Badlands News Brief

Wray Flayed, Zelensky Zapped & Trump Targeted

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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, July 12 …

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Wray Gets Flayed On Capitol Hill After FBI Bombshells

FBI Director Christopher Wray is set to appear before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. ET, where he is expected to face questions over the weaponization of his agency against former President Donald J. Trump, the FBI and the DOJ, appeared to give Hunter Biden the kid glove treatment in comparison, and how the FBI influenced Twitter to censor conservatives, particularly those amplifying the Hunter Biden laptop story.

This will be Wray's first appearance in front of the House Judiciary Committee since Republicans won the House and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) became its chair. Jordan says they will "examine the politicization" of the FBI under Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Wray will also likely face questions over the FBI's cover-up up the claim that Burisma's owner had secret recordings between he and the Bidens as an 'insurance policy,' which the agency stonewalled in the production of supporting documents.

"These recordings were allegedly kept as a sort of insurance policy for the foreign national in case he got into a tight spot," said Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA). The 1023 also indicates that then-Vice President Joe Biden may have been involved in Burisma employing Hunter Biden," he continued. "More than that, the FBI made Congress review a redacted unclassified document in a classified facility. That goes to show you the disrespect the FBI has for Congress." — ZeroHedge

Our Take: “Over the course of five hours Wednesday, legislators grilled FBI Director Christopher Wray about the weaponization of government, the asymmetrical standards of justice based on political ideology, and the utter failings of the bureau to operate within the confines of the law.

House Democrats engaged in heavy petting with Wray, congratulating him on the success of the FBI, though openly Marxist Representative Cori Bush demanded he do better to ensure the FBI isn’t harassing black and brown communities. She has to protect her street cred, after all. She also admitted to participating in the ‘Ferguson Uprising,’ though she was inexplicably allowed to leave the chamber. Isn’t uprising a synonym for insurrection? Every democrat maintained that Wray’s weaponization, asymmetry, and failure were conspiracy theories.

Republicans went hard at the Director, on everything from internal corruption and FBI employees accessing intelligence resources for personal use — such as to look up ex lovers — to Ray Epps, the persecution of parents, and the bureau ignoring the Biden Crime Family’s 459 documented crimes. Representative Victoria Spartz grilled Wray on the bureau’s intelligence sharing with compromised foreign agencies, and alleged that the existing process involves actioning the comprised intelligence against American citizens.

As for Zero Hedge’s 15 questions, few of them were asked and none of them were answered truthfully. The Director perjured himself at least twice.

Wray claimed unequivocally that the FBI did not reallocate resources investigating sex crimes to surveil parents at school board meetings, which multiple whistleblowers dispute. These whistleblowers, such as former Agent Steve Friend, were working on sex crime cases and then found themselves reallocated to tracking parents’ license plates outside school board meetings. Wray also lied when he stated that the FBI was not engaged in censorship or content suppression activities, which is provably false based on the Twitter files as well as the judge’s preliminary findings in Missouri v Biden.

It’s curious that Wray is so comfortable committing perjury in a Congressional hearing. It’s almost like he knows he’ll never be held accountable.” — Ashe in America

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NATO Is Papering Over the Cracks After Zelenskiy Loses His Cool

Volodymyr Zelenskiy was running hot ahead of his sit-down with NATO leaders on Tuesday evening. The Ukrainian president had been angered earlier in the day by what he said was an "absurd" reluctance to give his country a clear timeline on membership.

That outburst in turn riled the partners who have funneled billions of dollars of weaponry and aid into Ukraine’s defense against the Russian invasion — the US had been given no warning before Zelenskiy unleashed his attack on social media.

"Whether we like it or not, people want to see gratitude," UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace told reporters the following morning. "You’re persuading countries to give up their stock" of weapons and ammunition, he added.

This account of the behind-the-scenes wrangling is based on interviews with more than a dozen diplomats and officials involved in the summit who asked not to be named discussing private conversations. NATO leaders were trying to thread a needle on Ukraine’s membership bid when they arrived in Vilnius: They were seeking language that looked like progress and that Ukraine could sell as progress but fundamentally didn’t leave them any closer to getting dragged into a war with nuclear-armed Russia. — Bloomberg

Our Take: “Stateside, those familiar with Badlands content and the Devolution theory are likely able to take a Bicameral approach to Narrative and Political Deployments to come out of the Biden Administration. On the one hand, the Biden Admin is seen as a part of the Globalist Deep State; on the other, their continued actions seem to be resulting in the net exposure of the System of Systems.

Now, if we apply that same logic to Volodymyr Zelensky and Prussian Ukraine, things might make even MORE sense in that context.

Either way, even if we take the ongoing failure cascade emanating from the Ukrainian theater at face value, it looks like NATO’s proxy war against Russia shows signs of winding down, as the Globalist Beast has apparently lost its will to fight … by funding.

What ever is a Proxy President to do when his foreign cash and intel agency support dries up?

History doesn’t tend to be kind to such men.” — Burning Bright

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Sotomayor caught muscling universities into buying thousands of her books for a pretty penny

With a media campaign going on against conservative Supreme Court justices in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson, the Associated Press decided to do a little digging on the others — and came up with a doozy on Justice Sonia Sotomayor, starting with a softball lede:

WASHINGTON (AP) — For colleges and libraries seeking a boldfaced name for a guest lecturer, few come bigger than Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court justice who rose from poverty in the Bronx to the nation's highest court.

She has benefited, too — from schools' purchases of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of the books she has written over the years.

Sotomayor's staff has often prodded public institutions that have hosted the justice to buy her memoir or children's books, works that have earned her at least $3.7 million since she joined the court in 2009. Details of those events, largely out of public view, were obtained by The Associated Press through more than 100 open records requests to public institutions. The resulting tens of thousands of pages of documents offer a rare look at Sotomayor and her fellow justices beyond their official duties.

In her case, the documents reveal repeated examples of taxpayer-funded court staff performing tasks for the justice's book ventures, which workers in other branches of government are barred from doing. 

In other words, she and her personal henchwoman, Anh Le, who lives off the public dime, spend an enormous amount of time on shaking down colleges and other venues for book purchases.  The AP laid out the raw emails, where nothing was couched in delicate terms, leaving it pretty clear that Sotomayor has a pay-to-play operation going, muscling universities into having her speak and meet and greet their denizens — in exchange for absurdly high numbers of book purchases they aren't shy about demanding.  It has made her a pretty penny. — American Thinker

Our Take: “Should office holders and officials that receive prestige and social recognition for their position be allowed to leverage the social status hoisted upon them for personal gain?

For instance, should the POTUS be allowed to sell books about his life or exploits using the resources of the President to do so, such as having his staff set up interviews, contact publishers, edit drafts, etc?

I think most would agree that this is a no-no. Similarly, most bosses or business owners wouldn’t want their employees using business resources for personal projects on company time.

This is an almost universal common sense position that has a lawful basis to it.

From a law perspective, the resources of personnel, time, and energy that are officially appropriated for us by an official office holder, like the POTUS or a justice of the SCOTUS, are for carrying out the functions and objectives of the government positions they hold.

Resources come from THE PEOPLE, via taxation or the government income-generating schemes that the people give the government permission to engage in to generate funds for government use.

Technically, only those things the people agreed to explicitly can become objectives of the government that justify the use of the resources of the nation.

The reason this is a lawful position is because of the principles of an honorable, good-faith contract. All laws are ultimately contracts or agreements, and therefore, every law and every aspect of government can be evaluated using the rules of agreements.

If I ask my friend to borrow his car so I can go to the grocery store, and he says yes, but that I can only use it for that purpose, then the terms and conditions (the rules) of the agreement are to use the car for that purpose and no other. If I decide to use the car to pick up a prostitute, then that objective falls outside of the agreement, which is considered a violation of trust, bad faith, and a dishonor.

For friends, a breach of trust is a pretty serious offense—or at least it used to be. These days, it’s a regular occurrence for bad faith to be part and parcel of our relationship. Nevertheless, it’s serious enough so that nearly everyone at the very least recognizes that it’s bad faith—behavior that reduces trust in a person.

Given the laws or principles of trust that operate everywhere in the civilized world, what does it say about a justice of the Supreme Court when they, in bad faith, use resources provided to them in trust in an untrustworthy way?

How much time do you got?

Let me put it this way if anyone in government should know the lawful boundaries as to what they can use appropriated resources for, it should be a justice of the SCOTUS.

For comparison, it’s like asking a firefighter to make sure your home is fireproof, and instead, they douse it in gasoline. It’s like asking your doctor for a check-up only to discover they’re putting arsenic in the candies at the front desk. For a SCOTUS to misuse resources for personal gain, they must, at some level, either be incompetent insofar as duty and honor or a corrupt actor who has no intention to honor the spirit of the office they hold.

Finally, the irony does not escape me; it’s indicative of the corruption of the rest of our various government and private institutions—corruption isn’t the exception, it’s the norm.

Can a POTUS fire a judge? Let’s ask Trump what he thinks after 2024.” — Justin Deschamps

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National Poll Shows RFK Jr. Tops All Other Politicians In Net Approval-Rating

The  Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll taken during 14-15 June 2023, shows the following net approval rating (“Favorable” minus “Unfavorable”) for all of the listed possible candidates:

+21% Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

+9% Elon Musk

+9% Tim Scott

+8% Vivek Ramaswamy

+5% Ron DeSantis

+4% Nikki Haley

-1% Bernie Sanders

-3% Donald Trump, Doug Bergum, Ted Cruz

-6% Maryanne Williamson

-7% Kevin McCarthy, Mike Pence, Asa Hutchinson

-8% Chuck Schumer

-10% Kamala Harris, Joe Manchin, Gavin Newsom

-11% Joe Biden

-12% Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

-16% Chris Christie

-17% Hillary Clinton

-24% Mitch McConnell

Kennedy is tied with Trump for “Favorable” at 45% for each, but whereas Trump has a 48% “Unfavorable” rating, Kennedy’s “Unfavorable” is only 25%; so, if Party-affiliation were not a factor (which was the intention of America’s Founders), then Kennedy would at the present time be the most preferred person to become President. — OrientalReview.org

Our Take: “This poll is from Harvard, so consider the source and take it with a grain of salt. That said, the sweeping results cover every popular (and notably unpopular) public figure, as well as institutions and issues.

The headline and top questions focus on net favorability — favorable minus unfavorable — which is a largely meaningless metric, though it does provide comic relief outside the main candidates:

- Nikki Haley has net positive favorability.

- Chris Christie is less favorable than Joe Biden.

- AOC is less favorable than Joe Biden.

- Maryanne Williamson is apparently still a thing.

- Mitch McConnell is less favorable than Hillary Clinton.

- The only person Hillary outperforms is Mitch McConnell.

What didn’t make it into the headline is that the poll has Trump beating Biden by +6pts, and the U.S. Military is the most trusted institution by two dozen points. The police come in second. Again, this is Harvard, so grain of salt on all of it.

As for RFK, Jr., I think he would be a formidable challenger for Trump in the current political climate. He’s a Kennedy. He represents a return to a normalcy for lefties, a simpler time in America, and a idealized Democrat party that no longer exists. He represents decorum, decency, and democracy. It could be a real contest if we had free and fair elections.

But we don’t have free and fair elections. We have regime-endorsed selections, and I believe that RFK is in the same category as Kari Lake: They can’t allow him to win. While he is a Kennedy, RFK, Jr. has vowed to revive the mission of his father and uncle and shatter the intelligence apparatus. He has spoken openly about accountability for past government abuses, and he has openly committed to righting the wrongs of the COVID pandemic and the COVID vaccines. These are third rails, much like Lake’s promises to investigate the southern border and election fraud disqualified her from office. She was too dangerous, and they couldn’t allow her to win. And they can’t allow Kennedy to win either.

Just to be clear, I’m all in on Trump. Kennedy is a big government globalist, and he is wrong on guns, global warming, foreign policy, and protections for liberty. There is no candidate but Trump — no matter how the corrupted institutions persecute him and assassinate his character. So, enjoy the show, the speeches and the so-called scandals of campaign season. Try not to think too hard about the hundreds of millions of dollars being laundered through campaign finance. Trust the experts and the system and the science.

It’s a real shame we aren’t allowed to choose our own representation in a Republican form of government. It was a nice idea.” — Ashe in America

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Ex-Trump Attorney Predicts Jan. 6 Indictment Is ‘About To Happen’

Ty Cobb, a former White House attorney under Donald Trump, on Tuesday predicted an indictment is imminent in the federal investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and the role of the former president related to it.

“I believe it’s about to happen,” Cobb told CNN’s Erin Burnett.

“I think what is called the Jan. 6 case, which really encompasses all the attempts to cling to power and prevent the peaceful transfer of government, I think that has been a very important matter to the special prosecutor,” Cobb continued. “I think he has gone about it very deliberately, I think they have moved heaven and earth to do it in a timely way.” — HuffPost

Our Take: “Just a year ago, it was unthinkable to most within the MAGA and America First communities that Trump could be indicted, nevermind convicted with a crime in federal court.

Now, it’s almost becoming a surprise when a full week goes by without the latest rumors churning and ‘leaking’ out of various jurisdictions where swamp creatures want their pound of Trumpian flesh.

Still, while Trump has now been indicted twice in 2023, and while he awaits trial later this summer for one such indictment, I’m one of those silly, comfy Anons who seems to get MORE confident the crazier—and stormier—things seem.

Embrace the story and the drama that comes with it, and then you might start to see through the Narrative haze and glimpse all of the legal and psychological templates and precedents being set.” — Burning Bright

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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.