Badlands News Brief
Iranian Fireworks & Conspiracy Convergence
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.
Some items feature original (and subjective) commentary. Feel free to follow the corresponding link to see our writers’ corresponding Substack accounts and check out their other work.
Now, onto the news from February 1 …
Plans for U.S. strikes on Iranian personnel and facilities in Iraq, Syria approved after Jordan drone attack
U.S. officials have confirmed to CBS News that plans have been approved for a series of strikes over a number of days against targets — including Iranian personnel and facilities — inside Iraq and Syria. The strikes will come in response to drone and rocket attacks targeting U.S. forces in the region, including the drone attack on Sunday that killed three U.S. service members at the Tower 22 base inside Jordan, near the Syrian border.
Speaking at the Pentagon Thursday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters that the U.S. won't tolerate attacks on American troops.
"This is a dangerous moment in the Middle East," Austin said, noting that Israel's ongoing war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip and attacks by Houthi rebels in Yemen on commercial shipping in the Red Sea were also happening in the region. "We will continue to work to avoid a wider conflict in the region, but we will take all necessary actions to defend the United States, our interests and our people, and we will respond when we choose, where we choose and how we choose."
Weather will be a major factor in the timing of the strikes, the U.S. officials told CBS News, as the U.S. has the capability to carry out strikes in bad weather but prefers to have better visibility of selected targets as a safeguard against inadvertently hitting civilians who might stray into the area at the last moment. — CBS News
Our Take: “What would be the defining (for better or worse) point in most other presidencies is being seen as just the latest in a long line of massive blunders by the Biden Regime, as the faux President plays at being faux Commander in Chief by first telegraphing and then supposedly actualizing strikes on 'Iranian Targets' in a massive escalation that blows way past ‘tensions’ on the world stage.
I'm in line with
in believing Biden no more controls the US MIL than he does his bowel movements these days, so if there are Actuals occurring on the ground, I'd replace 'Iranian' targets with 'Deep State proxies,' and we could see a similar pattern that was set with the Azov battalion and continued with Hamas play out with said Iranian proxies, before potentially being repeated in Taiwan.But that's purely guesswork.
The Story is the key, and the story the Collective Mind is being told is that the geriatric in the White House is stumbling headfirst into the next Great War unimpeded.” —
Jimmy Kimmel Suggests Joe Biden Having Dementia Is A "Crazy Conspiracy Theory"
During a monologue about the Taylor Swift psyop, late night comedian Jimmy Kimmel suggested that it was a ‘crazy conspiracy theory’ to believe that Joe Biden might be suffering from dementia.
Kimmel weighed in on assertions by Trump supporters that the NFL might be involved in promoting Swift as part of a voter recruitment strategy to help the Biden campaign.
As we previously highlighted, the media has played up the NFL angle in a bid to dismiss the entire issue, attacking conservatives who talked about it as unhinged cranks.
This despite the fact that the New York Times reported the Biden campaign does have a Taylor Swift strategy that could involve Biden appearing at one of Swift’s concerts before the election.
Kimmel opened his monologue by calling Vivek Ramaswamy a “clown who ran for president” who then “added his nut voice to the chorus of cuckoos” surrounding the speculation over Swift being used as a Democrat operative. — Modernity News
Our Take: “This brings me back to ‘horse paste.’
When you want to take a legitimate discussion — like using ivermectin to treat covid — and turn it into a crazy conspiracy theory, mainstream ‘entertainment’ media is often your first stop. Here Kimmel is taking a legitimate discussion about Biden’s cognitive ability and equating it to the latest hysteria about Taylor Swift.
The timing of this narrative deployment — squirting horse paste on the idea that Biden has dementia — is interesting given the OMG video released yesterday where James O’Keefe revealed that loose lips do indeed sink ships.
O’Keefe enjoyed a date with a US State Department staffer who sang like a bird about his employers, including sharing that EVERYONE knows Biden is ‘slowing down.’
Biden’s State Department is the Titanic of government agencies. His DOJ is the Olympic. Covering up the cognitive decline of a president is not new in America. See Woodrow Wilson’s final days, and consider what knowingly covering up Biden’s mental state might mean in the macro sense. Iceberg right ahead!
Kimmel is following orders, but he embarrasses himself with this storyline, and proves that he is nothing more than a regime mouthpiece.” —
Not Just Claudine Gay. Harvard's Chief Diversity Officer Plagiarized and Claimed Credit for Husband's Work, Complaint Alleges
It's not just Claudine Gay. Harvard University's chief diversity and inclusion officer, Sherri Ann Charleston, appears to have plagiarized extensively in her academic work, lifting large portions of text without quotation marks and even taking credit for a study done by another scholar—her own husband—according to a complaint filed with the university on Monday and a Washington Free Beacon analysis.
The complaint makes 40 allegations of plagiarism that span the entirety of Charleston's thin publication record. In her 2009 dissertation, submitted to the University of Michigan, Charleston quotes or paraphrases nearly a dozen scholars without proper attribution, the complaint alleges. And in her sole peer-reviewed journal article—coauthored with her husband, LaVar Charleston, in 2014—the couple recycle much of a 2012 study published by LaVar Charleston, the deputy vice chancellor for diversity and inclusion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, framing the old material as new research.
Through that sleight of hand, Sherri Ann Charleston effectively took credit for her husband's work. The 2014 paper, which was also coauthored with Jerlando Jackson, now the dean of Michigan State University's College of Education, and appeared in the Journal of Negro Education, has the same methods, findings, and description of survey subjects as the 2012 study, which involved interviews with black computer science students and was first published by the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education. — The Washington Free Beacon
Our Take: “One might argue that we can’t get inside the head of Harvard's Chief Diversity Officer, Sherri Ann Charleston, to assess what she was thinking as she continuously built her career on plagiarism.
I would argue differently because, living in Toronto, I have had personal encounters with Neo-Marxist academics. In fact, a bunch of them emerged from the University of Toronto to lead the counterprotest against the 1 Million March 4 Children (LINK ON X) that occurred across Canada in September.
I’ve been in the weeds!
I can empirically say that those devoted to this ideology are automatically going to be self serving, entitled narcissists because that’s their cultural MO. It’s a requirement of the theoretical superstructure they worship.
Someone in a position of stature and authority like Charleston literally believes that hard work is meaningless in the face of overwhelming, ever-present (but mostly invisible) racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc.
She had to cheat! Because the white, heteronormative, cisnormative, patriarchy is keeping her down, so, why play fair?
Not only that, but Neo-Marxists are also self deprecating. They are currently teaching children in public schools that, in every single situation, you have to see yourself as both the oppressed and the oppressor. This comes from one of their greatest heroes, Neo-Marxist Paulo Freire.
Since Charleston is at the top of academia as a ‘body-normative, cis-normative, heteronormative black woman’, she is therefore oppressing the gay, obese, black, neurodivergent amputee trans woman who SHOULD HAVE BEEN GIVEN THIS POSITION AT HARVARD (Cue rage-sobbing).
If she is a true practicing ‘Chief Diversity Officer,’ then she has to hate both the world and herself.
Hell, if I was constantly mentally crippled by this kind of incoherent, solipsistic, cannibalistic communist mania, I would cheat too.” —
The Most Litigious Place On Earth: Disney Loses Major Challenge To Florida
Last year, I criticized the lawsuit of Disney against Florida after losing its special status in the former Reedy Creek Improvement District. U.S. District Judge Allen Winsor in Tallahassee appears to view the matter as dimly as I did. He just dismissed the action in a major loss for the House of Mouse.
Disney decided to go public with a campaign against the popular parent rights legislation for Florida schools. Florida responded by removing the special status long enjoyed by the company. There is another lawsuit pending in state court.
Judge Winsor found that Disney lacked standing to sue DeSantis, the secretary of the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity and the new governing district. The separate lawsuit is still pending in state court in Orlando.
The court found that the law was constitutional on its face. As a result, it found no standing to challenge the law under the First Amendment. As I noted earlier, Disney was effectively saying that a state legislature could not remove special status and create greater uniformity with all companies under this law. Even if there were retaliatory purposes, there was clearly a public policy reason for seeking such uniformity. If the courts were to block it, it would invite a major intrusion of the courts into decisions on the priorities of legislatures. As the court noted, Disney is “not the district’s only landowner, and other landowners within the district are affected by the same laws.”
Disney seems to be doubling down and said it would “press forward with our case.” It insisted that “this is an important case with serious implications for the rule of law, and it will not end here.” So once again, what does the company hope to achieve? Is a court truly going to order Florida to maintain special status ad infinitum? — Jonathan Turley
Our Take: “It's easy fodder for the culture war gold mine that has become of the YouTube algorithm these days, but the ongoing Disney controversy cascade is following a few other major storylines in keeping with the Shark Fin Template I write about quite often.
The Template suggests that some of the most impactful stories in the Mind War continue to resurface at opportune times in the Narrative, spiking interest and awareness in overall trends that forward the awakening and sifting processes in the Collective Mind.
While Disney continues to triple down on woke nonsense that is leading to hemorrhaging financial losses in the public market, they're also beginning to lose legal battles over special tax statuses and zoning, and it's all occurring against a business warfare landscape in which two former Trump allies are attempting a hostile stock takeover of the board in order to reform the company into, you know, a money-maker rather than a propaganda arm.
Something BIG is going to break in 2024.” —
Special counsel questioned witnesses about 2 rooms FBI didn't search inside Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence: Sources
Special counsel Jack Smith's team has questioned several witnesses about a closet and a so-called "hidden room" inside former President Donald Trump's residence at Mar-a-Lago that the FBI didn't check while searching the estate in August 2022, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
As described to ABC News, the line of questioning in several interviews ahead of Trump's indictment last year on classified document charges suggests that -- long after the FBI seized dozens of boxes and more than 100 documents marked classified from Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate -- Smith's team was trying to determine if there might still be more classified documents there.
According to sources, some investigators involved in the case came to later believe that the closet, which was locked on the day of the search, should have been opened and checked.
As investigators would later learn, Trump allegedly had the closet's lock changed while his attorney was in Mar-a-Lago's basement, searching for classified documents in a storage room that he was told would have all such documents. Trump's alleged efforts to conceal classified documents from both the FBI and his own attorney are a key part of Smith's indictment against Trump in Florida.
Jordan Strauss, a former federal prosecutor and former national security official in the Justice Department, called the FBI's alleged failure to search the closet "a bit astonishing."
"You're searching a former president's house. You [should] get it right the first time," Strauss told ABC News.
In addition to the closet, the FBI also didn't search what authorities have called a "hidden room" connected to Trump's bedroom, sources said.
Smith's investigators were later told that, in the days right after the search, some of Trump's employees heard that the FBI had missed at least one room at Mar-a-Lago, the sources said. — ABC News
Our Take: “Going to send you folks into the weekend with a fun, silly, totally probably not accurate but definitely true take regarding the ‘Bat Cave’ allusions in this news item, first pointed out by
.So, what’s an oddly-firm conspiracy theory I hold based on threadbare information that feels rock solid to me?
The Dark Knight Returns graphic novel, which largely invented the modern interpretation of Bruce Wayne/Batman, was published in 1986.
This version of the character is the inspiration for the dual life archetype that was widely copied in other interpretations.
Donald Trump went on a widespread tour of media publications and late shows the following year, talking about everything from 'The Trump Plan' for world peace with the Soviets to navigating 'high society' without getting sucked into 'the wrong deals,' all the while charmingly sidestepping questions about his eventual run for President while explaining exactly what he'd do if he ever did run ... a hypothetical agenda that largely matches what he did do during his first term, and WILL do when he's back for his second.
Trump is Batman in a way even I never understood when first chuckling at the memes.
Literally true? Probably not. But the fact that we can fit the archetype with the great truth-teller of our time? Pretty cool.
Greatest story ever told.” —
BONUS ITEMS
Republican lawsuits challenge mail ballot deadlines. Could they upend voting across the country?
Republicans are challenging extended mail ballot deadlines in at least two states in a legal maneuver that could have widespread implications for mail voting before the presidential election in November.
A lawsuit filed last week in Mississippi follows a similar one last year in North Dakota, both brought in heavily Republican states before conservative federal courts. Democratic and voting rights groups are concerned about the potential impact beyond those two states if a judge rules that deadlines for receiving mailed ballots that stretch past Election Day, Nov. 5, violate federal law.
They say it’s possible such a decision would lead to a nationwide injunction similar to one last year when a Texas judge temporarily paused the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion pill mifepristone.
“This effort risks disenfranchising Mississippi voters, but we don’t want that to also be precedent for other states,” Abhi Rahman, communications director of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, said in response to the most recent lawsuit. — AP News
House passes $78 billion tax bill in bipartisan vote
The House passed a $78 billion tax bill on Wednesday that boosts the child tax credit and reinstates business deductions that were rescinded during the Trump administration, sending the bipartisan, bicameral legislation to the Senate for consideration.
The chamber cleared the measure, dubbed the Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act, in an overwhelmingly bipartisan 357-70 vote.
Passage of the legislation — which was crafted by House Ways and Means Committee Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.) and Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) — marks a rare show of bipartisanship in this Congress, which has been defined by bitter partisan clashes and labeled as highly unproductive.
“The numbers speak for itself, it shows that when you’re trying to deliver for the American people, people will join together and that’s what we saw today,” Smith told reporters after the vote, walking into an office with cheering staffers.
It is also one of the few instances this session when a nonessential bill — legislation that is not required to keep the government running — has a chance of being enacted. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Wednesday said he is supportive of the tax bill and is working with Wyden “to figure out the best way forward.” — The Hill
Chaos Erupts In Brussels As Rubber Bullets Fired At Farmers Protesting Outside EU Parliament
Rubber bullets and water cannons were deployed against hundreds of European farmers protesting outside the EU Parliament building in Brussels on Thursday. The farmers threw eggs, set off fireworks, and started fires near the building while demanding that European leaders stop punishing them with more taxes and rising costs imposed to finance a so-called 'green agenda.'
The protests coincide with a Thursday summit of EU leaders, with the farmers calling on them to scrap agricultural and environmental regulations implemented by leadership in Brussels.
According to reports, farmers have broken through the barricades outside of Parliament and also ignited smoke bombs.
"We want to stop these crazy laws that come every single day from the European Commission," said Jose Maria Castilla, a farmer in Brussels representing the Spanish farmers' union, Asaja.
The protests come as EU leaders met to discuss a $50 billion aid package for Ukraine. Belgian PM Alexander De Croo said that the farmers' concerns would be added to the summit's agenda, saying "It is important that we listen to them," adding "They face gigantic challenges," the Washington Post reports. — ZeroHedge
EU approves €50B Ukraine aid as Viktor Orbán folds
European Union leaders on Thursday reached a deal to provide €50 billion in aid to Ukraine — and they were in unanimous agreement after some leaders persuaded the sole holdout, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, to drop his veto.
“All 27 leaders agreed on an additional €50 billion support package for Ukraine within the EU budget,” European Council President Charles Michel wrote on X, a few minutes after the formal start of the Council meeting on Thursday.
“This locks in steadfast, long-term, predictable funding for Ukraine,” he added.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he was “grateful” to Charles Michel and EU leaders for establishing the €50 billion Ukraine Facility.
“It is very important that the decision was made by all 27 leaders, which once again proves strong EU unity,” Zelenskyy tweeted.
“Continued EU financial support for Ukraine will strengthen long-term economic and financial stability, which is no less important than military assistance and sanctions pressure on Russia,” he added. — Politico
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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The condescension with which the farmers are being treated even when Brussels agrees to ’listen to them’ makes me sick. True justice would have the whole elite lot jailed with a healthy dose of crickets for their meals.
On the Harvard (really all of academia) drama, depending on "this kind of incoherent, solipsistic, cannibalistic communist mania" is itself best described as cheating; what follows is inevitable.