Badlands Brief
Southern Hospitality Superseded Plus Cross Burning
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.
DOJ Obtains Superseding Indictment Against Southern Poverty Law Center
The Justice Department said Tuesday it has secured a superseding indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center, adding new allegations about how the organization’s tax-exempt donations were used to fund informants inside extremist groups.
A grand jury in the Middle District of Alabama alleges the group used roughly $4.1 million to pay individuals embedded in hate organizations, who prosecutors say then took part in activities including recruiting members and obtaining materials linked to cross burnings and Ku Klux Klan regalia.
The updated indictment reportedly removes language referring to “false or misleading” statements to banks, following a Supreme Court ruling in Thompson v. United States clarifying that the relevant statute applies only to false statements.
The SPLC faces 11 counts of wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering, with prosecutors alleging it defrauded donors and banks by routing funds through shell accounts to individuals inside the groups it publicly opposed. The organization has pleaded not guilty and recently moved to dismiss the case, calling it a vindictive prosecution.
Ashe in America: Back in 2023, the commie mayor of Colorado Springs, Yemi Mobolade, was elected into one of the reddest cities in Colorado after a supposed cross burning in front of his campaign sign.
“Jurors found Bernard, who is also Black, and his wife, Ashley Blackcloud, were guilty of making a threat or conveying false information about a threat. They were also found guilty of conspiring to do that together. Rodriguez said setting the cross on fire and writing a racial slur on one of Mobolade’s campaign signs and then spreading word about it harmed Mobolade and his family and affected the city’s election.”
The story was always crazy, and when Mobolade was let off the hook, everyone (including yours truly) believed the mayor was in on it and skating free.
Also, the stunt didn’t harm Mobolade. It ushered him into office and, it turns out, he knows the guy that did it – but Mobolade’s complicity was off limits.
Now I wonder if the SPLC was involved.
The narrative was so important that, when supply for racism outweighed demand, racism had to be manufactured.
You can bet me and the homies are tracking the SPLC connections of the people and entities that fabricated claims under the KKK Act against us in 2022.
Abusing the legal process for narrative gain should be a crime. Note that, in trying to determine whether it is a crime, I learned a new word:
“Barratry is an old common-law offense that dates back to medieval England. At its core, it means habitually inciting, promoting, or fomenting lawsuits and legal disputes in which the instigator has no legitimate interest.”
Apparently it’s not really in vogue in 2026; but we should make barratry great again, beginning with the SPLC and their collaborators (and I have a list from there…)
Hezbollah Must Withdraw From Israel-Occupied Lebanon — US
The United States is backing a new Israel-Lebanon ceasefire framework that requires Hezbollah to halt attacks on Israel and withdraw its operatives from areas south of the Litani River, while security zones in southern Lebanon would come under the control of the Lebanese Armed Forces. The agreement was announced jointly by the US, Israel, and Lebanon following negotiations in Washington.
According to reports, the Trump administration views the removal of Hezbollah fighters from southern Lebanon as a central condition for stabilizing the border and advancing broader Israel-Lebanon peace talks. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the goal is a security arrangement in which armed non-state actors no longer operate in the designated zones.
The demand reflects a long-standing international position that Hezbollah’s armed presence south of the Litani River violates earlier ceasefire arrangements and should be replaced by Lebanese state authority. Previous agreements similarly envisioned Hezbollah forces withdrawing north of the Litani while Lebanese troops deployed in the area.
The proposal faces significant obstacles. Hezbollah has historically resisted disarmament and has insisted that any withdrawal or surrender of weapons must be accompanied by a complete Israeli withdrawal from Lebanese territory. Recent statements from Hezbollah leaders have rejected US-backed disarmament plans and warned against accepting arrangements they view as serving Israeli interests.
The ceasefire remains fragile. Even after the agreement was announced, rocket launches, drone incidents, and Israeli strikes continued, underscoring the challenge of enforcing a deal when Hezbollah itself was not a direct signatory to the negotiations.
The emerging US-backed framework appears to move beyond a simple ceasefire toward a broader objective: replacing Hezbollah’s military presence in southern Lebanon with the authority of the Lebanese state. Whether Hezbollah accepts that outcome may determine whether the current truce develops into a lasting peace agreement or collapses into renewed fighting.
GhostofBasedPatrickHenry: Listen to the way President Trump talks about Hezbollah in this clip:
Here’s how I think this is going to go:
The Lebanese People will plead for Hezbollah to stay, because they are the only fighting force that has been defending civilians from the IDF.
Hezbollah will ultimately pull back, due to pressure and incentive provided by Trump.
Once Hezbollah is gone, Israel will move quickly to annex the land south of the Litani River. The world will respond by unanimously rebuking Israel, with most countries cutting all ties and banning entry of Israelis into their border.
What happens at that point is anybody’s guess. Obviously, Hezbollah will return with a vengeance. I suspect that President Trump will take their side, honoring the agreement they are likely about to announce.
Putin and Iran will obviously come running to aid Hezbollah, as will Syria, Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan. Saudi Arabia, which has always been an enemy of Hezbollah, will stand with them. Pakistan will obviously oppose Israel, as will the Taliban in Afghanistan, which already offered to send Hezbollah fighters and weaponry.
The EU will continue to escalate the hostility it has already exercised against Israel, with France likely taking the lead, given its historical connection to Lebanon. Canada will follow suit.
China will likely remain relatively silent, but they will stand with their allies in the Global South. And North Korea will probably jump in the mix, for fun.
Simply put, I think this situation will unite most, if not all, of the world—which has already been voting together against Israel at the UN. (The US has used its position on the Security Council to veto these measures.)
With Trump negotiating peace with Iran, and Israel’s antics threatening that peace, the US will have no choice but to abandon Bibi and his merry band of Kahanist psychopaths.
And the American People will support the move.
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Trump Says Iran ‘Already Agreed’ Not to Have Nukes, Wants to Meet Ayatollah
President Trump said Iran has already agreed in principle not to obtain a nuclear weapon and suggested he would be open to personally meeting Iran’s supreme leader as negotiations continue. In an interview released June 3, Trump stated, “They’ve already agreed they’re not gonna have a nuclear weapon,” while emphasizing that preventing an Iranian bomb remains his top condition for any final agreement.
Trump also indicated that Iran’s supreme leader is directly involved in approving the ongoing talks and said he would “probably” meet him if doing so would help secure a deal. The comments mark a notable shift from months of military escalation toward a more diplomatic posture, with the White House signaling confidence that negotiations are making progress despite continuing regional tensions.
The remarks come amid reports that talks have been complicated by continued Israeli military operations in Lebanon and lingering disputes over sanctions, regional security, and the future of Iran’s nuclear program. While Trump has expressed optimism that an agreement could be reached soon, neither Washington nor Tehran has announced a finalized deal.
After months of conflict and repeated warnings that Iran could never be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon, Trump is now publicly portraying Tehran as having accepted that core demand. The remaining question is whether negotiators can turn that claimed understanding into a formal, enforceable agreement.
Burning Bright: In the latest turn of the Iranian Knot, Donald Trump has once again demonstrated that he already knows how this chapter closes, and that he has been content to let the Hegelian machine run its own script long enough to expose its authors before quietly seizing the pen.
Amid reports of a heated exchange with Benjamin Netanyahu over Israel’s planned escalations in Lebanon, the President sat for an interview and offered two lines that should have collapsed the prevailing narrative in an instant, claiming that Iran has already agreed not to pursue nuclear weapons under the framework now under discussion, and that he would like to meet the Supreme Leader.
Not the old Ayatollah whose image had been frozen in amber for decades as the necessary villain of the narrative, but Mojtaba Khamenei, a figure operating within a reconfigured leadership structure shaped by the strikes that supposedly removed his father and by the IRGC commanders we’re told represent the final blocks en route to peace.
Oh, and we were also told in advance (by the New York Times, no less,) that the man Trump signaled he would sit down with looks and sounds nothing like the one the original playbook required to remain in place, so disfigured and changed has he been by the very strikes Trump rained down on his regime at the start of the war.
This, to me, represents another deliberate inversion that has defined Trump’s approach to the entire theater from the outset.
Having long since studied the enemy’s preferred ending across multiple theaters—an on-ramp of controlled escalation that would lock the United States back into perpetual Middle Eastern entanglement, justify the continued weaponization of energy corridors and regenerate the military-industrial and narrative mandates the Globalist Hegemon requires to survive—he chose instead to run their script himself, ALMOST beat for beat in order to engender the very discombobulation we see writ large across all layers of the Mindscape right now.
In so doing, Trump has permitted the optics of tension with Netanyahu, the headlines of regional friction and the lingering specter of Hormuz to serve as narrative shielding while he inserts the hard pivots that redirect the story toward the off-ramp they never would have authored.
This recalls our own Chris Paul’s concept of ‘drafting’ in the Info War, where he argues that, in the same way a driver drafting behind a larger vehicle conserves power before sling-shotting past it at the moment of maximum vulnerability, Trump has stayed within the slipstream of the script the media and institutional voices were deployed to protect, only to edit it from the inside.
The result is not chaos for its own sake, but the methodical humiliation of a machine that now finds its own carefully-constructed story beats weaponized against it.
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Election Official Joins DOJ Role in Grand Conspiracy Probe of Prior Investigations of President Trump
Kurt Olsen, a White House official who assisted President Trump’s efforts to examine the 2020 election results, has joined the Justice Department as a senior attorney in the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida.
A Justice Department spokesperson confirmed Olsen began his role on Monday. He will report to US Attorney Jason Reding Quinones, a prosecutor involved in developing a broad grand conspiracy inquiry examining whether past investigations and prosecutions involving President Trump amounted to criminal conspiracy.
The effort is being overseen within the Southern District of Florida, where prosecutors are reviewing prior federal probes into Trump, including the Russian Collusion investigation tied to his 2016 campaign, cases brought by former Special Counsel Jack Smith, and the FBI’s 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago for classified documents.
The work is being supervised by Joe diGenova, a Trump ally serving as counselor to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and leading a civil rights unit in Miami.
Olsen has been involved in efforts examining possible foreign interference in US elections and participating in the collection of voting machines and election materials in Puerto Rico, Georgia, and Arizona to support the investigation.
Ashe in America: As I said on Badlands Daily yesterday, if there is any attorney in the nation that understands election fraud and malfeasance on every level – fake voters, fake ballots, and fake counts, and their evidentiary application across legal challenges, cyber expert analysis, legislative endeavors, and more – that attorney is Kurt Olsen.
Olsen spent the time between Trump Administrations as Mike Lindell’s attorney, and he went everywhere the evidence was. Patrick Byrne is very excited about Olsen joining DOJ, sharing that he and Olsen agreed that the latter was going to take election fraud “to the firing squad” – In December 2020.
That post is interesting. I always thought that Mike Lindell’s unfortunate photo op on January 15, 2021 where Olsen’s name was listed on the papers under Lindell’s arm, was Olsen’s origin story for how he got in the election fight.
But according to Patrick Byrne, Olsen agreed with Byrne that he was going to prosecute election fraud “all the way to the firing squad” back in December of 2020?
How very interesting.
I don’t recall where Lindell got the papers or who put Olsen’s name on them. Seems important.
Regardless, congratulations to Kurt Olsen!
Trump and Netanyahu Both Confirm Tense Call Re: Lebanon
President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have both confirmed reports of a tense phone call over Israel’s military actions in Lebanon. Trump acknowledged he was frustrated by continued Israeli strikes and confirmed he sharply criticized Netanyahu during the conversation, though he emphasized that the two leaders still maintain a strong relationship.
According to reports, Trump was concerned that further escalation in Lebanon could undermine US efforts to stabilize the region and advance diplomatic talks involving Iran. The call reportedly focused on planned Israeli operations in Beirut and the risk of a broader regional conflict.
The dispute highlights a growing difference in priorities between Washington and Jerusalem. While Netanyahu remains focused on pressuring Hezbollah militarily, Trump has increasingly pushed for de-escalation, ceasefires, and a broader regional settlement that could include an agreement with Iran.
And there you have it.
I wasn’t sure if we had actually reached that point yet. There have been so many moments that teased it, and then came the rug pull.
But it would appear that moment has finally come.
This doesn’t mean that President Trump will never be kind to Netanyahu again. In fact, I expect him to be. He will continue to kill Bibi with kindness just like he has done for the past ten years.
The real tell was this moment, when Trump said he was open to meeting the Ayatollah.
This was the moment, I’m sure, that heads exploded across Tel Aviv. Because this was the moment that it became painfully clear that Trump was being 100% truthful at the beginning of this Iran conflict when he described it as The Venezuela Model.
Just like with Venezuela, I suspect that we will soon see President Trump call Iran one of our greatest allies.
BONUS ITEM
NIH Researchers Charged In Monkeypox Smuggling Scheme At Detroit Airport
Two National Institutes of Health researchers have been charged in a federal criminal complaint with conspiracy to smuggle monkeypox into the United States and making false statements to federal authorities, according to the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Michigan.
Vincent Munster, a Netherlands citizen and chief of the Virus Ecology Section at the Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Montana, and Claude Kwe, a Cameroon national and research fellow in Munster’s section, are accused of attempting to bring biological materials into the country after traveling from the Republic of Congo during an outbreak of monkeypox.
Federal authorities say the two arrived at Detroit Metropolitan Airport on January 25, 2026, where Customs and Border Protection officers discovered a black case they claimed contained diagnostic equipment. Investigators allege the case instead held 113 vials in Styrofoam coolers. Of those tested, 17 contained deactivated monkeypox virus, one contained chickenpox virus, and two contained human DNA.
The case is being investigated by the FBI, Customs and Border Protection, and the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General. The men face up to five years in prison if convicted.
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Ghost already has a fairly immaculate record with regard to his prognostication, but I suggest that we might bookmark his predicted sequence of events in the wake of Hezbollah being ousted from Israeli-occupied Lebanon. Something tells me we will enjoy watching this unfold very closely to what is presented in today’s brief by our very own “Savant de Trumpamania.”
Ashe: “when supply for racism outweighed demand, racism had to be manufactured”. Well-stated tool in [their] playbook of division!!