Badlands News Brief

Trump Counters, Musk Sues & Biden Lies

The News Cycle is almost impossible to track these days. At least, to do so fully.

That’s where we come in.

In the Badlands News Brief, the Badlands Media team hand pick news items of interest from the previous days to give you an overview of the biggest goings-on relevant to the Truth Community.

Many items feature original (and subjective) commentary. Feel free to follow the corresponding link to see our writers’ Substack accounts and check out their other work.

Now, onto the news from Monday, April 1 …

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Trump posts $175 million bond to avert asset seizure as he appeals N.Y. fraud penalty

Donald Trump posted a $175 million bond on Monday in his New York civil fraud case, halting collection of the more than $454 million he owes and preventing the state from seizing his assets to satisfy the debt while he appeals, according to a court filing.

A New York appellate court had given the former president 10 days to put up the money after a panel of judges agreed last month to slash the amount needed to stop the clock on enforcement.

The bond Mr. Trump is posting with the court now is essentially a placeholder, meant to guarantee payment if the judgment is upheld. If that happens, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee will have to pay the state the whole sum, which grows with daily interest.

If Mr. Trump wins, he won’t have to pay the state anything and will get back the money he has put up.

Until the appeals court intervened to lower the required bond, New York Attorney General Letitia James had been poised to initiate efforts to collect the judgment, possibly by seizing some of Mr. Trump‘s marquee properties. Ms. James, a Democrat, brought the lawsuit on the state’s behalf. — Washington Times

Our Take: “The regime players tried everything they could to prevent this moment, but it’s official: Trump is appealing Engoron’s egregious abuses of power and discretion in the NY Civil Fraud trial.

The decisions made by this judge resulted in manifest injustice against President Trump. The judge’s penalties are cruel and unusual by any definition. Engoron’s decisions and choices in this case will now be reviewed.

The Appellate court has agreed to hear arguments in September — interesting timing. Do you still believe in justice?” —

Ashe in America

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Elon Musk's X sues the Australian government in 'free speech' battle after its 'world-first' e-Safety Commissioner ordered an 'offensive' post to be taken down

Elon Musk's X is suing the Australian government after its 'world-first' E-Safety Commissioner ordered an 'offensive' post to be removed from the platform.

Daily Mail Australia last week revealed that X faced an $800,000 fine if it did not remove a post written by Canadian man Chris Elston, in which he misgendered and made 'disparaging' remarks about an Australian citizen, Teddy Cook. 

Cook, 45, a female-to-male trans man who has advocated for taxpayer-funded surgeries for all transgender Australians, was controversially appointed to a World Health Organisation expert panel.

X, formerly called Twitter, complied with the request of the government-run E-Safety Commissioner and geo-blocked the post in Australia.

But the demand backfired spectacularly when it led to the offending post being re-shared in a different format and viewed hundreds of thousands of times. 

Now, X has revealed it will mount a legal challenge against the Commissioner to 'protect its user's right to free speech'. — The Daily Mail

Our Take: “It can seem almost comical to long-time Anons that censorship just seems to be coming to the forefront of the Collective Mind in 2024, but the timing couldn't be better for us, and worse for [them.]

To wit, Elon Musk being at the tip of the spear when it comes to the pushback on the Censorship Industrial Complex is conspicuous and auspicious.

Musk is once more at the forefront of a major attack vector in the Info War. He seems to be operating as a proxy for the Culture War front, pushing back against both foreign and domestic administrative overreach by either directly backing or engaging in legal campaigns against institutions connected to the government, and funded by them.

These lawsuits are helping to educate the Normie Layers of the Collective Mind as to the systemic nature of said censorship.

Coordination = Control. That goes both ways.

Their machine dominated the Info War landscape for years. Now, precedents are being set to bring the whole house of cards down around them.” —

Burning Bright

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"I Didn't Do That": Biden Reportedly Has No Idea He Issued 'Trans Day Of Visibility' Proclamation

Is this an April Fool's Day joke? While Democrats have spent the better part of the last six months insisting that President Biden is a well-oiled galaxy brain behind closed doors, the POTUS clearly can't keep up with his marxist handlers.

Point in case, when asked about proclaiming Easter Sunday "trans day of visibility," Biden flat out denied it.

"I didn't do that," Biden reportedly said when asked about the proclamation, RealClear Politics' Philip Wegmann reports.

When asked about Speaker Johnson's claim that he had, Biden replied, "he's thoroughly uninformed."

Except, as we all know, that's complete bullshit.

Of course, the biggest takeaway from this is obviously: Who's running the show? — ZeroHedge

Our Take: “It’s important to remember that it wasn’t just the White House that paid tribute to baphomet on Easter Sunday, it was a large part of the Executive Branch. It was also reportedly all but two Colorado democrat state legislators.

In a normal world, that level of coordination among institutions would interest journalists, and inspire questions about the true motives of these proclamations.

Not so much in clown world. Here, scrotus can just deny his own proclamation, despite its overt offense to millions of religious Americans. ‘Journalists’ will ignore the story, and everyone will simply move on and continue painting the world in rainbow communism.” —

Ashe in America

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JK Rowling Could Be Imprisoned For "Misgendering" Trans People Under New Law

Author JK Rowling could be prosecuted for “misgendering” trans people under Scotland’s odious new hate crime law that comes into force today, an SNP minister has admitted.

Senior police officers are expecting a deluge of complaints over online posts after the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 created a new crime of “stirring up hatred” relating to age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or being intersex.

A person could now be imprisoned for up to seven years if they engage in “insulting” behaviour towards ‘protected’ groups, and the prosecution only needs to prove that the hatred was “likely” rather than “intended”.

Siobhian Brown, the SNP’s community safety minister, initially stated that calling a “trans woman” (a man) “he” would not be a crime.

However, after the law came into force, Brown stated, “It could be reported and it could be investigated. Whether or not the police would think it was criminal is up to Police Scotland for that.”

Rowling has vowed to continue calling biological males men and says she will now be targeted for telling the truth.

During their training program on enforcing the new law, police officers were taught that even the content of plays and comedy gigs should be considered as potential hate crimes. — Modernity News

Our Take: “Isn’t it cute that these new laws in Scotland are being implemented in lockstep with Trudeau’s Online Harms Bill?

It’s helpful when these NWO goons line up operations so we can remind the people of the world that we have an apolitical, globalist enemy attacking the very concept of the sovereign nation state.

In my experience, these radical laws are dangerous in precedent, and more symbolic than practical.

Woke philosophy is inhere cannibalistic. It’s illogical nature causes it to consume itself. This is one of the reasons the laws become so hard to enforce. That, and they are also unbelievably vague.

Case in point—laws here in Ontario where I live have been in place since around 2017 which state that misgendering is a hate crime. It is an attack on someone’s fundamental human rights in the eyes of the law.

And yet, we didn’t have a deluge of woke activists and capture police making strings of insane, dystopian arrests.

I don’t point this out to say that we should take such laws lightly. They should be fought against vehemently. I point it out to sidestep the fight or flight response invested in the idea that there are about to be mass arrests of people for speaking common sense.

The anti-woke are the global majority. Perhaps the creation of maddening, unenforceable laws is intended more for psychological impact than acting as a functional form of lawfare?

I call our enemy’s bluff. They do not have the ready, willing and able army of foot soldiers prepared to take on the global majority. The asymmetrics of the current battlefield demand that our enemy rely on cognitive warfare above all else.

Belief in the false authority of treasonous criminals and a lack of citizens prepared to stand up for themselves are what make such laws dangerous, not the laws themselves.” —

Simon Esler

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Google Pledges to Destroy Browsing Data to Settle ‘Incognito’ Lawsuit

Google plans to destroy a trove of data that reflects millions of users’ web-browsing histories, part of a settlement of a lawsuit that alleged the company tracked people without their knowledge. 

The class action, filed in 2020, accused Google of misleading users about how Chrome tracked the activity of anyone who used the private “Incognito” browsing option. The lawsuit alleged that Google’s marketing and privacy disclosures didn’t properly inform users of the kinds of data being collected, including details about which websites they viewed. 

The settlement details, filed Monday in San Francisco federal court, set out the actions the company will take to change its practices around private browsing. According to the court filing, Google has agreed to destroy billions of data points that the lawsuit alleges it improperly collected, to update disclosures about what it collects in private browsing and to give users the option to disable third-party cookies in that setting.

The agreement doesn’t include damages for individual users. But the settlement will allow individuals to file claims. Already the plaintiff attorneys have filed 50 in California state court. 

Attorney David Boies, who represents the consumers in the lawsuit, said the settlement requires Google to delete and remediate “in unprecedented scope and scale” the data it improperly collected.

“This settlement is an historic step in requiring honesty and accountability from dominant technology companies,” Boies said.

Google didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the settlement. — The Wall Street Journal

Our Take: “Even in incognito mode?! Yes. The data is always being generated, collected, refined, analyzed, and used, for predictive purposes and often sold for other purposes.

Technology capabilities have exploded over the past 20 years, obviously. Just 10-15 years ago, it was nearly impossible to find any business value or insight in the massive amount of unstructured data that companies were generating. Most of this data (think log files, event streams, and cached data from an app or the Web) isn’t personally identifiable; its governance and regulations are more relaxed than those for, say, your healthcare information or social security number.

There is no real way to keep companies from gathering your data. The modern regulatory compliance landscape focuses on masking identifiable information when it comes into systems — meaning it’s collected and then masked.

Masking. Familiar term. ‘We pinky promise we won’t misuse your data.’

Incognito mode is just a pinky promise by Google that they are going to appropriately mask your identity when they collect and use your data. The legality here is gray (and these cases unprecedented) because we don’t own our own data. We should. It’s not as sexy or self serving as ‘censorship,’ but it’s an arguably more important civil rights issue.” —

Ashe in America

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BONUS ITEMS

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Iran says Israel bombs its embassy in Syria, kills commanders

Suspected Israeli warplanes bombed Iran's embassy in Syria on Monday in a strike that Iran said killed seven of its military advisers, including three senior commanders, and that marked a major escalation in Israel's war with its regional adversaries.

Reuters reporters at the site in the Mezzeh district of Damascus saw emergency workers clambering atop rubble of a destroyed building inside the diplomatic compound, adjacent to the main Iranian embassy building. Emergency vehicles were parked outside. An Iranian flag hung from a pole by the debris.

"We strongly condemn this atrocious terrorist attack that targeted the Iranian consulate building in Damascus and killed a number of innocents," said Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad who was seen at the site along with Syria's interior minister.

Iran's ambassador to Syria said the strike hit a consular building in the embassy compound and that his residence was on the top two floors.

Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said in a statement that seven Iranian military advisers died in the strike including Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior commander in its Quds Force, which is an elite foreign espionage and paramilitary arm.

Israel has long targeted Iran's military installations in Syria and those of its proxies, but Monday's attack was the first time Israel hit the vast embassy compound itself. — Reuters

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El Paso judge orders release of migrants accused of 'border riot'

An El Paso magistrate judge on Easter Sunday ordered the release of migrants accused in a "border riot" when a stampede overwhelmed National Guard troops along the Rio Grande.

Court officials noted that undocumented migrants will stay jailed if there is a federal immigration hold blocking their release.

The Texas Department of Public Safety booked about 220 people on riot charges, of those 39 have been processed to be released to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and remain jailed on immigration detainers, a spokeswoman for the El Paso County Sheriff's Office said Monday.

Presiding Magistrate Judge Humberto Acosta made his ruling on Sunday, March 31, during an online teleconference bond hearing where he accused the El Paso District Attorney's Office of not being ready to proceed with detention hearings for each defendant. Another hearing for more defendants was expected Monday.

"It is the ruling of the court that all the rioting participation cases will be released on their own recognizance," Acosta ordered on Sunday. — El Paso Times

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Speaker Johnson says House will move on Ukraine aid when Congress is back in DC

Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., suggested the House of Representatives will act in the coming weeks to get more funding to Ukraine.

"When we return after this period, we'll be moving a product. But it's going to, I think, have some important innovations," Johnson told Fox News’ "Sunday Night in America with Trey Gowdy."

Both the House and Senate are currently on the second week of a two-week recess, when lawmakers are working in their home districts. The House is back on Tuesday, April 9.

Johnson said he has been "working to build consensus" on a supplemental national security and foreign aid package, though he signaled it would look different from prior attempts. He said the House would "be moving it right after the district work period." — FOX News

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We hope you enjoyed this brief look back at the major news items you might have missed in this ever-escalating and ever-accelerating news cycle as the Information War continues to rage on around us.

As always, if you have any thoughts on these news items or the MANY others swirling in the digital ether, drop into the comments below to share them with your fellow Badlanders.

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