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Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

@RachelBitecofer

Feb 4

🧵How Putin Pulled Off The Greatest Intelligence Operation in History:

Putin's Small Investments Have Yielded Large Returns

This is a story about the best investment anyone’s ever made—anytime, anywhere.

Not a company.

Not a weapon.

Not a technology.

An idea.

In the early 2010s, Vladimir Putin looked at the United States and saw something most Americans refused to see about themselves. Not weakness in our military or the economy, but a country still strong by nearly every objective measure—and increasingly persuadable that it wasn’t.

By 2016, America had built the most powerful information ecosystem in human history: global reach, instant amplification, frictionless distribution, and no limits on money. And it had paired that system with almost no meaningful guardrails when it came to political speech. You couldn’t lie to sell a product. You couldn’t defraud investors. But lying to sell politics? That lives in a vast gray zone, protected by law, amplified by platforms, and rewarded by attention.

For a former intelligence officer, this wasn’t subtle. It was an open flank.

Putin didn’t need to defeat the United States militarily. He didn’t need to match American power. He just needed Americans to turn on one another inside a system designed to magnify conflict.

Why Misinformation Was the Weapon

Russia could never outspend the United States in conventional power. But modern intelligence operations aren’t about brute force. They’re about shaping environments—especially the information environments in which democratic decisions are made.

Read 14 tweets

Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

@RachelBitecofer

Feb 2

My 2026 Midterm Forecast is out

Our Brand is Stopping Chaos:
Negative Partisanship Will Drive a Strong Midterm Effect for Democrats in 2026

Folks,

For those of you that have been on this roller-coaster ride with me from the bananas beginning will appreciate how we’ve come full circle this year.

Once again we have a madman in the White House and an electorate with serious buyer’s remorse.

Now that Republicans control the White House, negative partisanship once again favors Democrats as the party out-of-power (out party).

We are now far enough into this shitshow presidency to stop guessing about the 2026 midterms and start measuring them. So I spent this week in deep in data, waiting for the results of an obscure special election for the Texas state senate. There, the Democratic nominee was able to raise $2,000,000 to compete for a long, LONG shot district in Tarrant County (key Republican ground in Texas) that Trump carried by 17pts. This forced the Texas GOP to spend about $200,000 to defend a district they should never have to compete in.

Rehmet gave them a good ole fashioned Texas style ass whoopin’ earning 57% of the vote in that “safe” Trump district against a very attractive Republican nominee.

Not only is Taylor Rehmet’s incredible victory another strong indicator that Republicans will face a Blue Wave of unusual size size in 2026, it also means that deep-pocketed Republicans will have to spend a lot of money on defense this cycle. On that note, it sounds like Elon wants to insert himself into the midterms, which despite flooding the GOP with cash will also allow Democrats to wedge Elon himself, a strategy that worked great for Wisconsin Democrats in 2025.

So, not only did the Democratic candidate manage to win a district Trump carried by 17 points in 2024, he managed to force open the party’s purse and set a very high bar for potential overperformance in red districts.

It has Ron Desantis pissing his pants.

Read 17 tweets

Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

@RachelBitecofer

Jan 10

🧵Dear Diary
Notes from Inside a Collapsing America

January 10, 2026

Dear Diary,

I have be honest, those are words I never expected to write, because I’m way too lazy and uninteresting to keep a diary But as most of you guys know, I’ve been reading and researching the Third Reich for about five years now.

I started off pretty wide, with big books about the developments and details of that eleven-year Reich that we mostly only pay attention to during the war years, even though it came into power in 1933. And it wasn’t long into that research before I started to really appreciate how important contemporaneous diary accounts were.

Back in the old days—before the internet —apparently most people kept diaries. That’s why we know so much about our history, our public officials, and what actually happened: because people intentionally wrote things down. All kinds of people:

Allied leaders

Nazi leaders

Resistance leaders

Jews in hiding

Jews in ghettos and camps

Journalists

Professors

Enslaved Workers

Housewives

Read 23 tweets

Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

@RachelBitecofer

Dec 14, 2025

🧵Living History: Don’t Give Up the Ship with Representative Jason Crow

We are living through a moment future historians will struggle to explain without disbelief. A sitting president has publicly called for the execution of members of Congress. The U.S. military has carried out strikes of dubious legality outside a declared war. Senior commanders have resigned. Others have testified behind closed doors that no one stopped them.

Read and watch the full interview👇
thecycle.substack.com/p/living-histo…

And when six members of Congress who are military vets reminded U.S. service members of a principle settled since Nuremberg not to follow illegal orders, the White House responded not with denial or evidence, but with rage.

That was the context for my conversation with Representative Jason Crow of Colorado’s 6th District, one of the six lawmakers featured in the Don’t Give Up the Ship video that ignited Donald Trump’s backlash.

Read 16 tweets

Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

@RachelBitecofer

Dec 8, 2025

The Trump Who Stole Christmas

(A Holiday Poem for a Country Getting Mugged in Broad Daylight)

Every American down in America

Liked Christmas a lot.

But the Trump, who lived south of sanity,

Most certainly did not.

Trump hated Christmas — not the money of course,

but the laughing, the shopping, it makes him feel worse.

So deep in his tower, carved out of gold,

He plotted a scheme—

one cruel, dark, and cold.

He’d tried once before to ruin their cheer,

With Big Lies about elections the previous years.

But this time he thought,

with a smirk and a grin,

“I’ll simply raise premiums ’til nobody can win!”

Because here’s the big secret the Trump never told:

The economy was growing before he took hold.

2.8% was the forecast the day he was sworn,

a smooth, steady market he didn’t have to adorn.

He could’ve done nothing—

literally nothing at all—

and Americans would praise him

from strip mall to town hall.

Read 13 tweets

Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

@RachelBitecofer

Dec 1, 2025

🧵The Whole World is Getting Dumber
(And the Smartphone Did It)

How’s this for a gut punch?

The entire developed world is getting dumber.

Don’t believe me? Check out this graph that shows a world wide “dumbing” across three core cognitive domains—math, reading, and science-that occurs right after the introduction of the smart phone.

And no, it’s not “woke teachers,” or “lazy kids,” or the Department of Education.

This isn’t even a uniquely American story.

The trends are global. OECD-wide.

Finland to France. Japan to Germany. Australia to the U.S.

Good systems and bad.

Everyone is slipping.

And the timing lines up perfectly with the most consequential technological shift of our lifetime:

the smartphone + social media + high-speed mobile internet.

That’s the trilogy that broke attention spans, rewired cognition, and kneecapped learning.

Read 19 tweets

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