Badlands Daily: 12/12/25 – Border Battles, Judicial Roadblocks & the Cracks in the Global Narrative

CannCon and Chris Paul close out the week by breaking down a sprawling news cycle that exposes the growing tension between federal authority, activist judges, and collapsing global narratives. They start with DHS touting thousands of illegal-alien arrests in Los Angeles before a federal judge moves to block Trump’s National Guard deployment, sparking a deeper discussion on constitutional authority, invasion definitions, and state defiance. The conversation moves through Supreme Court battles over the administrative state, birthright citizenship, and the broader implications of courts prioritizing “practical concerns” over constitutional law. Internationally, they dissect Venezuela’s escalating drama, Maria Corina Machado’s controversial escape to Norway, accusations of NGO-driven human trafficking, and the long-running CIA entanglements in Latin America. The hosts also connect NATO’s renewed World War rhetoric, Ukraine’s nuclear-risk allegations, renewed biolab scrutiny, vaccine narrative reversals, and Trump’s moves on marijuana policy into one overarching theme: the old information spell is breaking. A dense, high-signal episode tying lawfare, geopolitics, propaganda, and power into a single, unraveling thread.