Hot Type: We Have to Rebuild the World
American political correspondent Heidi Siegmund Cuda on what will come after the authoritarian surge we are all living through right now
In a bookstore in Galway, I was moved to see my colleague Nafeez Ahmed’s Alt Reich, published by Byline Books, nestled in amongst the popular political books of this moment.
Dr Ahmed meticulously documents how a new fascist movement grew out of an old one, but he does more than that. He envisions the future, and what it should look like. He envisions new possibilities.
In a blurb I wrote for the release of his book, I noted:
“In Alt Reich, Dr Nafeez Ahmed has created an important document for future historians to understand how the fascists could rise again. He also offers a blueprint for how democracy defenders can defeat them with a transformative vision of a future that remains to be written.”
I have been spending a lot of time thinking about how we get out of the news cycle that promotes the ugliness of Putin and Trump — the more they are seared into our psyche, the more despair permeates the air.
The reason I wrote about the women leaders of Eastern Europe in a recent Hot Type column is that we need role models for a better future. We need to hear the words of people who are focused on uplifting people and communities, who are working toward a brighter future. A future that does not include shipping people off to gulags when they speak truth to power, just to score political points from an inflamed base.
But how do we get there?
The first task is to diminish the lying to a tolerable level. Say, that of the 1950s?
As Timothy Synder says in his book, On Tyranny, post-truth is pre-fascism. There has to be a profound and global reconnection with truth. We will not survive in a world saturated with lies.
The reason Trump goes after universities with “veritas” written into their coat of arms is because truth is a terrible threat to fascists. The reason scientists are being exported to Europe is because you can’t have experts debunk your horseshit.
An administration that is like a horror house of mirrors — each carefully choreographed character spinning their part of the web of lies — has no place in the future.
So in preparation for the Lie Reduction Act of 2026, here are a few modest proposals:
No more multinational internet companies — they need to be broken up just like any monopoly and subject themselves to regulation by national governments. No more poisoning another nation’s culture by remote.
Failure to prosecute treason should be counted as treason. America lost its democracy because of its failure to eradicate Russian spies on our soil.
Failure to prosecute unregistered foreign agents who call themselves lobbyists falls under the rubric of failure to prosecute treason.
True identities on the internet.
National firewalls.
Dr Ian Garner, the author of Z Generation: Into the Hearts of Russia’s Fascist Youth, told me that where pro-democracy factions always fail is they never offer a vision of the future. They offer policy and comfort. When we brought policy papers to a gunfight, it turned out just the way you would expect.
“This is true in Putin's Russia, it's true in countries struggling with the far right across Europe, and it's certainly true in America, that those who oppose these movements are struggling to find between themselves a shared vision of the future,” he said. “Progressive circles are splintered and the progressive center is struggling to find anything that will actually transcend and unite people.
“We have to look at finding ways to bridge these divides within society and find some promise of the future, otherwise we are only going to go further down this path of total destruction and descend into an age of widespread trauma.”
In Alt Reich, Dr Nafeez Ahmed writes that it’s time to get out of the gutters of the internet and start focusing on our better angels if we are to survive as a species at all.
“We require an inspiring vision for the future that is, fundamentally, about transformation – a vision that builds on the best of what humanity has achieved, while discarding our mistakes,” he says. “The Alt Reich will only be defeated by social, political and cultural movements which are able to mobilise and deliver transformation at scale. This is the inflection point that will now define political struggles in the twenty-first century from here on.”
The world won’t repair itself.
Emmy award-winning investigative reporter, Heidi Siegmund Cuda is an American correspondent for Byline Times and her Hot Type column runs weekly in Byline Supplement. She is the co-host of RADICALIZED Truth Survives podcast and her Bette Dangerous Substack is read in 90 countries.