FIGHT FASCISM: A Prevention Kit for ‘Self-Cyborgization’
As an investigative reporter and a combat veteran of the Great Information War, I am dashing off a handy guide for you to add to your Fight Fascism toolkit
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Today, after spending the week reflecting on how deeply everyone is affected and touched by the protests, I am asking you to join me in taking a deep breath.
Take 30 seconds, and just breathe. 🧘♀️
Stop. Breathe. Do not respond on impulse. Think critically. Check sources.
If you’re being traumatized by horror porn or war porn on TikTok or wherever, consider who is doing it and what their motivation might be.
We all are affected by the atrocities we are witnessing, but we are also being directed by dictators and billionaires who need a dictator to rule America because they think it will be better for them, and they may be right. But it will not be better for us.
Dictators are mass murderers — they kill to influence political outcomes. They murder innocent people to help other dictators gain, retain, or regain power. They will continue killing until they face total defeat.
If not stopped, dictators will kill tens of thousands more innocent people if they think it will help get Trump in office and ensure their own job security.
In America we have one choice this November — our imperfect democracy or fascism. That’s it.
So all the operations occurring that are pushing people away from the democratic choice in the race are pretty obvious to me.
I understand wanting to believe that as Americans we are immune to undue influence, but we simply are not. There are no rear areas in an information war.
The Women’s March was infiltrated, Standing Rock was infiltrated, and yes, the current student protests are infiltrated.
For some, I know this is hard to hear, but I am not here to be pollyanna. We have the hardest six months ahead of us that America has ever faced in my lifetime, and I am not going to sit idly by and hope our better angels prevail.
We have to summons them.
Here is what I am offering, in the hopes it will help many of you sharpen your messaging and your focus.
No. 1 — The Invisible War: An Open Letter to President Biden
The countries that successfully defeat active measures attacks do so by informing the public. An informed public is less likely to vote against their own interests. Please read and share the open letter the RadPod team wrote to President Biden, and please ask your networks to pressure him to address the nation.
No. 2 — AN URGENT POWERPOINT: Active Measures 101 with Zarina Zabrisky
When RadPod released this episode in February, I asked you to share with your networks and you did. I am asking you to do again. Author and war correspondent Zarina Zabrisky was forced to study combat propaganda in Leningrad State University in order to graduate, and she shares her very important knowledge with us.
“In psychological war, the battlefield is the human mind.”—Zarina Zabrisky
The main goal, she explained, is demoralization of the army and population of the enemy in order to break down societal cohesion. She said it’s all engineered to undermine and lead to our weakening.
Demoralization
Stress
Discord
Confusion
Please listen to the entire explainer and share.
No. 3 — RadPod Ep95: Widening the Lens with Monique Camarra
Geopolitical analyst Monique Camarra just joined RadPod to reveal her investigation into the student protests in Italy. What she found were tentacles to the trucker ops from 2022 and pro-Kremlin operatives. She also found tentacles reaching from the Italian operations to the American, and tracked some of the origins back to 1968. As always, real people are voicing their very real concerns, but operatives are infecting and agitating toward fascist outcomes.
No. 4 — The Persuadables: “Nothing Is What It Seems” — My review of “The Great Hack”
If you are not on Twitter, please go straight to The Great Hack and watch it. I include the trailer below. The film focuses on SCL/Cambridge Analytica’s influence attacks and the Facebook data weaponization on global elections.
If you are on Twitter, here is my thread. I break it down in bite size pieces in 50-tweets. But I want you to pay attention to these words of investigative reporter Carole Cadwalldr. Here is a collection of her quotes from the film from my thread from July 2019:
“It is this sort of visceral thing, living with disinformation and propaganda every single day and feeling the effects of it and knowing that it does work and does have an impact in real life whether people believe that or not.”
“The real game-changer was they started using information warfare in elections,” said Carole, who noted they refined their persuasion and voter suppression techniques in developing countries before detonating in Britain and America.
“We literally cannot have a free and fair election in this country because of Facebook and the tech giants who are completely unaccountable. Sounds apocalyptic but we can see authoritarian governments on the rise.”
“We can see authoritarian governments are on the rise and they are all using these politics of hate and fear on Facebook...We also know that the Russian government was using Facebook tools in the U.S.”
As Carole cites the evidence of Russian intelligence creating Facebook “Black Live Matters” memes, pages and protests, she said: “It’s about stoking fear and hate to turn the country against itself.”
Addressing the tech bros in Silicon Valley in a TED Talk, Carole said: “Is this what you want? Is this how you want history to remember you? As the handmaidens to authoritarianism? Is this what we want? To sit back and play with our phones as this darkness falls.”
No. 5 — Digital Guerrilla: The Curious Case of Douglass Mackey, Russian Propaganda Superspreader, Part One in my 2016 Election Attack Series
Because we are living in the Flooding of the Zone of Shitticus Era, it’s important to continually revisit the recent past, so we don’t lose our grasp on what is happening in this moment.
To wit, But His Age is this year’s But Her Emails. To learn more about the foreign and domestic influence operations that move a democracy toward an autocracy, please read my investigation into Douglass Mackey:
The Crime Scene
Twitter 2016 is a crime scene. The chalk outline around the decaying corpse is an ominous warning — metaphorical yellow tape serves as an attempt to keep people out. But I go in — probing the bombed out traces of memetic warfare. And navigating my way between the mounds of deleted tweets and suspended accounts, I forensically piece together the carcass of 2016 — an election stolen by Kremlin-sponsored attacks facilitated by misogynistic white nationalists — superspreaders of GRU lies…
Do You Like Subpoena Coladas?
Lastly, have a listen to last night’s RadPod & Chill, Subpoena Colada edition. We don’t have billionaire backers so my video is always shit, and we had the usual technical difficulties, but we had a thoughtful discussion on all of this. I will also put our content and guests up against anyone in this space. I am proud of our team and our work. On a day like yesterday, when Public Enemy No. 1 announces he was served eight subpoenas, it reaffirms why we endure the struggle of this work.
As I said last night, I was challenged on Twitter by a person who I believe was real, who wrote to me that “the sixties protests were instrumental in stopping the Vietnam War, was that a bad thing” and then recited the death toll in Gaza and asked if it wasn’t time to stop.
I wrote back:
“Yes and in a second Biden admin I look forward to the freedom of still being able to protest all atrocities — Russia trafficking Ukraine children, regaining women’s heath care rights, stopping genocidal dictators — organically, uninfiltrated—US protests by US citizens without influence campaigns pushing us toward fascist outcomes.”
It was in that moment that I realized that dictators working together will kill tens of thousands more people to ensure Biden is defeated so they can install a dictator in America. A vote for a Trump is a vote for Putin.
I am just asking that we think critically, and think into the future.
We currently have a President who has done more for the environment than any other President in US history. The former guy was well on his way to annihilating the planet, because you know, tax breaks and removing regulations are good for billionaires, while offering religious extremists dominion over earth. We, too, are of the earth.
We have one choice. I hope we don’t blow it, because we were unwilling to think critically. To ask one question: who benefits from a fractured and weakened America?
Preventing ‘Self-Cyborgization’
Let’s give the final word to Timothy Snyder, who reminds us in his talk at the Center for International Development that in the online world — in the “us vs them” framing — the “them” isn’t always human:
He also reminds us not to get lost in the company of code and self-cyborgization, which he calls “desperately sad”, “more alone than alone”.
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More from the Fight Fascism toolkit series here:
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More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, 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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Begin each day with a grateful heart.
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