Welcome to West Russia: My Latest Hot Type Column for Byline
In today’s Hot Type column in Byline Supplement, I report on what happens when we let oligarchs run the politicians.
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In the country of Georgia, the people are in the streets. In Strange Weather, I listed examples of effective Resistance.
I am finding relief in the moments when I first wake up in the morning, and it takes a minute to recall the events of the week. I cherish those moments, and when reality presents, I remember I’ve been here before. November 9, 2016. March of 2018, when Project Veritas operatives blew up my life with an orchestrated demolition. March 3, 2023, when US traitors linked to Trump incited death threats. Now, again, the evening of November 5, 2024 — the election that turned America into Russia in the ‘90s.
When I interviewed geopolitical analyst Joni Askola last week for RadPod with HiFi, he told us that was the forecast in America. So I reflected back to what that means and what it looks like and what we can expect, if we don’t resist.
I also wrote a screenplay about a woman in the French Resistance — an American actress who saved the lives of 42 airman in real life — so I know what it took and how critical her network was and how she relied on Nazis who hated Hitler to help her. Believe it or not, we will find allies within the system who will help try. My hope is that we can avoid the violence that was ‘90s Russia, but the short window we have to arrest traitors is closing.
As always, I can credit inspiration from my brilliant podcast partners. The title of my latest Hot Type column for Byline Supplement, the magazine of Byline Times, comes from Jim Stewartson. If you have not joined his mind-war community, now is a good time. Jim wrote:
“We stopped doing ‘politics’ in 2016 when we let the Russians choose our President through psychological warfare and then failed to do anything about it.”
As he documents MAGA/QAnon cult members “now openly lionizing Putin as savior in league as Trump”, he writes: “This is going to rapidly accelerate while we all watch it happen. Welcome to West Russia.”
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.
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: Welcome to West Russia
Heidi Siegmund Cuda on the disturbing parallels between Russia in the 1990s and the grim forecast for the US post-election
“Nothing good is going to happen here in a long time.”—filmmaker Ernst Lubitsch, at his going away party in Berlin, December 14, 1932
People ask me how I’m doing, and I tell them, “I’m tired”. Like Madeline Kahn as Lili Von Shtupp in Blazing Saddles, “I’m exhausted.”
For more than eight years, I have investigated and investigated and investigated the intersection of mob corruption and PT Barnum stagecraft, and we need to face the music: the criminals won.
In the United States, oligarchs are running the politicians. Donald Trump and JD Vance are the frontmen for this crime spree, but it’s the oligarchs — both foreign and domestic — who put them in power. It’s the Catholic cabal on the Supreme Court that helped them along, as unlimited dark money propped up candidates with greasepaint on their face and corruption in their heart.
The United States of America became a hall of mirrors, where good economies were warped to look like bad economies and decent politicians were made to look indecent and pundits misjudged the clown as Bozo and not John Wayne Gacy.
Democracy was just murdered to thunderous applause, and those who saw it coming were called alarmist, but they were also the people who read history books or have lived experience — who know struggle from their unique perspectives or had fled authoritarian countries.
In the 2015 Frontline PBS documentary, Putin’s Way, we see how it was done three decades ago in Russia. How money was stolen from the people — money that was meant for the starving ended up in the pockets of a deputy mayor from St. Petersburg and his cronies. The theft was never investigated to completion, because when that deputy mayor — Vladimir Putin — became President at the turn of the century, one of his first official acts was to make it impossible to prosecute a sitting President. The crime spree continued unabated, with his St. Petersburg gang benefitting richly.
The documentary shows his journey from “unemployed spy to modern day tsar”. And the people, who were breathing their first taste of freedom after the collapse of the Soviet Union, excited about liberal democracy, got a metaphorical noose around their necks as Kremlin-linked ‘bloggers’ moved in to ensure the Russian people were mind-hacked online, drawn away from any notions of Western freedom and pointed toward totalitarian rule.
The Kremlin crushed independent TV and pushed out any political challengers by the mid-2000s. Before taking their hybrid war on the road, they targeted their own people’s minds first and continuously.
Geopolitical analysts like Joni Askola watched America this week with horror.
Finland-based Askola, who threads his analysis on X/Twitter, predicts that the US is on the cusp of an accelerated slide into violence and inequality.
“By successfully buying their way into power, the South African oligarchs are now exerting influence in the US through their proxies, Donald Trump and JD Vance,” Askola told Byline Supplement. “The US is gradually shifting toward a situation similar to 1990s Russia, where oligarchs control politicians and pursue their own interests rather than those of the state. This leads to a violent and unequal society where citizens feel powerless to shape their own futures. Although we haven't reached that stage yet, history indicates that oligarchs in such environments often end up waging bloody conflicts at some point.”
His threads are an important document of this moment in time.
He writes: “Trump's Secret Administration: South African billionaire oligarchs, with backing from Russia and China, have succeeded in seizing control over the United States, and the majority of Americans are totally indifferent!”
Referring to Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, he continues: “This group of friends cannot become President themselves because they were not born in the US, so they chose to exert influence indirectly by supporting Donald Trump and controlling his VP.”
He explained that the core problem with a group of foreign-born oligarchs gaining power indirectly is that “they do not align with the interests of Americans. These individuals will consistently prioritize their business and personal interests above all else.”
He said that from their attempts to destroy fiat currency, to announcements of Musk running the Orwellian sounding Department of Government Efficiency – where he promises to run things like X/Twitter (!), which devolved into a fascist hellscape on his watch – the destruction is intentional.
“These individuals are essentially striving to turn the United States into a failed, corrupt and violent developing nation akin to 1990s Russia, where oligarchs wield the power to make decisions driven by their own interests.”
… The carefully curated alternate reality built to deliver a MAGA victory was missed by the punditocracy.
As Salon political reporter Chauncey DeVega told Byline Supplement: “The pundits were mostly talking to themselves.”
DeVega walked over to Chicago’s Trump Tower on Tuesday night and saw the unbridled joy on the multiethnic faces of Trump supporters, reveling in the victory of their God King.
And all I can do is think of a Jesus quote from Luke 23:34 of the New King James version of the Bible:
“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.”
And part of the reason that they did not know that their love of Trump’s comedy and idolatry would end America as we know it is because the media at large never actually told them…
This hall of mirrors grows even more distorted when the most-viewed Russian state TV channel produced a segment about Melania Trump coming back to the White House and on the lush studio’s jumbo screens were pornographic images of the former model.
The message was, not only can we take you down, America, we despise you, too.
And the US billionaire and corporate-owned media which profited from the demise of American democracy forgot what happens next.
In 2018, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán encouraged owners of hundreds of Hungarian media properties to ‘donate’ them to a Government allied foundation. Freedom of the press has been on a steady decline in Hungary since.
In Russia, media tycoon Vladimir Gusinsky was forced to relinquish his empire to the Government…
In 2006, Anna Politkovskaya — a renowned investigative journalist who reported on the Second Chechen War — was assassinated on Putin’s birthday Oct 7, 2006.
We’ve been warning on these pages for years that we need to pull the roots of transnational organized crime out of the United States; mafia money embedded in Silicon Valley, real estate, academia, media, before it became a malignant situation. As with Russia in the 1990s, organized crime had entangled itself within the foundation of the newly formed capitalist system…
As Kremlin File cohost Olga Lautman wrote on X/Twitter: “Russia has had a corrupt and cruel system for centuries but when Putin came to power the first thing he did was replace all important roles in government and state owned companies with his criminal thugs. And the main qualification was loyalty.”
On Tuesday, we did not look like America. We watched a foreign Government interfere with our country in multiple ways — a decade of information warfare, direct communication from top Republican leaders with Putin, and terrorist attacks on American soil disrupted our elections, in the form of 67 bomb threats at polling stations, which the FBI said originated in Russia.
Bomb threats at polling places strike at the very heart of our erstwhile democracy. Internet sleuths are crying foul play on our election systems, but our biggest failing is being able to deal with actual treason. That is what sealed our fate.
By Wednesday, Special Counsel Jack Smith was said to be quietly wrapping up federal prosecutions into Trump’s actual treason — inciting an attempted coup.
As disinformation analyst Jim Stewartson told Byline Supplement:
“We stopped doing ‘politics’ in 2016 when we let the Russians choose our President through psychological warfare and then failed to do anything about it.
As he documents MAGA/QAnon cult members “now openly lionizing Putin as savior in league as Trump”, he writes: “This is going to rapidly accelerate while we all watch it happen. Welcome to West Russia.”
We lost the war for the soul of America because we refused to acknowledge it existed. We were left with a pocketful of platitudes and pundits selling hopium to the masses about a 2028 ticket that will never come, because that’s not how this works.
I am told by friends in Russia that people sit around and watch game shows all day, as they send their sons off to die in a “special military operation.”
George Orwell weeps.
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