BAD BONES—Heidi Siegmund Cuda looks beyond the mild-mannered exterior of US Speaker of the House Mike Johnson to find connections to religious extremism, Russian oligarchs, violent rhetoric, and sexual assaulters
My investigation for @Byline_Media on the creepy world of Mike
“The kingdom of God allows for aggression—and there’s a time to every purpose under heaven. From the time of John the Baptist until today, the kingdom of God has been advancing by forceful men and forceful men take hold of it, that’s what the New Testament says.”—Mike Johnson
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Feb 27 • 14 tweets • 6 min read
WITCH SWITCH—It was decades in the making. A cruel and sinister plot to turn the Republican party’s base into single-issue voters. As long as candidates professed to be anti-abortion, it didn’t matter if they left a trail of corruption littered with hush money and hypocrisy.
On June 24, 2022, the GOP got its wish, as the MAGA wing of the Supreme Court overturned fifty years of federal protection for a woman’s right to abortion, which really was about health care as people quickly learned.
I recall tweeting the moment I heard the news of Roe that “birds still sing under fascism”.
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Feb 22 • 35 tweets • 18 min read
Ethane — the company that paid @SpeakerJohnson — was majority owned by three Russian nationals: Konstantin Nikolaev, Mikhail Yuriev, and Andrey Kunatbaev.
Throughout our history, when faced with a threat to our Republic, to the United States of America, we have always come together to defeat it. Every time.
We are asking you as our leader in this grave moment to address the nation about the need to unite against a new threat coming from our adversaries – the threat of information warfare.
We are a target nation in an Invisible War. It is called cyberwar — or information warfare, also known as active measures — and it’s a pernicious type of threat because people may not even know it’s happening.
Instead of bullets or bombs, our enemies are using lies and deceit, half truths, falsehoods. They are using psychological operations designed by foreign military intelligence — targeted to twist our minds, break our truth and destroy our reality — in an attempt to bring America to its knees.
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This invisible war has taken aim at our decency, our humanity, our kindness and empathy, and we regret to inform you — the enemy is hitting their target: all of us.
A country divided is a weakened country, but a country that comes together to stand in shared truth is a strong country, a world leader, a shining example of democracy in action, and the people that make that democracy work. We cannot be divided when the enemy is on our doorstep.
These attacks by enemies of democracy aim to coerce our citizens into bizarre and dangerous beliefs through weapons of mass psychological destruction, weapons largely created to benefit the Russian government.
It is our belief that once Americans hear this truth from you, they will recall that together — united — we can do wondrous things. During the Civil War, Americans defeated slavery and restored our Union. In World War II, we defeated the dark authoritarian forces of fascism both at home and abroad.
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Feb 4 • 21 tweets • 13 min read
🚨The Cynical Plot to 'Demonize' Politics—A Q&A with @anelsona
My intervu with @Byline_Media guest, writer Anne Nelson
“There was no logical way the Berlin resistance could see that Hitler would not be victorious—and yet they persisted.” bylinesupplement.com/p/the-cynical-…
Q&A
Heidi Siegmund Cuda: You have written extensively, not least in the Washington Spectator, on the rise of Christian Nationalism and the threat it poses to Democracy. Can you explain to our readers how your book Shadow Network came to inform the new documentary Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy.
BREAKING THE GOP DEATH GRIP—What Other Countries Defying Authoritarianism Can Teach the US
I turns to countries in Europe, Central America and Asia for examples of how to go on the offensive against the threat of rising authoritarianism.—@Byline_Media bylinesupplement.com/p/breaking-the…
There is an unsettling feeling in the US of a weary nation obeying in advance. We’re exhausted. Those in the trenches exposing information warfare for the past seven years are admittedly tired. We see the same plays over and over again. We expose them as Russian active measures trafficked by cells of white supremacists over and over again.
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Jan 19 • 38 tweets • 16 min read
🚨2016 ELECTION ATTACK
“It is imperative to intensify criticizing Hillary Clinton.”—Secured Borders Facebook Group, St. Petersburg, Russia, 9.14.2016
“It’s absolutely insane we allow hostile dictatorships direct access to our citizens.”—Wes Clark Jr., environmental activist
The first day I slept in after the election of 2016 was the morning after Paul Manafort was indicted. I had been working 24/7 since the lead up to the US presidential election to report all that I knew about Trump & Co. being frauds, cons & foreign assets.
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Jan 2 • 14 tweets • 5 min read
Taking a deeper dive on Douglass Mackey. His prosecution feels like a limited hangout—Musk Tucker Jones Don Jr making MAGA cult believe his crime was just anti-Hillary memes and not election interference is a tell—could be obfuscating ties to Russian operation in St. Petersburg.
So why would Trump, his son, Musk, Tucker, Glenn Greenwald, Jones, all champion a racist, white supremacist convicted of election interference—who suppressed black voter turnout with lies about casting votes by text—who just happened to also heavily promote Russian MAGA accounts.
Jan 1 • 41 tweets • 27 min read
‘I Cannot Believe How Wrong I Was’ — Redemption of an Ex-MAGA
Former Trump MAGA Nationalist Rich Logis of Leaving MAGA describes the trauma, desperation, and panic of MAGA indoctrination in one of the most important interviews of this moment
Trauma, Desperation + Panic of MAGA Indoctrination
I am offering transcripts from RadPod’s interview with a two-time Trump voter who had a big awakening—Logis stood up in front of the world and said:
‘I was wrong. I was politically ignorant. I wish I had voted for Hillary.’
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Dec 16, 2023 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
PROJECT 25 is a blueprint for plans to finish the job started when Trump attacked the US government from within.
It reads like a Soviet-era how-to manual on total annihilation of the US government and critics of the regime.—my latest for @Byline_Media bylinesupplement.com/p/a-maga-hat-a…
Virgin’s Richard Branson once referred to Trump as the “revenge president”. Project 2025 is a revenge fantasy and the victim is democracy.
Conceived by dark money think tanks fronted by the extremist think tank, the Heritage Foundation, the plan is nearly 1,000 pages and proposes a ‘unitary executive theory’ — neutering Congressional oversight and granting the executive branch almighty power.
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Dec 12, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
German prosecutors have charged 27 extremists — including Russians — with planning to overthrow Germany's democratic political system.
The group had drawn up lists of enemies. Members were aware plans would result in people killed, the indictment stated. bbc.com/news/world-eur…
They group refuse to recognise the modern German state.
Other suspects came from the QAnon movement who believe their country is in the hands of a mythical "deep state" involving secret powers pulling the political strings.—@BBCNews archives
THE POROUS FRONTIER—“I call the Internet the porous frontier. We have been invaded by hostile interests. And nobody's been defending the frontier.”—@anelsona in my latest report for @Byline_Media on the erosion of the separation of church and state: “A Triumph for Fanatics’
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”—First Amendment, US Constitution
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Oct 4, 2023 • 33 tweets • 12 min read
WE ARE AT WAR—From me last year
The Rolling Insurrection—How Putin is Waging a Covert War Against the West
Heidi Siegmund Cuda and Matt Bernardini report on how the US and Brazil insurrections are part of a global attempt by Russia to destroy its enemies bylinesupplement.com/p/the-rolling-…
Russia knows it can’t win on the battlefield with the West, so is engaging in covert activity to present the message that liberal democracies are failing, according to a @Byline_Media analysis.
“They know that they can't go to war overtly,” said @KeirGiles — author of Russia’s War On Everybody. “And that’s where all of these covert, sub-threshold, grey zone, so-called hybrid attacks come in. Because that is how Russia has been reaching out to harm the West. It knows that if it is in open warfare, the result is a foregone conclusion that will be disastrous for Russia.”
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Sep 9, 2023 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”—Arthur C. Clarke
They were treated as special —
Awe-inducing cover stories exalted them on high. The faces of these special boys appearing in chiaroscuro to ensure their canonisation. bylinesupplement.com/p/the-cult-of-…
“It started with the dream of a connected world,” said digital rights activist @profcarroll in the film @thegreathackdoc. “These digital traces of ourselves are being mined into a trillion dollar a year industry… we are now the commodity.”
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Aug 15, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
AMERICAN MONSTER—As criminals in Trump’s orbit engage in information warfare, I’m unlocking my American Monster series about convicted US criminals accelerating global fascism.
These reports get granular, useful tools to fight monsters.
AMERICAN MONSTER—Fourth in a series on US criminals accelerating global fascism.
Due to Trump’s violent threats, I am removing the paywall this wknd. Plz share and support if you can.
“What is Donald Trump to Putin? Just another Yanukovych.”—@mhmck
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I intentionally profiled Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and Roy Cohn as the first three in my American Monster series before getting to Donald Trump. Trump does not exist in his current form without Manafort, Stone, and Cohn.
•Gray cardinal Paul Manafort, fresh from installing a… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Jul 19, 2023 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
When me, @jimstewartson & @hifilofipod launched @radicalizedpod with our friend Sean, I knew we would cut thru the multi-billion-dollar obfuscation industry with our collective investigative skills and global experts. I’m so proud of our legacy.
I haven’t taken off my ‘She Persisted’ t-shirt for 72 hours. I’ve shed a lot of tears. I called my daughter to apologize for how long we took. I promised her on 11.9.16 we would get the illegitimate president* out of office—the world would know he’s a con. bettedangerous.com/p/spy-traitor-…
As I told @JeffSharlet when he popped into RadPod & Chill on Thursday, it’s been a long seven years and four decades.
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Jun 11, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Curious which one of these traitors Putin is planning to make an example out of… which one suffers a curious defenestration.
My spidey sense says we are days away from a Fifth Column calamity.
They’re all losers who think they’re winners. Perfect marks for spies, traitors, cons.
Jun 10, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Holy cow.
‘Mission Congo’ Alleges Pat Robertson Exploited Post-Genocide Rwandans For Diamonds thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/…
“…the film alleges that these resources—the donations, the cargo planes, etc.—were used for the for-profit African Development Company Ltd., a diamond mining operation that was headquartered in Kinshasa… Robertson was the sole shareholder and president of ADC.”
Jun 1, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
We talk a lot about the fight but often forget to say who we are not:
* Never lied to FBI
* Never dined with Putin
* Never got fired by presidents
* Never promoted pro-Kremlin shit
* Never recited cult prayer in a church
* Never took the 5th instead of condemning J6 violence
Ya
* Never threatened to find someone in DC to shoot
* Never promoted a violent coup
* Never radicalized people en masse
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