An ‘Extraordinary Passivity’ — A Q&A with Keir Giles, Part 1
Author Keir Giles explains why he knew in July ‘24 how the American election would turn out, what it would mean for Europe and why people should be alarmed at the ‘extraordinary passivity’ in US bettedangerous.com/p/an-extraordi…
Author’s note: I had just finished threading a 50-part breakdown of Robert Mueller’s indictments of the Russian nationals who attacked the American election in 2016. This was July 2019, when it was still relatively psychologically safe for me to keep Twitter comments open. I had pulled an all-nighter reading the indictments and when I was finished, I noticed a comment with a link from an account titled “dog_in_clouds”.
Exhausted, I began reading the attachment — The NATO Handbook Of Russian Information Warfare — and knew I had a duty to make this my next thread. What I didn’t know is I was going to meet my next great ally in the fight.
Keir Giles — the author of that handbook — is a Russia watcher, who has authored multiple books on information warfare, including Russia’s War On Everybody: And What it Means for You (Bloomsbury, 2022). Keir is an associate fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House, and worked with the BBC Monitoring Service and the UK Defence Academy.
I have been interviewing Keir ever since that July day, when a Twitter rando (who turned out to be cybersecurity writer) commented on my work, and I gained another incredible source.
This is Part 1 of a two-part interview series with Keir. The interview took place on 11 June 2026. Part 2 will be released when I have the greenlight to report on his upcoming bombshell book.—hsc
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An ‘Extraordinary Passivity’ — A Q&A with Keir Giles, Part 1
At our semi-annual pub meeting, author Keir Giles explains why he knew in July 2024 how the American election would turn out, what it would mean for Europe, and why people should be alarmed at the ‘extraordinary passivity’ in the US
Heidi: Great to see you again, in some lovely pub, in an undisclosed location in the United Kingdom.
Keir: We are allowed to say we’re in Rutland, because it doesn’t exist (he points to a ‘Rutland’ map on the wall).
Heidi: Okay, good. Here we go. So I’ve been thinking about the time we met, in July 2024, and we chatted about the long screwdriver.
How a cynical scheme by a Putin friendly producer to fake that Trump was a successful businessman led to the rise of clickbait fascism and the world's first made-for-tv war
“We made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester the king.”—Jonathan Braun, editor, The Apprentice
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Before the merger of malignant narcissism and alleged dementia, Trump excelled at marketing. He was a pageant guy, smoke and mirrors was his thing — thumbs up photos with scantily clad women at his beach hotel Mar-a-Lago was his metier. But upon closer examination, in the background you would find light fixtures askew, the kind of crumbling decay producers from “The Apprentice” noted at Trump Tower.
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A book report on The Essential Anna Politkovskaya, the reporter who documented the rise of a KGB snoop, the Second Chechen War, and the 'age of the oligarchs' before being murdered on Putin's birthday
On Internatioal Women’s Day in 2023, I received a torrent of death threats. It was preceded by a tweet directed toward my podcast partner, Jim Stewartson, by Joe Flynn — the brother of Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn — which ended with the hashtag “arrestHeidi.”
Joe Flynn is linked to a cyber militia of stalkers, and appeared to be coordinating with the most venal of our harassers.
When the threats began to pour in — directly to my inbox through a vulnerability in Substack’s security settings — for a brief moment, I couldn’t use my fingers. I called my other podcast partner, High Fidelity, it was 3 am his time and thankfully he answered. He told me to turn off the ability to ‘comment and like’ my posts and when I did that, the threats began to slow. But not before I received comments like “Bang bang bitch” “You’re going to die” “Lock your doors” and a message with my address.
Anyone who had commented on my previous posts, received notes in their inbox from accounts with depraved and hateful names, accompanied with images of scat porn.
It was a nightmare, and when it didn’t end, I reached out to my friend Fred Guttenberg, who had been tormented over his daughter’s murder in Parkland by an extremely sick cyber stalker until the FBI arrested the perpetrator. He told me I had to go to the FBI, and I did. I won’t go into the details here, but I slept with my lights on for months, until one night, I got a call from HiFi telling me to pack a bag and go stay with my mom. He learned that a pair of my stalkers, one I vaguely knew from childhood, had moved offline and were livestreaming in my neighborhood. I was in the middle of writing an important investigation, and I made a decision to ignore the threat.
By then, the South Pasadena police officers knew me — I had called them repeatedly over myriad physical and cyber threats — and they told me, “Unless someone shows up at your door with a gun, there’s nothing we can do.”
So on that night when the stalkers were physically present, I thought, unless they mean business, I’m not leaving. I’m going to finish my investigation, and I did.
Back in 2016, when I pressed send on my first post that exposed Trump as a charlatan, I knew how serious a step it was. I knew there was no going back, and I didn’t want to go back. I was a woman with a certain skillset unshackled by a corporation, and I had a duty to warn.
Yesterday, on International Women’s Day, I took some time for myself to finish reading The Essential Anna Politkovskaya — an investigative reporter whose work was so important that Putin had her executed in Moscow on his birthday, October 7, 2006. She lived under constant threat, and the most important thing we can do is make her words live on and learn from them. Her reporting was so critical, she was assassinated to silence her. And what were her crimes? Truth and empathy.—Heidi Siegmund Cuda for Bette Dangerous
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Hot Type: How The US-Israel War in Iran Is Also Targeting European Democracy
In @BylineTimes I investigate a key target in the US-Israel war in Iran: European democratic leaders who are damned if they do support the war and damned if they don't
I didn’t set out to become a Russia watcher, but when I witnessed Russian military intelligence under the direction of Vladimir Putin attacking my country with active measures in 2016, I had no choice but to turn my investigative skills toward information warfare.
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I had spent my career working in print journalism and broadcast news and watching the media’s abject failure to report on the rise of Donald Trump within the context of his ties to the Russian mob was like watching the same horror film over and over again, with truth as the perpetual victim.
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“The indirect targets of US bombs are leaders of democratic nations — they are forced to make sense of the senseless, and the aim is to degrade their power. Putin understands this strategy.”—me on Twitter, March 2, 2026
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On Putin’s birthday in 2023, Joe Biden was put in a situation he could not win. Back an allied country that was run by a corrupt leader, who after losing the Israeli election two years earlier, called Putin and promised him: “I will be back soon.”
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'Clickbait Fascism: When War Becomes a Show' -- My Interview on Radio Free America
An interview I did with Radio Free America, Prague, on the day the Trump regime invaded Venezuela just dropped yesterday, the day the Trump regime invaded Iran