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.
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 10 …
The Gold Standard Is Back: BRICS To Intro Gold-Backed Reserve Currency
Remember back when the Russia/Ukraine war had just started, and I predicted that Russia and China would launch their own gold backed currency?
At the time, this idea sounded completely foreign, and I was ridiculed for bringing it up. Today, it just become reality. 41+ countries look like they could be returning to a gold standard.
The images plastered all over RT this weekend had headlines like “New Money, New World” and “Gold Standard Will Be Of Great Benefit To Strengthening New Singly Currency”.
“The official announcement is expected to be made during the BRICS summit in August in South Africa,” Kitco reported over the weekend.
“At first glance, a new transaction unit, backed by gold, sounds like good money – and it could be, first and foremost, a major challenge to the US dollar's hegemony," Thorsten Polleit, chief economist at Degussa, said.
He continued:
"For making the new currency as good as gold, a truly sound currency, it must be convertible into gold on demand. I am not sure whether this is what Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa have in mind. Using gold as money, the unit of account would be a true game changer, no doubt about it. It could lead to a sharp devaluation of many fiat currencies vis-à-vis the yellow metal (including the BRICS fiat currencies), and it could catapult up goods prices in terms of fiat currencies. It could be a shock to the global fiat money system. I am not sure that this is what the BRICS wish to achieve."
The official announcement of the new currency is expected in August during the BRICS summit in South Africa. — ZeroHedge
Our Take: “Gold-backed money is back. BRICS is doing what everyone hoped they’d do—work toward upending the globalist banking system.
If their gold-backed currency is pegged to the price of Gold, and that price is regulated to the extent that price manipulation can’t occur, then this could be an incredible step forward in safeguarding the financial system, taking it out of the hands of the parasitic bankers.
However, gold is not the silver bullet some folks think (pun intended).
There are many times in history when the switch to a gold standard caused massive economic catastrophe. The Long Depression that began in 1873 and lasted 20 years was triggered by abolishing silver money, which consequently created a gold standard, of sorts.
The problem with any top-down shift in what is considered money is that it devalues other currencies and shakes up all the valuations to some degree across the entire economy. Unless the switch is truly fair in that everyone has a chance to manage it and is instructed how to do so properly, given access to markets that normally are only for insiders, then it will, as history shows, favor those in the know and hurt everyone else.
The good thing about the move is that it makes money printing as a solution to financial woes untenable, for the most part. The bankers can’t engage in endless money printing, or they won’t be able to peddle their currency to the BRICS nations.
Don’t for one second think the globalist bankers don’t have a host of tricks up their sleeves to manipulate the currencies used by non-conforming nations and entities. They are masters of this financial warfare game, having done it successfully for at least 500 years.
The only lasting solution to the financial warfare machinations we’ve seen over the past 500 years or so is for the people to instill key knowledge and understanding with the general population combined with an effective process for managing price stability given the dynamic nature of the economy.
Every market actor affects price and therefore currency health. Anyone who has the power to set a price, buy, sell, or evaluate assets for sale, influences the currency in subtle and not so well-acknowledged ways.
Money is a unit of account; it needs to be stable in relation to all other monetarily valued items, services, or assets. And the people within the economy wherein the currency is used to measure value and facilitate commerce have to agree to use it honorably, knowing that every transaction can either stabilize the economy or cause it to become unstable.
Money is like a ruler—for it to be used correctly, without corruption or manipulation, the measuring power it provides has to be consistent. An inch can’t be one length for Jim, but another length for Bob, or it hampers whatever measuring they were trying to do in their efforts to create something, like a house.
Unfortunately, the propaganda surrounding money, the economy, finance, and how it’s supposed to work, is so sweeping and effective, we’ve been convinced that demanding the highest price for goods and services is ethical and valid. Or on the other end, reducing the price in a way that detaches it from the true measure of its value.
If the users of currency distort the measuring power by over or undervaluing transactions, price instability is the result—inflation, deflation, stagflation, and the resulting cost on human civilization.
The modern-day stock market, which emerged in the Netherlands only a few years after the formation of the first modern fractional reserve banking system, is, in part, designed to cause price instability by instilling avarice within the general public. Since currency is constantly deflated in this system, everyone needs to play the game of profiting above all else, even if it causes the rest of society to suffer—which it does.
Think of it like this:
Imagine if every player and coach in a sports game tried to exaggerate the value of the plays made to earn points. The measuring power of the game would be diluted considerably. A game, in this sense, is a yardstick, it measures the quality of the players, the coach, and the team, through a fair and consistent system for assigning points to plays made.
The financial system is supposed to work the same way.
The fractional reserve banking system, one where paper currencies rule the day, is the perfect financial warfare weapon because it can be manipulated very easily. Prices can be manipulated through transactions, as is the case today, allowing whales—rich investors—to engage in manipulative market activity that effectively rigs the financial system in their favor.
Hedge funds are businesses whose chief product is price manipulation and opportunism.
Gold-backed currencies, given what we just discussed, are an attempt to fix prices and stabilize the measuring power of money by pegging it to something fairly stable.
No doubt the BRICS nations know how to protect their system against manipulation, or at least, one would hope. That said, the incredible lack of key knowledge and understanding is so sweeping, there’s a chance they don’t know what they’re doing.
The globalists are very good at whale economic warfare, leveraging their money to buy up assets that manipulate systems, which is what they did from 1830 to 1913 in the run-up to the enactment of the Fed. The price manipulation continued all the way up to 1971, to convince people that a pure fiat system was better than a gold-backed one.
Will we ever learn enough to end the cycle once and for all?” —
Old yeller: Biden's private fury
In public, President Biden likes to whisper to make a point. In private, he's prone to yelling.
Behind closed doors, Biden has such a quick-trigger temper that some aides try to avoid meeting alone with him. Some take a colleague, almost as a shield against a solo blast.
The president's admonitions include: "God dammit, how the f**k don't you know this?!," "Don't f**king bullsh*t me!" and "Get the f**k out of here!" — according to current and former Biden aides who have witnessed and been on the receiving end of such outbursts.
Why it matters: The private eruptions paint a more complicated picture of Biden as a manager and president than his carefully cultivated image as a kindly uncle who loves Aviator sunglasses and ice cream.
Some Biden aides think the president would be better off occasionally displaying his temper in public as a way to assuage voter concerns that the 80-year-old president is disengaged and too old for the office.
Zoom in: Senior and lower-level aides alike can be in Biden's line of fire. "No one is safe," said one administration official. — Axios
Our Take: “Axios valiantly attempts to spin Joe’s angry outbursts as a sign of his strong leadership in this piece, but we all know what’s going on.
From Medical News Today:
‘Dementia occurs when once-healthy neurons and nerve cells in the brain stop working and die. This results in the loss of cognitive functions such as reasoning, memory, problem-solving, and judgment. These symptoms may make a person with dementia feel embarrassed, frustrated, and patronized, causing them to react with meanness and anger.’
Based on the complete picture of Biden’s capabilities — all of the gibberish, outbursts, whispers, and nonsensical ramblings — do we see a strong geopolitical leader? Or do we see a confused old man that belongs in a memory care ward?
There is zero evidence that Biden is in control of his faculties, let alone the Executive Branch of government and its aggressively communist agenda. Biden is a puppet that is rapidly outliving his usefulness to the regime. His mental issues combined with the scandals of both his family and his administration make Biden a massive liability for the Great Reset to the New World Order, no matter how Axios tries to spin it.” —
Tucker Carlson to Host First GOP Presidential Forum of 2024 Race - 5 Candidates Attending
Blaze TV announced Monday that former Fox News host Tucker Carlson will be hosting the first Republican presidential forum of the 2024 primary season.
The event will take place at the Family Leadership Summit in Des Moines, Iowa, later this month.
“Blaze Media is teaming up with THE FAMiLY LEADER to bring you the first presidential forum of the 2024 Republican Primary season, hosted by Tucker Carlson,” Blaze TV tweeted.
“We’ll be live streaming this event all day Friday, July 14th on BlazeTV and the BlazeTV YouTube channel,” the news outlet added.
Blaze indicated that the GOP candidates who are participating include Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, U.S. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, and former Vice President Mike Pence. — The Western Journal
Our Take: “Trump isn't going to attend.
The reason is that ‘Trump had indicated both publicly and privately that he may skip the Milwaukee debate, due in part to his large lead over the rest of the field, but aides say a final decision has not been made.’
From an optics perspective, the fact the candidate with the overwhelming lead won't be in attendance paints the debate as trivial, and by extension, devalues the legitimacy and pull of those who are attending. This effect is subtle and would not have a major impact, save for reinforcing whatever positions the candidates already occupy.
Regardless, the event could reveal previously unexposed conflicts, concerns, or valid proposals on the part of those candidates who are attending (possibly DeSantis, Pence, Haley, and Scott).
Scott, as far as I know, is the only candidate that doesn't have ‘baggage.’
Haley is a neocon that no one likes and never has.
Pence might be the most hated candidate in history.
And DeSantis, despite his second-place lead in the GOP spread, is similarly reviled due to his campaign efforts, using AI-generated photos of Trump and Fauci, and quietly changing campaign laws in Florida to run while governor.
No doubt Trump will speak to the event in a way that highlights all of these blemishes, in his usual Trump style.” —
IRS whistleblower’s lawyer says Washington Post could become accessory to Hunter Biden legal team
Empower Oversight President Tristan Leavitt, whose organization is representing IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley, says that if the Washington Post does not come clean and say that Shapley never spoke with them, then the paper is acting as accessory to Hunter Biden's legal defense.
Hunter Biden's attorneys have accused Shapley of illegally leaking to the Post for its October 2022 story titled, "Federal agents see chargeable tax, gun-purchase case against Hunter Biden."
Biden attorney Abbe Lowell cited the story in a letter late last month attacking Shapley and other IRS whistleblowers for alleged "illegal leaks" and said the whistleblowers "may be claiming that title in an attempt to evade their own misconduct" as part of "an obvious ploy to feed the misinformation campaign to harm our client, Hunter Biden, as a vehicle to attack his father."
Shapley has maintained that he was not a source for the Post in that story or any other story, ever. Shapley testified to Congress in May about an alleged Justice Department conspiracy to protect first son Hunter Biden during a criminal probe. Shapley told CBS News last month that he was stopped from investigating Hunter Biden's money trails involving "dad" or "the big guy."
Leavitt is demanding for the Post to clearly state that Shapley was not the source for their story. — Just the News
Our Take: “The post, formerly owned by the Graham Family then sold to Jeff Bezos' Nash Holdings LLC in 2013, is oft alleged by some to be a propaganda mouthpiece for the CIA and it’s deep-state criminal interests.
There are a number of red flags that have emerged over the years to these ends:
For one, the Washington Post, much like Forbes, is beholden to Monsanto, the mammoth biotech corporation that keeps offices in countries even where their GMO food is banned. The entire editorial board approves and publishes Monsanto’s corporate ‘quack science’ talking points, endorsing GMOs and the use of glyphosate, a highly toxic herbicide.
Secondly, the paper penalizes writers who are critical of Jeff Bezos or Amazon. A writer named Fredrick Kunkle was critical of Bezos, one of the world's richest men, for cutting pensions for nonunion employees and trying to eliminate health insurance policies for anyone who worked for the Post part-time. Kunkle eventually used his talents to pen an op-ed contrasting Bezos’ attempts to focus on philanthropy with the experience of those working beneath him. Bezos tried to get Kunkle written up on a warning for ‘freelancing for a competing publication without permission,’ but Kunkle wasn't being paid for his work, and the attempted disciplinary action was actually illegal.
Thirdly, WaPo regularly and shamelessly commits credibility suicide. In the fall of 2016, WaPo put out a hit piece attacking 200 independent (grass-roots, truth-propagating) websites and news blogs, accusing them of being ‘fake news’ sources controlled by the Russian government. This story was written up by one Craig Timberg, comes from an ‘Anonymous source,’ and has attacked online publications such as Natural News and 199 other websites. This opened them up to a flood of lawsuits, so they’ve all but admitted their entire story was fabricated by Timberg and his ‘source’ that still remains ‘anonymous’ so that nothing can be verified (or proven false, as is the case).
The fourth red flag, and perhaps the most damning, is that WaPo is accused by some of passing along assumptions and errors that support the CIA. These media ‘overlords’ fill the American mainstream minds with propaganda and striking liberal bias while advertising themselves as non-partisan in order to aid and abet the Democratic Party, whose goal is to vastly increase the size and scope of America’s central federal government, which is, in many people’s opinion, already far too broad and powerful.
The CIA and the American mainstream media machine have worked hand in glove for many decades. For at least one persons perspective, you could check Carl Bernstein's now deleted take which I have recovered via the Way Back Machine.
If we consider that WaPo is directly connected to the intelligence apparatus and has a history of working to further their ends, then the IRS whistleblowers claim should come as no surprise.” —
BBC Engulfed In Another Child Sex Abuse Allegation Against One Of Its Hosts
The BBC has taken pride in being the world's first national television outlet since it first took to the air in November 1936, tracing its history back even further to its founding as a radio station in 1922. Though it has earned a distinguished reputation over the years, it has done its best to throw that away in recent vintage. What once was a beacon of broadcast media has become a mouthpiece of Britain's propaganda ministry. The distorted narratives it pushes have become so undeniably visible that the hubris of its punditry and production alike teem with a lack of self awareness that has come to boil over in embarrassing interviews showcasing the BBC's fall from grace with regularity. From Elon Musk to Andrew Tate, the BBC has been made to look utterly foolish, leaving a reputation that was once exemplary tarnished and torn beyond repair.
Yet, those public faux pas are merely the tip of the iceberg concerning the rampant corruption coming from the BBC. While the hypocrisy of the broadcaster has been exposed in recently televised high publicity exchanges, a deeper pervasive issue that the organization has done its best to keep out of the public's purview reared its ugly head once more. Once again, an on-air personality at the the BBC has been exposed for child sex abuse. This latest controversy has led to the network taking one of its high profile presenters off air while it investigations allegations that they paid a teenager more than £35,000 for pornographic images since 2020 when they were just 17 years old.
While the BBC has addressed the revelation by removing the on-air personality from its broadcasts, it has not named the person at the core of the allegations. This is a shift on the BBC's usual strategy in which it has constantly cites unnamed sources and anonymous witnesses to push its own unsubstantiated accusations, a tactic that online influencer Andrew Tate castigated the network for in an interview over a then-pending criminal investigation he was enveloped in. Now, the BBC wields that sword of anonymity to cast a shadow over one of its own being investigated for sexual misconduct. — ZeroHedge, sourcing BlueApples
Our Take: “We are constantly told that powerful people trading in child sex is a conspiracy theory. Arrests for child sex trafficking and child pornography are happening every day, but we’re meant to believe that it’s just the underworld, not the polished faces of the beautiful people.
The BBC is the CNN of Britain, and a major megaphone of international news. That’s how we end up with a TV personality staying on the air for months after his child sex crimes were indisputably shown to the network’s brass. Months. The family watched this man stay on television after they revealed images of him abusing their underage daughter.
The establishment protects itself.
Yesterday, my husband and I went to see Sound of Freedom. Critics have called the film QAnon and claim its sensationalized, conspiracy theory propaganda. It doesn’t matter to the establishment’s megaphones that it’s a true story — that Rocia and Miguel are real children that were repeatedly sold and raped. The media doesn’t believe Rocia and Miguel’s story should be told. But then, the media always covers for the pedophiles. Just ask the BBC. Or CNN.
Child sex slavery, exploration, abuse and rape is not a conspiracy theory, and it’s not limited to the underworld. In the film and in the message after, Caviezel repeatedly says, ‘God’s children are not for sale.’ Unfortunately, though, they are in 2023 — and the industry is growing. God’s children are for sale because there is a market. There are people who buy children — people who pay money to exploit, abuse, and rape children. And according to reporting, many of them work in mainstream news.” —
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.
Thank you for commenting on The Sound of Freedom, contributing to the buzz that will get more people to watch this movie and start thinking about how to stop this horror and turn this thing around.
LOCAL politics is part of the answer to this and a lot of other problems. Yesterday I visited my county courthouse to meet people and begin to encourage more responsibility. I got horrible answers to my questions about oath of office (forgotten it--3 years ago, never read Federal and State constitutions, no copy of them). I expected that, so I expressed no dismay and gently suggested she needed to review her oath to keep it--and tapped her computer monitor. "Your nearest copy of the Constitutions is right here," I said. "Such things are always on the web." She said she would look them up.
We do not fix vast wrongness in one minute, nor by screaming. Most people want to do the right thing, and can be gently encouraged. It will take more than one person, but a handful of frequent (monthly or weekly) visitors is all it will take to improve things.
Trump is abstaining from the debate in order to let the other candidates make fools of themselves. To bring out their faults and weaknesses. Everyone should watch because it’s probably going to be quite entertaining. As he has always done, he lets the opposition destroy itself. And to their credit that is exactly what they have historically done.