Hot Type: ‘It’s War’ — My New Column In Byline Debuts Today
In a report that reflects both current facts and history, I report on the dangers of denialism and where we can find solutions
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Last week, I was invited to begin writing a column for Byline Supplement. So I spent four days trying to think of a title for the column — a day for each decade that I’ve been a reporter. I wanted it to be retro, old school newsie, but also current. I wanted it to reflect urgency but without panic. By Friday morning, I had six dozen possibilities but only one that I kept returning to: Hot Type.
I’ve always been a sucker for the triple entendre. More than anything, in two words I pay tribute to the evolution of the newspaper business in my lifetime.
I grew up with a hot metal printing machine in my garage. My dad began his career as a printing apprentice and his journey — from Germany, to Canada, to Chicago, to San Francisco — was reflected in that obsolete thing in our garage.
He had grown attached to it and used to show me how the hot type was set. We still had pica rulers around the house, and before he started his own typesetting business with two other immigrants, he worked in the hot type room at the San Francisco Chronicle. Newspapers have always been in my blood so to be part of a rebirth of a vital paper doing the job that corporate media is failing to do is a moment.
If you are curious how newspapers used to be laid out, here is a documentary that was made on the last day of hot type at the New York Times. The next day, they would turn to cold type — by going digital. You know the story from there.
This morning, at 3:32 am Pacific, Hot Type — my new column — made its debut in Byline.
I thought the most useful thing I could do is make sure everyone had a roundup of the most recent bombshells on Russian covert influence operations, so you can see the depth of the campaigns to attack and twist the minds of citizens.
In the report, I incorporate lessons I have learned from US historians, while also including my recent historic research into fascist propaganda, and how these cruel and effective techniques are being weaponized to obfuscate truth.
I am also grateful to investigative reporter Michael Weiss for cutting through the noise and simply referring to what we are enduring as ‘war’ — ‘it’s war,’ he told the US Helsinki Commission last week — no adjectives required.
So here, hot off the presses, is an excerpt from my new column in Byline. If you can support a small team of global investigative reporters with a paid subscription, we would surely appreciate it. If you are unable to do so at this time, feel free to reach out to me directly at bettedangerous/gmail as I am authorized to send upon request. Those of you who already subscribe, please do share with your networks. It helps us tremendously.
Hot Type: 'It's War'
In her new column, Hot Type, Heidi Siegmund Cuda reports on how the denial of Russian attacks on US minds is jeopardising American sovereignty, and looks at how the people can find their way back.
There is no arc of history. It doesn’t bend toward justice. It’s what people do or do not do. I learned that from one of Timothy Snyder’s lectures on the Making of Modern Ukraine.
In a Frontline interview, the author of Bloodlands expanded on that concept, suggesting that history is always with us and informs us, but that we should not fall prey to the myth of preordained justice.
“There’s no such thing as history on your side,” the Yale professor explained. “And I think the whole arc of history bending towards justice, it’s a nice thing; one likes to believe things like that are true. But there’s no arc of history; it’s not bending in any particular direction. You can make democracies happen, but to make democracies happen, you have to first set a really good example yourself.”
Currently, America has become a schizophrenic country. We have been blanketed by information warfare, and depending on what information one is ingesting, they will see the world with MAGA eyes or pro-democracy eyes.
The MAGA Cult has been conditioned to believe Democrats are communists, despite knowing absolutely nothing about communism. The MAGA Cult has joined openly with the racist and bigoted values of Russkiy Mir — or Russian world — because MAGA was always a Kremlin-GOP joint production, it’s just now out in the open.
The pro-democracy contingency sees the very scary and very real threat of November being potentially the last free election in the Great American Experiment. The Democratic candidates are doing their best to uplift the people with joyful messaging, while the media continues its deleterious addiction to Donald Trump and his sycophants.
Despite years of our reporting on the scope of these attacks, it’s only been in recent weeks that sunlight is finally breaking through on how intensely America has been hit by Russian covert influence activities. The Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the State Department, and the Treasury Department did more in three weeks to expose the vast attacks on American minds by a foreign enemy than they’ve done in the decade since these attacks began in earnest.
The gravity of all this news is, of course, being obfuscated by the Trump-Vance darkwave propaganda machine, which would rather have you focus on racist fake news about immigrants to stoke moral panic.
Moral Panic
For that, I also turned to history, where I learned that racist fake news about immigrants was a very cruel and effective strategy to help secure Adolf Hitler’s mob into power.
I studied how German propagandists made up stories in what became known as ‘The Black Horror on the Rhine’.
And we should always ask, what are they trying to make us look away from?
The answer to that is, a Putin-aligned party is using any means necessary to try to get back into power, and our enforcement agencies are telling us so.
Russian Covert Influence Activities Are Not Journalism
Among the recent activity exposing the depth of Russian influence campaigns:
The US Justice Department revealed in its RT indictment that a Tennessee-based ‘conservative media’ group took millions in Kremlin cash. Tenet Media paid such influencers as Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, Dave Rubin, and Lauren Southern with money linked to Russian-military intelligence, according to US enforcement agencies. Tenet content was removed from YouTube after an estimated 16 million views but is still available on X/Twitter. “We believe Putin is weighing in on these actions,” said a National Security Council spokesman of the RT operation.
Along with the indicted RT employees, Russian propagandist Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of RT, is among the Russian media managers sanctioned by the US for allegedly interfering in the 2024 presidential election.
The US Justice Department released a 277-page FBI affidavit revealing a covert Russian Government sponsored malign influence operation targeted the US and Europe. The operation relied on influencers, AI, paid social media, driving internet traffic to cybersquatted ‘doppelganger’ domains, 32 of which were seized by US authorities. In a Russian dossier translated to English, a Byline Times report was among the media highlighted by the Russians as threatening to the project.
The Russian dossier revealed that project directors were monitoring 2,800 influencers of pro-Russian, anti-Ukraine, and anti-democratic content, with nearly 600 of these influencers US-based.
A leaked video from the Russian doppelganger operation — Social Design Agency (SDA) — titled “Russian Ideological Troops” revealed such names as ultra-MAGA political candidate Kari Lake, reporter Glenn Greenwald, and pro-Kremlin influencer Kimdotcom.
Microsoft released a report on how Russian election interference is focusing on the Harris-Walz campaign, reporting that “Russia and Iran have both undertaken cyber influence operations headed into the 2024 presidential election (pivoting) towards targeting the Harris-Walz campaign, with actors disseminating fabricated videos designed to sow discord and spread disinformation about the new Democratic nominee Vice President Harris.”
The US Helsinki Commission reported this week on “Russia’s Shadow War on NATO”, explaining that Russia is engaged in a “shadow war against the democratic world, using assassinations, election interference, and sabotage to destabilize NATO and undermine the security and values of the transatlantic alliance”.
It is important to remember that each time Trump praises Putin at his cult indoctrination events, which the media continues to cover wall to wall, he is praising someone who is the subject of an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court for child trafficking.
‘It’s War’
At the US Helsinki Commission hearing on 24 September, investigative reporter Michael Weiss said what I have been thinking since I heard the event’s ‘Shadow War’ title:
“The evocative adjective that precedes the word war in the title of this hearing is slightly misplaced,” Weiss told the Commission. “There is nothing shadowy about what’s been going on for nearly 20 years. It’s war, what Russia has been waging across NATO and EU territories. The soldiers that Russia uses, or better say, the perpetrators, have all been promoted, received state medals, or even been assigned cushy positions in the Russian presidential administration for their grim spade work.”
He goes on to list a litany of war crimes, poisonings, terrorist attacks, and sleeper agents embedded in the West that facilitate Russian terror and influence, including agents recruited remotely through social media.
As the US State Department just reported:
“Russian covert influence activities are not journalism.”
So, repeatedly, I tweet out to X/Twitter’s CEO Linda Yaccarino and Musk one simple question:
“If Russia is paying for it, is it still free speech?”
‘Do Something About It Ruthlessly’
I recently discovered a book by a Berlin political columnist, Bella Fromm, who documented the rise of Hitler’s criminal gang in her personal diary, published in 1943 as Blood & Banquets.
The book is alarming in its parallels to modern America, which is in a fight for its very existence.
Now, is the time to stop them here… there is no arc of history bending toward justice, but a haunting reminder that it is what people do or do not do.
JD Vance and Donald Trump are telling us what they will do if they seize power — they are telling us they plan to round up millions of people. That is genocidal language. They are targeting immigrant communities with their psychologically abusive lies — cruel lies that are directly linked to real horror events in history with monumentally tragic outcomes for millions and millions of people. After the Nazis seized power, among the laws enacted was the forced sterilization of mixed race children.
I keep history close at hand, recalling what I have learned from the incredible people I have the opportunity to interview in my work.
On these pages, I have reported the words from Shadow Network and Red Orchestra author, Anne Nelson, who explained that we must take the dangers of a democratic overthrow with grave seriousness.
From our first interview in Byline Times — End Game — Nelson told Byline Times: “There was never a day when the majority of Germans woke up and voted for Hitler. It didn’t happen. The fault lines in their system were manipulated and exploited by bad actors. And then they ended up with a dictatorship. And I don’t want to see that happen here.”
A crushing majority in November by voters who want to see democratic governance continue can help offset the trickery, and therefore, get to the part of the story where deep structural reforms can take place.
But we have to get past the denial of how deeply Russian covert influence activities have scarred our psyche and endanger our sovereignty.
Admitting the problem is the first step.
The above is just an excerpt from Hot Type. Please do go to Byline Supplement for the full report. Again, if you are not yet a subscriber, reach out to me.
So a couple of things happened this morning that I want to share with you.
I have been thinking a lot about how ‘American exceptionalism’ and the narrative of ‘rugged individualism’ has been getting in the way of our ability to see the truth of how hard we have been hit by Russia. And as I was formulating the words to write down these thoughts for you, I woke up to Timothy Snyder’s new post about that very subject. I encourage you to read his latest here — Trump’s Hitlerian Month. Made me feel right on time.
In addition, I feel asleep last night to a documentary about Nazi propaganda. I am researching the devastating impact on the world by Joseph Goebbels.
As I feel asleep, the words and images from the film were imported into my dreams, and I suddenly found myself in a room with Adolf Hitler.
I thought I’d make myself useful so I took out the trash. I reached behind Hitler’s head to grab a paper towel from a dispenser on the wall.
“Entshuldigung Sie bitte,” I said.
And he didn’t flinch. As I was taking the trash outside on a long gravel road, I ran into Dave Grohl. I told him, “Hitler doesn’t flinch when you come near him. Some day, I’m going to shiv him.”
Then I woke up.
I thought, what kind of mass murderer doesn’t flinch in the presence of strangers… the psychopathic kind.
Clearly, I’ve watched a lot of pre-code James Cagney and George Raft films. And of course, my Bella Fromm report is still heavy on my mind. From her diary, I wrote:
Kissed by Hitler
On March 30, 1933, Hitler kisses her hand at a party thrown by vice chancellor Franz von Papen, causing her nausea. “Weird ideas flashed through my mind. Why did I not have my little revolver with me?”
Among her observations about him: “He did not know what to do with his hands.”
She noted how he used a tentative Nazi toe to test out the slippery floor before making his way to her. She noted “he was no awe inspiring personality. He gave no impression of dignity.”
I have always called this what it is — fascism. On the Saturday after the election of November 8, 2016, I marched with a sign that read: “We do not accept a fascist America.”
Join me in not allowing these corrupted and undignified men to continue trampling on our democracy. We deserve much better.
Lastly, I had a hard conversation with a conservative friend yesterday.
He is an avid anti-Trumper and recognizes the MAGA-Putin threat.
He told me that he was prepared to happily vote for Joe Biden, and he will vote for Kamala Harris to rebuke Trump. But he told me, in his circles, the ‘communist’ propaganda against her is spreading like wild fire and that the Democrats are missing the middle. It was no use arguing. I just took in the intel.
The fascists don’t need a majority. They don’t need the popular vote. They just need a few extra thousand votes in a handful of states.
We need a Justice Department that understands the gravity of our situation.
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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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That was some powerful dream you had.