BREAKING Senate Shakeup: Prominent Democrat Defects from Party

Breaking news today on Sekulow, a Senate shakeup as a prominent Democrat defects from the party. Keeping you informed and engaged, now more than ever, this is Sekulow.

This is going to disappoint a lot of Democrats and they're also going to feel like they don't understand why would you do this at a time when the Democratic Party is having a good week. I think folks at home in Arizona have known me for a very long time and they know who I am. I've always been someone who is focused on getting results, getting things done, and I've never fit neatly into any party box. I've never really tried. I don't want to.

And I think that's reflective of how most Arizonans live. We want to hear from you. Share and post your comments or call 1-800-684-3110. I intend to maintain my position on my committees and keep doing the work that I've been doing for Arizona.

So I don't think that things will change in terms of how I operate or the work that I do in the United States Senate. And now your host, Jordan Sekulow. We're taking your call to 1-800-684-3110. Two really breaking issues. We're going to discuss Kyrsten Sinema, of course, this move in the U.S. Senate, and then the Twitter files part two that have been released and how the shadow banning was going on, the de-throttling going on at Twitter, and how Elon Musk is trying to correct it as well, which I retweeted last night.

We'll go through all of that a little bit later in the broadcast. I want to start with Kyrsten Sinema because at a time when the Democrats were about to take the Senate 5149, she decides to leave her party. Now, there's a couple reasons behind this. She has an election coming up in two years. She was going to be challenged from the left.

And we've seen this a couple times. We saw it with Joe Lieberman. We've seen it with Angus King in Maine when he left the Republican Party, and he might have been challenged from the right. So we've seen people, and Bernie Sanders, of course, is an independent, who, again, run as an independent in states where they already are well-known, like she is in Arizona, that has a pretty independent kind of politics anyways, maverick kind of politics in that John McCain kind of old-school style. And so she had some personal reasons to do this because it takes her out of being challenged by the Democrat Party. She'll run as an independent, again, and she's got her whole machine in place but won't have to go through a nasty Democrat primary. Now, the difference here is the first thing I asked when I saw this news this morning, and my brother texted me and I said, is she still caucusing with the Democrats? And the answer is she plans to keep her committee seats. She's no longer going to attend Democrat caucus meetings, which Bernie Sanders and Angus King, the other two independents, do.

They effectively are Democrats for purposes of Senate math. She doesn't even know if her desk is going to stay on the same side as the Democrats in the U.S. Senate. Now, the one part of this is, as of right now, this still does not change the balance of power.

So I think she probably was only going to make this move if Warnock beat Walker, which he did, and thus that she could make the move to independent without giving power over to either the 50-50 Senate or Republican Senate. But it does certainly, again, it puts a wedge in, as we played from Jake Tapper, his question to Kristin Sinema. It puts a wedge in her hole in the entire Democrat talking point of, you know, we're doing so great. We're the ones winning because the Republican House is about to come in as well, and now you've got this new kind of actor in the Senate. It also raises back the profile inside the Democrat Party of Joe Banch. So it's an interesting dynamic because, you know, and of course the news is going ballistic because this kind of upsets the apple cart.

We don't know exactly where this is going to fall in. But one other thing that is clear and I think that we've got to recognize here is at the end of this process, when she decides she could caucus with the Republicans if she wanted to or not caucus with anyone, the question will be will she keep her committee seats, and that's going to be the great challenge. But you think it's because she's got competition coming.

Well, that was definitely part of it. I mean, she was going to have a challenge from the left in Arizona. It didn't mean she could win the primary, but I think as someone, you could really only do this if you've been established.

If you're an Angus King from Maine, if you're Bernie Sanders from Vermont, if you were Joe Lieberman from Connecticut, he did this as well when he was challenged from the left. So I think she said I'm going to vote the same way, which is still pretty liberal, but a little bit better on issues like border security and issues like that, that she just felt she was never really a Democrat in the first place. And so she's taking herself out of that structure. She's got questions about it. 1-800-684-3110. She says she plans on keeping her committee seats.

They don't have to give them to her. So that's going to be an interesting power struggle as well. We'll be right back. Welcome back to Secchia.

We're taking your phone calls at 1-800-684-3110. We're going to get into the Twitter files in just a bit. But we want to start with the breaking news about Kyrsten Sinema. What it's not is a balance of power shakeup in who controls the U.S. Senate. That will still be the media.

It's a loss for differences. Anytime someone who is in your party after election decides to leave your party and say, I don't care about your apparatus, I don't need the DNC, I don't need your fundraising support, I don't need your grassroots support, probably you were going to run a candidate against me, which was likely the case in 2024. So I'm stepping back.

I have my own machine. It's going to be the Kyrsten Sinema machine as an independent in a state where that can actually work. In Arizona it's proven to work in places like that. And so she had problems with the Arizona Democrat Party being way too liberal as well. So she's saying it's not – I don't think this is a Tulsi Gabbard move. It's not like she's becoming a Republican. And really the only way she could really hurt the Democrats, and even this would not take their power away, would be if she said, I'm going to caucus with the Republicans. And the thing about Joe Manchin, whose power diminished when they got 51-49, does this change that dynamic? You think it might? It could because he's still part of the apparatus, so he can ask in those caucus meetings to get his vote.

He can say, you know, you've got to do more. But they didn't do what he asked last time. Well, they put it in the legislation. It got voted out by liberals in the Democrat Party and Republicans who sent a clear message to Joe Manchin, stop trusting Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi to put in pipeline legislation in anything when their entire party is about ending fossil fuel in America.

So, I mean, I think that was a huge loss for him. And it really showed – he talks about all that power he has, how little power he really did have at the end of the day as one U.S. senator who could not deliver for a state. And that was his whole reason why he justified supporting the Inflation Reduction Act. Right.

Who's going to get that? Which was the one thing that turned people against him in West Virginia. And his selling point was, I'm going to get you this pipeline, all these jobs, no pipelines going to West Virginia. What's also interesting in all this is, of course, the Republicans are going to take over the House of Representatives on January 3rd by, you know, it looks like somewhere between three to five seats. So they'll pick a majority leader.

It looks like it was Kevin McCarthy. And they will move forward. So that is the block and tackle of legislation initiatives.

We did lose – the Republicans did lose the Senate even 50-50 on committees. That's a problem. The interesting dynamic is, does this – will this change that? And that's going to be totally up to Kristen Sinema.

Yeah. I mean, again, even if she left and went to the Republican Party, they would have a majority. So, again, it would be that's 50-50. I don't think she's making that move. So Chuck Schumer is still going to be majority leader. They're going to still have control over the committees as of right now. Unless she decides to make a decision to caucus with Republicans, there's nothing that appears like that is the case in her statement. She actually says the opposite about both parties, that neither party – she doesn't fit into either party's structure. I would say that the Republican Party is a much bigger-tit party right now, that the Democrat Party has gotten so liberal.

You've got to meet all their standards. But, end of the day, what it does show is, even after success, they've got major cracks going on within their party as well. I think both parties. At least on YouTube asks, is there a chance Joe Manchin leaves the Democratic Party? Probably not. I think it's like we need to stop – you know, if it ever happened, find it happened, wonderful.

Stop thinking that it will. I think he just plays people for that. He's a big, spinning Democrat. That's what he always supports. He loves spitting big – he loves spitting your tax dollars. He supported the increase in the IRS agents.

He loves – Which is something I like to see the Republicans, when they get in control of the House, stop that. Stop the appropriation process. Yeah, stop the appropriation process, put more agents on the border, less IRS agents being hired. 87,000 IRS agents is ridiculous. Yeah, and 80 billion – Like that's going to correct their problems?

No, it's not. Yeah, they want to go after people who make under $200,000 a year. They're trying to go after what they call gig jobs. It's all the stuff we were talking about with Venmo and all of that, with the $600 having to be reported through a – yeah, 1099.

They're going to sit down. But those kind of things I think can change. I think we can see some changes in that front, and that's a good thing. Well, Cinnabon was one of those people who said, this is wrong.

We should put it back to at minimum maybe like 5,000, but why don't we just keep it at the 20,000 and 200 transactions? You know, it's interesting. We're getting a lot of comments coming in on Rumble and also on Facebook and YouTube. Joey on Rumble writes, Joe Manchin is for Joe Manchin and not for West Virginia. He voted for several bills with Green New Deal garbage in it.

That was his words, garbage, not mine. Yeah, I think that Joe Manchin really gave up on caring about a lot of that when he did vote for the Inflation Reduction Act. What he was going to try to pivot to later on was, remember you guys didn't like that I voted for this. Now look what I brought back in return was this big pipeline with all these jobs.

That's not coming back anymore. So he's supposedly very angry. So you got angry Joe Manchin and Kristin Cinnabon leaving. And what I think it does show is, that is like Tulsi, there is a very narrow person politically to match up with the Democrat Party. And you have to like, especially when you're a US Senator, I think maybe in the House it might be a little different, but at the Senate level when you're like one of 100, you have to match up with all of their, the state party and the national party, which is very far left. And if you don't match up with that, they want you out.

What used to be the far left of their party, they talk a lot about the far right running the Republican Party, the far left is running the Democrat Party too. I mean that's clear with this move from Kristin Cinnabon. The question again, I want people to understand this is, as we look at the issues that we're dealing with, congressionally, I'm talking about our Government Affairs Office.

So the way the ACLJ is structured, we've got our lawyers, we've got a Government Affairs Office, we've got a Government Accountability Project, of course we've got the ACLJ Action. But you look into this legislatively, this presents a possible opportunity in the Senate to move some more blocking and tackle. That's right, she's been opposed to getting rid of the filibuster, and now she's not going to have the party pressure. Also, for groups like ACLJ, and we're not a partisan but we're seen as a conservative group, her staff would usually be very careful about engaging because they're part of the Democrat Party.

This opens us up to be able to even go to Kristin Cinnabon. Yeah, but you're not part of this party or that party, so if there's a specific issue which we know we can work with her on, whether it's border security or the filibuster issue, I think this opens up her staff to be able to communicate with us and not feel like they are going to get in trouble for even taking a phone call from the ACLJ. Which is the case on most Democrats. By the way, back when we started we had Democrats that we represented before the Supreme Court and amicus briefs.

That's not the world we live in anyways in our lives, and how divided people are with partisan politics, so of course that translates to Washington DC. She's also won all this 1-800-684-3110. The one thing that's interesting is she waited until after the midterm election, and she waited until after the Herschel Walker-Wernock race. Right, I think she did not want to throw power to the Republican Party. So she was not trying to make Mitch McConnell majority leader, because if she would have announced this before Herschel's race, I think that would have added a whole new enthusiasm to try and get Walker across the line.

Like a different kind of money being spent, because you said maybe we have this shot of actually taking back the Senate as well. So she didn't do that, that was not the move. I think the move was Herschel Walker lost, I can leave the Democrat Party, but I'm not really hurting them.

And it also puts her as a real power player. Yeah she's still right in the middle, she's that vote that's key for them and key for Republicans to help block things. Which she has been a vocal opponent of getting rid of the filibuster, which is really, right now is a little bit of a moot point, because the nominees can already go through, and the legislation is not going to go through because the House is not going to pass. Is it fair to say, do you think, that Joe Biden is lame duck at this point?

Yes, unless he really, I think these kind of moves show that too. This happened to Republicans with Angus King, remember he pulled this on Republicans a much nastier way. But yes, we're not going to see a lot of groundbreaking legislation on either right or left moving through Congress the next two years. And Republicans are going to block any kind of new spending, any kind of major new liberal plans, it's not going to go through. But, again we know with the nominees, we know with the committee power, they still can get through whoever they want with their Supreme Court vacancy.

They have to just get to 51, that's the same for the lower courts as well, same for cabinet officials. But when it comes to legislation itself, the filibuster is still in place, with that plus the Republican House, there shouldn't be any legislation moving that's not truly a compromise that Republicans agree with. All right, so let me tell you what we've got going on. We are filing, hopefully today, if not, it'll be Monday morning, our reply brief in the Supreme Court case involving religious liberty. We had an argument in the Sixth Circuit, two of them, one on Tuesday, one on Thursday. Look at all of these, and you say this, that it's important to support the work of the ACLJ. Because we're talking now about the Legislative and Government Affairs Office. You make a big difference here, ACLJ.org. Yeah, support the work of the ACLJ. You can double the impact of your donation at ACLJ.org. We have our matching challenge right now through the month of December.

It's an easy process to understand. We have a group of donors that will match each donation that comes through. So if you donate 50 bucks at ACLJ.org right now, we have a donor that's going to match that $50 donation.

Very simple, so it's like $100 for the ACLJ. Be a part of that. It's why we have the resources that we're doing. We can deploy those resources. ACLJ.org, donate today. We'll be right back.

Welcome back to Sech Hill. We are taking your calls on this too, the Twitter part two of the files. Now we're learning shadow banning reel, dethroddling reel, access to your own followers reel.

Take your inability to even reach people who want to follow you, to make sure that you don't trend, to make sure your statements don't trend. It was all real. It was not done through AI. It was done specifically by individuals at Twitter, a team at Twitter. We knew that, again, it was Jim Baker who was at the FBI's General Counsel who moved to Twitter who was blocking this release as of last week. He's now been moved out of Twitter by Elon Musk as the new term moved out. He was unconvincing in his response, according to Elon, of why he should stick around.

Yes, he's no good. And so he was trying to keep this moving. So we have this sound. I want to play it for you because this was a stelter going to Jack Dorsey who created Twitter, was their CEO for a long time. And he said outright, just ask him this question, take a listen. The President called you out for shadow banning. What is the truth around that idea? So I think a lot of the statements behind the statement, the question behind the question is, look, shadow banning is a very widely defined term. There's not one single definition. So the definition that we found that seems to resonate with most people is, you know, not amplifying particular messages or if someone puts out a tweet hiding that tweet from everyone without that person who tweeted it knowing about it. So but the real question behind the question is, are we doing something according to political ideology or viewpoints?

And we are not. I think for a lot of our listeners, what is shadow banning? I mean, it's what he kind of said is what we've kind of said, which is you don't know necessarily that your message is not getting out there. You put it out on Twitter and it just. Yeah, it's just not getting served essentially. And he could be really popular, but it's only going to get to a handful. That's why you see some accounts that millions of followers, but then, you know, that tweet only had one interaction or something happened.

You had to go seek it out to find it. They weren't just saying people who are getting banned are getting in their accounts suspended. And what happened here is he's saying, no, we don't do that. And what we've learned in the Twitter files that came out part two came out yesterday from Barry Weiss is absolutely they were doing that.

And they were doing that, as you said, not even in a way that was a driven. They did it in the way you would think of if you were just coming up with a really basic conspiratorial way of looking at it, which I honestly thought wasn't how these kind of big tech organizations run, which is literally just people creating lists of people not to be served. Dan Bongino was on a search blacklist, so if you search for him, you wouldn't find his account.

Things like that. He still had an account. Yeah, they were submitting his account.

But you couldn't find it if you were someone new. Are we on any of these lists? We've been banned from ads. So in 2017, we had run an advertising campaign. This is kind of the end of Twitter. So a lot of this is because we're all reusing Twitter, because a lot of you have come back to Twitter. We've gone back to utilize it. Well, we got very basic with it.

We basically posted the live link to the show and our blogs, but no commentary, no back and forth. It wasn't worth it. Because it became a hellhole. It really did. It became where a lot of hate would come from, would only be from Twitter, and we weren't getting the interactions like we once were. Right.

You weren't getting your people's support for it, so you weren't reaching an audience that mattered except for a bunch of people that didn't like you. So then we had our guys, though. Just in the last few weeks. Just last few weeks. It wasn't even here in 2017.

Right. Our social media team. And I said, hey, I've noticed, obviously people are getting back on Twitter. When you start looking at ad campaigns to run on Twitter, we wouldn't mind spending some more of our ad dollars there. We spend it on other social media platforms. We might as well share it on one of the few that's preaching free speech right now. And we went to go log in to set up ads and realized that your account, as well as your account, both of you, Jay and Jordan, both have no ability currently to run ads based on something we don't know what it was back six years ago.

And that is- And that's where the shadow banning is. We have no idea what it was. We don't know what it was. Yeah, we have no information of what happened in that time period.

No need for notice or anything like that. No, and look, we know what we post. We are pretty, like, middle of the road in terms of the way we use social media.

We are not posting things that are extremist points of view. So something happened there, but still, six, seven years later, we can't even run- we can't even spend money with Twitter, even if we wanted to. And that's something hopefully we'll get rectified in the near future. Well, Elon Musk tweeted out that they're working on a software update- Yeah, this is pretty interesting. To show you your true account status.

What does that also mean? Are you on any of these lists? Yeah. Have you been de-throttled? So are you on a list that doesn't get your message out? Are you not on a search list?

Are you on the ban from ads list? And then this supposedly will allow you to figure out the reason why and how to appeal. Yeah, and Facebook has some of this in their backend already where you can see, well, this got flagged for this.

If you got hit with a disinformation, misinformation, and you kind of can know a few reasons why this stuff might happen. However, it's still never clear, and you never know if you're being de-throttled. It actually says on there, you know, we may actually serve it to less people.

There's at least a little more honesty in the fact that they may be serving it to less. Twitter doesn't really have that. So right now you're going to be able to go, kind of like your Uber score, I have a feeling, and go see, you know, what you've been ranked. And that will be pretty fascinating to see the inside workings of Twitter like this. And that's what this really is. It's showing, and you got to give it to Elon for that, is to show the inner workings of how a lot of these big social media empires work. Yeah. I mean, this is, again, this is huge. I want to take calls too from folks because everybody who was told you're a conspiracy theorist.

Everybody that was told that they were conspiracy theorists. It was right. Yeah. I mean, even to, like you said, almost comedically, because I really just did not expect it to be this simplified, that this was Charlie Kirk said something wrong.

We put him on a graphic. There's a list. It has, you know, different things that they can't do, whether it is, yeah, we're looking at right now, recent abuse strikes, notification.

It has do not amplify and those kind of things put on there. And they even had accounts that they knew maybe in that sort of gray area of violation, but they knew would cause them some, some chaos if they banned them saying, do not ban this account without talking to a supervisor. So even know that there were those accounts.

So if it was a Dan Bongino, who they were definitely shadow banning, or it was a Charlie Kirk, instead of banning them, which maybe someone who is looking at the monitoring of tweets said we should ban them. They put a little thing on there saying, don't do it because we know this will be, bring them down. It was called the strategic response team dash global escalation team. SRT get 200 cases a day, a day, a day that this, these were individuals, not that this is not AI driven. So it was only they put in keywords like COVID vaccine. This was, there's individuals to say, what do we do to this account?

And again, it was a little different. That's why he answered that question. I think that way he defined shadow banning for his purposes there.

They had, they were doing that, but they were also doing the other part. So, so you might get your account suspended. You might get your account permanently thrown out. You might get just a message under your tweet. You might get the throttle. So your message is not, you might be taken off the search ability.

You might have your ability to advertise taken away. All these were all different steps, but what we're seeing is that it wasn't a computer doing this. All of these companies always love to blame the computer and say, oh, it's an AI error. And maybe we get this fixed, but then there's no one to contact anymore because they've all had to fire so much staff like Facebook and Twitter. So Elon Musk says it's going to be a computer driven program to rectify this.

He's not saying they can do it overnight. I like to see from our, I hear from our audience, if you're back on Twitter or if you're following Twitter or using Twitter or going to it first as a source, I like to hear from you. Or if you've decided you're still not going to, 1-800-684-3110, a whole half hour coming up. Don't forget, support the work of the ACLJ. We're in a matching challenge campaign. December is the biggest month of the year for us. Any amount you donate, we get a matching gift for.

So ACLJ.org, that's ACLJ.org. And your gift is doubled. Someone is going to match it. So if you donated $50, we're getting another $50. So we get $100 and it only costs you $50, which we appreciate.

That's how it works in the matching challenge campaign. But again, if you want to talk to us, we've got a lot more to talk about in the next half hour. But I want to talk about this Twitter a little bit more.

1-800-684-3110, your experience on it. Back with more in a moment. Keeping you informed and engaged. Now more than ever, this is Sekulow. And now your host, Jordan Sekulow.

All right, welcome back to Sekulow. We are talking about the Twitter release part two. So as we talk about this, there was the first release that went through Matt Taibbi. Tell people about that one.

Yeah, that first one came out maybe about a week ago, maybe less than a week ago. Over the weekend, Matt Taibbi dropped the first Twitter files, which was really about suppression of news information. Suppression of something like the Hunter Biden situation. So that came out. That was more about the story that they would suppress, not the accounts.

Then it went over, and this is kind of going to be ping-ponging. So now it went over to Barry Weiss, who then put out Twitter files part two, which is about the blacklisting. That's what they were creating. They were creating blacklist. They were creating shadow ban accounts. And it really goes deep dive into whether it is the comedic ones, like the libs of TikTok, or whether it's Charlie Kirk, or whether it's Dan Bongino.

And going through, and again, probably likely us due to some things we've discovered recently of why things got banned and really even how it all worked. It's really fascinating. I encourage everyone to go read it. And it's pages and pages, so it's not something we can just read on the air. But that's great. And then, we know part three is coming back to Matt Taibbi, who will now take part three, and we don't know what that will be on necessarily. But we'll see.

But we were, like I said, we were banned because of that. We've got good calls coming. Let's go ahead and take them. 1-800-684-3110, what do you think? Yeah, Norm in Washington, D.C., on Line 1. Hey, Norm.

Yeah, hey, thanks for taking my call. I was just curious, you know, I know that we can't do Twitter or, you know, any of the other social medias directly. But now that we know who the, you know, the culprits are, can they be held liable and can, you know, organizations sue people like, you know, Jim Baker? Tough because of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. They have broad immunity.

They can't be hauled before Congress. Yes. But I think what happened, though, was Elon Musk was saying, I'm trying to fix all this, so you could, you know, time me up by going to congressional hearings, but I've got to try to get this fixed.

And I think he's trying to get it fixed. Well, Elon Musk is not, no, no, no, not Elon Musk. It's, you pull Baker.

The older ones. Yeah, but you're not, Baker was an employee of Twitter. So we, you, there's no private cause of action. No, I do wonder, what about all the advertising money that maybe a Dan Bongino was spending in the F.A.D. through all this account? There could be action there.

Could be. Breach of contract. Yeah, financial.

You know, but you're right. If they were taking your money, if they were taking your money for ads, which they wouldn't take ours, but then not serving your tweets. Yes, I think they'd have exposure. I think then that Section 230 has nothing to do with that. Correct.

That's not about, Section 230 is about content, and it does let them kind of get away with what, and that was really about because, so they're not liable for criminal content that gets posted quickly, and they're always trying to get rid of that. But this also shows you where they spend their time. Instead of going after child pornography. Right.

And drugs. They don't want to talk about abortion. And, you know, maybe what the Ayatollah is saying about just killing all of the Israelis. It was about going, it's very American specific, that's an American based company, very U.S. specific about conservative political actors.

Sure. Not elected officials, other than Trump, but a lot of conservative political grassroots actors. Yeah, and we will, yeah, exactly, people, podcasters, radio show hosts, we'll see what all comes out. Maybe there is more on both sides, but for as of now, it's pretty clear that the, it was swinging very far one way. That it was one side really being targeted for all of this.

Yeah. And then you see this sound from people, and I want to play this going into the break, for people like Eric Swalwell, mocking conservatives about this. Call us conspiracy theorists. This is just in 2022, by the way.

This is this year, back in May. Take a listen. Republicans have this, you know, warped perception that Google and Facebook and others are shadow banning them. When you look at like the best performing pages on Facebook, and it's all conservative voices, but they, again, in their warped minds, they think that they're being affected by big tech. That's their interest here. First of all, we've noticed that that's not the case anymore on Facebook.

Yeah, you're not getting near as much. Lately, those are not the top performing posts. And second, it's real.

And there was no conspiracy here. They might have top 10 performing all the time. Yeah. And it would still happen from now and then. Yes.

And I think a large group of people are still on Facebook are that are engaged. Those things are conservative. So that's older.

Older. Yeah. So, again, folks, we'll take your calls. 1-800-684-3110.

That's 1-800-684-3110. Are you back on Twitter? Do you feel like, again, are you getting the messages from the people you follow? And will this make a difference? We can decide, hey, now maybe I'll give this platform another shot.

1-800-684-3110 to be on the show. We'll be right back on Secular. They also did it on Twitter, conservative parody accounts, whether it was Babylon Bee or also liberals of TikTok, which was just an account that would show crazy liberal stuff on TikTok and put it on Twitter because they knew that conservatives weren't going to see that information and likely weren't using TikTok. And that got banned. And that was, again, using public content that people post to say, look how crazy this stuff is, what liberals actually talk like when they're talking to each other and don't think you're watching.

And that got banned. And so it's this idea that parody, comedy, even just kind of news like exposing what people are putting online, which is all public, that was being intentionally banned, but only if it was coming from a conservative voice. What is clear from all this reporting, Logan, is that the only people targeted were conservative. It feels that way, unless they're keeping information from us, you know, the Twitter files. Which would make them look very bad if they did that. Yeah, I don't think so.

And neither Matt nor Barry are like. Right wingers. No, these are more, honestly, more traditional liberals, if you will, free speech liberals. But yeah, from what it looks like, it was very specific who they were going after.

And it was definitely more conservative leaning people. Hey, Elton John just announced three hours ago, by the way, he is leaving the platform. He has left Twitter and he put because of misinformation that is now allowed to flourish unchecked. Elon responded with, what is this misinformation that he is even referring to? So right.

Put them in their place a little bit. One of our listeners on rumble noted that Twitter is, was not a place for Elton John. It was a place for news, political discussion, community discussion, issue discussion, not I have a concert coming up tomorrow. Yeah. I mean, he has a million followers plus, but if you look really most of it, it's a hundred likes here, a hundred likes.

I think a lot of people were noticing that too. Is this really where we should be even spending our resources? And look, that's what we had with Twitter. When we, when Twitter was going through all this, we decided, should we even putting, putting our team. So we didn't even know that we were banned from running ads because we didn't want to run ads. Right. Exactly.

But it's interesting. It's been said that they have noticed that in the last weeks, people they were following, they are starting to get their information and the number of followers those people had has gone up, which I just checked on my account and it went up about 30,000 since I last checked. A lot of people reactivated also who were inactive as well as more people joined the platform. Well, what's happened is that they got rid of a lot of bots. So some of those accounts that weren't real lost a lot. And if you were purging the bot. So if you see a notice will drop because look, there are a lot of people, even the conservative world that started going, Hey, Elon, I lost 10,000 followers.

What happened here? I've actually gained. Yeah. Which I would say maybe even with bots being cleared out, more people are reacting. I've just maintained my same few thousand people to follow me are like, that's my people. Then follow at Logan secular on Twitter.

It's not as fun, but you can enjoy it a second. Let's go to the phones. Marty in Florida online five.

Hey Marty. Thank you for taking my call on, I appreciate all your hard work. I have, um, I was just sharing with the person who answered the phone earlier that I've had several negative experiences with Facebook. Um, you know, in different ways, they make it, make it where I'm unable to see or hear or follow on your daily show Monday through Friday. Um, and I had a different experience this morning.

A lot of times I'll go to Facebook first because it's just easier to get to on my phone. Not on the way, not out to arrange, um, I was able to see your live broadcast earlier this morning. Uh, but the audio part of it was like three or four different live shows going on at the same time. So the words were all so jumbled, I couldn't follow anything at all. So of course I switched over to rumble, but, um, I just wanted to share that it's own topic. It's not about Twitter, but just another example of, of our, you know, the message getting out and Facebook is worse. We've had a lot of issues with Facebook right now.

Nobody's watching on Facebook basically nobody, but not a lot of people, 600 people mean not as much, but that would be 10,000 then it was 1500 there's 2000 which means notifications are changing the way people are doing and, and just the way people, some people moved, they've moved. Like she said, she moved to rumble. Once you do that, you don't really go back. Yeah. Well, rumble's been great. I'll just say it. They've been great. Yeah.

I mean, it's been a much smoother video platform. We never have issues with, um, we're, we don't have to worry about what we're going to talk about that day. Yeah. The title is not the concern. What word will not get served or get served, which is what we do. We sit around trying to decide what we're going to title these shows. We have to go, what word will Facebook decide to feature? What word will YouTube decide to not just feature, what will they decide to not feature? That's more it. It's not about what we can use to get people to hook, to watch. It's what can, what words can we not use knowing that it will get banned or be blocked or it'll be shadow banned or it'll be suppressed.

Yeah. And we know that we have a list of those words. I mean, for real, we have a list of those words, not to use it. And sometimes when we do use them, we see, Oh yeah, we're still right. That those don't get served is it's definitely on topics that you care about.

Yeah, no, absolutely. Uh, we go back to phones 1-800-684-3110 that's 1-800-684-3110 let's go to Kathy in Virginia online three. Hi Kathy. Hi.

I have a question. I'm a grandma and I read, I read news articles. I watch different news outlets on TV.

I don't know anything about Twitter. How did it start? Why did it start? Who started it?

Why is it such a big deal? And what's the history of this? A lot of questions there at Twitter's in 2006. Yeah. Maybe even a little bit before then it's been around 15 years or so, a little bit more than that. It's been a short, short message platform to break news, have discussions. It was the very beginning of the social media boom.

Yeah, it was the beginning. So you, you'd set up an account, you could follow people who are well known. You can interact with them.

You had a limit test. So you could not just post these that you could post manifestos. Uh, then they had video platform abilities.

Uh, you could post links to that. Uh, it was, it became a very good source for breaking news still is one of the fastest places out. It beats the notifications, uh, to your phone. The news actually breaks there first. So that's that.

It was us. Jack Dorsey was the founder of Twitter and it was at some point they were thought about not even ever going corporate and being some multi-billion dollar company, but being like an open source platform. It's huge internationally. It's big for protest movements. It's big in countries that try to silence speech. What happened was Donald Trump took it to another level.

For everything. Did he have like 80 million followers? It was a huge number.

Right? It wasn't the number one. Number one is like a Kardashian. No, there's some that are like in the billion ish range. Ronaldo is a soccer player because he's international.

Yeah. Trump is currently at 87. I think Ronaldo has like, I can tell you, a billion. 160 million.

160 million. Yeah. I'm not sure.

The top. Yeah. So anyways, athletes use it. People use it. Corporations use it to get it.

You know, it's never quite figured out how to make money. Nope. Nope.

Nope. So it's worth a lot because of users. Amount of users. But it, you know, they're advertised, never been about right. And I'm not telling you that it's for everybody. It's not for everybody. I'd say if you're very into the news. If you're very into like breaking news, like you don't want to wait to see it on TV.

It's great for that. So first it's like Supreme Court cases coming out. And the info on that. It gets there.

In seconds. Before the news. And you get to read it. So it's not going to be misreported like in the news like where somebody may come out of the news. And they're trying to describe to you the Supreme Court opinion.

And there it's written down, typed out, usually with a hyperlink, you go right to an opinion. Politics trending off. Barack Obama actually is the most followers of anyone. Internationally? Internationally total.

With 133.5 million. Maybe it's not on Twitter. Yeah, that is on Twitter. That's what I'm talking about. And then- Facebook. I mean Instagram. Yeah. And then Elon is 120 million. So we're not that far behind one of the biggest ones.

You know, it's interesting. It was on March 21st, 2006, San Francisco, California. And it was, I remember when we first went on it, you always would have one friend.

It would be Jack Dorsey, the guy who founded it. Right? When that happened. That was a long time ago. You're thinking of something else. You're thinking of MySpace, I think. MySpace? Yeah.

I don't even remember. Was that guy named Jack too? That guy's name was, what was the guy's name on MySpace?

Nah, I forget MySpace. Tom. Tom. Tom on MySpace. Yeah.

There you go. That's what you're talking about. There's a Facebook of that too. Which Facebook did you have to be friends with?

Was it their friend? Zuckerberg? Yeah. Oh, it's Cristiano Ronaldo has over five million, 500 million on Instagram. Instagram, bigger platform like that, younger, much younger platform. Yeah, this is, Twitter's an interesting platform. It's a news junkie platform.

You started using it again. Even like sports news, any kind of news, things you need in an instant. Yes.

Things you want to, so yeah, if you're like really into sports, you can follow one of your favorite athletes. Yeah, and then live coverage. But also live commentary from more than just what you'd get on TV. For sure. The insider, the people who are like just devoted to Georgia Bulldogs news and reporting on what's happening in the football program in Georgia, that is not going to even make like ESPN. Right. It's not a big enough story for that. It's like a niche audience.

But for fans, it's great. And so it's not as much advertising based like, I feel like Instagram gets me more on like what I want to buy. For sure. Products. That's not Twitter really either. There are some funny corporate advertising that's gone on with Twitter where they'll like go out, they'll go back and forth each like Arby's will go after like, get your wagyu beef at Arby's.

Yeah. They've been trying to figure out all of this of how to even get ads to kind of work on Twitter for years because it never really was a ad platform that made any sense. Where Instagram and Facebook, it's kind of become, which is all the same, that's meta. They've all figured it out. Twitter, I think, is still trying to figure that out. They're still trying to figure out how to make money with ads or with subscription services or whatever it is they're going to offer. Yeah.

You can continue to take your phone calls 1-800-684-3110. There's more coming. I mean, that's what's interesting too.

There's a part three. So we now know about issues being banned. We now know about individuals being banned. We know it's all lining up conservative.

So far there's no examples that have been released about liberal issues being banned or liberal individuals. Yeah, it's like a violent something. Oh, yeah. Crime. It was criminal or it's like real since it shouldn't be there. So there's a part three.

The question is, does it matter to you? Are you just done with this platform and done with the mess of it or are you interested in returning back? Welcome back to Second. We were paying your calls at 1-800-684-3110.

One topic we didn't get to, we got to start a podcast. These attacks on these electrical plants and substations too. Not like the main plant. Started out in North Carolina where there were four days and it is very local focused. So it's not like the whole state is without power. And they're trying to figure out what is the conservative effort behind this. People are using basically all it takes is like wire cutters and a couple of gunshots and they're taking out the entire power infrastructure for at least days for a community. And it's also happened now in Oregon and Washington State.

It's coast to coast now. So now the FBI is looking at it. You got to look at it. You have to look into the context of terrorism to start. I don't think you can ignore that that is a possibility because one of the things the terrorists said back Jordan when you were working for the Justice Department years ago during the right after 9-11. It was the issue we were worried about.

I was working on the Patriot Act. It was the whole issue of power grid disengagement. Yeah usually we think about power grid attacks as a form of cyber attack coming out of like Russia or North Korea or China. This is again wire cutters at a substation which does not have a ton of protection.

They have you know fencing. You drive by these all the time in your community and a gunshot to a specific part of the of the machinery there and that's it. So one it shows some inside knowledge into how to fire how to use a gun to take out one of these power plants. But two it again this happens in a widespread scale during winter you got real real issue people die. So look you know you always have to look at this that's why I say you got to look at this in the context of terrorism only because let me tell you what it does. If you're in that community and your power's out it's terrifying and the fact that somebody is able to do it as easy Jordan as you just discussed they know exactly what to hit. It's wire cutters and a gun and they knock out they can knock out the power grid for an entire community and think Logan what was it four or five days? Yeah I think they said it was until yesterday I think that all of it was restored.

I'm not sure exactly the details but we know that's been a big problem and clearly with supply chain shortages and things getting parts getting things to get fixed it's probably not easy and there's a lot of these sort of substations where they probably can't guard all of them you know actually physically possible. So it's pretty it's pretty interesting to see. We do have some other calls all right Jane's calling in Dallas Texas you're on the air. Hi dear how you doing? I think you're caught you said something like you know should are you done with Twitter or what's your opinion on that right something like that and my thoughts are no why you know Elon Musk went through a lot of trouble his life is probably on the line to to let us see what the truth is and I say we can't stop I'm not leaving Twitter I'm gonna I wasn't even that active on Twitter but now I will be more active because it won't be the bias so I say keep going. I think that's where a lot of people are I'll give another shot I'm not a hundred percent saying like like let's say if Elon Musk can actually get a handle of this behemoth he certainly put the resources there him it like Larry Ellis and a few other investors they put their money where their mouth is now but they're still having to root out the fact that Jim Baker ended up at Twitter from the FBI just for the election period just the only time he was really there was for the last election that's when he started Presidential election so he gets over he gets removed from the FBI and goes right to Twitter and starts censoring if anything bad about Joe Biden it's pretty crazy well that's where section 230 also doesn't give you immunity because you can't use your company to play politics no and that's very illegal and I think again I have to say you want to punish Elon Musk for it but these individuals like Jim Baker who are attorneys knew that you can't use your corporation to play partisan politics that's correct because you violate not only your law but you're violating federal election law right because it's an ink it could be deemed an in-kind contribution to a campaign of like an unbelievable amount to keep a story like the punch or bind laptop out but the key thing is we were able to determine Jim Baker's involvement at the FBI level and then of course because of our FOIA work and our office of government accountability and then he goes over to so we're able to draw the links because we have the email that's why he's the name or else you would have never known who this guy was yeah nobody knows who's the could you tell me the general counsel the FBI today no no and even the general counsel from Twitter who was let go immediately no one knew that name yeah these are board level he put in that thing that when he said that this is coming from a source named Jim they were finding all the stuff out and they said when it actually figured out who it was it was like it's like you got to be kidding it was just like they were so stunned because every conspiracy these these again played Swalwell saying it I mean it's like my god I wonder what's going on at Facebook it's gotta be even worse well it is but you'll never know and right they don't have somebody buying it to expose it but I think it's very similar I actually think that they have more people doing the same thing it's probably is similar I think a lot of these companies they operate they're the similar people yeah isn't the interesting thing that we thought the problem was that it was initially AI right I would always have assumed that it was they blamed on AI and you kind of assumed that there was some but you thought it was like trigger words you know that you couldn't say abortion pro-life and clearly there is some of that by the way yes but to find out there's actually the people you know on the ground boots on the ground going for Charlie Kirk to say don't delete his account because we don't want to upset him too much just don't share his tweets too far yeah don't let him trend yeah don't let other people who don't follow him get loud yeah it's pretty wild and again there is an issue because people have invested resources into these accounts section 230 is not about liability from investing and money being exchanged that's a different issue I think now again you don't need to say punishing Elon Musk who's trying to fix it so what he's said he's going to do is create a software program that will allow us to see how are you bad where are you which you're standing in Twitter and how you can feel it he's gonna actually have an appeal process inside of Twitter is what they're saying yeah which they have for it's just like a Facebook was there until a few days ago every time really yeah until Facebook even Facebook whenever they've hit us with something you have an appeal process and every time we've won every time every single time they said this is misinformation disinformation we've won yeah you know of course they don't go out and say by the way everyone we were wrong we were wrong it wasn't fake news but it is part of the process they do have these boards that set in place to do it and again usually we win those but you'll never know that unless we go out and say it just like you would never know we couldn't run an ad on Twitter and we didn't even know until we went to go try to run an ad on Twitter I think that what it's going to show with the Elon Musk move here and then with Republicans in the House of Representatives you're going to start learning a lot more because you're right they could bring up Jim Baker to the House Judiciary Committee or oversight and say what were you doing there and the fact again we made we pointed this out a week ago because we had the information we had the information because your support to the ACLJ and we had the information because our lawyers went to court involving the FBI and we had an email I don't know if we have it where we could put it up there it's the one that has it's it's from James Comey to Jim Baker and also to Andrew McCabe actually and we're trying to figure everybody when we first got this everybody's trying to figure out who's who and I said you know part of what you have to do here is look at who the emails are from and to and we learn a lot just from seeing who's in communication with who and we certainly find that out but we didn't find that out without your help because without your help we couldn't do it yeah that's right so support the work of ACLJ this final bit of the broadcast today if you go to ACLJ.org right now you'll see a matching challenge on our homepage and just to explain it again it's very simple we have a group of donors this month of December final month of the year say we will match the donations that come through to ACLJ.org so if you make a $30 donation to ACLJ.org today we have a donor that will match that $30 so it triggers a match and so you've doubled the impact your donations like $60 for us the ACLJ so we encourage you to support our work that way at ACLJ.ormer yes Schumer has announced that she is keeping her committee assignments so she's staying with the Democrats okay yes she is or can't that's what she wants she said she wants them and now they said you can have okay she's basically they want to keep her in the fold which makes sense she's really focusing with the Democrats even if she doesn't show up the bees they said she didn't show up to me before yeah but I this was again I think more of a move for her electoral politically at home she didn't she could have get beaten in a primary by a liberal alright we'll talk to you Monday on Secular.