Badlands News Brief
'X' Marks the Spot & Vineyard Mysteries Abound
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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 picks 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 commentary from members of our growing team of citizen journalists. Feel free to follow the corresponding link to see their other work.
Now, onto the news from Monday, July 24 …
Elon Musk Officially Rebrands Twitter Logo To X
Twitter has officially rebranded to X after months of teasing by its former CEO, Elon Musk (who was formerly Chief Twit and will henceforth be called Chief Nothing Officer). The rebranding saw the popular social media app ditch its recognizable bird logo and replace it with a simple X.
The rebranding also saw the social media app change its color scheme from blue to black.
[…]
X.com was an early online bank, and the company was initially funded by Musk and Greg Kouri, who went on to fund Musk’s later ventures, Tesla and SpaceX.
Musk uses the letter X in several of his business interests, including SpaceX and Tesla car models.
Musk established X Corp. in March as the parent company of Twitter, making way for Twitter’s rebranding. The rebranding is part of Musk’s vision to create a “super app” with multiple functionalities. In April, Twitter introduced a new feature that allowed app users to access the crypto market and other financial market services from within the app.
Musk’s plans to transform Twitter began long before the takeover. In a recent interview, Musk reiterated that the main motive behind rebranding to X was to create an “everything app,” a concept popular in China. Chinese social media applications, such as WeChat, are used for text and video calls, and have provisions to pay bills, book cabs, book restaurants and other financial activities without leaving the app.
Musk said if done correctly, X could become a popular platform for finance, banking, payments and data, and over time it has the potential to become “half of the global financial system." — ZeroHedge
Our Take: “There is a lot of outrage on this story on Twitter, but I am personally finding it hard to care about Twitter’s rebrand while half the truth speakers remain banned and all the truth speakers are shadow banned.
That said, let’s look at Musk’s intentions here. According to the piece, ‘In a recent interview, Musk reiterated that the main motive behind rebranding to X was to create an ‘everything app,’ a concept popular in China. Chinese social media applications, such as WeChat, are used for text and video calls, and have provisions to pay bills, book cabs, book restaurants and other financial activities without leaving the app.’
An ‘everything app’ is a single point of failure from a technology standpoint, and you have to wonder how this shift in the Twitter experience will connect to the eventual central bank digital currency that we all know is coming. All of your behavioral data, psychological data, and financial data in one place. How convenient.
Centralization requires complexity, and complexity breeds and hides corruption.
I have no interest in an everything app and, if I feel anything at all about this rebrand and strategy shift, it’s to spend less time on Twitter.” — Ashe in America
***
Another Take: “The ‘X’ timeline is roughly as follows:
Elon Musk founds X.com in the early 00's, the internet's first direct payment system
Peter Thiel founds PayPal, which forms OUT of X.com
Elon Musk founds Tesla, becomes culture war darling
Elon Musk buys Twitter, promises payment processing
Peter Thiel starts the Crisis Cascade that results in the bankruptcies of Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic Bank
Elon Musk rebrands Twitter as 'X,' wants it to be an ‘everything app’ that could become ‘half the global financial system’
Planned LONG ago … ?” — Burning Bright
Obama’s personal chef drowns while paddleboarding near former president’s Martha’s Vineyard estate
The man who drowned while paddleboarding on a pond outside the Obamas’ Martha’s Vineyard estate has been identified as the former first-family’s personal chef.
Authorities confirmed Monday afternoon that the body of 45-year-old Tafari Campbell was found in 8-feet of water about 100 feet from the banks of the Obamas’ property on Edgartown Great Pond.
Campbell previously served as the sous chef in the White House kitchen while Barack Obama was in office, and was hired to be his personal staff when his term ended.
Emergency responders were dispatched to the 30-acre estate at 79 Turkeyland Cove Road Sunday evening after reports of a “possible drowning” in the water nearby.
Rescue efforts involving divers, Coast Guard helicopters, and resources from multiple agencies, were launched from the property overnight.
Campbell’s body was finally discovered around 10 a.m. Monday using sonar scanners deployed from a boat.
The Obamas were not home at the time of the incident, police confirmed. — The NY Post
Our Take: “Clinton playbook?
There’s nothing overtly suspicious about the body of Obama’s former sous chef turning up near their Martha’s Vineyard estate. Not that I could find. No smoking guns. No black books. No burner phones with Ukrainian phone numbers in the call log.
However, the mere fact that the Obamas are one degree of separation from the Clintons might just be enough to raise an eyebrow or two.
The Global Intelligence Files were released by Wikileaks beginning in 2012, detailing thousands of emails from 2004 to 2011. The emails went on to become fodder for the so-called Pizzagate conspiracy, which the DS media have since used to paint anything they don’t like or want suppressed as ‘wild QANON Pizzagate conspiracy theories.’
Despite the arguably billion-dollar effort to get ahead of the narrative on this, many people still believe there’s some truth to what has become associated with the now pejorative term, Pizzagate.
One email, in particular, reads:
From: Fred Burton [mailto:burton@stratfor.com] Sent: Thursday, May 14, 2009 2:39 PM To: 'Don Kuykendall' Cc: 'Aaric Eisenstein'; 'Darryl O'Connor'; 'Copeland Susan' Subject: RE: Get ready for "Chicago Hot Dog Friday"
I think Obama spent about $65,000 of the tax-payers money flying in pizza/dogs from Chicago for a private party at the White House not long ago, assume we are using the same channels?
Who spends $65,000 on hot dogs? And why do they need to be flown in from Chicago using “channels?”
Of course, nothing has been proven and there’s enough plausible deniability to keep the denial train rolling into the next century.
Nevertheless, the whole situation is highly suspicious, especially when we consider other aspects of the Obama administration and his apparently homosexual predilections, according to the now-deceased Mr. Spencer.
Mr. Spencer died from AIDS during the 2008 Obama campaign, conveniently enough.
Also recall that Hillary and Bill have a long list of friends who, aww shucks, died in staggering numbers. The tragedy of knowing the Clintons knows no bounds.
Fun fact: the article PBD referenced was one I posted to my website, Stillness in the Storm, years ago. Strangely enough, you can’t find it by doing a Google search anymore. But you can on Freespoke!
So is it really all that unreasonable to at least entertain the idea that this former cook for Obama maybe saw something he shouldn’t have?
Maybe this has something to do with it too?” — Justin Deschamps
'Let's go on an excursion to Warsaw and Rzeszow': Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko hints the Wagner mercenary group is ‘itching’ to march on Poland in cosy chat with Vladimir Putin
Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko has said that the Wagner mercenary group is 'itching' to march on Poland.
During a meeting with Vladimir Putin on Sunday, Lukashenko is reported to have said he was 'stressed' because he was having to restrain them.
A video posted on Twitter by Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine's minister of internal affairs, shows Lukashenko saying: 'They are asking to go to the West: 'Allow us'.'
'I said, "Why do you want to go west?" So they say, "We control what happens: let's go on an excursion to Warsaw and Rzeszow," referring to the Polish capital and a key military hub for the country.
Based less than 10km from the Polish border, the Wagner group was exiled to Belarus after an apparent botched coup to oust Russian president Vladimir Putin. — The Dailey Mail
Our Take: “Whether true or not, the Narrative being seeded by Putin ally Lukashenko that Wagner (who totally, definitely staged a very real and not at all MILDEC coup against Vladimir Putin this month,) is itching to march on Poland continues to further the escalatory rhetoric that sees the STORY of a world balanced on the knife's edge between destruction and absolution.
What's the biggest problem Trump could solve as part of his just-beginning redemption tour?
Peacemaker was always the endgame.” — Burning Bright
Report: Tens of Thousands of Illegal Aliens in Massachusetts Rush to Secure Driver’s Licenses
Tens of thousands of illegal aliens across Massachusetts are rushing to secure driver’s licenses after voters approved a law to extend driving privileges to those in the United States illegally.
Data from the state’s Registry of Motor Vehicles (RMV), published by Chris Van Buskirk of the Boston Herald, shows that about 100,000 requests for appointments to get a learner’s permit have been placed since July 1, when the law took effect.
The majority, tens of thousands, of those requests are likely illegal aliens who were given the right to a driver’s license in Massachusetts after voters approved the law in a statewide ballot initiative late last year.
With the passage of the law, Massachusetts became the 17th state to provide driver’s licenses to illegal aliens — joining California, New York, Colorado, and Connecticut, among others.
In the first four years of the law, state officials have said they expect close to 300,000 illegal aliens in Massachusetts to apply for driver’s licenses. Overall, the law will cost taxpayers at least $28 million to implement. — Breitbart
Our Take: “What could possibly go wrong?
Millions of illegal aliens have crossed the border since Biden assumed the presidency. Depending on the state they wind up in, they may qualify for drivers licenses. There are 17 states that extend driving privileges to illegals, making those states in violation of the law, but also opening up myriad other issues. Those issues generate additional bureaucracy, and the government grows with every law passed.
My state, Colorado, allows illegals to have drivers licenses. We also have motor voter registration, where drivers license registration creates a voter registration record. Officials claim there are controls in place to prevent these illegals from voting, but in the past two elections the secretary has ‘accidentally’ sent election mail to tens of thousands of ineligible voters. Voter roll hygiene is so bad in Colorado that the state leadership had to agree to report clean up efforts to Judicial Watch as part of the JW v Griswold et al settlement earlier this year.
Massachusetts new law, like Colorado’s existing law, creates bureaucratic complexity that further erodes the integrity of American institutions. And that’s the point. Welcome to the Open Society.” — Ashe in America
Hunter Biden put then-VP dad Joe on the phone with business associates at least 2 dozen times, ex-partner Devon Archer to testify
Hunter Biden would dial in his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, on speakerphone into meetings with his overseas business partners, according to testimony expected before Congress this week from Devon Archer, the first son’s former best friend.
Archer, 48, who is facing jail for his role in a $60 million bond fraud, is scheduled to testify to the House Oversight Committee about meetings he witnessed that were attended by Joe Biden either in person or via speakerphone when Hunter would call his father and introduce him to foreign business partners or prospective investors.
“We are looking forward very much to hearing from Devon Archer about all the times he has witnessed Joe Biden meeting with Hunter Biden’s overseas business partners when he was vice president, including on speakerphone,” said Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the committee chairman.
One such meeting was in Dubai late in the evening of Friday, Dec. 4, 2015, after a board meeting of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, which was paying Hunter $83,000 a month as a director.
Archer, who also was a director, is expected to testify that, after dinner with the Burisma board at the Burj Al Arab Hotel, he and Hunter traveled six miles north to the Four Seasons Resort Dubai at Jumeirah Beach to have a drink with one of Hunter’s friends.
While they were sitting outside at the bar, Vadym Pozharskyi, a senior Burisma executive, phoned to ask where they were because Burisma’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, needed to speak to Hunter urgently. — The NY Post
Our Take: “I don’t particularly care about Hunter Biden, except for the purpose he can serve in both the Great Awakening and the Exposure > Disclosure > Justice dialectic we’re seeing play out in the public square.
From where I’m sitting, he’s doing a fantastic job pushing us unerringly forward on the Informational and Mass Psychological Timeline, witting or not.
When you really try to zoom out and look at the Biden Admin in terms of its Net Effects on the Exposure > Disclosure paradigm, it has been overwhelmingly positive in favor of the Great Awakening.
You know who wanted Biden in the Oval Office less than all of us?
The Deep State.
Why?
Because Quid Pro Joe was caught red-handed, as was his son, and both are very likely cooperating as a lynchpin of the biggest RICO case ever assembled between the DOJ and OIG.
So, when you start seeing 25th Amendment rhetoric being spun up from the Alternative Media before filtering up into the mainstream … especially the Left, you’ll know [they] are trying to make their move.” — Burning Bright
'Sound Of Freedom' Breaks Expectations, Hits $100 Million At Box Office
Despite a bevy of negative articles from mainstream media outlets like Rolling Stone and Bloomberg News, the anti-child-trafficking movie “Sound of Freedom” has generated $100 million at the box office since it made its debut several weeks ago.
The low-budget film featuring actor Jim Caviezel is based on the life of Tim Ballard, the founder of Operation Underground Railroad, which is dedicated to rescuing kids from sex trafficking operations.
Now, according to Variety magazine, “Sound of Freedom” on Thursday became the first independent film to reach $100 million at the North American box office since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The film, which had a $14 million budget and was directed by Alejandro Monteverde, is the 16th highest-grossing movie so far in 2023.
At the same time, the film has generated very positive ratings among audience members, and film critics have also given it high marks. It’s received an A+ on CinemaScore and a 100 percent score on RottenTomatoes. — The Epoch Times
Our Take: “After several down months across the industry, and in the midst of the congruent Writer’s Guild and Screen Actor’s Guild strikes that are threatening to burn Hollywood to the ground on a permanent basis, the box office saw one of its most successful weekends in years with the somewhat opposite, counter-programmed hits Barbie and Oppenheimer, with the former representing one of the most openly neo-feminist films of all time, as the latter attempts to imprint the mainstream Narrative regarding nuclear war into the Collective Mind.
And yet, beneath all of the usual programming, Sound of Freedom continues to chug away, taking the third spot and racking up well over $100 Million on a $15 Million budget, making it arguably the most financially successful film of the year on a per-screen basis relative to its costs.
And yet … there are some in this community who still believe in coincidence …” — Burning Bright
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.
The Badlands Media team will continue to combine our cognitive powers in order to slow things down and find the signal amidst the noise as this series expands.
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.
Love the “Our takes!” Perfect for when time does not allow to Rumble. This brief is my best email message each day. Thank you to all contributors and especially editors.
“Nothing can stop what is coming.” Trust God, not man, for He is in total control and makes all things work together for good according to His purposes. Love God and love one another.