Hell Is Empty and All the Devils Are Here - Exposing the Merchants of Menace

A new year, a new defense of reality

We do not have a lot of time to get this right. We have been documenting the words and actions of domestic extremists through Western eyes. No more.

It stops today.

The Fifth column in America - comprised of GOP extremists, tankies, and tech leaders - are using Kremlin techniques to create chaos, despair, destabilization, and confusion, to distract from weaponized statehouses that are remaking our country in Putin’s image.

While Elon Musk transmits messages for Putin, and Donald Trump gives fascist speeches, and Abbott and Costantis weaponize human beings, it is time to unfailingly view all of this as Russian active measures. Their actions and words are designed to move us further away from liberal democracy and closer toward authoritarianism. Once you familiarize yourself with the plotlines, it gets much easier to spot the merchants of menace.

I have already proven the links between American traitors and the Kremlin in my myriad reports with Dave Troy, Anne Nelson, Nancy MacLean, Brent Allpress, and Jason Stanley. I have shown in multiple reports the origins of the school board terrorism to be rooted in Soviet-era techniques. The anti-woke, anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-intellectual - all the antis - are designed to pit us against each other, while the conductors of the narratives further their own corruption. I have exhaustively documented the horseshoe operations, where FSB cutouts finance American political groups on the left and right to cause chaos.

As RAND analyst Todd Helmus told RadPod when he was discussing the cognitive hacks that were waged against Americans by Russia in our elections: “They target both the left and the right. An interesting approach to what Russia does is they take people’s views and try to make them more extreme. They want to make conservatives not just fiscally conservative but they want to make them hate immigrants. They don’t want African Americans to just be suspicious of how the Western world engages with them, but they want them to be isolationist and militaristic. And in 2016, they wanted to turn Hillary Clinton supporters into Bernie supporters. So whatever position people are in, Russia wants to move them even further away. And our view, the goal of that of course, and it works for them on the election side - and they definitely wanted Trump over Clinton, that much was clear - but even more than that they want to make Americans hate each other.”

We are about to be deluged with headline-grabbing outrage, divisive distractions, and stochastic terrorism as those in Congress who sought pardons from Trump will now be center stage, creating theatre craft. We must see it for what it is.

In the words of Shakespeare, hell is empty and all the devils are here. Those words are actually super useful because if we can identify them and already sharpen our prebuttals, we can weaken their impact on the collective psyche of our nation. We need to build our defenses to their fake reality.

In 2019, I created a ‘Rogues Gallery’ thread of all the felons, war criminals, and billionaires who enabled the illegitimate presidency* of Trump. It’s worth a scan, if only to be reminded of key players.

And right-wing watch reporter Ron Filipkowski did a Top 100 Tweets of 2022 thread that revealed all the devils. Collecting them in one place makes it easier to document who’s who of domestic terrorism and treason.

Most importantly, it is vital to view the work of Julia Davis, the creator of Russian Media Monitor, who documents Russia state TV propaganda on Twitter. By familiarizing myself with key Kremlin propagandists, it has gotten much easier scrutinizing the actions and words of domestic propagandists, and not getting caught up in the why of it or the lie of it. It is simply designed for chaos and destabilization in order to subvert truth in a quest for power. I am particularly proud of my assessment that the two biggest Russian TV propagandists are Trump and Solovyov - both of whom should be worried about future tribunals in The Hague.

While interacting with Davis on Twitter, a person from the UK encouraged me to watch a 2016 BBC film called HyperNormalisation.

I want to share two passages from that documentary about the failures of the Soviet Union and how faking reality became the norm:

“By the 1980s, it was clear that the dream had failed, the Soviet Union became instead a society where no one believed in anything or had any vision of the future.

“The technocrats began to pretend that everything was still going according to plan. And what emerged instead was a fake version of the society. The Soviet Union became a society where everyone knew what their leaders said was not real, because everybody could see with their own eyes that the economy was falling apart. But everybody had to play along and pretend that it was real, because no one could imagine any alternative…The fakeness was hyper normal.”

I read these words, and what I see is an opportunity for America and the West to expose propagandists in real time by recognizing them for who they are and the unreality they are trying to promote. Recall, that creating unreality and selling conspiracy theories are key strategies of fascism.

We still have a chance to beat them back before a fake version of reality sets in.

Our response must no longer be, ‘How could they or why would they…’ It must be a cynical and measured assessment that they are simply Russian propagandists in American drag.

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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 coffee tips and who buy my books! My reflection, Confessions of a ‘Fox Blonde’ was just published in Byline Supplement. In a review of my latest ebook, the erotic novella Fox Undercover, I’ve been called “The punk rock Anaïs Nin.” Save the date: the next Bette Dangerous ‘Speakeasy’ Zoom for paid members is Sunday, 2/12 🤍. Who will be our special guest?