VIDEO: Therapy with David Pepper
VIDEO: Therapy with David Pepper
BETTE MEMBERS: Please see the video from our Happy Hour strategy sesh with David Pepper, which really felt like a big group hug/therapy session.
***Bette members will find the video below the paywall. If you would like to join our community events and access video and audio recaps, please take out a subscription. If you are not yet a member, you can find a print summary below:
Fans of David Pepper know how important his writing and activism is to exposing attacks on democracy. No one in America is better at coaching us on how we to on offense. Each post from David’s Pepperspectives Substack offers essential framing, while exposing corruption and encouraging where and how to take action.
Those who attended our Tuesday strategy sesh learned some very essential narrative framing:
“It’s Trump against you, and what freedoms are you willing to give up.”
And it was important to have a space to express the emotional sturm und drang of the week:
“If felt like a gut punch… I kept wondering what the rest of the world thought of us, not just Biden, but Trump engaged in truly over the top, authoritarian style propaganda… Stalin level lies.
“The media still doesn’t understand that this is what he does… Trump’s a serial liar… it was just this perfect storm of awful… people forget how awful he was, that’s why he lost by seven million votes, people were scared after Covid… he got crushed, it wasn’t even close. We’ve sort of forgotten that… so assume the worse, and then assume worst than that.“
He said people need to get with the program and never forget that Trump’s worse than you think and to prepare accordingly.
“A lot of the shock we’re feeling is that it’s really all on the line, but the sad truth is, it’s always been on the line — the closer we are to a diverse America being in the majority the fiercer those subverting democracy fight. That’s the reality… Any American who really cared about a diverse democracy, that’s how they always felt. John Lewis, the Suffragettes, it’s always been that way, that’s our real history.
“There have been moments worse, there have been Supreme Courts as bad as today’s… and the Suffragettes and the Civil Rights leaders, who started in a far worse position than we’re in today, they overcame it all. We can do it, if we wake up to the reality. We’ve done this in tougher odds, in a deeper hole, and we can do a ton of good this year and then once we’re done with that, we never make the mistake again of taking this democracy for granted, because that’s what we’re paying the price for because I think we did for a long time.”
Join me in weeping and then get to work.
As David says, this is an election about Donald Trump vs you and your freedoms, and that’s how we push the narrative forward to go on offense.
“The more real the better, it’s about IVF, vaccines in schools, it’s about Dobbs.”
It’s about women rolling up their sleeves, as I’ve written previously in my recap of RadPod’s latest Jason Stanley interview.
Quite frankly, women need to turn out in numbers that will rock the world and shut these fascists down for good.
Quick hot tip: David recommends a book he’s reading titled Comeback, Routing Trumpism, Reclaiming the Nation, and Restoring Democracy’s Edge by Steven Fish, which explains how Trump uses dominance and fear, and how we can learn to be dominant in a positive way through strength and humor — he used Nancy Pelosi as an example of how to dominate with class.
Another hot tip: I recommend David’s latest book about Project 2025: A Novel, which he is serializing at his Substack. That, and his epic tome Laboratories of Autocracy.
Onward and upward.
Keep scrolling for the video link, and please consider subscribing if you’re not yet a member! Thank you!
****
****
Bette Dangerous is a reader-funded magazine. Thank you to all monthly, annual, and founding members. Thank you to everyone helping subsidize my summer “workation” travels by doing the following:
Share my reporting with allies
Buying my ebooks — here’s a promo code: Birthday-Special
Also, a private link to an annual membership discount for older adults, those on fixed incomes or drawing disability, as well as activists and members of the media is available upon request at bettedangerous/gmail. 🥹
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.
🤍
Begin each day with a grateful heart.
🤍
BETTE MEMBERS: PLEASE VIEW VIDEO HERE
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Bette Dangerous to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.