Glitch Heard ‘Round the World: DeSantis’ Twitter Campaign Launch

Today on Sekulow, did Ron DeSantis break the internet?

Or did the internet break him? Today we discuss his campaign launch on Twitter and Fox News. We'll talk about that and more today on Sekulow. Alright folks, today we're going to launch the broadcast, well, launch is an interesting term to use, when Ron DeSantis tried to launch a very new way of launching a Presidential campaign that kind of crashed and burned on Twitter, trying to use a technology that existed on Twitter but certainly not for as many people as were interested in tuning in. And so we all were there, I think it was 5pm our time, central time, so pretty early, I was getting ready to go to a retirement reception for one of our friends, so I had my phone out while I was getting ready to go and kept trying to click through and I kept getting booted out and finally I just couldn't get through. So I had no idea what went on there, I said okay, I'll record Trey Gowdy in the interview and I'll figure out what happened there, but Logan, just to start there, it gave a lot of ammunition to the Trump team to do what they are best at. I mean Dan Scavino, I love Dan and I would want Dan on my team in any place in any time I was running for office or anything really, because immediately they put out the meme of the rocket, first of all they used the Ron DeSantis logo as the old Jeb logo and the rocket crashing, I don't know if we have it for people. Yeah we do, we can play it, certainly that was the immediate response, which by the way got probably the biggest laughs from my children of anything, because I watched it with my kids, because I was actually excited for them to see a candidate running, this is kind of the first time they've been old enough to probably understand the primary process. So we all sat around to watch it, I was going to watch the Fox one with them, I actually got into, I was one of those few people that got into the platform on Twitter, into spaces, I think partially because I got on very early, I got on probably 15 minutes, 20 minutes early, when there was only about 45,000 people in. By the time it launched there was about 800,000 people in, that obviously did not get off the ground if you want to say, they had to end it, and I think we actually have a, you can play a bit from it if you want to, just play like a second of it, right on byte 7, let's hear that.

We want to welcome you to this historic Twitter Spaces event and more broadly a first in the history of social media, tonight I'm pleased to introduce two individuals who have done more to loosen the ground. Yeah, and stuff just started bad from there. That was the narrator that just starts clicking off, he eventually did get to give about. Yeah, so they eventually relaunched, they explained the glitch, we can kind of go over that next segment if you want, and they did about an hour I think of content.

A similar one he did on Fox. Ended up having about 350,000 people watching live, or listening live, and then later on it's accumulated over 5 million I think people that have now listened. Have they cleaned it up? Well they restarted it completely, when they relaunched it, it worked flawless. But it was definitely a bad initial launch as we said, and even the fact that he called it like preparing for launch, apparently what happened was too many people got notifications that Elon Musk was going live. And when they all logged in, because it didn't say live with Ron DeSantis, it just said preparing for launch initially. So a lot of people tuned in going what's happening, it crashed the servers, you could say the excitement for DeSantis was this high that it crashed Twitter.

If I was his campaign I would have gotten out ahead of that Trump meme and said, yeah you wish you could write a meme like this, you wish you didn't have to write a meme like this because we just broke Twitter. Broke one of the biggest social media platforms in the country because people are so excited about our guy. Instead they kind of halfway did that?

Yeah they kind of let other people do it. The team DeSantis account did it. And I think maybe because they were concerned about attacking Elon Musk too much who said he would vote for DeSantis. It was interesting, Musk immediately came out and said, by the way we're going to offer this to other candidates.

The question is, is anyone going to trust that this system is going to work for them or is it just going to make them look bad? Right now the big takeaway was, it was a failure to launch part one. Then he had a second chance, we'll talk about that next. When he hit Fox News. We want to hear from you.

Were you trying to click in on Twitter? Did you watch him on Fox News? What are your thoughts, your reactions?

1-800-684-3110. We're going to get into heavier news on the broadcast today too as well. We've got Rick Rinnell joining us, we've got former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, there's a lot going on in the world. But we want to spend at least this first half hour on the leading candidate to Donald Trump right now running the Republican primary. Finally making, I guess the announcement was last night. And we kind of also have an idea of where his calendar is going, we'll get to that as well. Alright, welcome back to Secchios.

So we're taking your calls this 1-800-684-3110. Listen, polls are not going to remember all of this, there's going to be a lot that happens along this campaign. You always want to get out of a campaign launch cleanly, that's how I always like to say it. It doesn't have to be the best launch ever, it doesn't have to be the greatest thing ever. I know that there's candidates I worked for that did a whole scale of different launches. And by the way, some of those candidates that had great launches had very short campaigns. So it doesn't necessarily add up to how your campaign is going to do. But I will tell you that it is a first test of your campaign staff. It's not Ron DeSantis, it's the staff that he's built.

And right now, if I was Ron DeSantis and his top leaders, unless some of those top leaders need to go, I would be clearing some house. Not everybody, but the people that were responsible for this who did not do their due diligence and have the right answers ready to go if this failed because we were using new technology and the right way to spin it, knowing that the Trump campaign was going to go after them with the biggest punches they could throw. That's what they do. They are great at it. Kudos to them. They can take a narrative like this and actually end up controlling so much of the night.

Yeah, absolutely. I watched a lot of it. And look, I'm someone who is a bit more on the idea of being a little more open-minded this time. I want to see who is running. I want to hear from everybody.

I'm excited about having real debates. My biggest takeaway, honestly, wasn't the glitch. I thought the glitch was horrible. It was a bad start.

Good for older people who are trying it. I think it was a lot of people who didn't understand Twitter Spaces. I don't think most of anyone in this room had heard about it. I knew about it because, you know, I'm connected. I use it all the time. I listen to things. But I know about Twitter Spaces. I've been involved in listening.

I've engaged in some of them. My actual biggest takeaway negative for this, and look, I'm someone who, I'm a property owner in the state of Florida. I've seen some of the really good stuff that DeSantis has done. I want him to at least have an opportunity to make a good case for why he should be President of the United States. I don't think over Joe Biden, no question. But my big problem was I thought when going on with Elon, and even going on with Gowdy, that the idea was don't do a campaign speech.

Go and have a real discussion, a conversation. Because me, the podcast listener, your mid-30s-year-old voter, that's how I get my content. They like being a little bit more… I had like three hours of in-depth conversation instead of a stump speech. My biggest problem with the night is that he set that up that way, saying we're going to have a conversation with someone who's not, with Elon, who is conservative. But it's certainly not a Ron DeSantis triple goal, you'd think, conservative.

Not really a big social conservative. This is what I want to hear from you. And it wasn't that. He gave what felt like a very scripted speech in question form. And then when he went on Gowdy, he repeated it almost word for word.

Yeah, that's interesting because I couldn't tune in on Twitter Spaces. And you told me you did it word for word. And they were watching on Gowdy and said, well, that was very robotic again. That's not the kind of speech that would get a crowd going at a rally. So I want to hear from you on that, folks.

1-800-684-3110. Maybe it didn't catch him during Twitter Spaces. Maybe that didn't impact you at all because you weren't even going to try to use it. But what happened when you watched him on Fox News? Do we have that sound? The first question was a very long answer. We can find that. We actually have pretty much the same, though, that actually is from the Twitter Spaces. We can play both.

So you can probably play both. Let's start, though, with here's how he opened up. And you can kind of tell. This is from Twitter Spaces.

Yeah, so again, the sound quality is a little weird. First time I got to hear it. Let's hear it. Well, I am running for President of the United States to lead our great American comeback. Look, we know our country is going in the wrong direction.

We see it with our eyes and we feel it in our bones. Our southern borders collapsed. Drugs are pouring into the country. Our cities are being hollowed out by spiking crime. The federal government is making it harder for the average family to make ends meet and to attain and maintain a middle class lifestyle. And our President, well, he lacks vigor, flounders in the face of our nation's challenges, and he takes his cues from the woke mob. I don't think it has to be this way.

American decline is not inevitable. It is a choice. Yeah, so that's just the beginning of a statement. Again, not bad if that was out of speech. I felt it to be odd being this kind of supposed to be almost more like the town hall situation. More of a conversation of engaging people in a different way. So in that sense, I was a bit disappointed.

I told you I was disappointed because I like Ron DeSantis and I like a good campaign. You want to see a primary battle. I do. They're probably the side.

I do. Oftentimes that's good for Trump, too, if you're a Trump supporter because it toughens him up. Yeah. And it forces him on taking down a real worthwhile opponent that can give him a run for it instead of just kind of waltzing on through and not tightening up your message. And that's not so much for his campaign staff who's great at doing what they do. That's more for him to kind of put him in the right mindset.

And so far this is not going to be putting him in the right mindset. Yeah, I mean, look, I'm probably one of the more people who would at least consider what's going on. And it disappointed me and I it's not that this is going to stop me from considering him as a candidate at all because I can look beyond what was a glitch.

I can really look beyond the glitch because I've been in that situation, not where that scale, but I've been where this show can't go live because sometimes tech just doesn't work how it's supposed to. I know I was on the show yesterday, though, saying this is very risky. It was risky and it was risky in a different way than I was expecting. I wasn't expecting a technological risk.

I was expecting it to be an awkward conversation with Elon. It was very risky because this is technology that had not been utilized. It had been audio only in a world where we're not used to that really that working as well.

It has worked fine for months. For a very different purpose than what I learned. The guys I put together. Here's sort of two things. This is going to take about a minute, so if you're listening, know this. This is sort of a answer that he says on Twitter Spaces, followed by the answer from Trey Gowdy, and you can hear how it is incredibly prepared. He was going to say this on both regardless.

Yeah, yeah, and I think we should play that and listen to it. Last week, the NAACP issued a travel advisory against your state, claiming that Florida is not a safe place for minorities to visit. What do you say to those who have been advised that somehow they aren't welcome in your state? Claiming that Florida is unsafe is a total farce.

I mean, are you kidding me? You look at cities around this country, they are awash in crime. In Florida, our crime rate is at a 50-year low. If you look at the top 25 cities for crime in America, Florida does not have a single one amongst the top 25.

And if you look at cities like Baltimore and Chicago, you've got kids more likely to get shot than to receive a first-class education. Because that was from Twitter Spaces. And here's the Fox. Here's Fox two hours later.

It's a typical political stunt. First of all, Florida's crime rate is at a 50-year low. Compare that to places like Chicago or Baltimore. I don't hear the NAACP talking about that. If you look at our education system, we have school choice. That's one of the reasons why our black students perform as high as just about any black students in the country.

We're second and third and fourth grade math and reading, respectively, because parents have options. You go to Baltimore, Chicago, some of these kids are more likely to get shot than to actually have a high-quality education. I don't hear the NAACP talking about that. It is fine to have a message, prepared messages, completely fine. It is fully expected in politics. Don't sell me that you're going to have an hour or a half-hour-long conversation and give me just pre-written, scripted, beat-for-beat answers. Not that I don't agree with him. The thing is I agree with him in that message. I agree with him on a lot of the things he said.

Actually, I doubt there's very few things probably in his Twitter Spaces or that he did on Fox that I would sit there and go, no, you're completely wrong. But me, the prospective voter, goes, I didn't like the formality in it. It was a little less casual. And also, to give something to Donald Trump, I didn't love a lot of the social media stuff they did, even if you thought it was funny.

It wasn't for me. But the difference is that, and look, you're not appealing to 10-year-olds, but in some ways you are when you start talking about everyone. When my son sat down and watched the Donald Trump town hall, he understood a lot more of what was being said and what was being communicated than he did with DeSantis, using very interesting language and words that maybe a large portion of the audience may have to go Google. Yeah, I think we have people on rumble say, well, Donald Trump repeats his answers verbatim. That is normal in politics, especially on tough questions and on gotcha questions and on policy questions, where you know the press is going to try to push you to say something that you don't want to say so that they can then create a campaign ad for Democrats so you stay on message. That's different than when you get into a more long-winded discussion, not a campaign speech, not even just like the Caitlin Collins thing, which was adversarial. This was not supposed to be adversarial either on Twitter or on Fox News. Trey Gowdy is a friend of Rhonda Santis. They came up together in Congress, and so it was a friendly conversation with a friendly host. It wasn't like Trey was going to go after him in any way, and yet he still felt like he could not get out of that mode, which there has been criticism of DeSantis is that why are we not seeing a big rally?

Is it that he doesn't perform well in those settings? But that's tough when you're up against the Donald Trump. They're going to roll out rallies coming up next week, and we only got a minute. And look, there's some good callers coming in. I want you to call, too, because I would love your thoughts.

You've got to have them. Yeah, yeah. There's thousands of you listening and watching. There's no right or wrong here. This is just opinion on the first day of a rollout of the second biggest Republican running for President right now. Maybe the hottest one before Donald Trump ran back in. I mean, the fact that you thought about it beforehand, this is who we thought was potentially going to be the presumptive front-runner.

Especially before the DA indicted Trump. Yeah. So give us a call.

I'd love your thoughts. 1-800-684-3110. Like you said, we're not going to spend the whole hour on this, but we are going to catch up later on in the Secular Brothers podcast and really kind of break this down even more. But more from a media point of view and how this looks in your campaign experience, my media experience, and what that could look like moving forward. So give us a call right now.

1-800-684-3110. I'd love to take your calls in the next segment. Check out the work of the ACLJ.

Go to ACLJ.org for more information on that. And we will continue this discussion here coming up in just a moment. So stay tuned. We'll be back in just about a minute.

And what a quick update. The machete wielding New York City professor who overturned the tables of those pro-life students from Students for Life. And we're in contact with their attorney now in case they need additional legal assistance. We're ready to help if they need the ACLJ. And our attorneys are in contact with them now, so I want you to know that. That machete wielding New York City professor who ultimately got fired from Hunter College after putting a machete to the neck of a New York Post reporter who went to their home, which reporters are allowed to do, and you're allowed to just say, leave.

You don't have to open your door. She did and put a machete on his neck, then chased him down the street to New York in the Bronx with a machete, which could have led to a horrific incident unfolding, not just for the reporter, because I don't know if she would have actually struck him with a machete, but certainly if there were law enforcement around, you could see how that could have escalated very quickly and deadly. So she has now turned herself in, Logan, which is interesting. But while she turns herself in, she is claiming that she is the victim of the crime. So we're going to continue to follow this.

The reason she was getting put in the cop car or being arrested was winking at the camera and doing the whole thing. So there's some imagery of that as well. Like I'm the liberal activist.

Yeah, like I'm your hero, which is probably what they're going to spin it as. Let's go ahead and start taking some phone calls, because I'd love to hear from you. We have some guests coming on later, so let's get to them.

1-800-684-3110. We've got a couple lines open, and we'd love to get your thoughts. Let's start with Anthony, who is calling from Pennsylvania on Line 1, with actually an interesting comment I'd like to respond to. Gentlemen, thanks for taking my call. Yes, I did not watch nor did I plan to watch him on Twitter for three reasons.

One, pretty much knew his positions on everything. And two, if he said anything new or exciting or earth-shattering, I would have heard you or another talk show play the highlights. And the third reason, I could just go to the Internet the next day and print out the transcript of what he said, which is what I did with Tim Scott's speech so I could read and actually see what he really said. Yeah, Anthony, I think that's an interesting comment, and maybe I'll spend it a little differently than the printing-out thought, but we live in a world of on-demand. We live in a world where podcasting exists, where you don't have to – it's not always – there's not prime-time television like there used to be.

You can watch everything at your convenience. So now what happened was a million people were going to watch live or more or listen live, and it didn't happen. But I do think there's that fact, too. People go, I know I hear it, and here's just the truth. If you've been following Governor Ron DeSantis, which I have for years now as, again, a property owner in Florida, it directly affects me, there wasn't a whole lot of new.

No. It was the talking points that you'd expect. So he wasn't wrong in that. The only difference was, instead of just talking about Florida, brought it out to America. But he'd kind of been doing that for this shadow campaign. Yeah, we could take what we did in Florida, do it to the country. I mean, that's going to be his message.

It's a good message. And listen, what's going to be interesting is the next set of numbers that I'm going to be looking for is what did Fox News do that night, last night? We'll probably have those potentially by the time we podcast. Did they get a big pop, like a really significant pop by having him on?

You know, I think if it was a main host. So we now know – we'll get into it more with the Secular Brothers podcast. This was planned weeks ago, and it was planned for DeSantis to sit down with Tucker Carlson. So those numbers would have been substantially likely even higher because you take Tucker's was around 3 million. You add in a Presidential candidate announcing he's for office.

You could add in a couple more million numbers. So there was a little difference there, but he stuck with it. Yeah, and here's just the truth.

I think he knew he'd need to stick with the Fox News viewer. At the end of the day, the truth is, though, if you look at just ratings, pure ratings, CNN Town Hall for Donald Trump, 3.3 million. Currently, the Twitter spaces for Ron DeSantis, about 3.3 million. A lot more in the commentary, but yeah, three point – was it 3.1 right now? Oh, that was last night, so we can maybe find out what the updated number is.

I'd like to get that. About 3.2. 3.2 million. So almost exactly, let's say, that watched the CNN Town Hall with Donald Trump, almost the exact number, which prior to the people that are currently still engaged, watched or found the Ron DeSantis spaces. That is a pretty remarkable number for a platform that doesn't – like you said, for a product that doesn't make any sense.

That's how it needs to be described better. Like, you know, it may not have worked that immediately launch, but we live in an era where that doesn't have to work that way, and ultimately, over three million people tuned into that discussion. And that was just as many people as tuned into the Town Hall of President Trump. And by the way, we don't even have the numbers yet because we did double events in one day. What if we got huge numbers from Fox News? And so we have double the amount of numbers.

And there's a way to spin it. I hope his team – this is because I agree with Logan. I think a good primary – I'm more on the Trump side. Logan is not as – I'm on the no-one side.

Right. And I would say that – I like everybody. I'd vote for all of them before I'd vote for him. For Donald Trump.

And I'd say my number two would probably be Tim Scott. I like him a lot. Is that I know that Donald Trump needs focus. He needs a good enemy to fight and it gets him ready for battle once he – if he does get the nomination against Biden. It gets him trained.

DeSantis was the best hope to get him into the – you know, the fisticuffs, if you will. What I like is primetime television. I like – Yeah. You know, something – I like event politics.

I get it. Where it's like I like the debates. I like the build-up.

I like a year of having fun. My wife hates it because I turned it on last night and she was like, oh, it starts. This is it.

And I can't shut it off once it's on. Yeah. But I will go into the other room just like I will for some of her programming as well. But this is where I actually like politics. I'm not a huge fan of the system, but I do like the media side of it. I find it very interesting. So, I mean, I love the RFK thing. I thought that was such an interesting move that that was happening. By the way, he also announced his candidacy on Twitter Spaces. A lot of people aren't talking about that. That was, you know, months ago now.

Obviously to a little less fanfare, but still pretty impressive. Let's go to Lana who's actually calling State of Alabama. You're on the air. Hey, Lana.

Hi. In regards to the numbers being a little lower for DeSantis and expected now that especially Trump is, you know, made known he's running as well. I understand that. I felt DeSantis was my man. I like what he was doing. The momentum in the field was similar.

The ideas is Trump. But when he stepped back in, I mean, he's been thrown in the pen. He survived that scuffle. I mean, he really did. He had positive momentum. He had wonderful things accomplished.

I like everything about the economy, everything about the United States better. So, I mean, yeah. And now, so I'm going with Trump. I mean, he's seasoned. DeSantis, you know, would have to fill his way around. He would have to get those bruises and all that. So I just feel it's normal.

That's kind of where I am. And I wasn't there immediately. But when the stuff came out about the CIA recruiting the letter for the 51 agents on the Hunter Biden laptop, I realized, you know, it would be great if we can get Donald Trump the House, the Senate, and the White House, even if it's just four more years, to do the job that he'd be willing to do. And I don't know if the others would be willing to take the bruises, take the investigations.

Lord knows he is willing to do it, to fully drain the swamp, which could save our country so that we do not have to constantly question the integrity of our elections or the integrity of our FBI. Yes, we should always have oversight, but you know what I mean. We should be more careful about human error than we are widespread political influence in our justice system.

Yeah, I think that's probably right. My concern is that it's already getting really out of hand really quickly. I actually thought that some of the responses, and we'll talk about this coming up in the next segment, then we've got to move on to some other things. Some of the responses from the Trump campaign, as funny and comedic as they were, I think they're starting a path that I'm not comfortable with. And that is honestly the use of AI.

That is something that I am deeply concerned about. I love technology moving forward. I think AI, I've said, is the biggest technological advance since really the Internet.

We'll talk about secular brothers, what we were talking about. How quick do you think AI created that? Oh, minutes.

Minutes. Because this interesting thing on this, it was interesting when you looked on Twitter Spaces, my wife looked at all these people that we see, that we work with, and we're all grouped together. Yeah, I love that you could see who's watching or who's listening, because it makes you go, oh, he had every major influencer listening. Yeah, and it was interesting to see that, and it was interesting how Trump, they turned it into kind of an SNL style sketch.

Yeah, sketch. But I'm more concerned on the much broader impact of what AI can do. And what- That's wild. And the fact that you can have a Ron DeSantis using extreme profanity that is completely fictional. Right.

All right, we'll be back with more Second Half Hour coming up. We're gonna have a lot of exciting things to announce over the coming year, and really 18 months, and some of the issues we're gonna be engaging in, and more of the economic issues that we definitely talk about. We definitely do file in, but we don't always make a priority at the ACLJ on our homepage.

We certainly do on our broadcast, because it's important news, and we bring in Harry Hutchinson and policy team like that. But there's this case out to the U.S. Supreme Court on the EPA that's just very important. It's a 9-0 decision against the Biden EPA.

It involved a couple in their home along a U.S. waterway. The EPA was trying to find them and get rid of their home, and again, a 9-0 opinion. We'll talk to Mike Pompeo a little bit about that, but I think that there's this pushback against this over-regulatory state, which is the United States of America, and these issues where we've put, again, maybe the environment too much on a pedestal, and not enough about like getting Americans good opportunities. There's a balance there. I want clean air. I want clean water.

I do not want to breathe the air of Beijing after going there, or the air of Moscow after being there. So there is a balance, but you don't want to have the imbalance so bad that your economy is hurting so horribly because these agencies have unbelievable power to do whatever they want. The Supreme Court, I'm sure to the left, is very angry.

But all nine justices agreed that the EPA went too far, so that includes all the liberal justices as well. So we're going to talk about that with Mike Pompeo, so we'll get into some more substantive issues. But, Logan, I know we got calls on this because we're going to get into this with Secular Brothers too.

We got Rick Renell coming up too. We got two big segments coming up with guests, so we're probably likely not going to get to as many phone calls as we usually would in the back half, that's why we're trying to take them early. So let's go to Justin in Georgia. Real quick, Justin.

You're on the air. Hi. Thanks for taking my call. Yeah, I just wanted to say real quick that I think that most people know, and DeSantis is a smart man, and he's going into this knowing that he doesn't stand a chance against Trump to become the nominee.

So I think that he's probably doing this just to get his foot in the door and become potentially Trump's nominee for VP. Let's stop you there. Here's the problem. They both live in the state of Florida, and the Constitution bars that. So one of them would have to move, and I don't know if you could even move now, I don't know exactly when you'd have to move by since you've now launched your campaign.

Yeah, Justin, I appreciate your call. And our second point I would say is there ain't no way Donald Trump would pick Ron DeSantis. It is not happening. You will not have a Vice President Ron DeSantis. I don't think Ron would do it.

Nope. I think it's a bad move for him, and I definitely don't think Trump would do it because you don't want anyone taking away from your momentum. I also think, though it's all politics and mudslinging, of course everyone gets behind the conservative at the end, whoever it is, I don't think there's good blood there, and I also think it's just not going to happen.

Simply, that won't happen. One of them will likely win, and when you say he doesn't stand a chance, I think that's being a little delusional as well. I think that there is still a long road ahead of us, and when I mean Ron DeSantis, I mean anyone. There's still a chance for anyone to take the lead, though Donald Trump has an insurmountable lead right now. We haven't had a debate.

We haven't had anything yet. So give it a little time. A couple of you will come up on our broadcast I think would make better fits, Mike Pompeo and Rick Renell, because of the agency that they've run. You let Trump be Trump, and then you bring in someone who's run the State Department, the CAO, who's run the entire intelligence world, and you let them run the nuts and bolts of government, and I think that's how it works well, and it took Trump a couple of years to get there.

He can't make that mistake again if he does get the White House back. We want to be able to hit the ground running with good people. We're going to talk to two of them because they're part of the ACLJ team right when we get back from this next break. Yeah, unfortunately Roger, we're just going to tell Roger, I know you've been on hold for like nine minutes. We're unfortunately not going to be able to get to your call probably today because we have a packed second and third, or second half of this broadcast coming up.

So unfortunately Roger, we're not going to get to you, but I do want to say thank you to everyone who called in. We have a lot of people on a lot of different sides discussing this, so it's actually pretty fun. If you're not on our Rumble channel, I encourage you to do that, because right now there's like 3,000 people watching this live on Rumble. There's thousands on other platforms as well, but the discussion is probably the most fun over on Rumble because you have people who are, a lot of them are like-minded, but when something like this happens, they have a lot of different thoughts, so you can be a part of that as well. So make sure you're following our channel on Rumble. We hit that 200,000 number on Follow, so let's start working our way to 300,000. Follow on Rumble, you just click that button there or wherever you are on YouTube, on Facebook.

So you make sure you get the notifications when we're on live, which is daily, noon to 1 Eastern time, but we also, in these election years, oftentimes go live during and throughout the day because of breaking news and items like that. So again, make sure you do that. We'll be right back on Sekulow with Mike Pompeo. Welcome back to Sekulow, our Senior Counselor for Global Affairs Mike Pompeo is joining us, former Secretary of State and CIA Director, and he's got a new post up, and I just want to remind people, he's also writing exclusive content for us at ACLJ.org, and a new post up called, a new email show, the Biden team was more focused on promoting woke agenda than addressing the murder of countless Christians in Nigeria. So Secretary Pompeo, you have this piece up at ACLJ, breaking some news out of a FOIA we sent to the State Department on their decision to take Nigeria off the country's particular concern list, which you had placed Nigeria on. As a background, just remind people and our listeners why you did take that step as Secretary of State to designate Nigeria as a country of particular concern.

Well, thanks. Yeah, by the way, the ACLJ did amazing work with this FOIA request. They did, they did, they did really good stuff that highlighted a few central facts, which underpin the work that I did as Secretary of State. We knew, and we know to this day that the government in Nigeria is permitting Christians to be killed, to be persecuted inside of Nigeria. Some 90% of persecuted Christians killed in the last months have been in that particular place. We often think about China, we think about Northern Iraq, we think about places where you've been really troubled for Christians, Nigeria is really at the center of that so much today.

I can't figure out why the Biden administration walked away from it. Other than, I did see when I was Secretary of State Jordan, the bureaucrats inside the State Department want to walk away from anything having to do with religion. They don't view that as central to freedom and human dignity, instead, they focus on other things. They focus on gender and racial issues, instead of what we know to be true, that to deliver security for America, religious freedom needs to be front and center, and one of the places that is most at risk today around the world is in fact in Nigeria, and you all did great work figuring that out. Countries that have robust religious liberty laws, there's not a ton of them, but when you look at the countries that do, those are the freest and fairest countries in the world typically. I mean, Secretary Pompeo, I think that it's bizarre to me that even inside the State Department, they don't want to recognize just that bottom line truth that you have. That will lead to more freedom, more diversity, more opinion, different thoughts, a safer place to have those different opinions and thoughts, and just kind of a better respect for the systems of law and government and society, but instead, trying to put those on the back burner, even though we know it's kind of the basis of all rights, that if you've truly got religious liberty, you likely have freedom of speech, you likely have the freedom to organize, you likely have a whole host of freedoms that you might not have in your country because it might not have a constitution, but that you have those kind of rights respected. When the Biden administration took office, they removed Nigeria from the list immediately, and we took action at the ACLJ through that FOIA to find out why, and we're starting to receive documents which expose their shift in priorities.

What sticks out from this batch of documents that we received? Yeah, I hinted at it in my opening comments, Jordan, just their absolute utter failure to being able to talk about religious freedom around the world. They're happy to create social programs that try to get at diversity or equity or inclusion. In those emails, you start to see that, they're thinking about your money, US taxpayer money going to programs in Nigeria, and rather than in protecting Christians or protecting people of every faith, it's about can we voice some diversity program?

Can we do some work project to make their nation better? And Jordan, you hit on it, importantly, this matters to me, as someone who's a Christian, who's a person of faith, I want everyone to be able to practice their faith. And it mattered to me as Secretary of State as well, from a security perspective, three are nations, nations that protect basic human rights and basic human dignity are much less likely to be in a place that causes our country to have to go to take real risks to our kids, our soldiers, our sailors, our airmen and Marines, there is a direct line between nations with more religious tolerance and basic security for the United States of America and the State Department and the emails you're uncovering clearly doesn't want to talk about it, doesn't want to think about it, wants to make sure that we are flying rainbow flags, instead of protecting the human dignity that to which each of us is entitled as a result of our having been made by our creator. Again, when you have that religious liberty in a country that's likely going to be a country that's friendly to the United States, it's likely going to be a country that's not invading other countries and wars of aggression. And if there is a war of aggression, it's likely going to be a country that joins your side. It doesn't have to mean we share the exact same faith, but that we respect faith to an extent that we respect the individual rights of people.

It's kind of the core of our, the natural law system that our entire system of law is based on. Open Doors is a great organization that reports on Christian persecution, a report that last year that 90% of Christians murdered for their faith were killed in Nigeria, which is a country where about half the population is Christian, it's a huge country, but half the population is Christian leading up to the decision to remove Nigeria from the CPC. The state department was considering funding, a documentary meant to penetrate and analyze the complex and rather phony religious charade that has come to define a large part of Nigerian society.

So what does that tell you about the administration's priorities during that's worse than just ignoring it. That's actual hostility to people of faith. And I saw this in the debates when I had a great colleague, Sam Brownback, who was our head of religious freedom ambassador for religious freedom of the state department as, as ambassador Brownback and I were working on this project, trying to take all the facts on board. You could watch state department officials, deeply uncomfortable talking about faith. They want to describe this conflict to rural urban. They wanted to describe it as tribal conflict. In fact, the folks being killed are Christians and they are being killed because of their faith.

And it was unambiguous about that. And so we wanted to identify that the state department's designation as a country of particular concern is simply a statement saying you, you, you must do better. Our expectation is that you will do better, be more tolerant of religious faith, and then begins to impose burdens on them if they don't get it right.

It's so unfortunate. My guess is that the risk to Christians has only increased and will only continue to increase because of the state department's decision to remove them from this list. And the fact that the ACLJ has now uncovered documents, shining a light on what the state department did in the face of the cold, hard reality of religious intolerance in Nigeria is a really, a really important undertaking.

And the ACLJ did glorious work there. The pieces, uh, by secretary Pompeo and he writes exclusive content for the ACLJ. This piece is Pompeo new email show Biden team more focused on promoting woke agenda than addressing murder of countless Christians in Nigeria. It gives me to my next question, which is that the domestically, how this impacts us when the administration actively decides to promote this woke agenda globally, instead of keeping policies in place to end persecution, like before you can even get to these conversations about woke policies, you got to end the basics, like killing people because they're religious faith. But then how does that then impact us here at home?

Goodness in so many ways, uh, one of which we've talked about other nations, nations that are in a good place, doing the thing, right. Say how, if America can't get it right, if America can't be a force for good, as it moves around the world, if instead it's trying to impose some, uh, some American idea of diversity, equity, inclusion, that the progressive left has tried to adopt, uh, in ways that are deeply at odds with our American tradition, our founders ideas, it diminishes our place in the world. It diminishes American leadership when, when our diplomats are out focused exclusively on climate change and gender identity issues and race, racial equality issues. And instead of on the things that actually are fundamental to human dignity, it undermines our role, our capacity to lead in the world, Jordan, and that's just, that's a more dangerous place for every single American.

It impacts all of us. I want to turn to one issue, which I think is near and dear to so many Americans that's government overreach as well inside our own countries, breaking news out of the Supreme Court today in a nine oh decision. We don't always see a lot of those, especially with this court and especially when it comes to the EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, but we have what's in place in EPA policy that is called basically waters of the United States.

And the EPA tried to allege that these individuals land, they built a home near a ditch that fed into a creek, which fed into Priest Lake, a Navajo goal, our interest rate Lake and the EPA wanted to have them, uh, ban them from living at that home and ordered them to pay a 40,000 per day fine. And what the Supreme Court was able to do is go back and say, no, no, you have gone way too far into finding waterways of the United States when you're defining a ditch that feeds into a Creek, which then feeds into a Lake. And so this pushback again in a nine oh decision gives me some hope that the wokeness hasn't made its way all the way to the U S Supreme Court.

Oh my goodness, Jordan, this is actually wonderful. I worked on this issue 10 years ago when I was a member of Congress. The waters of the U S rule has been controversial. The Obama administration wanted to put it through the Biden administration finally did.

Here's what's great. Think about, think about how nutty this had to be for nine justices to all degree. This is nutty and unlawful and indecent and a government overreach. They justice Sotomayor justice Kagan, these folks are not ones that are inclined to rule against by demonstration government overreach. They use every technique they can to reshape the rules in a way that asserts a progressive agenda and they didn't hear. So think, think about how bad this rule was.

Second thing is I've now had a chance to read just the front end of the rule. I think this goes well for those of us who believe in requiring Congress to actually pack pass laws and actually direct what it is that the government can do instead of these big ambiguous rules that allow a progressive Presidents to run amok and regulate our lives in ways that are, are inappropriate and consistent with the constitution. So this matters for farmers. This matters for every property owner.

This matters because now the waters of the U S will actually be waters, not some Creek or or some underwater ground. All right, welcome back to secular. There's been a lot to talk about today.

We've had the DeSantis, a multiple announcements, some crashes with those announcements. We're getting into more of that on the secular brothers podcast. Logan, when does that go up today?

That goes up. It'll be up at four o'clock Eastern time. We post the new episodes of the secular brother podcast, the fun stuff around it. Some of the memes that were created, some of the goofiness that we'll talk about, sort of just the, what the meeting, the rating numbers by then maybe you may have overnight ratings for Fox. But yeah, that's a secular brothers.com or just if you're on rumble search for our channel, we're going to be broadcasting there again. Four o'clock Eastern time.

We do that a couple of times a week. Rick Renell, who's our, our senior advisor for foreign policy and national security is joining us now and he's joining us. He was in Albania earlier in the week. Now he is in Belgrade, Serbia.

Rick, I know you told Logan some of it is, uh, yeah, where in the world is Rick Renell? Uh, so you don't want to get too in the weeds, but to tell people a little about what you're doing in Belgrade, I know we've talked about on the air before. Yeah, well now that I'm in the private sector, I'm taking all of my, uh, advice that I was dishing out as the Presidential envoy for coastal and Serbia. Uh, that advice in multiple agreements was that the private sector needs to get involved and help develop some of the, uh, institutions and, and projects in the Balkans that need a little push so that we can create some peace. I firmly believe that this region, uh, benefits from, uh, Western style companies, capitalists that come in and, and share, uh, exactly what they do. So we're, we're trying to bring some investment into the Balkans, a place that I care very deeply about.

I want to go to this story. Uh, it's in CNBC and it's Microsoft actually warning the U S that Chinese state sponsored hackers have compromised critical us cyber infrastructure across numerous industries. But here's the kicker with a focus on gathering intelligence.

It's called volt typhoon. And the organization is apparently focused on not so much working to disrupt critical communication inside the U S but between the U S and Asia, Rick, to me, if I read between the lines there, I think that if you were a Chinese hacking group thinking that your, your country may be on a buildup towards an invasion of a place like Taiwan, you would want to make it more difficult for, uh, uh, those actors to be able to communicate safely. Yeah, I think, um, you're, you're exactly right. What, what we always have to be careful of with the Chinese is that they are very aggressive on the intelligence gathering and spine, but we in the Trump administration saw it firsthand. We, uh, we pushed back hard. Um, it was one of the reasons why I think Donald Trump, uh, was really disappointed with European leaders because they would talk a big game about seeing how China was gathering Intel against the West. And yet they would continue to do economic development with it. I mean, the, the, the country of Germany has so many cars that are being sold throughout China that they're really hesitant to be tough on China. And we've got to be able to change that. I think the reality is, is we know that the Chinese are secretive communist and, and always looking to interrupt, uh, the growth of the West. And so we need to be clear eyed about that. I do think I'm encouraged that, uh, both sides of the Republicans and Democrats in Congress have recognized that we got to bring the supply chain home, that we have to be very careful with what China is doing to our local politicians. When I was DNI, the local politicians, mayors, city council members, they were being targeted by the Chinese and many of them didn't realize it. And so we in the Trump administration, we're doing what we call defensive briefing, and it would literally be briefings for individuals who didn't know that they were in some sort of the cross hairs of Chinese spies.

Yeah. Rick, I think it's pretty interesting. There's a lot of comments coming in about the spy balloon from a few months back. And what's interesting is sort of the coverage of that going, yes, of course, when there was something physical floating through the sky, we can all point to it and go, that's a big problem. If China sending these over, we need to figure out what to do with this situation. However, the coverage of maybe what is, what is likely a bigger deal in sense of your digital space and what happens with these hacks, uh, kind of becomes ignored. I think Americans have to get a little more used to dealing with a little less physical, a little more digital in that world. Well, look, we, we've been warning for a while that, um, software applications like TikTok, for instance, which seems very innocent, uh, is, is allowing China to collect data.

It's allowing Chinese communist China to understand your IP address and your behavior. And so we need to be very careful and clear-eyed of what we're giving up to the Chinese, uh, sometimes unwittingly, but we are, and we need to be able to have a cyber, uh, crisis center that can immediately notify individuals or governments when they're being hacked. We've got to stay ahead of this. And what, what we absolutely have learned is that it's an ongoing 24 seven process. You can't just successfully get one type of, uh, you know, digital application and think you're done. It is constant and a constant digital war against the Chinese.

You know, Rick, I want to turn to this as well. A senior FBI official actually stunned GOP members of Congress on Tuesday when they were testifying under oath that she had not read or even been briefed on the Durham report. Joe Murphy, she is the FBI deputy assistant director of counterintelligence said during a hearing that she has quote not had time to read the report that was released early last week, though she does intend to get to it at some point. This kind of, again, dismissal by career officials at the FBI, which Rick, again, if they are supposed to be taking their politics out of it, they should be devouring any information like this so that the problems Durham outlined never happens again inside specifically an agency she oversees that would, that would deal with that kind of work like counterintelligence.

Yeah, let's put this in very clear perspective. The Durham report says that the leadership at the FBI manipulated, lied, and spied upon their political enemies. And we have a member of the leadership of the FBI saying, Oh, I haven't read it. This couldn't have been more dismissive. It's offensive. They are not taking it seriously, which is why the FBI put out a statement saying, Oh, yeah, we saw those problems. And they've already been fixed.

Thank you very much. They're not taking it seriously. And I do blame the media, because when the media can can focus in on a problem and highlight it, where a democrat administration is messing up, then they get embarrassed, and they will move to fix it.

But they haven't felt that pressure from the media at all. Washington, D.C. is literally a system that's pushing for Joe Biden and the Democrats. And it's got to stop.

It's going to ruin our country. You know, Rick, we got a minute left even got worse in the hearing. She actually said to a congressman, sir, if you'd like a brief on the Durham report from the FBI Counterintelligence Division, I'm happy to take that back. Like, if you want to hear from us on what we think of Durham, not what you read, but you know, take it from us.

Trust us like anyone trust them right now. That was her response is we'll give you a briefing. Members of Congress, of course, a briefing on something she had not yet even read is one of our people wrote in Granny Gross on Rumble. She's too busy sweeping the FBI dirt under the rug.

I have a feeling there's a lot of people in the FBI doing that probably digitally. Join us on Secular Brothers. We're going to dive deep into the DeSantis announcement. The bad, the good, the ugly, the strange, the bizarre, the memes. Support the work of the ACLJ. Donate today at ACLJ.org.