Bette’s Weekly Roundup — Lollygagging Justice
The Best of Bette from recent weeks
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“By harassing you, they’re telling you what you’re doing right.”
—Ruth Ben-Ghiat
I write my key investigation in the dead of night. The phones stop, the texts stop, the emails slow — the only interruptions are the late-night notifications from other night owl writers or those across the pond bringing me news on the war. And of course I enjoy the owls themselves — the occasional hoot reminding me of things in trees, until the mourning doves start up in the pre-dawn hours.
For those who missed our wonderful Happy Hour with Martin Sheil yesterday, we discussed how a star is born in the New York judge who put a gag order on Trump, which will make it more difficult for him to keep impersonating Roy Cohn, his mentor and mob lawyer:
The teams I work with take on the biggest criminals of our times and that we do so with virtually no resources is a testament to just how important the work is. If not us, who? When I wrote my latest American Monster investigation into Robert Mercer, whose “giant hidden footprints” need a helluva lot more exposure, I am perfectly aware of who and what I am taking on. I like being a PI for the people. It fills me with purpose. I just wish our justice system wasn’t lollygagging.
It’s been a minute since I’ve had the time to put together a roundup of my key reporting, but I’m pleased to be able to do tonight. I hope you find something of value.
American Monster No. 8 — Robert Mercer
Here’s an excerpt:
Essentially, Mercer operates just like another Putin general in America — one that the media has gone out of its way to offer cover for with dopey headlines about Mercer no longer funding politics, which they later have to walkback with headlines such as “Mercer Family Played Bigger Role in 2020 Election Than Thought, Giving Nearly $20 Million to Dark Money GOP Fund.
No, duh. A f**king Google search of his foundation’s 990s reveals he never stopped funding rightwing extremism. An Open Secrets report noted he was a top funder of Secure America Now, which worked with Facebook and Google to target anti-Muslim ads at voters in swing states.
Among the Mercer myth busters, are former colleagues, who said he “bought shares in Trump”, and that without his cash, “Trump would not be president”.
Funny that, another thing he has in common with Vladimir Putin.
This report is available in audio podcast form as well.
Suspended from X.com: The Cult of the Genius Tech Bro
It’s only been three weeks since I was permanently suspended from Xitter for a day, and that it occurred the day after this report was published seems about right.
Here is an excerpt:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”—Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future, 1962
They were treated as special — tech wunderkinds who possessed magical powers.
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Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel etc…
Awe-inducing cover stories in polished tech periodicals, which existed to exalt them on high. The faces of these special boys appear in chiaroscuro to ensure their canonisation.
But what was Mark Zuckerberg, really? A troll who created a website twenty years ago that judged if someone was hot or not. FaceMash, as it was known, evolved into Facebook, and its ‘move fast and break things’ ethos nearly broke democracy when the social media platform allowed Cambridge Analytica to hoover up all our data and target minds.
“It started with the dream of a connected world,” said digital rights activist Professor David Carroll in the film The Great Hack. “These digital traces of ourselves are being mined into a trillion dollar a year industry… we are now the commodity.”
No one read the terms and conditions, or checked the box for the part where the world becomes a deeply divided wreckage site, he said.
And it wasn’t that long ago when Elon Musk was a deified ‘star man’.
The world thought he was really special.
Then he bought Twitter, and starting posting Hitler memes and neo-Nazi references.
Many were shocked. Those who knew him from Tesla, SpaceX, PayPal, and the plethora of dewy deifying tech cover stories couldn’t believe it was the same guy.
But those who’d been paying closer attention saw it coming, as we did here in our report Unmusked: How Elon Musk is Using Twitter to Destroy the Concept of Truth.
The Bag Men
The origin stories of Twitter and Facebook always seem to leave out its initial funding. As the Guardian reported in 2017:
“Two Russian state institutions with close ties to Vladimir Putin funded substantial stakes in Twitter and Facebook through an investor who later acquired an interest in a Jared Kushner venture, leaked documents reveal.
“The investments were made through a Russian technology magnate, Yuri Milner, who also holds a stake in a company co-owned by Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser.”
If money is coming from a mafia state — one that is consistently and relentlessly targeting the West with information warfare, that should be well-publicized in the terms and conditions that no one reads.
The Hateful Eight — The Complete American Monster Series
So far. Look at them — mugshots, depositions, and the hidden money behind the acceleration of global fascism. Until the US rolls up these criminals, our inaction continues to endanger not only America but the world. This is a rolling insurrection, and we need some high level arrests stat.
Here is an excerpt:
Below is a compilation of the first eight American Monsters, and it’s truly an American horror story. Even though I largely write these series from memory — investigating Trump Russia has been my life’s work — I am gobsmacked by what I am learning.
For example, I just learned that the American people had voted Hillary Clinton as our favorite politician in 2013. She won over President Obama and Joe Biden, she beat John McCain and other popular GOP leaders. She was loved, this despite the right-wing cottage-industry that had been built to destroy her — the Nixon speechwriter who wrote Blizzard of Lies in the New York Times, casting her as a black widow and never apologizing for all that he got wrong — despite promising to do so.
Three years after that vote and a million ‘Benghazis’ later, Putin’s military and US traitors had gone all in — funding a malinformation hate campaign against her, making her the first politician to be virtually assassinated on US soil.
The Hateful Eight — The Complete American Monsters Series
‘Losing Sleep and Plagued By An Ulcer’
Below is an excerpt from my revisiting Ruth’s ‘Strongmen’ after three years, and why it’s so important we listen to her:
‘What Times Those Were’
Benito Mussolini was ‘losing sleep and plagued by an ulcer’ — the murder of the Socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti had de-popularized the Italian strongman, known as Il Duce.
As Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote in ‘Strongmen — Mussolini to the Present’, the lawyer Matteotti was ‘tall, urbane, and known for his integrity’ — everything Mussolini was not — but most notably, he had been compiling a dossier of Mussolini’s corruption.
‘The fastest way to lose your life to a strongman is to publicly denounce his corruption.’—Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen
Matteotti wasn’t just an outspoken anti-fascist, Ruth wrote, but a crusader for government ethics.
Matteotti’s dossier was exhaustive — containing bribes paid by the American oil company Sinclair — because oil is always at the heart of these mob stories — and according to Ruth, Matteotti was set to read his findings publicly at the next parliamentary session.
Then two Mussolini-linked allies, one a former squadrist, murdered Matteotti on June 10, 1924, and when the investigation put Mussolini on the defensive, his core supporters pressed him to resign, including military veterans, who turned in their party affiliation cards.
Critics then wrote of two dead men — Matteotti and Mussolini.
Accustomed to flattery and applause, he was now a pariah — declared ‘finished’ by a Liberal leader in the London Times.
So Mussolini deployed the ‘strongman’s golden rule’ — ‘do whatever is necessary to stay in power.’
On January 3, 1925, Mussolini announced the first fascist dictatorship.
Byline Supplement — My Review of a Storm Foretold
The new documentary about Roger Stone is a crime scene.
Here is an excerpt:
A Storm Foretold is a document of a political crime scene. We see veteran political operative Roger Stone rebooting his ‘Stop the Steal’ lie from 2016 — a fake narrative and fundraising grift he started before Trump’s ‘victory’. Stone, who has worked in US politics since the Nixon era — and has a Nixon tattoo on his back to prove it — created the lie in anticipation of Trump losing.
So in 2020, according to Stone’s own words in the new documentary by Danish filmmaker Christoffer Guldbrandsen, he set out to reboot ‘Stop the Steal’ — telling lie after lie about election ‘fraud’ by Democrats.
As Guldbrandsen narrated in the film:
“Stone was enacting Stop the Steal to deliberately undermine the public’s trust in the election. I was witnessing what looked like preparation for an assault on democracy.”—Christoffer Guldbrandsen, director, A Storm Foretold
In the film, we witness Stone calling Mike Flynn, a disgraced retired Lieutenant General fired by two presidents, to get his aide bringing retired military on board to promote the Stop the Steal lie.
In addition, we see Stone coordinating with Proud Boys and Oath Keeper leaders such as Enrique Tarrio, Joe Biggs, and Stewart Rhodes — each of whom have been convicted for sedition against the US for their role in the violence of the January 6 Insurrection. Each received long prison sentences.
We literally see them conspiring with Stone, so I ask the US Justice Department why is Stone free to continue going on garbage TV to now pretend Guldbrandsen used AI, denying what we see and hear with our own eyes? Why? His lies had violent consequences.
A Storm Foretold is a crime scene, and the crimes are ongoing. The New Republic famously called Stone ‘the cockroach of American politics” in a May 2017 report, and the evidence is clear.
Moon Dance
I have a desire to see infinite stars.
Moon Dance
Girls on Film
A tribute to mothers and daughters and mothers and daughters on film.
Crazing
Repairing the unseen cracks.
Crazing
American Monster — Rudy Giuliani: ‘A Dictator in Search of a Balcony’
There’s a line in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance about given the choice between fact and myth, print the myth. That’s fine for a John Wayne film, but it’s not fine for reality. Our desire to believe in myths has sent us down a dangerous path. We are just waking up and finding out that many of our so-called heroes are actually criminals obsuring their corruption with good publicity departments.
Here is an excerpt of American Monster No. 7:
The date was August 19, 2018. Giuliani, who still had some pocket lint of credibility in uninformed circles, was present to obfuscate truth. Trump, his uniquely criminal loss-leader was in the headwinds of the Mueller investigation and though he’d never met a camera he didn’t like, he demurred the request to testify in front of Robert Mueller.
A veteran criminal is aware that lying under oath is no bueno.
This was back when Giuliani still had the ability to practice law and could be a somewhat useful idiot obfuscater.
Trump’s other personal lawyers — like his campaign managers — had met disgraced endings. Disbarred, indicted, imprisoned, and/or pushing up daisies after being disbarred and disgraced, Giuliani still had a pulse so there in front of a national TV audience — looking every bit the drunktional apparatchik — he noted he didn’t want Trump to testify in case he’s ‘trapped into perjury’.
And then with Orwellian parasitizing, he said that ‘truth isn’t truth’.
“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.”
-George Orwell, 1984
Fascist politics creates a state of unreality, in which conspiracy theories and fake news replace reasoned debate. As the common understanding of reality crumbles, fascist politics makes room for dangerous and false beliefs to take root.”-Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works
Truth is kryptonite for Trump’s criminal gang so they throw lies to the hungry base, keeping them well fed on a diet of unreality. Truth, like sunlight to a vampire, might cause discomfort when one’s viewpoint is based on a per diem of three squares of bullshit.
Sadly, for Giuliani, he got high on his own supply.
“We’re only gonna die from our own arrogance.”—Bad Religion
The downfall of America’s Mayor — as he was known in his post-9/11 period, when he could command millions of dollars for speeches — is nothing short of spectacular to those who bought the myth.
RadPod reports:
We are filming full Eps again and please view our two latest:
We have so many new members and so many vital reports in this archive that pertain to the events of this week that I have been rebooting key reports. Among them are:
Conspiracy Theories Are Weapons of War — How Jason Stanley explained that fascism requires unreality so people stop believing their eyes and ears. Originally published January 15, 2023.
Into the Mists of Time — In light of the epidemic of Russian propaganda against the war in Ukraine being delivered in the US by Putin’s GOP and tankies, I am rebooting this report detailing lessons from Timothy Snyder on why US support for Ukraine is vital to the survival of democracy. Originally published May 20, 2023
Unmusked — How Elon Musk is Using Twitter To Destroy the Concept of Objective Truth — It’s nearly been a year since I wrote this report, and it holds up.
Alright, I hope you find my reporting investigative reporting useful and my features entertaining.
I am looking so forward to our Speakeasy zoom salon with Julie DeLaurier, an activist who is proof that we can each do something (Ep68 RadPod). In addition, Founding members can expect an invite to our Founder’s Day event with Zabrina Zabrisky reporting from Kherson (Ep69 RadPod). I am reading Zabrisky’s book ‘A Cute Tombstone’ and it reads like modern Kafka. She is brilliant.
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The next Bette Dangerous ‘Speakeasy’ Zoom for paid members is Sunday, October 8, 4 pm PT, featuring activist Julie DeLaurier, who co-founded Truth Tuesdays — a weekly protest in front of Fox News headquarters in New York. As Jim Stewartson says, “Be like Julie.” Our interview with her on RadPod is dynamite.
In addition, our next Founder’s Day event is on Oct. 15, at 1:30 pm PT and features war reporter/author/poet Zarina Zabrisky live from Ukraine. Our Founder’s will get a firsthand account and update on the war and what we need to know about the US’s vital support. You can upgrade to Founding member here:
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.
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“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, that can hear the invitation of Truth…”-words from a Bette Dangerous community member
“Nothing but blue skies from now on…”-Irving Berlin
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