Subscribe now

There are many reasons I stay on Twitter, behind enemy lines.

I continue to form alliances with people globally doing great pro-democracy work. And abandoning a key battlefield in an information war surrenders ground to the fascist enemy. Despite throttling my reach, I can still break through, as I did last night, when dummies were saying nice things about Susie Wiles, so I reminded them of her deep ties to Russia by reposting Zarina Zabrisky’s report in Bette Dangerous from 2024.

What a world.

This morning, I am regifting a video that I received from a Twitter rando featuring comedian Josh Johnson, a writer for the Daily Show, which explains why Trump makes random noises. He deduced that it’s a “demon trying to get out.”

As I learned from Jason Stanley and David Livingston Smith, “none of us demons.”

But this is good comedy, and I am trying to extend the post-midterms schadenfreude for a while longer. With Goebbels Miller now in charge, we know we in for a nasty spell.

But it is Sunday morning, and I watched this short three times, and I am still rofl.

See you in the trenches anon.

****

Support Lifeline Ukraine

2016 Election Attack — The Book!

American Monsters — The Book — Buy Here!

Donations Welcome

****

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

I expose the corruption of billionaire fascists with support from your memberships.

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

• Upgrade to Paid Member

• Upgrade to Founding Member

• Gifting memberships

• Share my reporting with your networks

• Buying my ebooks

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

Heidi’s Ko-Fi Fund

Heidi’s Venmo

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

More info about Bette Dangerous: This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter, author, and broadcast news veteran, as well as former music and nightlife columnist for the Los Angeles Times. A No. 1 Amazon best-selling author and award-winning film director, Cuda writes the Hot Type column in Byline Times, an independent UK-newspaper. She executive produced the film Kherson: Human Safari. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism, arts, and culture reporting.

🤍

🤍

Subscribe now

Author’s note: In recent years, convicted rapist Russell Brand has been performing as a pro-Kremlin mouthpiece, and it’s not unusual for ardent Russian propagandists to also have a history of sexual deviancy and criminal convictions. As we learned from Russian watcher Keir Giles, compromised people make great KGB targets. With that in mind, I asked North Atlantic Fellas Organization founding member Matthew Pearce to offer a ‘vatnik’ explainer based on a meme he created that speaks to this topic. A calendar note: I will be traveling this week so our next community gathering is Sunday, 15 November, 11 am Pacific, where we bring Giles back for a post-election briefing on what we can expect next from the Kremlin-MAGA syndicate. Look for an invite mid-week. Read on for a vatnik tutorial, and you can follow Matthew Pearce at The Angry Dogs Substack.—hsc

Vatnik Rule #1

Every vatnik is being blackmailed, says the meme. The truth is less dramatic, and more useful.

By Matt Pearce - The Angry Dogs

Rule #1

A cartoon soldier in a camouflage jacket and a fur hat with a hammer-and-sickle badge scowls out of the frame. Beside him, in friendly rounded lettering: “Every vatnik is being blackmailed: sex, money, crime, or fraud.” I should declare an interest: the rule is mine. I first typed “Vatnik rule #1” as a two-word reply on X on 31 May 2025, under a thread about yet another pro-Kremlin commentator’s private life catching up with him. On 28 June I asked ChatGPT what Vatnik Rule #1 was, mostly to see what it would say. It drew the soldier, and according to one reply it confidently attributed the rule to NAFO. Since then it has turned up in the replies under whichever “peace” account has just said something unusually convenient for Moscow.

A vatnik, for anyone who missed the lesson, is a quilted cotton jacket, the cheap padded workwear of Soviet building sites and labour camps, and by extension the person inside it: the reflexive, jingoistic defender of whatever the Kremlin did this week. The insult is Russian-made. Anton Chadskiy drew the original on VKontakte in 2011, a figure made entirely of padded cotton in loose parody of SpongeBob, with the red nose and black eye of the previous night’s brawl, and had to leave Russia once the joke caught on. Propastop has an excellent history of the word, including the 2022 campaign by pro-Kremlin accounts to edit Wikipedia into calling it an ethnic slur, so that moderators unfamiliar with it would ban the people using it. That did not work either.

Rule #1’s claim is that nobody ends up in the jacket by accident. Somebody has something on them.

It was a joke. Like most jokes that stick, it is an exaggeration of something true, and the exaggeration is the part worth examining, because the real version is less dramatic than blackmail and far more useful to anyone who does this for a living. On Thursday afternoon at Southwark Crown Court it briefly stopped being funny at all.

Thursday at Southwark

On 5 November, a jury of eight men and four women found Russell Brand guilty of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault, after a four-week trial and around eight and a half hours of deliberation. He was acquitted of two further counts of rape and one of attempted indecent assault. Judge Joel Bennathan remanded him in custody and told him to expect a lengthy sentence on Monday 9 November. The offences span 1999 to 2009.

That last detail matters. Everything the public now associates with Brand (the “revolution” interviews, the wellness-and-conspiracy YouTube channel, the Rumble channel, the April 2024 baptism, the move to Florida, the sudden fluency in the language of the American Christian right) came after the conduct the jury convicted him for, and the most recent of it came after he knew the Sunday Times and Channel 4 were asking questions. The politics did not cause the crimes. The politics arrived as the shield.

And the shield was built from Kremlin talking points. Ukraine’s VoxCheck, working with the country’s Centre for Countering Disinformation, catalogued what Brand was putting in front of 6.7 million YouTube subscribers, 1.7 million on Rumble and more than 11 million on X: the claim that the West is fighting alongside “actual Nazis”, the American “biolabs in Ukraine” story, the portrayal of Ukraine as a state that does not share Western democratic values, and in several cases straight recycling of Russian state media fakes. None of that makes him a Russian agent, and I am not saying it does. It makes him something the Kremlin finds more useful than an agent: a trusted voice with a grievance, saying the right things for his own reasons.

The verdict has not broken the loop. Within hours of Thursday’s result, the comments under Megyn Kelly’s reaction video were full of people insisting he was being punished for speaking out against government abuse of its own people. In a room where the courts are already assumed to be corrupt, a conviction is just another institution’s opinion.

The template: Scott Ritter

If Brand is this week’s example, Scott Ritter is the template the meme was drawn from.

In April 2011 a jury in Monroe County, Pennsylvania, convicted the former UN weapons inspector on six counts, including unlawful contact with a minor, corruption of minors and indecent exposure. He had exchanged explicit messages with, and then performed a sex act on webcam for, someone he believed was a 15-year-old girl. It was a detective. He had rejected a plea deal; that October he was sentenced to between eighteen months and five and a half years, and he was released in 2014.

He re-emerged as what he is now: a regular on RT, a fixture of the pro-Kremlin podcast circuit, and a repeat visitor to Russia and the occupied parts of Ukraine. In June 2024 US authorities took his passport at JFK as he set off for the St Petersburg International Economic Forum. On 7 August 2024 the FBI searched his home near Albany under a warrant citing the Foreign Agents Registration Act and carried out around two dozen boxes. He has not been charged over that, and I am not saying he will be.

What I am saying is: look at the title he gave his response, published in Consortium News nine days later. “The FBI’s Raid on Peace.” A man with a 2011 conviction for an offence against a child described a search of his house as an assault on peace itself, and a substantial audience nodded along. The redemption script and the persecution script are the same script. It was written years before the FBI turned up, and it is the script Brand’s supporters are now reading from.

What the professionals call it

My meme says blackmail. Counter-intelligence officers, who have thought about this for rather longer than I have, say MICE: Money, Ideology, Coercion (or Compromise), Ego. Four reasons a person works for a hostile state, and blackmail is only one of them. My Rule #1 puts all four into the C, because the C is the dramatic and funny one. The courts, over the last twelve months, say the C is the rare one.

Run the UK court record through the other three letters.

Money. Nathan Gill, former UKIP MEP and leader of Reform UK in Wales, pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey on 26 September 2025 to eight counts of bribery. Between December 2018 and July 2019 he took around £40,000 from Oleg Voloshyn, a Ukrainian politician in the Medvedchuk orbit who was later sanctioned by the UK, in exchange for pro-Russian speeches in the European Parliament and appearances on the pro-Russian channel 112 Ukraine. Some of the speeches he delivered almost word for word from scripts he had been sent. The payments were referred to as “Christmas gifts”. He offered to bring other MEPs in. On 21 November 2025 Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb gave him ten and a half years, telling him he had let money “corrupt his moral compass” and that the offending was persistent rather than a lapse. Nobody blackmailed Gill. Somebody paid him.

Money, and a dash of ego. Howard Phillips, a 66-year-old retired insolvency worker from Harlow, ran through his savings and then offered himself to two men he believed were SVR officers, “Sasha” and “Dima”, who were in fact MI5. He offered Grant Shapps’s home address, phone number and the details of his private plane, and had applied for a Border Force job to get himself security clearance. He had never heard of the SVR. His ex-wife told the court he dreamt of being James Bond. He was convicted under the National Security Act at Winchester Crown Court in July 2025 and sentenced to seven years in November. The prosecution said there was no evidence of any ideological support for Russia whatsoever. Counter Terrorism Policing’s summary of the whole genre is worth pinning to the wall: Russia’s proxies are unlikely to see a large cash windfall and quite likely to see no money at all.

Ideology, with ego. Paul Golding and Jayda Fransen of Britain First toured the Duma as guests of the LDPR, Golding went on the state channel Russia-24 to describe Russia as Britain’s “natural ally”, and in 2020 he was convicted under the Terrorism Act after refusing to hand over his device passwords on the way back from Moscow. Both had already been convicted of religiously aggravated harassment at Folkestone in March 2018, eighteen weeks for Golding and thirty-six for Fransen, for filming and harassing people they connected to a rape trial in Kent. Nobody in Moscow needed anything on them. They turned up with it.

Somebody else’s money, and all the ego. Tommy Robinson, or Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, has convictions for assault, drugs and public order offences, entering the United States on a friend’s passport (ten months, 2013), a £160,000 mortgage fraud (eighteen months, 2014), contempt of court (nine months, 2019) and contempt again (eighteen months, October 2024, for ten breaches of an injunction after a Syrian refugee schoolboy successfully sued him for libel). At the end of October 2026 a jury at Southwark Crown Court, a week before the same building dealt with Brand, convicted him on two counts of harassment causing fear of violence against two Daily Mail journalists who had reported that he was on a sunbed in Cyprus while the August 2024 riots were running. He had hired private investigators to find their home addresses and told one of them he was coming to get him. He will be sentenced on 16 December. In June 2026 he turned up in Russia on a trip that took in the St Petersburg International Economic Forum, and broadcast from the Metropol in Moscow alongside Errol Musk, the pair of them insisting that Russia is not the enemy of Britain. Elon Musk’s father later told the Guardian that the Musk Foundation had covered the trip. Police stopped Robinson at Heathrow on the way home and, by his own account, took his phones. He was one of the four names shouting loudest in 2023 that Brand was being persecuted. Ed Davey called him “a useful idiot for a hostile state”, which is the polite version of this article.

And the actual C? Look back at the top of this piece. Brand and Ritter were not blackmailed into anything either. Their convictions did not make them vulnerable to recruitment. Their convictions made them unemployable anywhere else.

Why social media makes it worse

Here is the mechanism, and it is not recruitment. It is selection.

You do not have to take my word for that. Laura Loomer, de-platformed after her 2020 run for Congress in Florida, said this year that RT came calling the moment the mainstream platforms shut her out: come on our shows, why not have a byline, you could write for us. She says she never took their money, and she did not need to. What they offered was reach, and reach was the thing she had just lost. She spent the next five years calling Ukraine a country of Nazi apologists. In July 2026 she flew to Kyiv, sat through an air raid, interviewed Zelensky at the Mariinsky Palace and told him she had been “bamboozled by Russian propaganda” and was wrong. She now says she believes some of the biggest American podcasters are financed by Russia, directly or indirectly. On that she has the US Justice Department behind her. In September 2024 two RT employees, Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, were charged with routing nearly $10 million through shell companies in Turkey, the UAE and Mauritius, invoiced as payments for electronics, into Tenet Media, a Nashville outfit that paid a roster of right-wing commentators including Tim Pool, Dave Rubin and Benny Johnson, in one case $100,000 a video. The hosts say they had no idea where the money came from, and the indictment treats them as having been deceived. The two Russians are in Moscow and have never faced a court, so Tenet stays in the charged column rather than the convicted one. But the money trail is the government’s, not Loomer’s. The confession is the useful bit. It describes the recruitment exactly, and it was never a recruitment. It was a door left open at the right moment.

Shared grievance does the rest. A man who has been through a courtroom and a state that has been through a sanctions regime are telling the same story: the establishment is rotten and it is coming for me. Brand said politically motivated. Ritter said chilling effect on free speech. Both found an audience that had decided those words were true before hearing the facts, because the audience had been told the same thing about Ukraine, vaccines, the BBC and the courts, in the same feed, by the same people.

Audience capture finishes the job. Once your income is your audience, you say what the audience rewards. And the audience that stays after a scandal is, by definition, the audience that did not mind the scandal, or decided it was a plot. They reward more plot. Each fresh consequence, from an agent walking away to a seized passport to a jury verdict, is turned into content proving the persecution, and the content pays.

Which is where “peace” comes in. Nobody can be against peace. It costs nothing to say. It turns a personal redemption story into a geopolitical one, and it recasts every consequence as persecution for the cause rather than the price of what he did. It also happens to be, word for word, the Kremlin’s own line: the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab found “Russia is seeking peace” among the core narratives Russian state outlets ran in the weeks before the full-scale invasion. The convert who discovers peace after the summons has arrived is not necessarily lying. He has simply found the one word that makes his old life and his new patrons’ interests sound like the same thing.

The pipeline runs both ways

The meme assumes the compromise comes first and the vatnik follows. Dylan Earl shows the pipeline running in reverse.

Earl was 20, a builder and part-time drug dealer living with his parents in Elmesthorpe, Leicestershire, and a member of multiple pro-Russian propaganda channels. In 2023 he made contact with the Wagner Group on Telegram, through an account the court heard was a bot called PrivetBot, and told his handler he wanted “missions”. On 20 March 2024 the men he had recruited set fire to industrial units in Leyton, east London, that were being used to ship humanitarian aid and Starlink terminals to Ukraine: about £1 million of damage and 60 firefighters to put it out. He then moved on to planning an arson attack on a Mayfair restaurant and wine shop and the kidnap of its owner, the Russian dissident Evgeny Chichvarkin.

The court heard he was “easy meat” for Wagner, and that the motive was “simple and ugly greed”. The judge, Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb again (she has had a busy year), described a planned campaign of terrorism and sabotage in the interests of the Russian state. On 24 October 2025 Earl got 17 years plus six on extended licence, the first sentence handed down under the National Security Act 2023. The young men who actually carried the jerry cans were promised money they never received. Wagner, naturally, never paid.

There was no hidden conviction at the start of this, nothing to blackmail. Social media did not find a compromised man. It made one, from inside a bedroom in Leicestershire, with nothing more than a few channels, a chatbot and the promise of cash. That is the version of Rule #1 that should worry people more than the cartoon soldier does.

What Rule #1 is actually good for

Treat it as a rule of thumb, not a conviction.

A loud “peace” account whose backstory has a hole in it (a career that stopped dead, a sudden move abroad, a conversion timed suspiciously close to a summons) is worth a check, and the check is cheap. Court records are public, convictions are reported, and sentencing remarks sit on the judiciary website. Half the people in this piece were caught not by MI5 but by a jury, and their records were never secret. The meme only looks like a joke because nobody bothers to look things up.

But stop assuming blackmail. Assume incentives, because incentives are checkable and blackmail is not. Follow the money (Gill). Follow the audience (Brand). Follow the grievance (Ritter). Follow the channels (Earl). The blackmail theory is seductive precisely because it lets the vatnik off the hook (poor chap, Russia has something on him) when the courts keep finding the simpler answer: he chose it, and it paid.

So here is the less funny, amended rule. I wrote the original, so I am allowed.

“Every vatnik has a reason that they support Russia, and it is usually a matter of public record.”

My meme’s vatnik scowls because he has been scammed and blackmailed. The real ones smile, say “bring peace to Ukraine”, and ask you to subscribe to their Rumble channel. Their version is not as funny as mine, but more dangerous.

****

Sources

Russell Brand verdict: CNN, 5 Nov 2026; Al Jazeera, 5 Nov 2026; NPR, 5 Nov 2026

Brand’s defenders and the persecution narrative: Newsweek; Variety, May 2025; Thought Catalog, Nov 2026

Brand’s Ukraine content: VoxCheck / VoxUkraine

Scott Ritter conviction and sentence: Inquirer / AP, 15 Apr 2011; Democracy Now, 27 Oct 2011; GlobalSecurity.org profile

Ritter passport seizure and FBI search: NewsNation, Aug 2024; Ritter’s own response, “The FBI’s Raid on Peace”, Consortium News, 16 Aug 2024

Nathan Gill: Counter Terrorism Policing, 21 Nov 2025; Al Jazeera, 21 Nov 2025; Sky News via Mansfield 103

Howard Phillips: Counter Terrorism Policing, Nov 2025; UK Defence Journal; Jerusalem Post

Dylan Earl and the Leyton arson: Counter Terrorism Policing, Jul 2025; LBC, 24 Oct 2025; Euromaidan Press, 25 Oct 2025; Express & Star (”easy meat”)

Golding and Fransen: Hope Not Hate on Golding’s Russia trips; The National, Golding Terrorism Act conviction; Vice, Mar 2018 harassment convictions

Tommy Robinson: The Week, timeline of convictions; LBC, 28 Oct 2024 contempt sentence; LBC, 12 Jul 2026, Musk Foundation paid for Russia trip; Guardian via AOL, 12 Jul 2026, SPIEF trip and Ed Davey quote

Robinson harassment conviction, Oct 2026: IBTimes; NUJ statement

Laura Loomer: Alternet, RT approach after deplatforming; The Hill, 23 Jul 2026, Kyiv meeting with Zelensky; The Hill, AP interview from a Kyiv bunker; JTA, 24 Jul 2026; Euromaidan Press, 2 Nov 2026, claims about Russian financing

Tenet Media indictment: NPR, 5 Sep 2024; Byline Times, 6 Sep 2024; CBS News

“Russia is seeking peace” as a pre-invasion narrative: Atlantic Council DFRLab, Narrative Warfare (2023)

More about Matthew Pearce here:

Economist and technologist Matthew Pearce is founding member of NAFO, a founder of SE42 Labs Technology and AI Research Company; a writer for Washington Outsider Centre for Information Warfare; a writer for theangrydogs.com; and a stakeholder in the UK government Rycroft Report into foreign interference in British politics.

****

Support Lifeline Ukraine

2016 Election Attack — The Book!

American Monsters — The Book — Buy Here!

Donations Welcome

****

Related:

****

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

I expose the corruption of billionaire fascists with support from your paid memberships.

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

• Upgrade to Paid Member

• Upgrade to Founding Member

• Gifting memberships

• Share my reporting with allies

• Buying my ebooks

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

Heidi’s Ko-Fi Fund

Heidi’s Venmo

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

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

🤍

🤍

Subscribe now

Offshoring MAGA: Parasite Bannon Targets Ireland

As Trump’s former chief strategist fraudster Steve Bannon is promising to build a MAGA movement in Ireland, recall the vital roles he’s played in spreading fascism globally. Reposting from 27 May 2026

Foreign influence operations are not journalism, they are a matter of national security.

If a country wishes to remain sovereign, and not end up under the jackboot of imperialism, then do not let Steve Bannon gain a foothold in your country. Trump’s former chief strategist continues his efforts to foment populist insurgencies throughout Europe, and Ireland is next on his hit list.

When he tried to open a “gladiator school” in Italy, he was tossed out. Five years ago, the Italian government legally evicted him and his organization from a historic monastery. The Italian courts and the Culture Ministry permanently blocked his plans to establish what amounts to an academy for far-right political activists.

Now, Bannon is promising to build a MAGA movement in Ireland and is attempting to open an Irish version of his “War Room” podcast.

As someone who spent a decade warning about my own country’s democratic demise, the impact will be so destructive, it’s like letting Joseph Goebbels take over public radio in 1939.

In recent weeks, Bannon’s been dedicating coverage of Ireland on his podcast, pushing anti-immigrant narratives.

Chair of the board of advisers at the Clinton Institute of American Studies at University College Dublin, Ted Smyth, told reporter Edward Luce in the Financial Times:

“Ireland cannot be complacent about Bannon’s threat, given that the billionaire owners of tech platforms ruthlessly use their algorithms to disseminate disinformation about immigration and crime in Ireland, spreading false claims about civil unrest.”

Smyth adds: “While the Irish government needs to do much more to address rising public concern about housing and immigration, the Irish people, having secured their independence after 800 years of British imperialism, are not about to vote for the American version.”

Smyth also noted that “many Irish Americans are angry that Trump refused to grant visas to thousands of undocumented Irish and is now arresting and deporting them in unprecedented numbers.”

In his FT report, Edward Luce explained that Bannon is targeting Ireland, seeking an “Irish Trump,” to put “the fear of God into Ireland’s political and media establishment.”

In 2025, Trump sycophant Conor McGregor aborted his run for president of Ireland, which was greeted like day old McDonalds, never rising above single digit polling.

But McGregor has ideal MAGA qualifications — last July, he lost an appeal over a civil court ruling that awarded damages to a woman who accused him of rape. And the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism flagged McGregor’s “inflammatory political rhetoric and anti-immigration commentary.” He spent St. Patrick’s Day in 2025 with Donald Trump.

After his recent failure in Albania, I’m sure gray cardinal Paul Manafort is available to offering McGregor KGB Charm School lessons.

The harsh reality is, any remaining democratic country cannot look away from the threats posed by the cell of greedy psychotics who took down America. Bannon, a parasite in search of a host, is networked to authoritarian money that is used to wipe democracies off the face of the earth.

They will find an avatar in each country, they will look different but each with the same agenda, to deliver the country to fascism.

Estonia is one of the only countries that actually understands these threats, and will convict bad actors for high treason and imprison them for 14 years. Estonia understands.

To read more about the existential threat of Steve Bannon, who pleaded guilty to defrauding donors for millions of dollars in his Build The Wall grift, and who spent four months in prison for defying a Congressional order, please read my American Monster series.

Here is an excerpt from the fifth in the series:

In 2019, I called Kurt Bardella — a former Breitbart employee turned democratic strategist and media personality — to thank him for gifting me the inspiration for the ‘Parasite Bannon’ phrase I deployed frequently in the early days of the Resistance. I also asked what had happened to people I had once known who had gone from trad fiscal conservatives to out of their damn minds.

He said, “They’ve been radicalized.”

By then, I had investigated the fallout from Cambridge Analytica for two years. And not unlike nuclear fallout, people were still so sick, left untreated to wander further down rabbit holes and away from their former selves. And like in Russia where the government psyoped its own citizens first — moving them away from liberal democracy and toward totalitarianism by state-run internet infiltration before attacking citizens globally — conservatives were ground zero targets. And Stephen Bannon’s tentacles were everywhere people were being infected and radicalized away from trust in democracy — as executive chairman of Breitbart, vice president of the data mining election operation Cambridge Analytica, and as Trump’s campaign CEO and chief strategist.

It’s important to note Bannon’s global endeavors. Funded by dark money, Bannon’s been attempting to unite Putin friendly political parties throughout Europe, accelerating global fascism — a key component of this series. He’s called Putin a “fellow nationalist and crusader against cosmopolitanism.” My readers will recognize that as straight Duginism. Not surprising, he met Russian political strategist Alexander Dugin in 2018 and considers himself a fan of Dugin’s extremist ravings.

Stephen Bannon is a convicted criminal who should be in prison where he can’t hurt people. But like the previous American Monsters I profiled, the inability in the US to incarcerate high-level criminals quickly and in a meaningful way is having deadly impacts on the West and the world…

So this is what happens when we do not incarcerate American criminals — they infect Europe with their fash brand, accelerating global authoritarianism…

Steve Bannon continues to be a liability to humanity — he is still free to radicalize people on his propaganda show where he floats right-wing narratives that then become popularized such as describing Putin’s war of annihilation in Ukraine as a ‘border dispute’ — his show ranking highest in disinformation among 79 political podcasts studied — and thanks to a many years’ long campaign to reputation wash him, the world as a whole has underestimated just how dangerous he is.—Heidi Siegmund Cuda for Bette Dangerous, American Monster — Steve Bannon, August 14, 2023

In 2016, Ukrainians tried to warn Americans, and we did not listen.

In 2026, I am an American, now trying to warning Europe.—Heidi Siegmund Cuda for Bette Dangerous, 27 May 2026

****

2016 Election Attack — The Book!

American Monsters — The Book — Buy Here!

Donations Welcome

****

Related:

Byline Supplement

The Mainstreaming of QAnon

When I first saw the trailer for Sound of Freedom four months ago, I called my podcast colleagues and told them my concerns. We produce an investigative show on disinformation and radicalization, and by outward appearances, it seemed to be a vehicle to mainstream QAnon — the lie that a shadowy network of Democrat and Hollywood elites are trafficking children through underground tunnels in order to harvest “adrenochrome” from their blood. The substance is supposed to have anti-ageing powers and QAnon followers believe that it is more potent when harvested from frightened children. They also believe that Democrats have been the perpetrators of this satanic ritual abuse and trusted Donald Trump to “save the children” from the “forces of darkness…

Read more

3 years ago · 28 likes · 5 comments · Heidi Cuda

****

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

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

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

• Upgrade to Paid Member

• Upgrade to Founding Member

• Gifting memberships

• Share my reporting with allies

• Buying my ebooks

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

Heidi’s Ko-Fi Fund

Heidi’s Venmo

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

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

🤍

🤍

Subscribe now

Author’s note: This report was first published on November 10, 2024 — just days after the US election. Zarina Zabrisky, an American journalist covering the war in Ukraine, followed the lobbying work for Kremlin-connected oligarchs and Trump’s then Chief of Staff Susie Wiles in this guest investigation, which first appeared as two X/Twitter threads — part one and two. Links to source reporting included in body of text below. Reposting today with the breaking news that Wiles is being replaced by Stephen Miller. And kudos to Zabrisky for derailing the Russian psyop in the Oleshky/Kherson region.—hsc

INVESTIGATION: Zarina Zabrisky Reports on Trump’s Chief of Staff’s Russian Ties

24 November 2024

Trump’s new Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, brings ties to Kremlin-connected oligarchs via her lobbying work. The implications for US interests are dire.

Before joining Trump’s 2024 campaign, Wiles was a co-chair for a firm that lobbied for Kremlin-linked oligarchs and Chinese surveillance companies. A lobbyist, who recommended Wiles to run Trump’s campaign, worked for a Russian oligarch with ties to Putin and Rosneft.

Wiles was a co-chair for Mercury Public Affairs. Yesterday, another Mercury lobbyist and a partner, Bryan Lanza, a former transition aide to Trump, told BBC that “the incoming administration will focus on achieving peace in Ukraine rather than enabling the country to gain back territory occupied by Russia.” A spokesperson for Trump's transition team later denied that Lanza spoke for Trump.

Both Wiles and Lanza lobbied for Chinese technology companies. The Chinese video surveillance company Hikvision has paid Mercury $5.5 million since 2015. Hikvision supplied surveillance tech used it to target the Uighur ethnic minority in China. Amnesty International found the company’s surveillance equipment was also being used in the West Bank.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johannacostigan/2024/11/09/magas-marriage-to-big-business---and-big-tech/

Lanza-Deripaska

In 2018, Lanza lobbied to remove sanctions from Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska’s energy and aluminum firm conglomerate EN+ Group. The US Treasury Department had imposed sanctions on Deripaska and his companies.

Deripaska has said that he does not separate himself from the Russian state. He has also acknowledged possessing a Russian diplomatic passport, and claims to have represented the Russian government in other countries.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/09/kremlin-controlled-russian-bank-hires-trump-insider-as-a-lobbyist/

“Deripaska has been investigated for money laundering and has been accused of threatening the lives of business rivals, illegally wiretapping a government official, and taking part in extortion and racketeering. There are also allegations that Deripaska bribed a government official, ordered the murder of a businessman, and had links to a Russian organized crime group.”

Lanza did not represent Deripaska directly. He represented the former British energy minister, Lord Gregory Barker, the board chairman of EN+ Group. Deripaska’s ownership in the company was reduced from 70% to below 50% to evade US sanctions. EN+ was removed from the sanctions list in January 2019.

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/06/latvian-banker-accused-of-aiding-north-korea/

In 2019, after Mercury successfully lobbied to removed sanctions, Rusal, the large aluminum company owned by Deripaska, purchased a 40% stake in a Kentucky plant.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/03/how-a-russian-billionaire-with-a-criminal-past-became-a-major-investor-in-lyft/

Lord Barker resigned as chairman of EN+ in March 2022, after Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, amid intense scrutiny of companies linked to sanctioned Russian oligarchs, alleged by authorities in the US, EU and UK. The London Stock Exchange suspended trading in EN+ along with more than 30 other Russian-linked firms, in March 2022.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/mar/07/tory-peer-greg-barker-to-resign-as-chair-of-russian-firm-en

Lord Barker was listed as Mercury’s client but Lanza was not listed as lobbyist for Barker or EN+ Group on the disclosure form for Mercury. Lanza did disclose the client in a separate filing.

https://efile.fara.gov/docs/6170-Exhibit-AB-20180504-42.pdf

Lanza appeared on CNN between Oct 2017 — May 2018 as a Trump surrogate, attacking Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference, while representing a Russian firm seeking to make the US government drop the sanctions.

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/06/latvian-banker-accused-of-aiding-north-korea/

Mercury has also undergone scrutiny over the past year for its role in the Ukrainian lobbying operation involving Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, in Mueller’s probe of Russian interference in the election. The firm has denied wrongdoing.

Mercury lobbied on behalf of the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, a nonprofit tied to former pro-Russian Ukrainian president Yanukovych. Mercury was recruited to improve Yanukovych’s image by future Trump campaign chairperson Paul Manafort.

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/06/latvian-banker-accused-of-aiding-north-korea/

The European Centre for a Modern Ukraine (ECFMU) based in Brussels tied to Yanukovich's Party of Regions had contracts with Mercury in 2012. Mercury received $560,000 over 2 years. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Centre_for_a_Modern_Ukraine

Mercury worked to sway American public opinion in favor of the country’s pro-Russian government by placing positive articles in The NYT, WSJ and AP and undercutting American public sympathy for Yulia Tymoshenko, an imprisoned rival of then-President Yanukovych. 

https://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/18/trump-advisers-manafort-and-gates-waged-covert-influence-campaign-for-previous-ukraine-ruling-party.html

Manafort’s deputy, Rick Gates, directed two Washington lobbying firms, Mercury and the Podesta Group, between 2012 and 2014, to set up meetings between a top Ukrainian official and senators and congressman on influential committees involving Ukrainian interests. Manafort oversaw the lobbying efforts and spoke by phone to Mercury and the Podesta Group.

https://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/18/trump-advisers-manafort-and-gates-waged-covert-influence-campaign-for-previous-ukraine-ruling-party.html

Manafort and Gates failed to disclose their work as foreign agents as required under federal law. Mercury also failed to register its lobbying work with the DoJ. Vin Weber, the principal for Mercury's Ukraine-related lobbying portfolio beginning in 2012, acted as an unregistered agent of a foreign government and foreign political party.

On April 28, 2017, Mercury retroactively filed with FARA within the Justice Department that it had been hired by the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine. Mercury had filed its lobbying efforts with Congress under the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995. Files between Mercury and the Manafort and Gates firms connected to Yanukovich and his Party of Regions were subpoenaed by the Mueller special counsel investigation.

Mercury’s founder, Vin Weber, an influential Republican and former congressman, told the AP that his firm was aware of Manafort’s and Gates’ affiliation with Ukraine’s political party and said Gates never participated in Mercury’s lobbying work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin_Weber

In August 2016, a New York Times report claimed that secret ledgers showed $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Manafort from the Yanukovych administration.

https://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/15/trump-campaign-chiefs-ukrainian-connection-keeps-coming-up.html

Manafort had ties with Deripaska (indirectly represented by Mercury’s Bryan Lanza, see above.) Manafort used an intermediary to offer Deripaska private briefings about the election. Mueller’s team later noted in a March court filing that the intermediary “has ties to a Russian intelligence service and had such ties in 2016.”

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/05/12/politics/washington-lobbying-trump-era/index.html

Susie Wiles, now a Chief of Staff, led Trump’s campaign in Florida after she was introduced by Brian Ballard, Trump’s longtime lobbyist in Florida and a GOP fundraiser.

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/05/12/politics/washington-lobbying-trump-era/index.html

Ballard-Yakobashvili

Ballard, who had lobbied for Trump in Florida and had since built a Washington practice, had represented a Russian oligarch and billionaire David Yakobashvili, closely connected with Putin and known for his involvement with Rosneft and defense industry complex in Russia.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/09/kremlin-controlled-russian-bank-hires-trump-insider-as-a-lobbyist/

Yakobashvili paid Ballard $450,000 through the first three quarters of 2018 to lobby the U.S. government on immigration and trade policy.

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/01/ballard-partners-revolving-door-white-house/

Yakobashvili is an investor into Petrocas Energy Group, a Cyprus-based major petroleum company which owned over hundred gas stations chains in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan and two oil terminals in Georgia.

In 2014, Russian state-owned Rosneft oil giant purchased 49% of the Petrocas shares. The controlling stake in Petrocas was retained by David Yakobashvili.

In 2020, after the US imposed sanctions on Rosneft over its dealings with Venezuela, Rosneft sold more than a third of its seaborne oil product exports to small trading firms, including Petrocas, in which Rosneft owned a 49% stake and Yakobashvili owned 51%.

https://www.reuters.com/article/legal/government/small-trading-firms-gain-rosneft-oil-product-exports-after-sanctions-idUSL8N2H45PF/

Rosneft sold off the 49% stake in Petrocas due to the Western sanctions imposed on Russia over its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

https://civil.ge/archives/494557

The Petrocas Energy Group, was allegedly responsible for transporting Russian-sanctioned oil into Georgia, according to Anti-Corruption Movement. Ukraine accused Yakobashvili of providing material or financial assistance for activities that compromise or endanger Ukraine’s territorial integrity, sovereignty, and independence.

https://georgiatoday.ge/ukraine-sanctions-georgian-pro-russian-businessman/

Yakobashvili’s close business connections with Putin also require attention. He is a co-owner of the former poultry breeding facility in Rublevka, some of Russia’s most expensive real estate near Moscow. Putin’s estate in the Novo-Ogaryovoestate is nearby. 2 hectares could be worth over $22.7 million.

In the mid-2000s, the land has been gifted or sold at a symbolic price to Putin’s former bodyguards and their families by Gorki-2, in which Yakobashvili owned 29%, according to the last available report dated 2015.

Putin’s former security guards Zolotov, Klimentiev, and Dyuminand and their relatives are among the landowners.

https://www.occrp.org/en/investigation/putins-bodyguards-rewarded-with-land-and-power

Landowners include an assistant to President Putin, a wife of Dmitry Medvedev's security chief, businessman Arkady Rotenberg, Putin’s childhood friend and close ally.

https://rublevka.proekt.media/person/agrokompleks-gorki-2/

In 2010, Yakobashvili sold the biggest Russian food producer Wimm-Bill-Dann to US PepsiCo. Wimm-Bill-Dann, built on the base of the poultry farm, is one of the largest producers of juices and dairy products in Russia. In 2011, the American PepsiCo Inc acquired Wimm-Bill-Dann for about $5.4 billion. This deal was the largest for the American giant outside the United States.

Yakobashvili served on the board of SFC Sistema, the largest diversified public financial corporation in Russia and the CIS, and one of the hundred largest defense companies in the world, supplying radio equipment to the Russian Ministry of Defense for 13 years.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110525006098/en/JSFC-Sistema-UK-Regulatory-Announcement-Statement-re-SISTEMA-BOARD-RECOMMENDS-THE-AGM-TO-ELECT-NEW-MEMBERS

The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, with the help of RTI Systems, deployed a system of radar stations along the Russian borders, capable of detecting air targets at long range.

https://munscanner.com/2022/03/etushenkov/

The owner of the RTI Systems concern is Vladimir Yevtushenkov, an oligarch close to Putin, ranked 41st in the ranking of the 200 richest businessmen in Russia in 2021. Yevtushenkov is the chairman of the board of directors and owner of 64% of the shares of AFK Sistema, the Russian corporation that owns the concern RTI Systems. Yevtushenko could be one of the intermediaries who introduced Yanukovych to to the instigators of hostilities in Donbas in 2014.

https://munscanner.com/2022/03/etushenkov/

Yakobashvili is present at meetings with Putin

https://riamediabank.ru/media/5743093.html?context=list&list_sid=list_137674448

In addition, he invested $10 million in the social media platform Telegram.

https://centrasia.org/newsA.php?st=1561622460

Ballard-Trump

Ballard is closer to Trump than any other lobbyist in town. They have known each other for nearly 30 years. Ballard worked as Trump’s Florida lobbyist.

During Trump’s presidency, Ballard helped clients get their way with the Trump administration. Ballard was one of the top fundraisers in the country for Trump’s campaign and continued to raise millions for his reelection campaign.

Ballard-Wiles

In September 2016, Ballard sent Susie Wiles to run Trump’s campaign in Florida.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/04/02/most-powerful-lobbyist-in-trump-washington-217759/

Ballard Partners worked on lobbying a case involving Rosneft, helping an Indian company Reliance Industries Ltd to escape sanctions for importing Venezuela crude oil. Reliance, the largest cash-paying client of PdVSA, a state-owned Venezuelan oil company, purchased  PdVSA’s crude oil through Rosneft Trading SA, the Geneva-based trading unit of the Russian oil giant, in order to avoid the US sanctions.

Reliance paid Ballard Partners $775,000 and $330,000 to lobby the US state and treasury departments, the White House, and the Senate, on issues pertaining to the sanctions, as reported in Caravan Magazine and Reuters.

https://caravanmagazine.in/politics/reliance-hired-lobbyist-brian-ballard-trump-aide-import-venezuelan-crude-oil-despite-us-sanctions

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics-rosneft-exclusive/exclusive-venezuela-skirts-u-s-sanctions-by-funneling-oil-sales-via-russia-idUSKCN1RU2A4/

With Putin-linked oligarchs and lobbyists entangled at the White House levels, the implications for US interests are dire.

Demanding transparency and accountability is critical, while we still have the system of checks and balances in place.—Zarina Zabrisky, November 10, 2024

****

Related:

****

American Monsters — The Book — Buy Here!

Donations Welcome

****

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

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

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

• Upgrade to Paid Member

• Upgrade to Founding Member

• Gifting memberships

• Share my reporting with allies

• Buying my ebooks

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

Heidi’s Ko-Fi Fund

Heidi’s Venmo

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

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

🤍

🤍

Photo: Susie Wiles in 2020, Wikipedia

Subscribe now

Wash Our Spirits Clean

Starry starry night

The desert sky is pink and subtle, muted like a faded postcard. I miss the astrophysicist, who used to tell me things about scattered light and black holes, gravitational waves and string theory. I understood little but loved the magic — a universe filled with wonder and beauty, particles colliding.

As the pink sky becomes blue black, manmade fireworks conclude for another year, and the real fireworks reveal themselves — first a scattering of stars — blink — then more — blink blink — then millions, sky sparklers, shooting through the night, an infinite tiara crowning the cosmos.

The buttery moon is big and its face bemused. I stare at it as if to never forget what it looks like in this moment. I am asked if I have a vision of heaven. I respond, “Yes… it’s this moment.”

I see heaven in moments such as these, and I don’t want to miss a single second of the wonder and beauty.

I come to the desert to wash my spirit clean, as John Muir wrote of our national parks.

I trade fireworks in Palm Springs, for the stillness of Joshua Tree.

In this stillness, in this moment, I feel clean.

I have learned to be very still in the desert — it’s this stillness that allows me to see its true and subtle magnificence. It is inhabited by things that endure. From the cacti that store water to survive the dry periods, to the coyotes — opportunists who adapt.

It’s 2:22 a.m., and I am blanketed by stars in Joshua Tree — I don’t want to sleep because the moon, and the stars, and all the night creatures. I am of the desert. I think of Tucson, where I fell in love with the Saguaro and javelinas. I think of Monument Valley, where the coral winds whipped nature’s flute music throughout Navajoland. I think of Silver City, New Mexico, and the infinite lessons of the Gila Cliff Dwellings. I think of the Grand Canyon, and how when I left — a fear-loop played in my head of a Big Wind carrying me over the edge. So I had the astrophysicist take me back to the same spot days later, and I stood firmly at the edge. I was not going anywhere.

I felt the wind protect me, blowing me gently away from the precipice, away from the abyss. I was never unsafe. But I just had to know it.

I can’t step away from the moon tonight. It’s just too beautiful.

The desert is perfectly still in this moment. The desert endures.

The silhouettes of Joshua Trees — exalting up to the sky — the moon, a klieg light for these spiky celebrities. The tree, which is not a tree at all but an exquisite yucca, is endangered. Which means the Scott’s orioles that nest in them and the yucca moth that relies on them — and in return pollinates them — are in trouble, too.

So I see heaven in this moment, and I wash my spirit clean.

I have been on the frontline of an invisible war for seven years and have learned to step away to refresh my soul — the war is still there when I return, and I endure like a Saguaro — spiky but with reserves.

In the desert, I am reminded that we are small and the universe is vast.

I wish for a day in the future when I can look back and realize a turning point, when the global community came together to be better stewards of the land. That day will not come unless we defeat the fascist creep.

Do it for the stars and the coyotes, the Saguaros and the orioles.

War is hell for the birds.

In the desert oasis where I am staying, there is a book of Pablo Neruda poems — ‘Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair’. I flip to a random page and read the poem ‘Juegas todo los días’, which translates to ‘Every Day You Play’…

Here is an English translation excerpt:

Every day you play with the light of the universe.
Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water,
You are more than this white head that I hold tightly
as a bunch of flowers, every day, between my hands.

You are like nobody since I love you.
Let me spread you out among yellow garlands.
Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south?
Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.

Suddenly the wind howls and bangs at my shut window.
The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish.
Here all the winds let go sooner or later, all of them.
The rain takes off her clothes.

The birds go by, fleeing.
The wind. The wind.
I alone can contend against the power of men.
The storm whirls dark leaves
and turns loose all the boats that were moored last night to the sky…

As long as there is poetry, we endure.

****

****

Wash Our Spirits Clean by DJ Oisin Lunny

DJ Oisin Lunny, from Geek Pie Radio 16th September 2023 mixed my “Wash Our Spirits Clean” post with Starseeds “Elsewhere”, taken from their seminal lost album of groovy electronica “Parallel Lives. The poetry starts a few minutes in.

****

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

I expose the corruption of billionaire fascists with support from your memberships.

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

• Upgrade to Paid Member

• Upgrade to Founding Member

• Gifting memberships

• Share my reporting with your networks

• Buying my ebooks

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

Heidi’s Ko-Fi Fund

Heidi’s Venmo

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

More info about Bette Dangerous: This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter, author, and broadcast news veteran, as well as former music and nightlife columnist for the Los Angeles Times. A No. 1 Amazon best-selling author and award-winning film director, Cuda writes the Hot Type column in Byline Times, an independent UK-newspaper. She executive produced the film Kherson: Human Safari. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism, arts, and culture reporting.

🤍

🤍

Subscribe now

Dateline: Paris, France. Another sleepless night. A million messages of joy.

And the Schadenfreude on Twitter rolled deep…

I partook in the revelry, with a few contributions, namely: “MAGA didn’t mind the fascism but the gas prices were too high.”

And oh the memes, they were glorious.

The first one came from Dr. Marci Shore. It was a gift of a GIF:

And from my European friends, myriad Mind Enterprises GIFs, embodying Europe waking up to the news from America.

It was geopolitical analyst Monique Camarra from Italy, who sent me the blue smoke signal from the Sistine Chapel that inspired this missive: how will America’s Big Epic Tuesday impact the upcoming European elections?

But before we get to that: more joy. The Pope met with Bob Dylan today, and many of my friends populate the US government. Among them: David Pepper in Ohio, Fred Wellman in Missouri, Deb Haaland in New Mexico.

I spent the early morning hours into the day in weepy mode.

Against all hope, I hope.

I also came in and out of fear.

What time does Trump start bombing Americans and blame it on Antifer?

Seriously though. I am serious.

But back to the exquisite joy.

The blue can of whoopass unleashed in America was so powerful, even Putin can’t noodle the margins. It was simply too definitive.

Hell froze over.

Texas flipped blue.

I stand on street corners and project Seamus Heaney:

“History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that the farther shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.”

It hurts to believe.

Yesterday, the Bette community came together from all over the world to virtually hold space for each other. It has been a long and very fucked up decade.

And today, I stand a little taller as an America in Europe.

Europe never stopped loving us. They just wanted us to fix our shit.

We’ll see, but at least we have purchase.

I asked our team of thinkers to share with us how they are feeling today and what they think this might mean for Europe, and here are their responses:

In Bette’s Blessing of the Midterms Happy Hour yesterday, both David Livingstone Smith and I held firm on not underestimating how serious these fascists are and how the judicial and media coups in the U.S. struck near fatal blows to democracy’s heart.

With this sobering thought in my mind, I ask you to consider the words of Russia watcher Ruth Deyermond, senior lecturer, Department of War Studies, King's College London:

“There will now be a temptation in many parts of Europe, including the UK, to think that things will eventually go back to normal with the US and that Europe can stop its reluctant shift towards strategic autonomy. That would be a serious mistake. Europe can hope that Congress now limits the Trump admin's attempts to harm European security, and they can hope for a more friendly presidency in 2 years, but neither will return the US-Europe relationship to what it was. None of this is to say that Europe shouldn't try to build a strong security partnership with the US in future. But Europe can't ever again depend on the US as the guarantor of its security.”—Ruth Deyermond on X

Prioritizing digital sovereignty is vital for the national security of European nations. Musk and Thiel won’t suddenly change their fascist stripes, and as Smith predicted with Trump, they could well become more dangerous.

As I walk to the Eiffel Tower tonight, timing my view for maximum sparkle, I know that Russia is trying very hard to gain control of the French government in next year’s election.

So I am sending out extra sparkles of love wherever I go. I am glittering like the Eiffel Tower at midnight.

The remaining free world cannot afford to lose another democratic country to hate and spite and petty grievances, algorhymthically served up by psychopathic billionaires.

Oui shall overcome.

****

Support Lifeline Ukraine

2016 Election Attack — The Book!

American Monsters — The Book — Buy Here!

Donations Welcome

****

****

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

I expose the corruption of billionaire fascists with support from your memberships.

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

• Upgrade to Paid Member

• Upgrade to Founding Member

• Gifting memberships

• Share my reporting with your networks

• Buying my ebooks

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

Heidi’s Ko-Fi Fund

Heidi’s Venmo

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

More info about Bette Dangerous: This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter, author, and broadcast news veteran, as well as former music and nightlife columnist for the Los Angeles Times. A No. 1 Amazon best-selling author and award-winning film director, Cuda writes the Hot Type column in Byline Times, an independent UK-newspaper. She executive produced the film Kherson: Human Safari. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism, arts, and culture reporting.

🤍

🤍

TODAY’S EVENT BEGINS IN FOUR HOURS.

Subscribe now

I look forward to seeing many Bette members today for our Blessing of the Midterms Happy Hour, where we will be joined by a group of global thinkers from the U.S. and Europe, to rally our spirits, sober and clear eyed.

As I told our panelists, I’m a natural born optimist but I’m under no illusions and stand with David Livingstone Smith’s assertion in my latest Hot Type column “that there is a widespread, quasi-delusional belief that Democratic wins will go a long way towards curing our political malaise. This vastly underestimates the severity of the MAGA problem. Democratic success will be a huge narcissistic injury to Trump, and will make him even more dangerous.”

And then in my head, I hear Bad Religion’s lyrics about the grim misfortunes of ‘modern man’ who built a cruel empire and then died from his own arrogance, and I feel a flicker of that thing called hope.

Against all hope, I hope.

A beautiful gift of a phrase I received from Marci Shore, who sent it to me in the original Latin: contra spem spero.

That Latin phrase is also the title of a Ukrainian poem from 1890, written by the poet Lesya Ukrainka, which ends with these words (translated):

Yes, I'll smile, indeed, through tears and weeping
Sing my songs where evil holds its sway,
Hopeless, a steadfast hope forever keeping,
I shall live! You thoughts of grief, away!

I feel hope in that Ceauşescu way, in that way where things end badly for the oppressors.

I think Donald Trump should be doing everything in his power to ensure the International Criminal Court continues to function, rather than trying to destroy it, which he is doing.

His best possible outcome is the civility of law.

Just ask the Romans.

Geopolitical analyst Monique Camarra is among our guests tomorrow, and she just happens to be reading the foundations of the Declaration of Independence, which she says is inspiring her in this moment.

She offers us this rousing patriotic reminder:

As it so happens, I’ve been reviewing John Locke’s Second Treatise (1689), a work of political thought that informed the American founders, along with documents they published up to the Declaration of Independence, including the Virginia Bill of Rights and other state constitutions. They’re perfect for understanding the founders’ mission and what they hoped America would be well into the future.

It all started with a radical idea at the time: according to natural law (not conventional or man-made laws), we are all equal and free the moment we are born, and according to the same universal law, we have a duty not to harm other human beings, their bodies, health, life, property, or happiness. This was explicitly expressed in the Declaration of Independence, which told the world what the United States was and stood for.

This idea we and other liberal democracies take for granted today rocked the world (mostly Great Britain) because it challenged the thinking that kings had a divine right to rule over others—that someone has more of a right by birth or virtue than you or I to rule over us without our consent. That’s the real shot that rang around the world. It all seems to have been forgotten as I see these foundational principles completely trampled and discarded by corruption, subversion, intellectual laziness, and short-sightedness. Aristotle called men who do this “beasts” because they work against the common good of the polis, the political community, and without its consent, just like Putin, Xi, and their political and business allies in our modern political world, immoral “beasts” who violate every known natural human right. It’s simply wrong. My hope is the electors remember what is right.

This is why this election and all others are so precious: we exercise our natural right of consent within our polis, our communities, and in doing so, we separate humankind from the beasts and hold our political representatives to account. This is why I’ll be glued to the news feeds to watch all the electoral contests across the United States tomorrow night.—Monique Camarra for Bette Dangerous

And retired IRS criminal investigator Martin Sheil sent us this poem, which he has titled Living Life in the Subjunctive: If Only

If only folks stopped acting like squirrels and ceased their hoarding and started sharing again like the old days . . .

If only if Progressives won control of Congress in the midterm elections in November.

If only if Congress then resets the political order and impeaches the President for all of his corruption?!?

If only if said impeachment would bring an end to endless war in the Middle East and tariffs and sanctions and we could be friends again with old friend Canada?!?

If only if America could return to some sense of normalcy in the Autumn and focus on baseball pennant races and playoffs and college football games on Saturdays and who is going to win an Oscar?!?

If only folks were more like birds sharing a bird bath—cooling themselves and not taking umbrage when one splashes the other.

If only folks could spend their weekends fishing in the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario—you know—the way they used to?!?

If only folks did not have to worry about how they were going to pay their medical bills and childcare costs?!?

If only folks did not have to worry about being replaced at work by some Chinese robot?!?

If only folks mingled around a fire pit on autumn nights instead of TikTok?!?

And my strongest sentiment—if only the Chicago Cubs could have worked out their bullpen issues in order to go on to participate in the World Series and win the major league baseball world championship…

Then and only then—life could be lived in the present tense and folks could worry about all that other stuff later.—Martin Sheil for Bette Dangerous

Sorry about the Cubs, Marty.

But we can do better as a country.

On a dark night two years ago, a friend who did not want me to be alone on election night, passed along these words from a blacklisted writer: “You still have to have a happy life.”

I have carried that with me everywhere.

Hope to see many of you today and grateful as always for the support.

Subscribe now

To register for our Happy Hour, keep scrolling to the bottom of the post. xo

****

2016 Election Attack — The Book!

American Monsters — The Book — Buy Here!

Donations Welcome

****

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

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

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

• Upgrade to Paid Member

• Upgrade to Founding Member

• Gifting memberships

• Share my reporting with allies

• Buying my ebooks

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

Heidi’s Ko-Fi Fund

Heidi’s Venmo

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

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

🤍

🤍

REGISTRATION LINK FOUND HERE

Read more

Subscribe now

Reporting in from Europe to make sure Americans know that Europeans understand that something went horribly wrong in the US. Don’t believe the escalating Twitter ‘anger’ directed at US voters — it’s often inorganic.

But what is real: Europeans are asking Americans to get their shit together and overthrow this regime, for the good of the remaining free world.

They want us to fix our own shit. And really, it is on America to fix its shit.

On that note, I made my first attempt in August to summarize Trump and his loyalists’ plan to interfere with the midterm elections.

Byline Times

Hot Type: ‘Everyone Has to Realise They’re Going to Try to Steal the Elections’

Read more

2 months ago · 67 likes · Heidi Cuda

I quickly realized it would require a 400-page report to really lay out all their plans, so I followed up with this report, noting that the entire regime is populated by 2020 election deniers.

Byline Times

Hot Type: Donald Trump’s Election Denial Industrial Complex

Read more

18 days ago · 64 likes · Heidi Cuda

And finally, this week I cautioned that Trump’s fading desirability, such as it was, would prove a grave narcissistic injury, so grave that the US and the world must brace for impact.

Byline Times

Hot Type: Trump’s Narcissistic Injury

Read more

3 days ago · 62 likes · Heidi Cuda

Among the highlights from each of these reports includes the following:

I have been thinking a lot about the way of the tyrants, how they always fall — sic semper tyrannis — that it got to this point in America is a monumental failure at every level. Mostly, we never acknowledged Russia, which targets every democracy with the same operations.

And we fell for it. Right now, Russia is attacking the French elections, falsely claiming two of the presidential candidates are ill — just like it did to Hillary Clinton, with the assist of Roger Stone et al.

By now, it is my hope that we can see the battlefield. I laid it all out in the reports above, as I have been doing for the last decade.

Godspeed, America. The world needs you to fix this shit.

****

Support Lifeline Ukraine

2016 Election Attack — The Book!

American Monsters — The Book — Buy Here!

Donations Welcome

****

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

I expose the corruption of billionaire fascists with support from your memberships.

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

• Upgrade to Paid Member

• Upgrade to Founding Member

• Gifting memberships

• Share my reporting with your networks

• Buying my ebooks

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

Heidi’s Ko-Fi Fund

Heidi’s Venmo

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

More info about Bette Dangerous: This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter, author, and broadcast news veteran, as well as former music and nightlife columnist for the Los Angeles Times. A No. 1 Amazon best-selling author and award-winning film director, Cuda writes the Hot Type column in Byline Times, an independent UK-newspaper. She executive produced the film Kherson: Human Safari. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism, arts, and culture reporting.

🤍

🤍

Subscribe now

Author’s note: I’ve been returning to Galway since May of last year. Any chance I get, I wander the medieval quarter, always seeking sacred spaces. Galway is a city filled with intrigue, magic, music and madness. It’s a city where, as an American linguist told me at an Irish-language play in a castle, ‘ambition goes to die.’ The arts and artists are thriving in Galway, as I shared with you in this recent post from my Galway Series:

The artist featured in that report told me when I bumped into him recently: “I have no hate in my heart.” That is a sound way to walk through life. Today’s report is about my friend Holle, a Hungarian puppeteer performing in Galway. I hope you enjoy the magic and the wonder.—hsc

A Happier Life: Holle and The Cellist

An interview with a Hungarian puppeteer in the heart of Galway. Part of a series of culture reports from Co Galway Ireland

I recall my first afternoon in Galway.

I was walking through the medieval streets near Eyre Square, moving from busker to busker, coins falling out of my pocket.

I met one of my favorite artists that first day, Sailhymn.

I picked up Sailhymn’s CD, Trust, and it’s perfection.

Any excuse I can muster, I find myself going back to Galway.

Galway artist Don Stiffe even wrote a song about this phenomenon — it is a hit in my home.

As I was making the busking rounds through the streets of Galway one day, dropping coins in the cases of bass players and street drummers, I heard the notes of Hallelujah on cello beckoning me.

I made my way through the gathered crowd and saw that what I was hearing was coming from a puppeteer playing a Jeff Buckley-esque version of Hallelujah. That his outfit directly matched his puppet’s outfit, and that the puppet tipped his hat toward me with his puppet fingers, and then his eyes fluttered, well okay… I was enchanted.

Holle and The Cellist on the Seine

I had just finished making all the plans for my wedding, no small feat, never having been a wedding planner.

Rather than fight the fact I was in charge of logistics, I dusted off my director’s hat and engaged my inner Jean-Luc Godard.

I turned to my now-husband and said: “Can we please get the puppeteer at the wedding?”

I imagine hitting knees to cobblestone and pleading with him, but that’s not what happened.

We were over budget, out of time, and my husband’s joke was: “We’re going to need a bigger boat.”

What began as a small family gathering in Paris was turning into a lost Alain Resnais film.

With this puppeteer, it could be a Jean Cocteau mise-en-scène on the Seine!

In reality, my husband said, “Sure.”

He, too, could recognize genius.

And we did, indeed, need to get a bigger boat.

I had a vision of guests arriving on the boat, and the first thing they would see is this puppeteer.

I tracked him down and he said, yes. He could meet us in Paris on a Monday on a boat.

Holle of Harkel’s Puppetry would not only help elevate our wedding to magical perfection, performing such songs as The Swan, Hallelujah, Metallica’s Nothing Else Matters, Joe Hisaishi’s Merry-Go-Round of Life and Amazing Grace, he would become a friend.

And now, when I’m in Galway, I see him and stop and think about that Best Monday Ever — the nickname for our wedding from one of the guests who attended.

One day, I’ll write about the after-party, when my friends from Byline Times and family members kept the staff at Caveau des oubliettes in the Latin Quarter up waaaay past bedtime. Lol. But not today.

What follows is my Q&A with Holle about the art of puppetry and why he brings a pocketful of childish wonder wherever he and his puppet, The Cellist, show up:

Heidi: Where does this story begin for you?

Holle: My puppeteer journey started when I was a young hitch-hiker, traveling around Europe. I was in Paris one day, where I saw a street puppeteer, who grabbed my attention, and that experience connected me to my childhood love for all that is puppetry. I’ve always been a creative person, doing arts from a young age, so I decided to give puppetry a go, creating my own puppets down the line.

Heidi: Do you have a moment when you knew this work would be your destiny?

Holle: I’m not a big believer in superstitious concepts, but I guess there were many moments instead of a singular one, where I knew I was on the right track. It’s hard to pick one, as when I perform on the streets small-big moments happen almost daily, and it’s always related to how the audience - who can be any member of the public - is touched by my work. I think it takes more effort these days to get lost in a piece of art or performance, and when I see that kind of childish wonder on my audience’s faces I know there’s some sort of a reason to do what I do.

Heidi: Can you share any stories about Hungary.

Holle: I had my workshop for years in a little house in the countryside in Hungary, where I’m from, and where I had done a TV-show as a puppeteer, and it’s genuinely a welcoming place for puppeteers, even if it’s not as famous for the art-form as Prague. But I always felt the need to move.

Heidi: Why Galway?

Holle: Galway is this special place. There’s a short saying you might think is associated with George Lucas’ Return of the Jedi, but I’m pretty sure he took it from the people who migrate to Galway. And I can confirm what they say.. “It’s a trap!” For any artistically wired person it’s obviously one of the most artsy places you can find on the planet, at least at this size. Which I have to say is a huge part of the deal. Galway has the scenery, the arts, the craic, the people, the busking community, but also it’s so compact, and can be so quiet, it’s just good for the soul.

Heidi: Oh, I feel that. What makes your craft different from other entertainment? How does the puppet add to the viewers’ experience?

Holle: I think puppetry, or viewing puppetry, especially these days is a challenge. It is unique and takes a few extra steps to really appreciate it. I see how people react to it, and it sometimes does not go from a “wow, it’s something different” to “how is this possible? I’m mesmerized (which is the goal in my mind)” smoothly always. I think it is because we are so trained to have a shorter attention span these days, and also to be overly analytical without taking things for what they are sometimes, without giving their childish wonder a chance. I truly wish to experience what I do as a viewer one day, then I could answer this question maybe better.

Heidi: How long have you been performing in matching outfits? Does the puppet have a name? And if so, why that name?

Holle: I think I came up with the matching outfit a decade ago, not like it’s a brilliant idea, many puppeteers have a mini version of themselves. I really just wanted to communicate to people that it is my creation, but then they just love the picture of us looking the same. As for a name, I usually refer to him as The Cellist, but you could call him H as well.

Heidi: How do you choose the music?

Holle: I tend to choose songs which are emotional, or have a personal meaning for me, but then I always check what works on the street. Think about the music as an atmospheric backdrop, a theme for the streets.

Heidi: What is the best part of the work for you?

Holle: The money, they say it cannot buy happiness but I beg to differ... On a serious note, this line of work gives me such freedom. Freedom to travel, to pick my sick days as I choose, to work as much or as little as I need at the moment, and to meet people, and to introduce puppetry from a different perspective to the world. There’s also a reason why I keep talking about childish wonder, I really think small surprises like connecting to a random artist at a random moment at a random street while you were just walking down to buy your cigarettes or baguette or whatever is a serious contributor to — broadly speaking — a happier life.

Heidi: Any comment about playing in Paris at our wedding, which was an honor for us that you came.

Holle: Fabulous venue! Also, great meeting you, and loved how our meeting added something more to each of our summers.

Heidi: So true! What is the greatest response you have received?

Holle: “Seeing you here makes my day every time.”

Heidi: Next steps in your journey?

Holle: I came to a point in my life now where I don’t want to plan out too much. I think it’s time to go more with the flow and drive down to a new city whenever the feeling takes me there. I will definitely experiment with new street acts too, but I also came to appreciate what I have through how others appreciate me. So maybe I won’t ever make a groundbreaking act, I know I still will be adding something to this world and that’s the most precious to me.

You can find Holle with Harkel’s Puppetry performing in the heart of medieval Galway, Ireland, and you can follow his work on Instagram at Harkel’s Puppetry.

****

Support Lifeline Ukraine

2016 Election Attack — The Book!

American Monsters — The Book — Buy Here!

Donations Welcome

****

Related:

****

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

I expose the corruption of billionaire fascists with support from your memberships.

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

• Upgrade to Paid Member

• Upgrade to Founding Member

• Gifting memberships

• Share my reporting with your networks

• Buying my ebooks

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

Heidi’s Ko-Fi Fund

Heidi’s Venmo

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

More info about Bette Dangerous: This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter, author, and broadcast news veteran, as well as former music and nightlife columnist for the Los Angeles Times. A No. 1 Amazon best-selling author and award-winning film director, Cuda writes the Hot Type column in Byline Times, an independent UK-newspaper. She executive produced the film Kherson: Human Safari. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism, arts, and culture reporting.

🤍

🤍

Subscribe now

I will always be grateful to a friend, who did not want me to spend the 2024 election night alone, despite my determination to isolate. By evening Pacific time, we could see how things were going, and I am glad I said yes to his company. I sat down at his table, and helped myself to a coloring book and pencils, and started mindlessly drawing. He and his wife fed me, and offered me stories of Resistance, and out of the corner of my eye, I could see on their muted television screen the moment the Trump Crime Family took the stage. I had promised myself I would leave America if he was voted in a second time. And at 2 am I wrote this column for Byline Times:

Byline Times

Hot Type: A Return to the Dark Ages

“There are men everywhere who would sell out humanity for their own personal profit. There are stupid and emotional masses everywhere who can be found to follow them, given a few slogans a…

Read more

2 years ago · 86 likes · 2 comments · Heidi Cuda

An elegy for my country. It reads like bittersweet poetry.

Two years of global degradation later, and we stand on the precipice of another election.

I want to return the favor a friend once showed me, and make sure that you know you don’t have to spend the day alone.

Bette members are invited to join our Blessing of the Midterms Happy Hour, where we will be joined by a group of global thinkers from the U.S. and Europe, to rally our spirits, sober and clear eyed.

As I told our panelists for tomorrow, I’m a natural born optimist but I’m under no illusions and stand with David Livingstone Smith’s assertion in my latest Hot Type column “that there is a widespread, quasi-delusional belief that Democratic wins will go a long way towards curing our political malaise. This vastly underestimates the severity of the MAGA problem. Democratic success will be a huge narcissistic injury to Trump, and will make him even more dangerous.”

And then in my head, I hear Bad Religion’s lyric about the grim misfortunes of ‘modern man’ who built a cruel empire and then dying from his own arrogance, and I feel a flicker of that thing called hope.

Against all hope, I hope.

A beautiful gift of a phrase I received from Marci Shore, who sent it to me in the original Latin: contra spem spero.

That Latin phrase is also the title of a Ukrainian poem from 1890, written by the poet Lesya Ukrainka, which ends with these words (translated):

Yes, I'll smile, indeed, through tears and weeping
Sing my songs where evil holds its sway,
Hopeless, a steadfast hope forever keeping,
I shall live! You thoughts of grief, away!

I feel hope in that Ceauşescu way, in that way where things end badly for the oppressors.

I think Donald Trump should be doing everything in his power to ensure the International Criminal Court continues to function, rather than trying to destroy it, which he is doing.

His best possible outcome is the civility of law.

Just ask the Romans.

Geopolitical analyst Monique Camarra is among our guests tomorrow, and she just happens to be reading the foundations of the Declaration of Independence, which she says is inspiring her in this moment.

On that dark night two years ago, my friend who did not want me to be alone on election night, also gave me a gift, passing it along from a blacklisted writer: “You still have to have a happy life.”

I have carried that with me everywhere.

Hope to see many of you and grateful as always for the support.

Subscribe now

To register for our Happy Hour, keep scrolling to the bottom of the post. xo

****

2016 Election Attack — The Book!

American Monsters — The Book — Buy Here!

Donations Welcome

****

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

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

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

• Upgrade to Paid Member

• Upgrade to Founding Member

• Gifting memberships

• Share my reporting with allies

• Buying my ebooks

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

Heidi’s Ko-Fi Fund

Heidi’s Venmo

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

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

🤍

🤍

REGISTRATION LINK FOUND HERE

Read more

THIS EVENT BEGINS IN THREE HOURS.

Get 30% off for 1 year

Paying members are invited to register for today’s Bette’s Book Club event with New York Times-bestselling author Craig Unger as he discusses the findings in his second book on Trump-Russia, American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery (Penguin Random House, 2022).

American Kompromat Book

This event is scheduled for today, Sunday, 1 November, at 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern. Registration can be found by scrolling all the way to the end of this post, below the paywall.

We just had a fantastic meeting with Craig on his first Trump-Russia book from 2018, House of Trump/House of Putin, and I invited him back for a refresher on American Kompromat, his follow up, which also exposed Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein and delved into the criminal underground tied to Robert Maxwell. As with all his work, he is years ahead of the mainstream and only now are people seeing that everything he has reported for a decade about Donald Trump and Russia was bang on.

I asked Craig for an update on how his American Kompromat book ties into this moment in time and he responded:

The release on Monday by the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, of a 52-page document citing five women — Beatrice Keul, Stacey Williams, Jill Harth, Katie Johnson, and a Jane Doe — who directly accuse Trump of sexual assault is the most promising sign yet that an incoming Democratic Congress will hold Trump accountable in the near future.

No matter how it unfolds, this will be the next chapter in a story I first addressed more than five years ago in American Kompromat, where I investigated Epstein not as a rogue predator operating in isolation, but as a node in a decades-long Russian intelligence effort — working hand in glove with Trump — to cultivate compromising material on American elites. I also addressed his ties to Israeli intelligence.

Every subsequent Epstein document release and DOJ file dump has done the same thing: forced the public to confront that his network reached further into finance, politics, banking, and intelligence circles than almost anyone wanted to admit in 2021. The book essentially pre-identified the shape of a story that is still being excavated piece by piece, years later, by federal prosecutors and congressional investigators only now catching up to the structural argument it made at the outset.

So far, the Republican Congress and Trump’s highly politicized DOJ — aided by massive corruption in the banking, legal, and political sectors — have managed to cover up both the breadth and depth of the scandal. My hope is that when a new Democratic Congress takes office in January, all of America will finally see women testifying on camera about both Trump’s criminal assaults on them and his role in Jeffrey Epstein’s larger sex trafficking enterprise.—Craig Unger for Bette Dangerous

Mic drop.

More about American Kompromat from the publisher:

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Kompromat n.—Russian for “compromising information”

This is a story about the dirty secrets of the most powerful people in the world—including Donald Trump. It is based on exclusive interviews with dozens of high-level sources—intelligence officers in the CIA, FBI, and the KGB; thousands of pages of FBI investigations, police investigations; and news articles in English, Russian, and Ukrainian. American Kompromat shows that from Trump to Jeffrey Epstein, kompromat was used in operations far more sinister than the public could ever imagine. Among them, the book addresses what may be the single most important unanswered question of the entire Trump era: Is Donald Trump a Russian asset? The answer, American Kompromat says, is yes, and it supports that conclusion with the first richly detailed narrative on how the KGB allegedly first “spotted” Trump as a potential asset, how they cultivated him as an asset, arranged his first trip to Moscow, and pumped him full of KGB talking points that were published in three of America’s most prestigious newspapers.

Among its many revelations, American Kompromat reports for the first time that:

• According to Yuri Shvets, a former major in the KGB, Trump first did business over forty years ago with a Manhattan electronics store co-owned by a Soviet émigré who Shvets believes was working with the KGB. Trump’s decision to do business there triggered protocols through which the Soviet spy agency began efforts to cultivate Trump as an asset, thus launching a decades-long “relationship” of mutual benefit to Russia and Trump, from real estate to real power.

• Trump’s invitation to Moscow in 1987 was billed as a preliminary scouting trip for a hotel, but according to Shvets, was actually initiated by a high-level KGB official, General Ivan Gromakov. These sorts of trips were usually arranged for “deep development,” recruitment, or for a meeting with the KGB handlers, even if the potential asset was unaware of it.

• Before Trump’s first trip to Moscow, he met with Natalia Dubinina, who worked at the United Nations library in a vital position usually reserved as a cover for KGB operatives.

• In 1987, according to Shvets, the KGB circulated an internal cable hailing the successful execution of an active measure by a newly cultivated American asset who took out full page ads in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe promoting policies promoted by the KGB. The ads had been taken out by Donald Trump, who, Shvets said, would become a “special unofficial contact” for the KGB, that is, an intelligence asset whose role has been compared to that of the late industrialist, Armand Hammer.

A number of America’s highest national security officials have said they believe Trump is a Russian asset, but neither the Mueller Report nor the numerous congressional investigations throughout Trump’s presidency pursued that vital question. American Kompromat does.

In addition to exploring Trump’s ties to the KGB, American Kompromat also shows that from Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein, Russian kompromat operations documented the darkest secrets of the most powerful people in the world and transformed those secrets into potent weapons. It also reveals:

• How Jeffrey Epstein and Trump jostled for influence and financial supremacy for years. A college dropout let go from his prep school teaching job, Epstein became a millionaire in part with the help of Ghislaine Maxwell’s father—media tycoon Robert Maxwell, who allegedly served as a Soviet and Israeli spy and likely gave Epstein a sum estimated between $10 and $20 million before his death in 1991.

• How the Jeffrey Epstein-Ghislaine Maxwell sex-trafficking operation provided a source and marketplace for sexual kompromat–dirty secrets of the richest and most powerful men in the world. While Epstein had a rule when it came to selecting women, namely, “the younger, the better,” he also knew that a multimillionaire–or future leader–caught committing adultery is nothing compared to getting caught on video in the act with a minor.

• How the Epstein-Maxwell ring helped enable young women with possible ties to Russian intelligence to gain access to the highest levels of Silicon Valley and the worlds of artificial intelligence, supercomputers, and the internet. This, at a time when Vladimir Putin has asserted, “Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere [artificial intelligence] will become the ruler of the world.”

• How Epstein had ties to Russia through sex-trafficking. Epstein partnered with Jean-Luc Brunel, head of MC2 modeling agency and a major sex trafficker, who, in turn, had worked with Peter Listerman, the celebrated procurer, or “matchmaker” as he prefers, for Russian oligarchs.

• How John Mark Dougan, a former deputy sheriff in Mar-a-Lago’s Palm Beach County, says he acquired 478 videos confiscated from the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, fled to Moscow, became only the fourth American to win asylum in Russia, and immediately gained access to Putin’s inner circle, showing the ongoing power that comes from kompromat and how its value is highest before it is “used.”

More about Craig Unger’s body of work 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, American Kompromat, 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

In addition, learn more about the Trump-Russia Timeline and Jeffrey Epstein’s Russian ties on Craig Unger’s own substack here:

• Trump-Russia Timeline

• The Epstein Files: The Russian Connection.

And please read and share this Q&A from one of my long-form interviews with him:

That interview was cited in the new book, “American Overthrow,” by Keir Giles, who was our first Bette’s Book Club guest and who will be coming back on 15 November for a Q&A session.

Thank you to everyone who has been showing up to meet our authors in our new book series: so far, we have enjoyed visits from French historian and disinformation analyst David Colon; Giles and Unger; and intellectual historian Marci Shore, who offered us an amazing talk on Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt.

Here is a print report based on that event:

Those who attended learned about the Yale Milgrim experiment, and as a follow up, Marci sent me these pages so you can learn more about this landmark psychological study.

Thank you Marci!

Please keep scrolling below the paywall for the registration link for our Craig Unger event. It’s not too late to become a member!

Subscribe now

****

2016 Election Attack — The Book!

American Monsters — The Book — Buy Here!

Donations Welcome

****

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

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

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

• Upgrade to Paid Member

• Upgrade to Founding Member

• Gifting memberships

• Share my reporting with allies

• Buying my ebooks

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

Heidi’s Ko-Fi Fund

Heidi’s Venmo

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

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

🤍

🤍

REGISTRATION LINK FOUND HERE

Read more

Subscribe now

I just finished cleaning up most of the typos in my latest Q&A with Dr. Marci Shore ‘After all these hells had passed…’

My interview with Marci on Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann In Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is full of vital information that we need today, in this very moment. Thank you to everyone who shows up for our events.

Please read the interview and share with your networks.

Among the themes I am pondering is the title I almost went with: ‘the greatest crime is the failure to think.’

I believe this is the narrative of the moment — when AI is being used to replace thinking, what then? Is it not easier to manipulate people to nefarious ends if they have relinquished their power and desire to think for themselves?

Our new book club is a solid reminder to think, think, think. As I teased in this vignette from Friedrich Reck’s Diary of a Man in Despair, allow the ghosts to begin their work and even guide us in this moment.

They are listening to the ghosts and taking action in Prague, among other cities in Europe.

Trump’s Narcissistic Injury

In my latest Hot Type column for Byline Times and Byline Supplement, I was gifted an embarrassment of riches. Such brilliant thinkers as David Livingstone Smith, Marci Shore, Michael MacKay, Keir Giles, and Miles Taylor offered me their thoughts on my theme of how Trump is losing control of the optics of his popularity and what that might mean for the U.S. and the world.

As I reported:

I struggled for a title, agonizing between Shore’s contribution of ‘Against all hope, I hope’… she gifted me the Latin phrase ‘contra spem spero.’ And another top contender was Taylor’s quote: ‘Popularity be damned.’ I really wanted to go with: ‘In short, Trump is insane.’ That quote is from Michael MacKay, and it’s the last word in the piece. (I guess I buried the lede lol.)

Ultimately, we determined ‘Trump’s narcissistic injury’ was the definitive sum up of the report, going with Smith’s contribution, which is frequent. If you do not already read his Substack, Dehumanization Matters, I think you should.

And please take 35-minutes to watch Taylor’s new documentary film CORRUPTIONLAND. Learn more in my report.

For those of you who are members, Keir Giles is back with us 15 November to answer questions about this latest book, American Overthrow.

And Craig Unger is back with us today to talk about his prescient book, American Kompromat.

Thank you in advance to those of you who already registered for today’s talk. And if you are not yet a member, please use this coupon to join here:

Get 30% off for 1 year

And here is the link to my Hot Type column, which was published in both Byline Times and Byline Supplement on Saturday:

Byline Times

Hot Type: Trump’s Narcissistic Injury

Read more

2 days ago · 56 likes · Heidi Cuda

Because X is suppressing independent journalists speaking truth to power, it really helps when you like and share these reports with your networks. If you find this week’s helpful, please share using the original link from Byline. Liking and sharing a report really helps to reach a wider audience, which Elon Musk is now denying us on his platform.

Here is a cross-post of Hot Type:

Hot Type: Trump’s Narcissistic Injury

As Trump loses control of his popularity optics, cancelling rallies amid open ridicule from the public and protestors, Heidi Siegmund Cuda warns America and the world to brace for impact

By Heidi Siegmund Cuda

Originally published in Byline Times and Byline Supplement on 31 October 2026

A protester shouted “Trump is treason!” as he threw Russian flags at Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell at a press event at the Capitol exactly nine years ago this week. That incident, captured on video, was one of the iconic moments of the early Trump Resistance. Another epic event happened that same week when a US government contractor flipped the bird from her bicycle to Trump’s enormous motorcade, and a star was born.

These moments are seared into my memory, because in 2017, there was so much pressure to conform, to just shut up and wait out Trump’s first term, that the defiance of these protesters was absolutely heroic.

Those of us in the media who had investigated Donald Trump prior to 2016 and knew of his corrupt and criminal background and chose to warn people publicly were often shunned and stalked – the goal was to silence us into submission.

It was so depressing to watch former media colleagues split into two camps — the cheerleaders and the normalizers. Some jumped on the MAGA train, others cowered under cover of neutrality, which in a time of rising fascism, always benefits the oppressor.

It was my lost decade.

And now, two years into the hellscape of the second Trump administration, no amount of media cowardice, normalizing, and cheerleading can obfuscate the growing repudiation of the man.

Trump can no longer control the optics.

Protest Panto

In recent weeks, at political rallies, Americans loudly ridicule Trump in Panto-like style, shouting things like, “Shove that ballroom up your fat ass!” “Trump went on Epstein’s plane!” “Pumpkin Spice Pedo!”

Protestors getting ejected while flipping the bird through the crowd are now de rigueur, with multiple incidents occurring at eight rallies in October. And as one is removed, another fires up the middle finger, and the protest-Panto continues. As each is removed, the cameras often pan to the audience, revealing empty seats, even up close to the stage. The notoriously thin-skinned Trump just canceled two rallies in Kansas and Iowa, and is now phoning it in, literally. He plans to campaign by phone just three days ahead of the US midterm elections, where polls are showing Democratic candidates leading across the nation. (As we went to press, reports now indicate the public rallies may be back on.)

In addition to the rally rebellions, reports that online Trump merchandise shops are shuttering throughout the country from lack of interest offer another data point of his downward spiral.

And an erstwhile press secretary who didn’t survive a full week reveals the former beauty pageant impresario may be having trouble casting another cross-bedecked blonde to lie for him at the White House podium.

For someone who built his image on TV showmanship, the curtain is now looking flimsy and torn, revealing decay and rot in stark relief.

But does it even matter? Investigating the actions of Trump and his loyalist band of 2020 election deniers, we find a country and a world that needs to brace for impact. The potential for black swan events is ominous, and in direct correlation to the thumping his party would receive if the election on Tuesday is free and fair.

---

Governing for Control

Miles Taylor, who worked in both the George W Bush and Trump administrations, told Byline Times: “You’re right — he’s lost the optics — the empty seats, the protesters mocking him to his face, the merch stores going dark — all of it. For a man who has spent his life measuring himself by crowd size, that’s a real wound. But I’d caution against reading it as weakness in the way it would be for a normal politician. Trump stopped governing for popularity a long time ago. I really think he’s governing for control, and the two are now largely decoupled.”

Taylor, who just released the film, CORRUPTIONLAND, a 35-minute documentary film identifying $377 billion dollars in corruption allegations in Trump’s Washington, said to “look at what he’s doing instead of actually courting voters.”

“His henchmen are subpoenaing election officials, trying to pull tens of thousands of mail ballots, seizing the Fed, threatening broadcast licenses, and so on. Those are the moves of someone who assumes he’ll be unpopular anyway and is attempting to expand his control, popularity be damned. That’s the thing to glean before Tuesday.”

Taylor worked in the US Department of Homeland Security as a senior advisor from 2017 to 2019 and famously wrote the anonymous op-ed in the New York Times in 2018 titled: “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration“ before resigning to publicly campainst against Trump in 2020.

“His thin skin is very real,” said Taylor. “And it makes him erratic… and it makes him crave more control through more means of cracking down. That said, his actions are so politically self-defeating that he is all but guaranteeing NEW checks on his power by effectively electing a new Congress opposed to him.”

Keir Giles, author of the new book American Overthrow, told Byline Times that “Trump is an unusual combination of extreme sensitivity to perceived slights and extreme lack of self-awareness. If his popularity is waning, this may present a serious preoccupation for him, but I’m not entirely clear to what extent he would perceive it accurately.”

Giles said the key question “is rather the point at which the strategist in the Trump group determines that popularity is no longer important because sufficient levers of power are now already in their hands and they can act without it.”

Philosophy professor and author of books on dehumanization, David Livingstone Smith, offers this blunt and ominous assessment: “My best guess is Trump doesn’t care. With regard to the midterms, I think that there is a widespread, quasi-delusional belief that Democratic wins will go a long way towards curing our political malaise. This vastly underestimates the severity of the MAGA problem. Democratic success will be a huge narcissistic injury to Trump, and will make him even more dangerous.”

A Man in ‘Violent Conflict’

Political philosopher Dr Michael MacKay sees Trump as a very dangerous man in “violent conflict” with himself.

“Trump is a malignant narcissist. He is obsessed with his popularity,” MacKay told Byline Times. “He convinces himself he has the biggest crowd sizes and the highest TV ratings. Trump is obsessed with being a winner. He has to be seen to be making ‘deals’ where he forces an opponent to capitulate and asserts his male dominance.

“But Trump is also a Russian operative and a slave to Putin. He is obedient to the Kremlin dictator and submissive to the demands of Russian imperialism. These key characteristics of Trump’s personality are in violent conflict. Ultimately it is Russia that wins out and Trump’s preening vanity that takes a beating.”

MacKay said that if Trump were to support Ukraine to victory against Russia he could clearly be seen as a winner, a point I made two years ago.

“He would be enormously popular as the ‘genius’ leader who helped David defeat Goliath,” said MacKay. “Trump would be seen to be the strong man who was better than Biden, better than Obama. But Trump can’t do that because he must obey Putin. Trump is compelled to ally the United States with the Russian terrorist state, destroy every US trade and military tie, and initiate conflict with peaceful and friendly countries like Canada and Denmark.”

MacKay said the hold that Russia has over Trump “is so great that it overwhelms his psychopathic instincts.”

As Trump gets jeered at rallies, intellectual historian Dr Marci Shore says she “keeps thinking about Romania in December 1989, that last rally for Ceausescu. I keep hoping that at some point it will all crash. It’s not impossible, it could happen fast, contra spem spero.”

Against all hope, I hope.

Shore then sent me a short video clip from Fox News, which was live-streaming an interview from a Trump rally in Rock Hill, South Carolina, with a presumed supporter, only to realize they’d been duped.

Reporter: Tom, why are you here this morning?

Tom: Well, in the late ‘70s I was a little too young to get involved and go to South America for the Jonestown massacre, and this is as close as I’m gonna get so that’s why I’m here.

Reporter: The Jonestown massacre?

Tom: That’s right. There’s nothing like seeing a cult right up front, man.

Reporter (turns to camera): Maybe this is not a Trump supporter.

Another data point: Fox News is seeing a dramatic decline in viewership.

MacKay said all of this feels good, and we take the wins where we find them, but without intervention, Trump “is on a path to destroy himself, the Republican Party and – if he can – the United States.”

“Trump truly believes that Putin is a magical being – some angel from hell – who will ultimately rescue him from the disaster of his own making and the stygian abyss of nihilism. In short, Trump is insane.”

I am sure you all agree, I have the best sources.

Together, we brace for impact and still have a happy life.

As Marci always says, “Go do something happy today.”

****

Images: top, screenshot courtesy Ryan Clayton; bottom, courtesy Juli Briskman, now a Loudon County Supervisor.

****

2016 Election Attack — The Book!

American Monsters — The Book — Buy Here!

Donations Welcome

****

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

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

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

• Upgrade to Paid Member

• Upgrade to Founding Member

• Gifting memberships

• Share my reporting with allies

• Buying my ebooks

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

Heidi’s Ko-Fi Fund

Heidi’s Venmo

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

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

🤍

🤍

Subscribe now

Hello Bette members!

Thank you to all new and renewing subscribers. Hope you join our community events — a membership perk!

Paying members are invited to register for our latest Bette’s Book Club event with New York Times-bestselling author Craig Unger as he discusses the findings in his second book on Trump-Russia, American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery (Penguin Random House, 2022).

American Kompromat Book

This event is scheduled for Sunday, 1 November, at 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern. Registration can be found by scrolling all the way to the end of this post, below the paywall.

We just had a fantastic meeting with Craig on his first Trump-Russia book from 2018, House of Trump/House of Putin, and I invited him back for a refresher on American Kompromat, his follow up, which also exposed Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein and delved into the criminal underground tied to Robert Maxwell. As with all his work, he is years ahead of the mainstream and only now are people seeing that everything he has reported for a decade about Donald Trump and Russia was bang on.

I asked Craig for an update on how his American Kompromat book ties into this moment in time and he responded:

The release on Monday by the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, of a 52-page document citing five women — Beatrice Keul, Stacey Williams, Jill Harth, Katie Johnson, and a Jane Doe — who directly accuse Trump of sexual assault is the most promising sign yet that an incoming Democratic Congress will hold Trump accountable in the near future.

No matter how it unfolds, this will be the next chapter in a story I first addressed more than five years ago in American Kompromat, where I investigated Epstein not as a rogue predator operating in isolation, but as a node in a decades-long Russian intelligence effort — working hand in glove with Trump — to cultivate compromising material on American elites. I also addressed his ties to Israeli intelligence.

Every subsequent Epstein document release and DOJ file dump has done the same thing: forced the public to confront that his network reached further into finance, politics, banking, and intelligence circles than almost anyone wanted to admit in 2021. The book essentially pre-identified the shape of a story that is still being excavated piece by piece, years later, by federal prosecutors and congressional investigators only now catching up to the structural argument it made at the outset.

So far, the Republican Congress and Trump’s highly politicized DOJ — aided by massive corruption in the banking, legal, and political sectors — have managed to cover up both the breadth and depth of the scandal. My hope is that when a new Democratic Congress takes office in January, all of America will finally see women testifying on camera about both Trump’s criminal assaults on them and his role in Jeffrey Epstein’s larger sex trafficking enterprise.—Craig Unger for Bette Dangerous

Mic drop.

More about American Kompromat from the publisher:

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Kompromat n.—Russian for “compromising information”

This is a story about the dirty secrets of the most powerful people in the world—including Donald Trump. It is based on exclusive interviews with dozens of high-level sources—intelligence officers in the CIA, FBI, and the KGB; thousands of pages of FBI investigations, police investigations; and news articles in English, Russian, and Ukrainian. American Kompromat shows that from Trump to Jeffrey Epstein, kompromat was used in operations far more sinister than the public could ever imagine. Among them, the book addresses what may be the single most important unanswered question of the entire Trump era: Is Donald Trump a Russian asset? The answer, American Kompromat says, is yes, and it supports that conclusion with the first richly detailed narrative on how the KGB allegedly first “spotted” Trump as a potential asset, how they cultivated him as an asset, arranged his first trip to Moscow, and pumped him full of KGB talking points that were published in three of America’s most prestigious newspapers.

Among its many revelations, American Kompromat reports for the first time that:

• According to Yuri Shvets, a former major in the KGB, Trump first did business over forty years ago with a Manhattan electronics store co-owned by a Soviet émigré who Shvets believes was working with the KGB. Trump’s decision to do business there triggered protocols through which the Soviet spy agency began efforts to cultivate Trump as an asset, thus launching a decades-long “relationship” of mutual benefit to Russia and Trump, from real estate to real power.

• Trump’s invitation to Moscow in 1987 was billed as a preliminary scouting trip for a hotel, but according to Shvets, was actually initiated by a high-level KGB official, General Ivan Gromakov. These sorts of trips were usually arranged for “deep development,” recruitment, or for a meeting with the KGB handlers, even if the potential asset was unaware of it.

• Before Trump’s first trip to Moscow, he met with Natalia Dubinina, who worked at the United Nations library in a vital position usually reserved as a cover for KGB operatives.

• In 1987, according to Shvets, the KGB circulated an internal cable hailing the successful execution of an active measure by a newly cultivated American asset who took out full page ads in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe promoting policies promoted by the KGB. The ads had been taken out by Donald Trump, who, Shvets said, would become a “special unofficial contact” for the KGB, that is, an intelligence asset whose role has been compared to that of the late industrialist, Armand Hammer.

A number of America’s highest national security officials have said they believe Trump is a Russian asset, but neither the Mueller Report nor the numerous congressional investigations throughout Trump’s presidency pursued that vital question. American Kompromat does.

In addition to exploring Trump’s ties to the KGB, American Kompromat also shows that from Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein, Russian kompromat operations documented the darkest secrets of the most powerful people in the world and transformed those secrets into potent weapons. It also reveals:

• How Jeffrey Epstein and Trump jostled for influence and financial supremacy for years. A college dropout let go from his prep school teaching job, Epstein became a millionaire in part with the help of Ghislaine Maxwell’s father—media tycoon Robert Maxwell, who allegedly served as a Soviet and Israeli spy and likely gave Epstein a sum estimated between $10 and $20 million before his death in 1991.

• How the Jeffrey Epstein-Ghislaine Maxwell sex-trafficking operation provided a source and marketplace for sexual kompromat–dirty secrets of the richest and most powerful men in the world. While Epstein had a rule when it came to selecting women, namely, “the younger, the better,” he also knew that a multimillionaire–or future leader–caught committing adultery is nothing compared to getting caught on video in the act with a minor.

• How the Epstein-Maxwell ring helped enable young women with possible ties to Russian intelligence to gain access to the highest levels of Silicon Valley and the worlds of artificial intelligence, supercomputers, and the internet. This, at a time when Vladimir Putin has asserted, “Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere [artificial intelligence] will become the ruler of the world.”

• How Epstein had ties to Russia through sex-trafficking. Epstein partnered with Jean-Luc Brunel, head of MC2 modeling agency and a major sex trafficker, who, in turn, had worked with Peter Listerman, the celebrated procurer, or “matchmaker” as he prefers, for Russian oligarchs.

• How John Mark Dougan, a former deputy sheriff in Mar-a-Lago’s Palm Beach County, says he acquired 478 videos confiscated from the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, fled to Moscow, became only the fourth American to win asylum in Russia, and immediately gained access to Putin’s inner circle, showing the ongoing power that comes from kompromat and how its value is highest before it is “used.”

More about Craig Unger’s body of work 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, American Kompromat, 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

In addition, learn more about the Trump-Russia Timeline and Jeffrey Epstein’s Russian ties on Craig Unger’s own substack here:

• Trump-Russia Timeline

• The Epstein Files: The Russian Connection.

And please read and share this Q&A from one of my long-form interviews with him:

That interview was cited in the new book, “American Overthrow,” by Keir Giles, who was our first Bette’s Book Club guest and who will be coming back on 15 November for a Q&A session.

Thank you to everyone who has been showing up to meet our authors in our new book series: so far, we have enjoyed visits from French historian and disinformation analyst David Colon; Giles and Unger; and intellectual historian Marci Shore, who offered us an amazing talk on Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt. Those who attended learned about the Yale Milgrim experiment, and as a follow up, Marci sent me these pages so you can learn more about this landmark psychological study.

Thank you Marci!

Please keep scrolling below the paywall for the registration link for our Craig Unger event. It’s not too late to become a member!

Subscribe now

****

2016 Election Attack — The Book!

American Monsters — The Book — Buy Here!

Donations Welcome

****

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

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

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

• Upgrade to Paid Member

• Upgrade to Founding Member

• Gifting memberships

• Share my reporting with allies

• Buying my ebooks

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

Heidi’s Ko-Fi Fund

Heidi’s Venmo

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

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

🤍

🤍

REGISTRATION LINK FOUND HERE

Read more

Subscribe now

Author’s note: In many lectures I have watched by the intellectual historian Dr. Marci Shore, she references the Hannah Arendt book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. So I sat down to read the book in recent weeks, and immediately knew that it was among the first books I needed to introduce our community to for our newly launched Bette’s Book Club. Marci joined us on Tuesday for our annual Halloween Hair-raiser, and with me wearing devil horns, and Marci in a witches hat, we talked about the upwardly mobile bureaucrats of the Third Reich. Here is that interview.—hsc

‘After all these hells had past…’

A Q&A with Dr. Marci Shore on Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the banality of evil

“The greatest crime is the failure to think.”

Heidi: It blows me away that it was a year ago that Marci and I did the first Hair-raising Halloween special. And we were talking about her book The Ukrainian Night. When I interviewed your friend from Serbia yesterday, Slobodan, he said the young people just by example, shamed older people to join them in protest. And that’s how civic engagement grew. And that reminded me so much of what I learned from your book.

It is so great to see so many people turn up for this conversation because these are not easy conversations to have. Our book club is serious. It began with Keir Giles’ American Overthrow and then we went right to House of Trump, House of Putin with Craig Unger. And we just keep continuing. We don’t look away from reality.

Full disclosure: I didn’t sleep last night, Marci, because I was up till 3:30 in the morning with a fear and anger combo. I feel like there are too many people selling hopium and copium. And not enough reality, as we approach the US midterm elections. I feel pre-devastated about the amount of people who continue to underestimate how truly criminal the Trump regime is. And so I always believe we brace for impact, and we do our part to have the best possible outcome we can.

Okay, Marci, let’s jump in: why is Hannah Arendt one of your first loves?

Marci: We are actually talking about the first book I ever read by Arendt, which I read for a class at Stanford in 1991 when I was 19. And I still remember my first encounter with Eichmann in Jerusalem, which was my first encounter with Arendt. And of all the thinkers that I’ve gone through phases of reading intensely and thinking with intensely, Arendt has been with me the longest.

I always go back to Arendt. I’m always thinking with Arendt. I’m always finding something new with Arendt. I never get tired of her. I do feel intensely close to her. In fact, Tim and I contemplated when I was pregnant naming our daughter Hannah, but I felt like that would just be too much pressure.

It didn’t seem right given my intense relationship with Arendt. But she’s someone I’ve come back to again and again. Although I’m finding it in some ways quite ironic that we’re talking about Eichmann in Jerusalem on Halloween, because the whole point of the Eichmann book was to understand that evil doesn’t necessarily come with horns.

It doesn’t necessarily come with the witch’s hat. It doesn’t necessarily come with the hooves. And that we have this desire to see evil in this embodied form, in that Halloween form, so that we recognize that it’s evil, so that it satisfies us as evil, so that it has a clear identity as evil. And the whole intervention of her Eichmann analysis was that you don’t get the little red things sticking up. You don’t get the devil’s ears. You don’t get the horns. You don’t get the hooves.

We have to understand evil as something that is not necessarily going to show up in this demonic form.

Heidi: You introduced me to David Livingstone Smith, who explained to me that it would be nice if they were monsters and they’re not. And Arendt came up with the term, ‘the banality of evil,’ this report on the banality of evil. And why I find it so scary is the whole reason we’re doing this particular project today is because, Marci, this book is so scary for exactly the reason you just delineated.

Marci: Yeah, I made my students the past two years watch one of the documentaries of the Eichmann trial, too. The footage was always there, but there are now some quite good documentaries where you can get clips of the footage. And I’m very sympathetic to this idea that we want evil to look demonic, because it’s more satisfying, and it’s more easily recognizable.

And the story of Arendt is that she was a German-Jewish student. She comes from German philosophy, very deeply from German philosophy. She famously studies with Heidegger and has this affair with Heidegger and then studies with Karl Jaspers. Heidegger and Jaspers are two of the iconic figures of the Third Reich on opposite sides. Heidegger is the iconic figure of the brilliant philosopher who becomes a Nazi. And Karl Jaspers is the iconic figure of the one who is never tempted and always morally clear.

And she’s imprisoned very briefly in 1933 when the Nazis come to power. She gets out of prison, she leaves, she goes to Paris, and then eventually she ends up in New York. And she very much makes a life for herself and becomes a central point of New York intellectual life. She is not one of these emigres who is not successful or doesn’t reinvent herself.

Everybody’s always asking how she possibly was able to write in English so quickly. I mean, she was clearly a genius in various ways.

She forms very important friendships in the New York intelligentsia in particular with writer Mary McCarthy. But she’s watching what’s happening in Europe, and this comes to her. She’s always very sober, not very idealistic, but also not very cynical. And she will later say that ‘for me, the real shock was not 1933. It was 1943. That was the day we learned about Auschwitz.’

And she said, ‘Before that, I thought amends can be made for just about everything as they generally can in politics, but not this. Some line has been crossed. This ought not to have happened.’

And she then begins this period of intensive thinking about what has happened.

And the book she writes, Origins of Totalitarianism, which she publishes in 1951, which is written just coming out of the war, is the kind of classic and original rendering of the revelation of the essential similarity between Nazism and Stalinism and how this phenomenon of totalitarianism is different from forms of tyranny and authoritarianism in the past.

Radical Evil

And it’s a huge book. It’s written in three sections. But it ends with her idea that there are crimes that can neither be punished nor forgiven. It ends with this idea that she’s taking in part from Kant of radical evil.

And she defines radical evil as what happens when all human beings become superfluous. And she has various ways in Origins of Totalitarianism about explaining what she means by superfluous. She kind of is reworking her own vocabulary. One of her interventions is to look at the phenomenon of statelessness after the First World War, when suddenly in Europe you needed a passport to travel, and there were all these stateless people after the collapse of empires. And her revelation then was that the famous Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen coming out of the French Revolution, 1789, ‘All men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights...’ She said there was an assumption that the rights of man and of the citizen are the same. Well, it turns out there is no such thing as rights of man. There’s only the rights of the citizen.

And in the absence of a country to guarantee your citizenship and protect your rights, it turns out that those rights of man are completely meaningless and that people without passports became superfluous people. They became people who were completely rightless. So there is this legal definition of the superfluous person. And then she makes a very controversial argument about how totalitarianism destroys subjectivity before physical death, that you can destroy someone’s sense of self. And it’s a very Kantian analysis. And she uses this idea of spontaneity, which I won’t bore you with right now. And she makes a very controversial argument that she says this happens with respect to both perpetrators and victims. The ultimate aim of a totalitarian regime is to do away with subjectivity so that everyone is suited equally well for the role of victim or executioner. And that by the time the Jews were led to the gas chambers, they were already dead. They had killed the self.

And she’s going to get a lot of backlash for this. But this idea of radical evil that can neither be punished nor forgiven, that is what happens when all men become superfluous, all human beings become superfluous, no one really has a self.

Heidi: It’s such powerful stuff, because until I read Eichmann in Jerusalem, I didn’t realize that first, the passports were taken away. There were so many things I didn’t realize until we got into those transcripts to see how the Third Reich functioned day to day. And to me, that was what was so frightening was that it was this big bureaucracy with people like Eichmann in the role of bureaucrat trying to please his bosses.

Marci: I’m so happy you read Eichmann in Jerusalem. I feel like this is like my service for the world. When Slava Vakarchuk, the Ukrainian rock star, spent a semester at Yale on this world leaders fellowship program, he discovered Hannah Arendt. And I felt like my contribution to Ukraine is going to be that I introduced Slava Vakarchuk to Hannah Arendt, because I do feel that these are the critical interventions in our thinking that we have to rework and to continue working through.

So in 1961, they get Adolf Eichmann. He’s not tried in Nuremberg, because he’s one of these Nazi figures who escaped. Only a small handful of people were tried in Nuremberg symbolically. A lot of them got away.

Most were not tried. And then some of them escaped. And Adolf Eichmann, who was not the interesting ideologue. He was basically a civil servant and a bureaucrat who was charged with organizing the Final Solution to rid Europe of Jews.

But ‘organizing’ in the very kind of bureaucratic sense, like you arrange the train schedules. You get the trains to the gas chambers, like organizing in the way lots of people working in civil service and administrative positions are organizing. You could be organizing anything, but Eichmann happened to be organizing transports to gas chambers.

He escapes to Argentina, which is a very popular place for these guys to escape to. He’s living under an assumed name. The Israeli Mossad is looking for him for years and years. They finally find him. If I’m remembering the details of the story, he was not hiding that well. It wasn’t by our standards of how you might disguise yourself. It wasn’t that impressive.

Heidi: He’d given an interview. He’d literally given an interview.

Marci: He’s such an idiot. So the Israeli Mossad swoops down and kidnaps this guy. It’s an illegal extradition, which is another controversial point. Like they don’t have any right under international law to get this guy, but they get this guy, and they take him back to Jerusalem.

And then there’s the whole legal question of the jurisdiction of Israel — Israel is claiming jurisdiction as representative of the Jews. It’s a state that didn’t exist at the time that Adolf Eichmann created the crimes, and they decide to try him. And that that trial becomes one of the most fantastical show trials in the sense that for the Israeli government, there has been largely silence about the Holocaust. Now it’s an obsessive reference. But for the first decade or so of Israel’s existence, it was in some ways the opposite.

A Source of Shame

It was a source of shame. It was a source of trauma. It was a reminder that Jews in the diaspora went like sheep to the slaughter. Holocaust survivors who ended up in Israel were often not treated very well. There was not the kind of public discussion you would expect about this. So this was also for Israeli culture, it was the moment when the government decides that we’re going to educate the new generation about what happened.

So the trial is really not just about Eichmann. And lots of people testify who had no direct contact with Eichmann, who were just survivors who were testifying, including people like Yitzhak Zuckerman, who was one of the commanders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. And it was a whole pedagogical project.

In any case, Arendt at that time was in New York. And the New Yorker sends her to cover the trial. And this is really one of these moments… it reminded me of when Slavenka Draculic is sent to cover the Yugoslav war crimes trials. She very much had Eichmann in Jerusalem in her mind. You have the woman, the writer, the intellectual who is going to, after the fact, after all these hells have passed, to sit in the courtroom with these guys and listen in her native language.

And the native language was significant. So they had simultaneous translation, German and Hebrew. But it was significant in the trial that all three of the judges were native German speakers. And it mattered to Israel that they be listening to Eichmann in his native language. And it really mattered to Arendt.

To Arendt, you really feel that German go through her as she’s listening to him talk. So she goes there to try to take this in.

Like that was the initial revelation. That was like, I mean, you’re looking at something that is just so bone chillingly evil in a way that nobody can get their mind around. And then you have this guy who’s not particularly impressive in any way.

Heidi: Right. And that was very controversial when she wrote that initially, when she identified who she saw as this bureaucratic type figure. And I remember a moment where he learns that his role is, which is deportation logistics, and there’s all these different schemes that he’s trying to pull off, but when finds out about the reality and grimness of what is happening, the mass murders, the Final Solution, and he says suddenly, the love for his job is gone. And I read that and thought, if it wasn’t so gravely serious, you could picture Mel Brooks doing a Producers sequel with this person. It’s like, ‘Oh, the fun now is taken out of the job.’ I mean, it was almost insane. It felt a little insane.

Marci: It does. And she captured… I mean, she has this very inimitable sarcasm, and it offends some people, but I feel like there’s a misunderstanding. She’s looking at Eichmann and she says he’s incapable of articulating a single sentence that’s not a cliche. And his inability to speak is indicative of an inability to think, and namely to think from the point of view of anybody else to make any kind of imaginative leap. He’s just totally thoughtless. He’s clearly self-interested, but not in a sadistic way.

This is the thing, like there’s no sadism here. Like there’s no taking pleasure in cruelty. He’s self-interested in the sense that what would give him pleasure is upward mobility. He’s a bureaucrat. He’s trying to perform his job well so that he’ll be promoted. I mean, you could imagine that he could have been put in charge of reorganizing bicycle lanes, and he would have done it, ‘I’m going to do very well. And then I’ll get to move up and I’ll get more status and I’ll get more money.’

There was no sense of any kind of personal investment in the actual content. And when Eichmann is saying, ‘Well, I never had anything against Jews,’ Arendt believes him. And people hate her for believing it.

Heidi: Yes, that’s right.

Marci: But for her, that doesn’t make him any better. That’s not an excuse. The fact that he fails to think, this is where people misunderstand Arendt. People misread her as somehow trying to exculpate him or excuse him. And for her, it’s the opposite.

There is no excuse for failing to think. The fact that he just thoughtlessly goes along with this is no excuse whatsoever. It doesn’t make him better than anybody else. You know, for her, it makes it a kind of epistemological challenge to try to penetrate the essence of evil in this banal form.

Heidi: Wow, Marci, I feel like people wanted monsters. They wanted the fangs and the demons. And instead, she delivered the reality of this bureaucrat. And I don’t know if that had ever been done before her. But one of the things that I think is very important for those of you who choose to read the book, and some of you I can see already have, for me, was the number of bureaucrats in other countries that went along with these murder schemes — it became pretty clear to anybody who was poking their head above ground what was actually happening. And then it was equally interesting that some countries, when they found out they were going to be targeting their native born Jewish population, then balked and then rejected them. But these people who had lost their passports and were being trained around from country to country, it was terribly depressing and shocking to see the number of bureaucrats within other countries that went along with this German plan. Not all of them, but some of them. And that was even more horrific, because some of the countries that fought, as I learned in reading this book, actually, pushed back against the Germans, they would then stand down. So it is one of the most incredible documents I think I have ever read.

Marci: It’s one of the books I’ve taught the most. It’s one of the books I always go back to. I did a public talk in Kyiv with the philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko on Arendt and the Problem of Evil.

And I may have already told Heidi this story, but it was the Kyiv Book Arsenal last year. So it was May of 2025. And there had been this unusually long air raid siren. Normally the air raid sirens are like maybe half an hour, an hour or two, but this air raid siren had been on for like 10 hours. So nobody slept all night. I spent the whole night in the bomb shelter and they can’t legally open the book fair until the air raid sirens are off and we get the all clear sign. So finally, after this long night, the air raid alarm is lifted and they reopen this huge book fair, and it’s like a Sunday at brunch time and everyone’s been up all night. And our room is packed with hundreds of people who want to listen to us talk about the Eichmann book, about Arendt and the problem of evil, for whom evil is not at all an abstract problem.

Because we’re in Kyiv, I felt like if Arendt were here, they’re hanging on every word, you know, and Volodya and I were like, ‘Okay, how do we parse these different paradigms?’ The Eichmann story doesn’t work well for Trump or for Putin or for people who are making the choices.

It doesn’t work well for like the performative sadist.

But then you have to assume that in any given, I always assume this, this may be wrong, but In any given population, the hardcore psychopathic lunatic sadist must be a marginal demographic.

The people who actually take pleasure in causing other people pain, I really do believe that’s marginal in any population. Grossly overrepresented in positions of power, but still marginal, not enough to explain the way in which everyone else enables the sadists to do certain things.

So Eichmann then becomes like your average ordinary person because you can’t count on having a whole country full of Hitlers, right? Like you’re counting on having a country full of Eichmanns.

Heidi: Right. And I think that anybody who studied that period of time… it’s the reason why I ended up doing the report two weeks ago after reading the Eichmann book and finding buried in it the reference to The Diary of a Man in Despair by Friedrich Reck… that made me want to look at who was actually populating Trump’s regime that we don’t always hear about. And that is when I found that 2020 election deniers have been seated in every single position of informal or formal power. That is, people who denied the truth of the 2020 election. Who are these people? And it was literally reading Eichmann going, ‘Well, who are the people in the Trump regime who facilitate this stuff?’ And Marci, when you talk about him talking in cliches. I didn’t even know what to do with that. What did you make of that? Because I’m trying to get into the mindset of people who somehow are firewalled off in their minds that they are basically functionaries of things that are very, very bad and lead to very, very bad things.

Marci: I do think there’s a relationship between language and thinking. And for Arendt, thinking, like ‘Denken’ in that big German sense, is a very active, strong concept.

There’s this really ethical imperative — you have to think and thinking is something active, and for her, this was, of course, her whole life. She was a philosopher, but it’s not just lazing around doing nothing, the words you choose really are crucial.

‘It’s a Fucking Catastrophe!’

I was probably complaining about this to Heidi when I was in Germany earlier this month, and doing various public events there. And I’m listening to the German policy people and the German diplomats speak in what sounds to me — they’re not stupid people — but like, Brussels speak, ‘there are certain challenges’ and ‘of course we face certain difficulties.’ And I’m like, ‘It’s a fucking catastrophe!’

There are times I’m sitting on this stage with these smart people, and I’m thinking, ‘We’re not at a corporate board meeting discussing office renovations. We’re talking about people being tied to boards and electrocuted. So maybe we can kind of shake ourselves out of this diplomatic language, which I understand is like the polite and respectable language.’

And I understand I’m embodying the stereotype of the woman who is on the stage with the men who is overly emotional. I feel like we need to use language that actually addresses the phenomenon that we’re looking at and not just kind of glosses over it.

Because there is something about this bureaucratic language that is so kind of deadening that you can forget you’re actually talking about human beings.

And this is where I feel like we should talk about the Milgram Experiment.

Heidi: Fire away, professor.

Marci: So after this book comes out, Eichmann in Jerusalem, for which Arendt gets death threats and it tears New York intellectual society apart. In fact, it was the precedent of tearing apart New York intellectuals that lasted until Tony Judt published Israel: The Anachronism in 2003, and then that kind of had that effect again.

Tony was very much aware that suddenly people weren’t speaking to one another, and he was getting death threats and she had been getting death threats. But there is a social psychologist at Yale who took this up. And decided to do a laboratory study. And this was known as the Milgram Experiment, Stanley Milgram in New Haven, Connecticut.

Milgram Experiment

And the idea was that, as with all of these social science experiments that they do at universities, you’re advertising for volunteers who get paid some token amount of money for participating in the study. I used to do this all the time when I was an undergraduate and didn’t have any money. You would show up for some study and you look at pictures and say what you think and blah, blah, blah. So you’re talking about some totally random population of people, of students, of local people. So the study is advertised as a study about the effects of punishment on learning. And the idea is that you come into this room, a lab room at Yale. I spent almost 20 years at Yale. These are not scary rooms. Everyone knows that the people are legitimate. It’s the effect of punishment on learning. The volunteers come in and they draw pieces of paper to decide who is going to be the learner and who is going to be the teacher. And they have to memorize — the learner then has to memorize pairs of words. And the teacher then is supposed to administer every time the learner makes a mistake, an electric shock in an increasing level of intensity. And the learner will then at a certain point complain more and more, to be clearly in distress, then in enormous pain, and eventually is going to pass out. The highest level of the shock is very clearly marked ‘dangerous.’

And the question that Stanley Milgram asked his lab of graduate students is, ‘Okay, if we start this study, what percentage of people will continue to administer those shocks all the way up to the highest level?’ And the graduate students, their predictions were between zero and 3%, that basically nobody would.

Now, before you get overly distressed, let me assure everyone, nobody actually received any electric shocks. The learner, as you’ve probably guessed, was a so-called confederate of the experimenters. He was an actor who was working with the lab. So nobody was physically harmed in this study. But from the point of view of the teacher-volunteer, the teacher believed he just as easily could have been in the learner position. Because they were drawing these slips of paper, which was a setup because they weren’t really drawing them because really all the volunteers were going to be the teachers.

And it turned out that it was 24 of 40 of the people in the original study who obeyed the experimenter to the very end, administering shocks to the highest level, the maximum past the point of danger, severe shock.

And 14 of 40 administered shocks past the level labeled intense shock. So it turns out that most people go along with this.

And again, you’ve now controlled for all these variables, like you’ve controlled for racism, you’ve controlled for anti-Semitism, you’ve controlled for personal animus. Whoever is the teacher has no reason whatsoever to feel any kind of antagonism or aversion to the person who’s learning. And on the contrary, he just as easily could have been in that position. And no coercion is applied, except that the scientist would say, ‘Well, the experiment requires that you continue.’ But nobody is threatened.

Everyone is told that they will be paid regardless of whether they leave or not. Everyone knows they can walk out of that university building. You’re not in a prison, you’re in a university building. But almost everybody, and everybody here in that first round of the studies, went all the way to intense shock. Past the point where you thought you were causing someone severe pain.

I mean, one of the extraordinary things about this study, which is why we’re all still obsessed with it, is that obviously it was traumatic then for the people who were in the experiment. And after that, they slapped down very strict rules on what you can do with human subjects. So this kind of thing cannot be repeated.

Nobody was physically harmed, but it was clearly psychologically traumatic for the people who volunteered for the experiment. And so this stands as a kind of iconic experiment. But I remember Lee Ross, who was part of this kind of cohort of social psychologists trying to understand the Holocaust when I studied at Stanford in the ‘90s.

He had something based on the Milgram study that he called the Fundamental Attribution Error. And he said that as a rule, we tend to overestimate the role of individual personality variables and underestimate the influence of the social situation over the individual. That most people most of the time go along with the social situation in which they find themselves. Not everybody, not all the time, but most people most of the time. And I remember, this was now like 37 years ago, but I remember listening to Lee Ross at Stanford give this lecture in 1991 and looking at all of us, and saying, if you read this study and you say that ‘I never would have done that,’ you’ve missed the point, because almost all of you would have.

Heidi: It’s phenomenal. And again, going back to Eichmann, there are so many traumatic things in this book, the profiteering that occurred. And then in reading both Eichmann and in reading Diary of a Man in Despair, I have to really rethink what I thought about humanity. I always thought the majority of the people were good and kind and decent, and I think…

Marci (holding her cat): The majority of cats are good and kind and decent.

Heidi: The majority of cats are good and kind and decent. And my worry is that I overestimated the majority’s decency or maybe it’s simply that among that majority we still don’t hear from 30% that for one reason or another decides to remain silent. But the study that you just delineated kind of gives that suggestion that people do go along with whatever is happening.

With the few minutes we have left, can you draw on your own personal experience on why you keep coming back to Arendt’s work and what are some of the things thematically or quotes that are some of her great contributions?

Marci: One of the things I took very deeply from Arendt, and one of the reasons why she’s controversial is that she is a German Jew who is adamantly a universalist. She says in one of her essays, written in ‘46, she says, ‘You know, after the war, I met all these Germans who told me that they’re ashamed of being German.’ She said, ‘I’ve always felt tempted to answer that I’m ashamed of being a human being.’ And her intervention was that, and it was very much like, maybe like 25 years ago, Daniel Goldhagen’s book came out, Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Goldhagen made an argument about the peculiar role of anti-Semitism in German culture and how this had always been brewing, and Germans were hard-wired to hate Jews, and this was inevitable they were going to try to kill them. And without going into the whole history of German anti-Semitism versus Polish anti-Semitism versus any other kind of anti-Semitism, the comforting thing about Daniel Goldhagen’s book and the reason why people like it, is that it feels like, ‘okay, there’s a clear division between the good people and the bad people. You can draw these lines and so okay, ‘I’m away from the bad Germans. I can sleep soundly at night.’

And what Arendt is telling you is that the vulnerabilities that lead to this cruelty, they are inherent in the human condition. And so there’s no safe space where you can go to escape them.

Heidi: I want a safe space! I want a safe space!

Marci: Exactly. I’m so empathetic to this. This is another story I probably already subjected Heidi to. But when my son was small, he was having trouble sleeping one night. Maybe he was seven or eight. We were in New Haven, and I was trying to get him to sleep. And he said, ‘Well, I’m anxious.’ I said, ‘Why are you anxious?’

And he said, ‘Well, I feel like home isn’t a safe place.’ And I said, ‘Well, why do you feel like that?’ And he said, ‘Well, I was thinking that a meteor could come and hit the house or a storm could blow the roof off or an armed robber could get in through the window, you know?’

And my impulse was to say, ‘I know exactly how you feel. I’m afraid of all those things, too!’

But the problem is that ‘not at home’ carries the same risk. This is what Arendt would say is the tragedy of the human condition, that there is no safe space in the world.

And I felt like psychologists all around the world would be proud of me for resisting the impulse to say that and instead, just reassuring him that everything was going to be fine and no one was going to break in the house that night.

But my impulse, like my Arendtian impulse to say like, ‘Yes, there is no safe space!’ There is no group of people, be they Americans or Jews or Ukrainians who somehow have some kind of genetic immunity to fascism or to these impulses or to going along with the lynching. There’s nothing in us that gives us that genetic immunity. This is all contingent.

And so that’s very unsatisfying to a lot of people because there’s no safe space. And I’m so empathetic to the desire for a safe space. I wish there were a safe space. But her message is that there is no safe space.

Heidi: Where I find a degree of safety and comfort is in the work of the brave people — authors, historians, journalists — who are currently working and who came before. I find so much comfort in that. And I shared with our friends a photo essay on sacred spaces over the weekend, places I treasure in my travels.

This weekend, there was a really huge storm where I’m staying, and I didn’t sleep, that’s not unusual, but I happened to be by this big window. And I spent the night, hoping it would hold and just watching the storm the whole night, watching the moon move from one side of the sky to the other, watching the clouds come in, moving so incredibly fast, looking anthropomorphic, like monster scorpions. And the whole thing was so amazing. And there’s something about releasing control. We cannot control that. I know I can’t control that. And knowing that I have no control over the natural world and just being in awe of it was a release for me.

All we can do in our day-to-day life and in our work is what we can do. Can we get a final word from you, Marci.

Marci: You need people to be brave. You look at Iran and those women in Iran were so incredibly brave. People need people to be brave and then a lot of them get killed. Like my friends in Belarus, there are a lot of brave people out there who then suffer.

Being brave is not a guarantee that you win. You are going out there taking the risk, knowing that if you don’t take the risk, there’s no chance, but also knowing that you could end up in prison for long periods of time and other horrible things can happen.

Heidi: One of the things that I always lean on now is understanding that historically, successful non-violent resistance movements needed to mobilize 3.5% of the population for them to achieve their goals. Is there an Arendtian concept that might help people in the days we have before the US midterm elections?

Marci: Well, when the whole controversy came out after the Eichmann book, and I remember one interview with her, she was asked, ‘How could you write this? And given what’s happened, would you write it differently today?’ And Arendt said, ‘Well, I had a choice to write or to be silent, but not to write differently.’ She said, ‘If you’re going to speak, you tell the truth.’

You have the choice to put yourself out there or not put yourself out there, but you don’t put yourself out there and hedge your bets. And I think about that a lot in today’s world with the role of journalist. Wherever we are, journalists or writers, you say ‘yes’ or you say ‘no.’ But once you’re out there talking, you say the truth and you say it directly. Otherwise there’s no point.

And I think I’ve very much taken that from Arendt. Not because I’m brave, but I have that in my head, that’s the moral imperative, that’s what it means to be a thinker. That’s what it means to be a writer. You speak the truth. You can be wrong. You can make a mistake, but you don’t hedge your bets. You tell the truth.

****

This interview transcript is from Bette’s Book Club on 27 October 2026. Edited lightly for brevity and clarity.

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, historian Timothy Snyder – in August 2024. She is an expert in European history and the author of The Ukrainian Night, and Caviar and Ashes.

****

Support Lifeline Ukraine

2016 Election Attack — The Book!

American Monsters — The Book — Buy Here!

Donations Welcome

****

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

I expose the corruption of billionaire fascists with support from your memberships.

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

• Upgrade to Paid Member

• Upgrade to Founding Member

• Gifting memberships

• Share my reporting with your networks

• Buying my ebooks

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

Heidi’s Ko-Fi Fund

Heidi’s Venmo

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

More info about Bette Dangerous: This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter, author, and broadcast news veteran, as well as former music and nightlife columnist for the Los Angeles Times. A No. 1 Amazon best-selling author and award-winning film director, Cuda writes the Hot Type column in Byline Times, an independent UK-newspaper. She executive produced the film Kherson: Human Safari. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism, arts, and culture reporting.

🤍

🤍

Subscribe now

Hello Bette members!

Thank you to all new and renewing subscribers. Hope you join our community events — a membership perk!

Paying members are invited to register for our latest Bette’s Book Club event with New York Times-bestselling author Craig Unger as he discusses the findings in his second book on Trump-Russia, American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery (Penguin Random House, 2022).

American Kompromat Book

This event is scheduled for Sunday, 1 November, at 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern. Registration can be found by scrolling all the way to the end of this post, below the paywall.

We just had a fantastic meeting with Craig on his first Trump-Russia book from 2018, House of Trump/House of Putin, and I invited him back for a refresher on American Kompromat, his follow up, which also exposed Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein and delved into the criminal underground tied to Robert Maxwell. As with all his work, he is years ahead of the mainstream and only now are people seeing that everything he has reported for a decade about Donald Trump and Russia was bang on.

I asked Craig for an update on how his American Kompromat book ties into this moment in time and he responded:

The release on Monday by the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, of a 52-page document citing five women — Beatrice Keul, Stacey Williams, Jill Harth, Katie Johnson, and a Jane Doe — who directly accuse Trump of sexual assault is the most promising sign yet that an incoming Democratic Congress will hold Trump accountable in the near future.

No matter how it unfolds, this will be the next chapter in a story I first addressed more than five years ago in American Kompromat, where I investigated Epstein not as a rogue predator operating in isolation, but as a node in a decades-long Russian intelligence effort — working hand in glove with Trump — to cultivate compromising material on American elites. I also addressed his ties to Israeli intelligence.

Every subsequent Epstein document release and DOJ file dump has done the same thing: forced the public to confront that his network reached further into finance, politics, banking, and intelligence circles than almost anyone wanted to admit in 2021. The book essentially pre-identified the shape of a story that is still being excavated piece by piece, years later, by federal prosecutors and congressional investigators only now catching up to the structural argument it made at the outset.

So far, the Republican Congress and Trump’s highly politicized DOJ — aided by massive corruption in the banking, legal, and political sectors — have managed to cover up both the breadth and depth of the scandal. My hope is that when a new Democratic Congress takes office in January, all of America will finally see women testifying on camera about both Trump’s criminal assaults on them and his role in Jeffrey Epstein’s larger sex trafficking enterprise.—Craig Unger for Bette Dangerous

Mic drop.

More about American Kompromat from the publisher:

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Kompromat n.—Russian for “compromising information”

This is a story about the dirty secrets of the most powerful people in the world—including Donald Trump. It is based on exclusive interviews with dozens of high-level sources—intelligence officers in the CIA, FBI, and the KGB; thousands of pages of FBI investigations, police investigations; and news articles in English, Russian, and Ukrainian. American Kompromat shows that from Trump to Jeffrey Epstein, kompromat was used in operations far more sinister than the public could ever imagine. Among them, the book addresses what may be the single most important unanswered question of the entire Trump era: Is Donald Trump a Russian asset? The answer, American Kompromat says, is yes, and it supports that conclusion with the first richly detailed narrative on how the KGB allegedly first “spotted” Trump as a potential asset, how they cultivated him as an asset, arranged his first trip to Moscow, and pumped him full of KGB talking points that were published in three of America’s most prestigious newspapers.

Among its many revelations, American Kompromat reports for the first time that:

• According to Yuri Shvets, a former major in the KGB, Trump first did business over forty years ago with a Manhattan electronics store co-owned by a Soviet émigré who Shvets believes was working with the KGB. Trump’s decision to do business there triggered protocols through which the Soviet spy agency began efforts to cultivate Trump as an asset, thus launching a decades-long “relationship” of mutual benefit to Russia and Trump, from real estate to real power.

• Trump’s invitation to Moscow in 1987 was billed as a preliminary scouting trip for a hotel, but according to Shvets, was actually initiated by a high-level KGB official, General Ivan Gromakov. These sorts of trips were usually arranged for “deep development,” recruitment, or for a meeting with the KGB handlers, even if the potential asset was unaware of it.

• Before Trump’s first trip to Moscow, he met with Natalia Dubinina, who worked at the United Nations library in a vital position usually reserved as a cover for KGB operatives.

• In 1987, according to Shvets, the KGB circulated an internal cable hailing the successful execution of an active measure by a newly cultivated American asset who took out full page ads in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe promoting policies promoted by the KGB. The ads had been taken out by Donald Trump, who, Shvets said, would become a “special unofficial contact” for the KGB, that is, an intelligence asset whose role has been compared to that of the late industrialist, Armand Hammer.

A number of America’s highest national security officials have said they believe Trump is a Russian asset, but neither the Mueller Report nor the numerous congressional investigations throughout Trump’s presidency pursued that vital question. American Kompromat does.

In addition to exploring Trump’s ties to the KGB, American Kompromat also shows that from Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein, Russian kompromat operations documented the darkest secrets of the most powerful people in the world and transformed those secrets into potent weapons. It also reveals:

• How Jeffrey Epstein and Trump jostled for influence and financial supremacy for years. A college dropout let go from his prep school teaching job, Epstein became a millionaire in part with the help of Ghislaine Maxwell’s father—media tycoon Robert Maxwell, who allegedly served as a Soviet and Israeli spy and likely gave Epstein a sum estimated between $10 and $20 million before his death in 1991.

• How the Jeffrey Epstein-Ghislaine Maxwell sex-trafficking operation provided a source and marketplace for sexual kompromat–dirty secrets of the richest and most powerful men in the world. While Epstein had a rule when it came to selecting women, namely, “the younger, the better,” he also knew that a multimillionaire–or future leader–caught committing adultery is nothing compared to getting caught on video in the act with a minor.

• How the Epstein-Maxwell ring helped enable young women with possible ties to Russian intelligence to gain access to the highest levels of Silicon Valley and the worlds of artificial intelligence, supercomputers, and the internet. This, at a time when Vladimir Putin has asserted, “Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere [artificial intelligence] will become the ruler of the world.”

• How Epstein had ties to Russia through sex-trafficking. Epstein partnered with Jean-Luc Brunel, head of MC2 modeling agency and a major sex trafficker, who, in turn, had worked with Peter Listerman, the celebrated procurer, or “matchmaker” as he prefers, for Russian oligarchs.

• How John Mark Dougan, a former deputy sheriff in Mar-a-Lago’s Palm Beach County, says he acquired 478 videos confiscated from the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, fled to Moscow, became only the fourth American to win asylum in Russia, and immediately gained access to Putin’s inner circle, showing the ongoing power that comes from kompromat and how its value is highest before it is “used.”

More about Craig Unger’s body of work 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, American Kompromat, 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

In addition, learn more about the Trump-Russia Timeline and Jeffrey Epstein’s Russian ties on Craig Unger’s own substack here:

• Trump-Russia Timeline

• The Epstein Files: The Russian Connection.

And please read and share this Q&A from one of my long-form interviews with him:

That interview was cited in the new book, “American Overthrow,” by Keir Giles, who was our first Bette’s Book Club guest and who will be coming back on 15 November for a Q&A session.

Thank you to everyone who has been showing up to meet our authors in our new book series: so far, we have enjoyed visits from French historian and disinformation analyst David Colon; Giles and Unger; and intellectual historian Marci Shore, who offered us an amazing talk on Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt. Those who attended learned about the Yale Milgrim experiment, and as a follow up, Marci sent me these pages so you can learn more about this landmark psychological study.

Thank you Marci!

Please keep scrolling below the paywall for the registration link for our Craig Unger event. It’s not too late to become a member!

Subscribe now

****

2016 Election Attack — The Book!

American Monsters — The Book — Buy Here!

Donations Welcome

****

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

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

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

• Upgrade to Paid Member

• Upgrade to Founding Member

• Gifting memberships

• Share my reporting with allies

• Buying my ebooks

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

Heidi’s Ko-Fi Fund

Heidi’s Venmo

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

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

🤍

🤍

REGISTRATION LINK FOUND HERE

Read more

Subscribe now

Author’s note: In a recent Speakeasy event with NAFO founding member and economist Matthew Pearce, he talked about how important it is to choose the battlefield in any political race and recommended Democrats stop responding to culture wars and get back to the reality on the ground. I asked him to expand on these concepts in a guest op-ed, and here is his response, which uses the Ohio governor’s race for a template. Bette members will recall how David Pepper, Dr. Amy Acton’s running mate, was a big part of the early days of Bette Dangerous, and one of the first, great pro-democracy lessons we learned from him was to get off defense and start playing offense.

I think he’ll like what Matthew has to say here. You can follow Matthew Pearce at The Angry Dogs Substack. Please share this Bette Dangerous guest post with your pro-democracy networks.—hsc

‘Don’t fight them on their ground’

What Ohio is teaching us about changing the battlefield

By Matthew Pearce

I write from Milton Keynes in England, which is a long way from Columbus, Ohio. But in January I sent a strategy note to the Democratic ticket in Ohio’s governor race. Its argument was old rather than clever: if your opponent is built for one kind of fight, the worst thing you can do is turn up and fight it.

Sun Tzu said it, Clausewitz said it, Kissinger said it in his own gloomy way. You change the terrain.

The terrain in question was attention. Vivek Ramaswamy is a master of it: fast, national, abstract and emotionally charged. Governing Ohio is the opposite. It is slow, practical and tangled up in agencies, budgets and statutes. My note’s advice was to refuse the attention contest altogether and drag every argument back to a boring set of questions. Which Ohio agency does that? What’s the budget line? What changes in month one?

I can’t tell you whether anyone read it. But with a week to go before the 3 November vote, the race makes a fascinating natural experiment, so here is how the predictions have fared.

Prediction one: the attention candidate peaks early

Ramaswamy entered the race as the clear favourite, with Donald Trump’s endorsement, in a state Trump has carried three times and which last elected a Democratic governor in 2006. As recently as last December he had nearly $10 million to Dr. Amy Acton’s roughly $1.5 million. By July the Cook Political Report had moved the race to toss-up.

The October polling tells the story. A CNN/SSRS survey gave Acton an eight-point lead, 50 to 42, with a 27-point advantage among independents. Bowling Green State University’s poll with YouGov had her six ahead, 50 to 44, double her margin a month earlier. A New York Times/Siena poll had her up four. There is a caveat: a co/efficient poll broke the run with Ramaswamy two points up, and ActiVote put him three ahead.

The race is close.

But there is one detail in the Bowling Green poll that I find telling: most Ohio voters still expect Ramaswamy to win. They assume the loud candidate is the strong one. The numbers suggest otherwise.

Prediction two: ask for the budget line and the abstractions fall apart

Ramaswamy’s signature pledge is to reset property tax valuations to pre-pandemic levels by mid-2027 and cap future growth, which he calls the biggest property tax cut in Ohio’s history. He started the campaign backing the abolition of property tax altogether, before walking that back. When the Ohio Capital Journal asked his campaign for the mechanics, it got none. Innovation Ohio estimated the rollback would strip around $4 billion from local services. The sitting Republican governor, Mike DeWine, warned Cleveland.com that abolishing property tax could push the state sales tax towards 20 per cent.

Then there is the plan to phase out Ohio’s income tax over ten years, with capital gains going first. Critics put the annual hole at $10.4 billion. His answer is to prosecute Medicaid fraud, which he estimates at $4.7 billion. You will notice those two numbers do not match.

This is what my note called fake Ohio-specificity: proposals that carry the state’s name but none of its constraints. They sound like governance and function as applause lines. The three questions expose them without anyone having to raise their voice.

For fairness: Acton’s own affordability agenda has been criticised for being light on funding detail, too. But hers is built from the kind of parts a state can actually move: an expanded homestead exemption for seniors and rebates for steep property-tax rises, fully funding the bipartisan school funding plan, an Ohio Rx platform using Medicaid’s purchasing power to cut drug prices, and a medical-debt relief scheme modelled on Illinois. Boring, specific, operational. That is the point.

Prediction three: when the terrain shifts, the attention candidate escalates, and farms the outrage out

My red-team exercise predicted that a disciplined opponent would force Ramaswamy to escalate, and that he would try to keep his own hands clean by outsourcing the outrage to proxies. That is a fair description of the final fortnight.

At a Youngstown rally on 12 October, Trump called Acton a “total lunatic” and relitigated the Covid school closures. When Acton published her affordability plan, Ramaswamy’s team dismissed it as something out of Zohran Mamdani’s New York playbook, which is a national metaphor doing the work an Ohio argument should. Then came the $4 million buy for a one-minute ad in which Acton’s estranged birth mother calls her a liar. The campaign manager called it a campaign-ending moment. Gateway Pundit and the Daily Wire cheered. DeWine called for it to be taken down. JD Vance backed it at a Cincinnati rally. Trump said Acton was fair game and that Ramaswamy should keep it up, then turned on DeWine for disloyalty.

So within a week the ad had split the Republican governor from the Republican president, and spread to other states: Iowa’s Senate nominee was being asked about it at her own rally. When a candidate’s party is at war with itself over his advertising, the outrage economy has started eating its own.

Prediction four: the governing candidate wins by being present but unexciting

For much of the race Ramaswamy gave few media interviews, while Acton did the unglamorous circuit: a roundtable at a Columbus coffee house, another at a Cincinnati brunch spot, small-business owners in Bexley on the day early voting opened. She has picked up the public-sector unions, the firefighters and, oddly for a Democrat in Ohio, a cohort of business leaders. Ramaswamy has the Chamber of Commerce. She has refused to debate him, which carries real risk, since it hands him a talking point he has used at every rally. But it is also a refusal to step onto his stage.

I should be honest about where her side has wobbled, because discipline is the whole game. Her campaign has called Ramaswamy a swindler and accused him of hiring his own mother to manipulate clinical-trial data. Personal attacks feed the other side’s machine. And on 24 October, Barack Obama flew into Cleveland to rally with her and Sherrod Brown, which by my own rules re-nationalises the race. Discipline is hard when the cameras turn up.

What this means for you

You almost certainly don’t live in a governor’s race with $4 million ad budgets. But you live in a school district, a county, a council ward. These are the battlefields nobody is contesting, and they are the ones where the outrage economy has the least purchase. Notice that Acton’s best weeks were spent in coffee shops. You can’t farm engagement from a neighbour who knows your dog’s name. People moderate when they have to share a car park afterwards.

Sun Tzu understood this twenty-five centuries before anyone had a timeline. “The clever combatant imposes his will on the enemy,” he wrote, “but does not allow the enemy’s will to be imposed on him.” And a few lines on: “In war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak.” The national culture war is where your opponents are strong. It is their ground, their rules, their referees, and every argument you have there is an argument they chose. The budget line is where they are weak. Nobody has ever gone viral explaining which agency does what, and that is exactly why it works.

So here is a practical ask for the final week. Get off the feed and onto a doorstep. Knock on doors for a candidate in a race you can walk to, down the ballot if the top of it is spoken for. Go to the town hall, the school-board forum, the candidate’s coffee morning, and find the people who haven’t decided yet. Take the three questions with you.

• Which agency does that?

• What’s the budget line?

• What changes in month one?

They work as well on a porch as in a council chamber, and they work on your own side, too. Ask them politely, then stop talking and listen. Nobody was ever persuaded by a quote-tweet. Plenty of people have been persuaded by a neighbour who turned up. And on 4 November, keep turning up, because the budget lines don’t stop when the polls close.

You must remember that culture-war arguments are unwinnable partly because they are unanswerable: there is no budget line for a feeling or grievance. Local politics has budget lines. Ohio is about to show us whether voters reward the candidate who knows it.

Go and find your village or town hall. Take biscuits and snacks.—Matthew Pearce for Bette Dangerous

****

Sources

Newsweek: Bowling Green and CNN/SSRS polls

Newsweek: co/efficient poll

Onmanorama/PTI: ActiVote poll and race background

WVXU: December 2025 fundraising figures

AP via KTTC: the mother ad and Trump’s response

Daily Signal: DeWine v Trump on the ad

Multistate: race summary, debate refusal, “swindler”

IANS: Youngstown rally

Ohio Capital Journal: property tax rollback

WYSU/Statehouse News: Innovation Ohio estimate

VisaVerge: income tax phase-out and Medicaid fraud estimate

Acton campaign release quoting DeWine on sales tax (via Cleveland.com)

WOSU: Acton property tax plan and union endorsements

Ideastream: Acton affordability plan

Washington Examiner: medical debt relief

WSYX: Ramaswamy campaign’s Mamdani line

Fox19: firefighters endorsement

Ohio Capital Journal: Cincinnati roundtable

Statehouse News Bureau via DeFi Rate timeline: Bexley event, Obama rally, early voting

FOX 5 Atlanta: Obama’s Cleveland rally for Brown and Acton, 24 October (video)

More about Matthew Pearce here:

Economist and technologist Matthew Pearce is founding member of NAFO, a founder of SE42 Labs Technology and AI Research Company; a writer for Washington Outsider Centre for Information Warfare; a writer for theangrydogs.com; and a stakeholder in the UK government Rycroft Report into foreign interference in British politics.

****

Getting Randy’s Donuts with David Pepper, February 2024. Pepper represents the best of America. Go Ohio go!

****

Support Lifeline Ukraine

2016 Election Attack — The Book!

American Monsters — The Book — Buy Here!

Donations Welcome

****

Related:

****

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

I expose the corruption of billionaire fascists with support from your paid memberships.

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

• Upgrade to Paid Member

• Upgrade to Founding Member

• Gifting memberships

• Share my reporting with allies

• Buying my ebooks

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

Heidi’s Ko-Fi Fund

Heidi’s Venmo

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

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

🤍

🤍

This event begins in 30 minutes.

Subscribe now

• Tuesday, October 27, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern, please join me and Marci Shore for our Second Annual Hair-Raising Halloween Costume Party and book club event. Shore, an intellectual historian who wrote The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution, and whose brilliant insights often appear in my work, will be offering us a master class on one of the scariest books I have ever read: Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Costumes are optional.

More on our guest here:

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, historian Timothy Snyder – in August 2024. She is an expert in European history and the author of The Ukrainian Night, and Caviar and Ashes.

More on German political philosopher Hannah Arendt and Eichmann in Jerusalem:

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is a 1963 book by the philosopher and political thinker Hannah Arendt, who is among the most quoted and influential scholars of totalitarianism and a renowned 20th century political theorist. The Jewish historian fled Germany during Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, and was hired to by The New Yorker to report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the key organizers of the Holocaust. The reports evolved into a book and Arendt’s subtitle introduced the term, “the banality of evil,” as Eichmann claimed he was just “doing his job” and “obeying the law.’

It is a troublesome read, as people who look back at the evil period want monsters. What Arendt delivers in her documentation is bureaucrats. (More on this in my upcoming review of the book.)

Here are some excerpted quotes from Shore on her essay, Hannah Arendt on the Jewish question (from the English original of an essay Adam Michnik asked Shore to write for Gazeta Wyborcza when a collection of Arendt’s writings on Jewish questions was published in Polish):

“You know, what was decisive was not the year 1933, at least not for me. What was decisive was the day we learned about Auschwitz,” Hannah Arendt said in a 1964 interview. “That was in 1943. At first we didn’t believe it. . . It was as if an abyss had opened.”

In 1961, Arendt had traveled to Jerusalem for the trial of Adolf Eichmann, who had organized the transports to Auschwitz. In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, she maintained that what was striking about Adolf Eichmann was that he was so ordinary. Not especially intelligent, Eichmann was an obedient bureaucratic interested in career advancement. “The subject of a good government is lucky,” Eichmann said in his own defense, “the subject of a bad government is unlucky. I had no luck.” Arendt found Eichmann to be “incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché.” In her opinion, this man, whom the Israeli prosecutors desperately wanted to portray as the embodiment of the demonic, failed to emerge as a monster. On the contrary, she wrote, “it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown.”

What she learned from Eichmann, she believed, was that the nature of evil was its shallowness, its lack of depth—in sharp contrast to our longing for the demonic. She understood that this insight was unsatisfying. Discussing the Eichmann book, she told one conversation partner, “it seemed only too obvious to us all that we needed to demonize the catastrophe in order to find some historical meaning in it. And I admit, it is easier to bear the thought that the victim is the victim of the devil in human disguise. . .the victim of a metaphysical principle, rather than the victim of some average man on the street who is not even crazy or particularly evil. What all of us cannot cope with about the recent past is not the number of victims, but the shabbiness of these mass murderers lacking any sense of guilt and the mindless shoddiness of their so-called ideals.”

Here is some extra credit homework if you want to learn more about Shore’s research on Arendt:

• Links to Shore’s books:

The Ukrainian Night

Caviar and Ashes

The Taste of Ashes

Please keep scrolling for the event registration.

***And more upcoming Bette’s Book Club events include the return of Craig Unger on 1 November; and a folo up Q&A on 15 November with Keir Giles.

Look forward to seeing many of you today in the squares… in costume :) for this very important and timely conversation.

****

Support Lifeline Ukraine

2016 Election Attack — The Book!

American Monsters — The Book — Buy Here!

Donations Welcome

****

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

I expose the corruption of billionaire fascists with support from your memberships.

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

• Upgrade to Paid Member

• Upgrade to Founding Member

• Gifting memberships

• Share my reporting with your networks

• Buying my ebooks

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

Heidi’s Ko-Fi Fund

Heidi’s Venmo

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

More info about Bette Dangerous: This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter, author, and broadcast news veteran, as well as former music and nightlife columnist for the Los Angeles Times. A No. 1 Amazon best-selling author and award-winning film director, Cuda writes the Hot Type column in Byline Times, an independent UK-newspaper. She executive produced the film Kherson: Human Safari. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism, arts, and culture reporting.

🤍

🤍

REGISTER BELOW

Read more

Subscribe now

Harvard research indicates that only one to three percent of any population participated in Resistance efforts in World War II. But the researchers 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.

In Serbia, a student-led movement ultimately mobilized 10 percent of the 6.6 million population. according to Professor Slobodan Markovich, who just took 40 minutes out of a celebratory party to explain to the Bette Dangerous community what just happened in Serbia to inspire pro-democracy forces.

Serbian leader Aleksandar Vučić’s 12-year reign ended in a massive turnout by voters in an election that was prompted by the bravery of student-led protests.

Professor Markovich, a historian and political anthropoligist who teaches at the University of Belgrade, explains how a 2024 tragedy rooted in corruption sparked the protests after a concrete canopy at a railway station in Novi Sad, Serbia, collapsed on 1 November 2024, killing 16 people and injuring many more. Students who led these protests faced savage beatings, were targeted with spyware, but ultimately, their opposition to the Vučić regime led to today’s democratic gains and celebrations throughout the country.

“This whole student-led mobilization ended up with the crushing defeat of Mr. Vučić, like 53% for the Students List and 39% for Mr. Vučić,” he said. “And with 141 out of 250 MPs in the parliament, a total majority and ability to form the government just from the Student List. The Student List also, it should be noted, out of 250 MP candidates, more than 160 have PhD degrees.”

He calls the ‘Zoomers’ that led this movement “an amazing generation with huge potential” and said “that throughout the democratic world, we should learn from them rather than antagonize them.”

He says he hopes that France will be inspired to work with their young people, and he thinks Macron meeting with students was a positive step in that direction. He also said he look forward to “new gains for democracy and civil liberties in America.”

Have a listen to this Bette Dangerous Breaking News podcast and thank you to everyone for your support always.

Subscribe now

Prof. Slobodan G. Markovich, MBE, is Full Professor of Political and Cultural Anthropology and Political History of SEE at the Faculty of Political Science, Belgrade, and the Institute of European Studies. His books, edited volumes, and studies deal with British-Balkan relations and cultural transfer Europe-Serbia. He has also published works on Sigmund Freud and psychoanalytic anthropology and takes an interest in the history of European pessimism. He has been the head of the Centre for British Studies/FPS since its inception in 2017, a Research Associate at LSEE of the London School of Economics since 2012 and at LSE IDEAS since 2019. Since 2022, he has served as the head of the project “Cultural Transfer Europe-Serbia from the 19th to the 21st Century”. In 2023, he was a Krzysztof Michalski Fellow at the Institute for Humanistic Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. He is a member of Academia Europaea.

****

Support Lifeline Ukraine

2016 Election Attack — The Book!

American Monsters — The Book — Buy Here!

Donations Welcome

****

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

I expose the corruption of billionaire fascists with support from your memberships.

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

• Upgrade to Paid Member

• Upgrade to Founding Member

• Gifting memberships

• Share my reporting with your networks

• Buying my ebooks

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

Heidi’s Ko-Fi Fund

Heidi’s Venmo

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

More info about Bette Dangerous: This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter, author, and broadcast news veteran, as well as former music and nightlife columnist for the Los Angeles Times. A No. 1 Amazon best-selling author and award-winning film director, Cuda writes the Hot Type column in Byline Times, an independent UK-newspaper. She executive produced the film Kherson: Human Safari. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism, arts, and culture reporting.

🤍

🤍

Subscribe now

• Tuesday, October 27, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern, please join me and Marci Shore for our Second Annual Hair-Raising Halloween Costume Party and book club event. Shore, an intellectual historian who wrote The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution, and whose brilliant insights often appear in my work, will be offering us a master class on one of the scariest books I have ever read: Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Costumes are optional.

More on our guest here:

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, historian Timothy Snyder – in August 2024. She is an expert in European history and the author of The Ukrainian Night, and Caviar and Ashes.

More on German political philosopher Hannah Arendt and Eichmann in Jerusalem:

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is a 1963 book by the philosopher and political thinker Hannah Arendt, who is among the most quoted and influential scholars of totalitarianism and a renowned 20th century political theorist. The Jewish historian fled Germany during Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, and was hired to by The New Yorker to report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the key organizers of the Holocaust. The reports evolved into a book and Arendt’s subtitle introduced the term, “the banality of evil,” as Eichmann claimed he was just “doing his job” and “obeying the law.’

It is a troublesome read, as people who look back at the evil period want monsters. What Arendt delivers in her documentation is bureaucrats. (More on this in my upcoming review of the book.)

Here are some excerpted quotes from Shore on her essay, Hannah Arendt on the Jewish question (from the English original of an essay Adam Michnik asked Shore to write for Gazeta Wyborcza when a collection of Arendt’s writings on Jewish questions was published in Polish):

“You know, what was decisive was not the year 1933, at least not for me. What was decisive was the day we learned about Auschwitz,” Hannah Arendt said in a 1964 interview. “That was in 1943. At first we didn’t believe it. . . It was as if an abyss had opened.”

In 1961, Arendt had traveled to Jerusalem for the trial of Adolf Eichmann, who had organized the transports to Auschwitz. In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, she maintained that what was striking about Adolf Eichmann was that he was so ordinary. Not especially intelligent, Eichmann was an obedient bureaucratic interested in career advancement. “The subject of a good government is lucky,” Eichmann said in his own defense, “the subject of a bad government is unlucky. I had no luck.” Arendt found Eichmann to be “incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché.” In her opinion, this man, whom the Israeli prosecutors desperately wanted to portray as the embodiment of the demonic, failed to emerge as a monster. On the contrary, she wrote, “it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown.”

What she learned from Eichmann, she believed, was that the nature of evil was its shallowness, its lack of depth—in sharp contrast to our longing for the demonic. She understood that this insight was unsatisfying. Discussing the Eichmann book, she told one conversation partner, “it seemed only too obvious to us all that we needed to demonize the catastrophe in order to find some historical meaning in it. And I admit, it is easier to bear the thought that the victim is the victim of the devil in human disguise. . .the victim of a metaphysical principle, rather than the victim of some average man on the street who is not even crazy or particularly evil. What all of us cannot cope with about the recent past is not the number of victims, but the shabbiness of these mass murderers lacking any sense of guilt and the mindless shoddiness of their so-called ideals.”

Here is some extra credit homework if you want to learn more about Shore’s research on Arendt:

• Links to Shore’s books:

The Ukrainian Night

Caviar and Ashes

The Taste of Ashes

Please keep scrolling for the event registration.

Look forward to seeing many of you in the squares… in costume :) for this very important and timely conversation.

****

Support Lifeline Ukraine

2016 Election Attack — The Book!

American Monsters — The Book — Buy Here!

Donations Welcome

****

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

I expose the corruption of billionaire fascists with support from your memberships.

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

• Upgrade to Paid Member

• Upgrade to Founding Member

• Gifting memberships

• Share my reporting with your networks

• Buying my ebooks

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

Heidi’s Ko-Fi Fund

Heidi’s Venmo

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

More info about Bette Dangerous: This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter, author, and broadcast news veteran, as well as former music and nightlife columnist for the Los Angeles Times. A No. 1 Amazon best-selling author and award-winning film director, Cuda writes the Hot Type column in Byline Times, an independent UK-newspaper. She executive produced the film Kherson: Human Safari. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism, arts, and culture reporting.

🤍

🤍

REGISTER BELOW

Read more

Subscribe now

Today’s Speakeasy event is a slide show of some of my favorite Sacred Spaces; and also note that we are meeting Tuesday for a Bette’s Book Club ‘hair-raising’ event with Dr. Marci Shore walking us through Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, 27 October. All times are 11 am Pacific.***

Subscribe now

Please join me today for a visual trip to places I have visited in the last two years that I find sacred.

Here’s a preview photo:

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

Thank you as always for your support.

****

2016 Election Attack — The Book!

American Monsters — The Book — Buy Here!

Donations Welcome

****

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

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

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

• Upgrade to Paid Member

• Upgrade to Founding Member

• Gifting memberships

• Share my reporting with allies

• Buying my ebooks

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

Heidi’s Ko-Fi Fund

Heidi’s Venmo

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

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

🤍

🤍

REGISTER HERE

Hello Bette members!

You are cordially invited to Bette’s Sacred Spaces Speakeasy

When: Sunday, 25 October, 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/BXVXX-_FRf-tvOW5CuTDwg

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!

****