BREAKING: Biden Social Media Collusion Blocked by Judge

Breaking news today on Sekulow as the Biden social media collusion is blocked by a judge. Keeping you informed and engaged. Now more than ever, this is Sekulow.

We want to hear from you. Share and post your comments or call 1-800-684-3110. And now your host, Jordan Sekulow. Hey, welcome to Sekulow.

We're taking your calls to 1-800-684-3110. A district court judge out of Louisiana issued an injunction blocking the Biden administration, so think about this, from contacting social media companies with the purpose of suppressing political views and other speech normally protected from government censorship. A lot of this came out of the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2016 election and the Hunter Biden laptop. Remember, all of these were suppressed in different ways. Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged the suppression on the Hunter Biden laptop, specifically how the FBI came to them and they basically stopped serving it to people.

So you might have thought you were posting it, but your own friends, people that follow you on Facebook, still wouldn't have had that served to them. Twitter was deleting accounts. This is the pre-Elon Musk era of Twitter, so a lot of that has been reversed. But look at the criticism now that Twitter faces any move they make because they have become another place for free speech once again, and this idea that they've unbanned Donald Trump and they've unbanned so many—like the New York Post was banned because of the Hunter Biden laptop. So those three issues, and what the judge said specifically, was that during the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States government seems to have assumed a role to an Orwellian ministry of truth.

Well, of course, the Biden administration wanted to have a disinformation czar. Remember that whole situation and ended up that that never materialized because the outcry was so significant. But the First Amendment violation here is what's so significant. It's interesting, the judge in the case, who issued a very lengthy opinion because there's a lot of technical issues in addition to the constitutional issues, noted that two things. One is that the government was the government was engaging in, in fact, viewpoint discrimination. Now, the seminal case on viewpoint discrimination is a case we argued in 1991 called Lamb Chapel versus St. Mauritius Union Free School District, where the Supreme Court said in an opinion by Justice Scalia that discrimination based on viewpoint is, per se, really unconstitutional, presumed unconstitutional, and that the government, because it requires strict scrutiny, the highest level of review, has to show a compelling governmental interest on why they would silence the speech and then use the least restrictive means to do that.

Well, that wouldn't be going to the social media companies and telling them not to publish it. Then the government came back with Jordan interestingly here and said, oh, wait a minute, this is also government speech. And they cited Pleasant Grove versus Summum, another case that we argued in, I think, 2002 at the Supreme Court of the United States.

We won unanimously. But there's a crucial difference between the government as speaker, when the government can say what it wants to say, versus the government, Andy, as censor, which is what was happening here. Well, that's exactly right. The government was basically censoring speech. And the analogy to the George Orwell novel 1984 Ministry of Truth is really very good and very important. Judge Dowdy, who was a Trump appointee, by the way, but who issued a very interesting opinion.

I've got it right here. It's 155 page opinion that we've just started to read and to analyze. But he goes into great detail with respect to the fact that the government has seriously overstepped its bounds by really suppressing political views and other speech normally protected from censorship with a conservative slant. That's the thing that it was focusing on. Widespread censorship campaign talking almost exclusively as those holding conservative views.

You know, what's interesting, too, about this, we'll take your calls, 1-800-684-3110. It's also the idea, there's a lot of chilled speech. A lot of people just stopped using these platforms. If you think about it, these are the new ways to really reach a lot of people. And so when people say, you know what, I'm out, or I'm not going to utilize this anymore, it's also giving up your opportunity to reach all the people, one that decided voluntarily to follow you, your own friends and family members. And then, of course, this larger reach if people are interested in what you have to say. But people gave up on some of these platforms.

In a sense, you can't let them win. And so I would encourage a lot of people to get back on and start utilizing, keep sharing, keep posting to these platforms. 1-800-684-3110, support the work of the ACLJ, ACLJ.org. Be right back. All right, welcome back to Second.

We are taking your calls to 1-800-684-3110, 1-800-684-3110. I think, again, this is a very unique opinion by this judge because it confirms a lot of what we all believed. And to some extent, what we know was happening. Remember, these social media companies have come out and said, yes, we were doing this. I mean, Twitter banned the New York Post Twitter account for posting about Hunter Biden's laptop. Mark Zuckerberg said they did stop serving it. And basically, you think you were posting it, but it wasn't being served.

So no one was seeing it. And so, again, we also know that this is because the government, where they were utilizing the FBI or other resources, were coming directly to them and telling them what to choose, what to pick, and what you also can't pick. I mean, and I think it's important to point out, the government can have a message that you disagree with, but you're supposed to be able to disagree with the government. So let me tell you what I've got in my hands right here. We are in court on a very similar issue. It involves the FBI and their reach out to the social media companies to put their thumb on the scale of what they wanted covered and what they wanted served, I should say served and not served. So we started with a Freedom of Information Act request. That's here. I'll put it up on the screen right now. This was the FOIA that we sent to the FBI involving this whole conversation with Mark Zuckerberg, the one that Jordan just mentioned, where he talks about the FBI coming to them and saying, look out for this Russian disinformation and then kind of put their thumb on the scale of that.

So it started with that. No response from the FBI, nothing, not even an acknowledgement that we sent it. So we filed, and we'll put this up on the screen. I'm going to walk you through this, a Freedom of Information Act appeal inside the agency. This is before federal court.

So this was inside the agency. We then filed an appeal saying, hey, look, we serve this Freedom of Information demand about this discussions you've had with these social media companies, specifically, number one, withholding records, much less refusing to confirm or deny the existence of the records. We said these are not records that are personnel, medical, or similar files. The disclosure of the information would not constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy, because that's what they'll argue sometimes. And number two, the records sought are not gathered for law enforcement purposes and the public interest and the citizen's right to be informed of the exemption compels disclosure.

Even if there was protected privacy interest, we said disclosure was still required. So we filed this internal appeal to which the FBI did nothing, which is typical of these government agencies. But this is your federal dollars at work. Then we filed a federal lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, American Center for Law and Justice versus the FBI.

And that's on this. This complaint was filed for an injunction and declaratory relief. That is now currently pending before the court in the District of Columbia.

Andy? Judge Chuck, and that's correct. But Judge Dowdy's opinion, I think, in Arizona and that litigation is really important for something that he said that I think is really significant. And he says it at the beginning, he says, if the allegations made by plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States history. This is precisely what we've asserted in our litigation.

So I want to be clear here that we're not just talking about something. We're taking direct action on this. And we're in federal court right now to get to the bottom of this. And once you get to the bottom of this, then you get congressional oversight. Once you get congressional oversight, guess what you get? Change. That's what happens. So that's what we're working on right now.

And Jordan, we are literally in federal court to get to the bottom of this. But they put their thumb on the scale of what information they want you to get and what information they don't want you to get. And it's had a look. I remember the days when we'd have 10,000, 25,000, 30,000 people watching at any given time this broadcast on Facebook. And over the course of 24 hours, it could be a million people, 800,000 people, which is more than CNN gets in their primetime viewing. Now you're lucky if over that 24-hour period we get 25,000 people.

So the thumb is on the scale. Now, other platforms like Rumble and YouTube, I've been surprised at YouTube, quite frankly. You think, Jordan, that they've maybe loosened up some of their restrictions? All of them unbanned Trump.

But I think that to some extent that had to have an effect on the titles, have an effect on you can use him in the titles again, you can use his name. But the idea, again, that in a lot of these sites too, people quit. So they might not have closed out their accounts, but they quit. And I think that it's very important going into this next election cycle, especially if it is a repeat of 2020 in the sense of Donald Trump versus Joe Biden. The idea here is that we know that they've tried it and been successful with squelching conservative speech.

I mean, the judge says it outright. It's conservative speech that's being targeted by the government. They're not going to stop trying to do this next election cycle. They might try to do it different ways. But what's interesting here is they're appealing. What are they going to certainly appeal? We are allowed to do this?

We're allowed to tell them what they are allowed to post? Here's what they're going to try to do because you see it in the opinion. They're going to argue government speech. They're saying, no, no, we don't control the censors, but we can convey a message to the censors as the government saying, we'd rather have you not do this. The problem with that is, and we know a lot about government speech since the main case on government speech, we argued, and it was government speech in that particular case. We were representing the government. So we understand that issue from both sides. The issue when it's government speech is the government can convey a message, do not smoke. The government can convey that message. It doesn't have to say, the other side says you should smoke.

It doesn't have to do that. What the government cannot do, though, is go and say, you third party, censor this message. That's viewpoint discrimination. And then you've got it being done by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. So if you're Mark Zuckerberg or any of these groups and the FBI is coming to you, Andy, you were a US attorney, you worked with the FBI.

It's fairly intimidating, even from Mark Zuckerberg. Well, of course it's intimidating when the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and despite the fact that it has become weaponized, it is not the agency that I recall, I can tell you that, or that I worked with. Nonetheless, when the FBI comes to you and tells you, do this, do that, don't do this, do that, or we would prefer that you not do this, or we would prefer that you not do that, or how about putting this message out or that message out, that's not government speech. That's tipping the scales in favor of what is really censorship. And Judge Daugherty in this very lengthy and well-reasoned opinion out of the District of Louisiana said that, that they were targeting and are targeting conservative viewpoints by suggesting what should and should not be said. So we, by the way, at the end of last month, we received a status report of the litigation.

So we're in court on this. The FBI completed its initial search. This is the one they didn't even respond to initially. And it's processing records. So shockingly, they found records. Second, the FBI has identified additional custodians and is conducting supplemental searches. The FBI said they need additional time to supplement the record for responsiveness.

The next court date is September 27th, so in about two and a half months. So there you go. We got from nothing to, oh yeah, we found documents.

How many times have we had that happen? I'll never forget when we sued the Department of Justice and the FBI for the same documents. The Department of Justice came back and said, we do not have those documents.

There is no documents responsive. The FBI gave us documents with the Department of Justice on it, responsive. We went to court, we went to the judge and said, your honor, it's supposed to be transparent government.

That's the idea in a free society. How in the world could the FBI have it and the Department of Justice not? And it was the same document that they were on. And that tells you the whole story right there.

Yeah. And so again, we encourage you to support the work of the ACLJ. We have a matching challenge this month of July where you can double the impact of your donation at ACLJ.org. That's ACLJ.org.

And again, the matching challenge month, it's simple. If you donated $50 right now to the ACLJ at ACLJ.org, we have donors who will match that throughout the month of July. So match your $50. So in effect, that's $100 to the American Center for Law and Justice. So you can see how your support and your donations add up quickly. So I encourage you to do that at ACLJ.org. Also encourage you to weigh in on these issues.

Give us a call at 1-800-684-3110. Are you more likely to utilize these platforms knowing now that they have made some moves to, I'd say, unban? So whether it's Twitter, which has done so in a very public way, and he's constantly being criticized. I mean, even over this past weekend for saying, well, how many tweets can you see and how much data do they have to constantly pay for? Because they're in negotiation with the people like Google and those companies that run the servers. And there was this whole push against Elon Musk and they're kind of figuring out how do you operate a business but still also allow for free speech. So are you more likely to go back to those platforms or are you totally done with them?

1-800-684-3110 because I think conservatives have to find places that obviously there's the Rumbles, there's the truth socials that have been launched that have, again, have created their own audience. I think with Rumble, it's continuing to grow, but it's still very hard to compete with what's out there on a Facebook, what's already out there on a YouTube. And so I don't think we can give up on trying to utilize those platforms, but you do have to utilize it.

You kind of have to go into it with reality that you're probably not going to get the same response that you may have gotten just three or four years ago. But we are in federal court right now on this issue. We've just got a status report in our last court appearance, which was just about 10 days ago.

We are now expecting the next one in about 11 weeks. So we are litigating this issue for your interests, for you, for your family, for your kids, for your grandkids to find out what the government's doing and trying to suppress messages. So we need your support on this. And we're in a matching challenge campaign.

As I said, put it up on the screen. We are in federal court right now on this litigation. So I encourage you, there it is, support the work of the ACLJ. Go to ACLJ.org. And any amount you donate, we're getting a matching gift for. So again, ACLJ.org. You donate. It's right there on the homepage. Any amount you donate, tax-deductible, we get a matching gift back. All right, welcome back to Secular. Over the holiday weekend at Independence Day, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo wrote for the ACLJ, this Independence Day, Remember What Makes America Great. That's exclusive.

That's up at ACLJ.org. Secretary Pompeo is joining us now. And we know, Secretary, that it's become trendy not just to bash political opponents on the left, to bash like the right, but the idea of attacking the United States of America has become trendy on the left. And you kind of write back about why it's not just important as a country, but why it is important to teach a positive message about the United States. I know it sometimes seems strange that we're having to say this, but we are. And what makes America great? You know, Jordan, it does seem strange that you have to remind people how blessed they are to carry that blue passport to be an American citizen. You know, we see these folks trying to come into our country illegally, and we try to stop it.

But we do have to remember, they're coming here for a reason. We're so fortunate. We live in such a privileged place in the greatest nation in the history of civilization. And frankly, Jordan, in spite of all the challenges we face, we live in one of the greatest times in American history, too. The opportunity for the next generation is spectacular. But if we get it wrong, and we teach this next generation that somehow this nation is racist, and we're the problem in the world, and the power structures are somehow inherently corrupted, and we don't recognize that we can fix it, that we have the capacity to get this right, if we don't teach our kids about our Constitution and our Declaration of Independence and the things that have built this country, then we put it at risk. And a lot more risk there from the inside than there is from any of our foreign adversaries. You know, Mike, this current administration was proposing a ministry of disinformation, and disinformation czar, they had proposed that.

It didn't go through. But they have, clearly, the evidence is now showing that they were putting their thumbs on the scale, especially as it relates to the social media companies. A good decision came out of a judge yesterday, actually July 4th, where he said that the government was exercising viewpoint discrimination. And we've argued a series of viewpoint discriminations at the Supreme Court.

The case is now going on appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. But this is where you have to guard your liberties aggressively to protect what is, as you said, the greatest time to be alive in the greatest country in the world. It's so true. And you've lived this, and the ACLJ has lived this. And not only that, you have caused it. You have been a protector of these fundamental rights. This organization is truly central to this, and you are to be applauded for that.

And those who have contributed to the organization should be applauded for that as well. But the fight's not over. This decision from this Louisiana court, federal court in Louisiana, fantastic.

I know Attorney General Landry pretty well. Good stuff. But this fight's going to continue. To watch the government try to ban speech based on its viewpoint, its content, is at the very core, Jay.

You fought this. You would know the law better than I'll ever know it. But it's just a common sense matter. I don't want to deny progressive leftists from saying stupid things, right? Let a thousand flowers compete for the American mind.

I have confidence in the American people. But when the government steps in and viewpoint, uses viewpoint to discriminate and censor, two things happen. One, we miss the ideas. And second, I think everybody starts to self-censor. People start not saying things they truly believe. And that's how republics fall, Jay. And I'm so glad that the ACLJ is there working tirelessly on so many fronts to protect it every day. If we get this wrong, if we get this freedom wrong and we allow government to begin to claim something as disinformation because it's undesirable from their perspective, bad things follow, Jay. You know that.

Yeah. And again, up at ACLJ.org, this exclusive piece by Secretary Pompeo, this Independence Day, remember what makes America great. We encourage you. We also want you to share that with your friends and family.

Go to ACLJ.org and do that. And we know, Secretary Pompeo, that the world watches that discourse in the United States. And so, again, it's one thing to have a robust fight within our country, again, on the principles that we have, who we want to elect in our elections, but this idea that we can't then rally back around the flagpole. That idea, again, it is something that other countries watch carefully, the divisions within the United States. And this ability for us to say after an election or after a fight, we might be upset that we might have lost and we might win some, but that we all still come together as Americans. And if we don't do that, the world takes notice.

No doubt about it. They not only take notice, Jordan, but they're working to propagandize and to fuel that anti-Americanism within our own country. I'm sure you all, Jay and Jordan, you've seen some of the data that's come out over the past handful of weeks suggesting that Americans are less patriotic than they used to be. I don't know exactly what question they asked or exactly what that meant, but I do know that for an awfully long time, we've been teaching in our schools ideas that run counter to the American narrative, an American narrative of continued efforts to be more perfect as a nation. And so as we pass through the Fourth of July, we should be mindful that when Xi Jinping in China talks about American decline, it is only going to happen if we permit it to. And we stopped teaching our kids about the greatness of our country.

So we have to get this right. We had to your point, when elections are over, it's time to move forward to win the next one, to compete on the, in the intellectual space. I hope folks running for school board and city councils and for Congress, wherever it may be, I hope they'll compete in the ideas world, not in the name calling world. I hope they'll get that part right. I hope they'll make arguments and use reason to win and to convince people no vote for me because I will deliver a better outcome for you, your family, your community, your small business, whatever that might be.

If we get that right, we're going to be just fine. And if we don't we'll be the goodness for our Republic. Our founders knew this.

They talked about this country and this constitution are only fit for virtuous people. We need to own that and live up to it. You wrote, well not you wrote when you were the secretary of state, you had a commission on unalienable rights and to celebrate and rededicate our efforts to uphold these values at home and abroad. Obviously it was needed. And I think it's important for the American people to understand what your goal was with that, because I think some of that's lacking today.

And it goes back to wherever you are on the political landscape, it's still the greatest country and there was no place else I'd rather live than the United States of America. Yeah, what I was trying to do was, and we got sued like 300 times when we created this commission by human rights groups. Oddly, we were trying to reground America's foreign policy and human rights tradition in the American understanding of that, like how it is our founders knew that protection of private property mattered, that every human being was endowed by their creator with unalienable rights. I wanted to go take back the state department's role in articulating this fundamental truth about America. So that's what the commission was aimed at. Help folks will take a minute to go read the report. It's a little hard to find these days because the Biden state department pulled it off of the main part of the website.

It's still out there, but it shouldn't be controversial. All 10 of the commissioners from various faith backgrounds, and if you look at them, different political backgrounds could all agree, our constitution matters, our understanding of America's place in the world as a force for good. These things matter. And when we get them wrong, young kids who volunteered to be a Marine or in the Navy or the Air Force, their jobs will get harder, we'll be less secure, and our country will be less prosperous.

True. Our founders had it nailed. The Federalist Papers explained it all pretty well, Jay.

And if we can constantly remind ourselves of that and teach it to the next generation, we'll be just fine. We appreciate it. We encourage you to go to ACLJ.org and share that article, the Independence Day, Remember What Makes America Great. That's exclusive to the ACLJ by Secretary Pompeo. Support the work of the ACLJ at ACLJ.org. Our matching challenge month of July, where you can double the impact to your donation. That's at ACLJ.org. We encourage you to donate today.

Be part of that matching challenge. We'll be back with the second half hour of Sekulow. 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 taking your phone calls to 1-800-684-3110.

That's 1-800-684-3110. We encourage you to, if you were just listening to Secretary Pompeo, he talked about the Commission on Unalienable Rights. He talked about how the Biden administration's made it difficult to find their report on the efforts of the United States to uphold our unalienable rights, both in the U.S. and abroad. That commission is linked in the newest piece by Secretary Pompeo, up at ACLJ.org, entitled This Independence Day, Remember What Makes America Great.

So, instead of having to go and try to search for that throughout the State Department website, or using a search engine, you can go right to that piece and check that out. As he said, 300-plus lawsuits trying to take down this Commission on Unalienable Rights and this idea that you can't be proud to be an American. I mean, flying an American flag now for the last few years has become controversial.

Oh, it is. And so, the fact that that's a statement now, the Pledge of Allegiance has become controversial. We know, and it's constantly been under attack in courts, but it's this idea now, I don't think it was as widespreadly accepted as it is now, that now this idea that patriotism is bad.

You know, it was interesting, though. I noticed yesterday in the celebrations around the country on July 4th, though, there was this sense of, and I think this is because the American people are basically good people, and understand the importance and the blessing of liberty living in the United States. If you looked at the various networks that were covering the 4th of July festivities, it was pretty upbeat as far as living in this country. I did not see a lot of negative. I thought that was a good sign, because the political divisiveness is obviously huge.

And when you've got the government putting their hand on the thumb on the scale of information as we had, and the judge quickly shot that down, and we were in federal court on another case similar, it tells you why it's important to continue to fight for these freedoms. Let's go ahead and take calls, 1-800-684-3110. Let's go ahead and take a call. Yeah, let's go to Bob in Washington State, online one. Hey, Bob.

Hi, this is Bob from Washington State. I noticed you were on my Huckabee show this past Sunday, and that was great. And the question I had was, why are they protecting Joe and Hunter Biden so feverishly?

I mean, I can't believe. What special status do they have? Well, it's the status of the presidency of the United States, which gives you some protection. You cannot indict a sitting President. That doesn't apply to his son who has been indicted, ended up being two misdemeanor counts, and he had a really good lawyer in Abby Lowell. But that's why there's a legal distinction.

But you are 100% right. There's a lot of controversy on that right now, because allegedly whistleblowers are saying, and I say allegedly because there's a lot of back and forth on this on who's right and who's wrong, are saying that the US attorney was given very limited parameters of what he could do. Contrary to what Merrick Garland said, at least that's what's being alleged. Yeah, we're still trying to figure that out. Remember, you've got an IRS whistleblower who named names of people that were in the room and the different departments they're from.

Right now, again, we still have this holiday weird week. But remember, one of the last things done that happened last week before the holiday was that Jim Jordan and that committee requested they come testify. So they haven't gotten to the point where they've had to subpoena, but they have put that request in for the named people. And I don't think there's any way for most of them to make a case to Congress that they can't testify. It'd be interesting to see what the US attorney says. There's been some statements saying, at some point in the investigation, he said that he could, he said he could, he did feel like he could bring these cases wherever he wanted to. But it does seem like when the rubber met the road and they tried to bring the cases, these US attorneys were refusing it and so was the Department of Justice wouldn't override them. Right. Now, again, it's complicated.

The whistleblower is not an attorney. So you do have to kind of... That's why I'm saying alleged. Yeah. Keep it all with a great assault. But it is unique, I think, for conservatives to see a whistleblower come out in our favor, who is acknowledging at least the idea that people are treated to this two-tiered system of justice, which is something we can't allow to happen in our country. We encourage you to support the work of the ACLJ.

We're on top of all these issues. You can double the impact of your donation right now at ACLJ.org. That's ACLJ.org. Double the impact of your donation. Straight up matching challenge.

If you donate $25 right now at ACLJ.org, a donor will match that, and it's like $50 to the ACLJ. Right. Welcome back to SECU. We are taking your phone calls to 1-800-684-31.

Tim, we hope you had a great holiday weekend. And this idea, what it opposed to people as we're talking about these social media companies now, a federal court judge saying they need to limit their contact with social media companies when it comes to, again, not the idea of if there's an actual security threat, if it was promoting ISIS and giving them a heads up like these are the accounts they're using so that you know. There's a distinction there. And the idea that, again, any speech that was critical of the government was somehow the speech of an enemy. And that was what this judge is focused on being censored. If you question anything about COVID-19, if you question anything about the Hunter Biden laptop, if you question the election and what was going on with the election, it was immediately banned. And what they've said is that speech, the government can have their, the government can promote as many vaccines as it wants. That doesn't mean they should be able to just cancel people out from speaking or having a viewpoint. We're actually right now, I mean, this is what you have to file with Facebook.

I'm holding up my hands. They have an internal legal system, Logan. And right now they've utilized this kind of language to specifically target pro-life speech because when we say it's the taking of a life, they're flagging that as saying like you're promoting murder or the idea that you're talking about, so if you use words like the murder of the unborn or the life of the unborn, they are actively banning that. Yeah, we've had to fight against that, whether that's directly or indirectly, but indirectly, I mean, when we decide what we're going to title a show, we have to make sure we know that there's certain words that do not get served to people. So how do we talk about the important issues of the day while not avoiding getting completely squashed? Because again, at the end of the day, what we want is the most people to hear our content, most people to see your content.

That is the most important part about this broadcast. So if Facebook decides or whoever decides we don't want your content spread, well, then the message doesn't get out there. We're not sitting here behind a paywall.

We're not sitting here just being in an echo chamber. We want people to actually hear and think about these ideas. And when Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or whoever it is or any of them have these governance boards, there needs to be some transparency here. And when you have the opportunity to actually have these discussions, it'd be great. Something with Facebook, I mean, we used to have a representative at Facebook and they took that away at some point after spending however many dollars on advertising and the things you did, because Facebook was the boss at that time when it comes to the top tier social media platform.

Now, when I'm looking at this, though, and the way that we know that one of the processes is, they had a portal they could submit. And a lot of times this is being approved by lower level staff who were just or AI universally just say, okay, yeah, oh yeah, they're definitely the word list, but even the specific usage. Oh, like the context.

I mean, that's what we're pointing out in our appeal. It's not that everything that says kill is the right kind of speech, but you can't just assume generally if the word kill is being used that, and again, there's a lot of casual ways the word kill is used. And you can kill it, you could do this, you could do this.

You killed something, you murdered something. A lot of times that's a good could be used as positive. If a human being or even a well-trained AI is looking at it, it understands context, but they're utilizing the ideas almost like they're not complicated enough, so they have to be so simple, which we know is ridiculous and absurd, that they just have to ban everything with kill. They're not doing that, but they're using that to target pro-life speech. And so it's not the regular court process though, because it's a private company, they've set up their own tribunal internally. They have former judges and you have to appeal from within. And I guess having a public company and those things, there does need to be some kind of oversight in that sense.

And they figured out their way to do it is this way, but guess what? I assume that a large, large percentage of the people that work there do not agree with us on that issue. That's why context is so important. And if they don't have context for it, or they don't want to know the context for it, you can easily see how that... You know, what happens with a lot of these groups is it's not stopping you from posting it. It's stopping you from putting money behind it. Stops people seeing it. And stops people from seeing it. So they'll let you post it, but like Zuckerberg said with the Hunter Biden laptop, they made sure it didn't get served.

Yeah. Where there was options where this is obviously the pre-Elon Twitter said, you can't share this. Facebook said, you can share it. We're just not going to show it. And we're not going to show it because they're able to do that. It doesn't show up in your feed. Yeah. If you went to someone's page, but who's doing that?

Nobody. Very little are actually not looking, are looking beyond their own feeds or going to that. So it's just, it's not true. We had that clip from Joe Rogan, where it was Rogan and Zuckerberg, and they discussed it. Again, it was out in the open.

So let's take a listen. Can I say the distribution has decreased? It got shared.

How does that work? Basically the ranking in News Feed was a little bit less. So fewer people saw it than would have otherwise. So it definitely... By what percentage?

I don't know off the top of my head, but it's meaningful. But basically, a lot of people are still able to share it. We got a lot of complaints that that was the case. Obviously, this is a hyper political issue. So depending on what side of the political spectrum, you either think we didn't censor it enough or censored it way too much. But we weren't sort of as black and white about it as Twitter.

We just kind of thought, hey, look, if the FBI, which I still view as a legitimate institution in this country, it's a very professional law enforcement, they come to us and tell us that we need to be on guard about something, then I wanna take that seriously. I mean, there he goes. So he says it's significant. The fact that your content's not getting served, that was just on the laptop.

It was last year. Yeah. And what's weird to me is that usually these platforms would be... You would think, Logan would be the kind who say, you know what, if the government's telling us how to do it, let's really look deep in this because they shouldn't like that. But in a sense, they've become in line with the government because they're so reliant on different government protections, like the protections from Section 230 of the Communications Indecency Act, which make them immune from lawsuits for having a terrorist post. I think they get scared. Yeah, they get scared when you're dealing with situations where you say a terrorist posts content on their platform, who's responsible.

They are somewhat reliant. When you have billions of people, a billion plus people on your platform, you obviously can't monitor that. You can't monitor it in the way that's realistic.

You have to have these sort of stop gaps in between. I'm sure when the FBI shows up at your door or in your inbox saying, we don't want you to do this, it's probably very hard for them to say no. You have to have people who really will stand up to it and deal with the consequences of saying no to the FBI. And as he said, this was obviously the Hunter Biden situation. This was before a lot of the whistleblowing and exposing of what was going on at the FBI.

So there maybe was a bit more trust in just the brand, if you will. Let's go to Maria Collin from Florida Online 2. Hey, Maria, welcome to Sekulow.

Hey, how are you? Thank you for taking my call. Well, I wanted to let you know I was deleted four days before the election for posting about the laptop. That's the 2020 election, obviously. And something Pompeo mentioned that we are at risk of losing our freedom of speech or having people afraid of posting.

And that's where we're at already. After I've been deleted, I've been censored, I've lost my job. So it caused me not to delete every social media I had.

Yeah, I think that's what a lot of people have done. I mean, I think, Logan, it's not as many people have deleted their accounts because they make that very difficult to do. But they've stopped using it. Yeah, I think that's true.

And then you see pop-ups happen, like Rumble. I think that's been a success story so far and great for us. And Truth Social, which created its own kind of environment. But you still, the big three are still the big three. Yeah, and I think with like a YouTube situation or Rumble situation, the amount of energy it takes to produce a video is a lot different than firing off a Facebook post or a tweet. So it's always going to have a different kind of appeal because you have to have someone who has pretty significant technical skills to make content that people are going to ever see. When it comes to Facebook and Twitter, it's still that sort of, I'm putting this out into the universe, maybe Instagram as well.

I'm putting this out into the universe, take it as you want. And when it comes to those social media platforms, like you said, whether people are still using it or not, look, I'd be lying if I didn't say someone applies for a job here, we don't look at their social media. That's just at this point, that's due diligence. You want to see if the person's lying to you.

You want to see the person is actually holding the standard of which you are wanting out of your employee, or is this someone that's going to be destructive? That's happening across the board. So sure, if someone posts radical posts that go completely against the beliefs of the ACLJ, am I going to go, yes, a hundred percent, that person should be a person on board?

I don't think so. So I don't blame people for that, for just going, you know what, maybe I shouldn't be involved in this social discussion at all. And it's difficult. It's a way of life. It's addiction.

And to break that, and three people enjoy it. Can you take away that? But I think come election time, you should always, especially if you're someone who's looking for a job that's not in a world that's political, be careful what you post. I mean, it's interesting, but most people's jobs shouldn't really be that affected by their politics. I mean, but, and so that world, you shouldn't feel like if you post something, I mean, what's been, what's been absurd is that mainstream Republican posts are becoming hate speech. So just the idea, it's not going to be that fringy. Yeah, no, you just have to put that you're a conservative.

Yeah. I mean, if you're a Republican that's fringy enough. And, and so you're somehow doing something wrong. And listen, I get why people feel like they might have to be careful, but see, that's why groups like us exist. We don't have to worry about that part, but we do have to make sure that it's getting served and that we're using our resources, right. That we're spending the right time on the right resources or spending the advertising money, the right way to get it to people on these issues. And then who's being stopped from it, or if it's not being served, Hey, maybe let's not spend as much time and attention on that platform and move to somewhere else.

I mean, we're kind of there to be your voice when you're afraid to post when you're afraid to speak up. So we encourage you to support the work of the ACLJ. You can double your impact, your donation right now. It's our matching challenge at ACLJ.org. All right, welcome back to Seck Hill. We are taking your calls to 1-800-684-3110. It's our final segment.

So if you want to get in on the show, we encourage you to call right now at 1-800-684-3110. It's interesting moves too that we want to talk about a couple of different issues. We've seen the call again from the left to pack the court. Every time there's a judicial decision, I mean, and from the time that the Dobbs decision leaked out more than a year ago, reversing Roe versus Wade, which again, just sent the issue of abortion back to states. I mean, so some states are very liberal on abortion.

Some states are more conservative and have more restrictions on abortion. That was really the beginning of this war on the Supreme Court. I mean, to the point where the rhetoric got so intense that Supreme Court justices who usually after their confirmation, after they were on TV for a couple of weeks, even the ones that are more controversial, people don't know who they are.

People wouldn't be able to pick them out or even name them. But it got to a point where there were assassination attempts where they had to have their entire yard. I mean, there was literally someone arrested just a block away from Justice Kavanaugh's home with guns and weaponry.

So they had to put all the security around. Now there's a call yet again, if they disagree with a court opinion, which I think the left just got used to for decades, they would lose sometimes. But on the big issues, they'd win. And so they'd win on abortion. They won on the Affordable Care Act. And so they never called really for the court packing or the idea that we should impeach justices because they might have a different view of affirmative action.

I mean, think about what they're calling for. They're calling for the impeachment or removal of Supreme Court justices or the idea to pack them simply because they disagree with their judicial philosophy. They got confirmed by the Senate. They went through a public process.

They got chosen by a President. And this idea that that's not enough because they don't agree with where I am on a political issue. And again, the right has never taken that role. I don't think we've ever said, because a liberal justice is liberal, we have to impeach them or get rid of them.

But it starts a dangerous path. They already think that the court's so politicized. If you start legislating who gets impeached and who gets removed because of their views, and this again goes back to the affirmative action issue, the majority of Americans actually supported where the court was.

They didn't think it was right to discriminate against Asian students. Yeah. And this is what Adam Schiff tweeted. He put, we must expand and unstack this partisan court. So when you hear that kind of rhetoric coming from your elected officials, yeah, it should make you nervous that this is what they're going to try to do with the Supreme Court. And nothing is final in that sense.

But you're right. A lot of times they're voting in a way that does line up with where the American people are. The mainstream media doesn't want you to believe that. They don't want you to actually see that.

That's where they're going. And I think yes, that was a big one with the affirmative action situation where sure, people hear affirmative action. They're going to think one way. But then when you broke down what was actually going on, then the American people start to go, oh, well, maybe that was, maybe we need a reform here. Maybe it's not as cut and dry as it once was. And that's what I think the Supreme Court ruled.

Whether you like it or not, they ruled that it was maybe appropriate for a time, but not appropriate for now. And I think we're going to see those kind of laws. Look, I think that's what happened with Dobbs, is that technology advanced, things advanced, where states were saying, we don't want abortion in our state.

And now they have to get to make that decision. And that's where we ended up. That's where we landed as a country. Whether you like that or not, you may want a federal ban on it. Frankly, this is where we are right now, statewide. So I think that that's an interesting point. You have a lot of also conservatives, and I think this is, it's the good and the bad about it, that are fine confirming liberal judges, justices, elected officials, not elected officials, but appointed positions that they have to approve because they understand the way the system works.

It's probably a dirty word about some people, but it's like a Lindsey Graham who comes and goes, you know what, if you're qualified to be on the Supreme Court, there's a good chance I'm going to support you, even if I disagree with you on every issue. That's kind of how it was. For a long time, that's how it was. Then it became, even like the Clarence Thomas situation, and really since then, a major shift. And obviously that happened a lot more aggressively during the Trump years.

Yes. And that, again, that all began under Joe Biden. That's where the war began. It was some of those clips where Joe Biden is already at the point, this was probably 35 years ago, saying nonsense that even Clarence Thomas was like, I have no idea what he was saying. It's a pretty funny clip from his documentary. It's interesting.

It's terrifying. The AOC school, which went to Boston University, their law school is offering counseling to law students because of the Supreme Court decisions. Do you ever want an attorney representing you that needs to get counseling because they disagree with the affirmative action case out of the Supreme Court? I mean, who would want that attorney? Most of the time when people have attorneys, they're being accused of some wrongdoing that's pretty extreme. It's not all nice flowers and this idea that your attorneys could accept mentally, that the court may disagree with them on some issues, that the point that they need counseling.

But listen to what she said. It's the war on the court and it's taken up a notch because they tried to attack their faith that backfired. Now Judge Barrett is Justice Barrett, but they are taking it to another level.

Let's take a listen to the AOC. We have justices saying that the Supreme Court is going themselves much too far. They are expanding their role into acting as though they are Congress itself. We really must be focusing on the danger of this court and the abuse of power in this court. There also must be impeachment on the table. The Supreme Court has not been receiving the adequate oversight necessary in order to preserve their own legitimacy.

So, I mean, there you go. Impeachment has to be on the table to oversee their legitimacy, not because they committed a high crime of misdemeanor. I mean, they can impeach for what they want, but they did try to put some limits on it.

Is it a high crime of misdemeanor to have a different view on affirmative action or to believe that an individual shouldn't be forced into representing a client they disagree with? I mean, does AOC's companies all have to take conservatives at their businesses that they run and their consulting firms that they run and their families run? No, but this is the new war and they've been effective in radicalizing. I think that we sometimes look at it again, the idea that the American flag is controversial. The July 4th is now controversial. Yeah, we're going to talk a lot more about that on the secular brothers podcast today. We're going to talk about the Ben & Jerry's controversy that we've seen, their social media posts.

Again, I don't know how a major corporation like Unilever lets them post what they did, but they come up with a pretty big anti-American pitch on the 4th of July. So we're going to talk about that on secular brothers, but people see like the court packing stuff, Jordan, they see all these things, they get concerned. That's why we're here at the ACLJ. We are in the middle of the very beginning of our matching challenge.

That's right. We encourage you to support the work of the ACLJ at the beginning of this matching challenge. If you're new to us and you say, okay, what is this? And you sometimes see these matches mentioned before politics and other folks that again, you may be contacted.

Ours is very simple and straightforward. It's a complete match of your donation. So if you donate 50 bucks online at ACLJ.org right now, we have a group of donors that say we're going to match that. So because you donated $50, an additional $50 gets donated to the ACLJ. So you see how, again, your support, it doubles your impact to the ACLJ.

So we encourage you to do that at ACLJ.org. We encourage you to share the broadcast. Check out Mike Pompeo's piece because I think it's so important. We just came out of a holiday. It's becoming controversial, as we've seen already, to fly the flag, to have pride in our country. And we're seeing those poll numbers go below 50%. People are proud to be an American.

But are they afraid to say that they're proud to be American because their job could be in jeopardy? So all of these questions, we're going to get into more of it on the Secular Brothers podcast, too, and how corporate America is pushing these ideas that America is the problem, that the United States is the problem in the world. Instead of being the shining city on the hill, we're the world's problem. And so we need to be destroyed from within. So support the work of the ACLJ. Donate today at ACLJ.org. Be part of that Matching Challenge.