is affiliated with the Moscow Patriarchate, has six months to appoint a new metropolitan and cut ties with Patriarch Kirill.

Citing the enforcement of “amendments to the Churches and Congregations Act,” the changes prohibit “religious associations in Estonia from being affiliated with a religious leader based in a foreign country that poses a threat to Estonia’s national security.”

And according to a letter from Tarmo Miilits, secretary general of the Ministry of the Interior, “all religious associations have…until December 28, to bring their activities into compliance with the new requirements. Otherwise, the minister of the interior may initiate proceedings to forcibly dissolve the religious association.”

Metropolitan Eugene, a church leader whose real name is Valeri Reshetnikov, was already required to leave Estonia at the beginning of 2024 after the Estonian Internal Security Service (ISS) determined he presented a threat to Estonia’s national security.

I am inspired by Estonian ISS, which is willing to play hardball when very few intelligence agencies in democratic countries appear to have any remaining spine.

The Russian Orthodox Church functions like just another arm of the KGB, an unremarkable fact to anyone who pays attention to how Russia weaponizes everything,

Estonia Seeks to Defund the International Olympic Committee

In addition to its hard line in the sand over the Russian Orthodox Church leadership, Estonia is turning its attention to the International Olympic Committee (IOC), calling for a ban on the IOC receiving funding from the European Union. Estonia is seeking the ban due to the IOC executive board’s recent decision at a meeting in Lausanne, Switzerland, to lift the suspension of the Russian Olympic Committee.

That move prompted Estonia to demand all sports organizations permitting Russia and Belarus to return to international competition to have their EU funding cut.

A press release from Estonia’s Culture Minister, Heidy Purga, reads:

“In the current security situation, it is impossible to understand decisions which seek to bring aggressor states back into international sport as if nothing had happened… At a time when the war in Ukraine goes on and people are suffering, we cannot allow sport to be used to normalize this situation. Sport is not values-neutral – it always carries a message. The question is whether we stand by our principles, or surrender them. Europe must be clear and united on this: Our support must not reach organizations whose decisions conflict with our values, and our responsibility toward Ukraine.”

Estonia’s leaders understand how this works, and they were joined by Denmark, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania and Sweden in their appeal.

I am often writing about moral clarity, we have examples from history of collaborators who were executed.

Billionaire and hedge-fund media will continue to try to run interference on moral clarity. They are collaborators, and we should call them that.

In 2026, Estonia ranked third out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index, published by Reporters Without Borders. It has been as high as second, with Norway in the lead.

The US ranked 64, between Botswana and Panama.

****

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"It’s a brief for a predatory state"

Heidi Siegmund Cuda — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 23:13:16 GMT

***Please take out a membership to support the light of truth.***

Author’s note: This morning, I read Victor Rud’s “Open Letter to Arkady Ostrovsky of The Economist” published on July 27 in EU Today. I immediately reached out to him with the request to publish the letter here at Bette. I, too, had a visceral response to “The Economist’s” July 9 publication of an essay by Russian “industrialist” Andrey Melnichenko, which as Rud astutely noted, “allowed a collaborator’s argument the appearance of impartial, business-minded advocacy against further resistance to Russia.”

Thankfully, Rud agreed to allow me to cross-post the letter here. I also include the original email he sent to “The Economist’s” editorial staff, where he noted: “I have been dealing with Russian psy-ops for a lifetime. Their invasion of brain is an art form.” The response he received from the magazine’s Russia and Eastern European Editor Arkady Ostrovsky, which he references in the Open Letter, prompted him to write that Letter. Please have a read as it’s a brilliant and biting dissection of what Rud calls “one of the most refined Russian influence methodologies” he has “encountered in the media space in decades.”—hsc

“It’s a brief for a predatory state, laundered through systems theory.”—Victor Rud

An Open Letter to Arkady Ostrovsky of The Economist

by Victor Rud

July 21, 2026

Dear Mr. Ostrovsky:

I have your reply to my email to your Editor-in-Chief, Ms. Minton Beddoes and Mr. Matthew Valencia, your “By Invitation” Editor. You have mischaracterized my point and also contradict your other writing.

The matter is too important to let stand, so I write for the record. I copy Ms. Minton Beddoes and Mr. Valencia, and also your Deputy Editor, Mr. Edward Carr, and to your Ukraine correspondent, Oliver Carroll. The text of my original email follows below, and then your email response. A copy of this communication is also attached.

I don’t suggest The Economist consciously promoted what it knew to be Kremlin narratives. But Melnichenko’s essay reflects one of the most refined Russian influence methodologies I have encountered in the media space in decades. You presented the essay as the reflections of a prominent Russian “industrialist” whose views deserved careful consideration. You saw Melnichenko himself and his message as the principal story. You missed the point of the message, not recognizing the misdirection in all its most pristine forms.

You’re part of history. And of course, it isn’t just a matter of media influence. In the 1920’s, Moscow targeted Russian émigré opponents of the Bolshevik regime by creating an entirely fictious underground opposition organization in the USSR to lure them back to the Soviet Union. It worked. It was called Operation “Trust.” Its arsenal was . . . words.

Then we had Moscow’s coup in spiking the news about Stalin’s genocidal starvation of Ukraine the 1930s. Walter Duranty, The New York Times‘ Moscow correspondent and dean of the Moscow press corps, denied it in his reporting. A year before winning his Pulitzer, he had told a U.S. Embassy official in Berlin, that his dispatches were written “in agreement with the New York Times and the Soviet authorities” and reflected Moscow’s official line, not his own. The prize was awarded anyway.

Fast-forward to Fiona Hill’s 2004 New York Times Op-ed that I had mentioned. Fortunately, since then she has better understood. That’s not always, or even often, been the case. And the damage was done. Before, between, and since, there have been countless other such operations.

It’s the old adage: rake your hot coals with someone else’s hands — better still if the unwitting hand believes it has done something commendable. The world-renown British historian, the late Professor Robert Conquest, pithily called this the consequence of “mind slaughter.”

Melnichenko’s essay, and its placement in The Economist, is infinitely more refined. It’s meticulous, restrained, clinical — a subliminal reality reversal delivered without bombast. Readers are encouraged to fear the consequences of holding Russia fully accountable for the most egregious acts of international criminality, including, unstated but implied, its expanding predation in the rest of Europe.

The purpose isn’t to persuade that Russia is innocent. It’s to persuade that demanding accountability is too dangerous — that Russia is only being defensive, and its “security interest” must be honored or bad things will happen. Responsibility recedes; consequence advances. Aggression becomes instability. Justice becomes imprudence. Accountability yields to risk management. But good things can happen too, if only the West backs off.

None of this requires factual fabrication. Readers leave believing they’ve encountered a sober, balanced argument, when in fact they’ve been guided toward a different hierarchy of strategic and moral priorities. The aggressor’s strategic anxieties become the readers’ strategic anxieties. “What happens if Russia wins” is quietly flipped into “what happens if Russia loses.”

The issue

Russia is waging the largest, longest, bloodiest war of aggression since WWII, a war where Hitler’s purpose was the conquest and colonization of Ukraine. Ukraine paid the highest price of any nation for the ensuing “rules-based international order.” Russia shattered it and demands a carve-out in the name of “sovereignty” (that same order’s central pillar) as it wages an openly-declared genocidal war against the same Ukrainian nation. It’s worse than that: Russia declared decades ago that its purpose was the destruction of that order, using Ukraine as the fulcrum. In July 2022, Putin declared: “This [special military] operation means the beginning of a radical breakdown of the US-style world order.”

Where’s your own recognition of the 8 yrs of war preceding 2022, and what that tells us? Less than two years after receiving MFN status and WTO membership, Russia invaded and annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula — larger than Israel, 2/3 the size of Taiwan, and almost the size of Belgium. It invaded Ukraine’s east “on invitation,” displacing millions, and killing, abducting, torturing untold scores of thousands. Russia’s murdered 298 innocents on Malasia Flight MH17, closed the Kerch Strait, blockaded Ukrainian ports in the Sea of Azov, attacked the Ukrainian Navy, occupied Ukrainian gas rigs and Ukraine’ territorial waters and exclusive economic zone, equal in area to South Korea. It sank freedom of navigation and the Law of the Sea. Through it all, Russia simply . . . lied. And now, angst over the “rules-based international order?” And what of Russia’s rampage through Europe?

Yet the essay simply casts the West and Ukraine as the culprits and argues that pressing Russia further — defeating it, isolating it, letting it dissolve as empires eventually do — would be a catastrophe. The sign off is clear: “The choice before the world… is between two kinds of future: one in which major powers again learn to respect each other’s sovereignty, and one in which each attempts to reduce the others to objects of management… The most important thing is that we step back from the abyss.”

That is not a business essay. It is a foreign-policy argument, delivered by a man with an obvious stake in its outcome, dressed as detached analysis. That is craft. If Melnichenko genuinely wants an international order robust enough to protect his own assets, the essay should have argued for a return to the status quo ante 2014.

Melnichenko’s credibility

The essay is described as “a remarkable intervention from an insider living in Moscow who understands the risks of speaking out in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.” Your promotion repeatedly elevates Melnichenko as “the man who would change Russia,” that “the change he wants would amount to an end to one-man rule,” and that “implicitly, he wants Mr. Putin to relinquish one-man rule.” If he is genuinely afraid, why do you so assiduously ascribe to him a purpose that will lead to defenestration?

And the title: “Why a broken Russia is bad for the world.”

Not “Why the War Is Wrong.” Not “Why Russia Should Withdraw.” Not “Russia, Like Nazi Germany, Should Repent.” Melnichenko knows exactly what any of those titles would cost him.

You downgrade my objection to mere “scepticism,” attributing the essay’s “vagueness” to Melnichenko’s knowledge of the “repressive nature” of Russia’s regime. Vagueness isn’t fear, it’s stealth. He moved his capital and his family back to Russia after 2022. He has made his peace with the system and now argues its case in an outlet the West still trusts — service rendered comfortably from inside the systema, not in spite of it.

In an earlier Financial Times interview, Melnichenko said, “Trying to work out who is guilty and not guilty is very dangerous.” “It doesn’t matter who started it.” Russia’s openly-declared, exterminationist war against Ukraine is reduced to “a global mistake.” His line that it’s “pointless to talk about good and evil” earns a pass from the Kremlin, not a knock on the door.

The editorial frame

You invite readers to consider whether Melnichenko might become an “architect of change,” whether he represents a new generation of Russian pragmatists, whether he is “putting his head above the parapet.” These are editorial judgments, not factual errors. But they frame the reader’s encounter with the essay before its argument even begins.

Had The Economist introduced the essay as a case study in Russian influence methodology — how careful omission, passive language, appeals to stability, and selective historical analogy redirect moral attention without a single outright falsehood — it would have done a genuine public service. Instead, the editorial architecture authenticates the messenger and pre-loads the premises from which readers are meant to reason.

The essay did not appear alone. Its 3,000 words arrived with 8,550 more words of companion editorials, an advertised sixty hours of interviews, a podcast, and additional video — consistently describing the author not as a sanctioned oligarch profiting from a war but as a “pragmatic” industrialist. That is not neutral placement. It is promotion and welcome, an extension of Alaska’s red carpet . . . but with intellect.

You wrote that Melnichenko’s “call could resonate in a country where wars gone wrong… have led to campaigns by industrialists for political change.” That country is Russia. The Economist is not a Russian publication, and you are not writing for a Russian audience. Melnichenko doesn’t need you for that. Your target and Moscow’s target are the same Western business and policy readership. The message The Economist is delivering to Russia is confirmation of its credulity.

Reversing the historical record

Russia’s need for “sovereignty” is the essay’s lament, when “sovereignty” is the very thing that Russia has appropriated to itself to hyperbolic levels while dynamiting it elsewhere. It’s the license for doing so. Remember Alexander Litvinenko and miniature nuclear warfare on your soil? Numbing repetition burrows it deep into our brain, pushing aside pesky questions.

If the head of Thyssenkrupp, one of Germany’s industrial giants that supplied the Nazi war machine, had described the “Jewish question” as a matter of German “security,” would you have given him space and a promotional ecosystem to make that case to your readers? “Industrialists” such as that were on the dock in Nuremberg, some were executed.

After the war, no one published a German industrialist’s essay arguing that German “sovereignty” and “predictability” were what the world most urgently needed, war crimes unmentioned. What if today (paralleling Russia) a former Gestapo officer was ensconced in Berlin, revitalized a resurgent Germany, reintroduced the swastika, glorified Hitler and its Nazi past, and invaded Denmark, Holland or Czechia mouthing that they are “threats?”

Melnichenko inverts the analogy. He invokes Germany and Japan as models for Russia’s reintegration but drops what came first for both: a genuine reckoning. Constraints on an aggressor’s sovereignty — constitutional reform, war-crimes prosecutions, reparations, arms limits — were never violations of the postwar order. They were that order, and how it deals with a state that tries to break it. Sovereignty followed accountability; it did not substitute for it. You won’t find that distinction in his essay, and you didn’t supply it either.

Every scenario Melnichenko sketches for “post-war Russia” treats any constraint on Moscow as an injustice for the West to atone for — never as the ordinary, historically consistent cost of having started a war of conquest. He asks the West to grant Russia the outcome of a reckoning it has not undergone, while it still refuses the terms of that reckoning.

Ukraine disappears

Melnichenko writes with precision on economics, sanctions, and systems theory. Only when the subject turns to Russia’s accountability does the language go passive and abstract — the atrocity never denied, simply renamed until it stops sounding like one. Excepting a single word, that Russia “acted,” there is no verb. “Invaded” would be one. He discusses “post-war Russia” as though the map has already been redrawn and settled.

You counter my earlier point by quoting his line that “Ukrainian sovereignty is real.” That sentence is the setup, not the concession: it is immediately followed by treating Russian and Ukrainian sovereignty as symmetrically at risk . . . in a war Russia started. From there the discussion shifts to Russia’s sovereignty, Russia’s future, Russia’s fragmentation, Russia’s place in the international system, Russia’s predictability, Russia’s security, Russia’s reintegration. Instead of asking what justice and the international order require after aggression, our mind is steered into asking what prudence requires for Russia. Ukraine disappears, and the reader scarcely notices the handoff. The tip toe away from Ukraine is not accidental. It’s one of the essay’s achievements. Your concern is never the global consequences of the West’s fecklessness or continued capitulation to Russia’s nuclear blackmail. Business is the background siren song.

Russian conquest of Ukrainian land and its humanity — roughly the size of South Korea, or Austria and Switzerland combined — is airily accepted as a fait accompli, the result of an apparatchik’s paper shuffle. It’s even integrated into Russia’s “constitution.” That’s not a victim’s “sovereignty.”

Freedom House rates that territory at minus 1. North Korea is rated plus 3. Ukrainians are murdered, forcibly “re-educated,” tortured, and subjected to enforced Russification; their children have been trafficked, in some cases through online auctions, sexually abused, and militarized. Russia itself has stated that some 700,000 have already been deported, some as far as 3,000 miles, to its Far East and to North Korea. Elsewhere in Ukraine, civilians are targeted directly and continuously. POWs are sadistically tortured and beheaded. “Your task is to wipe the Ukrainian nation off the face of the earth,” reads the wallet card issued by the Russian Orthodox Church to troops. “The genocide of these cretins is due and inevitable.” “No one should be left alive in Ukraine” was the recent headline of the Kremlin’s official mouthpiece.

Genocide scholars, not a community known for reckless labeling, have pointed to the slaughter, combination of dehumanizing state rhetoric, systematic child deportation, and destruction of Ukrainian civic and cultural institutions as meeting the legal hallmarks of genocidal intent, not merely wartime brutality.

Melnichenko files all of it under “tragedy.” The war is not “against” Ukraine, it is “in” Ukraine.

“Security interests” as a license

You wrote to me, presenting it as settled analysis rather than a restatement of a running Kremlin excuse, that Putin “invaded Ukraine in order to crush its sovereignty in the name of Russia’s security.” That sentence doesn’t report Russia’s stated prevarication — it adopts it, and in doing so sustains the fiction that a state which has expanded by force for centuries is, uniquely and abruptly, only defending itself.

Russia does not lack strategic depth. It is the largest country on earth, straddling a third of Asia and enveloping 40% of Europe, and with a border longer than the equator. “Security interest,” in this context, is not an explanation for Russian conduct — it is permission for it. The campaign in Ukraine targets a people and a national identity, not a border. Intoning Russian “security concerns,” is a cognitive laundering operation, reversing cause and effect, retooling the aggressor as the victim, and masquerading conquest as grievance. The astonishing fact is not that Russia propagates this mythology, but that you repeat it.

Ukraine surrendered the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal in 1994, under joint Russian and American coercion. It was in exchange for security assurances Russia itself signed and then discarded. Russia used the stability the world extended it to rebuild the military that subsequently invaded Ukraine. Melnichenko now asks the world to repeat that same accommodation, under the same rhetoric of imminent catastrophe. We have already run this experiment.

“NATO,” perhaps? “Today, only one country decides whether Ukraine will join NATO. That is Russia,” chortled a Russian Air Force blogger.

The nuclear choke collar

Melnichenko issues no direct threat, but the argument is coercive throughout: “a complex system containing enormous amounts of energy does not forgive miscalculation or arrogance.” Pressing Russia too hard, he warns, “rests on a false assumption: that a complex system can be pushed to the edge and stopped precisely where it is politically convenient.” Translated: sustained pressure produces irreversible consequences; accommodation lets the world “step back from the abyss.” The essay never asks what would restrain Russia from further aggression once that accommodation is granted. It asks only that readers regard the alternative as catastrophic. This is nuclear blackmail in a lab coat — and Russia is a single nuclear power confronting a Western alliance that includes three.

Melnichenko performs, for a Western business readership, a role close to the one Kirill Dmitriev performs for Steve Witkoff: the businesslike interlocutor for whom commerce is the cover story. Witkoff himself came away from talks with Dmitriev describing “very compelling commercial opportunities” that could “give real stability to the region.” That is the register Melnichenko writes in — a salvific investment pitch in lieu of kilo tonnage.

The alternatives he sketches to an accommodated Russia — anarchy, humiliation, subordination to China, a second North Korea, outright fragmentation — revives the apoplexy that gripped the West about a Soviet collapse. That empire simply deflated once Ukraine renewed its independence without the chaos Washington feared. Empires are bad. They’re “destabilizing.” Brzezinski was clear: “without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire.” Never mind that that’s good. The Economist allows the apoplexy a makeover

The essay’s operative instruction, beneath the repeated invocation of “sovereignty,” is that Russia must be permitted to do as it wishes. The reward is “predictability,” not friendship, not justice: “the choice for external players is not between a friendly Russia and a hostile one… It is between a Russia whose behavior is predictable and one whose trajectory is unknown… predictability is more important than sympathy.” A “predictable” Russia, on these terms, is one that keeps Ukrainian territory, continues the war at lower intensity, faces no tribunal, and rebuilds its military on schedule for the next round.

Where this leaves the matter

Your letter closes by noting that “the war has come home” to Russia, and that this is “hardly a coup” for Moscow. The first observation doesn’t establish the second — they are separate ledgers. Fuel queues from Ukrainian drone strikes are a genuine problem for Russia. A sympathetic, largely unchallenged platform in The Economist for Russia’s inversion of cause and effect is a strategic achievement for Moscow, whatever view The Economist takes of it.

In 1997, when Russia was already signaling its intention to extinguish Ukraine as the stumbling block to it destroying the “international order,” the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace published a warning that Russian-led reintegration of the former Soviet space would largely depend on the role Ukraine was permitted, or compelled, to play. That warning went unheeded for a generation, at a heinous cost that will come to the rest of the world if the “messaging” continues to find a respectful platform in publications the West still trusts.

The essay was written by invitation of The Economist, allowing a collaborator’s argument the appearance of impartial, business-minded advocacy against further resistance to Russia. It’s a brief for a predatory state, laundered through systems theory.

If The Economist genuinely did not see this when it prepared its campaign, it may be rather to its credit. It can also take some comfort: Melnichenko did not pull a fast one over an internationally acclaimed institution. He didn’t even write it.

Sincerely,

VICTOR RUD

Chair, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Ukrainian American Bar Association

Board Member, International Supervisory Board, Holodomor Genocide Museum, Kyiv

Board Member, Centre for Eastern European Democracy

****

Here is the original email Victor Rud sent to The Economist:

----- Forwarded Message -----

Sent: Monday, July 13, 2026 at 11:25:22 PM EDT

Subject: Andrey Melnichenko’s essay

Madam, Sir,

In 2004, The New York Times published an Op-ed by Fiona Hill, titled “Stop Blaming Putin and Start Helping Him.” Hill was then with the Brookings Institution and eventually on President Trump’s first National Security Council. Putin had invited her and a small group of other Western influencers to his residence outside Moscow to discuss Chechnya, analogizing its bid for independence to Islamic terrorism’s threat to the West. Hill: “First, Western leaders should reassure Mr. Putin that they do not expect Chechen independence to be on the table. And they should underscore that nobody is pushing him to negotiate or -- as he put it – ‘deal with people who kill children.’”

You can see that your decision to publish Andrey Melnichenko’s essay (”Why a broken Russia is bad for the world”) has precedent. The above, and endlessly more.

Melnichenko retools the aggressor as the party owed security guarantees, reduces a war of conquest to a “common tragedy,” and dresses up nuclear blackmail as a warning about “complex systems” that “do not forgive miscalculation.” Its real argument is that the West should prize Russian “predictability” over Ukrainian sovereignty. The Kremlin’s talking points are in the preferred register for your readers: calm, reasonable . . . and entirely free of the word “invasion.” They’re laundered through a familiar and until now credible byline. The apocalyptic drumbeat is subliminal. Pavlov’s bell works. But here, there is no reward for the target, only the bell ringer.

You compounded the error by surrounding the piece with two companion articles and a podcast, lending it exactly the institutional weight such arguments are designed to exploit. I have read it all and listened carefully. I am not questioning your motivation. But please do not treat a coup for Russia as a breathlessly pioneering scoop for The Economist. A magazine that prides itself on seeing through cant should have recognized this one. Instead, it gave it a stage.

I have been dealing with Russian psy-ops for a lifetime. Their invasion of brain is an art form.

I’d appreciate the opportunity to offer your readers an analysis of the essay. My background follows.

Thank you.

Victor Rud

Chair, Committee on Foreign Affairs

Ukrainian American Bar Association

New York

VICTOR RUD

Victor Rud has practiced law for 40 years, and before the fall of the Soviet Union represented, in the West, political prisoners persecuted by the KGB. He also served as Special Counsel to a member of the US Delegation to the Madrid Review Conference on Security & Cooperation in Europe.

Mr. Rud has spoken, domestically and internationally, before various audiences on issues affecting U.S./Russia/Ukraine relations, among them the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the American University Kyiv, NATO, the UN, the Institute of World Politics, the National Association of Scholars, and the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute. He has participated in various domestic and international conferences on the subject, and his commentary has been carried, among others, by Forbes, Foreign Policy Association, Kyiv Post,The Hill, EUToday, and Center for European Policy Analysis.

Mr. Rud is the past Chairman of the Ukrainian American Bar Association and currently chairs its Committee on Foreign Affairs. He is also board member of the Centre for Eastern European Democracy.

Mr. Rud’s undergraduate degree is from Harvard College, and his law degree from Duke University.

****

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Related:

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

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

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

Upgrade to Paid Member
Upgrade to Founding Member
Gifting memberships
Share my reporting with allies
Buying my ebooks
Donating to the ko-fi fund or directly to venmo

🤍

Begin each day with a grateful heart.

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TODAY: Bette's Happy Hour with Monique Camarra and Friends

Heidi Siegmund Cuda — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 15:56:55 GMT

***Paid Bette members will find the registration link below the paywall. To join our community events and to help support independent investigative journalism in a time of grave peril, please upgrade to a paid membership here:

Every week, we come together for our community conversations, where we get better informed as we hear from global voices.

Today, two hours from now, we’ll hear from geopolitical analyst Monique Camarra, our featured guest for our Tuesday Happy Hour, and we’ll also be joined by disinformation analyst Dietmar Pichler, and Joni Askola, who just returned from Ukraine.

We’ll be bringing news from Canada, Europe, and the States.

I look forward to another hour with you all on Tuesday, as we continue to think our way to solutions for these trouble times.

A note for new members: the Happy Hour began three years ago, when I noticed many Bette members in despair. I thought a weekly wellness checkin for newsies was in order, and it evolved into a session where global guests offer news from around the world. The title was always meant to be ironic, but I know I feel better when our community comes together. Our bi-monthly Sunday Speakeasys will resume this Fall, and look for an announcement about our upcoming Bette’s Book Club in August.

Lastly, a heartfelt thank you to those of you who are renewing your memberships and are new to the Bette community. Your support means everything to me. It’s been a devastating time to be a member of independent media, and I am so grateful for your continued support.

Keep scrolling to find the registration link.

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

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

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

Upgrade to Paid Member
Upgrade to Founding Member
Gifting memberships
Share my reporting with allies
Buying my ebooks
Donating to the ko-fi fund or directly to venmo

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Begin each day with a grateful heart.

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REGISTRATION LINK FOUND HERE

REGISTER: Bette's Happy Hour with Monique Camarra and Friends

Heidi Siegmund Cuda — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 12:54:11 GMT

It’s not surprising that I had a dream I was back in broadcast news. In the dream, I was visiting a former newsroom — my old colleagues still plugging away — and I began a righteous soliloquy, lambasting management, and the reporters and producers, for normalizing the Trump regime. I ranted against the collaborators and stenographers. I explained that they were accessories to the death of truth, and by normalizing the regime they were helping to create an alternative universe, where leaders used lies as a weapon, to dominate and incapacitate the masses, to literally bring people the democratic world to its knees.

I looked for a response but just saw blank, nervous faces. I could see some of the former cameraman I had once worked with nodding in agreement. But everyone else was silent — gripped by corporate- and billionaire-owned media paralysis.

Clearly, I’d watched some of the clips from the White House Press Dinner, which looked more like an RT gala, before going to sleep last night.

I was saddened by what passes for journalism these days. I was also heartened by the feeds of independent journalists who share my grief and my defiance.

We can’t ask media owned by Murdoch, Thiel, Musk, Bezos and multinational corporations to do better — they’re in on the fascism. But we can continue to support independent media and the historians who are waging a mighty battle in defense of truth.

Every week, I try to do just that as we come together for our community conversations, where we get better informed as we hear from global voices.

This morning, I was on the phone with geopolitical analyst Monique Camarra, our featured guest for Tuesday’s Happy Hour, as we discussed the topics for tomorrow. She’ll be bringing you news from Alberta and Germany, and helping us understand influence operations. Loomer in Ukraine? Um ya.

I’ll be bringing news from Europe and the States, and always pausing for culture. When I launched this Substack in 2022, it was with the idea of writing about culture and politics — the urgency of the 2024 election and its aftermath dominated these pages.

But like many of you, I fill my days with music, theatre, art, and history — more of that please. In August, I’ll be introducing you to a Belfast-born artist. Last month, we met a globetrotter from Italy. So along with the political experts of our times, expect more appearances from cultural ambassadors I’m meeting in my travels.

In many ways, art is life so I’ll leave you with a clip from my favorite TV show, The Sandbaggers, which I wrote about here:

In the clip, the head of UK’s Secret Intelligence Service is getting excoriated for going rogue, as he defends his country from external threats:

That clip is from an episode in the 1970s series titled Decision By Committee, something that doesn’t work when you’re fighting the KGB.

I read a line to our community last week during Craig Unger’s visit from William Shirer’s Berlin Diary, published in 1941. It was important, I thought, because Shirer noted that “Hitler’s success has been due to the luck of having mediocre men like Daladier and Chamberlain in charge of the destinies of democracies.”

How long have we cried, “When is someone going to do something to stop this?” We bore witness to the mass radicalization, we know who’s behind it, we’ve seen how soft the democratic world has responded to Putin’s aggression and now to Trump’s aggression. When Roosevelt was reelected in 1940, Hitler knew he was in trouble, and he was right.

In a previous century, leaders with moral clarity could be both decent and strong.

In a previous century, reporters like William Shirer left Berlin when he could no longer report the truth. When the Germany censors made truth impossible.

On that note, I look forward to another hour with you all on Tuesday, as we continue to think our way to solutions for these trouble times.

Keep scrolling to find the registration link.

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

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Bette In the News: 'Rejecting Palantir' on Hartmann

Heidi Siegmund Cuda — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 10:48:11 GMT

***Please take out a membership to support the light of truth.***

I had a few minutes to get ready for my appearance on The Thom Hartmann Program to discuss my report on the many European countries that are now blacklisting the data analytics company Palantir due to US threats to national security and sovereignty.

It’s an important subject, as the concept of digital sovereignty is increasingly front and center in the fight for human rights.

Here is my conversation with Thom:

Multiple European countries are attempting to cauterize the wound to prevent further damage.

As I reminded Thom’s audience, Palantir’s founder Peter Thiel also sat on the board of Facebook, when Cambridge Analytica was stealing and weaponizing our data to then help steal the 2016 election for Trump, with Palantir’s assistance.

Europe can’t afford to leave that door open for exploit, and EU and UK leaders are increasingly aware that Palantir’s founder is pro-autocratic and it’s not safe to work with his company. Thiel and Palantir’s weirdo CEO Alex Karp are not safe to work with. As I also noted, Palantir has multi-million dollar contracts with ICE because it’s a notorious surveillance company, those contracts, in addition to its contracts with Israel.

The bottom line: if Palantir is continued to be allowed to operate within European Union borders, you can expect the EU to collapse.

That is why it’s so important, and why I’m grateful that Europe is finally fighting on the battlefield that it should have been fighting on all along — the tech battlefield.

As I noted in our interview, I had just driven in from Cornwall, where I took a few days off to enjoy the beautiful seaside towns of the south coast of England. I was on a mission to tour Port Isaac, the fishing village where the British TV series, Doc Martin, was filmed. (If you know, you know.)

It was there I met a woman from the east end of London, who understood my worries for America. Of Trump, she said repeatedly: “Someone needs to sort him out.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Sharing a table with a stranger over Cornish pasties in Truro — communal tables are very common in Europe and a wonderful way to meet people — I learned that Cornwall is filled with “Irish people who never learned to swim.” Probably why I felt an immediate kinship with the locals.

His family was originally from Co Limerick, and he had a profound understanding of America’s troubles.

He said even in his local pub, where people’s heads are filled up with a bunch of junk politics and disinformation, there is now an understanding that “it’s not about left and right, it’s about up and down. The billionaires are sucking all the money to the top, and leaving nothing for the bottom.”

He said, “That’s the thing about people here in the UK, we can smell a rat. And the smell is getting stronger.”

I told Thom a bit about that interchange and how for the first time in 18 months, I am starting to be hopeful about the UK’s prospects of thwarting the pro-Russian authoritarian political factions masquerading as populists for the people, while engaging in immigrant bashing. Maybe it’s the new PM, who I met last year at Byline Festival. Andy Burnham is such a decent chap. And decency matters.

It also matters that Palantir is being rejected both nationally and locally — that matters.

A final word about moral clarity.

I encourage each of you to watch the “50 Ships” episode of a British series titled Foyle’s War, starring two brilliant actors Michael Kitchen and Honeysuckle Weeks.

The series is set during World War II, and Kitchen plays a cop whose job it is to keep law and order in an increasingly evil world. He never loses his moral clarity — not for a second. While war profiteering is occurring and locals are looting houses bombed by the “Jerries” — and murders are covered up for geopolitical gains — Foyle remains perfectly clear-eyed about right and wrong.

I am drawing great inspiration from him.

And from the people I am meeting in shared spaces.

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

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

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'Reds Under the Bed' - My Latest Hot Type column for Byline Times

Heidi Siegmund Cuda — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 21:13:25 GMT

***Please take out a membership to support the light of truth.***

I built my career as an independent investigative reporter tweet by tweet — a decade of slogging through the cesspool of bots, trolls, influence campaigns, psycho brigades, cyber stalkers, to get to what was real — to meet allies and brilliant minds in the fight for global democracy.

I had decades of investigative reporting and feature writing experience in both broadcast news and print journalism before becoming a full-time pro-democracy truth scribe. It simply had to be done. There should have been government departments dedicated to thwarting the onslaught of active measures, but in their absence, the work was left to independent reporters.

Tweet by tweet, I built a following and a network that sustained me, and for the last few years, Elon Musk has been taking it away. It began with peeling back my reach — stripping me of ten thousand followers, as he did other journalists. I used to be able to search my Twitter archives with just my last name and a key word, which helped me move quickly when triaging lies with fact-based reporting from my back catalogue. Now, I try to search for an old tweet, and I have to wade through the suck.

In the last two years, I went from posting threads of my work which reached millions of views, which translated into paid supporters, to posting threads of important work that will receive a handful of likes, and a couple of retweets.

I know this is war, so nothing’s shocking, but losing visibility when truth is under assault — and losing out on new subscribers — makes me have to work harder for far less. And I know how lucky I am to have built this substack in the before times, and it remains a fertile garden which I water with the best reporting of my life.

But it’s difficult, and it will only get more difficult. So if you can, please consider supporting this work.

Hot Type: Reds Under the Bed

With every source of trusted truth now under assault, we’ll be relying on independent thinkers more and more.

I am really proud of today’s Hot Type column in Byline Times. It’s always tricky when you cover the propaganda words being detonated by autocrats, but I think I hit the right tone with this:

Byline Times

15 days ago · 33 likes · 1 comment · Heidi Cuda

I got the idea for the theme at the end of our Happy Hour with Craig Unger, when I asked him why he thinks Trump’s ginning up the Red Menace.

Take a look at the column, which I am cross-posting below. If you think it’s worthy of a share, please share the original report from Byline Times and thank you as always for your support of the Byline team and my work here at Bette.

Hot Type: Reds Under the Bed

Political columnist Heidi Siegmund Cuda reports on the ‘Freudian projection’ of Trump’s latest boogeyman – the ‘Communist’

Published originally in the Byline Times and Byline Supplement magazine, July 25, 2026.

Disinformation is the system. And that’s the trick.
How to investigate the tropes being put out by the fascist regime in America without furthering their cause.
The latest boogeyman – the “communist” – has entered stage left, as “antifa” failed to serve the purpose of its masters.
Independent reporters worked overtime to ensure even the most MAGA-drenched brains understood that “antifa” – like Big Foot, chupacabras, and Bat Boy – simply does not exist in any substantial form in America.
So taking a page from Trump’s mentor, OG red-scare tactician Roy Cohn, the universally loathed liar-provocateurs of the Cell of Jerks in the White House are staying on message. Now, it’s all communism! All the time!
“Communist! Communist! Communist!”
Between June 23 and July 8, Trump referenced communism 81 times. In recent days, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise are behaving like burbling apparatchiks – spouting anti-communist rhetoric with such great frequency they appear to have a form of Tourette’s Syndrome.
“The United States doesn’t want to be a communist country. We’re never going to be a communist country. We’re not going to allow communist influences to undermine our politics or our society.” – Marco Rubio, 22 July 2026
“The Bolshevik takeover of the Democratic Party is in full swing, and communism is on the ballot this November.” – Steve Scalise, 22 July 2026
It would appear they’re hoping to scare the olds at the polls in yet another front in the attack on truth.
“It’s Freudian projection,” Dr Marci Shore told Byline Times. “What was horrifying about Bolshevism was not universal health care. It was arbitrary violence and terror. This is what the Trump regime is employing.”
Shore, the chair in European Intellectual History at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, reminded us to look at the latest acts of violence executed and condoned by Trump’s brownshirts in immigration enforcement.
In the recent weeks, there were two more fatal killings. In Texas, a 52-year-old man driving to work in Houston, Texas, was murdered by an ICE agent who shot at him through his passenger side window. Just six days later, in Maine, ICE agents murdered a 26-year-old in his car. According to a database tracking these murders, the Gun Violence Data Hub, there have been 30 deaths by immigration officers since Trump returned to the White House last year. Among the murdered include Renee Good and Alex Pretti – US citizens killed by ICE agents in Minnesota — and 22 people have died in ICE custody this year.
Investigative reporter Craig Unger told Byline Times he sees another reason for the GOP’s new-old communist obsession.
“The trigger was the election of Mamdani, the mayor of New York City,” said Unger. “He is a member of the Democratic Socialist Alliance. And since his election, three people, three candidates he endorsed, won the Democratic nomination for office.”
Unger noted that out of the 48 countries in the recent World Cup competition, the US is the only high-income country without universal health care.
“That puts us in the same league as DR Congo and Haiti,” he said.
It also helps explain why the Mayor Zohran Mamdani-backed candidates swept the New York primaries – two are democratic socialists. This fact prompted Trump Inc messaging to go for the low-hanging fruit of “reds under the bed.”
I was gifted that phrase in an interview I did with Russia watcher Keir Giles in January 2023, during a podcast about his book, Russia’s War On Everybody.
What will get obscured in this new Red Scare is the fact that, yes, Russia is at war with the West, but unfortunately, the Trump regime is on Russia’s side.
In that 2023 interview with Giles, he said:
“For so long, Russia was not recognized as the problem and people like me were saying, ‘Well actually, we do have a problem. And it will bite us very hard in the tender parts before long.’ We were called the cranks, we were called the conspiracy theorists, who saw reds under the bed where there were none. That presents a very deep-seated attitude, against which you have to push back. But that’s the reason why the book is dedicated to Vladimir Putin, because he’s done more for us than anybody has in proving that actually, yes, the world really does have a Russia problem.”
Fear-baiting communist rhetoric to the contrary, I predicted five days after the 2024 election in my Byline Times report, Welcome to West Russia, that Trump 2.0 would behave very like Russia in the ‘90s – the violence, the staggering thieving, oligarchs running politicians – and tragically, I was right, as I wrote:
“Democracy was just murdered to thunderous applause, and those who saw it coming were called alarmist, but they were also the people who read history books or have lived experience — who know struggle from their unique perspectives or had fled authoritarian countries.”
And it’s that knowing of history that also gnaws at me.
Red Menace
It was fear of communism among middle-class voters and rural communities in Germany during the 1930s that led to support for the Nazi party. That fear was drilled into people by Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who consistently and with great repetition deployed aggressive rhetoric against communism. They created the anti-communist fear – the Red Menace – dressing it up with anti-semitism, to then use it to justify eliminating their political opponents, and then eliminating democracy.
And that same old fear is being ginned up by Trump’s Reality TV fascism scriptwriters, who continually use tired tropes to bang away at their deletion of democracy, now making it appear as if our only choice is fascism or communism. As if.
Situational Morality
Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn taught Trump a lot. The New York lawyer was regarded as the king of situational morality. Cohn taught Trump to never admit defeat, always counter-attack, and always claim victory.
Explaining Cohn a decade ago, investigative reporter Wayne Barrett for the Village Voice told Democracy Now!:
“Roy is incandescent evil… the Satanic feeling that he would give you… He was the weirdest guy. He was into the strangest stuff. He was a chicken hawk after little boys, and yet he was the most virulently anti-gay guy you could imagine. And so, that was Donald’s mentor and constant sidekick, who represented all five of the organized crime families in the City of New York.”
Cohn’s cousin David L. Marcus said Cohn “became chief counsel to Senator Joe McCarthy, who led witch hunts against people suspected of being Communists; in 1973, Cohn met Donald Trump and began grooming him to become a national figure.”
So witch-hunting communists has likely been in Trump’s bloodstream since the early days of his relationship with Cohn, who before his death in 1986 to AIDS, bragged that Trump called him 15 to 20 times a day.
Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, also appears to have received the witch-hunting memo, as he called people with left-wing beliefs “enemies of civilization,” in what can only be described as a fascist speech on July 16 in Washington, DC, that clearly mimicked Joe McCarthy’s infamous 1950 “enemies from within” speech.
State of Emergency
“That Americans would be vulnerable to the Trump administration’s attempt to conjure up a new ‘Red Scare’ reflects a lack of understanding of the whole Soviet project,” Dr Marci Shore explained. “Communism as it was carried out in the Soviet Union and the satellite states was a radical social engineering experiment, which, needless to say, involved much more than cutting the edges off of capitalism and guaranteeing healthcare, education, and housing. On the contrary: postwar West European states instituted social welfare measures precisely as a defense against communism, rightly grasping that universal healthcare and strong public education were politically stabilizing and in fact in the whole society’s interest.
“Now the Trump administration is trying to create a state of emergency around a communist menace in response to calls by people like Mamdani, AOC and Bernie Sanders for universal healthcare and affordable housing. There is more than just a little bit of Freudian projection here: as I noted, what was horrifying about Bolshevism was not universal healthcare. It was universal terror. Communist regimes created states of emergency, moments of the ‘intensification of the class struggle,’ as pretexts for the suspension of any rule of law. They made use of the politics of ‘provocation’ – provoking violence so as to justify more repression. They instituted mass surveillance and encouraged a culture of denunciations. They invoked the specter of ‘enemies of the people’ as a pretext for arbitrary violence and terror. This is increasingly how the Trump administration behaves.”
Vienna-based disinformation analyst Dietmar Pichler added: “What is dangerous and wrong is a discourse that equates social policies like universal healthcare with communism. It not only distorts reality, it also downplays the totalitarian character of real communist regimes.”
Even a cursory knowledge of the writings of Vaćlav Havel and Aleksandr Solzhenitsynwould reveal that Soviet rule was a brutal combination of communist totalitarianism, and no Democrat on the horizon is trying to bring that back.
No Democrat is publicly doing fascist Nazi salutes. That is reserved for members of the Trump regime, with all its brutality and connivance.

****

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

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

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

Upgrade to Paid Member
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Moral Clarity: 'Time to Deal with Collaborators'

Heidi Siegmund Cuda — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 17:28:58 GMT

***Please take out a membership to support the light of truth.***

I just filed my latest Hot Type column for Byline Times, and I look forward to sharing it with you this weekend.

All I can think about in this moment is moral clarity, retaining it, defending it, not giving in to the erosion of it.

I wrote about how three key propagandists, sycophants, and puppets during World War II were executed for treason.

There was no ambiguity. The prosecutors had moral clarity — each defendant had promoted the Nazi regime and by so doing, each sealed their fate — death by hanging or execution by firing squad.

During the 1945 treason trial of William Joyce — known as “Lord Haw-Haw” — the presiding judge Mr. Justice Tucker stated that while the accused himself was “of little importance,” it was of great importance “that the standard of British justice should not be lowered.”

When Norwegian puppet-leader and traitor Vidkun Quisling was found guilty and sentenced to death on 10 September 1945, a psychiatrist who examined Quisling over three sessions noted he “was deeply lacking in a sense of reality, if not common sense.”

When the Norwegian authorities arrested Quisling in the months before his execution, they determined “it was time to deal with collaborators.”

When Joachim von Ribbentrop — the German diplomat and war criminal, who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs of Nazi Germany from 1938 to 1945 — was sentenced to death at the Nuremberg trials for his role in starting World War II in Europe and enabling the Holocaust, the military tribunal determined:

“There is abundant evidence, moreover, that Ribbentrop was in complete sympathy with all the main tenets of the National Socialist creed, and that his collaboration with Hitler and with other defendants in the commission of Crimes against Peace, War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity was whole-hearted.”

There’s no waffling. Just moral clarity.

Ribbentrop was “in complete sympathy with all the main tenets of the National Socialist creed.”

And therefore, on October 16, 1946, he became the first of the Nuremberg defendants to be executed by hanging.

I’m sure for each of them it seemed good for a time — profiting off the regime, as it spread murderous violence, misery, and cruelty.

‘It’s Not Me Who’s Imprisoned — It’s Poland’

Intellectual historian Marci Shore drew my attention to a famously defiant letter sent by Polish historian and essayist Adam Michnik to Poland’s Interior Minister Czesław Kiszczak on December 12, 1983. Michnik sent the letter from prison — the Rakowiecka investigative arrest center in Warsaw. The letter rejected the regime's offer of freedom in exchange for forced emigration from Poland. He wrote that it wasn’t him who was imprisoned, but rather, it was Poland.

Among his statements:

“In the life of every honorable man there comes a difficult moment, General, when the simple statement that this is black and that is white requires paying a high price. It may cost one one’s life on the slopes of the Citadel, behind the wire fence of Sachenhausen, behind the bars of Mokotów prison. At such a time, General, a decent man’s concern is not the price he will have to pay but the certainty that white is white and black is black. . . It may come as news to you, that there are two things in this world, evil and good.”

Michnik offers us an example of moral clarity.

Now 79, Michnik was asked by historian Irena Grudzińska Gross for his advice on how to oppose the Trump regime, and he responded:

“Russian President Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump’s regimes do have something in common, and it is not only their rhetoric. For both, foreign policy is a function of domestic policy. Putin needs a permanent state of war to keep the Russian people under his thumb; Trump needs to create conflict with the entire world to present his use of power as necessary for the defense of American identity, for America’s well-being… we are witnessing a thoroughgoing Putinization of the United States. Trump wants to create a Putin-like regime, but he must do so within the American system…
If I were to give advice… I would (say) to read Snyder’s On Tyranny. It is a textbook that allows you to understand the world you live in and what dangers await you. It is no coincidence that he draws heavily on the experience of Eastern Europe at the time of the dying communist dictatorship… None of us knew back then that the dictatorship was dying; we all knew that it was weakening, that it was faltering, but no one expected it to end the way it did. Later, none of us expected the ‘revenge of memory’ that we now see in Russia, as well as in Hungary, the US, Brazil, Argentina, and so forth.
We are seeing a different face of America that we had lost sight of, though it was there all along. It is the face of racism, exclusion, cruelty, lynchings, and brutal imperial domination – an impulse that was fully on display during Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance’s clash with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office… it was something none of us expected. It was a physical shock… We need to understand how we can defuse these minefields. It will not be easy.”

None of this easy.

But it’s made more difficult by the propaganda barrage coming from regime collaborators.

I recommend anyone who can get to the International Criminal Court in The Hague to do so.

My soul is still filled up from the recent tour I took of the ICC — where there is no ambiguity about “evil and good.”

I keep returning to William Shirer’s final paragraph in Berlin Diary, which is where I learned about the fate of multiple Nazi collaborators.

As a CBS reporter, Shirer documented the rise of Nazi Germany and in his last diary entry on December 13, 1940, as he’s fleeing Germany to go back to the US, he writes:

“I stood against the rail watching the lights recede on a Europe in which I had spent all fifteen of my adult years… they had been happy years, personally, and for all people in Europe they had meaning and borne hope until the war came and the Nazi blight and the hatred and the fraud and the political gangsterism and the murder and the massacre and the incredible intolerance and all the suffering and the starving and cold and the thud of all the bombs blowing the people in a house to pieces, the thud of all the bombs blasting man’s hope and decency.”

It’s that he ended his book on the word “decency,” that’s what keeps staying with me.

These conniving regimes hammer away at decency, because they are so very indecent.

****

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

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

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

Upgrade to Paid Member
Upgrade to Founding Member
Gifting memberships
Share my reporting with allies
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TODAY: Bette's Happy Hour with Craig Unger, Tuesday July 21, 11 am Pacific

Heidi Siegmund Cuda — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 16:27:30 GMT

***Bette members will find the registration link below the paywall. To join our community events, please upgrade your membership and help support independent investigative journalism in this time of grave peril.***

THIS EVENT BEGINS IN 90 MINUTES!

How Did the FBI Allow the Greatest Intelligence Failure in American History to Take Place?

“I am working on my next post on how nothing really moves the needle and why. That is to say, the president is a rapist. Ho hum. A Russian asset. So what? How did that come to be and why. When I was a child Sherman Adams was the subject of a huge scandal because he took an overcoat as an apparent quid pro quo. But now you have the most corrupt president in history by far and a third of the country is perfectly happy with that. How did that happen?”—Craig Unger for Bette Dangerous

I can only go about a month or so before I need to hear from Craig Unger.

I asked the New York Times-bestselling author and intrepid investigative reporter to join our Happy Hour, today, Tuesday, July 21, 11 am Pacific, to walk us through his recent Substack post, How Did the FBI Allow the Greatest Intelligence Failure in American History to Take Place?

American Kompromat

American Kompromat is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber…

a month ago · 1509 likes · 91 comments · Craig Unger

As the tease quote at the top of this post hints, Unger will also preview what he’s working on next.

For those new to Bette, here’s a report I worked on with Unger, revealing key Russian women in Jeffrey Epstein’s orbit:

Byline Supplement

Hot Type: Epstein and Russian Connections to One of the World's 'Sleaziest Pimps'

The problem with investigating and reporting on transnational mob ties is that no matter how careful you are with word choice, it always takes you right to the gutter. There is literally no way to write about Donald Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein, and Je…

a year ago · 60 likes · 4 comments · Heidi Cuda

And here is a detailed conversation with him covering his decade of investigating Trump’s ties to Russia:

Please keep scrolling to join this conversation, and if you are not yet a member, please consider subscribing to receive invites to community events:

Read more about the Trump-Russia Timeline and Jeffrey Epstein’s Russian ties on Craig Unger’s substack here:

Craig Unger is the New York Times-bestselling author of six books on the Republican Party’s assault on democracy, including House of Bush, House of Saud; House of Trump, House of Putin, and now Den of Spies, a real life political thriller about how master spy William Casey put together a treasonous covert operation in 1980 that hijacked American foreign policy and stole the election for Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.
A graduate of Harvard University, Craig began his career in journalism as an undergraduate editor of The Harvard Crimson. In 1976, he moved to France as co-owner/editor of The Paris Metro, a celebrated biweekly English-language city magazine in the French capital. In the Eighties, as senior editor at New York Magazine, Craig wrote and edited major features on subjects ranging from medicine to pop culture, architecture, and politics. Over the years, his work has appeared in The New Republic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Esquire, The Independent, and many other publications. He also served as a contributing editor for Vanity Fair where he covered national security and foreign affairs for more than 15 years.

You can check out his collection of investigative reporting on Trump-Russia and the Republican party’s war on democracy here by ordering his books here:

Craig Unger’s Books

Look forward to seeing many of you at our Happy Hour.

New members: I began these Happy Hours three years ago, when I realized the despair many of us were in over what was happening to America and the ongoing attacks occurring in all democratic nations. I bring in global experts to learn as much as we can as we seek solutions together.

Please keep scrolling to register.

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

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

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

Upgrade to Paid Member
Upgrade to Founding Member
Gifting memberships
Share my reporting with allies
Buying my ebooks
Donating to the ko-fi fund or directly to venmo

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Begin each day with a grateful heart.

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Please register here

REGISTER: Bette's Happy Hour with Craig Unger, Tuesday July 21, 11 am Pacific

Heidi Siegmund Cuda — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 05:01:11 GMT

How Did the FBI Allow the Greatest Intelligence Failure in American History to Take Place?

I can only go about a month or so before I need to hear from Craig Unger.

I asked the New York Times-bestselling author and intrepid investigative reporter to join our Happy Hour, Tuesday, July 21, 11 am Pacific, to walk us through his recent Substack post, How Did the FBI Allow the Greatest Intelligence Failure in American History to Take Place?

American Kompromat

American Kompromat is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber…

2 months ago · 1509 likes · 91 comments · Craig Unger

As the tease quote at the top of this post hints, Unger will also preview what he’s working on next.

For those new to Bette, here’s a report I worked on with Unger, revealing key Russian women in Jeffrey Epstein’s orbit:

Byline Supplement

Hot Type: Epstein and Russian Connections to One of the World's 'Sleaziest Pimps'

a year ago · 60 likes · 4 comments · Heidi Cuda

And here is a detailed conversation with him covering his decade of investigating Trump’s ties to Russia:

Please keep scrolling to join this conversation, and if you are not yet a member, please consider subscribing to receive invites to community events:

Read more about the Trump-Russia Timeline and Jeffrey Epstein’s Russian ties on Craig Unger’s substack here:

Craig Unger is the New York Times-bestselling author of six books on the Republican Party’s assault on democracy, including House of Bush, House of Saud; House of Trump, House of Putin, and now Den of Spies, a real life political thriller about how master spy William Casey put together a treasonous covert operation in 1980 that hijacked American foreign policy and stole the election for Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.
A graduate of Harvard University, Craig began his career in journalism as an undergraduate editor of The Harvard Crimson. In 1976, he moved to France as co-owner/editor of The Paris Metro, a celebrated biweekly English-language city magazine in the French capital. In the Eighties, as senior editor at New York Magazine, Craig wrote and edited major features on subjects ranging from medicine to pop culture, architecture, and politics. Over the years, his work has appeared in The New Republic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Esquire, The Independent, and many other publications. He also served as a contributing editor for Vanity Fair where he covered national security and foreign affairs for more than 15 years.

You can check out his collection of investigative reporting on Trump-Russia and the Republican party’s war on democracy here by ordering his books here:

Craig Unger’s Books

Look forward to seeing many of you at our Happy Hour.

Please keep scrolling to register.

****

****

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
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Quick Note — Hartmann on Monday; Unger on Tuesday

Heidi Siegmund Cuda — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 09:35:00 GMT

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Hope everyone is managing to have a beautiful endless summer despite the Daily Awful of the US regime.

I’ve been on the road with spotty internet but just wanted to say to all of you who stay informed and actively oppose authoritarians everywhere, I love you and am grateful.

I’ll be on The Thom Hartmann Program Monday and Craig Unger will be our guest on Tuesday, 11 am Pacific, at Bette’s Happy Hour. We’ll sort through this fresh hell together. Registration for members in separate email.

In the meantime, enjoy a Cornwall sunset.

The sun is still rising and setting on this great earth.

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

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

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TODAY: Bette’s Happy Hour with Levan Tarkhnishili on Trump Tower Tbilisi + Marty's Thoughts

Heidi Siegmund Cuda — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 15:01:50 GMT

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THIS EVENT BEGINS IN THREE HOURS. READ ON FOR NEW COMMENTS ON TRUMP TOWER TBILISI FROM RETIRED IRS CRIMINAL INVESTIGATOR MARTIN SHEIL, PLUS ONE RAY OF SUNSHINE.

“Georgia has been told for two years that it is drifting away from the West because the West does not understand it. A skyscraper bearing the Trump name will not change that diagnosis. It will only make it harder to see clearly. Vance’s plane did not land in Tbilisi for a reason. Before the first stone is laid, the public is entitled to know whether this tower is the beginning of a reset with Washington — or a very expensive piece of cover for the people Washington has already named.”—Levan Tarkhnishvili

BETTE MEMBERS: Please join us for another informative hour with Ilia State University professor Levan Tarkhnishvili, the author of this recent guest op-ed for the Bette Dangerous community on the money and shadow figures behind Trump Tower Tbilisi.

We’ll meet Tuesday, July 14, 11 am Pacific; 2 pm Eastern; 7 pm UK. Look for our bi-monthly Sunday Speakeasys to return in the Fall.

More about Levan:

Levan Tarkhnishvili is a Professor at Ilia State University, with his research interests including the values of society and transition, elections, secularism, and political transition. He formerly served as Chair of the Georgian Public Broadcaster, Chair of the Central Election Commission, an advisor to former President Mikheil Saakashvili, and was an MP from 2012–2016.

Our community events have often focused on the country of Georgia, which was ground zero for Russian active measures.

AND THIS JUST IN: After I sent retired IRS criminal investigator Martin Sheil the Trump Tower Tbilisi op-ed, he zipped me the following comments:

H,
I thought I might shine a little light on the shadows, and demonstrate the possible means and manner, money can be moved surreptitiously when motivated to do so, and how offshore shell companies, banks and law firms often play a role in camouflaging the movement of money and/or provide shadows to shield the tracing of money movement.
Let’s run down some of the players that our friend Evan Tarkhnishvili writes about when referencing Trump Tower Tbilisi:
And please feel free to link my Substack on the same topic.
In my piece, I referenced Bidzina Ivanishvili’s association with offshore shell companies and a Swiss bank account. I also discuss Ivanishvili’s long-time association with Vladimir Putin and question whether Ivanishvili could be a bagman for Putin, since he possessed the means to do so, and given Putin and the KGB’s long history of using offshore shell companies and bank accounts, as well as real estate, to conceal/camouflage the movement of money.
So who am I talking about here?
The author referenced Giorgi Ramishvili and the Silk Road Group as an intermediary or possible shadow. ICIJ documents Ramishvili’s offshore shell companies and association with the Silk Road Group. The Silk Road Group is a shell company located in British Virgin Islands and limited to Ramishvili as his ultimate beneficial owner. Oh my!
The author also references the Sapir Corporation as involved in the Tbilisi transaction. Alex Sapir is the CEO of the Sapir Corporation, which has a history of partnering with the Trump Org in real estate transactions. Alex Tamir is the son of Tamir Sapir (Georgian-born businessman) who once resided in Trump Tower and partnered with Donald Trump in the construction of Trump Soho. Prior to that, Tamir partnered with Sam Kislin in the ownership of a Manhattan electronics store called Joy Luck Electronics, that catered to KGB officers and Soviet diplomats located in NYC. It has been reported that both Kislin and Sapir were associated with Russian organized crime in NY. Joy Luck reportedly sold Trump a couple of hundred television sets for one of Trump’s hotels. Fast forward to contemporary times and let’s see what ICIJ documents offshore-wise for the Sapir Corporation.
Oy vey - please note the association between the Sapir Organization registered in the British Virgin Islands and Mossack Fonseca - a notorious Panamanian Law firm with Swiss offices. Mossack Fonseca was at the very heart of the infamous Panama Papers that detailed international money laundering by oligarchs and government officials worldwide. Oh my!
Last Note – It should be noted that in my experience, successful prosecution of Federal money laundering or tax evasion charges, necessarily focuses on evidence of concealment, or in this particular case “camouflage.”
So that’s my two cents on this topic. Please stay tuned for my coming Substack tentatively titled Bribe Force One that outlines some potential legal basis for impeachment should Congress and DOJ be so inclined...
Best regards,
Marty

Marty also wanted to share the following with our community, a positive development that warmed his heart:

Yo H,
Did you see today’s court ruling against Trump’s IRS immunity settlement deal?
Judge Williams totally eviscerated Trump and particularly the lawyers involved for gaming the system. Judge Williams included sanctions against the lawyers involved, which were totally justified.
This ruling means neither Trump nor his family retain any immunity from the IRS and given that Trump is the single most corrupt President in American history going all the way back to Warren G Harding and the Teapot Dome scandal, it is good to know that the finest financial investigators in the world are back in play completely unleashed to keep the Grifter in Chief and his family in check!
Marty

Always great to hear from Marty!

He says he is currently “raising an adult beverage in the general direction of Judge Williams in South Florida” and making a toast “to the restoration of integrity in the U.S. Judiciary! Thank you Judge Williams.”

New members: I began the Happy Hour three years ago, when I realized many community members were struggling with despair. When we come together, I know I’m not the only one who feels better.

Look forward to seeing many of you today. I do not paywall my work here, so your paid memberships are everything to me. Thank you as always for supporting my work.

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

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

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

Upgrade to Paid Member
Upgrade to Founding Member
Gifting memberships
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ARCHIVING TRUTH: Who Will Write Our History?

Heidi Siegmund Cuda — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 12:22:42 GMT

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Hot Type: The Next Phase in the Assault on Truth

Funny to wake up to Marco Rubio’s threats to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, just after I wrote about my visit there.

The ICC is a fact-based sanctuary, a threat to criminal leaders engaged in genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. Sitting leaders can be prosecuted. Rubio is an accessory to the murder of truth, and will likely be standing by Trump as he lies to the American public on Thursday night about Venezuela tampering with the 2020 election, confusing Venezuela with Russia in 2016 and hoping no one notices.

Over the weekend, I shared with you my Hot Type column on the next phase in the assault on truth, focusing on multiple reports that indicate Russians are advancing beyond the spreading of disinformation to methodically targeting, poisoning and subverting all trustworthy sources of truth.

Byline Times

a month ago · 38 likes · 1 comment · Heidi Cuda

I open with my trip to the ICC, because I want you to feel centered and focused on the fact that there are places in this world where international law still functions, despite attacks by fascist regimes. Here is a report I wrote in May about the ground being laid for a Special Tribunal for Russian war crimes.

Byline Times

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

3 months ago · 57 likes · 1 comment · Heidi Cuda

In my most recent column from June 11, I cite multiple deep dive reports on Russian manipulation of Wikipedia and other reliable and trusted sources.

Who Will Write Our History?

In advance of writing that report, I reached out to intellectual historian Dr. Marci Shore for examples from history on how truth was preserved.

She responded: “The historical examples are all pre-digital, pre-internet. We’re in a different world now. The thing to do used to be to bury archives —the famous example is Emmanuel Ringelblum and the Oneg Shabbat archives.”

In the book Who Will Write Our History by Samuel Kassow, we learn the story of Ringelblum, a historian “who had the prescience to create and encourage the keeping of an archive in the Warsaw ghetto during the Holocaust.”

According to the book’s description:

“His story cannot be told without reference to the archive itself, which Ringelblum called “Oyneg Shabes” (the joy of Sabbath), primarily because its management committee met secretly to discuss the archive on Saturdays, the Jewish Sabbath. In the Warsaw ghetto, where the archive was assembled and ultimately buried in the ground to protect it from the destruction of the ghetto by the Nazis, this was no mean feat – the archive was born at a time when it was difficult enough for individuals to keep body and soul together, never mind dedicating themselves to a project – more like a mission – that was much bigger than they were…
Nineteen-year-old David Graber, one of the boys who helped to bury the archive at the beginning of August, 1942, at the height of the murderous frenzy that would result in the deaths of almost 300,000 of the ghetto occupants at the hands of the Nazis in Treblinka, scribbled a ‘last will’ that was found with the archive:
‘What we were unable to cry and shriek out to the world we buried in the ground….I would love to see the moment in which the great treasure will be dug up and scream the truth at the world. So the world may know all…May the treasure fall into good hands, may it last into better times, may it alarm and alert the world to what happened…in the twentieth century….We may now die in peace. We fulfilled our mission. May history attest for us.’
The Oyneg Shabes archive itself grew out of the self-help organizations in the ghetto – particularly the “Aleynhilf” (literally, “self-help”), and the house committees – organizations which themselves point up the struggle of the individual within the community, and the community itself, to survive in the Warsaw ghetto.

Shore highlights a woman named Nadezhda Mandelshtam, who “memorized her husband Osip’s poetry — the only safe place was in her head.”

That revelation is something Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn also shared in his book, The Gulag Archipelago about the Soviet forced labor prison camps.

Documenting Ukraine

Shore also recommended we learn about the Documenting Ukraine project, which is working on a digital archive.

Ukrainian historian “Roman Tymoshevskyi has been doing a lot of the work to organize the actual archive part,” she said.

A project of the Vienna-based Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (IWM) Institute for Human Sciences, Documenting Ukraine objectives include:

Launched in March 2022, Documenting Ukraine seeks to contribute to creating a record of the Russo-Ukrainian War, capturing the human experience of that war, and making it accessible and comprehensible to the broader world.

Through Documenting Ukraine, the IWM supports scholars, journalists, public intellectuals, artists, and archivists based in Ukraine as they work on documentation projects that establish and preserve a factual record—whether through reporting, gathering published source material, or collecting oral testimony—or that bring meaning to events through intellectual reflection and artistic interpretation. Ultimately, the materials collected and produced through these projects will be housed in a complex, transdisciplinary archive.

This is a project that centers Ukrainian intellectual work: the projects are conceived, developed, and carried out by Ukrainians, and Documenting Ukraine grantees retain full intellectual property rights to any work they produce. The same thinking underpins the archive that will result from the project: any materials contributed by people we are supporting are an important part of Ukraine’s intellectual heritage.
Documenting Ukraine is part of IWM’s Ukraine and the World program headed by Lesia Ukraїnka Permanent Fellow Prof. Timothy Snyder.

In light of how Russia has tried to erase Ukrainian history on and off for centuries, this project headed by Shore’s husband seems particularly important.

Here are reports from my interviews with Ukrainian historian Tetiana Boriak, who explains the last century of Soviet imperialism and its impacts on Ukraine, including the Executed Renaissance.

The Reckoning Project

Shore also directed us to The Reckoning Project, which has been documenting war crimes in Ukraine, Palestine, and Sudan.

Its mission statement:

“When war crimes go unpunished, violence always returns. The Reckoning Project exists to end that cycle–closing the gap between atrocity and accountability to build a safer, more just world.”

In Ukraine, The Reckoning Project “trains local researchers to gather and document war crimes with precision and care for every witness. Each testimony is rigorously verified and transformed into powerful tools for justice — from legal submissions to media investigations. By bringing truth to both courtrooms and global audiences, we amplify survivor voices and expose Kremlin disinformation.”

The Case of Yuri Dmitriev

In addition, Shore leads us to the case of “Yuri Dmitriev from Memorial, which is unfortunately a good example of how Russia deals with attempts to collect truth.”

In a report on Dmitriev from Eurozine, Irina Galkova writes about “memory as source of personal and collective resistance.”

She wrote:

In 2016, Yuri Dmitriev – the head of the Karelian branch of the Memorial Society – was arrested on an anonymous denunciation, facing false charges that ruined his family’s life and, for himself, have resulted in years of imprisonment.
For more than thirty years – half of his life – Dmitriev has been studying the traces of the Stalinist regime’s crimes in Karelia. Part of his work is spent in archives, the other part in the field in search of secret burial sites. His main topic is the executions during the Great Terror from 1937–38. The truth about them has not been fully disclosed: many sites have not been found and archival documents remain classified. What we know is thanks to enthusiasts like Dmitriev.
The work of restoring the memory of murdered people has never been easy, and in recent years it has become dangerous too. Almost simultaneously with the final verdict in Dmitriev’s case, two central Memorial organizations in Moscow were liquidated, one of which I worked for… He made me think in a deeper and more serious way about the case I was studying. Through him I came to realize that the history of repressions is not just a topic of research, but a source of enormous pain, compressed in the memory of several generations, undisclosed, unprocessed and unmourned.
Touching this pain makes the historian a participant in it. One must make a choice to accept it as one’s own or to distance oneself. In Yuri’s case, it was comprehension of other people’s pain and unwillingness to disassociate himself that led him to become a historian.

Her reflections of present and past — including her visit to him in prison — are sobering, and I encourage you to read the entire article.

We can see the from history the lengths that people will go to to ensure truth is preserved. Burying truth in the ground, as people did in Warsaw, or gathering evidence of war crimes as people are doing now, just some ways to ensure truth is archived from those who build themselves a world of lies in order to evade consequences.

Dr Marci Shore is an American Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Toronto. She left her position at Yale University in the US – with her husband, the historian Timothy Snyder – in August 2024. She is an expert in European history and the author of The Ukrainian Night, and Caviar and Ashes.

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

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

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

Upgrade to Paid Member
Upgrade to Founding Member
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Begin each day with a grateful heart.

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Collaborator, Puppet, Sycophant

Heidi Siegmund Cuda — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 16:12:37 GMT

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Collaborator

The Nazi-collaborator William Joyce was an American reporting from Germany during World War II. He and other collaborator-reporters earned the nickname Lord Haw Haw, as they broadcast pro-German reports to a UK audience, affecting an upper-class English accent.

The Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda used the broadcasts as a way to demoralize listeners and traffic despair to the Allied troops. The broadcasts began in 1939 and continued for nearly five years.

Joyce was captured by British forces just as the war ended, spotted while hiding out in a German forest. He was put on trial and hanged for treason on January 3, 1946.

1945: William Joyce in an ambulance under armed guard before being taken from British Second Army Headquarters to a hospital, courtesy Wikipedia

Puppet

Vidkun Quisling was a Norwegian military officer, politician and Nazi collaborator, who headed the puppet government of Norway during the country’s occupation by Nazi Germany during World War II.

Quisling was the founder of the fascist Nasjonal Samling party, and under his pro-Nazi puppet government, his collaborationist regime deported Jewish people out of Norway to concentration camps in occupied Poland, where most of them perished.

After World War II, Quisling was put on trial and found guilty of high treason against the Norwegian state — also convicted of embezzlement and murder.

He was sentenced to death and executed by firing squad in Oslo, on October 24, 1945.

Among the most prominent traitors in European history, his last name is now synonymous for ‘collaborator’ or ‘traitor.’ To be called a ‘quisling’ is to be identified as a collaborator for an enemy state.

Vidkun Quisling, left, in custody at Akershus Fortress, Oslo, 1945, courtesy Wikipedia

Sycophant

Joachim von Ribbentrop was a German diplomat and war criminal, who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs of Nazi Germany from 1938 to 1945.

Universally loathed within the Nazi regime for his sycophancy toward Hitler, Ribbentrop was known for his monologues in praise of Hitler, as well as offering his home and liaising for the secret meetings in 1933 that led to Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor of Germany.

Ribbentrop brown-nosed his way into Hitler’s inner circle, having been a champagne salesman in the early part of his career, using flattery and memorizing Hitler’s ideas to later present as his own, thus impressing Hitler, who thought him an ideal Nazi diplomat. Ribbentrop became Hitler’s favorite foreign-policy adviser, despite not knowing anything about foreign policy.

Due to what can only be described as an abundance of stupidity (it’s worth reading about his gaffes during his time as the Ambassador to the UK, where his Nazi salutes nearly knocked over royals or appeared during hymns he mistook for the German national anthem), Hitler wearied of Ribbentrop and began avoiding him, causing him to be sidelined during the final years of the war. Interestingly, friends who knew him in the 1920s noted that before he wormed his way into Hitler’s orbit, he didn’t exhibit signs of anti-semitism.

In June 1945, Ribbentrop was arrested, convicted and sentenced to death at the Nuremberg trials for his role in starting World War II in Europe and enabling the Holocaust. On October 16, 1946, he became the first of the Nuremberg defendants to be executed by hanging.

Ribbentrop in his cell at Nuremberg after the trials had concluded, courtesy Wikipedia

Today’s Traitors

Today, I am thinking of Joyce and his fellow Lord Haw Haws, Quisling, and Ribbentrop as I see the unlimited supply of useful idiots and agents of influence peddling Russian propaganda and sucking up to US fascists.

So many so-called reporters raging against immigrants in their countries, ginning up old hatreds to pave the way for authoritarian leaders. Nothing new under the sun.

Then there are the promoters of traditional values shilling for Russia, ignoring the ICC arrest warrants for Putin and members of his regime trafficking children. Or ignoring the extrajudicial murders in the US occurring under and with approval from the Trump regime.

In addition, there are the sycophants — the flatterers and brown-nosers — who normalize the human rights violations that are occurring with greater frequency and less outrage.

All along the way, social media enables the vitriol and the normalizing to spread through telegenic upstarts, who don’t have to identify their funding sources.

And when their funding sources are revealed — as was the case for Tenet Media, who took ten million dollars through RT cutouts linked to Russian military intelligence — the facts don’t reach the population being duped by their reporting. And in the transfer of power from Biden to Trump, the influencers paid millions by Russia for their pro-Kremlin propaganda reporting get invitations to the White House rather than indictments for treason.

I invite you to look at the following quotes: the first is from William Joyce, aka Lord Haw Haw, and the others are from contemporary politicians, reporters, and influencers.

“The people of England will curse themselves for having preferred ruin from Churchill to peace from Hitler.”—William Joyce, Broadcast, Radio Bremen (2 August 1940)

“Well, I was wrong. Putin has gone much further than I thought he would. A consequence of EU and NATO expansion, which came to a head in 2014. It made no sense to poke the Russian bear with a stick. These are dark days for Europe.”—Nigel Farage, Twitter, 24 February 2022

“I have officially confirmed a meeting with Kirill Dmitriev, Special Envoy to the President of Russia, for later this month. It is important, not just for my fellow Americans, but to the world, that we continue to foster the relationship and conversations of peace and trade.”—Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, Twitter, 8 October 2025

“I suggest every American who wants to know what’s *actually* going on in Russia and Ukraine, read this transcript of Putin’s address. As I’ve said for month — NATO (under direction from the United States) is violating previous agreements and expanding eastward. WE are at fault.”—Candace Owens, Twitter, 22 February 2022

“The most radicalizing thing for me in the eight days I spent in Moscow was not just the leader of the country (who he called ‘capable’)… what was very shocking, very disturbing was the city of Moscow, where I’d never been … it was so much nicer than any city in my country.”—Tucker Carlson, World Government Summit, 12 February 2024

Today’s fascist collaborators can be found in the media, in state capitals, and engaged in business.

Eighty years ago, democratic nations took treason seriously, as you can see by how things ended for Nazi collaborators.

I learned about the Lord Haw Haws, Quisling, and Ribbentrop in my reading of William Shirer’s Berlin Diary. A colleague of Edward R. Murrow’s at CBS during the rise of Nazi Germany, Shirer ends his diary as he sails from Europe back to America in December of 1940. Nazi censorship had made truthful reporting impossible, and the Nazis were building an espionage case against him.

His last diary entry, December 13, 1940, he talks about the bond he made with Murrow during the war, the “kind you make only a few times in your life.” He met up with five other American correspondents, who were also leaving Europe, at the ship’s bar, finding “alcohol a good way of cushioning your farewell.” He determined that “alcohol isn’t always enough.”

And then he writes:

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