‘How to Fight the Autocrat Contagion’ — My Latest Hot Type Column in Byline
For this week’s Hot Type column in Byline Supplement, I focus on what’s actually working to topple autocrats. Enjoy this excerpt with bonus comments
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The subject of this week’s Hot Type column in Byline Supplement is how to fight an autocrat contagion, and there is a lot we can do:
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Below is an excerpt from this week’s column, and you will also find bonus commentary from guests who weighed in after Byline’s publication:
Hot Type: How to Fight the Autocrat Contagion
As the ‘No Kings’ protests erupt all over America, Heidi Siegmund Cuda reports that good journalism, repetition, and a culture of mockery are still the best tools to break the autocrats’ spell
An Excerpt from Byline Supplement:
While standing in the Blavatnik Hall at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, pulling myself together after an emotional journey through a Marie Antoinette exhibit, I thought about the power of propaganda. The last queen of France never said “let them eat cake”. She didn’t steal a diamond necklace or have improper relations with her son. She did, however, apologize to her executioner, after accidentally stepping on his foot on the way to the guillotine.
Propaganda on repeat has been burning witches and boosting autocrats to power since Julius Cesar wrote his own war chronicles touting his amazing prowess.
But if we’re going to survive as a species with even a shred of dignity left, we have to get more savvy at separating fact from fiction.
The political world is populated by media creatures — lying with the ease of used car salesmen (no disrespect). But instead of the annoyance of a leaky radiator, you can now lose your entire country.
So how do we fight the autocrat contagion?
The power still lies within a free and independent press. But that press cannot be distracted by the daily conjuring of phantoms.
In the US, ‘antifa’ is a phantom created to defang the word ‘fascism’ — a pretend enemy so that real fascists can go after their political enemies.
In the UK, Nigel Farage continues to ‘other’ immigrants, promising large-scale deportations that mirror Trumpian rhetoric.
What both men have in common is curious and well-documented ties to the Russian Federation.
I used to have tweets go viral on the regular but under the leadership of Elon Musk, my account is among the many journalist accounts throttled, resulting in a serious decline in reach. So it came as a surprise that one tweet managed to rise above the noise and into viral territory. On Monday, I wrote:
“Boris Johnson’s career was broken because Byline Times reporters continued to investigate PartyGate until it couldn’t be ignored and Nigel Farage spell can be broken too as independent journalists prove his ties with Russian puppet Nathan Gill thanks to Byline and The Nerve News.”
It was a quote-tweet of an account run by Nick Reeves, who posted video of Farage commenting on Nathan Gill, the former leader of Reform UK Wales, who recently pleaded guilty to taking Russian-linked bribes. In the video, it’s clear to me that Farage graduated with honors from Russian charm school, his disappointment in Gill getting caught seemed sincere.
Farage, who made paid appearances on RT many times before the Kremlin’s media arm was banned in the UK, is a superb propagandist.
Reeves notes this in his comment about the Farage video:
“Reform UK has been desperately trying distance Farage from traitor Nathan Gill. But here is Conor Gogarty reading Farage’s own quotes about bribe-taker Gill back to him:
‘I have worked closely with Nathan Gill as leader of Ukip Wales. I have always found him to be hard-working, honest, and loyal.’The Reform UK bigwigs are frantically lying because they know how closely Farage is linked into Putin’s hybrid war against democracy. Farage’s fortunes now depend entirely on the majority of the mainstream media, especially the BBC, maintaining near silence about Farage’s links with Russia. If the wall of silence breaks, Farage may well be destroyed.”
And therein lies the opportunity.
Both Byline Times and the newly launched The Nerve have been relentless in their thorough reporting about Gill, who led Farage’s party in Wales and worked closely with him on Brexit…
It is entirely in the court of what’s left of the independent press to keep this story on its front pages until corporate and oligarch-owned media cries uncle.
And they won’t have to look far to see that Farage’s ties to Russia have already been well-documented, as in this exhaustive report by Jukes from Byline Times, where he wrote:
“For eight long years, most of the media has either ignored or failed to inquire how Farage has been a conduit for Russian influence in UK politics. For most of that time, it was confused with the Brexit vote, and any questioning of foreign influence was dismissed as an attempt to question the legitimacy of the referendum.”
Now is the time to reup all that work and push it out on the front page — focused, without distraction. UK citizens need only look to the US to see the ghost of the future. It does not have to darken your land.
The Farage fever can be broken.
In America, there are signs of the fever breaking.
The propagandists are having an increasingly difficult time selling their Reality TV Fascism to the masses. They’ve been outmaneuvered by a chicken, a frog, an inflatable cow, and Cookie Monster.
Costumes have become the colorful norm of protesters decrying Trump’s efforts to send National Guard troops to major cities, as he tilts at the ‘antifa’ windmills.
The Portland Frog became a national symbol of heroism after getting pepper sprayed directly into his intake valve, and a giant chicken shot to fame on October 7, when Russian-paid influencer Benny Johnson posted a video of Homeland Security propagandist Kristi Noem being heckled by the chicken.
The Portland Chicken, who real name is Jack Dickinson, is a 26-year-old math major, with a graduate degree in economics. He said in an interview that there’s been an overall culture of “whimsy” that’s shown up.
“What they rely on is fear,” he said. “So by coming out in an absurdist manner, it speaks to them, to some extent, that we’re really not afraid. It also dismantles their narrative… When they try to describe a situation as ‘war-torn’, it becomes much harder to take them seriously when they have to post a video saying Kristi Noem is up on the balcony staring over the Antifa Army and it’s, like, eight journalists, and five protestors and one of them is in a chicken suit…. it feels like we’re winning this.”
Humor can be ammunition, social scientist Matthew Pearce told Byline Supplement. Pearce, a founding member of NAFO — the pro-Ukrainian decentralized fund-raising group that reinvented information warfare through memetic humor, said authoritarian regimes run on narrative control.
“When memes become immune to repression and repurpose reality with humor, they become more than jokes—they become weapons,” said Pearce. “Diversity, resilience, and humor. They all come as a team.”
Laughtivism
Intellectual historian Dr Marci Shore offers Byline Supplement multiple examples from history where humor saved lives and countries.
“There’s a good chapter in Peter Pomerantsev’s second book, This Is Not Propaganda, on the Serbian activist Srdja Popovic and his training manuals for how to overthrow a dictator. They used the word ‘laughtivism’. He wrote: ‘When Milosevic’s domineering wife announced she would rather see the protests end in bloodshed than resign, Otpor (Popovic’s student movement) set up a blood transfusion station and delivered blood bags to the government: will the Milosevic’s kindly leave now that they’ve gotten their blood?’ The moment when Milosevic sent his army into the streets and the army refused to shoot at the people was the end of Milosevic.”
She also points to humor being a key to understanding Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“‘You can’t be serious about what Russian politicians and Lukashenko say every day,’ Zelensky said in an interview for The Atlantic. ‘If you take it seriously, you might as well go and hang yourself.’ The humor is sanity-preserving,” Shore said.
Shore said Henri Bergson’s 1900 essay on laughter is also useful on this topic.
“He explains that what is humorous is what is not self-aware. Laughter is an antidote to mechanism; it wakes people up,” she said. “Here’s a quote by Bergson: ‘And were all men always attentive to life, were we constantly keeping in touch with others as well as with ourselves, nothing within us would ever appear as due to the working of strings or springs. The comic is that side of a person which reveals his likeness to a thing, that aspect of human events which, through its peculiar inelasticity, conveys the impression of pure mechanism, of automatism, of movement without life. Consequently it expresses an individual or collective imperfection which calls for an immediate corrective. This corrective is laughter, a social gesture that singles out and represses a special kind of absentmindedness in men and in events.’
“Maksym Butkevych, who survived over two years in Russian captivity and was released a year ago on a prisoner exchange, told me that humor was crucial as a survival mechanism. Stanislav Aseyev, who survived even younger in Izolatsiia, said that he learned there that it was the freedom to commit suicide and humor that distinguished humans from other animals.”
Pearce said humor is authoritarian kryptonite.
“If an inflatable shark can humiliate Vladimir Putin, it can do the same to American fascists.”
With thousands of No Kings protests set for today, I hear there’s a chicken suit shortage.
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Bonus reporting:
Bette friends Anthony Barnett, co-founder of Open Democracy, and disinformation analyst Alex Alvarova — both of whom appeared at recent Bette Happy Hour and Speakeasy events — sent me their thoughts on how we topple autocrats.
Here are some of their comments:
Barnett said to relentlessly expose a ‘regime’ without legitimacy, and included a report he wrote for The Nation, where he highlights a “snarling” Stephen Miller, who with premeditated virulence said on Fox News: “The Democrat [sic] Party does not fight for, care about, or represent American citizens. It is an entity devoted exclusively [his emphasis] to the defense of hardened criminals, gang-bangers, and illegal, alien killers and terrorists. The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.”
He wrote: “Democrats in Congress should unite to demand that Stephen Miller either be fired or that he apologize and withdraw his grotesque claims. Because the person entrusted with executive authority over Homeland Security has literally declared civil war on the representatives of half the American population. The clarity of his claims is an opportunity to unleash repudiation with a clear focus: Get Miller, wound him, insist that such views are beyond the pale for any official whosoever.”
We can see that the snarling rhetoric has now moved on to calling those who oppose the Trump regime as “Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, violent criminals, antifa, anarchists…” etc. So Barnett’s point is important: wound these propagandists by demanding they be fired. The People pay their salaries, after all.
Alex Alvarova’s take is important as well. She brings her experience growing up under Soviet rule to her research, and I always find her work so enlightening.
“I think the main idea is what a Polish-born French-American mathematician and polymath said about how complex system become fragile and could implode. His theory was later transformed into a meme: Butterfly wings effect. The butterfly effect is the idea that small, seemingly trivial events in a huge amount may ultimately result in something with much larger consequences – in other words, they have non-linear impacts on very complex systems.
“What they do in the US is a complex long game coup with millions of action nodes within, but only one vertical decision hierarchy. These systems, like the communist autocracy and Hitler’s regime, tend to be complex and fragile, because the disbalance between management and freedom of action. They try to deploy the self decisive nodes too (ICE), but in the end, Trump could override and overrule anybody and anything, because that’s what they want. An absolute, vertically organized power. And this is what makes the complex system incredibly fragile. Every small action ads to another, every small act against them pushes their system out of balance. In the end, one tiny buttefly action is the last one, which makes the system implode. It doesn’t have to be their own corruption and rivalry, it could be anything they can’t control. Even the dancing frogs and unicorns.
“By wreaking havoc and shutdown of money they try to provoke desperation and violence, no dictatorship under the sun had ever openly attacked first. They know what they do is a crime and all they need is justification of their own violence. No violence, no dictatorship. Without switching roles they remain just what they are: Terrorists. Not Kings. Not presidents, not judges, not congressmen. Terrorists.”
Thanks to Alvarova, we know a lot about Orbán’s dark history:
She also gave me bonus comments on our Orbán report:
“Hungary withdrew from the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court this summer,” Alvarova told Bette Dangerous. “However, according to Article 127, the withdrawal will not take legal effect until one year later, that is, in June 2026. Until then, Hungary remains a full member of the ICC and is still obliged to cooperate in investigations and the issuance of arrest warrants.
“Perhaps Viktor Orbán is an underrated genius strategist who will secure lasting peace by having Putin arrested immediately upon landing at Budapest Airport and handed over to the tribunal in The Hague. Otherwise, he deserves nothing but a humiliating defeat at the hands of Péter Magyar, toward which he is steadily heading in the rapidly approaching parliamentary elections.”
Thankful to Alvarova, Barnett, Matthew Pearce, and Marci Shore for their brilliant insights — and the hard work of the Byline Times and The Nerve teams.
I hope wherever you are in the world, if you are joining fellow pro-democracy activists to demand No Kings that you are safe and that you know how powerful you are.
Photos below: No Kings protest, Paris.
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Related:
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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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I laug(❤️) your take! Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator is such a humorous movie!
Also this new article https://substack.com/@sarahkendzior/note/c-167761722 is good to read.