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

2/

TrumpMania: The World's First Kayfabe War

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

1/ bettedangerous.com/p/trumpmania-t… “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

2/

What You See at the End of the World

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

1/ bettedangerous.com/p/what-you-see… 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.”

2/

https://twitter.com/heidi_cuda/status/1633506543126876160

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

1/

bylinesupplement.com/p/hot-type-how… You do this work long enough, you see patterns.

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.

2/

Indirect Targets of Crazy Making

As the US becomes a drunken brawler, we can see a real goal emerge - to weaken Western leaders with shock events and so-called wars

1/
bettedangerous.com/p/indirect-tar… “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

2/

'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

1/ bettedangerous.com/p/clickbait-fa… “If you want regime change, bomb the Kremlin.”—me on Twitter, February 28, 2026

2/

https://twitter.com/heidi_cuda/status/2027746731438301609

From Rybolovlev with Love: How Trump's DHS Funnels Cash to Russian Oligarchs

As DHS overpays for concentration camp shells, it's worth revisiting the failures of US intelligence agencies who were supposed to protect us from organized crime, and why we need to push on

1/
open.substack.com/pub/heidicuda/… As the world falls under the spell of sleazy glitz delirium — the Russian-backed boogeyman Jeffrey Epstein smirking at you from every news kiosk — the theft of a nation continues.

2/

bettedangerous.com/p/sleazy-glitz…

Sleazy Glitz Delirium

It's tempting to go down the rabbit hole of scandal and stay mired there, but we know enough about the organized crime ring of deviant freaks to know our main focus should be getting them out of power

1/ bettedangerous.com/p/sleazy-glitz… There is a reason our next two Bette Dangerous guests have experience documenting trials of war criminals at The Hague. We need to learn how criminal leaders were brought to justice in the past to determine a prosecution strategy for the present.

2/

GHOSTING IN, AND GHOSTING OUT: We can’t just move on from foreign influence campaigns

Democratic nations being ripped apart by foreign influence operations in lockstep with domestic traitors need to acknowledge they are at war and then fight back ffs

1/ bettedangerous.com/p/ghosting-in-… “We’ve just used a different organization to run a very, very successful project in an Eastern European country. No one even knew they were there. They were just ghosted in, did the work, and ghosted out.”—Cambridge Analytica’s executive Mark Turnbull, on the use of subcontractors in a 2018 Channel 4 undercover report

2/

FAMINE AS WEAPON: Exposing Soviet Evil

In Part 2 of our Speakeasy series with Ukrainian historian Tetiana Boriak, she offered the Bette Dangerous community a detailed history of the Holodomor, Stalin’s man-made famine. Here is that report

1/
bettedangerous.com/p/famine-as-we… Author’s note: With the help of a Ukrainian scholar, I am rewriting the history of what we know about communism. Any romanticized notions go out the window when we view history through the eye of a refugee-historian, with access to key documents that tell a cold and hard story about lies and theft, murder and starvation. We are offering a service to reality that helps us in this grave moment when political starvation proves again convenient to dictators and war criminals who talk of peace, as fascist dictators did a century ago. The following transcript, edited lightly for brevity and clarity, is from our interview with Ukrainian historian Tetiana Boriak on November 23, 2025, about the history of the Holodomor, Stalin’s man-made famine, which took the lives of 3.9 million Ukrainians. While working on a book project on the topic in February of 2022, Boriak realized that ‘Russia was killing us again,’ and she sought refuge in Lithuania for her and her children. She is now an associate professor in the History Department at Vilnius University. This interview took place during the week of the Holodomor Remembrance and is part of our three-part Speakeasy series with her. As you will learn, the Soviets were expert at creating fake realities to fool the West, a tradition that continues today.—hsc

2/

The Last Defence Against Trump's Total Immunity

Donald Trump’s recent threat to the International Criminal Court is a sign that he is in far more trouble than he is willing to admit, I report in @BylineTimes

1/
bylinesupplement.com/p/the-last-def… Donald Trump’s administration this week threatened new US sanctions on the International Criminal Court, in an attempt to strong-arm it into not investigating him and his top officials.

2/

We Fight As We Breathe—A Q&A with ⁦@Mamulashvili_M⁩

A thoughtful conversation with commander of the Georgian National Legion Ukraine on Putin’s attempts to reanimate the corpse of the Soviet Union and why supporting Ukraine is the West’s best play bettedangerous.com/p/we-fight-as-… Author’s note: On September 23, reporter Adam Sybera and I interviewed Mamuka Mamulashvili, Commander of the Georgian National Legion — Ukraine, at Bette’s Happy Hour. Mamuka has been fighting in Ukraine against the Russia invaders for more than a decade, survived multiple assassination attempts, three poisonings, and 32 years of war. At the age of 14, Mamuka took part in the Georgian-Russian war in Abkhazia. Towards the end of the conflict, he and his father were taken prisoner. Mamuka spent three months in captivity and was later released through a prisoner exchange program.
What follows is a transcript of the interview, lightly edited for clarity and brevity.—hsc

2/

Orbán Bagman and ‘Other Loyal Servants of Organized Crime’

A brief conversation with Alex Alvarova about Hungary etc.

1/ bettedangerous.com/p/orban-bagman… Bette’s Happy Hour on Tuesday with disinformation analysts Dietmar Pichler and Alex Alvarova was one of our finest — the exchange of information from our global community was phenomenal.

2/

‘A Book for Our Own Troubled Times’

A historic look at how conspiracies poison democracy, as detailed in Richard J. Evans book, “The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination”

1/ bettedangerous.com/p/a-book-for-o… It’s okay to admit we got it wrong. We weren’t prepared for the Great Propaganda Wars.

2/

Nazi Martyr Horst Wessel

Beware the mobilizing martyrdom by American fascists

1/
bettedangerous.com/p/nazi-martyr-… The moment I learned of Charlie Kirk’s death, I thought of Jeff Sharlet. Sharlet has documented extremist right-wing movements in America for two decades, and he was the one who taught me how Ashli Babbitt became a MAGA martyr.

2/

Hot Type: The Sickening Nature of It All

As Vladimir Putin glad-hands Narendra Modi and Xi Jin Ping, I report in ⁦@BylineTimes⁩ that, like the recent Alaska summit with Trump, the point of these events is to reputation wash Putin

1/ bylinesupplement.com/p/hot-type-the… “I really do feel a crisis of language,” Dr Marci Shore told Byline Supplement. “Watching Trump roll out that red carpet for Putin — there's already been so much rhetorical inflation, and yet everything feels inadequate to capture the sickening nature of it all.”

2/

The problem with investigating and reporting on transnational mob ties is that no matter how careful you are with word choice, it always takes you right to the gutter. There is literally no way to write about Donald Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein, and Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to Russia, without feeling like you’ve just soiled your soul.

2/ Currently, Americans have been focused on the depraved and cruel world of human trafficking — no, not the pretend conspiratorial kind pushed by Russian propagandists to try to tar Democrats — but the real one that hurts real people, the one with ubiquitous ties to the current occupant of the White House.

3/

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.

2/

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.

2/

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

1/
bylinesupplement.com/p/hot-type-san… “Accept the truth from whoever utters it.”—Maimonides

2/

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

2/