The Badlands Brief is your daily drop of Badlands’ takes on the narratives dominating the info war. Read on, and join the conversation in the comments section.
Trump to Appear on Supposed-Turncoat Michael Cohen’s Radio Show
President Donald Trump is reuniting publicly with his former personal attorney Michael Cohen, sitting for an interview that will air on Cohen’s 77 WABC radio program Thursday evening, with the remainder scheduled for Sunday. Cohen described it as their first public conversation in eight years, although he says the two have spoken privately during their recent reconciliation.
Cohen was once one of Trump’s closest fixers before turning against him following an FBI raid in 2018. He pleaded guilty to federal crimes including campaign-finance violations, tax evasion, bank fraud and lying to Congress, served prison time, and later became a key prosecution witness in Trump’s 2024 New York criminal trial.
The relationship has now taken another turn. Cohen has recently criticized aspects of the prosecutions against Trump, said he felt pressured in some of his previous testimony, and sought a presidential pardon. During the interview, Cohen called Trump “boss,” while Trump praised Cohen for recanting previous statements.
GhostofBasedPatrickHenry: The history of Michael Cohen and President Trump is fascinating, tracing back to the 1980's when Trump worked with the FBI to construct several casino's in Atlantic City to [presumably] run operations against the Ukrainian/Russian/Israeli mafia, which was operating out of Brighton Beach in NYC.
Cohen was a childhood friend to Felix Sater (born Felix Mikhailovich Sheferovsky) whose father, Mikhail Sheferovsky, was an underboss for the "bosses of bosses" Semion Mogilevich. Mogilevich is a Soviet Jew from Ukraine who fled to Israel at the collapse of the Soviet Union. Robert Maxwell facilitated a deal between Mogilevich and the Israeli government where Mogilevich would "invest" (launder) $100M into the failing Israeli economy, and in exchange he would receive full Israeli citizenship and diplomatic assistance in procuring the rest of the material.
Mogilevich was also involved in the Maidan Coup of 2014. One of his lieutenants, Oleksandr Turchynov, was appointed by the CIA to serve as interim president of Ukraine in the immediate aftermath of the coup.
In 1998, Felix Sater pled guilty to his role in a $40 million stock trading scheme run by the Russian Mafia. Sater became a cooperating informant It is my own speculation that he has been working on a number of these cases with the FBI.
It was Sater who facilitated that 2016 meeting with Cohen about brokering a deal to construct a Trump Tower in Moscow. This was just one of the many anecdotes used to frame President Trump as a Russian asset.
And then there's that whole Stormy Daniels thing. It is unclear where that currently stands, but my mind is open to all kinds of possible explanations, including that Cohen is a willing or unwilling cooperating witness against all sorts of bad people.
Perhaps Cohen was always working for the enemy while simultaneously working for Trump, presenting himself as a spy. Perhaps Trump discovered Cohen's true intent and turned him against hi masters. Or, perhaps Sater is just another scumbag in a long ling of scumbags in this broke and morally desolate world.
If you would like to hear more about Cohen and his connections to the mob, CannCon recently joined me on The Book of Trump to discuss the Atlantic City era in depth. You can listen to that here.
Whether Cohen is actually a secret white hat is largely irrelevant. He could be a leveraged asset, or he could be an earnest actor, but in either case he still serves the same core functions that I think we need to help finish shifting the public narrative in a direction that will expose many people in DC. And I think that sounds just swell.
In any event, this interview between Cohen and Trump should be quite telling as to the current nature of their relationship. I'm eager to hear what Cohen has to say about Ukraine, Israel, and NYC.
EU Bankers Hit the Panic Button as Trump’s Disentanglement Tangles Them Up
European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde warned Wednesday that the economic model underpinning Europe since World War II is eroding as global trade fractures, cheap energy disappears and the US-backed security order becomes less dependable. Europe is roughly twice as exposed to international trade as the US, while more than 2,500 new trade restrictions were imposed globally last year.
Lagarde said Europe has simultaneously lost access to cheap Russian energy and faces increasing competition from China. EU electricity prices for energy-intensive industries were more than twice US levels last year, while China now competes directly with the eurozone in nearly 40% of sectors where Europe has a comparative advantage, up from about 25% in the early 2000s.
Her prescription is greater European economic integration: removing barriers between EU national markets, creating a unified corporate framework and accelerating integration of European capital markets. Lagarde said Europe’s old growth model is “unlikely to return to the form we once knew,” arguing the bloc must increasingly generate growth internally rather than relying on the trade, energy and security arrangements that powered its postwar economy.
Burning Bright: There is schadenfreude, and then there is schadenfreude, my friends.
While all Central Bankers tend to look and sound the same to this audience (because they are the same,) I’ve got to give it to ECB President Christine Lagarde for operating as one of the best reverse indicators of the current cycle.
Every time the woman speaks, she tends to be speaking to an insider crowd of Davos Elites who have no conception of the prospect that they stand more exposed than ever; as such, she tends to just say ALL the quiet parts out loud.
This week, when speaking to another such gathering of so-called Elites, Lagarde took a break from freaking out about Bitcoin and sound money standards in order to tell her friends in the would-be controller class how Biblically porked their entire collectivist experiment is for one reason and one reason only:
The United States.
And yet, for once, they’re not freaking out because the United States is DOING something. They’re freaking out precisely because we’re NOT.
Which is part and parcel to Donald Trump’s Power Paradigm, which I’ve been writing about for years.
You see, power can be levered directly, and applied in order to act as a forcing function, but power can also be deprived.
When it comes to supposed enemies of the kinetic, clandestine and even political variety, Trump’s power approach tends to be direct and applied.
When it comes to our so-called Allies, he moves them by first moving himself, meaning us.
Put another way, in extricating the US from the Globalist System it propped up (that WE have propped up against our better judgment and conscious will) Trump is not only strengthening American Sovereignty by removing its vestigial structures, but he is leaving such structures out on the pavement in an absolute scorcher of a geopolitical summer he has helped to engineer in the interim.
The result?
The European Union, whose two levers of power projection (US Military Might and Institutional Sanctions) are no longer functioning, as the former has been withdrawn, by their own admission, leaving the latter entirely toothless ... by their own admission.
Now, Lagarde is leading a lagging charge from within the bloc, stating in no uncertain terms that, just as NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has acknowledged a lack of kinetic power projection capabilities for the Collectorate on the back of Trump’s renewed Pax Americana doctrine, the same grouping has also lost all manner of non-kinetic, i.e., financial and economic power projection capabilities.
This is because the European Economy is almost entirely based on THREE others: China for much of its manufacturing, Russia for much of its energy and the US for ALL of its physical and financial security.
Now, the EU is caught between a rock and a hard place, entirely by design, and unfortunately for them, the only way out of this mess is by kickstarting the sort of European Renaissance ALL of their systems have been erected to prevent.
And so ... they will come begging.
They will come begging not just for the renewed promise of American Might to backstop their fragile experiment, but more so, for the American capital required to kickstart the very European super cycle that will render their control structures moot.
This means American capital and American ingenuity will literally backstop the next European Renaissance, which is only going to supercharge our own.
It should be fun to watch.
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ActBlue Co-Founder Pleads the Fifth in House Deposition
ActBlue co-founder Matt DeBergalis pleaded the Fifth Amendment during a closed-door deposition Thursday before three House committees investigating the Democratic fundraising platform.
The session before the House Administration, Oversight, and Judiciary Committees lasted less than 30 minutes. Sources familiar with the matter confirmed DeBergalis refused to answer questions under the Fifth Amendment.
The joint probe is examining allegations that ActBlue’s fraud prevention standards were too weak and may have allowed foreign donations into U.S. campaigns. House Administration Chairman Bryan Steil, R-Wis., opened the investigation in 2023, pointing to the platform’s previous failure to require credit card CVV numbers for contributions. ActBlue has since added that requirement.
A committee report released in April 2025 stated that ActBlue executives and staff were aware foreign and domestic fraudulent actors were exploiting the platform but did not take the threat seriously. The platform’s current CEO also invoked the Fifth Amendment during congressional questioning.
Ashe in America: Yesterday, CannCon and I were debating Pete Hegseth campaigning and if there are implications under the Hatch Act, so that was top of mind when I opened this WinRed email claiming to be from Vice President JD Vance:
This is your friendly reminder that WinRed is implicated in money laundering in the same broad sense as Act Blue, specifically through smurfing. WinRed is also like Hotel California where you can check out any time but never leave. It’s almost like unsubscribing subscribes you even harder.
The approach in this email – a briefing with private access to intel that you should keep between you and the Vice President – is objectively unethical. It’s also just stupid.
Vance allowing his name to be used to insult voters and hoodwink them into donating money is a spot on example of the absolute state of the narrative.
I’m still hoping for investigations and prosecutions for all of the levers of fraud, and I won’t be satisfied with anything less than indictments.
At the very least, while we work towards that outcome, watching WinRed use the Vice President’s branding to remind the public why the uniparty establishment should be indicted is entertaining. As is watching ActBlue execs plead the Fifth before a congressional committee.
And that’s irritating.
The government should not be in the entertainment business.
“Thou Shalt Not Steal,” Huckabee Warns Israeli Settlers Against Stealing Palestinian Property
US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee warned extremist Israeli settlers against seizing privately owned Palestinian property in the West Bank, invoking the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not steal.” Huckabee said taking someone’s home or land and frightening the family away violates both civil law and “God’s law.”
The warning follows a more than weeklong confrontation in Qusra, where settlers surrounded three Palestinian homes, including property belonging to Palestinian American Loui Abu Ridi. Israeli troops subsequently pushed settlers away from the homes, though they remained nearby. Huckabee previously called those responsible for the siege “Israeli terrorists” and described the activity as “inexcusable and repugnant.”
Huckabee, a longtime supporter of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, stressed that he considers violent settlers a minority and defended the broader settlement community. He said perpetrators in Qusra should face significant consequences under Israeli law and could potentially face US sanctions, including entry bans, although he said he was unaware of any sanctions currently under consideration. Israeli authorities had not announced any charges or arrests related to the Qusra siege as of Thursday.
GhostofBasedPatrickHenry: “I think the message is bigger than just even the Trump administration. It’s a message of basic civility and civilized behavior,” Huckabee said in Jerusalem. “You don’t take something that doesn’t belong to you.”
Citing the Ten Commandments, Huckabee said “Thou shalt not steal” and that people should neither take nor “covet” what belongs to others.
”If someone owns the land and they own their house, then having someone come and take it over and scare the family away from it, that’s a violation, not just of man’s law. That’s a violation of God’s law,” said Huckabee.
This is a situation that I have been discussing and describing for years. And for years, many said that I was succumbing to Hamas propaganda when describing the process in which an Israeli Settler (who is often a US citizen born on American soil) obtains property in the West Bank.
The process is rather simple: A group of Israeli Settlers, often backed by the IDF, approach a home in the West Bank that they fancy. (Entire neighborhoods are regularly designated as targets by government and non-government authorities.) The Settler speaks to the homeowner, telling them that they have until the end of the day to vacate the home, or else they will either be shot or arrested. If the Palestinian homeowner resists, they are branded a "terrorist" and then dealt with accordingly. Often these people are arrested and thrown in prison without any formal charges, where they languish for years. This has been going on since the Nakba of 1948, when Israel was first created by the UN.
Once enough homes have been stolen, and a new Settler neighborhood is established, they are inhabited by Hasidic or Ultra-Orthodox communities. The men in these communities do not work for a living. Instead, they study the Talmud and devote their lives to "serving God." They are supported financially by US taxpayers.
I'm glad to see that Mike Huckabee has finally grown a spine and is speaking out against this degeneracy, though I'm skeptical that he is actually doing it for the right reasons. The reality is that there is a cultural rot in Israel that has allowed the worst side of humanity to proliferate and indulge itself on those unable to defend themselves.
Everyone in DC is aware that this is happening. And yet, we continue to fund and support these cut-throats.
On our current trajectory, it seems that all of these details of how Israel runs the West Bank and Gaza will soon be common knowledge. Whether the American public has the appetite to stop it remains to be seen. We should not underestimate the intoxicating power of psychological warfare operations, and how they can be used to manipulate somebody.
If America is going to re-establish decency, then we must have the courage to walk away from this vapid degeneracy.
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Badlands Media hits the road four times a year for a 3-day patriot-packed event with our hosts and the Badlands community. Our 13th stop on the Great American Restoration Tour (GART) is September 17-20 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Come meet like-minded Americans, hear powerful content, and be part of something real.
FBI Confronts Eric Swalwell at Airport, Searches Home in Sexual Misconduct Probe
FBI agents confronted former Rep. Eric Swalwell at San Francisco International Airport last Saturday after he arrived on a flight from Washington, D.C. Agents served a search warrant and seized his cellphone and other electronics as part of a federal criminal investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct.
Agents also executed additional search warrants the following day at Swalwell’s residence in Washington, D.C., where they seized other potential evidence.
The investigation relates to multiple allegations of sexual misconduct against Swalwell. A former staffer alleged that he raped her twice when she was too intoxicated to consent, once in 2019 and again in 2024 at a New York hotel. Another woman alleged he drugged and raped her in 2018. Additional claims include unsolicited explicit photos and messages. At least four women have made public accusations.
The Department of Justice opened its investigation in April 2026. Parallel investigations are being conducted by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
The airport confrontation and seizures occurred just days after the White House Transparency Task Force released declassified FBI interview summaries in which Swalwell admitted to having physical relations with suspected Chinese intelligence operative Christine “Fang Fang” Fang on multiple occasions between 2012 and 2015.
Ashe in America: Are we still believing all women?
The #metoo crowd is awfully silent on the rape allegations against Eric Swalwell. A congressman is alleged to have raped members of his staff – one reported claimed she woke up and he was having sex with her – and there is a severe lack of public outrage.
To be clear, I don’t believe all women, and I think that women that make fake rape allegations should receive the maximum punishment for rape. It’s only fair. But the establishment storytellers believe all women and peddle outrage over every allegation…except this one. And the ones against Joe Biden.
If a party’s outrage about rape is dependent upon the politics of the rapist, then the outrage about rape – not a specific rape, but all rape – isn’t real for that party. It’s political storytelling. The establishment storytellers are hypocrites at their core, so it’s not even that newsworthy that they’re protecting an alleged rapist for political points, but it’s still important.
The bigger Swalwell story, in my opinion, is the one we started the week with – Fang Fang and the foreign influence and the value exchanges.
Swalwell’s political exit being caused by sexual allegations reminds me of Andrew Cuomo’s political exit. In that case, it was sexual harassment allegations that materialized to avoid accountability for the death of NY elderly which was, at best as alleged, criminally negligent. Sexual harassment was a preferable story. Remember, Cuomo made a political comeback.
Is Swalwell experiencing these rape allegations to help him avoid accountability for treason?
Which is worse? (Both can be true.)
BONUS ITEMS
DOE Awards $162 Million for Critical Mineral Recovery Projects
The Department of Energy announced Tuesday that it is awarding $162 million to nine projects aimed at recovering critical minerals from industrial feedstocks and existing infrastructure.
The funding supports efforts to extract materials such as scandium, copper, antimony, and rare-earth elements from sources that were previously discarded, including mining waste, old tailings, abandoned copper mines, and aluminum facilities. The goal is to strengthen the domestic supply chain and reduce reliance on foreign sources, particularly China. Selected companies include Anactisis, Still Bright, Nusano, SiTration, Thompson Creek Metals Company, Felix Gold, DISA Technologies, Alcoa Corporation, and Trigg Minerals.
One project, Felix Gold’s Treasure Creek near Fairbanks, Alaska, will use existing gold mine infrastructure to extract high-grade antimony, a material used in ammunition, sensors, and flame retardants. Another, SiTration, an MIT spinout, will recover copper and rare-earth materials from diluted mining waste streams at operating sites.
The awards are part of a larger DOE effort that could provide up to $275 million for similar projects. In July, the department already awarded $75 million to five projects focused on producing rare earths and other critical materials from coal and coal-based feedstocks.
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@GBPH - "The reality is that there is a cultural rot in Israel that has allowed the worst side of humanity to proliferate and indulge itself on those unable to defend themselves."
Of course there is...IMO we should expect nothing else!
Four things:
1) Moses warned the nation of Israel just before they entered the land that "another" would come and that they would reject Him at the price of their own destruction (Deut. 28-30)
2) When the leaders of the nation, at the set time of the Messiah's coming (yes - Gabriel told Daniel exactly when He would be manifest - even Herod had an inkling), rejected Jesus the Son of the Living God and Messiah - He Who fulfilled/completed the Old Covenant - they triggered the end of the Levitical system (which was a replacement of the original priesthood design (Ex. 19:3-6)), though 40 years of grace were appointed before its final destruction. All the blood shed after that has been as sacrifices to the adversary.
3) Almighty God, Creator of Heaven and Earth, is patient and wishes that no one would choose to perish and that all would come to a place of rethinking their opinion of Him. That is Who He is and has always been and will always be. (His patience should not be presumed to be His tolerance of one's rejection of Him; He will always honor a person's choice to either reject or accept Him.)
4) In God's eyes there is no racial, ethnic, or inherited superiority. The need for a line from which Messiah would come was facilitated through the "seed of Abraham" - as was the preservation of the ordinances of God. But the Good News message declares that we all, each and everyone, stand on the exact same footing as any and everyone else. Because God so loves His created order...
Yesterday there was a discussion about the words “Federal Reserve Note” that appear on all of our currency. In answering some questions on this subject I uncovered some troubling facts going back to 1913. Congress approved the creation of the Federal Reserve and said they could issue Federal Reserve Notes in 1914, but that did not happen!
In 1914 you could go into any bank and exchange a twenty dollar bill for a one ounce Gold coin. The bill you presented said, “Gold Certificate”. There was nothing about the FED printed on it!
That was still true in 1933. Nothing had changed until FDR produced an executive order stating that all Gold coins were to be removed from circulation and it was illegal for an American citizen to hold more than $100 in coins. His reason was the Great Depression and the bank runs that were happening. Of course he blamed it on his Republican predecessor. But, in fact it was the first Marxist step in destroying the American economy.
After 1933 Gold Certificates disappeared as they were no longer valid currency. The new dollars said “ Silver Certificate” and were readily exchanged for Silver dollars at any bank.
That was true until 1963. That year new dollar bills were being printed that said “Federal Reserve Note” and banks began taking the Silver Certificates out of circulation. Silver coins were still being exchanged for the dollar, but the words on our dollar changed.
JFK began to work behind the scenes to reverse this reversal of our currency backing. And, of course, he was assassinated. In 1965 LBJ took away the Silver backing of our currency and clad coins were substituted. Today Gold Certificates as well as Silver Certificates are collector’s items and are a curiosity for interested people. They mean nothing to a bank because they are obsolete.
Today I heard the national debt just surpassed $40 Trillion which means it has doubled since 2017. Does anyone see how all of this is connected? Doubling our debt in nine years tells me our dollar has deflated in value at a compound rate of loss of over 8% per year. Meanwhile the GDP has increased by 3.4% annually. In other words we are going bankrupt over twice as fast as we are growing our tax revenue stream.
My friends, this is what Democrats do. I should say, “This is what Marxists do.” They destroy us slowly and deliberately and they do it in ways that seem harmless. We have a bankrupt government. But it still has really good credit. We have time to correct our mistakes.
This is the true story of our demise beginning over 112 years ago. Our job is to educate the public. The problem isn’t us. The problem is Congress. Deficit spending is their invention and they have no intention to stop. President Trump is on the case and he cannot do the job alone. He needs our support. Of course, he has a lot of opposition from the Left. Is that a surprise to us?