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 with some Badlands flavoring to help wash it down.
Now, onto the news from Thursday, July 11 …
Joe Biden defiant despite gaffes at Nato press conference as he battles calls to stand aside
In a critical press conference meant to make or break his presidential campaign, Joe Biden spiritedly defended his foreign policy record even as he faced a barrage of questions on his mental fitness and, in another gaffe, mistakenly referred to Kamala Harris as “vice-president Trump”.
Biden offered extensive remarks on thorny foreign policy issues including competition with China and the Israel-Hamas war, in which he said he had warned Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu away from an occupation of the Gaza Strip.
He said he was directly in contact with Xi Jinping to warn him not to offer further support for Russia’s war in Ukraine, but not with Vladimir Putin, whom he said: “I have no reason to speak to him right now.”
But Biden, who is running to be president until January 2029, fielded an equal number of questions during the press conference on his mental fitness, an issue that has loomed over his campaign since a faltering debate performance against Donald Trump that he called “that dumb mistake”.
Ultimately, it was a performance that supporters will probably say shows he is capable of handling his responsibilities as commander-in-chief, but unlikely to convince those already in doubt about his mental fitness that he can serve another four years in office.
Biden, 81, insisted he would stay in the race despite calls from some in his party to drop out and to allow another figure, including Harris, run in the November election. Shortly after he finished speaking, Connecticut congressman Jim Himes, the top ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, called on Biden to step down from the campaign.
Wrapping up a summit of the 32-member bloc in Washington DC, Biden said. “I’ve not had any of my European allies come up and say, ‘Joe, don’t run’. What I’ve heard them say is, ‘You’ve got to win’. — The Guardian
Our Take: For more than a week, the Biden Administration has attempted to convince reporters that Joe Biden is a sharp and focused, model statesman, and that his upcoming ‘Big Boy Press Conference,’ will prove it.
It did not go well.
In his very first unscripted answer to a Reuters reporter’s question, Biden expressed complete confidence in ‘Vice President Trump.’
This comes back around at the very last question he took, to the horror of his staff.
This was particularly rough for scrotus, because just a few hours earlier, at a NATO ‘Ukraine Compact’ event, he referred to Zelenskyy as ‘President Putin.’
The press conference was basically the establishment press begging Biden to drop out of the race. It was both fun and cringe, but the best description of Biden I can muster is this:
Defiant Confusion
As shown in the clip above, Biden told everyone to listen to Trump.
What a time to be alive. —
Another Take: They're telling you out loud.
And by them, I'm not referring to the Deep State. I'm referring to patriots in the Sovereign Alliance, Ghosts in the Media Machine using the reanimated corpse of the memory of Joe Biden, currently living out the #OurBoyBlue narrative deployment.
Every so often, patriots decide to throw a cross straight down the middle, right into the Collective Mind's eye, to see if it shatters any cognitive dissonance walls that might have been just about ready to crack, once the laughter and the slow-mounting dread of witnessing the dissolution of the false reality subsides.
Joe Biden is not the president of the United States. Donald Trump is.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy is not the president of Ukraine. Vladimir Putin is.
The rest, as I always say, is a matter of timing, and awakening.
We're in a War of Stories, and stories are defined and powered by the characters that make them up.
You've been told the choice to know will be yours. Always has been.
Wakey wakey, Anon. —
‘You’re worried if he knows which direction he’s going’: Nervous world leaders greet Biden at NATO
The contrast couldn’t be starker: President Joe Biden, physically and politically frail, presiding over what could be his final NATO Summit at a moment when the alliance has never been so strong.
That tension is not lost on NATO officials from multiple European nations who say they are alarmed by Biden’s apparent decline and increasingly concerned at the prospect of seeing an ardent champion of the alliance replaced in November by a hostile Donald Trump.
NATO officials are both saddened at how Biden’s fortunes have turned and frustrated that the storyline has distracted from what was to be a celebratory summit. They are also increasingly resigned to his defeat this November, which they fear could halt or reverse the 32-member alliance’s recent momentum, threatening Ukraine’s ability to fend off Russia’s onslaught and the broader stability that has been the bedrock of the organization since its Cold War creation.
“It’s a very weird feeling to be in Europe listening to the president of the United States, and you’re more stressed about whether he will go off script than being excited to listen to the leader of the free world,” a senior European diplomat said. “You’re worried if he knows which direction he’s going or whether he’s going to fall or what he’s going to forget or if he’ll say ‘North Korea’ when he meant ‘South Korea.’ It’s just a weird experience.” — Politico
And …
Poland Preparing Military For Full-Scale Conflict, Army Chief Says
NATO officials have announced several major moves which collectively mark a significant escalation with Russia at the annual NATO summit in Washington DC this week. First, President Biden on Tuesday unveiled that the US is sending dozens of anti-air defense systems to Ukraine forces amid stepped-up Russian aerial assaults.
Next, a joint statement from Washington, the Hague and Copenhagen confirmed that an initial batch of US-made F-16 jet fighters are en route to Ukraine. This alone marks a massive escalation, given Moscow has already vowed it will target the jets.
On Wednesday, yet another ultra-provocative announcement was made aimed at 'deterring' Moscow. Poland's army chief of staff General Wieslaw Kukula called for his country to prepare its soldiers for all-out conflict.
"Today, we need to prepare our forces for full-scale conflict, not an asymmetric-type conflict," General Kukula told a press conference. "This forces us to find a good balance between the border mission and maintaining the intensity of training in the army," he said. — ZeroHedge
And …
Russia's Medvedev wants NATO, Ukraine snuffed out for good
Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev says Moscow needs to ramp up efforts to keep Ukraine out of the North Atlantic Alliance - and put an end to both the former Soviet republic and the bloc.
The Russian politician commented on the Washington Summit Declaration, specifically on the paragraph reading: "We will continue to support it [Ukraine] on its irreversible path to full Euro-Atlantic integration, including NATO membership."
"One thing is for certain. We must do all we can to make sure that Ukraine’s 'irreversible path' to NATO ends in the demise of either Ukraine or NATO. Or - even better - both," Medvedev said. — TASS
Our Take: "It’s just a weird experience."
“It’s incredibly awkward for our allies to get asked these questions about Biden’s mental acuity,”
“The Americans need to hear from us all that the problem is not Ukraine,” said Baiba Braže, the Latvian foreign minister. “The problem is Russia.”
No. The problem is parasitic elites leeching the lifeblood out of humanity, while they indulge in the deepest throes of groundless degeneracy and occult satanism.
The problem is NATO.
Now we have Poland preparing for a "full-scale conflict" with their historic nemesis—I feel confident now that Putin's history lesson to Tucker was very intentional—and Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman (and former president and prime minister) Dmitry Medvedev vowing to destroy either NATO or Ukraine, or "even better—both."
Wew, lad.
Let's check in on Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who is considered one of the most measured and even-keeled diplomats in the world.
Okay... well, what about the Chinese? They have been on the sidelines this whole time, with Xi being the cooler head in the room.
Well then. It would appear that the stage is set. The world has been reforged into a powder keg, and the State Department is a scorned child playing with matches.
Who will step in and stop them? —
‘Morning Joe’ hosts: Biden campaign sees Obama’s hand in calls to drop out
MSNBC host Joe Scarborough said Thursday that President Biden’s campaign believes former President Obama is behind growing calls for his former vice president to drop out of the 2024 race.
“One thing that we do have to underline here — just so viewers can follow what’s going on behind the scenes — is the Biden campaign and many Democratic officials do believe that Barack Obama is quietly working behind the scenes to orchestrate this,” Scarborough said on “Morning Joe.”
Scarborough added during Thursday’s broadcast that Biden is “deeply resentful of his treatment under not only the Obama staff but also the way he was pushed aside for Hillary Clinton” in 2016.
Mika Brzezinski, Scarborough’s co-host and wife, added, “I think Barack Obama has a lot of influence, and there’s a lot there.”
Biden is facing calls to drop out of the race and intensifying questions about his mental acuity and ability to defeat former President Trump following his shaky debate performance two weeks ago.
Former aides to Obama have been among Biden’s most vocal critics in the postdebate fallout.
Biden has said he intends to stay in, while Scarborough has defended the president from calls to bow out. — The Hill
Our Take: Some believe that everything we are witnessing is scripted; as in, everything is controlled— and they may very well be right.
I look at it as more of a game script, like in football: After studying the habits and past strategies of your opponent, you develop a playbook that is designed to be fluid, adapting to whatever plays they throw at you.
The technical term is "game theory," and I'm sure all of you have heard it before, in the content of this information war.
Our opponent is rather formidable. We know for certain that they have spent the past century building their modern empire, though it's likely they are merely the scions of far older dynasties. Drawing from the experiences of their imperial predecessors—overthrowing warlords and royal sovereigns in India—they refined their psychological warfare techniques during the world wars of the twentieth century.
After World War II, they created television and put former OSS propaganda masterminds in charge of the broadcast networks, as Mike Benz has detailed in his rants on X. They used television and other media to subvert culture and indoctrinate the public, transforming our society into what it is today. And every layer of power they have built is fortified with psyops and taboos, layered and intertwined to create redundancies, so things were ostensibly compartmentalized in the mind of the public.
For decades, the idea that politicians and movie stars and music producers and media executives and other elites were secretly in contact and engaged in some subversive and malevolent plot to destroy the country would have sounded insane. Then Barack Obama became president and celebrities were hanging out at the White House, and those interactions always seem to feel simultaneously contrived but also very authentic; because it became clear during Trump's presidency that those elites from all walks of life are indeed dear friends, and they fell in file and had locked shields like Leonidas and the Spartans by the time Trump was sworn into office.
The psychological warfare operation that has been run on the American public since Donald Trump took office has been one of the most insidious and profoundly malicious campaigns ever waged on a civilian population. Many have resigned to the conclusion that this enemy is simply unassailable.
The best way to defeat an unassailable opponent is to get him to defeat himself.
Make him make mistakes—the first of which being to draw him out from his unassailable fortress—and then get him to turn on himself.
I think Joe Biden's performance at the debate was one of those major milestone events, like the Sword Dance in Riyadh. The Sword Dance was significant because it was a declaration to the Deep State that Trump's rhetoric about Islam during the campaign had been a feint. They thought he had taken the bait on radical Islamic terrorism, and could be baited into wars.
The Sword Dance was signal that they had been fooled. I think the Debate served a similar purpose. What we are witnessing is that realization, and Our Boy Blue said he isn't leaving.
Moves and Countermoves. —
Senators strike bipartisan deal for a ban on stock trading by members of Congress
A bipartisan group of senators on Wednesday launched a renewed effort to ban members of Congress from trading stock.
“Congress should not be here to make a buck,” Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said at a press conference Wednesday on Capitol Hill. “There is no reason why members of Congress ought to be profiting off of the information that only they get.”
The proposal is the latest chapter in a yearslong saga in Congress to pass regulations that limit lawmakers’ ability to buy and sell stocks, and the first one to get formal consideration by a Senate committee — in this case the Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee on July 24.
Ethics experts say that legislators’ access to the kind of information they receive gives them the potential of having an unfair advantage to the investing public.
Wednesday’s amendment to an existing stock trading ban bill would immediately forbid members of Congress, the president and the vice president from purchasing stocks and other covered investments. It would also give lawmakers 90 days to sell their stocks.
Sens. Hawley, Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., and Gary Peters, D-Mich., negotiated and announced the new details. — MSNBC
Our Take: The fact that this isn’t already law tells you everything you need to know about our current predicament.
From 2003-2017, I was an employee of the largest SEC audit firm in the world. I’m not an auditor. My job was communications and change management. But because working at an audit firm may have provided me access to ‘insider information,’ in every single year of that time span, I had to test on ‘Independence.’
Independence is a long, intensive exploration of insider trading, antitrust, money-laundering, bribery, and every other imaginable financial crime. As a member of an SEC audit firm, I had to understand all of it, pass a test confirming that I understood all of it, and attest (a legally-binding declaration) that I would not violate the well established rules that govern the financial industries and public markets.
Everyone in the firm, including the secretaries, had to do this, every year. The reason is simple: Public Trust.
When it comes to capital markets, the entire system runs on public trust. In that domain, violations of the public trust will land you in prison.
Legislative and Executive branch officials and bureaucrats have significantly greater access to information about capital markets than the secretaries, support staff, or even the auditors at SEC audit firms. Yet, they enjoy much more lenient oversight when it comes to independence.
Similarly, the government has a greater role in preserving the public trust than any other industry or entity. It’s really no wonder, then, that public trust is in a downward-spiraling crisis.
They won’t pass this legislation if it meaningfully holds them accountable or restricts their ability to enable and profit from corruption. It’s maddening, but not surprising.
If they cared about public trust, they’d demand a full, comprehensive audit of the Federal Reserve. Have any legislators other than Rand Paul and Thomas Massie done so? Of course not.
Public trust demands accountability and, for those looting the treasury and trading on inside and proprietary information, accountability can’t come soon enough. —
Trump to Speak at Bitcoin Conference in Nashville on July 27
The presumptive Republican U.S. presidential nominee will be speaking at the upcoming Bitcoin conference in Nashville, Tennessee, later this month, the conference organizer announced Wednesday.
Earlier in the day, speculation of a Trump appearance increased as speakers told CoinDesk their slot was reassigned to make room for what an email described as “a very special guest.”
Former President Trump will be speaking at 2 p.m. CT (19:00 UTC) for 30 minutes on the last day of the conference, which runs from July 25-27, a spokesman for the conference told CoinDesk.
Trump has leaned into Bitcoin and crypto rhetoric since coming out in favor of the industry at his NFT gala this spring. He’s since baked pro-Bitcoin policies into the core Republican Party platform, casting a strong contrast with the Biden administration.
Trump’s upcoming speech is likely to further burnish a self-assigned image of crypto booster, despite previous misgivings of the tech during his first administration. His attendance at the annual Bitcoin gathering was widely expected. — CoinDesk
Our Take: The Info War. The Shadow War. The Strange War.
These names signify different theaters of the war against the Globalist Controllers, and yet, there is significant overlap between them, as, to be able to take down the System of Systems, all pillars of its subversive empire must be weakened over time, so that the whole thing might come down seemingly of a sudden.
The criminal empire we fight against also has many names, from the Deep State to the Cabal to the Prussians who thought we'd forgotten their many-faced singularity, but in the end, what they all represent is Collectivism.
We represent its antithesis. Sovereignty. Free will. Truth.
Anons like
and have been orange-pilled since the dark ages of the Info War, but First Principles codified into corporeal reality tend to produce watershed moments that recall the 'very slowly ... all at once' refrain we often use in relation to the Great Awakening.Training wheels off. Are you paying attention, yet? —
Biden's allies are pushing old stories about Trump's connections with Jeffrey Epstein
Some Joe Biden supporters are employing a tried-and-true strategy to fend off rampant debate over the President's age and mental acuity: deflection.
On social media — and even in the halls of Congress — certain Biden supporters are using Donald Trump's associations with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein as an argument to disqualify him.
Discourse about Trump and Epstein was reignited after documents from Epstein's first Florida investigation in 2006 were released last week.
But the 158-page document — a grand jury transcript showing prosecutors heard testimony that Epstein raped girls as young as 14, then still cut him a sweetheart plea deal — makes no mention of Trump himself.
Still, some seized the news cycle as a way to counteract doubts about Biden's own fitness to run for office in 2024. — Business Insider
Our Take: The PANIC has become palpable.
Ellen DeGeneres just announced in rather brash fashion that she would be swiftly exiting public life and into obscurity, blaming Hollywood for being mean. (hah!)
It is fair to assume that the people who visited Epstein Island were powerful enough to prevent that visitor log list from being published—let alone prosecuted for being vicious pedophiles. It is fair to assume that they have considerable influence over the media—total influence, it would seem, when you stop and consider the total lack of interest and intrigue from the media on who those pedophiles may be.
Where were the investigations? Where were the round table discussions on air demanding the list be released? Where was the intrigue on a salacious topic that would most certainly set records in viewer ratings if the discussions were allowed to be honest and earnest and well researched.
But those things didn't happen.
Now those outlets—which remained so indifferent to a story that could forever impact our society—are running psyops to falsely implicate President Trump with Jeffery Epstein?
The pattern of behavior from these outlets and their affiliates is projection. They always project their own guilt onto their nemesis, and we have the memes to prove it.
These people are not in control. If they were, they wouldn't be behaving this recklessly. This is an erratic tantrum of desperation and despair.
...and you love to see it. This is PANIC. —
BONUS ITEMS
Musk Announces X To Sue 'Perpetrators And Collaborators' Behind Advertising Censorship Cartel
Elon Musk announced on Thursday that social media platform X will sue 'perpetrators and collaborators' who have colluded to control online speech, as revealed on Wednesday by an interim staff report released by the House Judiciary Committee.
"Having seen the evidence unearthed today by Congress, 𝕏 has no choice but to file suit against the perpetrators and collaborators in the advertising boycott racket," Musk wrote on his platform, adding "Hopefully, some states will consider criminal prosecution."
The House report details a coordinated effort by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and its Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) initiative to demonetize and suppress disfavored content across the internet.
As we noted on Wednesday, the WFA is a global association representing over 150 of the world’s biggest brands and over 60 national advertiser associations which created GARM in 2019.
This alliance quickly amassed significant market power, representing roughly 90% of global advertising spend, which amounts to nearly one trillion dollars annually.
GARM’s Steer Team reads like a who’s who of corporate America, including heavyweights such as Unilever, Mars, Diageo, Procter & Gamble (P&G), GroupM, AB InBev, L'Oréal, Nestlé, IBM, Mastercard, and PepsiCo. These corporations not only wield immense economic influence but are now revealed to be leveraging this power to control online discourse under the guise of "brand safety." — ZeroHedge
Hungary’s Viktor Orbán to meet with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago
Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, will fly to Mar-a-Lago on Thursday to meet with Donald Trump, according to two sources with knowledge of the meeting.
Orbán has enraged his Nato allies by meeting with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping en route to the alliance’s summit in Washington DC. He has also met with Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Kyiv, and is said to be quietly negotiating his own ceasefire plan without consulting either the Biden administration or other EU countries.
The two men will meet at Mar-a-Lago at 7pm, a source close to Trump said. Orban’s 606 Dassault Falcon jet was one of the several international planes that flew into Joint Base Andrews on Tuesday to attend the 2024 Nato summit. As of 10.30am eastern time on Thursday, the Hungarian military plane was still parked in Maryland.
Orbán did not discuss details of his negotiations with Putin or Xi with the Biden administration. Three sources briefed on the summit preparations said that he did not ask for a bilateral meeting with Joe Biden.
“I haven’t heard directly from anybody about this meeting, I’ve heard indirectly about it as many of you have,” said Jake Sullivan, the US national security adviser, when asked about the meeting.
“It certainly isn’t coordinated with the Ukrainians. They’ve indicated that they have great misgivings about any effort to negotiate some kind of fake peace with Russia without the Ukrainians being a part of that effort. — The Guardian
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.
Badlands Media will always put out our content for free, but you can support us by becoming a paid subscriber to this newsletter. Help our collective of citizen journalists take back the narrative from the MSM. We are the news now.
Epic news stories right here. I love what Ashe said about Bidens press conference and it being a great time to be alive. It really is impressive and exciting to watch the swirling of the toilet bowl that is the Biden administration being flushed! Orban going to Mar-a-lago is quite interesting and I love seeing these leaders defying the DS it's so reassuring to see the sovereign alliance in real view doing amazing things. Even though it's been excruciatingly slow, it was necessary and it's going to be permanent I can just tell!
BB, Ashe, and Ghost…what a great team!!
Love the Briefs and Takes❤️🙏🇺🇸🦅🕊♟️🌎