Biden Admin Doubles Down on Ministry of Truth

Today on Sekulow, the Biden administration doubles down on their ministry of truth. Keeping you informed and engaged.

Now more than ever, this is Sekulow. This week we learned the DHS disinformation governance board was coming out and we saw immediate concerns about free speech. You understand some of this pushback? Oh, there's no question, Brett, that we could have done a better job of communicating what it does. We want to hear from you.

Share and post your comments or call 1-800-684-3110. We address disinformation that presents a security threat to the homeland. Disinformation from Russia, from China, from Iran, from the cartels.

And now your host, Jordan Sekulow. You know, Secretary Mayorkas, how about focus on our southern border? How about protecting our homeland from actual threats, not verbal communications? And if you really need to go after cartels, you have the authority to do that without a disinformation governance board. If you need to go after Russia propaganda, you have the authority to do that without a disinformation governance board, which appears to be targeting American speech. And here's why it appears to be targeting American speech. The person you've put in charge of this governance board, let's flashback to when she was doing an online forum on civic duty.

This is, again, Nina Jakowick talking about what is your civic duty. Bite2, does it sound like Russia? Does it sound like I don't hear about cartels in this?

Bite2. Most of the disinformation that we've seen, this highly emotionally manipulative content, is coming from the right. If you look at the top 10 most engaged with posts on Facebook or Twitter on a given day, they are usually posts that are coming from the right. And that's because the right does deal in this highly emotional rhetoric. Highly emotional rhetoric, by the way, protected by the U.S. Constitution. Second, don't hear anything about cartels or Russia there. No, of course not, because, listen, the fact that the Department of Homeland Security has set up a disinformation and misinformation governance board.

Now, let's look at the title of the group. It's a board that's going to govern misinformation and disinformation. So when the censors at Facebook label something fake or partially false, they send that over, I guess, to the governance board, who does what with DHS?

Takes legal action? I mean, this is the question, and I don't know the answer to this, because nobody can find the rules or regulations that this governance board has put in place. But we do know this, and I think we've got to be clear on this, this government board actually is operating and has people on the panel.

Yeah, that's right. It's not just Nina. She's got a deputy general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, as well as an undersecretary for policy at the Department of Homeland Security. My concern is that it's not Facebook going to them, but it's the disinformation board going to social media platforms and especially places like Twitter now with a new owner, True Social, trying to put pressure on them, trying to put pressure on Instagrams, wherever there is social media communication going on. And they're doing it under the guise of fighting back against cartels, except for you don't need this division to do that.

You don't need this division to fight back on Russia. In fact, she wrote that this is unnecessary, that this entire division, this entire, again, setup is completely unnecessary. She wrote this back in 2017. So at the height of all the Russiagate nonsense, she wrote it for the New York Times. And she said, all is not lost. Disinformation can be defeated without the establishment of a shiny new initiative, cased in the language of Cold War 2.0. Instead of rapid information operations, the United States should work to systematically rebuild analytical skills across the American population and invest in the media to ensure that it's driven by truth, not clicks. I don't like either of those statements, but guess what she's done?

She's now joined the shiny new initiative, cased in the language of Cold War 2.0. Yeah, but this is, listen, this is the new censorship board, and these are unconstitutional. We'll learn later in the broadcast. This is nothing new for the Democrats, by the way. They've been doing this for a long time. They call it different things. This time, it's called a Board of Governance of Misinformation and Disinformation, but it's not something we should tolerate.

By the way, if you're watching on our social media platforms, including Rumble, we encourage you to subscribe to those platforms, but specifically to Rumble as well, because we know there, we're not gonna get censored by the Misinformation and Disinformation Governance Board. This just adds another tool, but this time, the tool's controlled by the, bad enough when it was big tech. Now it's the government. Your reaction to all this, 1-800-684-3110, 800-684-3110.

Back with more in a moment. All right, welcome back to Secula. We are taking your phone calls on this too, 1-800-684-3110, because one of my top concerns of this entire effort is, and of course, we've got our FOIA in to learn more about this group. We filed immediately on Friday with the Department of Homeland Security. If they don't respond in about 20 days, which is about 30 calendar days, we're gonna take them to court in June.

They're not gonna respond. And so, we're gonna get this information. But it's also the idea that once the government announces something like this, Dad, when they announce a Disinformation Governance Board that's gonna be reviewing all of this speech, it, in a sense, scares people. Well, it's chilling of the speech. So, there's a doctrine of the First Amendment.

You start saying, maybe I won't write, maybe I won't go to that political rally, maybe I won't put the sign in my yard, maybe I won't put this thing on my social media platform. So, the doctrine is the First Amendment prohibits the chilling of free speech. That is activities taken by a government actor designed to limit or basically scare people, chill, stop First Amendment activity because you think you might be violating a law. Now, here, it's particularly onerous because the agency that's been tasked with working this through is the Department of Homeland Security, which is a law enforcement mechanism, a law enforcement agency. And the idea that a law enforcement agency now has a board of governance with misinformation and disinformation is chilling. The existence of the board itself is chilling to free speech. Now, the question becomes here, and we're looking at this right now, we would like to challenge this head on. This thing needs to not come into existence. You know what the problem is? It's already been in existence, folks, for two months. It's just now it's out publicly. And, you know, Mayorkas says, oh, well, and we have the bite again where he says, oh, I could have rolled it out better.

Yeah, let's play that one again. I mean, this is... This week, we learned that DHS's disinformation governance board was coming out, and we saw immediate concerns about free speech. You understand some of this pushback? Oh, there's no question, Brett, that we could have done a better job in communicating what it does.

Really? I don't even know if they know what it does. That's the scary part of all this. I think they know exactly what it does. It's going to put a ton of pressure on social media companies to clamp down even harder.

That's what the plan is, yes. They don't like the Truth Social launch. They don't like that Twitter's been bought by Elon Musk. I think they rushed up their announcement because of that. They don't like Fox News. They don't like conservative talk radio. But especially where the pressure can be put on is the social media companies that open the door to content moderation.

That's their fault. They open the door to say, let's bring in these outside groups, outside organizations to moderate our own content. And we've gone through that process before at the ACLJ. Now, there's going to be a government agency helping them put more restrictions on the content. That means more shadow banning. That means more Facebook jail.

That means more getting kicked off the platform because of opinions. And this is the difference. If you're going to have to cartel information. Which they could do, by the way, without this.

You don't need a disinformation governance board. If you're going after. You need a subpoena and a search warrant. Specifically Russia.

Right. You should be utilizing the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. You don't need to announce a board. You don't need to tell Russia that you're doing it. That's why I don't believe either of those lines because you don't tell the cartels what you're going to do. You don't tell the Russians what you're going to do.

And by the way, here, Russia target this agency now and target these individuals who are leading this agency now. No, it's, it's a game. He came up with talking points for this because he knew he was going to have to go on Fox News and answer the question.

Yeah. And he did a very poor job of doing it. Now it was interesting. Brett Barrett brought up the Steele dossier because that was, you know, foreign information aimed at the former President. Listen to this one, number 21.

Was the Steele dossier disinformation? I it's not for me to, to opine on that. I want to stop right there. It's not for me to opine.

Well, but wait a minute. I thought you have a board of governance that's for misinformation and disinformation. Then here's the rest of his answer. Just censorship. And that's, that's exactly, that's exactly why we set up this working group to make sure that our work to address a real threat to the homeland, the threat posed by Russian disinformation, the threat posed by Chinese disinformation, by Iranian disinformation, the work that we do does not infringe on people's right of free speech. But you appointed a person to head up the organization that has said the misinformation is incumbent. They're not, she wasn't talking about Russia and, and Iran. She was talking about right wing outlets. Right.

I mean, this is the, I will, I will play it for you again. So you understand this is what Nina, the executive director of your new disinformation governance board that we're paying for their taxpayer dollars said is the biggest problem by two. Most of the disinformation that we've seen this highly emotionally manipulative content is coming from the right. If you look at the top 10, you know, most engaged with posts on Facebook or Twitter on a given day, they are usually posts that are coming from the right.

And that's because the right does deal on this highly emotional rhetoric. She was a Wilson fellow on misinformation and disinformation at the Woodrow Wilson center. I mean, I just think about this from what, this is the person they put in charge of it. 32 years old. I don't know if she's a lawyer or not.

Maybe I don't know. I do know this, that the potential chilling of free speech here is drastic. So we're not just talking about it on this broadcast. We have taken action. I'm putting an action, I'm putting up on the screen right now again, this is the freedom of information act request that we went out on the air with on, we announced it Friday. We sent it out Friday. Jordan's going to be doing Sean Hannity's radio and television broadcast this evening on this. We are looking at taking direct legal action in addition to this, which the FOIA will end up, I suspect in court because they're going to either not want to produce documents or what they produce is not going to result in, this is the problem, it's not going to result in the real information.

Right. I mean, we want to look at who are the DHS officials involved in establishing this board other than Mayorkas and the other name people. Were members of Congress involved? Because we've seen a lot of Democrats pushing for this. Non-government entities, left-leaning groups, were they involved? How involved was the White House staff? Again, we were even looking for certain words, election, candidate, misinformation, abortion, reproductive freedom, religion, Christian, patriot, conservative, Twitter, Musk, free speech, speech, constitution, first amendment. Because we know the words, because the IRS, remember with the IRA, they'd be on the lookout list within their agency.

That's the same kind of problem here, except DHS has even more power. They'd be on the lookout list for, as Jordan just listed, for specific words and phrases. So we want to know that too. And we want to know their definition of disinformation. How are they going to define what disinformation is? All we've heard is talking points about what it's not and who it's supposed to be targeted at.

But of course, none of that makes any sense. I want to take your phone calls on this at 1-800-684-3110. Join the broadcast.

That's 1-800-684-3110. It is an attack on our free speech rights. It is an attack that we've really not seen before at this level. And do you trust the Biden administration? Could you imagine if Donald Trump did this, they'd be screaming?

First of all, he wouldn't have. And it was really Barack Obama in a speech about a month ago who called for this. So Barack Obama, former President, saying we need more content moderators on social media. And guess what the Biden administration does? They listen to Barack Obama and they say, you know what?

We're going to put in an official office of content moderation. This to me is what's scary here is because people want to have opinions and you should be able to have opinions in this country without being demonized or criminalized or have the threat or fear of an agency like the Department of Homeland Security, a law enforcement agency coming after you because they don't like your opinion. This is a country founded on radical opinions.

Yeah, like overthrow the king. Opinions that are outside the norm are okay. Opinions that, again, it's opinion.

And then, of course, people have a tough time now. Who defines facts and truth now is also a game because it really depends on what media source you go to to define what is a fact or what is absolutely true. And sometimes in many situations like in war, it's hard to get truth because it's a messy situation.

So you get as best information as you can, but sometimes in that best information comes disinformation from one of the two parties in the conflict. You know, I'm looking at some of the posts, the comments that are coming in and here's what's interesting. A lot of people think, and I mean, I can understand why you think this, this can't possibly be real. I mean, is this possibly, I think it was one of the senators, I don't know if it was Josh Hawley or one of the other ones, who wrote a letter to Tom Cotton saying, I thought this was not real when I heard about it.

And some of you were saying the same thing. Could this possibly be real? Well, not only is it real, it's been in existence for two months and they only leaked it out because it was about to get out. So that's exactly why they leaked it out. But you have to understand that when you've got this kind of, Jordan set the stage on this, when he says chilling of free speech here can be dramatic if you let this stand.

Yes, it can. Because again, the average person who hears about this, and I'm not talking about to even most of you listening to this broadcast or watching this broadcast, the average folks out there who, you know, it gets towards election time and they decide to say something online or tell, start talking to their friends about who they're going to vote for, maybe put the yard sign up or the bumper sticker on their car, maybe attend an event. This makes them think twice because they know right now the party in charge, if they're conservative, doesn't like those events and is looking for a way to demonize that speech and criminalize that speech and block that speech from ever seeing the light of day.

So you can see this chilling effect it might have on just average folks who, when it gets close to election time, want to have an opinion on the candidates they choose, the issues they care about. Support our work at ACLJ.org, but I want to hear from you. 1-800-684-3110. It's 2022, and this is happening in the United States of America. Give us your call. 1-800-684-3110.

I want to play the sound. This is from your new executive director of the Government Disinformation Board. She said this back in 2020 about President Trump and what she would never want to see the executive branch doing by 2023.

Imagine that, you know, with President Trump right now calling all of these news organizations that have inconvenient for him stories that they're getting out there, that he's calling fake news and now lashing out at platforms. I would never want to see our executive branch have that sort of power, and that's why, you know, the legislative process with our duly elected officials is really important, that sort of consultative rule-making process, and we can't just govern by executive order anymore. But now the executive branch is taking it over and she's leading it up. She never wanted to see the executive branch initiate this kind of power, and now she is the executive director of that power.

Under the executive branch of the government. She'll say exactly what she was afraid of. She's now heading up. I mean, I want you to think about this for a moment, but Harry, you said something in our prep meeting that's interesting. This is not really new for them.

You're precisely correct. So, Nina Jankowicz is simply the latest iteration of the Democrats' attempt to take over speech in the United States. Excuse me. It's important to remember that in the 2010 State of the Union address by President Obama, he rebuked the United States Supreme Court.

Why? Because it issued Citizens United a free speech decision which protected the free speech rights of corporations, which are persons within the meaning of the United States Constitution. Secondly, in 2014, Senator Udall formally proposed legislation to do what? To shrink freedom of speech in order to quote unquote restore democracy.

This amendment threatened the free speech rights of every single American. If the amendment, the Udall Amendment, took effect, it would bar the National Right Rifle Association from distributing voter guides. It would bar potentially pro-life organizations from distributing pro-life information.

Congress could criminalize pastors from making an effort to get their parishioners out to vote. These are the commitments of the Democrats. And in 2021, what did the Democrats propose?

HR1, which is a House bill which would enable the Democrats to take over elections in the United States. Wall Street Journal's editorial board had an interesting comment. They listened to what Mayorkas said on CNN's State of the Union.

We already played that. And then they said this. This isn't reassuring. The concern isn't that the board will spy on Americans. The problem is that this new board may choose to play the role of national fact checker, a kind of government politic fact. They'll look down from Mount Washington at this or that statement and vouchsafe to the masses what is true and what is false. And then it says whatever Mayorkas intentions may be, but refereeing political debate isn't the government's job. And Jordan, that's precisely what you have said. Harry, you said they've been trying to do this for 12 years, but now they've done it.

That's right. I mean, political speech is some of the most protected speech in our country. And the courts have been very clear about that. And the freedom of speech is one of our most protected sacred rights. The courts have been very clear about that.

If they draw any lines, they take a very difficult task. At any time, they feel like they might be silencing kind of any kind of speech because it's illegal. And even then a speech that is illegal is usually speech that leads to an imminent criminal conduct. Not one day down the road, someone might commit a crime because they're crazy and read something online. Imminent criminal conduct.

All of these laws already exist in the books. There does not need to be a new agency to do exactly this. And we all, I think, understand where this is going towards. It's targeting us. It is targeting you. It is not targeting the cartels. They don't need this for that. It's not targeting Russia. They don't need this for that. You won't use it for that.

It doesn't even make sense. This is the national content moderator. If you had Russian disinformation coming into the United States, why would you go to a governance board if you're the Department of Homeland Security?

You'd go to the FBI. Absolutely. This is why it's so fake, folks. It's also important to keep in mind that Mayorkas has suggested that it's all right, for instance, to spew anti-Jewish statements and rhetoric. But it's not all right to take hostages at synagogues. Well, you don't need a disinformation board to prevent hostage taking.

So at the end of the day, I think Mayorkas, the DHS, is simply a corrupt organization headed, unfortunately, by political hacks. Let me go to Dave in Maryland online, too. Hey, Dave, welcome to Sekulow.

You're on the air. Hey, guys, thanks for taking my call. Big fans. Been listening to you guys for about six months.

Really appreciate what you're doing. Real quick question about Mayorkas. He defended Janka Wedge basically saying she was an expert in disinformation. My question to you guys is, what constitutes her as an expert? In other words, what did she do to qualify herself as an expert? I mean, she worked for the Wilson Center as a disinformation expert.

But we played the bite from her already, what she said. She said that she would not want to see the federal government through the executive branch have the authority to do exactly what she's now heading up. So I would not, I would totally discount, Dave, what she said she's going to do or not do. She's also hyper-partisan. So I mean, you go back to the 2016 election, she was a Hillary Clinton supporter.

She's very anti-Trump. So again, if you're going to do this as the Biden administration and you don't want to have this conservative outrage, and it should be American outrage, because of free speech rights, you don't put in a hyper-partisan actor. Would you want me in next time around to decide I don't like liberal speech? I'm going to say, we're not the right actors for that.

There is no right actor for this job though, because this job shouldn't exist in the United States of America. This position, this board, there's no one qualified to do this because in our constitution, we have the freedom of speech and no one should be moderating it. One of the things we're looking at right now is to find out, and we filed the Freedom of Information Act request to get information. If we don't get information, we'll go to federal court there, but we're also looking at the idea that this, the board itself, ill-defined as it is, Harry, is chilling free speech because if you're concerned you're running a foul of the Department of Homeland Security's governance board, it's going to automatically throttle speech in this country.

I think you're precisely correct. So what we have is an intolerable infringement on Americans' free speech rights, and so all Americans from the left and the right should react negatively to the attempt by the Biden administration to control what we say. Importantly, we should also note what the Supreme Court has said about our free speech rights. That is, there is no such thing as a false idea, and that is particularly true with respect to political ideas. But the Homeland Security Department basically says that it has the right to decide what you believe, what facts are true, and this, at the end of the day, from a constitutional perspective, is simply nonsense on steroids. In our second half hour, Rick Rinnell will be joining us.

He's active, again, on social media platforms, active in campaigns and political work, and he understands, again, he's been in the intelligence world too. The world that would have handled if there was a problem with cartels, if there was a problem with Russia, that's the right world. Not the department which, by the way, secure the border, Mayorkas. Stop trampling on my free speech rights and get the border secured.

How about do that first? A 1-800-684-3110, if you want to join us on the broadcast, we want you to be a part of the show. Give us a call. 1-800-684-3110, can you believe this is happening in your country, the United States of America, in 2022?

And what it could mean for your kids and grandkids? Give us a call. For decades now, the ACLJ has been on the front lines, protecting your freedoms, defending your rights, in courts, in Congress, and in the public arena. The American Center for Law and Justice is on your side. If you're already a member, thank you. And if you're not, well, this is the perfect time to stand with us at ACLJ.org, where you can learn more about our life-changing work.

Become a member today, ACLJ.org. Keeping you informed and engaged, now more than ever, this is Sekulow. And now your host, Jordan Sekulow. So of course, you know, last week a disinformation government governance board was announced by the Biden administration through Secretary Mayorkas, who is failing to protect us at the border. I think they're estimating what, like 22,000 people a month at the border. I mean, that's a full-on invasion of our country to deal with that.

So putting that aside, guess where he's focusing his attention, why he'd had to do the media rounds this weekend? Because he created a disinformation governance board and put in his place the executive director, who's a hyper-partisan actor, who said this should never exist in the United States of America. Even under Trump, we should never have something like this, even if we're dealing with figures like that.

She's a hyper-partisan, has no business being in this role. And as I've said, because no one does, this should not exist in the United States of America. They are lying when they say they need this for cartels and they need this for Russia.

That is always an excuse, Russia especially. We have intelligence agencies to do that. The Department of Homeland Security, the job there, again, terrorism and border security, border security, something they are totally failing at as we speak and it's just going to get worse. So they're trying to shift our attention to now trying to have a national center for content moderation. That is what the Biden administration is creating through this board.

And they're going to put pressure, and you see how bad it is already with these content providers and media platforms, they're going to put that much more government pressure now for them to censor your conservative speech. Why do I say it's your conservative speech? Because she said that's the problem.

Play the bite again. We are the problem to Nina Jankowicz and to this board. Most of the disinformation that we've seen, this highly emotionally manipulative content, is coming from the right. If you look at the top 10 most engaged with posts on Facebook or Twitter on a given day, they are usually posts that are coming from the right. And that's because the right does deal on this highly emotional rhetoric. Highly emotional rhetoric is protected speech.

I can be highly emotional about what I believe in. I don't need a government censor to ever step in there. There is no question about that.

Hyper emotional rhetoric is protected speech, folks. Will Haines pointed this out. This is a very good point. Because they're having a media problem now, because this thing got out and it's creating all kinds of problems, here's what they're saying. This was for disinformation by cartels. First of all, any information by a cartel.

I mean, think about this. They're worried about cartels giving disinformation, like come to this particular place to go, rather than go to the other place to go. I mean, this is what's so ridiculous. So they came up with this cartels and Iran, who they want to cut a deal with, by the way, as they're worried about their disinformation. Why would DHS have a board to determine that? Why won't you just go after the cartels? They're engaged in illegal conduct. Because what you're trying to do is target free speech.

And you say that. I mean, their executive director has said it. She said it, that all the information comes out of the right and it's all this misinformation. And what if Donald Trump were to do this? He calls it fake news and that makes it unconstitutional.

But it doesn't. You have the right to make these statements. But the idea that they're justifying it now by saying, oh, well, we have to do this because we have to get misinformation from drug cartels controlled. As if the FBI and DHS can't do that already. That's just nonsense, folks, what they're trying to pull over the American people.

Bogus excuse. I'm going to take your phone calls when we come back. Rick Rinnell is going to be joining us as well. He led the Department of National Intelligence. So again, he's the director of national intelligence.

So this idea that these tools aren't already in place to go after real bad actors is bogus. We'll talk about that with him. We'll take more of your phone calls to it. 1-800-684-3110.

That's 1-800-684-3110. You can support the work of the ACLJ at ACLJ.org. Now, our FOIA on this, we got way out ahead of this first. So the filing is in place on Friday with the Department of Homeland Security. They don't respond. We'll be in court next month with them.

But you can read it at ACLJ.org. So you can see that now, understand what we're filing there. And we are working on figuring out what more we can do as an organization to prevent this governance board from ever, ever censoring you. We'll be right back.

All right. Welcome back to Sec Hill. We are going to get to your phone calls as well at 1-800-684-3110. Rick Rinnell is joining us and in his role as acting director of national intelligence. Rick, I wanted to ask you this first question because Mayorkas came out this week and he said, you know, we need this governance board because of cartel disinformation and we need it because of Russian disinformation. I would imagine when you oversaw that as a director of national intelligence and through DHS that they have all the tools they need to do that without announcing a new governance board with a partisan hack as its executive director. Yeah, it's a great point.

Look, I'll just say this, and I've said this before, I think here at ACLJ, but it's worth repeating. And that is that the, you know, me running the intelligence agencies, what I came to realize is that the Russia team that is looking at all of the intel is extremely dramatic and partisan. And the China team is opposite.

They're very slow and judicious. And so the leaks that come out and the innuendos and the partisanship that gets done makes us realize that 30 or sorry, 50 former intelligence officials are going to say that Hunter Biden's laptop is Russian disinformation. And that is exactly what the Chinese want you to do. They don't want you looking at the laptop. The Chinese don't want you looking at the relationship with the Bidens. The Chinese don't want you looking at them. And so every time a Democrat goes out and says, Russia, Russia, Russia, the Beijing crowd applauds.

They love this. And so Mayorkas, I think, is missing what's happening. He's being whipped by the partisans inside DHS and inside the intelligence agencies. And it is not making Americans more safe to pretend like somehow we need political people using the tools of government to shut down dissent and to shut down our discussions.

So, Rick, what's interesting to me here, what's really troubling is you're the director of national intelligence. If the Russian cartels are sending out missing first of all, the Russian drug cartels and the Russians are doing something that's illegal, which the drug cartels are engaged in an illegal enterprise, you don't need a governance board to determine whether their speech is appropriate or not. I mean, this is where this is such a bogus reason to defend this group. So what happened here was they were not prepared to defend the existence of this organization. But with inside DHS, and this is what I am trying to really focus our people on, inside the Department of Homeland Security, there is now a board of governance. I mean, think about this, a board of governance on misinformation and disinformation, the head of which, the executive director of which said, it's the right that engages in the disinformation and misinformation. She didn't say the cartels, which it doesn't even make sense that this governance board would deal with drug cartels, Rick, and you supervise these agencies.

Yeah, we've got to get a handle on them. And I would argue that the majority, by far the majority of career intelligence officials hate the leaks. They hate the partisanship. They want to keep America safe, but they see it.

They see it every single day. And let me be very clear that fascism is about shutting down dissent. And what the Biden administration is doing is shutting down dissent. They're afraid to have a conversation. We know this because they're afraid to have a conversation on the university levels. They don't want Hollywood.

Anyone in Hollywood who pipes up and says something different than the official line is crushed. They are crushing dissent everywhere they can, including big tech, including our conversations about elections. I want to go to the phones, Joe in North Carolina on line one. Hey Joe, welcome to Secular. Hey, thanks for having me guys.

You guys do a great job. I just wanted to ask you, are the same people who decided that the New York Post story on Hunter Biden was disinformation, are those the same people who are going to be deciding whether from here on now, whether it's disinformation? Well, you know, the new executive director for this governance board, Rick, she took that as fact. Once those 50 former Intel folks came out and said, the Hunter Biden laptop is disinformation, she said, she tweeted out, it's disinformation.

It's something the media should not look at. So I want to speak very clearly to Joe. I got one word answer. Yes, it is the same people. It is the same people who want to shut down dissent, who literally went after the New York Post, shut them down. And again, I want to be clear on this Russian propaganda because that's what it is. It's, you know, we've changed the word to Russian disinformation, but it's old fashioned Russian propaganda.

They always do it. We got to call it out. And in the reality is, is that it didn't it wasn't about our elections. It was about our election debates. And it was largely on social media where they tried to inflame our debates. So I tell everybody constantly, if you see on social media, somebody that you don't know that is inflaming a debate on guns or abortion, it's probably a Russian bot. Just ignore it and don't inflame the debate anymore because they want us to disagree. And that's their goal. They don't have an agenda of policy. They have an agenda to get us to fight amongst ourselves. And Rick, I want you to think about this for a moment. Could you imagine when we were all working in our different roles in the last administration, if they were a proposal that the President was going to announce or the DHS director was going to announce, or you were going to announce as director of national intelligence, hey, we're going to put this committee together, this governance board, and look, don't worry about it.

We're just going to engage in reviewing misinformation and disinformation from everyone. Yeah, right. Exactly. So could you imagine what would be going on at CNN and MSNBC right now, if that was coming out of your mouth two and a half years ago? Is meltdown two words or one word? Because there would be a total meltdown.

Yes. These people, their heads would explode. And you know, I've learned, Jay, every single time the left accuses me or others on the right of something, they're doing it themselves. That's their whole game plan. They're trying to cover up.

And so beware, when they accuse us, they are doing the exact same thing. I want to go to Diane in Nevada, because Rick, you're involved in the political world all the time. Diane, welcome to Secular.

You're on the air. Thank you for taking my call. And I'm hoping that I'm going to make some sense here. This whole thing, and I think you mentioned it on your program a few days ago, that this was a tactic of Hitler. This is a tactic of the Soviet Union to squelch any kind of debate and then put out their own information as being the only information you could accept. And I think that our job here is to possibly stop taking every bite, as the guys don't bite at this information, these inflaming conversations. But know that if this is going to happen in this country, we need to vote against it. This is my key though, Rick, because a key to voting is not just the individual voting, but it's the individual being able to talk to their friends and family about voting. And that's how you build an organization and a group of people. And that's how you actually win elections. If we're all just silent, again, that also hurts voting and hurts the chance of winning elections. Yeah, we got to fight back. As Diane was saying from Nevada, look, don't take the bait every time. But I think what she's saying is push out our own agenda, push out our own positive points. I hope I'm allowed to say that Adam Laxalt, our great candidate in Nevada, deserves Diane's support. I don't know if I can say that, but I just did. But the reality is, is we need, as Diane is saying, we need brave, courageous people to fight for us.

And we also need Diane's and Joe's of the world, every single person to fight back. They want you to be silent. That's what Julian free speech means, scares you into silence.

Yeah, go ahead, Rick. They're going to call you a racist, a sexist or a homophobe or the new one, a Russian agent. And so all that is designed to take your voice away and to scare you into silence.

You are the only person that can take away your voice. You know, the truth of the matter is this is what we're looking at right now is whether litigation can be, we're obviously doing the FOIA, but whether direct litigation on this governance board can be taken because the chilling nature of what they're doing. The Supreme Court has long held that when you chill free speech at the outset, it gets subject to constitutional attack.

And I think this is one of these situations. Rick, we appreciate it as always, appreciate your insights. Folks, let me say this and be really clear on this. The idea that we have a board of governance for misinformation and disinformation. Let me tell you the disinformation.

It's about drug cartels and Russia. That's why they need this. That's the disinformation.

That's right. And I mean, the fact is we have these places, our government to already handle that where secretary Marcus should be focusing his time is actually securing our border, protecting Americans, not empowering a partisan actor to be the head of a new truth police, the ministry of truth. This is not a joke.

This is not satire. This is moving forward right now in your taxpayer funded federal government. Now the ACLJ is taking action on it. We've already filed a FOIA.

We got way ahead on Friday. That's been filed with DHS. We have to take him to court. We will. Or also after this broadcast, we're gonna be talking about what else we can do to protect your rights on this. So let's keep the pressure up. I think that's very key here. Continue to take your phone calls at 1-800-684-3110. Pressure this administration.

Maybe they shut it down. Let me take Amy's call, call from Pennsylvania online to Hey Amy, welcome to secular. You're on the air. Thank you. Thanks for everything you do.

We appreciate that. As with something as blatantly unconstitutional as this is, why do you have to bother with FOIA requests? Why can't you take it directly to Supreme court? Well, you got to find out about exactly what they're doing. Remember, are they just using words or are they going to actually, and I think they will actually do something here. I think that this is setting up a national content moderation board. You know, interesting enough, a new kind of piece of information for you. The executive director, Nina Jankiewicz of this governance board, disinformation governance board, when she was at the Wilson center as a disinformation fellow, guess who was paying for it? Facebook.

Okay. So they already are doing content moderation. So this is like nationalizing content moderation.

So we file the FOIA to get as much information as we can. We are looking at whether or not announcing this alone is silencing speech. Is it, is it again, is it enough of an effect on speech that people are going to think twice before exercising their constitutional right?

I mean, dad, we talk about chilling speech. And I think that a lot of people wonder how can the U S government, it's shocking. It's like what the Senator said. It's almost satire. It appears to be satire that the U S government whose first amendment right to its people is that right to speak. So here's the irony of all of this. And this is why the FOIA isn't very important here. The freedom of information act request sets a predicate. So we can find out exactly how this came into being, exactly what they're doing.

If there are rules and regulations, no one knows any of this now. Mayorkas came out in damage control mode. That's what this was today.

Damage control mode to say, Hey, we're not talking about free speech here. We need this for drug cartels and Russian disinformation. And again, I say, think about that for a moment. You know, that is not correct. They don't need a board of governance for misinformation and disinformation to go after drug cartels or Russia, you know, propaganda. So that doesn't work for the American people, but the, but what they're going to do is they're going to, this board is going to work. And now we know that her, her, her fellowship, the head of the board of governance for misinformation disinformation's fellowship was partially funded by Facebook. Oh, you mean the group that's already engaging in a lot of censorship in our view, flagging things and then having us take it back saying, Oh, you're right.

We didn't, we shouldn't have flagged that. So this is just now, but now you're going to put the, the department of Homeland security and criminal law enforcement behind it. But they're justifying this by saying, this is what you got though. We got to go after the drug cartels, which we want them to go after, which would mean protect us on the border, which they're not doing a very good job of, which is actually their mission. But instead they need a governance board to go after the drug cartels, get a subpoena, get an indictment, get a, get a search warrant. That's how you do that. That's how you lose law enforcement. This is bogus.

This is an attempt. And she has said it it's coming from the right. She said that in her previous statements, they didn't appoint some constitutional expert on this. They, they promoted an individual who has an agenda. And she was so concerned that under the previous administration, if executive power would have gotten this kind of control over content, what it would mean now she's heading it up for this administration, exactly what you feared about.

Yeah. I mean, this is again, to me, what is so concerning is you've got a, now a play between Facebook and the governance board, the U S government, and now a U S government content moderation board. We have got to fight back. Everyone understands we have to fight back because I want you to understand she, she went through this interview in 2020 when this was after she said, I never want to see our executive branch have this sort of power, which is now leading up by using an example of what's gone on in Poland, take a listen to bite 24. In the more democratic countries, I'm thinking in particular of Poland, Poland has established this consultative process with its ministry of digitalization and Facebook. Because like the Trump administration, and I wouldn't be surprised if the law and justice law and justice party got this idea from the Trump administration. They, they believe that there's anti-conservative bias on Facebook, even though there have been multiple studies that prove otherwise. And they have this consultative process where they send someone from the ministry of digitalization to discuss with Facebook's officers in Warsaw, all of the instances of unfair content moderation. And some of them are being overturned through that political pressure. They have a tip line that people can kind of report when they think their content has been unjustly overturned and the Trump administration has a similar thing. So it's providing a lot of fodder for anti-democratic online governance. And it's, it's very, very scary.

And I think this is really where Congress needs to step in. Think about she's now heading up the org, everything she just said that she dislikes and distrust and thinks is dangerous and violates the principles of a constitutional Republican democracy. She's now heading up to do. Yes.

Everything. She just laid out exactly why you shouldn't do this. And now she's doing it. She's doing it from the executive branch, the most, again, the idea that we are going to have a national content moderator board. Which is what it is.

This is what this is. And so what they're going to do, she's already worked with Facebook. They paid for it to get educated. They paid for it to become this disinformation expert, whatever that means.

So she has now gotten this position. Then Facebook, who is looking for more content moderation. If they can, they'll take it from the government. If that helps them with their regulatory issues, they'll implement what the government wants because they don't mind silencing, as she said, predominantly right-leaning speech.

She's acknowledged that. She said, it's going to be right-leaning speech. Guess who doesn't care about silencing right-leaning speech?

Facebook. They're going to be totally on board with this. You're going to see this interplay between the private sector and of course the US government. So Chris on Rumble said, wouldn't this be discriminatory against speech?

That's precisely what we're saying. It's viewpoint discrimination. Patricia on Facebook says, so how can this board be dismantled?

Can a case be brought in court since it appears to violate the free speech in the constitution? We are working on that this afternoon. And there's two ways it can be dismantled. Maybe through the courts or maybe just political pressure saying, this was a huge mistake. We should not have done it. Yes, we got the FOIA. We're going to work on the political pressure. And we're going to, we're going to figure out if there's any other legal action we can take right now.

So we are working on all three fronts at the American Center for Law and Justice. And we have been since the moment this was announced. That's why our FOIA was already in on Friday. It didn't, we didn't take till today.

It was in on Friday to make sure, again, we're getting as much information as we can about this governance board. I mean, it is again, to me. Shocking. This is, this is the top attack on free speech that we've seen in our country in a very, very long time, because it's not just coming from corporate America. This is the US government taking action.

This is the IRS targeting the conservatives now coming from the Department of Homeland Security targeting free speech. It's this, and that was, by the way, that was 10 years ago, 12 years ago that we started that litigation. We won, took us five years to litigate it and win. It's going to be a long fight here, folks. But if we don't fight, then you're just conceding to the government control of your thoughts and speech. And you can't allow that to happen. And again, I go back to this idea that Mayorkas comes out, the director of Homeland Security and says, oh, we need this to go after the drug cartels. That is such a poor excuse. You have the tools to go after the drug cartels. You don't need a governance board on misinformation.

It's amazing. That's the best they could come up with. That's the only thing they could come up with. Is drug cartels, and of course, no, well, they had to throw in Russia. Yeah, of course. Because Russia is blamed for everything.

So if you don't like the content moderation governance committee, blame Russia for that. Let me encourage you to do this. So follow us on our social media applications, whether it is Rumble, which is our preferred site, or YouTube, or Facebook. And also, we are now on Truth Social at Jay Sekulow, at Jordan Sekulow, at Logan Sekulow, at ACLJ. You should sign up for those as well to stay engaged in all of our work. And of course, now more active again on Twitter. Now that change is taking place there, and the same handles for that. We'll talk to you tomorrow.