Love Thy Neighbor - It’s All Our Fight
How we rise above propaganda to focus on the national fight against the LGBTQ+ community and any othering anywhere
“We cannot, we must not be afraid to oppose dictators and authoritarianism wherever it rears its head."-Director Daniel Roher, Navalny
I spent last year working in local politics, ensuring the future of my Angel City would be in good hands.
I didn’t work as a campaign manager because it was good for my health - it most certainly was not. We worked around the clock and got cyber bullied relentlessly. I knew just how much it was wearing on me when I bought my first pack of cigarettes in a decade and fake inhaled.
When it came time to decide which direction to choose post-victory, I chose the bigger, global fight - the fight for democracy. I had, after all, been sharpening my words publicly for many years and had skin in the game.
I launched Bette Dangerous, and here we are - kicking fascists in the teeth.
With each post -under the tutelage of the great minds of our times - I expose the game, punching through their boorish techniques to get to what they’re trying to sell - unreality, the mythic past, anti-intellectualism, sexual anxiety, victimhood - things I learned from Jason Stanley.
‘Freedom Thieves’
The extremists are freedom thieves, and they’re coming for yours.
At her latest Lucid chat, historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat noted that propaganda is about creating noise and silence - creating noise to distract from criminality and corruption, and silencing truth.
Not a day goes by when I don’t ponder her words about memory repression and self-censorship indicating early stage autocracy. How strange it is that corporate media seems to largely have forgotten Trump’s failed pandemic response, the Big Lie, and the Insurrection.
I feel a duty to remind people the GOP is engaged in a massive criminal cover up at every turn. And it’s working. Thousands of people are reading Bette daily and learning how to spot the fascists behind the flags.
Quite frankly, today’s GOP is anti-American.
Consider the evidence: while Congress is staging theatre craft as distraction, bills are making their way through statehouses that are taking us back in time, in the wrong direction, to a world that the majority of Americans do not want.
There is a war against LGBTQ+ people in America, and my readers know that is a war on everybody. If we allow one group to be othered, then it’s lights out for democracy. Just as Putin won’t stop in Ukraine, domestic extremists won’t stop at one out group.
In a new report by MAP titled Under Fire: the War on LGBTQ People in America, the report notes the hundreds of bills nationwide have the following goals:
Erasing LGBTQ people from schools and public life
Criminalizing and banning transition so transgender people can’t be themselves
Enshrining inequality
Erecting systemic and structural barriers to make change harder
Silencing supporters
The report documents that the language around these bills is the kind of dehumanizing and inflammatory rhetoric we have seen before, the kind of vilifying language that precedes genocide. By referring to a population as ‘predators’ and ‘groomers’ it not only incites stochastic terrorism against members of the gay community which we have already seen in the recent shooting at a club in Colorado, but it also hearkens back to Nazi Germany.
‘1933’
As I wrote in 1933 - How Nazi Violence Destroyed Berlin’s Gay Freedom, I learned the origins of the book burnings began during the Weimar years in the 1920s in Berlin. A doctor named Magnus Hirschfeld, who was gay, began studying and documenting gender fluidity.
Dr. Hirschfeld discovered that many of his gay patients were committing suicide and he was also deeply affected by the trial of Oscar Wilde, which he documented in his writings. This led to Dr. Hirschfeld becoming an activist on behalf of gay rights, and ultimately, the founding of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, or the Institute of Sexual Knowledge. He created a haven for people with different gender identities and worked with law enforcement to prevent harassment of people who identified as openly gay.
Doctors at his institute performed the first trans woman surgery, and Hirschfeld became a global scholar on gender acceptance - noting the similarities between the gay struggle worldwide.
In 1933, when Hitler came into power, Berlin’s thriving gay community became the target of Nazi brutality. Gay clubs were attacked, and among the first books burned in May of that year were works by Dr. Hirschfeld, who had written voluminous scholarly works on gender. The burnings were carried out by a Nazi youth student group. Dr. Hirschfeld fled to Paris, where he died two years later.
“There are always years between the violent rhetoric justifying mass violence and the state-sanctioned mass violence,” philosophy professor Jason Stanley said in a RadPod interview.
These are our years to take action, before the state-sanctioned mass violence.
‘A War Against Gay People’
Reading the new MAP report, it describes a “war against gay people in America “and their very right and ability to openly exist.”
The Human Rights Campaign has tracked 340 anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced so far in 2023, over 90 bills targeting medical care for trans youth, with South Dakota and Utah already signing those bills into law and Tennessee and Mississippi rushing to do same.
It feels shocking for me to type these stats and words, having grown up in San Francisco in the 1970s, where freedom reigned. But it is also a reminder that the course of democracy never did run smooth - it is always hard fought.
At our ‘Speakeasy’ Zoom for paid members on Sunday - our guest Dr. Ian Garner told our community about how much more freedom Russians enjoyed when he lived there in the mid-2000s and how quickly Putin’s regressive policies erased freedom.
Dr. Garner - who wrote Z Generation: Inside the Hearts of Russia’s Fascist Youth said that 25 percent of Russia’s gay population has attempted commit suicide.
‘Safeguarding Hope’
“Now is when we need hope the most,” wrote my friend Jason Van Tatenhove. “We, as humans, are hardwired for hope. However, hope is complicated. We have to have a way to safeguard hope and plant the seeds of change for humanity’s better future.”
I live my life by the second definition of hope - the one about trust - I trust that I will be taken care of not matter how dire things seem, as long as I keep taking action.
Inaction leads to systemic oppression. Inaction leads to mass state-sanctioned genocide. We cannot afford inaction.
What I am documenting on these pages seem unfathomable - that America could be reversing course and careening toward a regressive darkness.
We must only look to the recent past to know that it can happen when good people do nothing.
As I wrote in Hell Is Empty and All the Devils Are Here - Exposing the Merchants of Menace 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 regressive image.
We are being deluged with headline-grabbing outrage, divisive distractions, and stochastic terrorism as those in Congress who sought pardons from Trump are now 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. We must sharpen our prebuttals to weaken their impact on the collective psyche of our nation. We need to build our defenses to their fake reality.
We still have a chance to beat these extremists 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 steering our country toward darkness.
We must love our neighbors, because their fight is our fight. We can’t start making exceptions because propagandists misuse half-baked words created in right-wing think tanks to dehumanize people.
We must choose love.
As Nadine Smith of Equality Florida cautioned: “What they sharpen their knives on is who they perceive to be politically the weakest, it's why they went after trans kids. With that victory, it emboldened them to come after a larger swath of the population. They’re coming for you right now, too.”
Only if we obey in advance.
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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 your generous coffee tips and who buy my ebooks. A private link to group activist discounts available upon request.
More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter, 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.
Save the date! The next Bette Dangerous ‘Speakeasy’ Zoom for paid members is Sunday, March 26, 4 pm PT. Each ‘Speakeasy’ features special guests, and if you are not yet a paid member, please consider subscribing to join the community:
