REMINDER: Bette’s Book Club
Bette members: please note registration links included for three upcoming events with the following authors — Nafeez Ahmed, Marci Shore, and Nancy MacLean. Plus, my new ebook — 2016 Election Attack!
***Bette members will find all three registration links below the paywall. To join our community Speakeasy and Happy Hour events, please take out a membership and support independent investigative journalism in a time of grave deception.***
“First, they came for the journalists. We don’t know what happened next.”—Maria Ressa
Bette’s Calendar at a glance — our next event is in two days:
Tuesday, Dec. 10, noon PT — Dr. Nafeez Ahmed joins our weekly Tuesday Happy Hour to discuss his book Alt Reich.
Sunday, Dec. 15, 4 pm PT — We will be joined at our Sunday Speakeasy by Yale professor Dr. Marci Shore on her book The Ukrainian Night.
Sunday, Jan. 5, 4 pm PT — Author Dr. Nancy MacLean joins Bette’s Speakeasy to discuss US Resistance efforts and her updated version of Democracy In Chains.
All three events are open to all levels of membership. To join our monthly Founder’s Day events, please upgrade your subscription to Founding Member — you can choose any amount above a full annual membership.
“Thunder on! Stride on Democracy! Strike with a vengeful stroke!”—Walt Whitman
Thank you to new and renewing members and a special thank you to those buying my new ebook — 2016 Election Attack.
If you’re looking for a virtual stocking stuffer, you can purchase the ebook here:
Nailed It
I didn’t want tires for Christmas, but thanks to the Bette community, I have the option. Last night, rushing to meet my mom at a Christmas parade, I managed to lock my keys in the car — never happened before, but it is the result of a distracted mind. While waiting for the technician, the only light in an otherwise dark parking lot was beaming on my right rear tire, where a staple nail was protruding out. The technician told me if I had not spotted it then and there, I would have had a blowout.
For someone whose contribution to the earth is working from home and driving little, I pondered my plight. As an independent journalist during an organized crime ring takeover of my country, I often think of reporters from history and share their words with you on this pages.
But sometimes nails are just nails, and angels are everywhere.
A few weeks ago, I left my phone on top of my car on my way to deliver donuts to my recovery group. For two miles, when there was no absolutely no traffic, I was trapped behind every slow-moving vehicle on the planet. And then I looked for my phone. Because angels are everywhere, it was still on the roof.
I have learned to say “head” and “feet” over and over, in an attempt to sync my mind, but lately, my head is filled with the brilliant books of our brilliant guests, who inspire me to keep trudging during dark, worrisome days.
Today, RadPod interviewed Dr. Nancy MacLean again and of course, her interview was nothing short of amazing. She is giving us better words to use as we forge ahead.
As I wrote in the previous invite, a year ago in January, I was in Palm Springs with Anne Nelson, author of Shadow Network, for the world premiere of the film Bad Faith, based largely on her book and featuring our OSInt friend Brent Allpress as key researcher. Because Anne and I were together, I invited her to join our weekly Happy Hour and when a Bette member asker her for advice on how to best defend democracy, Anne said: “Form a book club.”
I recall thinking that RadPod and Bette Dangerous’ events had already taken the form of book clubs, as we interview authors weekly. We have interviewed the most important authors of our time, and being a veteran book worm, I have also been diving backwards in time to fill my mind with the writings of those who documented the fascist surge in the ‘30s and ‘40s.
Spending more time reading and writing and less time on anti-social media has been good for my soul, and I hope this community is benefitting.
I am not abandoning the virtual battlefields, where I meet my allies in this fight, but I am making sure that I spend more time on scholarly research to inform and inspire my writing.
So with that windy prelude, just making sure you all know we have three incredible authors coming up:
Event One:
Tuesday Happy Hour, 12/10, noon Pacific with Dr. Nafeez Ahmed
Dr Nafeez Ahmed — author of the new book Alt Reich — is a globally-renowned systems theorist, change strategist and investigative journalist, formerly of The Guardian and VICE, whose work has been officially used by the 9/11 Commission, the London bombings coroner’s inquest, and cited in the Congressional Record and houses of parliament. He is currently Director of the Futures Lab at Unitas Global Advisory; Executive Director of the System Shift Lab; and a Distinguished Fellow at the Schumacher Institute for Sustainable Systems. He is also the Special Investigations Reporter-At-Large for the Byline Times newspaper. He has twice been featured in the Evening Standard ’s list of the top 1000 most influential Londoners.
On Alt Reich: The West faces its most dangerous threat since World War II. Over the last 100 years, a shadowy network of American, British and European extremists inspired by Nazi eugenics has worked feverishly to shape an insidious new fascism, masquerading under the banner of ‘freedom’.
My review:
“In Alt Reich, Dr. Nafeez Ahmed has created an important document for future historians to understand how the fascists could rise again. He also offers a blueprint for how democracy defenders can defeat them with a transformative vision of a future that remains to be written.”—Heidi Siegmund Cuda
For those who are not yet Bette members, you can watch RadPod’s interview with Nafeez here.
Event Two:
Sunday Speakeasy, 12/15, 4 pm Pacific with Dr. Marci Shore
Marci Shore — author of The Ukrainian Night — is an intellectual history professor at Yale University and the award-winning author of Caviar and Ashes and The Taste of Ashes. She has spent much of her adult life in Central and Eastern Europe.
The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution is a “vivid and intimate account of the Ukrainian Revolution, the rare moment when the political became the existential.”
From Yale’s website:
“What is worth dying for? While the world watched the uprising on the Maidan as an episode in geopolitics, those in Ukraine during the extraordinary winter of 2013–14 lived the revolution as an existential transformation: the blurring of night and day, the loss of a sense of time, the sudden disappearance of fear, the imperative to make choices. The Maidan was an illumination of the human capacity for natality, the ability to act, to begin anew at this moment. It was the turning point without which Ukrainian resistance to the full-scale Russian invasion cannot be understood. In this lyrical and piercing book, Marci Shore evokes the human face of the Ukrainian revolution. Grounded in interviews with activists and soldiers, parents and children, Shore’s book blends a narrative of suspenseful choices with a historian’s reflections on what revolution is and what it means. She gently sets her portraits of individual revolutionaries against the past as they understand it—and the future as they hope to make it. In so doing, she provides a lesson about human solidarity in a world, our world, where the boundary between reality and fiction is ever more effaced.”
“Shore brilliantly captures the contingency, uncertainty, and chaos that was transmuted into the remarkable, seemingly transcendent solidarity of the Maidan’s unified resistance to a corrupt and cruel régime.”—Charles Taylor, professor emeritus of philosophy, McGill University
If you are not yet a member of Bette, you can watch RadPod’s interview with Marci here.
Event Three:
Sunday Speakeasy, 1/5, 4 pm Pacific with Nancy MacLean
Dr. Nancy MacLean is the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University, and the author of the New York Times bestseller, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Current Affairs and the Lillian Smith Book Award for outstanding writing about the U.S. South. This year, her first book Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan, came out in a 30th anniversary edition that explains how today’s radical MAGA right draws from the Klan well, but is more dangerous.
More about Democracy in Chains — updated with new preface, from Amazon summary:
Behind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority. In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us. Based on ten years of unique research, Democracy in Chains tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government.
If you are not yet a member of Bette Dangerous, you can watch RadPod’s first interview with Nancy here and I will be promoting her second RadPod interview on these pages when it drops this week.
Thank you to everyone who supports our authors by buying their books. And thank you to everyone who supports my writing.
In the words of Nobel Peace Laureate journalist Maria Ressa:
“First, they came for the journalists, we don’t know what happened next.”
Writers matter.
In solidarity, reality, truth, and unity,
Heidi xo
****
****
Recent:
****
Bette Dangerous is a reader-funded magazine. Thank you to all monthly, annual, and founding members.
I expose the corruption of billionaire fascists, while relying on memberships to keep the light on.
Thank you in advance for considering the following:
Share my reporting with allies
Buying my ebooks
A private link to an annual membership discount for older adults, those on fixed incomes or drawing disability, as well as activists and members of the media is available upon request at bettedangerous/gmail. 🥹
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.
🤍
Begin each day with a grateful heart.
🤍
REGISTER HERE FOR OUR UPCOMING EVENTS
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Bette Dangerous to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.