Bette’s Weekly Roundup - Get Happy!
Bette’s Weekly Roundup - Get Happy!
Namaste. This is the only email that matters, and all the others lol.
First some housekeeping - paid members can register for tomorrow’s ‘Speakeasy’ zoom forum with Dr. Mia Bloom here. I am so excited to see how many people have already signed up and have done their homework on this incredible woman. Mia knows more about radicalization techniques and the threats to democratic nations posed by conspiracy theories than anyone I have interviewed. Like all our guests, she is a wonderful combination of smart and cool.
If you would like to join us tomorrow, please upgrade to a paid membership here:
Next bit of housekeeping, I will be starting our weekly wellness checkins - Bette’s Happy Hour - this Tuesday, noon, PT. The name is meant to be cheeky. I am not the only one in this crew suffering the emotional slings and arrows of an invisible psychologically punishing war. Some of our friends are on the frontlines of the very visible physical war. So starting Tuesday, we’ll be checking in weekly, sharing the things that help us get through dark days - recipes, books, films, quotes, hobbies, etc., and a pocketful of gratitude.
Paid members will receive a registration invite each Tuesday morning.
Happy days are here again.
Alright, now it’s time for Bette’s roundup of some of my most vital reporting of the week. I am aware not every email gets read, so I try to include the must-read stories all in one place so when you do have a moment to catch up, this post provides an easy news hack.
Gee whiz, there’s so much good stuff from this week, I almost don’t know where to begin, so let’s begin with the inevitable doom of Donald Jessica Trump:
Byline Supplement Report - ‘The Biggest Loser’
Trump is a fake rich guy who’s been a Russian asset since the ‘80s. America is still catching on, so I focused on the facts - using metrics to show this cat with nine lives is finally tot, gestorben, kaput.
I wrote:
Comedian Michelle Wolf who roasted the Trump administration at the 2018 White House Correspondents’ Dinner was correct when she accused the media of being hopelessly addicted to Trump. Even those who try to look away, still gawk at the toxic trainwreck of an increasingly radioactive geek.
Despite his staggering number of legal entanglements and the fact that his speeches embody the fascist playbook chapter and verse, the media continue to prop up the metaphorical ‘corpse’ like a marathon viewing of Weekend At Bernie’s.
The disgraced Fox News network seats him opposite anchors whose text messages revealed a shared antipathy toward him. And yet the anchors sit there docile, as Trump bleats in a series of bizarro interviews where he fangirls dictators and tells fairytales of tears that were never shed by government employees when he was fingerprinted.
All key metrics are trending downward…
Those who do not have a subscription to Byline Supplement, please consider supporting. I do have permission to send a copy of the article to anyone who requests it at bettedangerous@gmail.com so please do not hesitate to ask. If you do take out a subscription, you will be helping a team doing very important work.
‘Corrupting US Elections’ - Americans Charged With Working for the Russians
I reported last year about a story I wrote investigating an FSB cutout who was paying American political groups - on the left and on the right - to create chaos and destabilization, dividing citizens against each other. They were being paid to interfere with our elections. They were being paid to divide our states. They were being paid to spout pro-Kremlin talking points about the war in Ukraine. They were being paid to be traitors to the United States of America.
And they got served.
Please read about how American traitors working for the Russians can get indicted. Looking forward to seeing much more of this in coming days.
The New Capture - ‘Sick a Little Bit’
A lot of this work is personal - I do it for my kids - so they will have a record that when fascism came to our shores, their mother fought like hell. After RadPod interviewed a podcast team from the Czech Republic, I realized I also do this work for my father, our elders, whose minds are being picked off one at a time at scale by the radicalization criminals.
Ep65 of RadPod features disinformation researchers Alex Alvarova and Josef Holy, who host the Czech Republic podcast, Canaries in the Net.
In our interview, we learned that some of the same bad actors pushing the QAnon radicalization cult are involved in pushing a cult aimed at Eastern Europeans.
Alex, who also appeared on Ep15 of RapPod, explained that growing up under Soviet-era rule made people ‘sick a little bit’.
“We grew up in constant war paranoia, they applied their warmongering culture on us,” said Alex. “It’s actually a part of our brain, so we are actually sick a little bit and infected a little bit with their way of thinking.”
“We’ve been fed for 40 years that Russia liberated us, but when you look at it from a distance, it was not liberation, it was the new capture,” said Josef Holy.
I bold that quote, because I realize that we are in the middle of a new capture - our minds are being captured in order to pave the way for the kinetic part of the war, which I believe has already started in the mass shootings and power grid attacks. Such attacks preceded Russia’s invasions, and we will be talking more about that on Ep66 of RadPod, where we bring back Bette member Michael Mackay, another brilliant academic who has been vital to my understanding of not only Russia’s Ukraine aggression but how Musk’s Twitter is assisting Putin.
My response to everyone’s queries about how I felt about Fox getting away with murder, literally, was to write a script, just like I did for Fox 11 L.A. for 15 years. It’s scathing.
On Monday, I was feeling blue. Upon learning about the teenage boy who was shot ringing the wrong door by a radicalized 84-year-old man, I took contrary action. I wrote a few words to remind people to cherish the decent.
Tokyo ‘Twitter’ Rose - Bigfooting Bad Takes
Just like with Trump, media does not want to admit it was wrong about Elon Musk. Corporate hack reporters are trying to find new ways to minimize the damage he is doing to our country, democracy, and the world at large. Not me.
I have been reporting for years that Elon Musk is a fucking problem, as my podcast partner HiFi would say.
Most notably, this report:
But what I realized yesterday was Twitter has been amplifying liars over truth for years, and that may actually have been the original point of the Russian-funded site. Recall how it got seed money from Russia and Russian cutouts?
Here in an excerpt from this story:
I had quite a realization today as I did something I rarely do - engaged with a hate terrorist paid to try to discredit me and my podcast team. I am an expert in their techniques, having been a target for many years, but I rarely engage. They are time sucks getting paid by the tweet. I usually block and move on, and focus on doing the labor of democracy.
I pointed out to the anonymous account with 18 followers all its bullshittery and was hastily blocked. Then it dawned on me - this was the entire purpose of Twitter all along.
To give fascists and fakes the same weight as the truth tellers, and in fact, tip the scale toward the fascists and fakes.
It was always the point. Creating unreality and forcing people to live in it is necessary component of fascism. It’s a way to train people to not believe their eyes and ears - its purpose is to erode trust.
As I wrote a few weeks ago when I reported on Justice John Paul Stevens’ dissenting opinion in the Citizens United case, where he warned that giving corporations personhood would doom us:
“Such an assumption would have accorded the propaganda broadcasts to our troops by ‘Tokyo Rose’ during World War II the same protection as speech by Allied commanders. More pertinently, it would appear to afford the same protection to multinational corporations controlled by foreigners as to individual Americans.”—Justice John Paul Stevens, in his dissent in Citizens United v. FEC, January 21, 2010
Twitter gave Tokyo Rose a bullhorn to be louder than the Allied commanders. Straight up.
Twitter is one of the key battlefields in the war for truth, and you’ll find me there fighting til we see this thing through. At least we have identified we are behind enemy lines, as Jim Stewartson says. At least that.
Additional stories to catch up on:
‘An Impoverished Vocabulary’ - words really matter in a psych war. Defend their truth at all costs.
Follow the Money with Martin Sheil, April 22 - Retired IRS criminal investigator Martin Sheil weighs in on the breaking financial news of the week as it relates to Deutsche Bank’s massive Russian profits and Poland wanting to add Gazprombank to the EU sanctions list
Follow the Money with Martin Sheil, April 16 - Marty gives his two cents on UK’s crackdown on financial enablers of Russian oligarchs, and the latest on Jack Smith’s investigation into Trumplandia
Wow, even I am blown away at the volume of work these fast fingers accomplish in a week. Go me! Lol.
Looking forward to seeing many of you tomorrow, and until then, please stay kind, please stay focused, and please stay loud.
Namaste.🤍
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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, April 23, 4 pm PT, featuring ‘Pastels and Pedophiles - Inside the Mind of QAnon’ author Dr. Mia Bloom. Please consider becoming a paid member. I am running a Bestseller Special of 20% off an annual membership at the moment. Paid members can register here. We do have a gifting program so if you’re nickels down or bucks up, you can learn more about that here. My generous benefactors have given eight gifts in the past week or so. 🤍
