‘We Need a Lion’: My Latest ‘Hot Type’ Column in Byline
My weekly Hot Type column in Byline Supplement zeroes in on how in a time of unprecedented peril, Joe Biden needs to roar
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I woke up to hate mail from an ally across the pond.
He doesn’t understand why I stan for Joe Biden. He may not be aware of the great relief pro-democracy forces felt in 2021 when decency returned to the White House. Literally, this is what Biden walked into…
That cartoon by Morten Morland for The Times is everything to me. In a time where noisy mobs angle for headlines, Biden quietly got to work. He put us back in the Paris Accord. He tried to save the North Atlantic Right Whale. His lifetime as a public servant proved valuable. No one knew what he was doing because the labor of democracy isn’t sexy. The media preferred to follow George Santos and Marjorie Taylor Greene around.
But I understand and sympathize with my friend’s visceral reaction. He was responding to my latest Hot Type column, which just dropped in Byline Supplement:
He had only read the intro, and hadn’t gotten to the part where I show what other countries are doing to fight the same war, and how Trump was not elected by any majority — less than 32 percent of all eligible voters is not a majority.
In any case, I wrote today’s column ‘We Need a Lion’ as a last-gasp effort to urge our actual president to stop this fascist train. He has the power at this moment.
Thank you to everyone who supports my work here and at Byline. I believe the work of independent investigative reporters exposing the transnational crime wave has revealed the failing of corporate media in stark contrast.
What a world.
If you are not yet a member of Byline, I am authorized to send a copy of my reports upon request to bettedangerous/gmail.
Below is an excerpt from today’s Hot Type:
Hot Type: We Need a Lion
At a time of unprecedented peril, Americans desperately need Joe Biden to rise from his slumber and save democracy from Trump, argues Heidi Siegmund Cuda
In a Rose Garden photo op, President Joe Biden promised a peaceful transfer of power. By contrast, the incoming Trump regime is promising state-sponsored violence on day one.
You can’t have a peaceful transfer of power to a regime that is promoting violence. Trump is promising to destroy America with a regime of pro-Kremlin sycophants. He has declared war on America. He is promising the initiation of mass deportations at 12:01 pm on January 20, 2025, the minute he is inaugurated.
But at a time when we need the ferocity of a lion, we get a lamb.
All of the good and great work that Biden has done — his steady hand, his decency, his ability to steer America’s economy out of a global pandemic and return it to the envy of the world — all of that is being diminished in his final days where pro-democracy Americans are desperate for a hero of historic proportions.
The majority of Americans are pro-democracy. The majority did not vote for Donald Trump — convicted felon, coup inciter, Putin stan. Less than 32% of all eligible voters voted for Donald Trump.
Maybe it’s the guns Biden fears, but do we not have a military?
Maybe it’s fear of disrupting the supply of cheap Russian petrol but do we not see the future? Biden put us back in the Paris Accord. He knows the US needs to lead on renewables, showing the way to be weaned off petrol.
We need a leader to talk cold truth to us.
Just tell us the truth about the information war, and how Russia didn’t need to fire a shot.
As Keir Giles, author of Who Will Defend Europe?, told me Thursday:
“Russia doesn’t actually necessarily need to roll tanks across the border to capture a country,” said Giles, who also wrote Russia’s War On Everybody. “They can put their own people in charge of the country, and therefore, direct its policy and decide what it does to favor Russian interests. And we’ve seen that not just in the United States but also look at what has happened in Georgia where you don’t need to rig an election if you’ve got a ruling party that has made sure it’s only going to go one way and is busily shutting down the opposition.
“If you put a pro-Russian party in power in any of these countries that is the direction it is actually likely to go. And of course, that ties in with the promises that we’ve heard from Trump that now that people have voted for him a second time, they won’t need to vote again.”
In Georgia, there are mass protests on the streets, in America, there’s a quiet paralysis.
Already the buyer’s remorse among some Trump supporters is settling in. In the hours and days after the November 5 election, headlines of regret sprouted up like mushrooms after a bitter rain.
Trump Supporters Express Regret
Muslims ‘Regret’ Voting for Trump
Arab-Americans Slam ‘Pro-Israel’ Cabinet Picks
Dearborn Residents Show Remorse After Trump Win: ‘He’s Playing Us’
Regret: Trump Voters Hit with Brutal Reality
“I ended up voting for Trump, and I regret it”
It is almost like a dark spell has been broken.
In a Supreme Court ruling this year, presidents in America were given the power of kings, and there is so much President Biden could do today, in this moment, in this grave and dark hour.
Both Elon Musk and Donald Trump are committing crimes in plain sight — openly communicating with Vladimir Putin — operating as unregistered foreign agents. In previous decades, we called it treason. Musk used his social media platform to tilt the election toward Trump. Covert influence activities are not journalism, according to the US State Department. Seize his properties, freeze his assets, like we do with other criminal oligarchs.
We need a President who roars, who calls an emergency meeting with our enforcement agencies.
Our FBI and Justice Department, which showed Americans in September the vast infiltration of our media sphere by Russians connected to Russian military intelligence, could release the list of known Russian propagandists — comedians, professors, academics, think tank operatives, businessmen, politicians, veterans, influencers, journalists.
A release of that list could further break the spell.
Our federal government could detain those known to be illegally cooperating with our foreign enemies in this massive decapitation strike of the US…
Only in a world where people are living in an alternate reality created for them would blue collar people vote for billionaires to deliver them austerity.
As Timothy Snyder just explained: Trump himself lives in a fictional ‘reality’.
“He understands not the rules of reality, but the rules of fiction. So for him, there’s no such thing as lying, because there’s no such thing as truth,” explained Snyder, a Yale professor who wrote On Tyranny.
That statement is our emergency.
President Biden could immediately disrupt the delivery of weapons-grade propaganda…
That is not censorship — it’s defending our citizens from the Russian military and US traitors.
French authorities — by arresting the CEO of Telegram and charging him for officiating crimes on his platform, and by requesting Marine Le Pen be banned from running for public office in her embezzlement trial — is showing the world you don’t have to cower in fear. On Thursday, Brazilian police formally charged Jair Bolsonaro and 36 of his backers of not only being involved in a coup, but of an assassination plot of the current President…
Despite Putin’s nuclear willy waving, obeying in advance does not work, just ask the media anchors who traveled to Mar-a-Lago how that turned out.
We need a lion.
Biden can be that lion.
He just authorized Ukraine to strike Russia with US missiles.
Some are calling it too little too late, but to me, it offers evidence that he knows who the real enemy is…
On November 4, we were a multi-racial democracy in the process of succeeding. On November 5, we were positively medieval.
There is a quote in Keir Giles’s book, Who Will Defend Europe?, where a former commander from a Baltic state told him:
“We know what happens if we don’t fight — we may die, if we don’t, we die anyway…”
Over and over, I am haunted by quotes from brilliant authors.
“Gradually and then suddenly” — a quote from Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 book The Sun Also Rises as a character describes how he went bankrupt.
“Gradually and then suddenly.”
And from Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead:
“There must have been a moment — at the beginning — where we could have said no, but somehow we missed it.”
We missed the moment at the beginning, and now, here we are, the generation that witnesses the curtain coming down on democracy.
We are approaching the final scene as if it’s all a fait accompli.
In this winter of our discontent, we need a lion.
The above is just an excerpt from my Hot Type column. As always, I ask those who can afford to support a small global team of investigative reporters to please take out a subscription to Byline Supplement.
I also understand that if you are not able to do so at this moment, the good chaps at Byline allow me to send the column to Bette members upon request, as I noted above. Just zip a request to bettedangerous/gmail. New members will also find they are invited to unlock one report at the Byline site.
To my Bette members who support both publications, please forward the column to your allies. We have a very small window to encourage Biden to take action.
Maybe he will be remembered for what he didn’t do.
The future is unwritten.
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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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Well I posted my message to you on Facebook and they could it down! There is nothing mean, or hateful, it untrue in what I wrote! The people from back home are all on Facebook and that is where I well get feed back from relatives and friends on what I have to say about anything so good some not so good, but that is OK. So I re posted what happened to my post that Facebook took it down and I said nothing improper about anyone not even trump. And that trump and his followers have said the hate speech all over the news stations, in print, online for all citizens to see and hear, but they are afraid of me a 75 year old handicap woman who cannot walk without her walker more than a few steps! I am now so MAD at Facebook I could scream!! PS I also posted your WE NEED A LION to Facebook!
I have never been more disappointed than to think our President Joe Biden well go down in our collective consciousness as the man who did not save DEMOCRACY. How can I allow such a thing to happen, me a nobody a 75 year olds handicap old woman! I don’t drive or have money Please tell me what to do! Do I get down on my hands and knees and crawl to Washington DC to appeal to a man I respected with everything I had to save us all from this tragedy that has fallen on American a man who seems to at this point in time given up on Us all! I know he is tried at doing the peoples work and being mocked for his actions on our behalf but my faith never wavered not once. I didn’t want him to step down, i know full well that putting someone else so late in the process is ill advised on all fronts. But Kamaka was so smart, so sure of how she could improve our lives, all Americans women, men, children, migrants, many people from so many countries that are here for the freedom they well have for the first time, religious freedoms to worship free of government intervention, I could go on but where well that get me? I want that strong man the President Biden I voted for and Vice President Kamaka who I also voted for this time. My husband had cancer, he is in his 3rd year of recovery and in no shape to fight in another war, Vietnam took so much from him then, and at 74 with failing eye sight I doubt he could see the enemy! My people and my husband’s people all have lived into their nineties , his mother is 91 next year. I don’t think myself or my husband well be that lucky we can not survive a coming war with the trump regime that he and his like well rain down on America and it’s civilians citizens. Without our SS, my Medicare, my husband’s small military income and a small pension we have nothing, and well lose our house! That day well be my death date as I don’t think I well get far with my walker and our three little dogs. All I have left is to plead with those still in power of our government to take ACTION on BEHALF of the AMERICAN PEOPLE TO FIGHT FOR US and I am sure that other AMERICANS WELL COME FORWARD TO FIGHT TOO! Sorry I am so frightened at this time in my life, I never thought it could very happen here, I was so STUPID!!