‘The Hardest War’ - Is Now
We are at war, we are islands, and we have to start fighting it together
I open my emails. I cover my eyes, squinting, like I’m watching a horror film.
I have trained myself to scan the email name right to left - to determine if the name is pornographic or in any way offensive. If it is, I have trained myself not to look at the profile image, which is invariably designed to traumatize me.
I screenshot it, and upload into a document that I share with the FBI agents assigned to my case. I remove the email address from my Substack subscription list. I delete the image, and then I repeat those steps.
This has been going on for 24 days, 19 hours, and 24 minutes.
I have trained myself not to feel anything.
“Nothing they say matters, because they are nothing to you. Nothing anyone says who doesn’t love you matters.”
President Biden’s lead threat analyst for his 2020 campaign, Jackie Singh, taught me that. Like many women in tech and women journalists, she, too, suffered an onslaught of hate terrorism when she excelled in her work. Anyone influential in this war who has the stomach for the work is targeted.
As Gamergate target Brianna Wu taught me, it changes you. So I honor that reality. I respect it. I do not try to minimize it.
I have been the target of hate terrorism ever since I pressed send on my first anti-Trump blog September 17, 2016. We didn’t have words for it back then, but I was a media darling in the second biggest market in the country, and I had influence. And I got hate - right there on my timeline. I started blocking people I’d known for years - they seemed to be under some kind of hate spell. Invasion of the mind snatchers.
This recent escalation is because I am dangerous to those trying to force people to live in unreality, to swallow lies, and fear, to buy into their victimese. Thanks to the many great mentors I interview each week, I see right through all of it, and I see beyond it, and I keep doing the work. You guys make that possible.
The full-time hate terrorism campaign against my podcast, RADICALIZED Truth Survives, is because the guys I work with are punk rock - they truly are all out of f**ks. They keep researching, reporting, and exposing the authoritarian right and the controlled opposition, and the same cadre of single-purpose hate accounts keep swarming them. The guys on my team are the fiercest warriors I know - giving it their all in the fight against disinformation, radicalization - fighting for democracy’s very survival.
If anyone is confused, here is some clarity: today RadPod dropped a news breaker with Vancouver-based reporter Jody Vance. Her online abuser just pleaded guilty after terrorizing her for seven years. He got 12 months probation, so now she and a colleague who was also targeted are filing civil charges against her convicted abuser. She is my hero.
“Harassment is not normal, it is unsafe, it is criminal,” Jody said on RadPod.
After I posted the interview on Twitter, Jody - who has suffered seven years of abuse - was swarmed by our abusers.
So let’s pause a moment. Anonymous accounts targeted our guest with more abuse. I think that is all you need to know.
As Jackie Singh noted:
“I feel sorry for people who fall for disinfo. But the people peddling it are way sadder. They seem to have really empty lives. They’ve given up their bodies and minds to become tools of hatred and division. That’s some of the deepest dystopian shit I’ve ever heard.”
Truth.
“April 18, 2017”
I was at a market in North Hollywood, breaking up a fight between an elderly man and a woman who had stolen his parking spot. I had been doing a lot of that post-election - breaking up fights between angry people, radicalized by the cult of Trump and Russian disinformation campaigns on social media.
I helped to deescalate the situation by telling the man, “Just let it go. It doesn’t matter.”
I guided him into another parking space, and spent some time talking with him. He was in his ‘90s and a full-time caretaker of his wife who had Alzheimer’s. He was very upset at the election of Trump, and how his violent rhetoric had brought out the worst in people. He recognized the fascist creep - he had fought it the first time around. He started telling me about all his favorite presidents. He told me he was still angry at FDR for turning away thousands of Jewish refugees who were fleeing fascism by boat. Many who were forced to return to Europe died in the Holocaust, he said.
I had never heard that story, and I just kept listening to him - he educated me on decades of presidents. When I was sure he was okay, I thanked him for his time. Before I left, he asked me, “What do you think is going on?” I told him, “I think we are in a cyberwar.” I had learned about cyberwar at a lecture I attended led by General Wesley Clark two years earlier.
He nodded and said, “It’s a different kind of war. It’s a war without bombs, but it’s war.”
I thought about him all that night, how he fought in World War II to save us from the very kind of people who were harming us again.
The next morning, on April 19, 2017, I received an email from MoveOn.org inviting me to write a petition. I sat outside on my balcony, and dashed off a manifesto on my phone. I wanted to see the Trump campaign ads, I wanted to see the Cambridge Analytica ads, I wanted to see the Russian ads. I wanted Americans to be able to look squarely in the face of this war, and see who and what was attacking us, and who was on what side.
I wrote:
“Let's force these clandestine operators out of their bunker$ and into the interrogation light, because it's time for citizens to see how their minds were twisted away from the truth by a gaslighting regime that only knows one racket: money.
“Cyber Mind Crimes are War Crimes, we've just never experienced Big Data enabling corruption of this magnitude. It's the first time a cyber misinformation war was waged on American soil, affecting the outcome of a presidency, which many Americans feel is not a legitimate presidency but part of a much larger con.”
Among the people who signed my petition was a gentleman from the UK, who was the first to tip me off to the fact that Brexit was also Russian active measures, and he led me to the great reporting of Carole Cadwalladr.
He wrote these words when he signed my petition:
“This is about transparency in democracy, political integrity and the future direction of our world and society. A political electoral system that is maintained by lies and misinformation to retain power without having the courage to stand up to scrutiny regarding it's claims is an abhorrence which must be nipped in the bud. You have here an opportunity to make a stand for ethics and a set of values in defence of a non totalitarian or repressive regime. You have this power at this juncture. Please use it wisely, as eventually your decision will be judged by history as long as we are still permitted to think for ourselves.”
As long as we are still permitted to think for ourselves.
‘The Hardest War’
Every Thursday before we livestream RadPod & Chill - our mid-week sweary, at-the-bar recap of our previous episode - I join Jim’s Substack group chat. I learn a lot from his friends, and one of them said: “I think this is the hardest war.”
I caught my breath. Paused, and thought, yes, this, exactly. The hardest war.
She went on to say that we are stuck fighting it in isolation - we are in a constant state of trauma - the chaos and destabilization efforts are relentless, and quite frankly, we don’t have enough people fighting in the trenches with us. Each week, I beg our President to acknowledge it, give us resources to fight it, as other countries have done, and then another week goes by.
Me, Jim, and HiFi are on the frontlines every day, and even though we have global alliances with other brave warriors who understand the stakes - many of whom I cherish and celebrate on these pages, many of whom are in Ukraine bravely fighting on the frontlines of the kinetic part of this war - it is still a lonely place.
We are building our community, one at a time, and we are weathering the assaults. But this war is invisible to millions of people, who do not understand that there are no rear areas in an information war. The canyons of loneliness are vast.
“Finding Words”
And then I stumble across some words - words in a cyberwar - a war of words. Amid all the doom-scrolling are words from someone I don’t know on Twitter, who writes something so perfect, they feel like a warm summer breeze entering my heart. Two months ago, I wrote an investigation that bears out his words - The Rolling Insurrection: How Putin is Waging a Covert War Against the West - but I am always seeking reinforcements and often find them in the comfort of strangers.
Here are those words. A gentleman named Jack Hopkins wrote:
I’ve said it before, and I won’t stop saying it: While it started many years ago, we are in a full on overt attack phase from Russia.
For many years, it was a covert attack. No longer. When an enemy is willing to reveal their position, rest assured there will be no retreat. From that moment on, it’s going to be a fight to the end.
The GOP and Russia are One. And. The. Same.
Eat right, get plenty of sleep each night and keep yourself healthy. We need you in this fight. YOUR vote and efforts will be historically crucial.
If you’re over 50-like me-it’s very likely that you’ll not see the end of this fight in your lifetime.
We fight for the children, and their freedom. Read that again. We fight for the children…and THEIR freedom.
If that doesn’t inspire you, check your pulse.
Our very democracy depends on your aliveness and alertness.
It should be noted when I first met Jim Stewartson it wasn’t to interview him. I had seen his work on Twitter, how he warned people to stay away from DC on January 6. I, like Dave Troy, try to meet as many people in real life as possible. I didn’t interview him that first day, because I just wanted to see how he had pieced together what he knew. He walked me through it all step by step, and explained the origins of the radicalization that was occurring and who was behind it. I had seen his TedX with Dave Troy, and Dr. Stephen Hassan.
I wanted to share my story, too. He knew exactly who was behind my attack in 2018. He had so much empathy for what I had been through. It was a relief to have a witness.
We walked for a long time that day, and when he finished explaining what he knew, my last question for him was, “Why do you do it?”
He said, “Because I don’t want my children to grow up in a fascist hellscape.”
We fight for the children, and their freedom. Read that again. We fight for the children…and THEIR freedom.
We fight for the children, and their freedom. Read that again. We fight for the children…and THEIR freedom.
We fight for the children, and their freedom. Read that again. We fight for the children…and THEIR freedom.
Join us. Fight with us. Don’t look away.
****
Author’s Note: In the time I have been writing this post, I have removed 15 new free subscribers to Bette, some of which may have been legitimate accounts, but the assailants are devious - they are now using a program to generate and “authenticate” email addresses faster. I am likely removing some genuine free subscribers, and I do apologize for that. This is war, and alas, this is one of the costs of war.
Onward and upward.💘
****
Bette Dangerous is a reader-funded magazine. Thank you to all monthly, annual, and founding members. Thank you as well to all those who support my work with your generous coffee tips and who buy my ebooks. A private link to group activist discounts available upon request.
More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter, 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.
Save the date! The next Bette Dangerous ‘Speakeasy’ Zoom for paid members is Sunday, April 9, 4 pm PT. Each ‘Speakeasy’ features special guests, and if you are not yet a paid member, please consider subscribing to join the community - the annual rate of $60 is currently 15% off through April 1. Looking forward to meeting new members and seeing Bette’s core group. 🤍
(I read these words written on my cybertreason petition from a man in the UK quite often. When we win this war, they will be enshrined in a museum next to the ads I requested so many years ago, along with the boots I and others wore to the Women’s March.)
🤍
“Something Sacred never dies in almost all of us, that can hear the invitation of Truth…”-words from a Bette Dangerous community member