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 Thursday, March 14 …
Speaker Johnson says 'didn't know' about fellow House GOPer Buck resigning, narrowing his majority
House Speaker Mike Johnson said that he didn't know beforehand Tuesday that fellow Republican Rep. Ken Buck had resigned.
When Johnson was asked about Buck's resignation and whether knew when it was coming, he responded, "I didn't know," according to Politico.
The Louisiana Republican also said he was surprised by the announcement.
Buck's office reportedly said the congressman called Johnson to let him know, but Johnson didn't answer so he left him a voicemail.
Buck, of Colorado, had previously announced that he was not seeking 2024 reelection.
He announced his retirement on X, in a two-sentence statement tin which he in part said: “I look forward to staying involved in our political process as well as spending more time in Colorado and with my family.”
The GOP-controlled House now has 218 members, compared to 213 for Democrats, narrowing the conference's majority and making it more difficult for Johnson to pass legislation without the help of Democrats.
If all members are present, the GOP majority can lose only two members on any measure that comes down to a party-line vote. — Just the News
Our Take: “Appears the UniParty may be attempting to throw the House back to Dems before the 2024 election, assumably so that they can end the investigations, hearings, impeachment, etc
AND…
Can try to block certification of Trump electors.
Will they also launch their own ‘alternate slates of electors’ scheme?
I think a mirror to Jan 6, 2021 may be inbound.
Good thing Trump and Pence terrified the UniParty into reforming the ECA and making it more difficult to block certification!
Should be fun to watch them try, though.” —
Former Treasury Secretary Mnuchin is putting together an investor group to buy TikTok
Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is building an investor group to acquire ByteDance’s TikTok, as a bipartisan piece of legislation winding its way through Congress threatens its continued existence in the U.S.
The House of Representatives on Wednesday passed a bipartisan bill that if signed into law would force ByteDance to either divest its flagship global app or face an effective ban on TikTok within the U.S.
“I think the legislation should pass and I think it should be sold,” Mnuchin, who leads Liberty Strategic Capital, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Thursday. “It’s a great business and I’m going to put together a group to buy TikTok.”
There is common ground between Liberty and ByteDance. Masa Son’s SoftBank Vision Fund invested in ByteDance in 2018, and is also a limited partner in Mnuchin’s Liberty Strategic.
The bill is now headed to the Senate, where its future is uncertain, though President Joe Biden has said that he will sign the legislation if reaches his desk.
“This should be owned by U.S. businesses. There’s no way that the Chinese would ever let a U.S. company own something like this in China,” Mnuchin said. — NBC News
Our Take: “Independent journalist Ian Carroll went deep down this rabbit hole and came up with some great evidence that Mnunchin represents the will of Israel to buy TikTok.
Interestingly he also cites evidence that TikTok censors anti-Israel content and not anti-CCP content.
If Tiktok is already furiously banning anti-Israel posts, then what control does Mossad, or some other arm of their government, have over Tiktok?
And what greater control would Mnuchin and his team of Israeli Deep State cohorts exercise if this purchase was executed?
What relationship does the CCP have with the Israeli influence operations that seem to be inside Tiktok?
How much of the ‘TikTok is a CCP weapon’ narrative is acting as cover for Mossad?
I have many questions.” -
USAID Internal Documents Reveal Government Plot To Promote Censorship Initiatives
The US Agency for International Development (USAID)’s Center on Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance (DRG) created an internal “Disinformation Primer” that revealed the agency’s explicit praise for private sector censorship strategies and proposed additional censorship practices and techniques.
USAID’s censorship proposals were aimed at influencing private sector technology companies, media organizations, education ministries, national governments and funding bodies.
USAID endorsed “Advertiser Outreach” for the purpose of getting corporate advertisers to financially throttle disfavored media sources and social media accounts.
USAID recommended Google’s Redirect Method and “prebunking” (i.e., psychological inoculation) as potential solutions to stop the erosion of traditional media influence over citizen hearts and minds.
USAID proposed targeting gamers and gaming sites, pushing the need to censor their formation of “interpretations of the world that differ from ‘mainstream’ sources” and interrupting the process by which “individuals contribute their own ‘research'” to collectively form their own “populist expertise.” — Foundation for Freedom Online
Our Take: “This is the sinister side of public-private partnerships, but it’s wholly unconstitutional. If the freedom movement had strategic (and courageous) attorneys, many of our dystopian societal problems would disappear.
It’s settled law that the government cannot use private entities to subvert the Constitution. And this isn’t the first time they’ve tried.
‘According to the Supreme Court in Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Co, Inc (1991)
‘…governmental authority may dominate an activity to such an extent that its participants must be deemed to act with the authority of the government and, as a result, be subject to constitutional constraints.’
USAID’s primer ‘recommends censorship action items for virtually every governmental, non-governmental, and private sector commercial entity across society to address disfavored speech online, both individually and collectively.’
That is governmental authority dominating the activity (censorship), and the private actors — in this case NGOs and technology companies — should be deemed state actors and restrained. Censorship is a violation of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, and the government can’t engage in it, even through proxies.
If only we had lawyers who truly believed in our rights, we could end this thing pretty quickly. Sadly, while the left has Marc Elias and networked resources, the right are celebrating mediocrity, embracing internal division, and operating out of self interest. I very much want to be wrong, and I hope that America First Legal proves me wrong in this instance. Let’s see what happens.
If history is our guide, then we can expect the public private partnerships to continue their great reset to the new world order, and we’ll watch as the people who swore oaths proceed to loot the treasury and flee the crime scene. It’s just the way things are now.” -
Trump launched CIA covert influence operation against China
Two years into office, President Donald Trump authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to launch a clandestine campaign on Chinese social media aimed at turning public opinion in China against its government, according to former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the highly classified operation.
Three former officials told Reuters that the CIA created a small team of operatives who used bogus internet identities to spread negative narratives about Xi Jinping’s government while leaking disparaging intelligence to overseas news outlets. The effort, which began in 2019, has not been previously reported.
During the past decade, China has rapidly expanded its global footprint, forging military pacts, trade deals, and business partnerships with developing nations.
The CIA team promoted allegations that members of the ruling Communist Party were hiding ill-gotten money overseas and slammed as corrupt and wasteful China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which provides financing for infrastructure projects in the developing world, the sources told Reuters. — Reuters
Our Take: “Chinese dissent against Xi is seemingly a force to be reckoned with, and knowing that Trump has been helping foment it ties into some recent information I came across pretty interestingly.
At the recent Patriotic Podcasters conference in Tulsa, Gen. Flynn was sharing his team's use of AI, and the strategies behind it.
One of the things he disclosed was that on his personal time, he likes to study demographics. He used this as framing for when he revealed that his team had developed an approach to creating AI videos of Flynn on interviews speaking a variety of different languages, one of them being Mandarin.
This was not simply an overdub, but a use of AI that copied Flynn's unique vocal signature and lip movements and made it seamlessly appear as if he was fluent in Mandarin.
This was used to emphasize how important it was to grow our influence into other cultures, and that using technology this way was a sign of respect that would garner more influence.
That's when he revealed that the fastest growing Christian population spoke Chinese, attributing part of this to the growing population of Chinese people dissenting against Xi Xinping.
Seems pretty comfy that Trump launched ops engineering dissent against Xi Xinping, and now Flynn is running ops to get his messaging, and the messaging of a growing network of independent, patriotic media, to the growing population of CCP dissidents.
It's almost like there is some kind of continuity connecting past and present operations...” —
Young French voters are flocking to the Right ahead of EU elections
An increasing number of young French voters are preparing to vote for right-wing parties in the upcoming European Parliament elections in June, the latest polling has revealed.
According to an Ipsos survey published on Tuesday, 31 percent of 18 to 24-year-olds in France are lending their vote to Jordan Bardella’s National Rally (RN) — the anti-immigration party still heavily influenced by nationalist firebrand and former presidential candidate Marine Le Pen.
A further 3 percent of young people in France are backing Éric Zemmour’s hard-right Reconquête, for whom Marion Maréchal, the niece of Le Pen, is the party’s lead candidate.
National Rally’s popularity among young voters has risen considerably since the previous polling from December, with the party up 9 percentage points, while Reconquête has fallen from 8 percent to 3 percent. — ReMix News
Our Take: “Strange alliances are becoming increasingly common, and this signal out of France seems to support the idea that the populists of the two parties may find themselves on the same side.
‘The key takeaway from the current polling is the disillusionment with establishment parties felt among French youth as young voters drift towards both the left and right of the political spectrum.’
Once one breaks free of the two-party hypnosis, it becomes clear that the parties are at the root of our problems. Party politicians do what they’re told, and attempt to manage the disruption of free agents, and to date they’ve been largely successful. During the first speaker vote, we saw Rep Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) scheming during the proceedings. Fighting the uniparty effectively in Congress may require such alliances — and that’s new and uncomfortable for a lot of people.
The French have been kicking our asses from a resistance standpoint; here, they are showing us that the kids are alright and foundational in their populist uprising. I spend a good amount of time around US teenagers, and the same spirit of resistance is catching fire.
They may not poll or publicly advocate— and that is the result of the government making examples of those who do — but reality is reasserting herself, and the information generation may just save us all.” —
Judge denies one of Trump’s motions to dismiss documents case
A U.S. district judge denied former President Donald Trump's motion to dismiss his federal classified documents case based on unconstitutional vagueness, one of the two motions -- the other being his protection under the Presidential Records Act -- that his lawyers used to argue dismissing the case.
In her ruling on the unconstitutional vagueness motion, Judge Aileen Cannon said that while Trump's argument warranted "serious consideration," she did not want to "prematurely decide" the issues raised by Trump's lawyers related to the Espionage Act.
"Although the Motion raises various arguments warranting serious consideration, the Court ultimately determines, following lengthy oral argument, that resolution of the overall question presented depends too greatly on contested instructional questions about still-fluctuating definitions of statutory terms/phrases as charged, along with at least some disputed factual issues as raised in the Motion," the order said.
Cannon dismissed the arguments without prejudice, meaning defense lawyers could raise the argument again later in the case.
She has not yet issued a ruling on Trump’s other motion to dismiss that lawyers also argued during today’s hearing. — ABC News
Our Take: “This is a Non-Evidentiary hearing to discuss Trump's motions to dismiss based on Unconstitutional Vagueness and The Presidential Records Act, as well as replies to those motions.
These motions ONLY concern Counts 1-32, because those are the Willful Retention of National Defense Information charges.
In the Unconstitutional Vagueness motion, Trump's counsel argues that Section 793 ‘unconstitutionally vague as applied to ...a former President operating within the framework of the Presidential Records Act (“PRA”), who
(1) acted as the ultimate Original Classification Authority based on Article II of the Constitution and under Executive Order 13526,
(2) has recourse to the executive privilege, and
(3) is entitled to immunity for his official acts.
Additionally, they argue that federal judges should not be trying to fix legislative ‘language chosen by elected officials’
and...
‘Judicial efforts to “save” § 793(e) by attaching broad interpretations to a criminal statute in order to reach the conduct of defendants hauled into court by overzealous and politically motivated prosecutors is contrary to the Rule of Lenity. The Supreme Court recently applied this logic in three cases striking so-called residual clauses in the Armed Career Criminal Act, Immigration and Nationality Act, and 18 U.S.C. § 924(c). E.g., United States v. Davis, 139 S. Ct. 2319, 2323 (2019).
The Court should do so here as well.’
‘whatever the term ‘unauthorized’ means in § 793(e)’
That's the vagueness here. Who could be more authorized than Trump, a former President who STILL had clearance for at least one of these documents?
[…]
If Judge Cannon agrees with the arguments in this motion and dismisses Counts 1-32, then naturally the remaining counts would ‘fail to state a claim’ and would likewise be dismissed.
Should be an interesting hearing.” —
BONUS ITEMS
Johnson Whips Out Ukraine Funding Promise To Appease Senate, No Mention Of Border Security
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) told Republican Senators that the House would be sending over legislation to send more US taxpayer funds to defend Ukraine's border.
This bite at the apple, however, will "look substantially different than the $95 billion foreign aid package the senate passed last month," according to The Hill.
For starters, Johnson suggested that the package could be a loan or lend-lease program in order to pretend that the US will ever see any return on the 'investment' - an idea floated by former President Donald Trump last month.
Next, Johnson suggested something similar to the REPO for Ukrainians Act sponsored by Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), which would allow for the confiscation of Russian sovereign assets - which would be liquidated and deposited into a Ukraine support fund, senators told the outlet.
Absent from the discussion was any mention of whether US border reforms would be included, such as "Remain in Mexico" language, which Senate Democrats would vehemently support.
Singing a different tune to the press?
While Johnson made all sorts of promises to the Senate, he told the NY Post that Ukraine funding will take a backseat to funding the federal government for the rest of the fiscal year. - ZeroHedge
House Judiciary Committee threatens DA Fani Willis with contempt
The U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary is placing Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis on notice that her cooperation is expected in their investigation into allegations of misusing federal funds during the Georgia election interference case investigation.
A subpoena sent to Willis, dated Feb. 2 and issued by Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), claimed that Willis had "failed to comply voluntarily" with the committee's requests for documents related to her office's receipt and use of U.S. Department of Justice grants.
Furthermore, Jordan accused Willis of terminating an employee who attempted to halt the Fulton County District Attorney's Office from using a federal grant for purposes such as travel, computers, and "swag" related to the creation of a Center of Youth Empowerment and Gang Prevention.
In response to Jordan's claims, a spokesperson for the Fulton County District Attorney told FOX 5 that the allegations were false and stated that the terminated employee was from the previous administration and was dismissed for cause, dismissing any potential lawsuits over the termination as "baseless litigation." — Fox 5 Atlanta
Judge Cannon Takes Wrecking Ball to Trump Classified Docs Case Citing Robert Hur’s Report
Former President Donald Trump appeared in a Florida courtroom on Thursday to appeal his classified documents case, while citing Special Counsel Robert Hur’s decision not to bring charges against sitting President Joe Biden.
Hur’s report showed that Joe Biden not only willfully and intentionally mishandled classified documents, stored them in multiple insecure locations, and procured them while Senator and Vice President, but he also misled federal investigators, obstructed justice, and divulged national security secrets.
Biden’s leaks of classified information are deemed to be so serious that the Intelligence Community is now performing a “damage assessment” to ascertain the extent they compromised national security.
Judge Cannon on Thursday, as reported by legal analyst Julie Kelly, took a wrecking ball to the Department of Justice’s case against Donald Trump. — The Politics Brief
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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NOT ONE MORE DIME ON UKRAINE OR HATI, WE ARE NOT THE WORLD'S POLICE. FIX THE BORDER.
Thanks for today's cup of sanity.
As We the People retake control and Trump & team send the DS Rat Bastards into the depths of hell we need to remember that along with all the Treasonous people, government agencies and organizations we also need to rid the world of most lawyers too!!!
Keep it coming.
God Wins!
God Bless!!!