CORRECTION: Bette’s Happy Hour — How We’re Doing with Greg Olear — Tuesday, July 8, 1 pm Pacific
BETTE MEMBERS: Please join us Tuesday, July 8, 1 pm Pacific for our Happy Hour with writer/raconteur Greg Olear on managing self-care during troubling times
***Registration for our member events can be found below the paywall. If you would like to join our community, please take out a subscription here:
The previous invite had an incorrect date for this event — please note it’s on Tuesday, July 8, at 1 pm Pacific, 4 pm Eastern.
Here are the details:
I saw a clip from my friend Greg Olear yesterday that I’d like to share with you:
His gentle assessment that even the courtesy question of “How are you?” has been stolen from us during this time is poignant.
“We can’t even ask someone ‘how are you’ because things are so bad in this country, that it’s impossible to not be affected by it emotionally, right… unless you’re actively evil or not paying attention… it’s another in the long list of things Trump has taken away from us… our greeting: ‘How are you?’ The world’s on fire man, how can I possibly be…”—Greg Olear, July 4th, 2025
After seeing the video, I asked Greg to return to Bette and be our guest for this Tuesday’s Happy Hour. He’s an author, ranconteur, podcaster — a Renaissance man of the Resistance.
Greg is not only a brilliant writer but a great friend of the Bette community, and I figured we’d spend some time just exhaling — discussing self-care and whatever Greg wishes to chat about. His humor has gotten me through some rough days.
Let’s plan to reserve some time to discuss his most recent book, Rough Beast, which predicted what we are currently enduring.
As he wrote in his latest Prevail substack post:
In “Slouching Towards Dictatorship,” the introduction to my 2024 book Rough Beast: Who Donald Trump Really Is, What He’ll Do If Re-elected, and Why Democracy Must Prevail, I warned that if, God forbid, Trump won a second term “a rabid battalion of religious zealots, Christian nationalists, and reactionary monarchists [are] poised to make so many drastic changes to the country so quickly that the United States won’t be recognizable by the Fourth of July 2025.”
Full disclosure: When I wrote that, I never really believed that Trump would win. I had faith in the wisdom of the American electorate and the essential goodness of humanity. I was accurately reporting all the horrible things Donald had done and the even more horrible things he planned to do, sure, but even I was naïve enough to think that it would never happen here.
Those of you who have been reading Bette all these years know I follow the reporters of history closely who cautioned that it can happen anywhere:
“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 and some nice uniforms.”—Bella Fromm, Blood & Banquets, A Berlin Social Diary, 1943
What we do about those ‘slogans’ and ‘nice uniforms’ is an entirely different matter, which we will discuss with Greg — please note the special time this Tuesday: July 8, 1 pm Pacific, 4 pm Eastern.
More about Greg here:
Greg Olear is a political columnist, host of the "Prevail with Greg Olear" podcast, co-host of The Five 8 and the newly launched The Five 8 1/2 and best-selling author of three novels and three books of nonfiction, including Dirty Rubles: An Introduction to Trump/ Russia, which Salon called "essential reading for all Americans." His book, Rough Beast, charted at #1 on the Amazon New Release chart.
More about Rough Beast here:
Who is the real Donald Trump? A serial liar with long ties to both organized crime and the Kremlin. A corrupt demagogue whom most historians consider the worst U.S. president of all time. And, most urgently, a vengeful wannabe dictator whose re-election would end American democracy. In this short and necessary volume, Dirty Rubles author Greg Olear presents the facts about FPOTUS: who he is, what he plans to do, and why the country cannot survive a second Trump term. Donald Trump is a Rough Beast. America is slouching towards dictatorship.
Here is the link to Rough Beast:
To support Greg’s substack, please check it out here:
To join Bette’s Happy Hour please consider becoming a member here:
Keep scrolling for the registration link, and see you in the squares!
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