Badlands Brief

The Old Guard Is Very Confused About What’s Happening to Them

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.

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SCOTUS Drops Five Opinions Before Session Winds Down

On June 23, 2026, the Supreme Court issued four opinions addressing immigration admissibility procedures, aiding-and-abetting liability under U.S. statutes for international violations, foreign sovereign immunity under the Helms-Burton Act, and the constitutional measure of “just compensation” in tax foreclosure sales.

In Todd Blanche, Acting Attorney General v. Muk Choi Lau (No. 25-429), the Court held 6-3 that the Immigration and Nationality Act does not require a border officer to have clear and convincing evidence that a lawful permanent resident committed a crime involving moral turpitude before treating the resident as an applicant for admission upon reentry. Justice Thomas wrote for the majority.

In Cisco Systems, Inc. v. Doe (No. 24-856), the Court held that courts may not create new causes of action under the Alien Tort Statute to remedy violations of international law (including aiding-and-abetting liability) and that the Torture Victim Protection Act does not impose aiding-and-abetting liability because its text requires a defendant to have “subjected” another to torture through direct causation.

In Exxon Mobil Corp. v. Corporación Cimex, S.A. (Cuba) (No. 24-699), the Court held (in a divided decision) that the Helms-Burton Act itself abrogates the sovereign immunity of Cuban agencies and instrumentalities for private suits alleging trafficking in confiscated U.S. property.

In Pung v. Isabella County, Michigan (No. 25-95), the Court held that the baseline for measuring just compensation under the Takings Clause after a tax foreclosure sale is the price obtained at a fairly conducted public auction, not the property’s hypothetical fair market value.

These rulings emphasize statutory text, historical practice, and limits on judicial creation of new liability or expanded remedies.

Ashe in America: The trend of the 2025 Supreme Court term is encouraging.

They shouldn’t be seeking to perfect policy outcomes — as Sonia and the Banshees would prefer — but to interpret and apply laws enacted through the constitutional process.

This court seems hesitant to do novel stuff; but they seem more than willing to insist upon coloring inside their constitutional box and reinforcing those lines.

Encouraging.

The Court announced that it may issue more opinions on Thursday, June 25.

We’re still awaiting opinions for birthright citizenship, Trump’s removal powers, transes and guns and more.

I hope the trend continues.

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Trump Insists Nuclear Understanding Reached With Iran While Russia Enters the Chat

On June 23, 2026, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that Iran had “fully and completely agreed to highest level Nuclear inspections long into the future (Infinity!!!)” to ensure “Nuclear Honesty,” calling this a major concession that enabled further negotiations.

Iranian statements stressed that missiles and defensive capabilities are not subject to discussion, there are no plans to permit IAEA inspectors at nuclear sites targeted in the conflict, and the Strait of Hormuz will be administered by Iran under international law (with talks involving Oman).

Officials conditioned further progress on full implementation of commitments by all parties and noted the Strait remains open to shipping.

Kremlin foreign policy aide Yury Ushakov stated that while the developments is positive, achieving lasting peace will take time, and that Russia is open to hosting Iran’s enriched uranium as a concession to all powers.

Burning Bright: While Donald Trump and the Iranian Regime have finally compelled the global Mindscape to register that a ceasefire is in place, the deeper truth is that a deal has already been struck (and was some time ago) in order to create the conditions for the making public of the public making of the final deal at the end of this deal.

And that actually makes sense, if you think about it.

I have believed this for some time, and yet, one issue continues to swim beneath the surface of the fray while occasionally rising above it, its Narrative shadow so large that virtually every player on the game board concedes its existential weight when it arrives.

That issue is the nuclear question.

It is the core animating engine not merely of the supposed threat the Iranian Regime poses to the West, but of the broader construct the Globalist Hegemon has sought to weaponize for years.

Trump has been methodically disarming this engine in a more permanent fashion than any of his predecessors for reasons this audience finds obvious, beginning with the net effects of his Operation Midnight Hammer in 2025 and continuing through the more recent supposed kinetics and narrative maneuvers of what we now recognize as Epic Fury.

Both operations were, and are Actual Military Operations.

And yet, I maintain that they have been conducted largely within the domain of Fifth-Generation Warfare—above the threshold of all-out war in visible strikes on missile silos, naval assets and proxy infrastructure, and beneath it in the simultaneous dismantling of the Narrative architecture that would have justified a wider, hotter and more permanent proxy conflict.

This is why disarming the Narrative of Iran’s nuclear threat has always been paramount to Trump’s ability to claim eventual victory—not a victory over the Regime itself, but a victory over the story that would have served as the anchorpoint of the very war the Globalist Hegemon has long attempted to ignite, using Iran as both proxy and patsy.

Under this framing, the contradictory messaging emanating from the Switzerland negotiations is almost comedic in its transparency.

It suggests that not every member of either delegation has been fully read in on the true contours of the deal Trump has in the offing.

And to that effect, Trump himself just cut through the noise with a single, clarifying signal: “Nuclear Honesty.”

On the back of Epic Fury’s demonstrated resolve, that phrase becomes the key vector toward the codification of a long and stable peaceful paradigm, while acting as the translation layer of a private understanding that the old nuclear Narrative is no longer operative, and must not be again, to be used by ANY player on the board.

And Trump, as always is not alone in the setting of this Sovereign Signal, as Russia continues to position itself as the willing host for Iran’s enriched uranium program—not as a means of enabling weaponization, but explicitly under the guise of preventing it while preserving the on-ramp toward the civil nuclear energy program I predicted last year.

This is no accident.

Whether this dimension is primarily Actual or primarily Narrative matters less than the geometry it creates in keeping with the Regions of Responsibility template and the Multipolar framework we've discussed for years, and which stands as the central promise at the heart of the Sovereign Alliance theory.

Where it concerns the threat Iran poses to the west, then, Russia is forming yet another pincer with Donald Trump rather than against him.

Through backchannels and overt mediation offers, Moscow is supplying off-ramps to war and on-ramps to peace at the precise moment the Globalist Hegemon’s preferred escalation path has been cut off.

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Israel Smuggled Starlink Systems Into Iran, Former PM Says

According to a Reuters report, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett stated that Israel smuggled tens of thousands of Starlink satellite internet terminals into Iran to help anti-government protesters maintain internet and social media access for coordination and to ultimately topple the Iranian regime.

Bennett said he initiated the effort to acquire and smuggle the systems, but claimed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government halted the program, leaving the infrastructure unavailable during protests.

Starlink, operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, is not licensed to operate in Iran. Iranian authorities have repeatedly shut down public internet access during unrest, including deadly nationwide protests in January and throughout the U.S. and Israeli war with Iran that began at the end of February 2026.

Iran has previously accused Israel and the U.S. of smuggling the devices to undermine its security.

GhostofBasedPatrickHenry: Take: And there it is.

The former Israeli Prime Minister—the same one who in 2022 deceived Putin into pulling back from Kiev, believing he had a real ceasefire—admitting that he flooded Iran with StarLink receptors so that Mossad assets could coordinate a violent overthrow of the Iranian government.

Don’t be fooled into believing that Netanyahu is the sole warmonger in Israeli politics. No matter who is in office following the upcoming election, Israel will have war with Iran.

Netanyahu’s only chance to win the public mandate and remain in office (the legitimacy of elections being a separate issue) is to have a war with Iran either won or well underway when the election commences in October.

Therefore, I suspect that we will see violence resume very soon.

Now consider the implications of this disclosure from Bennett.

Iranian leadership shut down the internet—as expected—the operatives turned on their StarLink receptors, and then they all started getting targeted for arrest by Iranian security forces.

We later learned that the Russians helped the Iranians hack the StarLink receptors so they could locate the operatives.

Was it Elon helping the Iranians?

In any event, the Sovereign Alliance worked together to thwart a bloody coup in Tehran. And all evidence points to them coming back for more.

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Lindell’s Crucible With Dominion Comes to an End

According to a Law & Crime report, a yearslong defamation lawsuit between MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and voting machine company Dominion Voting Systems has been dismissed with prejudice following the company’s acquisition and rebranding.

Dominion originally sued Lindell and My Pillow, Inc. in February 2021 for $1.3 billion, accusing him of repeatedly and falsely claiming the company rigged the 2020 presidential election.

Lindell countersued Dominion and added Smartmatic as a third-party defendant; those counterclaims were largely unsuccessful. Smartmatic obtained sanctions against Lindell for frivolous filings, with fines exceeding $92,000 by early June 2026 after he failed to pay.

In October 2025, former Republican election official Scott Leiendecker acquired Dominion, rebranded it as Liberty Vote, and chose not to pursue further recovery from Lindell.

Liberty Vote Holdings, My Pillow, a Dominion subsidiary, and Lindell filed a joint stipulation in federal court in Washington, D.C., agreeing to dismiss all claims and causes of action with prejudice—meaning they cannot be refiled.

Each party will bear its own attorneys’ fees and costs.

Smartmatic was not a party to the dismissal agreement.

Ashe in America: Law & Crime provides a great summary of the litigation between Dominion Voting Systems and Mike Lindell.

“Now, one change is readily apparent: The company will no longer pursue a cent from Lindell or his once-profitable bedding company.”

It’s also notable that, as far as I can tell, the only remaining Dominion defamation case from that very silly season — where media companies abandoned winnable cases — is their (now Liberty Vote) action against Patrick Byrne.

Will be interesting to see if that one is dropped or litigated.

Patrick Byrne is said to have all the evidence. He is also said (by himself) to be CIA.

He appeared to be lamenting some sort of coming “justice” not that long ago — on LindellTV.

Is the final case going to be a big reveal? Or will it too be settled and just go away?

Either way, it would be cool to wrap up some of these (abandoned?) election narratives before our massive birthday party with all the winning and $2.40 gas.

Let’s see what happens.

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New US-Iran Lebanon Oversight Body Excludes Israel, Gives Tehran Say Over IDF Actions

A new US-Iran deconfliction and oversight mechanism for Lebanon has emerged from negotiations in Switzerland, with mediators Qatar and Pakistan announcing its creation via joint statement.

The framework includes the US, Iran, Lebanon, Qatar, and Pakistan in an oversight body, but excludes Israel, marking a shift from the November 2024 mechanism that had included Israel along with the US, France, and the UN.

Under the reported terms, Israeli military responses in Lebanon would be limited to “imminent threats,” a narrower standard than the previous allowance for addressing “emerging threats.”

The mechanism is tied to the broader US-Iran talks and ceasefire framework.

US Vice President JD Vance indicated Hezbollah would be part of regional conversations.

Lebanese President Joseph Aoun emphasized that Lebanon negotiates for itself.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected any restrictions, stating that Israeli forces in southern Lebanon have “full freedom of action to thwart any direct or emerging threat” and that the IDF faces no limitations.

Some US officials have downplayed the exclusion, suggesting a direct US-Iran channel could ultimately benefit Israel.

A Jerusalem Post editorial framed the development as empowering Tehran by giving it a say over IDF actions in Lebanon. The reports reflect ongoing tensions between Israel’s security posture in southern Lebanon and the US-Iran negotiating track.

GhostofBasedPatrickHenry: With each passing day, we see more and more daylight between the Trump administration and Israel.

Now it appears that the Trump admin is cooperating with Hezbollah and Iran over the Lebanese government—at least, that appears to be the way that Lebanese President Joseph Auoun is interpreting the situation.

Frankly, this makes sense. Hezbollah appears to be the legitimate fighting force that is protecting the Lebanese people from a foreign invading army. Hezbollah is the natural response to a hostile force invading and occupying a foreign land. Anyone suggesting that they wouldn’t take up arms under those conditions is a coward of the highest order. (They certainly aren’t 1776.)

Naturally, the Israelis are livid.

Listen to what former Israeli intelligence officer Mosab Hassan Yousef said at the Jerusalem News Syndicate’s summit this past weekend:

It certainly sounds to me like this guy is threatening the United States with an attack from Israel.

What’s even more interesting about Yousef is that he is the son of the founder of Hamas.

Huh?

Yeah, you read that right.

The son of the founder of Hamas works for Mossad.

I repeat: the son of the founder of Hamas works for Mossad.

And now that guy is openly threatening the US, out of frustration because we are no longer submitting to Israel like good little lap dogs.

Say it with me, everyone:

ACCELERATE.

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