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REGISTER: Founder’s Day with Craig Unger on ‘Distorted Reality Fields’

New York Times-bestselling author Craig Unger will be discussing vital findings from his book, “House of Trump, House of Putin” and why it’s so important today

Heidi Siegmund Cuda's avatar
Heidi Siegmund Cuda
Oct 09, 2025
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***Bette’s Founding members will find registration link below the paywall. To join us, please upgrade your membership and help support independent investigative journalism in this time of grave deception. This event is open to premium members, high-level supporters, and those who are active participants in the Bette community.***

On Sunday, October 12, at 11 am Pacific, I am bringing back investigative journalist and New York Times-bestselling author Craig Unger for an interview about his recent Substack post, which revisits his groundbreaking book from eight years ago, House of Trump, House of Putin.

Craig Unger
Distorted Reality Fields
For what it’s worth, I wanted to repost something I wrote eight years ago, in House of Trump, House of Putin. The context was that I was writing about one of the fathers of hybrid warfare, Vladislav Surkov, and how he and Putin intended to use it to shore up Putin’s popularity domestically and, ul…
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6 days ago · 96 likes · 15 comments · Craig Unger

Unger takes a historic look at an originator of modern hybrid warfare Vladislav Surkov, the political technologist who manipulated Putin’s popularity and helped wage mind war against West.

In his post, Unger wrote: “As Deputy Prime Minister to Putin from 2011 to 2013, Surkov served as the Kremlin’s chief ideologue and ‘gray cardinal’ to Putin. As Soviet-born British author Peter Pomerantsev put it, Surkov, ‘the puppet master who privatised the Russian political system, is the real genius of the Putin era,’ and as such is someone who is essential to understanding how Putin — and now Trump — created a new strain of authoritarianism that was far more subtle and understated than the epic spectacles from the previous century.”

As Unger wrote in House of Trump:

“As one of the architects of hybrid warfare on behalf of Putin, Surkov set out to destroy the very idea of reality, to undermine the whole notion of truth in order to create a never-ending conflict about perception that helped the ability of Putin’s regime to control and manage Russia.”

If it sounds familiar, it should.

I have been hyper focused on this topic to increase our understanding of how poisonous stories being fed by the Trump regime and Russian propagandists our designed to incapacitate and immobilize our minds from being able to both see reality and fight against narrative warfare.

Unger will help guide us toward solutions as he explains how we got here.

More details about Craig Unger:

Craig Unger is the New York Times bestselling author of six books on the Republican Party’s assault on democracy, including House of Bush, House of Saud; House of Trump, House of Putin, American Kompromat, and now Den of Spies, a real life political thriller about how master spy William Casey put together a treasonous covert operation in 1980 that hijacked American foreign policy and stole the election for Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.

A graduate of Harvard University, Craig began his career in journalism as an undergraduate editor of The Harvard Crimson. In 1976, he moved to France as co-owner/editor of The Paris Metro, a celebrated biweekly English-language city magazine in the French capital. In the Eighties, as senior editor at New York Magazine, Craig wrote and edited major features on subjects ranging from medicine to pop culture, architecture, and politics. Over the years, his work has appeared in The New Republic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Esquire, The Independent, and many other publications. He also served as a contributing editor for Vanity Fair where he covered national security and foreign affairs for more than 15 years.

Subscribe to Craig Unger’s Substack here:

Craig Unger’s Substack

You can check out his collection of investigative reporting on Trump-Russia and the Republican party’s war on democracy here:

Craig Unger’s Books

And here is a recent interview with him by me that ran in my Hot Type column in Byline Supplement on Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to Russia, which we will also be discussing:

Byline Supplement
Hot Type: Epstein and Russian Connections to One of the World's 'Sleaziest Pimps'
The problem with investigating and reporting on transnational mob ties is that no matter how careful you are with word choice, it always takes you right to the gutter. There is literally no way to write about Donald Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein, and Je…
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2 months ago · 51 likes · 4 comments · Heidi Cuda

Thank you, and I look forward to seeing many of you on Founder’s Day. Keep scrolling for registration link. To upgrade to a premium member, please note that it’s any amount above the cost of a full annual membership — you can set your own price — although those who pay the full Founding Member fee of $210 truly help keep this project afloat, and I am very grateful.

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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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