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bury me in the future,
when the inelegance
of these times,
a bitter memory fades.
I wrote that poem, which I titled “the activist,” when I was still very fond of the lower case. It was an old habit adopted from ee cummings, and when I wrote those words, it was 2019, and America still had a year to go before (the collective) we deposed a dictator in the process of autocratic capture.
I had just finished watching “All the King’s Men” and had learned of the World War I sonnet, “The Soldier” by Rupert Brooke, published posthumously in 1915.
On 23 September 2019, sitting in a Chinese restaurant in Alhambra, a dizzying array of K-pop videos playing on a loop, I wrote my response poem: “bury me in the future… when the inelegance of these times… a bitter memory fades.” I posted it directly on Twitter. Today, I am grateful that I was able to retrieve it for this reflection. Grateful that it wasn’t lost to the mists of time, to shadow bans and an unsearch engine, broken by a billionaire who likes to break things — truth, people, democracies.
By 2019, I had spent three years raging against the Twitter machine, using my training as an investigative reporter in broadcast news to alert people to the criminality of Donald Trump and his associates. Having left a successful media career behind just in time to become an unpaid Twitter activist, I made the most of being unshackled by a corporation by posting thread after thread after thread. They can all still be found in my pinned Tweet - antiquities before the fall.
By September of 2019, we had copious evidence that Trump was working on behalf of Russia, which had used the power of its war machine to help elect him in 2016. Millions of Americans, easily duped by reality TV stars, already had buy-in. But for those clinging to a fact-based reality, it was important to document his criminality. I threaded the Mueller Report, I threaded the indictments of the Russian nationals who attacked our election, I threaded the NATO Handbook on Russian Information Warfare. I took my journalistic oath seriously.
I’ve been providing evidence on the dangers of Trump since I pressed send on my very first anti-Trump post, titled “DOOSHBAGGERY, and other things I’ve resigned from” at my Maewestside Tumblr.
That was exactly ten years ago — 17 September 2016. I knew him to be a Ponzi schemer, and I simply didn’t want someone who rated women on a number’s scale to rise to the highest office.
I wrote: “If we allow a Pageant Guy into our beloved White House, then ladies we’ve undone ourselves.”
I will never forget holding my daughter in my arms the morning after the 2016 election, promising her we’d get him out, never realizing it would take four years and that in another four years, we’d bear witness to Trump turning America into West Russia on the acceleration plan.
In mourning on 6 November 2024, I wrote an elegy for my country.
I believe America as we knew her fell on 5 November 2024.
In my elegy, I wrote:
“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
I have spent the last eight years investigating the Trumpocene and Russian information warfare, and the last six months, deeply immersed in research on Weimar Germany.
The gravediggers didn’t have to triumph. In 1932, Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist party was fracturing, haemorrhaging members, and many in his orbit were showing him only a “performance of solidarity, imposed devotion”, according to the authors of The Gravediggers: The Last Winter of the Weimar Republic.
But revenge-seeking men with a lust of power and greed saw in Hitler a tool to obtain both.
Despite knowing that it can happen ‘here’, in the last 72 hours, I allowed a flicker of hope into my heart. I allowed myself to believe that America was going to get it right this time, and we would celebrate our first woman president. We had already fired Donald Trump once, and his final campaign message to America was denying he was a Nazi and that he simulated a blow job.
As of this writing, Donald Trump is on television, declaring victory, and I can’t go through that again.
So now, I am a woman without a country writing an elegy for the once admired United States of America.
We just handed over our country to Vladimir Putin and US oligarchs, because not enough people could bring themselves to vote for a black woman.
As Nikita Khrushchev said in 1956: “We will take America without firing a shot. We do not have to invade the US. We will destroy you from within”.
There were 50 bomb threats to polling locations in five swing states — with 32 in Georgia — according to the FBI, which stated that threats to four of the states came from Russia.
When Kamala Harris ran for President in 2020, I lined up behind her. When it became clear she was not getting enough traction and dropped out, I lined up behind Joe Biden.
After his poor debate showing in June, I was not among the people demanding he step aside. I thought it was the wrong move. I was aware that incumbents overseeing a strong economy are always re-elected, and he already beat Trump once.
But when he chose to step aside, after being pressured to do so, I lined up behind our party’s candidate, Vice President Harris. And the transition was seamless. Democrats came together and worked hard to get their ticket of Harris and Gov. Tim Walz into the White House. It was a powerful thing to witness — with President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama returning to the stage with brilliant, inspirational speeches.
In contrast, Trump was telling dick jokes to thinning crowds.
So I allowed myself to believe that the woman would prevail, because women bleeding out in parking lots would enrage enough people that enough millions would prevent the unthinkable from occurring.
“Be calm when the unthinkable arrives.”—Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny
The unthinkable has arrived.
Both predictable and shocking. For the past decade, Americans have been blanketed with digital poison served directly into the minds of our citizens by hostile foreign powers. It works particularly well on those who are already racist and misogynistic to begin with. And for the past five decades, the religious right in America has demonized Democrats.
But really, how we got here was one lie at a time. One amoral NBC producer at a time, producers who knew Trump was a bankrupt fraud but pretended he was an ubermensch for ratings. We got here one author at a time, willing to create a mythological ‘Art of the Deal’ character or authors who withhold important national security information to sell books.
In 2016, the New York mediasphere had a duty to warn us about their homegrown confidence man but instead, they burned the witch: screaming ‘Benghazi’ and ‘But Her Emails’ until the fake rich guy who laundered money for the Russian mob looked like a sensible choice.
We got here one access journalist at a time, one normalizing puffpiece at a time, one Vichy headline at a time, and one propagandist on nightly news shows at a time.
Lie after lie compounding to a complete annihilation of reality, aiming to encourage people to overthrow their own governments, to become foot soldiers for fascism under the guise of patriotism.
We got here because Ford pardoned Nixon. We got here because people don’t read history books anymore.
We got here because those history books they don’t read would have told them that Trump and his VP JD Vance were using a cruel and effective playbook, where people are ‘othered’ and called ‘vermin’ and dehumanized until those listening to the ravings of these mad men were out for blood.
We got here because America has collective amnesia. We forgot that Trump has a sentencing date coming up in three weeks, and that he led an insurrection.
Trump, who sells gold shoes, cheap watches, and bibles made in China, to foot soldiers of fascism, who think they’re patriots.
We got here because the churchy wanted to conquer mountains, and they chose an amoral man.
We got here because we didn’t listen to the smart woman who warned us in 2011 that Russia’s election was fraudulent, and that democracy was receding in Europe and the former Soviet Union.
In 2013, that smart woman, Hillary Clinton, was the most popular politician in America. In 2016, after Putin ran his full-court ops, millions decided they didn’t like the smart woman, they didn’t like her voice, something about her emails. They’d been Benghazi’d by Fox.
But the Orange Man who grabbed pussies and didn’t pay his contractors, the one with the six bankruptcies, who ran a Russian dorm he called a Tower, he was just right. Smh. The smart woman still won the popular vote, but the Orange Man who grabbed pussies had Cambridge Analytica, and Jill Stein who sat with Putin, and Facebook, which scraped our data for Cambridge Analytica. And Peter Thiel, JD Vance’s funder, who was credited for the tech ground game.
Now, he has Elon Musk in a Mein Kampf-lettered MAGA hat, who brings all the trolls to the yard, boosting Russian-paid ops for Trump.
So, here we are — the death of a flawed but beautiful country, a country so divided from reality, we didn’t even know that President Joe Biden was doing a great job, quietly doing the labor of democracy, returning our economy to the top of the world.
We didn’t know because Russia and US oligarchs were targeting us on social media to deny us that reality. He was blamed for being one in a long history of presidents unable to affect peace in the Middle East.
And the Russians knew about his success as a President. But they didn’t want us to know.
In the 277-page Doppelganger affidavit, detailing the seizure of web domains run by the Russians to mimic Western news outlets, a translated dossier by the Russians revealed they knew Biden had saved the economy, and in their words “fed the rednecks.”
So the Russians looked for proxy wars they could start, kicking around a few ideas. They knew us better than we knew ourselves.
I spent election night with friends — one from Hungary, who told stories of door knocks, family businesses being seized, Russians raping ancestors — and another friend, a longtime activist who grew up with blacklisted families. We all understand reality. We know there is no announcement in advance when a country has had its last free election.
We all have our passports in order.
I am haunted by the words of Bertolt Brecht, a poet and playwright from Weimar Germany, who fled to Scandinavia when the Nazis came to power and later moved to Southern California.
In his poem ‘To Posterity’, he wrote:
“Indeed I live in the dark ages…
Ah, what an age it is…
When to speak of trees is almost a crime
For it is a kind of silence about injustice!”
I don’t know how to be silent about injustice. I do not know how to obey in advance.
I don’t want to think about the unthinkable, but I am forced to, in interviews by people who are watching America at this time, worried for Ukraine, worried for Europe.
For months, I have been asked about what it would mean if Trump gets back into power.
And for months I have answered:
“It means a thousand years of darkness.”
We can hope for a deus ex machina — a magical resolution to a seemingly unsolvable problem, like Trump being thrown in jail where he belongs — but hope is the thing with feathers.
RIP America. You had a good run.
And now, two years later, on the eve of my tenth anniversary of speaking truth to power as an independent investigative reporter, it’s no wonder I feel uneasy.
I see well-meaning people selling hopium to the masses once again, as if all these criminals will just evaporate after the midterm elections. If the upcoming elections in the US are held free and fair, there remains a massive amount of work ahead.
“Be calm when the unthinkable arrives.”
Expect the unthinkable.
Those paying attention to the Daily Awful surely notice the uptick in newsporn as the midterms approach:
AI could kill all humans!
Senator Kennedy Presses Kash Patel on Bestiality!
Melania Denies Link to Oligarch ‘Involved in Child Abductions!’
And before I’ve even had my morning coffee, I’m reading a 17-page federal indictment charging five suspected Russian intelligence operatives for plotting attacks on Kremlin enemies, including a gig worker murder-for-hire scheme. This, while asking colleagues to stop sending messages about Kash Patel, because my troll radar is telling me not to be diverted by the perverse. On another device, I’m sending GIFs of Claude Rains in “Casablanca” “shocked” to learn gambling is taking place at Rick’s Cafe, because is anyone really surprised that a member of the Trump Crime Family would mooch off a Russian oligarch for wedding favors? It’s 2026 ffs.
Watching global media respond to a doomer dweeb at face value — again and again — I crack my knuckles, and write on Twitter:
Get everyone to put all their money into a narrow sector of tech stocks, you let those stocks collapse, and the money evaporates, and everyone is poor and desperate. Desperate people run to dictators. The goal is to use an economic crisis to destroy the last democracies on earth.
And then I note: “Little evidence of tech bros suddenly sprouting a conscience, so...”
While I wait to hear back from Prague technologist Josef Holy for his take on the AI narrative, I find a refreshing comment from a Twitter rando named Jeff:
“AI can do anything except make a buck for its investors.”
And then I hear back from Holy, who tells me:
“It’s all a psyop, which makes the fossil fuel industry’s climate change denial pale in comparison.”
Sounds about right.
It’s been a long decade. I no longer write in lower case, but I’m considering dropping all punctuation
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More info about Bette Dangerous: This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter, author, and broadcast news veteran, as well as former music and nightlife columnist for the Los Angeles Times. A No. 1 Amazon best-selling author and award-winning film director, Cuda writes the Hot Type column in Byline Times, an independent UK-newspaper. She executive produced the film Kherson: Human Safari. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism, arts, and culture reporting.
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Begin each day with a grateful heart.
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Heidi, that is one of the most deeply moving, radiantly beautiful laments of a Resistance fighter I have ever read. You put this era into its coffin and nailed it shut, but the vampires keep rising. Your work is profoundly important. We the People are still here and fighting. Thank you for being one of us.