ACLJ Goes After Dept. of Homeland Security

Keeping you informed and engaged, now more than ever, this is Sekulow. We want to hear from you.

Share and post your comments or call 1-800-684-3110. And now your host, Jay Sekulow. Hey everybody, welcome to the broadcast.

We've got a very interesting program for you today. We're going to be talking about a lot of issues, one of which is something we have been focusing on from time to time as it becomes relevant, and it clearly is. Remember they were to start a misinformation board that was going to be part of a multi-government task force, and then the pushback on it was incredible, so they backed away from that. But the fact is, the work combating the executive branch's focus on what they are calling targeting maldis and misinformation is serious because it's coming up in every context within the government itself.

And what you worry about in these situations is the criminalization of speech. When you've got the Department of Justice or the HHS or whatever agency FEC might be involved in this, so this whole misinformation theory that this administration is operating under, that the government is operating under, is impacting every different branch of the federal government. We've seen this, we talked about this on the broadcast the other day, HHS, VA, you put up a pro-life message, you can put up any message you want, but if it's pro-life, that's out.

Of course, the VA is now in the abortion business. So this misinformation, disinformation, mal-information is something, Logan, we've been looking at literally for a decade, but obviously we're focusing on very aggressively now. Yeah, obviously it's become a much more hot topic, so we've been discussing it at the ACLJ in different ways that we can combat it, whether that be legally or in the media to make sure people know about what's happening and make sure that we are on every social media platform talking about what's happening in on our own website, spreading all the right information against the misinformation, the disinformation, the mal-information, and all those terms that get thrown around so loosely it feels like these days. And you know, someone's misinformation doesn't mean it's not true. In other words, they're not saying it's not true, they're saying you're misinforming people. And the idea that the federal government's engaging in what we call CC, viewpoint-based discrimination, which is the Supreme Court in a series of cases that we did at the Supreme Court, rejected nine to zero every time the cases came up.

Nine to zero. The most conservative members of the court, the most liberal members of the court, tells you that despite those rulings, the government is still trying to squelch messaging. Right. And it's the government that decides what's misinformation or what's disinformation. And just like you said, that doesn't mean that it's untrue. It's just like when they go after the pro-life messages, they call pregnancy resource centers fake clinics. And we see that they constantly target them as purporting disinformation and misinformation. If they talk about the harms of abortion, they become targets. And so we're seeing this especially being applied in the pro-life side of things.

100%. We've seen, look, I mean, we know that it's going to be, they're saying that the crisis pregnancy centers, pregnancy resource centers, as they now refer to us, are, quote, engaging in fraudulent practices, Logan. They're giving out misinformation. They're giving out disinformation. They're giving out mal-information. I mean, this is the government in action, and that's why the ACLJ is fighting back on this on so many different levels.

That's right. And as we head into this holiday, we're in the middle of a matching challenge right now, which means if you give any donation, which we know is hard on people right now, but if you have the ability and you have the means, you go to ACLJ.org. Any donation that you make allows the ACLJ to not only continue doing our work, but it's effectively doubled. That means you don't get charged. If you give $100, you don't get charged $200.

That means for $100 donation, there essentially unlocks another $100 that another donor has already pledged to match if the donation comes in. So we appreciate that right now. This is a great time to do it. Go to ACLJ.org. Don't only just go there to donate those, spend time, look at the great content, look at the incredible videos, the blog posts, the articles that come out. There's so much happening in that world and you need to be engaged on it. So go to ACLJ.org.

Make your simple, easy decision, and your gifts are doubled. Coming up, we're going to be hearing from former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to talk about the targeting of speech. And then what happens during this lame duck session of Congress, the things that you've got to be looking out for when Congress is in a lame duck situation, which is exactly what they're going into right now. So we've got to be on the alert for that. Also again, as Logan said, I want to underscore, your support of the ACLJ is critical. We encourage you to do that with our matching challenge campaign at ACLJ.org. Like Logan said, any amount you donate, we get a matching gift for ACLJ.org.

Back with more in just a moment. Let's talk about what we did here and the responses we've gotten. And first, Jordan, I just asked, it looks like there's about six of these amendments or ballot initiatives on the life issue across the country.

Yeah. I mean, some of these got ahead of they were preparing for if, you know, Roe is overturned and already had the measures ready to vote on. Some are preview measures that you will see in this ballot and you actually vote in a couple more years. But we saw a preview was what we saw in Kansas and that vote did not go well. Between the official overturning of Roe vs. Wade, the actual, not the least opinion, but the actual opinion coming out, it's really not enough education time on a constitutional change at the state level.

Usually they fail. I mean, most of the constitutional amendments, your initial reaction going into the booth is vote no. Yeah, because if you haven't educated yourself about it, that's a safer option than messing with your constitution. Here in Tennessee, we have a couple like unique ones about like, if the governor is something, you know, where they are impaired. Again, the constitutional limit game can be very clear cut if you do the education right.

If you don't, it's not like predicting a race. That's where the state, the state fight on abortion is used, but there's also a federal component to it. And that is we've said that states like California, New York, where the first line of defense is going to be the Pregnancy Resource Center.

I mean, that's where the first line of defense is. You're not going to get legislation through to defend life, but you're going to be able to keep these Pregnancy Resource Centers. We've gone all the way to the Supreme Court multiple time defending them. Yet the Biden administration is unrelentingly enforcing the Free Access to Clinic Entrances Act. And they issued a directive, an executive order. And so you see that executive order, let's talk about what that kind of the executive order laid out.

Sure. So Biden issued an executive order, which was basically protecting abortion clinics, but it contained language in there that said that the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the attorney general and the chair of the FTC could address deceptive or fraudulent practices related to reproductive health care services, including online and to protect access to accurate information. And we know that specific language is always used to target Pregnancy Resource Centers. You know how anti-speech they are, anti-free speech they are? They want the Crisis Pregnancy Centers, Pregnancy Resource Centers to advertise for abortions. I mean, this is what, as compelled speech, which nobody on the Supreme Court supports by the way, compelled speech.

Although when they put in the context of abortion, amazingly, they get the liberal members of the court because of the, as justice leader said, the, the, the jurisprudence has been distorted because anytime it's related to abortion, it even packs the first amendment. But they issued an executive order. We did not take that lying down. I'm holding my hand, our letter to Secretary Mayorkas because we were concerned about it. Cece, lay out what's in what we laid out in this letter, and then Jordan, I want to talk about the kind of what we got as a response and what that really means.

Sure. So we specifically highlighted the language, the problematic language, language that I just highlighted about attacking the Pregnancy Resource Centers. Then we highlighted the benefits of Pregnancy Resource Centers, that they provide essential and professional services, hundreds of thousands of free ultrasounds, just invaluable resources and services. And we point out that they have been the targets of terrible attacks, firebombing and vandalism. And we, we pointed out and highlighted our cases where we have protected in the past these Pregnancy Resource Centers from the government targeting them. And we've won those cases. And then we just put out our concern again for this language, and then we put them on notice that we would be absolutely filing and closely monitoring everything that comes out of these reports and that we will take a legal action if we need to, to protect these PRCs. And we are. So we are already in a defensive mode for the Pregnancy Resource Centers. But let me be clear here, and Jordan I think wants to reiterate this. They've tried to make abortion an election issue of paramount.

But every time they score it, I notice it's only 15%. It's like the second or third important issue, even to the Democratic voters. So while they're trying to do all this, making this the most important issue that there is, the fact of the matter is you've got to fight them where it counts. And where it counts right now is either in court or through the legislative process, or this is really the regulatory process with this executive order.

Yeah, that's right. And I think again, you're getting a clear cut view of where the Biden administration is. And again, whether or not you think who's in control, it's the radical left inside that administration. The political power, unfortunately, the way law enforcement's being used in politics now, you can put a stop to a lot of that by just putting someone in who knows their role, knows their place as the Attorney General or as a DA.

And does it overstep it or make it so, I mean, it's so obvious now how politically motivated the prosecutions are, and the indictments and the investigations are not even about issues. They're just about the people. Look, they brought all these free exits to clinic entrances indictments against two groups, one in Tennessee, the other one I think was Pennsylvania. And they made these big announcements, they did these, you know, the raids with the FBI.

Just meanwhile, you've had crisis pregnancy centers, pregnancy was bombed, fire bombed, destroyed. And I don't know of an investigation that's going on by the FBI at this point. Right. So the face investigations, I think it's up to 22 where they've gone after pro-life protesters.

And we do not know of one where they have gone after anybody who's fire bombed, targeted, vandalized. And James Revenge acknowledged that they did it. I mean, that group James Revenge said we did this. Right, absolutely. They know that they've done it. With trying to find who's the organizer, who's the money behind this, and go after them with RICO and treat them like organized crime, which they admitted they are.

Yeah. But no one's taken action on them. No one's taken action. And the ones that they've taken action against the pro-life protesters, these are year and a half, two, three years old. There's a big difference between putting your body on the line to protest and fire bombing.

Oh, yeah. I mean, one is violence. One is civil disobedience. And one is arson. The other is arson. There are both crimes because one would be normally a trespass. But different kinds of crimes. One's very different. One would be a state trespass action. The other would be an arson, which is a felony of a big magnitude.

But to say there's a double standard is unreal. But I want to say this to our ACLJ members. We got a response from DHS. Trust me, they know we're looking and we're monitoring and we'll take legal action as necessary.

This was a letter directed by Mayorkas's office to the assistant secretary to respond to us. And while the response was we're following orders, basically, which we expected it would be, they're fully aware of the scope and nature of how in-depth our analysis was of this problem. We are already in a defensive mode for the pregnancy resource centers. But let me be clear here.

And Jordan, I think, wants me to reiterate this. They've tried to make abortion an election issue of paramount. But every time they scored, I noticed it's only 15%.

It's like 15. It's like the second or third important issue, even to the Democratic voters. So while they're trying to do all this, making this the most important issue that there is, the fact of the matter is you've got to fight them where it counts. And where it counts right now is either in court or through the legislative process. Or this is really the regulatory process with this executive order.

Yeah, that's right. And I think, again, you're getting a clear cut view of where the Biden administration is. And again, whether or not you think who's in control is the radical left inside that administration.

And it's very radical. Yeah, I was talking about Arizona. We had the Nevada candidate yesterday.

I've been flipping those in my head. It's a lot of places, because we're going down ballot for you and trying to explain why those races are... Why is George Soros spending hundreds of millions of dollars on AG races and DA races? There's a reason. And why he's been doing that, by the way, has been doing that for a decade. And Republicans had not yet really made that switch. We're starting to now. We're starting to say, let's go over to the folks with that kind of money and say, we need to make a case why these races can be just as important, sometimes more important than who you're necessarily fighting to send to Washington DC or control of the governor's mansion. Because certainly on the other side of politics, they don't let these go.

And sometimes we take them for granted. And then we realize the political power, unfortunately, the way law enforcement's being used in politics now. Because of your support of the ACLJ, we're able to do it. Now, we're in a matching challenge campaign, folks. And this fight for life is now state by state.

It's ballot initiatives. We've worked on those already. We just finished up a case at the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit for the governor of South Dakota, where we were successful.

I mean, there's a series of these cases. We are in a matching challenge campaign at the ACLJ, at ACLJ.org. These are the November and December, the two months that have the greatest impact on the overall work of the American Center for Law and Justice.

We set our budgets based on November and December going forward. And we've got big initiatives we haven't announced yet that are really big initiatives here in the United States that's going to impact the world. But your support of this is critical. You see this broadcast and you see me and Jordan and our team that's on air. You see the studio, you don't see the six people behind the camera that are working here to put this for you. Jordan and Logan are also adding three times a week a podcast, the Secular Brothers podcast.

I mean, more content is being created. We've got cases going on all over the country. We just authorized... We've got a case pending at the Supreme Court of the United States right now involving prayer.

All that's happening because of your support of the ACLJ. So if you're able to support us, this is a great time to have your support matched. So whatever amount you... You know, Jordan, you said it yesterday, some people wish they could give $100, but it's only, you know, $25 or $50 this year. Well, effectively, that's $100 for us when they get $50 because it's matched. So every amount helps. We encourage you to do it if you're able. Yeah, that's right. At ACLJ.org, you'll see right on top the matching challenge.

And it's a great example. So if today, you know, you can't give what you usually would give, if you usually would donate something like $100. Well, if you donated $50, that will be matched by another $50. It's like $100. Donating $25, it'll be matched by a $25 donation.

That's $50. So it's a great time because you double the impact of the money that you do donate. And we know, again, you're making tough decisions right now. But if you're in that position where you're still making contributions, we really encourage you to support the work of the ACLJ today at ACLJ.org.

Donate today. We'll be right back. All right, welcome back to Secular. This report, again, folks, as we told you before, and we'll actually place that later in the broadcast, when Nina Jankowicz was fired or terminated by DHS because of all the negative attention around the Disinformation Governance Board, we said, you know, be careful that you think that that's a full victory. Let's make sure that they're actually not doing this and just doing a different name, a different title. And now we have this document from The Intercept. We are joined right now by former Secretary of State and NCA Director Mike Pompeo. And Secretary Pompeo, we got this report from The Intercept. It shows it, and we've got the document itself, the login, that despite the canceling of the Disinformation Governance Board, the work of DHS not to police misinformation from overseas or bad actors, whether it's the Chinese Communist Party or Russia, but domestic, U.S. citizens, that it's growing. What is the Biden administration trying to do here behind the scenes to the American people?

Well, I think it's twofold. First, your point about behind the visibility for the American people is exactly right. They made, you know, then they created the Disinformation Board.

It got blown up. Civil libertarians, conservatives, people from a broad spectrum said this is a terrible idea. They backed off of it publicly, but apparently have kept doing this.

And Jay said earlier, I think that's not a surprise. They have tried to take down the sensor to move out of the marketplace of ideas, conservative thought for a long time. They've used, you all know this, they've tried to use the IRS, they've used the FBI. Now they're using DHS to police information to stifle debate so they can project their own progressive view of the world.

This is deeply dangerous. The fact that they're not doing this behind the scenes when they claim they aren't doing it anymore is even more troubling. The access point is live through Facebook.

And we actually have the portals live. The government has direct access to it. We don't even know the extent of how many government actors. We know you have to have some kind of government email address to log in, but it just seems very dangerous because there's so much pressure then on these companies who get immunity from lawsuits under federal, you know, the Communications Decency Act in Section 230 there, that if someone from the FBI goes in and says, okay, hey, don't let this talk on, what are the issues with the withdrawal of Afghanistan? Well, we need to de-throttle that content or criticism. I mean, this is the United States of America. You can oppose a war, you can support a war, you can support a withdrawal, you can oppose a withdrawal, you can criticize it. It's just some of these topics that they listed as concerns, it just seems such a dangerous attack on our freedom of speech.

Oh, it truly is. And our founders could probably not have imagined Facebook or Twitter, but they knew the danger of government throttling information, taking information down, protecting voices from being heard. They understood it. There is this long thread, over 240 plus years now, and the Biden administration has uniquely tried to undermine the capacity for all of the voices to be heard. They want to push it aside, they want to use government power combined with the incredible capabilities of these businesses.

To your point about the portal, that is real-time capacity to shut down information without any oversight any place inside of the system. This is deeply dangerous. It's something that the Biden administration should not be permitted to do. I'm confident there'll be lawsuits filed as a result of this, but more importantly, I hope when we get a Congress here in January that has the capacity to conduct oversight, that they will look into what they were doing when they got rid of the Disinformation Governance Board, but disinformation governance was something they were continuing to do every day. Yeah, and there was a shift, obviously, when President Biden came into office, and this report outlines that shift, and the Inspector General's report outlines that shift. Initially, this was directed, I'm sure, to the Trump administration that you served. Any kind of initiatives like this would have been directed at foreign adversaries trying to, again, meddle if they were trying to meddle in their elections or cause any kind of issues in the United States. And it's, I think, still there.

You have to do it with a lot of, again, protection because of the laws we have in place. But then they had this complete shift to focus on the domestic audience almost completely, and they took people off of terror teams. And this is the IG report off the teams that are focusing on al-Qaeda and other Islamic terror groups and put them on these domestic teams to shift there. To me, the idea that all of these topics could be used to de-throttle a message of someone who's a political opponent of Joe Biden or the Democrat Party.

Yeah. Well, we've seen that they have done it. Your point about the appropriate role, so I was the CIA director along with other external agencies. We tried to get it right to try and keep bad actors from putting misinformation to our system. By the way, frankly, less about politics, but more about disinformation to take down terror plots and the like to keep people safe. But to do this on domestic political debate, to do this on the issues that are most important to the American people and to stifle, throttle back, discard the views of US citizens, whatever they may be, those that agree with you or me or disagree with you and me, is so inappropriate, so unlawful, so indecent that it does begin to undermine the republic.

And so your point is very well taken. They've now turned their attention to this idea of domestic terrorism when A, the threat from abroad remains and B, to do this to American citizens, to stifle debate inside of our country is deeply un-American. We know it's active as enough because of the report, because it lists also US involvement in Ukraine. I can't count the number of times, Secretary Pompeo, we've discussed that on this broadcast and we're putting it on Facebook, it's on all these platforms and we're just having honest, open discussions because American people, it's a shifting battlefield, changing battlefields.

It's been a lot longer conflict than people thought it might be and it impacts us at home, it impacts our European allies. The idea that the discussions around that, if you're not right in line with wherever the Biden administration is that day, which by the way, as you know, Secretary, they're shifting on it too all the time. So if you're not on the party line message, suddenly you can't get your message out on these platforms, regardless of the money you're putting behind it.

Think about this, we've seen now they want to not talk about the withdrawal from Afghanistan, this terrible debacle that had 13 Americans killed, not permitted to speak about this. Again, support for it, against it, lots of different views. By the way, across the political spectrum, there's those who are for and against it on the left and on the right. These are exactly the kinds of topics that we should be encouraging a robust debate about. I saw too, they were throttling back information about conversations on racial justice. Goodness gracious, there's Supreme Court cases in front of the United States Supreme Court today where they're talking about affirmative action and its appropriateness. These are exactly the kinds of debates that the American people should be having.

And clearly, the Biden administration believes that it is losing the argument, it is losing the debate, and has chosen to use its power, governmental power, to throttle back the voices that oppose them. I can't tell you how troubling that is. That is so important. Secretary Pompeo, thank you for joining us. Folks, we are in a matching challenge campaign at the ACLJ at ACLJ.org. These are the November, December, the two months that have the greatest impact on the overall work of the American Center for Law and Justice. We've got big initiatives we haven't announced yet that are really big initiatives here in the United States that's going to impact the world. But your support of this is critical. You know, you see this broadcast and, you know, you see me and Jordan and our team that's on air.

You see the studio, you don't see the six people behind the camera that are working here to put this for you. Jordan and Logan are also adding three times a week a podcast, the Secular Brothers podcast. I mean, more content is being created. We've got cases going on all over the country. We just authorized, we've got a case pending at the Supreme Court of the United States right now involving prayer.

All that's happening because of your support of the ACLJ. So if you're able to support us, this is a great time to have your support matched. Every amount helps. We encourage you to do it if you're able.

Yeah, that's right. At ACLJ.org, you'll see right at the top the matching challenge. If you usually would donate something like $100, well, if you donated 50, that will be matched by another $50. It's like $100. If you donated 25, it'll be matched by a $25 donation.

That's $50. So it's a great time because you double the impact of the money that you do donate. And we know, again, you're making tough decisions right now, but if you're in that position where you're still making contributions, we really encourage you to support the work of the ACLJ today at ACLJ.org. We'll be right back. Welcome to the broadcast. We've got a very interesting program for you today. We're going to be talking about a lot of issues, one of which is something we have been focusing on from time to time as it becomes relevant, and it clearly is. Remember they were to start a misinformation board that was going to be part of a multi-government task force, and then the pushback on it was incredible, so they backed away from that. But the fact is the work combating the executive branch's focus on what they are calling targeting maldis and misinformation is serious because it's coming up in every context within the government itself. And what you worry about in these situations is the criminalization of speech when you've got the Department of Justice or the HHS or whatever agency, FEC, might be involved in this. So this whole misinformation theory that this administration is operating under, that the government is operating under, is impacting every different branch of the federal government. We've seen this with, we talked about this on the broadcast the other day, HHS, VA, you put up a pro-life message.

You can put up any message you want, but if it's pro-life, that's out. Of course, the VA is now in the abortion business. So this misinformation-disinformation mal-information is something, Logan, we've been looking at literally for a decade, but obviously we're focusing on very aggressively now.

Yeah, obviously it's become a much more hot topic. So we've been discussing it at the ACLJ in different ways that we can combat it, whether that be legally or in the media to make sure people know about what's happening and make sure that we are on every social media platform talking about what's happening in on our own website, spreading all the right information against the misinformation, the disinformation, the mal-information, and all those terms that get thrown around so loosely, it feels like these days. And you know, this idea, someone's misinformation doesn't mean it's not true. In other words, they're not saying it's not true. They're saying, but you're misinforming people. And the idea that the federal government's engaging in what we call CC viewpoint-based discrimination, which the Supreme Court in a series of cases that we did at the Supreme Court rejected nine to zero every time the cases came up.

Nine to zero. The most conservative members of the court, the most liberal members of the court tells you that despite those rulings, the government is still trying to squelch messaging. Right. And it's the government that decides what's misinformation or what's disinformation. And just like you said, that doesn't mean that it's untrue. It's just like when they go after the pro-life messages, they call pregnancy resource centers fake clinics. And we see that they constantly target them as purporting disinformation and misinformation. If they talk about the harms of abortion, they become targets. And so we're seeing this especially being applied in the pro-life side of things.

100%. We've seen, look, I mean, we know that it's going to be, they're saying that the crisis pregnancy centers, pregnancy resource centers, as they now refer to us, are, quote, engaging in fraudulent practices, Logan. They're giving out misinformation. They're giving out disinformation. They're giving out mal-information. I mean, this is the government in action, and that's why the ACLJ is fighting back on this on so many different levels.

That's right. And as we head into this holiday, we're in the middle of a matching challenge right now, which means if you give any donation, which we know is hard on people right now, but if you have the ability and you have the means, you go to ACLJ.org. Any donation that you make allows the ACLJ to not only continue doing our work, but it's effectively doubled. It means you don't get charged. If you give $100, you don't get charged $200.

It means for a $100 donation, there essentially unlocks another $100 that another donor has already pledged to match if the donation comes in. So we appreciate that right now. This is a great time to do it. Go to ACLJ.org. Don't only just go there to donate those, spend time, look at the great content, look at the incredible videos, the blog posts, the articles that come out.

There's so much happening in that world and you need to be engaged on it. So go to ACLJ.org, make your simple, easy donation, and your gifts are doubled. Coming up, we're going to be hearing from former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to talk about the targeting of speech.

And then what happens during this lame duck session of Congress, the things that you've got to be looking out for when Congress is in a lame duck situation, which is exactly what they're going into right now. So we've got to be on the alert for that. So again, as Logan said, I want to underscore, your support of the ACLJ is critical. We encourage you to do that with our matching challenge campaign at ACLJ.org. Like Logan said, any amount you donate, we get a matching gift for ACLJ.org. Back with more in just a moment.

All right, welcome back to Secular. So I want to outplay the Biden. It was set up by a reporter from Bloomberg. And Joe Biden didn't have to bite on this.

He honestly could have just pushed to the side, kind of laughed it off. Yeah, because honestly, they tried to say all these things now. The Saudis, they already had board seats, by the way, on Twitter. Their public investment fund is the biggest in the world.

They have lots of companies in the US, probably more than you would like to know. Maybe everybody doesn't love that, but it's not illegal to do business with the Saudis. It never has been. It's always been a close relationship actually with the United States, even through 9-11, even through the terror attacks.

And yeah, there's a balance there, but again, they're using them too as we know that. They're in a public fight with the Saudis constantly. But take a listen. This is Joe Biden, and then it gets backed up. So the White House didn't walk this one back or try to say, oh, he was just answering a question. He's not actually ordering an investigation because the National Security Advisor then doubles down. But take a listen. Mr. President, do you think Elon Musk is a threat to US national security and should the US and with the tools you have, investigate his joint acquisition of Twitter with foreign governments which include the Saudis?

I think that Elon Musk's cooperation and or technical relationships with other countries is worthy of being looked at. Whether or not he is doing anything inappropriate, I'm not suggesting that. I'm suggesting that it's worth being looked at. But that's all I'll say. Worth being looked at is what he was saying. It's worth looking at. But it's not, I didn't suggest it to do anything wrong.

Nothing wrong, but it's worth looking at if someone had a... It's the President of the United States, but they say that, listen, it's ridiculous. They are using the tools of government to intimidate and scare people. Also it divides people. It causes this debate, like Twitter now is, it's a political statement.

Just using it, I guess. Now there's a lot of liberals still on it. Most believe.

Of course. Now I have to say- It's wild. It was a pretty dramatic shift. Oh, it's wild. But I got more followers, they're wild. I'm actually having fun on it again and I was off of it for years.

I utilize it more than I did. Not just for breaking news. So, okay, then you take that, you say, okay, was that just a rambling Joe Biden statement? But then Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor gets brought into the discussion as well. Do we have the sound from that as well? So I mean, this gets, again, this is not a rambling Joe Biden.

This is not a off the cuff, one Toronto answer. This is now you realize a pre-planned thing. Absolutely. Take a listen. The President yesterday said that it should be, that the Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter should be looked into as a potential threat to national security.

Can you offer anything about why? And he also said there are many ways to look into that. How would you look into that? Well, you heard the President yesterday and the CFIUS process is the normal process through which transactions that might have a national security nexus get reviewed.

And I will defer to the CFIUS process rather than comment on it further from this program. By the way, they're not using this about all the Chinese that are buying up all the land in the United States. They're not investigating that through CFIUS, which by the way, CFIUS plays a role usually before the acquisition is done, if it poses a threat to our national security. But owning all of our farmland, they don't think poses a national security nexus because they're all the Chinese. It's just, again, it's like, who's a threat to national security bigger? Hunter Biden going around the world as a crackhead, doing business deals with his dad as the President.

That's a pretty wild, that's kind of like a loose cannon. Or even in the social media front, you had the whole TikTok controversy, whether what TikTok was doing or not doing, that I'm sure needed to be looked into maybe more decently. That's the Chinese just stealing data and influencing. Yeah. But Twitter. Twitter, which is just a bunch of words. And now that it's just become now more ads and maybe more- Monetized? Yeah.

And more middle of the pack to right leaning or libertarian leaning. And just by ownership alone. And like I said, I feel like this is a win-win for Twitter. I think Twitter was pretty gross. It was pretty much a hell- These people that work for Bloomberg News, you don't think they have business with the Saudis?

Are you kidding me? The Saudis were already on the board of Twitter, already board seats on Twitter. They were huge investors. He didn't bring them in. They might have helped with the deal, because he had to convince the board, but they weren't new. So did anybody care about Jack Dorsey having the Saudis on there? No one was talking about that. No, just because he has weird facial hair and piercings?

Yeah. And he had to put out the apology when Musk laid off. Everyone said, actually it was all my fault.

I over bloated everything. All these companies are done. Listen, no one is saying about Mark Zuckerberg.

It is weird. He just cut like, how many of these are 13,000 people? A huge amount of people.

And a lot of these people are cutting 30 to 50% of their staff. And he gives money to Democrats. Yeah.

He lets the FBI go in and... Tell them what to say. Yeah. Which Twitter did too, until now. This is from CNN's newsletter last night. An actual security threat? Whatever is happening on Twitter is public.

It allows you to track even bad actors. Yeah. I don't know. It's ridiculous.

CNN newsletter last night said the world... It's an awful, but lawful thing. We got to stay with it.

It's not the best sell. It doesn't always make people happy. And there's a line.

There is lines. But you know, the Supreme Court says it. It's not... You can't just write the definition of the line. You have to just say, okay, this is when things go too far. We all kind of collectively as a society realize that. Yeah.

What's the line between questioning the race things and being racist, and then also what's the difference between racist and violence? It's all these different lines. And again, free speech means a lot of awful speech. Unfortunately, that's part of it. But you know what?

Who's the first people they would love to cancel? Is all of us. Yeah. So be careful what you're saying. This came from CNN's newsletter last night. They said the world is watching while the world's richest man single-handedly destroys one of the world's most powerful and important communication platforms, just weeks after acquiring it for $44 billion. Bunch of trolls. Yeah, but it's like maybe it was your most effective.

But now that it's not just a liberal cesspool, now it's all of a sudden one of the world's most powerful and important. Well, like we said it, how many times- It's they all freaked out of the blue check mark. We use our dad's official account. Okay, he's not writing the tweet. Let's be honest with everybody, okay?

He's not. And you know what? It never moved to that because Twitter got so nasty. Yeah. So he put out something that'd be like, Mike Pompeo's coming next. And everybody's replying to Mike Pompeo. And you get 400 responses in the exact same, supposedly different accounts. And they're always from bots. And you're like, why are you even following me?

Or a- What do you even care? Or some sort of Democrat initiative that we're telling them to do often? It's like they go online and say, okay, we need to all do this.

Or whether it's actually grassroots or not. And you can see the same four words being used in just different ways. Yeah, even the stuff that starts trending about random people. And you're like, this is trending because of liberals. And now they're just mad because we're going to have equal opportunity there?

This is what I said. It's hard to succinctly summarize the absolute chaos, this is again from that CNN report, that has consumed Twitter over the last 12 hours as Elon Musk continues to wreak havoc on Silicon Valley company. It feels like the beginning of the end, honestly, one recently laid off Twitter employee candidly told me Thursday evening, describing the company as a Titanic with everyone looking for lifeboats. My favorite part about that is one, the company was already sinking miserably. It wasn't like all of a sudden Twitter was this incredibly financial success. So to me, I've always said this, I have no stake in the Elon Musk game, but what I will say is if two things can happen, it's a win-win. Either it becomes a place to actually go and have a entertaining, interesting conversation kind of goes back to old Twitter, or he blows it all up and it goes out of business. Either way, win-win for the world. I think that that's a good thing.

Either one of those situations. It did empower a lot of bad actors, Iowa, Putin, the Russians, Chinese. To be able to spread their stuff. Spread their propaganda. Yeah.

In two sentences. In people anonymously being able to threaten and make statements that were untrackable. I mean, the amount of people who have said horrible things to us and then also threatening things to us that were untrackable or untraceable. Yeah, every day.

Yeah. And there's usually some people that you could point to and go, there they were. Actually Twitter actually was better about that for a few years ago. A few years ago if I reported someone for making a death threat, they would kick them off pretty quickly. Now it's like, eh, you just said he wanted to hang you. He didn't say, legitimately those would be the responses you'd get back. They're like, I mean, is that a threat?

I don't know. So I mean, again, it's a, there's a line it's going to be, it's more like the wild west again. I like it that way. For me, it becomes more entertainment. I noticed the reactivation.

I'd like to take folk on 1-800-684-3110 if you've gone back. Well, I think he said comedy is back and I think that's true. Either you're allowed to have satire, a lot of comedy, more fun, like a Jesus account got verified.

Yeah. But I'm sure it was a paid verify. It's actually nothing bad. It's kind of funny, but it's not a parody. The paid verification thing is going to, it's a catch 22 because that you, I think you now said you do have to put if it's parody in the account or it can get shut down. I've seen some friends already getting impersonated and that'd be an issue because they have the blue check mark.

Personally, again, though, I do think it's kind of funny. I do love that everyone who freaked out. But the liberals, they love their blue check mark so much that they'll, you know, they were so they'll, they, they all of a sudden they're talking to Elon Musk being like, please don't take away our precious verification.

Oh God. I remember through this process growing up through Twitter when it first, and that was like the gold standard. Oh, when I got my email saying I got verified, it was a, I made a lot of my friends very jealous, very mad.

It does, but mostly liberals. At the time it wasn't. At the time, no, but like now I feel like, you know, they all want to like take our accounts down. I don't know how, God knows how many times people are clicking that button for everything I put out. I only do it for a few people. Yeah. I don't like that.

Again, I'm not making personal taxes. You know, it's politics, free speech, and, and voting and elections. And we'll take your calls. Mike Pompeo is going to be joining us. Support the work of the ACLJ at ACLJ.org.

That's ACLJ.org. We'll be right back. Welcome back to Seqio. Final save of the day. We wanted to hear from you and you've called in 1-800-684-3110. Let's just start with how people have been holding on the line. So we'll start first with Pat in Texas online too. Hey, Pat.

Thank you so much for letting me on your show and God bless. You guys really appreciate you. So my deal is because the Democrats are wanting to count these votes, what are they trying to push through at the 11th hour? Basically why they're holding back where we can be able to see the results.

Well, that's all I wanted to know. Listen, they have control of Congress till January. They have the House and the Senate. They could get rid of the filibuster. They could codify Roe.

They could pass more crazy spending legislation. That has nothing to do with the vote counting. Ultimately this vote counting has to be done. Technically it has to be like certified in December, but usually we know much longer before that.

So, you know, we're just learning election law as we go through this process is that oftentimes we thought, you know, on election day, those members of Congress don't go right to Washington, DC, who won and take the oath. That won't be until January. So they'll be preparing some kind of orientation. I think they have those.

Yeah. They start that after, after Thanksgiving to get prepared so they could staff up. But you can imagine how difficult it is to staff up when you're not even sure if you're going to be in the majority or the minority because the funds are differently spent. Who's going to be chairman of committees? Who is going to have that committee staff?

Who's expert staff? It's unclear right now in the House. Unfortunately, it is clear in the Senate. So it's not so much, they always have this session, Pat, where regardless of the outcome, they still go back to Washington and they can pass some serious stuff. We're going to be on that and tracking very closely what they may be up to. So I appreciate you bringing that up to remind people that the current Democrat majority of the House and the Senate is still very much active for a couple more months. Yeah. And maybe emboldened even more so. Yeah.

I mean, they may, a lot of them are on their way out who've retired or did lose. And because of that, they're not going to be as, like, I worry very much about codifying the codification of Roe into our federal law. Yeah. Cause that's tough. That's tough. I mean, they'd have to get rid of the filibuster to do it.

And it makes you very upset. The fact that they would take a Supreme Court case and do that, but nothing is beyond, like you said, they're going to use everything they could do that's in their legal, at least powers to get done. We'll continue on calls. Yeah. Let's go to Michael in Texas on like three. Hey Michael.

How are you? Uh, thanks for taking my call. I just don't think we should leave the focus of, uh, making sure Walker wins the Senate in Georgia because we could, uh, find ourselves with a Senator or somewhere in the country that leaves the democratic party and we'll vote Republican similar to Tulsi Gabbard. That's a prominent, uh, Democrat that has left the party because of their radical policies. And there could be enough pressure on a state Senator to go ahead and make that move.

Well, here's, here's where, first of all, we love Tulsi Tulsi no longer in Congress and was not the Senate. Here's where I think it becomes difficult. If Herschel loses, why would they give up the power of being in the majority? Yeah. At the end of the day, a lot of this is a game.

This is a game. So if we can convince one, Michael, great, but it wouldn't flip it unless you'd have to have Herschel win and flip one. It also feels like, you know, we think, you know, obviously the hope is a Herschel can pull it out still regardless. Uh, but when you look at it, I don't want to give up hope. I'm just saying that's pretty, that's up. You're going for a theory that I think a lot of people with mansion and with cinema and these people never have, it's always like this, this, you know, rabbit that you're chasing that you never can quite get that this person is going to flip and it just doesn't happen very much. Not that it can't, but it would be shocking.

As you said, coming out of an election where there wasn't the red wave, the red tsunami, or any of these terms that are being thrown around when that didn't happen. Uh, that would be tough. But Michael, thank you. Appreciate it. Obviously, uh, Tulsi Gabbard, if you want to say last week, she had our dad on our podcast. She should go take a listen to that.

It's a good episode. If you want to get a gux, you're a really good history of the organization of what we do here. Uh, that's a good one to go to and we're doing a podcast. We do secular brothers. Podcasts will be on later today.

A little lighter. I hope so. We usually have a more casual, informal conversation. Uh, we'll be doing that this afternoon. So make sure you're following us all, all your favorite social media platforms, but also mainly make sure you're subscribed on apple podcasts and you're subscribed on rumble. Those are kind of our two big outlets.

We're also on youtube, but you can find all the links at secular brothers.com. We'll take some more calls. Yeah.

Cause it's a, it's a big, it's a big day at ACLJ here. This office, Mike Pompeo is going to be here today. Yeah. Later on the afternoon, we're going to film some special stuff with him later this week and a lot of stuff that you'll see in the center. Cool as well. Let's take some more. Yeah. All right. Let's go to Richard and Georgia on line one.

Richard. Welcome. Hey guys.

Thanks for taking my call. Uh, came up while ago about Republican voters. Well, I know that just don't want to vote anymore because Republicans don't do anything. They get in power. They're afraid of the media.

They're afraid. I mean, what they had, you know, when Obama, we had a Congress, we didn't do anything. Even when Trump was President, they didn't do anything. Yeah. I mean, I think, listen, margins matter. There were some massive tax cuts under Trump.

So I see they didn't do anything. I mean, it was only a couple of years like that. And then you get hit with the Democrat takeover. So remind yourself, remember Republicans come in, especially if a Democrat is President and we have one of the houses, the first job is to stop legislation. The second is to see if you could get anything done in a bipartisan way. That's become that much more difficult with a left Senate and a potentially conservative house and a left President. But, but, uh, again, just, I would not give up on voting. If you give up on voting, we can never win. Oh yeah, absolutely. There's no chance. They're doubling down on voting, right?

Because they've already created a whole new group of young voters that never used to vote before who, like you said, Logan, feel pressure, not to say from like the traditional lines of party politics, but from influencers online that they follow and celebrities they follow to say, you know what I need to, I need my vote sticker. Yeah. I need to get engaged. Yeah. I need to have something to share. Here's another thing to share. Uh, let's go ahead and try to take at least one more call.

Which one do I go with? You pick. All right. Let's, let's go to Alex is calling in North Carolina. Alex, you're on the air. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much for taking my call. I know of strong Republican women that voted straight Democrat simply because they did not understand the truth about abortion. Yeah, I think that that is a problem that happened across the country and it was a much bigger than it was polling. It pulled high earlier this summer that it started dropping off the polls like number four and five issue ended up being the second biggest issue in the country.

Just four points behind the economy. Listen, I'll tell you this and maybe you agree, maybe you don't as someone who's worked in the pro life world since I was born, uh, I would easily give up, uh, you know, a branch of Congress to see overture row versus weight overturned. We're talking about a midterm election. You're not a general election, but a midterm election. If we can keep the house and it was because of overturning row versus weight that we lost the Senate.

That's okay with me longterm because the longterm battle, that's a bigger deal. Now what else do we need to do? We know we need to double down on education. We're going to be doing that at the ACLJ. Uh, obviously even in Herschel's race to some extent, we're going to be focusing on, on, on early voting, uh, in that race and just getting more people to utilize that process, uh, in a bipartisan way through ACLJ. Just say, don't be afraid of early voting. Yeah.

Get out and use it. Make votes. You heard Rick Renell talk about if you hear somebody like him talking about it, you know that these are people who obviously have been on the front lines of the election stuff. They're telling you to go early vote.

Definitely get engaged. Yep. So folks, and again, I don't want you to be down.

I think this is, this is part of politics. I will tell you when you work closely in it, like I have my entire life, honestly end up losing more than you would. And that's because these votes are right on the margin. We told you there'd only be a red wave if we won these very close races. We just ended up not running, winning the very close races that the ones we were down two or three points we lost by two or three points. Uh, uh, and we'll stay updated with you, but support the work of the ACLJ financially at ACLJ.org. We got our matching challenge. Donate today. If you can.