Bette’s Weekly Roundup - April 29, 1992
There was a riot on the streets, tell me where were you…
To our new members, welcome! This is my weekly roundup of my key reporting for the week as an easy hack to managing your inbox. Bette Dangerous is a magazine, and I write as news breaks, and as I break news. This week, RadPod broke news, and it didn’t break us, so there’s that. For those of you who aren’t yet members and who would like to receive invites to our weekly Bette’s Happy Hour wellness checkins, our special guest ‘Speakeasy’ zoom forums, and access to all archives and private author chats, please subscribe. You will receive a 20% discount on an annual subscription for the first year, and you will be joining a wonderful and inspiring pro-democracy community.
🤍
So this date is meaningful. I have been reflecting all day on what it means to me, and how hard I am working to give my words purpose so America stops going in reverse. I try to use words to interrupt the fascist creep, to wake up the silent, and to expose the flow of digital hate, blanketing its embers with radical love.
On this day in 1992, I called Ice T’s manager — the streets of Los Angeles were on fire, and I said, “See! I was right! We gotta do his book.” I reminded him of the urgency of letting me write Ice T’s book, which I had been pushing to do since Lollapalooza of ‘91. A jury had acquitted four police officers of using excessive force in the beating of Rodney King, and the LA Uprising had begun.
I drove to LA from San Francisco two days later and the streets were torched. I wrote a book proposal from the Venice Beach apartment of the editor of Creem Magazine, and the rest is history. Our book, “The Ice Opinion,” was the first book of rap, and if you’ve been reading these pages for a while, you already know the origin story.
I have been reflecting on how far we have come since Daryl Gates’ reign of police brutality terror, and based on the tragedies of recent years, we have not come far at all.
I don’t know why I just flashed on a conversation I had with a reporter at Fox 11, who produced stories on Tupac. I had written a book with Tupac’s bodyguard so I thought it might be helpful if the reporter understood what a poet Tupac was and stopped just focusing his reporting on thug life. As someone who had been faxed death threats for writing the book, I knew all about the criminals who exploited him. But I also knew it was the poetry of Tupac that would be his enduring legacy.
I handed the reporter a 2Pac mix tape I made for him to be helpful, and he declined. He said, “I prefer country music.”
And I thought, then why the f**k are you producing stories on Pac?
I am in a somber, reflective mood because I have a story coming out in Byline Supplement in a few hours where I excavated some old trauma in honor of Tucker Carlson getting shit-canned.
I have also been listening to Timothy Snyder’s latest lecture on the Ukrainian famine, where I learned famine’s are always political — “peasants are expected to die” — and how Ukrainian writers and poets were executed for daring to have independent thoughts and ideals. Members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia from the 1920s and 1930s were systematically eliminated.
I often write about how writers are the heroes of our times, and I never wanted to be a hero. I just didn’t want a guy who owned beauty pageants and rated women on a scale of 1 to 10 to be president. That I had investigated him and knew him to be a con man was a key factor as well.
My podcast partner Jim Stewartson, who was served a threatening letter from Mike Flynn’s lawyer this week, is on his 1000th day of investigating the radicalization of Americans using gaming techniques he helped pioneer. Jim started doing this work because he didn’t want his children and their children to live in a fascist hellscape. Our other partner, High Fidelity simply wanted the Kyle Rittenhouse fundraiser taken down. He started pulling on threads and found a network that led to the PayPal Bratva and Russian oligarchs.
That’s our origin story — the threads that brought us together. We saw minds being stolen by terrible people, and we decided to do something about it. We put a little show together. We do our best every week to warn people about what’s coming, what’s already here, and who is behind it.
Week after week under heavy troll fire, death threats, and now legal threats, we keep doing the work. We do it for all the same reasons that we started it originally. We think America is better than this - we think Americans deserve better than this.
We do not want what Russia has and the American traitors who are creating an unreality and forcing people to live in it, all have direct ties to the Russian Federation and other foreign enemy states.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my path, what brought me here, the over-developed sense of justice that courses through my German-American blood. I’ve been kicking hornets’ nests my entire life.
I ain’t new to this.
🤍
Bette’s Weekly Roundup
Following the Money Laundering with Martin Sheil - All Roads Lead to Cyprus, UAE, and Dubai
If you’re still on the fence about joining Bette, hop over to this side. Among the most solid reasons to join is access to the brilliant mind of Martin Sheil - a retired IRS criminal investigator who was nicknamed Quincey for his incredible gift of of following the money laundering to facilitate the arrest of guys with names like Fat Larry. In this post, I list key investigations on sanctioned oligarchs and the indicted Fox News producers and money men who enable them. Marty says, now that Brits are putting the squeeze on Cyprus offshoring, expect UAE and Dubai to light up.
I wrote a quick thank you to his community after I learned about my podcast partner Jim Stewartson receiving a threatening letter from Mike Flynn’s lawyer, who also represents Donald Trump, Ron Paul, and Libyan Warlords - only the best people. You can read the letter in this post. It contains multiple erroneous accusations, and gives Jim five days to publicly retract all comments about Flynn on his Twitter feed, the podcast, and other mediums (what about his TEDx Talk, ‘Dismantling QAnon’?). I added the letter to my file for the FBI and included the threats I received today. Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.
Desperocity in the Upside Down
“2016 was the year when the elite capture of the Republican Party by Russia was completed.”—Dr. Michael MacKay
2023 is the year when the elite capture of the Republican Party by Russia should be obvious to anyone remotely paying attention to American politics. As I wrote: This desperocity in the upside down is natural. When one’s entire act is built on lies as cover for treason and corruption, it’s a race to stay out of prison.
‘The Russian Federation is a Terrorist Regime’ - And Other Useful Slogans
RadPod specializes in brilliant guests, and our guest for Ep66 - three-time RadPod champ, Dr. Michael MacKay - returned to update us on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but also to give us the proper words to fight fascism. In this post, I document some incredible slogans that. I mined from his brain, and I ask you to begin deploying them in your communities immediately.
Among my favorites:
Words are action - as much a part of the war effort as sending troops to the front.
I see Putin’s delay as an irrational fatalism, like Hitler in the bunker, when the Russians were surrounding Berlin. There’s nothing left but the propaganda.
The Russian Federation is not a nation state - it is a terrorist regime.
Russia is the residue of an empire.
2016 was the year when the elite capture of the Republican Party by Russia was completed.
‘Wise Guy’ - Following the KleptoCapture Task Force with Martin Sheil
Hot on the heels of last week’s report on the Americans indicted for working for the Russians to interfere in US elections, Marty weighs in on the conviction of Robert Wise, a New York lawyer who ‘pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit money laundering to promote sanctions violations’
🤍
Okay, that ought to keep you busy for awhile if you haven’t had a chance to read these reports throughout the week.
If you’re up late, look for my Byline Supplement memoir set to run after midnight PT. It picks up where Confessions of a Fox Blonde and How I Lost My Father to Fox News left off.
Thank you as always for your support of my work. It is everything.
💘
****
Bette Dangerous is a reader-funded magazine. Thank you to all monthly, annual, and founding members. Thank you as well to all those who support my work with your generous coffee tips and who buy my ebooks. A private link to group activist discounts available upon request by emailing bettedangerous@gmail.com.
More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.
Save the date! The next Bette Dangerous ‘Speakeasy’ Zoom for paid members is Sunday, May 7, 4 pm PT, featuring ‘Canaries in the Net’ podcast team Alex Alvarova and Josef Holy, who can offer insights into disinformation campaigns targeting the Czech Republic and Eastern Europe, the overlap in America and the West, and how we inoculate ourselves against disinformation. Paid members will also receive invites to our new weekly Bette’s Happy Hour, a wellness checkin on Tuesdays.
We have a membership gifting program so if you’re bucks up and wish to adopt a member, you can learn more about that here. My generous benefactors have awarded eight gift memberships in the past few weeks. Thank you, truly.
(Portrait of the writer as a young scribe - me and the OG, back in the day)
🤍
“I say a silent prayer of thanksgiving as I walk upon the earth.”-Audrey Peterman.
“May the viral hope for truth and humanity wash away the chaos of these years.”-S.C., Bette community member
“Something Sacred never dies in almost all of us, who can hear the invitation of Truth…”-words written by a member of Bette’s community
🤍