SUNDAY REMINDER: Thom Hartmann Joins Us for An Ode to Joy + Building Resiliency

Register in advance for our upcoming ‘Speakeasy’ with special guest Thom Hartmann, who joins us as part of our Building Resiliency series, as we celebrate joyful days. Plus a self-care reminder

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Upcoming Dates at a Glance: Sunday Speakeasy, 8/25 and Tuesday, 8/27 Happy Hour (details tbd)

“Even though Love doesn’t sell as much as Hate, we must always believe in Love. There is always more Love, it just got buried under the trash heap that is Corporate Controlled Media. The only true press is now Free Press, which gets truth directly to the people.”-me, The Kindness of Strangers, November 14, 2016

We talk a lot about the importance of self care on these pages, stepping away for a few hours or days to refresh is vital for running this marathon gauntlet of information warfare. For many of us, it’s been nearly a decade of frontline warring — combatting lies and hate and fear with counter-messaging of truth and love and kindness.

So it is almost surreal to be bathing in a week of love and joy and reality and pure goodness, like the look of pride on a young boy’s face when he sees his heroic father — a good and decent man — address the nation.

There’s a part of me that wants to wrap him in my arms and protect him from this war — information warfare doesn’t go away because we want it to. It goes away when we defeat this fascist insurgency.

We have been denied so many moments of joy, because they have been followed by cruelty. In 2020, we did a rare thing — we defeated a dictator in the middle of autocratic capture and elected a good and decent man. We were unable to properly celebrate that incredible victory, because the cruel and indecent led an insurrection. I held my breath through the Inauguration, not even fully being able to celebrate seeing a young woman I knew through the Los Angeles poetry circuit, Amanda Gorman, take the stage and bring her light to the world. (Both my daughter and Amanda are Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureates, and I first saw her perform as a teenager.)

I’ve gotten used to peering over my shoulder, so I manage that stress with poetry, and music, and art. I live in a city with access to the greatest philharmonic in the world, under Dudamel’s tutelage, we’ve been competing with ourselves. So I wrap myself in Beethoven, Mahler, Mozart, Rachmaninoff, Barber, and this week it was an all Dvorak night, with Midori on violin. And I’m still swooning, haven’t yet found words. I go with my friend who was a sergeant in the US Army, who salutes during The Star-Spangled Banner, and I cry each time because our flag is still there.

Twilight’s Last Gleaming

The American flag symbolizes the resistance to tyranny. It’s time we take it back from the tyrants.—Heidi Siegmund Cuda for Bette Dangerous

I want our flag back. And we’re taking it back. We are taking it back from the creeps and putting it into the hands of the decent and worthy and honorable.

Authoritarians strive to be thought of as cruel to keep people in fear, but they don’t like to be thought of as weird or creepy or small, because it removes their power.

The Weirdos — My Latest Report in Byline Supplement

The most beautiful thing about this week so far is the reminder of how many good and decent people there are in government and in America. There’s always been more goodness.—me, August 21, 2024

Onward and upward.

Here are more details for our Sunday Speakeasy:

REGISTER: BUILDING RESILIENCY WITH THOM HARTMANN

As part of this joyful week, we’re bringing in Thom Hartmann on Sunday, August 25, at 2 pm Pacific for Bette’s Speakeasy to help us celebrate the infectious joy of the DNC while also preparing for the onslaught of dark money operations.

The Bette Dangerous community is building resilience together, and we will need it as we have some long days ahead of us.

And as Thom wrote in his ‘tsunami’ dark money report, which I include below:

We won’t even know the dimensions of the coming onslaught until it’s upon us in September and October.

As Senator Elizabeth Warren noted, echoing a position held by fully 72% of American voters, “Our democracy shouldn’t be bought and paid for by the wealthy and powerful.”

If Democrats survive the onslaught that’s coming and emerge victorious at the federal level, the first order of business next year must be to strip the cancer of dark money out of our body politic.

If you are not yet a member and would like to join us, please subscribe (and free subscribers: check your emails for a special invitation):

I also offer monthly Founder’s Day events for those who support me at the premium level, so if you’re bucks up, please consider becoming a Founding Member. The Happy Hour and Speakeasy events are open to all levels of paid membership.

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SPEAKEASY, 8/25:

Bette’s Speakeasy with Thom Hartmann on an Ode to DNC Joy and also Preparing for the Tsunami of Rightwing Dark Money Operations:

• Sunday, August 25, 2 pm Pacific

  • Thom Hartmann is returning to join the Bette Dangerous community to help us prepare for the floodgates of well-funded right-wing operations, while also taking a moment to celebrate the joy of the week and how we harness that joy to remain on offense. This invitation was inspired by his recent report:

    Will Democracy Survive the Tsunami of Rightwing Dark Money Coming this Fall?

  • Thom is a New York Times best-selling author of 36 books in print and the #1 progressive talk show host in America for more than a decade. Thom has co-written and been featured in 6 documentaries with Leonardo DiCaprio about climate change. A former psychotherapist, entrepreneur and refugee worker helping the worldwide Salem group start homes for abandoned and abused children all over the world, Thom’s daily Substack writing is at www.HartmannReport.com. Thom and his wife Louise live in Portland, Oregon with a small menagerie of cats, dogs, ducks & geese. Thom has been kind enough to feature me on his show multiple times, and I’m looking forward to his return to our Speakeasy.

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Register here please…