‘Everything Was A Lie’ - The ‘Sainting’ of Killers
Lessons from disinformation researcher Alex Alvarova on a somber day in history
Sunday’s Bette Dangerous ‘Speakeasy’ with Alex Alvarova as our guest was perfectly timed.
We needed some divine intervention after the latest massacres by radicalized men, and we got it in the form of a Czech born writer, who is an expert on disinformation and grew up under the dark shadows of Soviet-engineered thought manipulation.
“Everything was a lie,” she said, as she reflected on her youth to the Bette community. Her parents taught her to be careful with words - to speak her real thoughts in the privacy of their home, but in public, to project fealty to Soviet propaganda.
Before we even began our ‘Speakeasy’ zoom forum, Alex wanted to share with our community her thoughts on Mike Flynn’s lawfare against my podcast partner Jim Stewartson.
“The point is to break Jim’s spirit and soul, it’s not about the law, it’s about public opinion,” she said. “It’s about appearances.”
Having witnessed Jim endure the full force of a digital army for nearly three years, Alex’s words rang very true. I also know Florida is attempting to weaken its defamation laws, and this could be an attempt to test the case law up to the Supremes. We’ll see. Stenographers are slandering Jim daily, as well as obsessive Twitter accounts, who are spending as much time trying to discredit Jim as the Internet Research Agency from St. Petersburg, Russia, invested in trying to destroy Hillary in 2016. It should be obvious to all someone doesn’t want Jim’s work to be seen by a wider audience.
Maybe we’ll be pleasantly surprised by some arrests of boss level insurrectionists. Last week, violent supremacist associates of Mike Flynn and Roger Stone were convicted of seditious conspiracy.
So a quick note: I have some very important information to relay about how radicalized killers are being engineered and ‘sainted’ in chat rooms, but first let me offer you a summary briefing of three ways to inoculate yourself from radicalization, courtesy of Alex. Her ‘Canaries in the Net’ podcast partner Josef Holy tried to join our Sunday group but was traveling so we will bring both of them back asap to a Bette’s Happy Hour.
Alex said there are three key things to be aware of when trying to avoid being emotionally manipulated:
Everything that makes you angry - if you’re being driven to intense emotions that is a sign for concern/suspicion you might be being manipulated
Territorial/familial dominance
A gang mentality - in group/out group
She said drop by drop there will be attempts to slowly break down moral barriers to dehumanize the out group. If you feel this occurring, step back from the group and do a self-check
Sexuality
She said sexuality is detonated to engineer impulses
She pointed to the ‘Fox blondes’ on ‘Fox and Friends’ - engineered to seduce viewers with lip gloss, Loubitons, and legs. And of course, we know about the honey pots engineered by Cambridge Analytica, Project Veritas, and such Russian red sparrows such as Maria Butina, who infiltrated the NRA and GOP
One of Bette’s members also brought up ‘disgust’ - offensive images that are deployed to cause a visceral reaction. Alex referred our group to a study from University of Chicago about the political impacts of the psychology of disgust for those who want to research the topic further.
She also noted how the exposure to hate speech lowers our ability to feel other people’s pain, and how the main goal of radicalization is to see the enemy in your neighbor - not in Russia, or the domestic political extremists harming liberal democracies.
These targeted psychological manipulations are about eroding trust in each other and breaking our communal bond.
Please refer to the first quote I chose in my ‘Read Quotes, Fight Fascism’ report - it’s about making us hate each other.
I have turned to Alex for her expertise multiple times. The first time was when I saw the inorganic vitriol popping up at school board meetings across the country. I did an investigative report with Sian Norris, where we followed the dark money funding hateful bullshittery to the extremist group, the Council for National Policy, no surprise there. But I asked Alex if she had seen anything like it in the Czech Republic, and here is what she told me:
Writer and journalist Alexandra Alvarova, who grew up in Soviet-era Czechoslovakia, told Byline Times how during Communist rule, a similar structure to school boards existed, known as “trust committees”. The people on these committees, she explained, “were extremely fanatic. Their main qualification was aggressive behaviour and support of the regime. Teachers were scared s***less.”
So when I was reaching out for a greater understanding of the daily massacres occurring in America, I asked Alex if there was anything comparable to it in the Czech Republic. I had already reported in depth about Putin’s rolling insurrection and the chaos and destabilization events occurring as being part of a hybrid warfare.
Alex sent me to two key links. I am pleading with you to read both of them. Read this one first:
Exposed: Dallas Humber, Narrator of Neo-Nazi ‘Terrorgram,’ Promoter of Mass Shootings
Subhed: “Her propaganda canonized white supremacist murderers as "saints." She may have helped inspire a shooting at a gay bar. Now she's been unmasked.”
Excerpt: On Oct. 12, 2022, Juraj Krajčík used a laser-sighted gun to open fire outside a popular LGBTQ bar in Bratislava, Slovakia, killing two queer people and wounding a third. “Feeling no regrets, isn’t that funny?” he tweeted. He killed himself a short time later.
The 19-year-old had also tweeted a link to a 65-page screed he’d authored advocating the genocide of queer people, Jewish people and Black people. Krajčík mimicked and cited the writings of other white supremacist mass shooters, whom he referred to as “saints.” And in a “special thanks” section, he expressed gratitude for the online community that had radicalized him.
“Terrorgram Collective,” Krajčík wrote in italics for emphasis. “You know who you are…. Building the future of the White revolution, one publication at a time.”
It was the first time the Terrorgram Collective — a neo-Nazi propaganda outfit that uses Telegram, an encrypted messaging app, to encourage acts of far-right terror and to celebrate the people who commit them — had been cited in a mass murderer’s twisted treatise.
The investigation, published in March in the Huffington Post, reported:
The Terrorgram Collective is at the heart of the international neo-Nazi accelerationist movement, the most extreme and explicit iteration of white supremacism, which advocates deadly violence and other acts of destruction to hasten the collapse of society so that a whites-only world can be built in its place. The collective produces propaganda — audiobooks, videos and memes — that travels across the web in hopes of inspiring the next Christchurch shooter, who killed 51 Muslims in two mosques; the next El Paso shooter, who killed 22 Hispanic people in a Walmart; the next Pittsburgh shooter, who killed 11 Jews in a synagogue; and the next Buffalo shooter, who killed 10 Black Americans in a grocery store.
The Terrorgram Collective maintains a horrifying hagiology of these shooters, calling them “saints” and sanctifying their likenesses with medieval-style church drawings. Last year, to the alarm of antifascists and counterterror organizations, the collective produced a 24-minute documentary that glorified the murders committed by 105 “saints” over the last 50 years.
“Slovaks have already experienced the gun terror, but due to heavy regulations of guns it’s only one large case each state,” said Alex.
This investigation is vital to our understanding of how people are being radicalized online - something Jim has been loudly warning about for years, particularly he has warned about Russian-spawned Telegram.
In group, out group - dehumanization - Nazi ideology - rewards in the afterlife, all radicalization portals
We are learning that the Allen mall massacre in Texas was carried out by a subscriber to Nazi ideology, who according to an extremism researcher had a Russian social media profile.
The second link I beseech you to read is this:
Terrorgram’s First Saint: Analyzing Accerlerationist Terrorism in Bratislava
From the report’s abstract summary:
On October 12, 2022, 19-year-old Juraj Krajčík perpetrated a terrorist attack that killed two people and injured one outside a LGBTQ+ bar in the center of Bratislava, Slovakia. The authors used a multi-disciplinary approach to assess the empirical evidence of the case by combining the authors’ unique skill sets in terrorism, international security, threat assessment, and forensic linguistics. The report provides a forensic analysis of the attack and its aftermath; the attacker’s life before the event; and the attacker’s targeted violence manifesto, suicide note, tweets, and 4chan comments and, in turn, provides groundbreaking evidence in support of the hypothesis that the shooter did not write his manifesto alone. The research culminates in an assessment of the role of militant accelerationist milieus (e.g., Terrorgram) that were central to the attacker’s radicalization and subsequent mobilization.
“The possibility of a co-author changes the entirety of the Bratislava shooter's story and suggests the shooter was ‘potentially groomed or guided along his mobilization to violence’ rather than being self-radicalized as previously thought,” said Alex.
Why this is so important to me is I have been documenting the massacres where the investigations lead to chat rooms where it is clear that radicalization and emboldening of dehumanizing and ‘othering’ rhetoric is taking place. In the case of the Buffalo shooter, authorities are investigating if a retired former agent who was allegedly in a chat room with shooter Payton Gendron discussing racial hatred - knew of the shooting in advance.
As RadPod has been saying for going on two years, we have a radicalization problem. It’s global, and it won’t go away with magical thinking.
It will require leadership at our highest levels.
To address it, we have to fight it with all the vigor of the Allied forces in World War II.
It’ll likely take a Moms Demand Action-like fervor to get the movement jump started.
Today, Moms Demand cheered in Texas as a ‘Raise the Age’ gun bill passes out of committee after months of advocacy by Uvalde families. It’s a start - not enough - but we take the wins where we can get them.
After we all said goodbye to Alex and thanked her for expertise, many of us jumped on Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s Lucid call, where she spoke of ‘engineered trauma’, and how ‘gun violence was priming us for authoritarianism.’
She said no amount of death will be too much for the authoritarian right, which is preventing the US from taking life-saving action.
“They’ll just keep saying thoughts and prayers,” she said, as she reminded the attendees that Texas does not recognize Joe Biden as our president.
So from a place of steely neutrality and with all the knowledge we gain week after week from the experts in our community, please join me in tweeting to President Biden - who this community recognizes as our authentic leader - and Vice President Harris:
“We need you to address the radicalization problem in the US with all the fervor of the Allied forces in World War II. No more massacres. No more brainwashed extremists. The good people of the world demand action.”
Let’s go!
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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 an annual membership discount for activists and members of the media is available upon request.
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.
The next Bette Dangerous ‘Speakeasy’ Zoom for paid members is Sunday, May 21, 4 pm PT, featuring geopolitical analyst Monique Camarra, cohost of Kremlin File and WTF podcast, as well as the daily EuroFile Report. Monique will update us on Italy’s ‘Soft Fascism’ and the Ukraine war, which she documents daily.
Paid members will also receive invites to our new weekly Bette’s Happy Hour, a wellness checkin. This week’s checkin is Tuesday at noon, PT, and a registration invite will be sent to members on Tuesday morning.
Thank you to everyone - you have no idea how grateful I am for all your memberships and additional support. You know who you are💘🥹.
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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
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