Hot Type: The Die is Cast

In my Saturday column for Byline Supplement I try to make sense of a brutal week in the history of America

1/ bylinesupplement.com/p/hot-type-the… Julius Caesar stood on the banks of the Rubicon River contemplating the fate of his country and the world. The legions were expressly forbidden to return to the city of Rome for the Roman Senate knew very well that if they did, the Republic would lost.

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HOT TYPE: The Real Leaders of the Free World Are Women

My latest column in ⁦@BylineTimes⁩ focuses on the remarkable women leaders of Eastern Europe, who are a crucial counterweight to the media's obsession with the ‘strongmen’ Trump and Putin

1/🧵 bylinesupplement.com/p/hot-type-the… I was an investigative reporter in broadcast journalism when Donald Trump landed on my radar in 2006 while I was interviewing the victims of a pyramid scheme. Lured in by get-rich-quick videos featuring Trump, some told me they’d spent their entire life savings on a video phone company that turned out to be bad business.

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HOT TYPE: Sane Asylum

Canada and EU universities are offering US scientists and academics safe harbour from an increasingly authoritarian US in an echo of a dark past. From my latest column in @BylineTimes

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bylinesupplement.com/p/hot-type-san… “Accept the truth from whoever utters it.”—Maimonides

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PROJECT 2025: Then and Now

Revenge Fantasy Fulfillment

1/ bettedangerous.com/p/project-2025… “Project 2025 is a revenge fantasy and the victim is democracy… It reads like a Soviet-era how-to manual on the total annihilation of the US government and any critics of the regime.”—Heidi Siegmund Cuda, December 16, 2023

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Hot Type: Being Braver Than We Want to Be

American columnist Heidi Siegmund Cuda turns to Václav Havel’s dissident essays from 1978, 'The Power of the Powerless', to learn how people can find a collective way back from democratic ruin bylinesupplement.com/p/hot-type-bei… In 1969, when I was five years old, I traveled with my parents to Czechoslovakia. It was the same year my parents became proud US citizens. It was the same year humans landed on the moon.

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HOT TYPE: America, You Are Not Alone

In my latest Hot Type column, I document Russia’s attacks on 22 countries to show that America is just another campaign for Moscow and Elon Musk is just another oligarch.

1/🧵 bylinesupplement.com/p/hot-type-ame… It’s rare for an independent woman reporter like me to be invited on high-profile radio shows to discuss my work.

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‘The Knocking from Below’

My Latest ‘Hot Type’ Column in @BylineTimes exposes how an abject failure of prosecuting treason and a history of pardoning traitors has led the US to this desperate hour

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https://twitter.com/bylinetimes/status/1865544663135846547

In an interview with Dr Marci Shore for my podcast this week, we asked her about the parallels between Ukraine in 2014 and the US in this moment.

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‘That Curious Feeling of Unreality’—Under Cover in Nazi America 1938-1943

A Report: Under Cover: My Four Years in the Nazi Underworld in America—The Amazing Revelation of How Axis Agents and Our Enemies Within Are Now Plotting to Destroy the United States bettedangerous.com/p/that-curious… “I was about to witness star-spangled murder with American Democracy as the corpse.”—John Roy Carlson, Under Cover, 1943

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Hot Type: We Need a Lion

In my latest column for @BylineTimes I write that in this time of unprecedented peril, Americans desperately needs Joe Biden to rise from his slumber and help save democracy

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https://twitter.com/bylinetimes/status/1860297835976990860

In a Rose Garden photo op, President Joe Biden promised a peaceful transfer of power. By contrast, the incoming Trump regime is promising state-sponsored violence on day one. 

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A House United

Repairing a reality destroyed by Putin’s network — a reminder why truth and unity is paramount and why this is no longer about politics bettedangerous.com/p/a-house-unit… “It is imperative to intensify criticizing Hillary Clinton.”—“Secured Borders Facebook Group”, a fake US page run from St. Petersburg, Russia, 9.14.2016

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HOT TYPE: Welcome to West Russia

In my latest column in @BylineTimes I report on the alarming parallels between Russia in the ‘90s and the grim US post-election forecast.

“Nothing good is going to happen here in a long time.”

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https://twitter.com/bylinetimes/status/1855615559540379978

“Nothing good is going to happen here in a long time.”—filmmaker Ernst Lubitsch, at his going away party in Berlin, December 14, 1932

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@BylineTimes “There are men everywhere who would sell out humanity for their own personal profit. There are stupid and emotional masses everywhere who can be found to follow them, given a few slogans and some nice uniforms.”—Bella Fromm, Blood & Banquets, A Berlin Social Diary, 1943

2/ @BylineTimes I have spent the last eight years investigating the Trumpocene and Russian information warfare, and the last six months, deeply immersed in research on Weimar Germany.

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American Redemption is Our Last Best Hope

In my latest “Hot Type” column for ⁦@BylineTimes, I urge Americans of faith to challenge Trump's Christian Supremacy and redeem the soul of America

1/🧵 bylinesupplement.com/p/american-red… It never made any sense, how the most religious people I knew in 2016 became the most virulently anti-Hillary Clinton. More shocking was how they became ardent Trumpists. Church on Sunday, and MAGA-hatted all week.

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‘The Gravediggers Didn’t Have To Triumph’

Genocidal dictatorships comprised of ‘sorcerer’s apprentices and windbags’ are not inevitable.

Excerpts from “The Gravediggers: The Last Winter of the Weimar Republic” bettedangerous.com/p/the-gravedig… “The gravediggers didn’t have to triumph.”—Rüdiger Barth and Hauke Friederichs, The Making of, The Gravediggers

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IF WE CALLED IT TERRORISM—Lithuanian Minister of Foreign Affairs @GLandsbergis annihilates the weak words we’ve been using to refer to Russia’s terrorism on the West

We are in a war — it has always been a war, because it has always been terrorism.

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https://twitter.com/heidi_cuda/status/1848125011699384610

Lives have been lost — hundreds of thousands in the United States alone — and we have done nothing, because we’ve used weak words.

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‘DESTABILIZING DEMOCRACIES’—Canadian PM Names Tucker Carlson and Jordan Peterson as Paid By Russia

In a hearing on foreign interference, Justin Trudeau named names

1/ bettedangerous.com/p/destabilizin… “We’ve recently seen that RT is currently funding bloggers and other YouTube personalities of the right, such as Jordan Peterson, other names that are well known, Tucker Carlson as well, to amplify messages that are destabilizing democracies.”—Justin Trudeau, October 16, 2024

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THE GRAVEDIGGERS: How Hitler’s Elite Business Supporters Were Executed By Hanging

And other cautionary tales about the fate of those who back fascists from the Keppler Circle files

1/ bettedangerous.com/p/the-gravedig… As with Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, it is taking me months to get through The Gravediggers: The Last Winter of the Weimar Republic by historians Rüdiger Barth and Hauke Friederichs.

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1914: THE VICTORY ANGELS OF MONS

How a WW1 legend reminds us to always summon our warrior goddesses — both real and imagined

“I find inspiration in legends of battlefield angels appearing when guns and bravery are no longer enough.”

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bettedangerous.com/p/1914-the-vic… x.com/heidi_cuda/sta… “There comes a moment in a storm at sea when people say to one another, ‘It is at its worst; it can blow no harder,’ and then there is a blast ten times more fierce than any before it. So it was in these British trenches.”—Arthur Machen, The Bowmen, 1914, London Evening News

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HOT TYPE: Musk Unmasked

In my latest column for @BylineTimes I investigate Elon Musk's attempts at election interference and why he should now fear being caught out

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https://twitter.com/bylinetimes/status/1845501716558401608

Elon Musk is scared.

One of the world’s richest and most powerful men told pro-Kremlin mouthpiece, Tucker Carlson, that he’s “fucked” if Trump loses. In an interview with Carlson earlier this week, he brought up the assassination of Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, again, having tweeted about it two weeks ago, and then he questioned how long his prison sentence might be if Trump loses. 

Frankly, he should be worried. 

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HOT TYPE: My latest column in Byline exposes Russian interference by the numbers while showing that platforming covert influence operations is not journalism.

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https://twitter.com/bylinetimes/status/1842852138847793202

A fine tactic in oligarch-owned media is to downplay the efficacy of Russia’s attacks on the West. Always lurking beneath the fold is the Great Minimizing Moment, a sentence or clause that says the reach born of the lie factories was limited. 

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‘Who Goes Nazi?’ — An 83-Year-Old Prediction of JD Vance

Dorothy Thompson, the first American correspondent to be kicked out of Nazi Germany, described the archetypes of ‘who goes Nazi’ more than 80 years ago. It’s time we listen bettedangerous.com/p/who-goes-naz… Last night, we saw a 90-minute infomercial for normalizing Nazis.

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