‘Your Freedom Is a Gift: I Ask You to Defend It’ — I offer my year-end reflections in my Hot Type column for Byline
Today’s Hot Type in Byline gave me an opportunity to reflect on 2025, while also focusing on the necessary work in 2026, with words of wisdom from Marci, Marty, Joni, Alex, Tetiana, and Anthony
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I struck a nerve with the tankies — their devotion to an imaginary Russia that never was flares up when their myth is challenged. Cognitive dissonance causes a serious case of whataboutism, and I encourage my readers to use this meme should they encounter a bad case of the age-old Russian propaganda technique:
We are all learning from Ukrainian historian Tetiana Boriak myriad tankie deflection techniques, including the fact that Putin doesn’t respect borders. Nice country you got there, be a shame to lose it to the Russian terrorist mafia state.
Among our most profound lessons from her is this:
So for 40 years, Ukrainian peasants lived without a passport...
They just had certificates saying where they were born, but no passport. Tell this to the leftist who say that the Soviet Union was a paradise.
It was a paradise for those who lived in the cities, especially in Moscow or in St. Petersburg, that were fed by the peasants, like my ancestors, who worked their whole life in the damned collective farm as a cattle with no passport and no rights, and then no pension. Initially, Soviet peasants even did not have a pension.
Can you imagine this? The state refused them. The party members had this amazing amount of food rations, special currency, and the privilege of shopping in markets — tell this to the leftists because, for some reason, people who support communism, they think they would end up on the top of this pyramid, that they will live in Moscow with a view of the Kremlin, and they would not end up in a Ukrainian village of 1933 where starving mothers ate their children.—Tetiana Boriak for Bette Dangerous, November 23, 2025
So yeah, I don’t romanticize the Russian state — past or present, and that is the theme I open with in today’s Hot Type column for Byline Supplement, where I was offered the opportunity to reflect on 2025 — always reaching further over the waves to an international community of sources who share their brilliant insights — while also focusing us on the hard fight ahead in 2026.
My thesis of this reflection is America is under Russian occupation, we need Europe to step up and lead the free world. SOS.
Thank you as always 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.
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Below is an excerpt from today’s Hot Type.
Hot Type: Your Freedom Is a Gift — I Ask You To Defend It
Heidi Siegmund Cuda argues that America’s spiritual and political nadir in 2025 gives Europe the opportunity to light the way back and to remind everyone of the gift of freedom in 2026
Among the things I learned this year is that the Soviet Union was always a lie, possibly the greatest lie of the 20th century.
I spent many hours in recent weeks interviewing Ukrainian historian Tetiana Boriak, who explained that archival records and speeches from the Bolshevik leaders, as well as from the Ukrainian party from 1919 to 1923, indicate that ‘Russia’ was called ‘Soviet’ to serve three primary goals: to hide the imperial nature of the Russian/Soviet leaders that mentally remained in the matrix of the Russian empire; to combat independent movements in the occupied territories; to gain a baseless positive image in the world as a democratic state.
In the 34 years since its collapse, this never-was-‘union’ continues its occupation of territories that did not belong to it in the first place. As I learned from Keir Giles, the author of Russia’s War On Everybody, Russia missed the enlightenment, and we are forced to live in its dark ages.
I begin here, because to understand what happened to America in the year 2025, you first have to understand what happened in Estonia, Chechnya, Moldova, Belarus, Georgia, Hungary, Ukraine, Slovakia, and only then can you look clear-eyed at the US now.
Using three primary tools — propaganda, cyber attacks, and agents of influence — the Russian state has managed to infiltrate and upend target countries from the inside out, using its over-rated military force only when active measures fail. Puppet regimes rule Chechnya, Belarus, Georgia, Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia, and now America.
The UK was weakened with Brexit, in which Russia was a major player, but it still has time to defend against Russia, as do France and Germany, which are on the brink of being in the grip of America’s fate. Moldova, Romania, and Albania managed to defeat Russia in recent elections, but as we can see in Albania, titushky mobs are already out in force.
I offer this international blow-by-blow on geopolitical events, because the Trump regime is doing everything it can to obfuscate the obvious: that the big story of 2025 is America is under Russian occupation.
They obfuscate with clickbait fascism, where social media platforms become a vehicle for Trump-branded newsporn — vicious videos of bombings and cruelty, interspersed with oligarch chic home and garden design plans, tough talk on ‘peace’, gilded excess in Mar-a-Lago. I often think of a quote in a New York Times article from 9 December 2017: “Before taking office, Mr. Trump told top aides to think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals.”
We’ve now endured this Reality TV fascism for a decade, with 2025 the culmination of all bad things—including more details of Trump’s close ties to convicted pedophile/Russian-linked financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Performative Sadism
“I think of 2025 as the year when performative sadism became a dominant motif in American politics,” Dr Marci Shore told Byline Supplement. “I wish I had something more cheerful to say. This really does feel like the year when ritual humiliation and performative sadism became a thing.”
Shore, the Chair in European Intellectual History at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto, looks at the rise of Trump as a failure in international law.
“Why has the UN become nothing more than a symbol of its own impotence?” she queried. “The Hague is great, but you’ve got to get those guys there first.”
Disinformation analyst Alexandra Alvarova looks at 2025 as the year we battled dark money feudalism.
“I think 2025 was the darkest year of the 21st century yet,” she said. “I see people organizing and connecting in the US and Europe too. No one can guarantee us that we will win against the dark money feudalism we are facing, but the fact that people organize and share knowledge means we still have hope. Some hope.”
Retired IRS criminal investigator Martin Sheil reminds us that we can’t hope on this side of the grave, as he quotes Irish poet Seamus Heaney:
“History says don’t hope on this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime the longed for tidal wave of justice can rise up and hope and history rhyme.”
“Let that one time life occurrence occur in the year 2026,” Sheil told Byline Supplement. “And free us in America from the horror of all of Donald Trump’s dark tricks; and prove once and for all that the idea of freedom and justice for all, is not just some passing illusion of 2025, but an inspiration to move forward with reborn hope and happiness for the new year just to be alive.”
In truth, the US hit a spiritual bottom in 2025. America lost some of its heart, because it’s been soaked in a steady drip of propaganda for the last decade.
The Year the Fig Leaf Came Off
Despite all the propagandic nonsense, 2025 is the year the fig leaf came off and on February 28, the US surrendered to the terrorist mafia state of Russia in full view of the world when Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky was ganged up on and publicly shamed in a televised visit to the Oval Office.
Zelensky’s return to the US on Sunday for more ‘Russian war wishlist talks’ — this time in Florida — gave Trump the opportunity to hit all of Putin’s talking points — now quite normalized. Trump boasted he’d spoken to Putin before the press conference with Zelensky. As Russia unleashed a barrage of drone and missile attacks on Kyiv, killing and injuring civilians, Trump told the TV cameras: “Russia wants to see Ukraine succeed. It sounds a little strange but President Putin was very generous in his feeling toward Ukraine succeeding.”
I don’t need to delineate all the rest of the evidence of this performative cruelty, it’s there for anyone to see — the boat murders, the innocent people sent to concentration camps, war criminal Putin invited on US soil, the great hack of citizens’ data, the meetings of crime bosses larping as diplomats, it’s a gangster’s free for all. Billionaires’ cuts to USAID resulted in 661,000 deaths to date, two-thirds of which are children.
My columns in this newspaper offer a blow by blow for the truth-curious — but with the fig leaf’s removal, something else has occurred. Something potentially magnificent…
Destiny is calling.
With every indecent and cruel action undertaken by the pro-Kremlin hacks in the White House, the call for Europe to step into the breach and take over as leader of the free world gets louder.
It’s so obvious: the full-throated narrative warfare targeting Europe by Russian propagandists, techlords, and Trump’s regime, should remind Europe of its power…
While the decrepit dying Russian state spews garbage about the EU every minute, consider the facts:
Not only does the EU provide its citizens with human rights and dignity, the EU is the world’s second largest economy—a massive single market driven by strong trade. Its member nations are the world’s largest exporter of manufactured goods. Its currency is robust. And it showed resilience in 2025 and is projecting growth in 2026. Although Germany, France, and Italy still lead, Spain and Poland are catching up.
In other words, its very success is a threat to the autocrats, who are systematically and intentionally demolishing all democratic safeguards and protections.
Decrepit Russia and its US toadies aren’t just going after the EU, their narrative warfare targets the UK, Ukraine, Germany, France, the Baltic states, and anywhere a trace of democracy and human rights remains.
That they deliver their clickbait fascism through social media should reveal an inherent weakness in their plans of destruction. Their abusive shock and awe is landing on everyone’s phones — an exercise in mind control.
And once you know this, you can take away their power.
If you know that Trump is just running a reality show, things get clearer.
I don’t see any of this as politics anymore: you can’t vote your way out of an international mob, but you can with every waking breath demand justice, find a way to get Trump and Putin to The Hague.
As Marci Shore said: “My friend Janine di Giovanni, who runs The Reckoning Project, [which documents war crimes] keeps reminding me every day I express my despair: ‘Eventually we got Milosevic.’”
A New World Born
“As we enter 2026, Europe faces both significant challenges and extraordinary opportunities,” Finnish geopolitical analyst Joni Askola told Byline Supplement. “European leaders cannot say it openly, but they understand a stark reality: the US has moved from being a reliable ally, one that pursued its own interests but could generally be trusted, to an adversary whose actions now align with Russia and China in seeking to divide, weaken, and marginalize Europe. The goal is clear: prevent Europe from ever becoming a strong geopolitical actor. This pressure is finally forcing Europe to wake up and unite, something we have achieved before when facing existential threats and something we can do again.
“Europe must learn from this moment because we may soon be the last continent actively defending liberal democracy. This can be Europe’s decade and Europe’s century if we choose it.”
openDemocracy co-founder Anthony Barnett told Byline Supplement this ‘gangster international’ can’t last and with that, is opportunity.
“As we can see most clearly in Trump, this gangster international is burning the future. So this is a wonderful time to be young, profoundly challenging but what a challenge! A new world is being born.”
Your Freedom Is a Gift
I find myself obsessively watching the British espionage series from the late ‘70s, The Sandbaggers — among the most brilliant shows ever made. Among its exquisitely crafted narratives is ‘the special relationship’ between England’s Special Intelligence Services (SIS) and the American CIA. It’s an uneasy friendship, but united by a mutual understanding that Russia is their enemy. Anytime there’s a terrorist act or political turmoil, they rule out the KGB first before drawing conclusions.
Last night, I watched an episode that detailed how the SIS wanted to put a sleeper agent named Anna Wiseman in the USSR. Her actual mission was to expose and embarrass the Soviet Union on its human rights failings. She wanted to publicly join the dissident movement, and as the episode ends, we hear her narrating these words:
“Finally to the Western world, I say this, your freedom is a priceless gift. You undervalue it or abuse it at your peril. If you lose it, you will yourselves become prisoners of a regime that allows no criticism of itself, no alternative to its oppressive policies, no expression of individuality. I ask you, therefore, to defend your freedom so that all people now dominated by Soviet Russia, may one day share it with you.”
Your freedom is a gift. I ask you to defend it.
The above is 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.
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I am grateful you are here.
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Dave Troy says the US and Europe must work together as much as possible to defeat fascism. Neither can do it alone. The democracies of the world must stick together as much as possible. I think it's a mistake to put the US in the democracy grave. We aren't dead yet. There are millions here on both sides of the aisle who will fight tooth and nail to keep our benefits and freedoms.