The GOP Is a Lawless Party - Full Stop

We can’t play nice with bullies

In 2017, I knew I would be voting for Joe Biden in 2020. I knew we needed an experienced leader who brought empathy and decency to the White House, to offer healing to our fractured nation. Bluntly, we needed someone who could win.

In 2019, when it was uncool to do so, I banded together with a bunch of Twitter activists to publicly show our support for Biden. By early 2020, we went full speed ahead and like Lazarus, Biden’s candidacy was resurrected, and he won the White House. Like millions of others, I did my small part to ensure Trump would be removed from office.

I was hoping tonight’s State of the Union speech would offer some aid and comfort for the information war we find ourselves in - that Biden would address it so we could move beyond the denial and get resources to fight it, to help those who have gone down radicalized rabbit holes.

Instead, Biden went with norms, a calming, kindly elder statesman reassuring a country he was looking out for its best interests. He brought empathy and decency, qualities that I cherish. He paid tribute to heroes and victims. He is a good man.

There was a moment where I held my breath, with the hope he would address the radicalization problem - that he would tell Americans we are a target nation of cognitive warfare by Putin and Fifth Column traitors. That our minds are the battlefield of ongoing assaults on truth to weaken us so we accept the authoritarian capture that is occurring in our statehouses and affecting our rights. As Dr. Mia Bloom told RadPod, and estimated 30 million people have been radicalized.

It was the moment when he addressed Paul Pelosi - who was attacked by a radicalized man with ties to Russia - that I held my breath. In that moment, he had the opportunity to tell the nation the truth, and to let us know he was looking out for us, so it’s not just left up to me, Jim, and HiFi, and a handful of others who do this work as civic duty.

But he didn’t. And he kept reaching across the aisle, because that is what we used to do to get things done in the before times. But these are not those times.

Trying to play nice with bullies is perceived as a weakness by ‘strongmen’ - the authoritarians we are fighting within our own country. As well as the chaos agents - the garbage tossers - whose only job is distract and make it look like liberal democracies are ungovernable. Who wear lapel pins of AR-15s so we can look on horrified and demoralized and unable to cope with the insanity that has infected our body politic. That is the goal.

As RadPod guest Zarina Zabrisky told us in our latest episode on the first anniversary of the war in Ukraine, that insanity is a Russian import, and we better seal off the pipelines of “tube-fed brainwashing sludge” before real bombs start dropping.

When Huckabee got up to do her rebuttal schtick, it was note for note How Fascism Works. All the tropes were there - victimhood, the mythic past, propaganda, unreality, sexual anxiety, law and order.

I thought of parsing it as I did Trump’s 2024 announcement speech, but instead, I decided to transcribe it for you directly:

Blah blah radical left blah blah woke mob blah blah democratic socialists blah blah border crisis blah blah violent criminals gonna snatch you up blah blah Isis! blah blah insert China othering here blah blah work woke woke crt crt don’t say gay blah blah law and order 🥴blah blah blah pffft.

All the rhetorical bullshittery that plays great with the base was implanted for maximum outrage and victimhood. For further reference, here’s a two-minute clip on how Lois from Family Guy became mayor.

Look, I knew this was going to be a long war. It’s likely the fight of our lifetime.

But when I jumped into an NPR Twitter spaces after the speech, and I heard norms being discussed, I wanted to scream. This is not normal!

No one is talking about the coup. Ruth Ben-Ghiat warned us about that. Huckabee memory holed the coup. NPR memory holed the coup. The GOP is a lawless party masquerading as patriots, and getting away with it.

Nancy MacLean told us, “There is no more Republican party of the kind that once existed… and future historians will look back in horror at the moral failings.”

I will not obey in advance. This is not normal. I took this photo below at the Women’s March in Washington on January 21, 2017. That piece of cardboard is more right than NPR tonight.

The GOP is a lawless party. I will not forget that.

CODA: I got a call from a friend. She is smart and sophisticated, an executive who unwinds with cat videos and woo in the form of positivity affirmations. While one of her affirmation videos was ending, a new “for you” video popped up, and she told me 3-minutes later she was down a radicalization rabbit hole. The video began with the Illuminati and took her through Epstein videos, trauma videos, and she cut out when she was being coerced to believe that Tom Hanks was a pedophile and that Andrew Tate was framed and was trying to break matrix.

She got pulled into QAnon, and if she was not a watcher of RadPod, she said she might have believed it all. She called me right after it happened. She told me she felt dirty and needed a shower. I understood.

This is what we are fighting. It’s not just some backwoods’ militants who believe in lizard people, it is also happening to our neighbors right next store.

While I am glad to have a dignified and sane leader of our beautiful nation lowering prescription drug prices, we also need a leader who will prevent the “tube-fed brainwashing sludge” leaching into our homes as part of hybrid warfare to disable people’s minds en masse.

As RadPod guest Keir Giles told us:

“Short of recognition at the very senior level that there is a problem and admitting what the problem is, and pointing to those ways in which Russia is delivering this hostile information into US society and the consequences of it, nothing is ever actually going to change.

The problem in a way is not a media issue, it's a counterintelligence issue, because the only thing that is going to make a difference is establishing those connections that actually lead these major voices in the US media to parrot Russian disinformation.”

And of course, what I have been reporting on is the fact that we are just in the early stages of understanding the massive intelligence breach and its impact on the 2016 election and our democracy.

I realize it’s my fight. I chose it. I will keep fighting. I just would like some reinforcements.

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Bette Dangerous is a reader-funded magazine and Substack bestseller. Thank you to all monthly, annual, and founding members. Thank you, as well, to those who support my work with coffee tips and who buy my ebooks. My reflection, Confessions of a ‘Fox Blonde’ was just published in Byline Supplement. In a review of my latest ebook, the erotic novella Fox Undercover, I’ve been called “The punk rock Anaïs Nin” and a “powerful woman - the book is smart and sexy AF.”

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More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter, author, and 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.