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When my podcast partner Jim Stewartson was sued by Mike Flynn in 2023, I reached out to every journalism organization set up to help reporters defend against lawfare attacks aimed to silence them and got nowhere. It took a small group of us to put together a legal team to help Jim fight back against Flynn, and later Kash Patel, who also targeted Jim with lawfare.
Jim had the audacity to speak truth to power under heavy fire by controlled opposition ‘reporters’ who tried to make him radioactive with hit pieces in prominent publications. Jim is stubborn and hates bullies, and kept on doing the work exposing those behind the QAnon cult, when other so-called experts wanted you to look anywhere but toward the people Jim identified.
Thanks to 754 small donations to a GoFundMe we launched on his behalf, Jim has been able to put up a defense. Now he’s taking it to another level, with the launch of a 501(c)4 non-profit — DefendSpeechNow.org — which will help Jim as he is set to go to trial with Mike Flynn — Trump’s former National Security advisor who pleaded guilty twice about lying to the FBI about his contact with Russian nationals. The non-profit is also being set up to help others targeted by SLAAP suits in the future.
To my many generous friends and allies, please donate what you can:
For years, I’ve been warning about the declining press freedom in the US, and offering examples of how it worked in other countries that went from democratic to authoritarian and how it starts with the silencing of truth. I warned that to be neutral during the rise of fascism was to be complicit and how parroting propaganda is not journalism. I wrote about how the media coup preceded the judicial coup and how every euphemistic headline was taking America one step closer to authoritarian capture.
And then, last Wednesday, I woke up to a message from a friend in New York that a reporter had been hospitalized after being assaulted by ICE. I have been documenting the global attacks on journalists, including the journalist genocide that’s occurring in Gaza:
As always, thank you to everyone who supports the work we do at Byline Supplement — it means a great deal to those of us on the frontline of independent investigative reporting. If you are not yet a member of Byline, and you would like to read any of my paywalled columns in full, please reach out to me at bettedangerous/gmail.
Below is an excerpt from this week’s column:
Hot Type: 'What the Hell Are We Doing Here?’
Heidi Siegmund Cuda reports on the escalating war against journalism and truth under the Trump administration
An Excerpt from Byline Supplement October 4, 2025
In a recent Hot Type column, I wrote about the genocide of journalists occurring in Gaza. I’m sure it’s been long forgotten in a sea of clips featuring a weekend anchor fat-shaming leaders of the US military and Nigel Farage’s latest lies about immigrants eating royal swans.
But the Fourth Estate, which used to be the thing that separated democracy from autocracy, is under siege in ways that once seemed unthinkable.
A journalist in America was hospitalised on Tuesday. Federal immigration agents were caught on video pushing journalists to the floor in New York City at 26 Federal Plaza, where members of the press have been documenting the increase in immigration hearings. L.Vural Elibol, a photographer for the Anadolu Agency, was knocked down in the confrontation, and his head is seen hitting the floor. Later, he is seen in a neck brace being treated by medics on a stretcher. This comes less than a week after a woman was shoved to the ground by another ICE agent, who is back on active duty.
Credentialed journalists documenting the detainees at asylum hearings are not breaking any laws, but they’re being treated like criminals. On Tuesday, they were shoved out of the elevator, resulting in the kind of violence usually associated with authoritarian countries.
“Masked ICE agents shoved and injured journalists today at Federal Plaza… What the hell are we doing here?” wrote New York Governor Kathy Holchul on X/Twitter .
Reports from Chicago aren’t much better.
On September 29, ICE agents shot at journalists documenting a demonstration in Broadview, Illinois, using rubber bullets and chemical agents. And in July, police took aim at journalists covering anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles, who were also hit with rubber bullets and trampled by horses…
Independent journalists in particular are subject to lawfare and cyber stalking, as well as verbal threats from law enforcement. The escalation to physical harm is only shocking if you haven’t been paying attention.
‘Time to Be Brave’
“It is time to be brave,” New York activist Julie DeLaurier told Byline Supplement. “It is time to see what we are made of. Trump is trying to scare people inside—bolt the door, draw the curtains. That’s what the Germans did when their Communist neighbors were hauled away. And when their Jewish neighbours were hauled away.”
DeLaurier, who works with the activism group Rise and Resist New York, attended a protest in support of press freedom on Wednesday after Tuesday’s ICE attacks on journalists. She said: “We will not be silenced. We will stand up for our neighbors, for our journalists, for our politicians and for ourselves.”
As I documented on these pages nearly three years ago, a free press is a threat to authoritarians, who often take swift action when coming to power.
Authoritarians vs Free Press
In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán encouraged owners of hundreds of Hungarian media properties to ‘donate’ them to a Government allied foundation. The result was a centralized right-wing Government-controlled media syndicate. Subsequently, freedom of the press has been on a steady decline in Hungary, as have human rights.
In Russia as Vladimir Putin came to power, the media tycoon Vladimir Gusinksy said he was pressured to relinquish his empire to the Government…
Currently, in Belarus, 37 journalists remain in prison and 39 media organisations have been declared “extremist formations”, five years after President Aleksander Lukashenko’s fraudulent electoral victory, according to the National Union of Journalists…
Trump’s Tactics
Among the Trump regime’s ‘soft’ tactics has been an executive order that caused massive layoffs at Government-funded news outlets like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia, among other US subsidized networks…
And recall back in 2017, how Trump began referring to journalists as the ‘enemy of the people’ — a Nazi Germany and Soviet Union phrase aimed to silence and destabilize critics and to thwart truth in reporting.
I do hope I’m wrong, but the next step might be what we see prolific in Russia and Russian proxy states and that is journalists and dissidents enduring the old Soviet-era practice of ‘forced psychiatry’ — held in psychiatric hospitals to drug, punish and silence them.
I do so hope I’m wrong, but something I read in a Peter Pomerantsev book keeps me awake at night. In Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, Pomerantsev, the son of Soviet dissidents, wrote about the Moscow TV producers he worked with in the 2000s.
“The producers… might all be liberals in their private lives, holiday in Tuscany, and be completely European in their tastes,” he wrote. “When I ask how they marry their professional and personal lives, they look at me as if I were a fool and answer: ‘Over the last twenty years we’ve lived through a communism we never believed in, democracy and defaults and mafia state and oligarchy, and we’ve realized they are illusions, that everything is PR.’
“When I ask them about Soviet-era dissidents, like my parents, who fought against communism, they dismiss them as naïve dreamers and my own Western attachment to such vague notions as ‘human rights’ and ‘freedom’ as a blunder. ‘Can’t you see your own governments are just as bad as ours?’ I try to protest—but they just smile and pity me. To believe in something and stand by it in this world is derided, the ability to be a shape-shifter celebrated.”
Yes, but who is doing the celebrating? Who benefits when integrity and truth are dismissed?
This week, I watched as Putin once again stood at a podium and said ‘democracy is failing’ — he so desperately needs democracies to fail, because should they survive, this war criminal will eventually be brought to justice…
Oh well, gotta go.
My podcast partner Jim Stewartson, who is being sued by Trump’s former National Security advisor, Mike Flynn — who twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI — and also by the current head of the FBI, Kash Patel, is giving a deposition.
Gotta offer moral support.
****
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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.
