Badlands News Brief
Trump Defiant, Biden Protected & Woke Worn
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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 Wednesday, June 14 …
Defiant Trump rails against Biden, prosecutors at Bedminster, N.J., rally hours after Miami court appearance
Hours after pleading not guilty in Miami to criminal charges stemming from his hoarding of secret government documents, former President Donald Trump delivered an angry, campaign-style speech at his Bedminster, N.J., golf club.
Speaking at one of the very locations at the center of the federal case against him, Trump repeated his favorite talking points portraying himself as victim and President Biden and the government as “thugs.”
“It’s a political persecution like something straight out of a fascist or communist nation,” Trump said of charges alleging he illegally took secret documents and refused to hand them back to authorities.
He also repeated a popular refrain from his time at the White House and since then — that the authorities are really going after Trump supporters. — NY Daily News
Our Take: “Supporters of President Trump assembled at Bedminster Tuesday evening, and then serenaded 45 with an early round of Happy Birthday. Trump was reserved as he recounted the details of the latest witch hunt against him, and clearly laid out the case that our government has a two-tiered justice system.
As Tucker Carlson said on Tuesday evening, this isn't just political, its ideological. Trump drove the point home. ‘...they’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you, and I’m just standing in their way and I will never be moving,’ the President said to a cheering crowd.
It's not just Trump that needs to be stopped. It's anyone that thinks like Trump. It's America First that needs to be stopped.
The most interesting outcome of Tuesday's unprecedented events is the response of establishment Republicans. All of a sudden, despite the Clinton Sock Drawer Precedent, 'prominent' Republicans are talking about documents that a President isn't allowed to have. Christie, Romney, Pompeo, and the rest of the establishmentarians took turns this week embarrassing themselves by aligning with the flimsy case of the weaponized DOJ. They are being roundly mocked and losing what little support they have left, as they should.
Trump, on the other hand, appears to be gaining support, as he should. It's not lost on the American People that Trump is being persecuted in ways previously thought unimaginable for a US President. It was unimaginable for Clinton. It was unimaginable for Bush. It was unimaginable for Obama. But for Trump, the federal government is breaking all the rules, destroying all the precedents.
I think about precedents a lot these days, especially the long-standing precedents that protect former Presidents and other elected officials from prosecution for their lies and provable crimes. When Trump returns to office, there will be no long-standing precedent holding him back from delivering justice to the American People.” — Ashe in America
A Quiet Revolution Is Unfolding Against ‘Woke’ Corporate America–Here’s the Strategy Behind It
Consumer boycotts against “woke” corporations such as Target and Anheuser-Busch are the key to reversing race, gender, and environmental activism in corporate America, according to conservative groups.
That’s because customers ditching companies pushing left-wing policies have given conservative groups the traction they needed to fight them legally.
Scott Shepard is a Fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR) and director of the National Center’s Free Enterprise Project, a conservative shareholder activist group.
Shepard told The Epoch Times the tide is turning against environmental, social, and governance, or ESG.
“We’re seeing something very different this time. Because it’s not just the conservatives, who are always interested in this sort of thing, it’s the whole country,” Shepard said.
ESG, which started as guidelines, has now turned into heavy-handed mandates on controversial “social justice” ideologies, he said.
And a potential breach of fiduciary responsibility to shareholders will expose businesses to legal action like Shepard’s organization has started. — The Epoch Times
Our Take: “Vote with your dollar.
Cause and effect. Never unexpected when push comes to shove, the one surefire way people can protest is with their purchasing power. Moreover, the option not to exercise that purchasing power.
Often, we feel we are not making progress in the fight for freedom. Therefor, I would submit this article is proof we are having an impact. Bud Light, Target, and Kohls have all been made to bare the example of backlash. Drawing ire from parents, and incurring wrath stemming from the hypersexualization pushed on children. Woke indoctrination, political polarization, and nonsensical virtue signaling has begun to fail. This is yet another prime example of how cancel culture cancels itself.
Essentially, it becomes the most effective tool against itself, and the best way to defeat Marxism, showing real signs of a collective awakening being realized in society. Greater scales of resistance such as this give me hope, and show favorable results in the mission to save America. We should not forget the power of boycotting, and relearn it's proficient use in this information war of Good versus Evil.” — Johnny Q
GOP Lawmakers Question Who Gave Joe Biden’s Corporation Nearly $10M in 2017
Republican lawmakers are demanding transparency from President Joe Biden regarding his 2017 tax returns in which his entity, “CelticCapri Corp,” listed nearly $10 million without specifying revenue line items, raising concerns about who paid the entity and for what in the wake of Joe Biden’s alleged link to a $5 million Ukrainian “bribery” scheme.
Before the 2020 election, USA Today published a “fact check” article that tried to support the claims that the Bidens earned “$15.6 million … from speaking fees and book deals” from 2017 to 2019, and that “more than $10 million of that total income was profits from Biden’s memoir ‘Promise Me, Dad’ and $3 million in profits from Jill Biden’s book.”
But a closer look at Joe Biden’s 2017 tax returns raises eyebrows. “Follow the source link provided to that $10 million number, though, and you’ll end up at Joe Biden’s campaign website with financial disclosure links to only their individual returns — no S-corporation tax returns,” the Federalist critiqued USA Today. “So, in reality, readers were left with a smokescreen.”
The so-called “smokescreen” raised alarm for Republican lawmakers, causing them to demand transparency about the nearly $10 million sum from the passthrough entity. — Breitbart
Our Take: “There are two stories happening at present: the Biden bribery scandal and the indictment of Donald Trump. So far, the mainstream media has put in zero effort reporting on Biden, while dedicating a tremendous amount of screen time to Donald Trump's indictment.
Donald Trump is being charged with violating the Espionage Act, which is a 100+ year old Law created at the outset of WWI to prohibit acquiring or disseminating information relating to national defense with intent or reason to believe that the information may be used for the injury of the United States, but was primarily used to squash dissent in wartime scenarios. It was also an Obama era tactic to rein in the likes of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning.
Now, the Espionage Act is being used to go after Trump. And as this aggressive and biased lawfare is being waged against Trump, the far more egregious violations Espionage Act by Biden and Hillary Clinton have gone completely ignored and underreported. The big difference? Donald Trump enjoys special privileges and protections having served as the president, primarily the Presidential Records Act, which supersedes the Espionage Act.
When stacked up side by side, the difference is shocking: Donald Trump brought some things with him when he left the White House. Whether it was a single postcard or a million documents; under the Presidential Records Act, it doesn’t matter; he is allowed to do so. Joe Biden on the other hand is accused not only pay-to-play and bribery schemes, but also utilizing the FBI to cover it up.
Hunter Biden admitted in his own words that he gave half of his salary to Joe Biden for the last three decades. There are at least 459 documented crimes found on the Biden Laptop, including money laundering, tax fraud, and more, which the FBI has had since December 2019. The FBI KNOWINGLY covered it up! And the MSM is instead focusing on Trump? Baffling.” — Ryan DeLarme
"Nightmare Scenario": US Government Has Been Secretly Stockpiling Dirt On Americans Via Data Brokers
The US Government has been purchasing troves of information on American citizens from 3rd party data providers, according to Wired, which cites privacy advocates who say this constitutes a "nightmare scenario."
The United States government has been secretly amassing a “large amount” of “sensitive and intimate information” on its own citizens, a group of senior advisers informed Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, more than a year ago.
The size and scope of the government effort to accumulate data revealing the minute details of Americans' lives are described soberly and at length by the director's own panel of experts in a newly declassified report. Haines had first tasked her advisers in late 2021 with untangling a web of secretive business arrangements between commercial data brokers and US intelligence community members. -Wired
"This report reveals what we feared most," according to attorney Sean Vitka of the Demand Progress nonprofit. "Intelligence agencies are flouting the law and buying information about Americans that Congress and the Supreme Court have made clear the government should not have."
The government has been using 'craven interpretations of aging laws' to bypass privacy rights, as prosecutors have increasingly ignored limits traditionally imposed on domestic surveillance. — ZeroHedge
Our Take: “Intelligence agencies, throughout history, have been a shadowy enterprise, walking the line between official policy and legalities and underworld criminal activity. ‘By any means necessary’ is a decent summation of their MO.
The origin of the US Intelligence Apparatus is a sordid tale of corruption, mafia tactics, and top-down white-collar style criminal activity.
What many normies don't realize is that most societies and nations, civilization itself, is not sometimes corrupt, it is corrupt by design, from top to bottom.
The intelligence community, at this point, despite the valid services it performs in some respects, is the criminal arm of the globalist control apparatus. It employs all manner of insidious and immoral means of procuring information and influencing outcomes for the benefit of it's hidden controllers and owners, up to and including mass murder of citizens.
Case in point: this story from Wired showing massive violation of the public trust.
Bear in mind, governments are formed expressly for the purpose of securing the rights and freedoms of their citizens. No government can argue it has the right to violate this sacred covenant as a primary function of an arm of the government itself. However, this is precisely what the intelligence community and its propaganda machines have convinced the American people to believe.
What purpose might this serve the globalists? In order to rollout a global social credit system tied to CBDCs, systems calibration is required. The system is carefully designed, with machine-learning automative capacities that provide controllers unprecedented, very subtle and very effective tools to manipulate society. No doubt, this data aggregation is critical for the initial ratings or scores assessed to citizens, along with improving and refining the initial rollout in future updates.
The real question is, will WE THE PEOPLE continue to rollover for our hijacked government institutions, who continue to violate our trust, en masse, without recourse? We have the right and duty, to strip these bad actors from our government institutions and dissolve whatever policy was pushed through. Trump, no doubt, will act as the tip of our grassroots spear to finally address this longstanding problem.” — Justin Deschamps
Starbucks Pulls Back from Trans, Diversity Advocacy
Multiple media reports say corporate executives — including at Starbucks — are reducing their chatter and advocacy on “green and social initiatives” amid the Target and Bud Light stock-market disasters.
On June 13, NBC News reported that gay and transgender employees at Starbucks protested when the company executives told the outlets to reduce the in-store displays for transgenderism and gay status:
“The group, Starbucks Workers United, is alleging that the company’s corporate management has been asking its workers in at least 21 states to take down Pride decorations over the last two weeks, a claim that the company refutes.
The union said that workers in Massachusetts, for instance, were being told that there weren’t enough “labor hours” for employees to spend decorating. It added that in Oklahoma, some were told “it was a safety concern to block windows with flags” and cited threats to Target employees over that company’s Pride displays as a reason for the safety concern.”
Companies executives are trying to bump up the company’s stock value.
The company denied a policy of reducing support for the “Pride” ceremonies, but an employee union provided evidence of corporate curbs. — Breitbart
Our Take: “My favorite part of this story is that the transgender activist that was just banned from the White House for going topless on the lawn is also whining about Starbucks backing off rainbow communism. 'I’ve spoken to a lot of my trans friends and colleagues, and we’ve all noticed less brands seeking partnerships and smaller budgets for Pride campaigns,' Rose Montoya told the Guardian. 'It’s disappointing.'
My second favorite part is that it appears corporations still care about revenue and profit. I wasn't so sure given the doubling down on woke that we've seen recently from global brands like Disney and Anheuser-Busch — brands that have lost significant market share due to poorly executed virtue signals but continue riding the rainbow. Starbucks is a pioneer of woke, so rumors that they are muting the rainbow are particularly interesting. That said, this article is largely rumors; it's mostly anecdotal reporting about disgruntled employees. Fun to watch, but not necessarily indicative of broader trends.
What is indicative of broader trends is the Wall Street Journal piece cited in this article: 'Finance chiefs and other executives have significantly quieted down in public settings about their environmental and employee diversity efforts,' Breitbart quoted from a June 12 Wall Street Journal article. Muting the rainbow on shareholder calls is indicative of a broader trend. It means consumer boycotts are having a more significant impact than previously reported.
Companies know that muting the rainbow will upset the rainbow coalition. But they're muting the rainbow anyway. That means the purchasing power of the rainbow coalition is less impactful than those opposed. It means the boycotts are impacting corporate bottom lines so significantly that it caused Starbucks to downplay pride month. Capitalism really is undefeated. Don't let up — shift your dollars to the parallel economy and continue making intentional choices about where you spend your dollars.” — Ashe in America
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.
The backlash against woke is real. My local grocery store has Bud & Bud Light in the sale flyer this week on sale for $18.49 for a 24/pk + a $15.00 manufacturer rebate for a final price of $3.49. That is insane but it's glorious to see! Anheuser-Busch is practically paying people to drink their product. Hilarious.
Thank you all - busy times, I appreciate your efforts to keep our eyes up and forward.
Johnny Q said: Cause and effect. Never unexpected when push comes to shove, the one surefire way people can protest is with their purchasing power.
I believe that as well. That said - as I have read here more than once - part of the current globalist agenda removes the profit motive from corporations and replaces it with an idealogical one. We should continue to choose where we spend what the government so kindly leaves for us in ways that support businesses we respect, whether the boycott or "consumer" vote seems to be working or not - cuz it is right to do so!