VIDEO: Pro-Democracy Messaging from Bette’s All-Stars!

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Despair is the enemy of action.—Heidi Siegmund Cuda

Vote for the prosecutor over the felon.—Martin Sheil

The number one goal of combat propaganda is the demoralization of the population and army of the adversary… We all have agency. We just keep going.—Zarina Zabrisky

First of all, we need to acknowledge that in the information war, there are no civilians, so that means everybody is a target. But on the other hand, everybody can be a soldier, everybody can fight back, especially in the time of social media.—Dietmar Pichler

We've decided that our job in this election period is to damage Trump. So we do as much of that as possible.—Julie DeLaurier

We're in a war. March. Put some steel in your spines. Let's go, every single one of you. And every single person on this call needs to get a hold of five people and say, “Yo, you're going to vote, right?” We're in a fight for our country.—High Fidelity

Kamala Harris represents democracy, and Trump doesn't represent democracy. Trump don’t like democracy.—Dmitrii Kovegin

When we connect with each other, we keep ourselves healthy, we keep ourselves strong. Our reality is what we make it.—Andrea Hildebran Smith

We are all democracy warriors, it’s go time.—Desia Batiste

Are we downhearted? A thousand times no!

In 94 days, I will be in Washington DC with fellow democracy warriors celebrating the Inauguration of America’s first woman President.

In order to get us across the finish line, I invited a group of Bette All-Stars to give us their best pro-democracy messaging so we can each inform those in our networks.

You will find video from the event below the paywall, but everyone can access the print highlights below — please feel free to share this print recap with everyone who you think might benefit. Onward.

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The First Ever Bette’s All-Stars Happy Hour — Messaging Highlights

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HOST: Welcome everybody to Bette Dangerous's First All-Stars. I was in a meeting last week where the despair was palpable. Everybody was already thinking about where they were going to move to, as if the election outcome is a foregone conclusion, as if we don't have agency, as if we are not made of tougher stuff. 

And so I thought, what we should do is bring our experts in who understand this world and understand messaging to give us some great pro-democracy messaging in a pep rally format.

And so who do we have?

• Martin Sheil from Chicago

• Dietmar Pichler from Vienna

• Dimitrii Kovegin, originally from Moscow, now in America

• Zarina Zabrisky, reporting from Ukraine

• Julie Delaurier, New York City, where she's been protesting every week against Fox News

• High Fidelity, co-host RADICALIZED Truth Survives podcast and Silicon Valley technologist

• Andrea Hildebran Smith, an activist calling in from Florida, on her way home from having had to evacuate due to Milton

• Desia Batiste, an activist calling in from Blue Tennessee

So we have a wonderful group. LFG! Marty, you’re up:

MARTIN SHEIL, retired IRS criminal investigator:

I'm a law enforcement guy. I always have been. And you know, if we're going to have a democracy, it has to be a democracy — central to a democracy is the rule of law. And I guess, most concerning this past week are statements coming out of the Trump camp that Trump is looking to use the military against those who oppose him, specifically, and the MAGA folks.

Vote for the person who’s for the good guys, who is amongst the good guys, and vote against the person who's going to use the military against the good guys. So that's, that's my message.

ZARINA ZABRISKY, author, poet, war correspondent in Ukraine — Zabrisky broke the story on how the people of Kherson are being hunted by Russians with drones in a human safari:

Everything that we are experiencing now is a part of a hybrid war that has been going on for at least 10 years, and for most folks out there in the wide world, unbeknownst to them.

I'm currently in the part which is experiencing the conventional war, hot war, you guys are in the part that is living the cyberwar, information warfare, mind war.

Since Heidi would like me to focus on the specific weapon that has been drilled into me in the Soviet Union, when I had the misfortune of attending the combat propaganda class, not because I wanted to, for those of you who are not familiar, but because I was forced to. And I'm actually very glad that I was, because now I can tell all of you good people what it is, and very few people have this experience or speak openly about it.

The number one goal of combat propaganda is the demoralization of the population and army of the adversary.—Zarina Zabrisky

And in this equation, you guys are the population of the adversary. So you are being targeted specifically in order for you to be demoralized. So when you have the flood of information coming at you from various sources, and that includes social media, includes Twitter, your preferred news source, whatever it is, and it could be as innocent as emails from your family, that is all targeted to make you feel bad. And it might not be something direct. It might not be something that is mentioned in the elections or Trump or Democrats or Republicans or even America. It could be something as obscure as, the death of multiple kittens somewhere in Madagascar. But if you hear about a lot of kittens dying all over the world, eventually, if you you know if you like cats, you will be upset — if you don't like cats, there will be another message targeting you because they are multi multi-pronged, multi-faceted, multi-directional.

It's sort of like a hydra — the monster with many heads, and so it's coming at you from every direction and where you're not expecting it. It's horrifying, and it's aimed to make you confused, disoriented and not able to process information when you got it. So that's called demoralization.

It’s working on the emotional level. So my message would be, know that you are the target of a demoralization campaign, and take every bit of information, every piece of news that's coming at you with a piece of grain — use critical thinking, and ask yourself, “Is this meant to demoralize me?”

HOST: Wow. Thank you so much for that. Zarina. I told Zarina, before we got on the call that I gave myself my own psychic shift today by tweeting out how I’m looking forward to in 97 days, inaugurating our first woman President. I'm just cutting through the shit. I don't want to see Trump's face anymore. I don't want to see him standing anywhere. I want to pound the message that we're going to get through this. It's not hopium, it's what we do. Okay, now on to Dietmar…

DIETMAR PICHLER, disinformation analyst, founder Disinfo Resilience Network, Vienna:

What we are doing here, in this discussion that we are having online, is actually fighting back. We exchange information, we connect and this is a very powerful tool, because in the information war, there are no barriers.

I would say 30 years ago, you would need to have a lot of money to do something.

So it's all about connecting people. It's about being smart. It's about knowing the right people, having a good sense of who to trust, and who not to trust.

We need to communicate, especially towards the far right, that we are actually the Patriots, because the issue at stake is patriotism when it's about foreign powers, foreign adversaries who try to manipulate us and use their proxies, their agents of influence within our democratic countries, to subvert us and to gain more influence, to gain more power.

And in my opinion, no politician who in any way is connected to these authoritarian leaders can be considered a Patriot in any way.

So yeah, basically, that's my message here, to stick to our values and to communicate this quite clearly.

HOST: Thank you! So we're going to go to Julie, one of my favorite Patriots! Fire away!

JULIE DELAURIER: We've decided that our job in this election period is to damage Trump. So we do as much of that as possible.

(She holds up multiple signs she carries while protesting outside of Fox News in NYC — among them:

Fascists Tell Big, Bold Lies;

Felon; Stop Project 2025,

Stop Trump;

I’m Above the Law (with photos of Stalin, Putin, Trump, and Hitler).

Outside Fox, we hand out flyers, and we have a lot of European tourists. And they are astounded at where we are. They're astounded at where America is at this juncture. And I say it's because they have a first-hand history of fascism that we do not, so it's crept in… and we don't recognize it for what it is. We don't call it what it is, which is why we're very clear in calling it what it is: fascism, dictatorship. We use those words to make it clear what we're fighting. And I'll tell you, I'm not leaving. I'll stay and fight.

HIGH FIDELITY: Maybe it's just because I was in the Marine Corps, but when I hear that people are feeling down and feeling depressed about the situation we're facing and the battle we're in: you don't get a choice, kids.

We're in a war. March. Put some steel in your spines. Let's go, every single one of you. And every single person on this call needs to get a hold of five people and say, “Yo, you're going to vote, right?”

This is not the America we grew up in. Whatever this Trump thing is, it's not us. Call Five people.

ANDREA HILDEBRAN SMITH, Resistance Mom podcast, and along with her wife, Nadine Smith, the Executive Director of Equality Florida, both are vital activists at mobilizing the defeat of DeSantis hate bills:

When we connect with each other, we keep ourselves healthy, we keep ourselves strong.—Andrea Hildebran Smith

We are couple of hours into our drive trying to get ourselves home, back to St Petersburg, which experienced hurricane Milton just a few days ago. The fight we're in is a fight for democracy, and without a democracy, we can't make decisions as a culture, as a society, or even as a as a world, about how to keep ourselves safe, how to keep our our industry from developing in ways that destroy us.

So about discouragement and hope, I want to say there were days after the Democratic Convention and the days after the debate, where I noticed how hopeful and excited I was, and all the people in my world, who are wanting to see Kamala Harris win. We carried the airwaves, and there was this lift, and I know that it was discouraging to me to hear stupid, crappy, meaningless, unworthy sludge come out of the Republican camp.

And that sludge fills up the airways, because our media has decided to be complicit and act as an arm of the Trump campaign, which you just can't see it as anything else — Trump campaign, Russia's campaign, all the same thing. But we have good people. We have a game plan. The fundamentals did not change.

HOST: Thank you my friend! As Andrea makes her way back home, another important message is that Trump got an F on every single environmental metric. We can’t afford to have an admin filled with climate deniers aligned with an axis of evil. Now, on to my friend Dmitri Kovegin. He volunteered for two Navalny campaigns, was poisoned, escaped Russia and made his way to America, where he’s been such a pivotal messaging machine for me, and he's all heart.

DMITRII KOVEGIN, pro-democracy activist, and former Navalny volunteer:

We are on a battleground, you know? And when in this crucial situation, we should understand the urgency of moment, and why we fight and what we are fighting for.

Slogans from Kamala Harris, it's about joy. And what kind of joy? It's not just silly happiness or something floating in dreams. It's the joy of education. Because we support people who educate others.

We have to support educators.

It's the joy of justice. What Kamala Harris represents is justice for everyone.

Right now, the Republican Party is divided, and Democratic Party leaders are at least united. We deliver a message, concepts of consistency of leadership, consistency of predictability, just predictability itself, because it's how we can trust each other and based on those ideas of joy, trust, consistency, we do something for defending our democracy.

HOST: Thank you Dmitrii! You taught me something key, that Putin envies are trust and the trust we have with one another, and is always attacking that trust. So we need to cherish it. And now to Dee Batiste, who is helping Tennessee go blue!

DESIA BATISTE, activist with Blue Tennessee and Advocacy Arena:

I love what Dimitri was saying about leaning into that joy. And I say that we have to harness our power, that we are each more powerful than we actually realize. And you know, like this is an old saying — people who are organizers like to say:

Our vote is our voice, and our voice is our power, and we need to lean into it and not be afraid of it, because when we harness it collectively, we are much stronger together.—Desia Batiste

And you know, Madam VP, soon to be next president, says: when we fight, we win. And of course, as a veteran like Hi Fi knows, it's no time to cry, baby.

HOST: Round two, lightning round from each panelist.

MARTIN SHEIL: One of Abraham Lincoln's least known sayings was that laws without law enforcement is just good advice. So get out and vote!

ZARINA ZABRISKY: We all have agency, even if it seems that you can't break the wall, there's a wall of silence. Nobody hears you. It's not true… awareness is not enough. Action is everything, but information and awareness leads to action, and we all can act. It all accumulates and leads to the result, not immediately. It's not the instant gratification. You just keep going. You remember that demoralization is the first goal of the people who are pushing this information warfare campaign on us. So you just keep going. You find some joys. Previous speakers spoke, you take care of yourself. You know, eat well, do fitness and one practical piece of advice that I would like to share is not engaging with trolls and bots on social media, because that takes a lot of your precious time and a lot of your emotional reserve, and it is designed to be that way… clear your space… So my final departing word for you is to stay strong. You know, don't lose faith. I'm learning that from Ukrainians here. If they were not such strong optimists, in a way, they would have succumbed a long time ago, but I've learned how to persevere in the face of the unspeakable, and so I'm here to give it to you. Thank you very much for being here, and let's hope for victory.

DIETMAR PICHLER: There is a spoiler candidate — Jill Stein. And I know that she's a Russia Today guest. She's a Russian asset, I would say. Be aware!

JULIE DELAURIER: We're going to be protesting tomorrow at the New York Times, because it's not just Fox, it's the New York Times. And here's the flyer. They've done this before. This was an article — a puff piece on Hitler 12 days before the Nazis invaded Poland. It includes a fuzzy warm line about how the Führer is very partial to English flannels and tweeds. This is 12 days before Hitler invaded Poland! A Hitler at home in the clouds in Berchtesgaden. They're doing it again. They've been doing it for eight years. They make money when Trump is in office.

Okay, next point, I want to make a plug for going into the streets. Cyber activism is great, but please remember how the streets filled across this country and, in fact, across the world after Trump was elected, not before, after. We need people in the streets before the election. (She tells two great stories about Pelosi and Harris.)

I beg you, get in the streets now. Do not wait till January 6. Do not wait until November 6. Do not wait till January 21. Do it now. The time to fight is now. I don't want to have to prove that I'm as courageous as Dimitrii and Zarina. Because I don't know if I am. I don't know if I have your courage — to do what I do now is easy. I have laws that protect me. You guys didn't — you put your lives on the line. My dad put his life on the line to fight Hitler, you guys put your lives on the line now to fight Putin. I don't know if I have your courage. So please, let's get out now. Now, while we still can.

DMITRII KOVEGIN: Put bumper stickers on your cars. And my message is: Trump don't like democracy.

ANDREA HILDEBRAN SMITH: Voting and democracy is about you choosing. You have agency. So hold yourself in a space of choosing. Choose who you listen to, choose what emotions you want to stay with, choose who your candidate is, choose who you want to invest your time in, but, more than anything, see if you can recall the information that inspires you and choose how you want to feel right now. We don't have to feel the way they want us to feel. We certainly don't have to act the way they'd want us to act, but it begins with choosing where we want to stand and be in this world and in this fight.

DESIA BATISTE: Our democracy has had a lot of holes punched in it. We have a lot of cracks. And I just like to remind people that our democracy is only as strong as our active participation in it, and so we need to be all hands on deck. And I like to think of it as kind that Japanese pottery, the broken stuff, and then they put it back together with gold, that is what we're going to do with our democracy.

MARTIN SHEIL: Vote for the rule of law. I feel so buoyed and boosted by every one of these warriors of democracy.

HOST: Me too. Thank you everyone. LFG!

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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.

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Begin each day with a grateful heart.

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