Killing Free Speech!

The following program is recorded content created by Truth Network.

And now, here's your host, Steve Noble. Facebook, because of our age, but a lot of us are not on Twitter, you may think, I don't use Twitter, I don't do the tweeting thing, all that stuff. It's not very interesting. However, you may not invest much in Twitter, but Twitter has invested much in you and has made a big impact on you. Twitter has in fact made a big impact on the entire nation. And that's why even though Twitter is not nearly as big in terms of users as Facebook is, it has massively been massively influential. Especially in the cultural dialogue and in political dialogue for years now. And it's really important to understand what's going on behind the scenes as they do these Twitter files dump number seven today since Elon Musk bought and took over Twitter.

And that's a fascinating story in itself. But just because you don't use Twitter, don't don't think that Twitter hasn't been impactful in your life. It has. You could make a case that because of Twitter, Joe Biden is the president today instead of Donald Trump, you can make that case. And I don't think that case is stretching it much. And so Twitter has been enormously impactful and influential and in very nefarious ways for the abridging of free speech in America, and mostly just its unusually intense impact on the public dialogue and media itself, the way news stories are covered.

Because news people are looking at Twitter all the time, thinking that that's some kind of an accurate representation of the voice or thoughts of the American people. And it's not. But man, has it been impactful. So I want to I want to unpack a bunch of that for you today. But a couple of big breaking news things that just happened today.

You may have heard this already. The infamous now infamous January 6, House January 6 committee voted on Monday, they're recommending to the Justice Department, four charges for former President Donald Trump recommended that he be charged with obstructing an official proceeding, that's the counting of the Electoral College votes, conspiring to defraud the United States, which doesn't even make sense, conspiring to make false statements to the federal government, and inciting an insurrection. Now, this is I mean, there's so many I was going to read some of these quotes coming out of this house, January 6 committee, but I'm not because it's just ridiculous. So we'll see what happens.

It's going to make 2023 fascinating and intensely, I would say, uncomfortable and alarming year. But they're recommending these charges, six charges they're recommending to the Department of Justice. The DOJ doesn't have to do anything with it.

But do you really think they won't? Merrick Garland, who's comfortable putting a letter out there calling parents concerned parents that go to school board meetings, essentially labeling them and us as domestic terrorists, that Merrick Garland? Plus, these people have so much Trump derangement syndrome.

They can't help themselves, but can they go anywhere with it in a court of law? So that'll be Merrick Garland and his new lapdog, Smith, who's running a special counsel on the Mar-a-Lago stuff. These people are not going to stop until they just want to paint Trump with as much as they can. Whether he deserves it or not, whether it's real or not, doesn't matter. He's getting painted with it.

Okay. And my concern is I think that at this point, I think that's made Donald Trump unelectable when it comes to a general election. Certainly, I think he can win a primary. I don't think he can win a general election. And if somebody like Ron DeSantis got in, I think we're going to spend a lot of time talking about Twitter. I think we could legitimately see Ron DeSantis run and push for a bunch of investigations.

Hopefully clean out the DOJ, the FBI, a bunch of the organizations there in the swamp, which needs to be done. And just like they're not releasing all the information from the JFK stuff. And every month I have less and less faith in our federal government. And I don't enjoy saying that. That's terribly alarming.

And you're going to see with the Twitter stuff today, how far does the rabbit hole go and how long has it been dug? It's really concerning. One little other thing here, because I've known Father Frank Pavone for years. When I became an activist back in 2004, I met him in 2005. The Vatican decides to get to get tough. And they actually defrocked Father Frank Pavone, who's been a firebrand pro-life activist for years, a Catholic priest.

And they kicked him out just recently. This action was taken after Father Pavone was found guilty in canonical proceedings of blasphemous communications on social media and a persistent disobedience of the lawful instructions of his diocesan bishop. Because he's been beat up by the Catholic Church for years.

And he went on in a meeting to describe the circumstances of his blasphemous communication, saying that he had typed the word GD in a tweet in 2020. OK, that's on un-conduct, unbecoming. But do you defrock a priest for that? What about all the priests that are giving communion to all these pro-abort Democrat so-called Catholics out there?

What about those guys? Those guys should be defrocked. I think serving communion to somebody and then the Catholic Church communion isn't just, you know, a simple thing.

It's one of their holy sacraments, if you will. And so to serve that over to somebody that's part and parcel on board with the destruction, the murdering of children, preborn children, you're not going to kick those guys out. You're not going to defrock those guys, but you're going to defrock Father Frank Pavone, who's been one of the leading voices for life in the last 40 years because he said something he shouldn't have in a tweet.

And he gives his leadership a hard time. This coming from the same church that kept pedophiles in their employ for decades and has been protecting that for centuries. So there's your moral authority right there.

See ya. OK, so a lot of the folks that are dumping the information from Twitter now that Elon Musk owns it are part of a website that's called the Free Press. OK, the Free Press. And so you've got several people involved in these dumps that are going on. Susie Weiss, Peter Savodnik, Olivia Rheingold.

You have Abigail Schrier, Michael Shellenberger, who did a big dump today. And so they're the ones that have worked with Elon Musk in order to get access to the Twitter files and all the Slack things, which is intercompany communication, to see what in the world has been going on with Twitter as they've been affecting the culture, the nation, the politics and even the last presidential election. And this is dark, difficult, disturbing stuff coming out of Twitter that shows you how few people are actually in charge of what's going on in this country. And boy, should we be praying for this nation or what?

This is Steve Nolte. OK, put on your fast listening skills here because I'm going to take you through several of these articles from the folks that Elon has partnered with. Elon Musk has partnered with to do all these dumps of Twitter information. A lot of this information is internal emails. Their Slack channel, which is for those of us that are older, Slack is just an internal communications platform so that people inside Twitter, inside any company can talk to each other back and forth.

As opposed to doing an email or text or whatever, Slack allows you to do that. So this first article is just our reporting at Twitter. OK, this is kind of the story of how did all of a sudden, once Elon Musk bought Twitter, they started to have, you're going to get all this information dump out there. OK, so I want to read you most of this article, our reporting at Twitter. The story of Twitter's former overlords is about their prejudices and power trips. The question now is what Elon Musk will do with the powerful tools they created.

This just came out today. At dinnertime on December 2nd, I received a text from Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, founder of SpaceX, the boring company Neuralink on most days, the richest man in the world. And as of October, the owner of Twitter. Was I interested in looking at Twitter's archives? He asked. And how soon could I get to Twitter HQ?

Two hours later, I was on a flight from LA to SF. And so off this person goes. OK, one of the people that's been putting the information out there on Twitter that's working with Elon. In the days that followed, we, the journalist Matt Tabibi, investigative reporters connected to the Free Press, which is where I'm reading this from. Plus, Free Press reporters Susie Weiss, Peter Savonidic, Olivia Rheingold and Isaac Grafstein camped out in a windowless fluorescent lit room at Twitter headquarters and began looking through the company's vast archive of internal communications. The only condition Musk imposed was that was that we first published our findings on Twitter itself. Twitter was founded in 2006.

It's impossible to calculate how many emails and internal Slack messages and reports that is generated over the years. And they said, you know, how are they going to pull all this together? We had to work through lawyers using e-discovery tools. Software designed for lawyers to help them search huge amounts of information. So we entered search terms, mostly dates and names of former Twitter executives, and over many hours, files would pop up. We then stitched together a chronology of events and communications.

We did not selectively retrieve or cherry pick files with an eye towards servicing a particular agenda. Our goal was simply to figure out what had happened at crucial moments in the history of the country and the company, company being Twitter. As for Musk's aim, what was his goal in asking us to exhume the so-called Twitter files? And what did the man obsessed with outer space decide to spend forty four billion dollars on a social media company that has made most of us feel more claustrophobic? Those are much harder questions to hear Musk tell it.

His motivation is obvious. It's about saving the world. Quote, I'm not going to spend forty four billion dollars to reinstate a satire blog.

He was referencing Babylon Bee because that got banned. I did it because I was worried about the future of civilization. As far as Musk sees things, quote, birth rates are plummeting. The thought police are gaining power and even having an opinion is enough to be shunned.

We are trending in a bad direction, unquote. He says he wants to transform Twitter from a social media platform, distrusted and despised by at least half the country into one widely trusted by most Americans. To have it fulfill its highest mission, that of a digital town square where all ideas can be heard and the best will win out. If there's one information source that breaks ranks, then I think it ultimately forces others not to have the same narrative.

He said, even if one organization competes hard for the truth, others will have to follow to win back. To win back that trust Musk figured it would require being honest about what had until very recently been going on at the company. He just bought the suppression of disfavored users, the curtailing of certain political views that would be conservatives, the censorship of stories like the Hunter Biden laptop and the extent to which the government had tried to influence such decisions. Now, that's actual censorship. When the government works with a social media company to start pushing down on communications, that's government sanctioned censorship. OK, when a private company is doing it, that's a little more sticky. But when the government's doing it via the FBI, OK, now you've got a case. We have a goal here, which is to clear the decks of any prior wrongdoing and move forward with a clean slate, Musk said. I'm sleeping at Twitter HQ for a reason.

This is a code red situation. So now they're just digging into everything, OK? At one point after midnight, as Musk showed off a closet of swag, including T-shirts left by the previous crew that said stay woke, he joked the barbarians have crashed in through the gates and are pillaging the merch. He laughs a lot, they say in the article. Musk estimates that he paid at least twice what it was worth, but that he had to chew down this hairball, which is to say he had to buy Twitter. The price tag isn't his only grievance. There's also the fact that the company, to hear him tell it, wasn't really a functioning company at all. When Musk took over, he said he found Twitter in disarray.

Employees had unlimited vacation time and permanent work from home. The company had stopped doing performance reviews altogether, according to a longtime Twitter employee. Quote, As long as Twitter could just keep its head above water and be roughly cash flow breakeven, then that's all they cared about, Musk said. Musk calls the Twitter he purchased a non-profit. Twitter as it existed wasn't pursuing net earnings, but social influence, which is the key.

This was fundamentally an activist organization, quote, unquote. Since he took the helm at Twitter, he has fired 80 percent of the staff. He's insisted that those not prepared to be extremely hardcore. Yeah, so he's keeping everybody. He's only keeping the people who want to work hardcore. OK, they're working like 18 hours a day. In the two stories we are publishing today, Twitter's secret blacklist and why Twitter really banned Trump, you'll see evidence of Musk's claim that at old Twitter they were pressing the thumb hard in favor of the left.

This is a direct quote. On the left, you could get away with the death threats. On the right, you could get suspended for retweeting a Trump rally. In one sense, that shouldn't be surprising. Twitter is in San Francisco.

Its workforce is between 97 and 99 percent Democrat. If institutions are just people, well, of course, Twitter would be would more readily censor conservatives, which is exactly what's been happening. Now they have the proof. What's surprising is how thoroughly Twitter misled the public, insisting that they didn't suppress disfavored users and topics when they absolutely did. Let me pause here for a second and just think of all the articles, all the things you've read, Fox News, whatever, I don't care where you're getting it from, that that would reference tweets. Tweets became the crime scene, a person on the crime scene that saw the whole thing.

And you got there. You're the good ace reporter and you got them a comment and then you put it in the story, which adds validity to the story. So now in one tweet and another tweet and this tweet and that tweet and then polls on Twitter, all kinds of stuff. Well, this is trending on Twitter. Well, if it's trending on Twitter, that must be what the American people think. No, it isn't.

It's what a company thinks. That's 99 percent liberal, progressive Democrat. And that moved the needle of the entire conversation across the country.

OK, that's why this is so dangerous. I don't think we live in a representative republic. I think we live in an oligarchy.

An oligarchy is a country controlled by a very small group of people, very small, very powerful. Musk promises that the future of Twitter will be a level playing field. We'll see. But if the story of old Twitter is about the biases and prejudices and power trips of the company's former overlords, the question is what Musk will now do with the powerful tools they've created. What does it mean when the owner of Twitter tweets that his pronouns are prosecute and Fauci? Lots of people thought it was hilarious. Many others thought it was horrifying. It's certainly not apolitical.

Doesn't that take us back to where we were before? Now, the thing I don't necessarily agree with everything in this article, but these are the people that Trump asked to write to help dump the Twitter files and get the information out there. And Barry Weiss, the person writing this article, she's been like hammering Elon on Twitter about some things that he's done in the last few days. OK, well, that's the deal. That's free speech. You don't like it?

Too bad. Just yesterday, news broke of Twitter banning Elon Jet at Elon Jet, an account with half a million followers that tracked the movements of his plane. Musk justified it by saying any account doxing real time location info that's telling people where somebody lives. If anyone will be suspended as it is a physical safety violation and noted that a stalker recently climbed onto a car carrying his young son. Another answer could simply be I own Twitter, my platform, my rules.

Right. So where's it going to go from here? And he does say he's open to ideas. And over the weekend, he tweeted a poll. Should I step down as leadership and I'll abide by the answer in the majority?

About 55 percent said, yeah, you shouldn't be leading the company war when we come back. Welcome back at Steve Noble, The Steve Noble Show, and I will be here tomorrow and Wednesday. Have a great show on the incarnation for Theology Thursday that I recorded already with our friends at B.J.U.

Seminary. So that's awesome that I love that interview. Oh, my goodness.

It was so good about the incarnation, God taking on human flesh in the form of Jesus Christ, who we celebrate his birth this time of year. Right. So that's Thursday. I'm off Thursday, Friday and Monday. So today I'm doing kind of some new stuff. And then tomorrow and what's today? Monday. Goodness.

Where does the time go? So today, tomorrow, Wednesday, I'm doing the annual conversation about Santa Claus. And my favorite evangelical Santa Claus is going to zoom in for the final segment of the show. He's a dear friend. He's in the Santa Claus Hall of Fame. He's all over the place. So that'll be fun.

I have that conversation every year about should Christians do the Santa thing or not? So we'll do that on Wednesday. Anyway, talking about Twitter and Elon Musk and everything going on now. Number seven, Twitter file dump number seven today on Twitter. And I'm reading some articles from the journalists that Musk has partnered with who are releasing all this stuff. The free press for free people.

This is where most of these people come from. But this one's from the Daily Wire. This just came out as a result of the Twitter file number seven dump today. New Twitter file shows FBI paid Twitter millions. That should concern you. Influence execs to censor Hunter Biden laptop story.

Oh, goodness gracious. The bombshell story about Hunter Biden's laptop from the New York Post was censored after the FBI had repeatedly warned Twitter executives about foreign election interference campaigns, according to the seventh installment of the Twitter files released Monday. Today, previous editions of the project have shown that federal law enforcement policed content on the platform and asked executives to remove certain posts.

That's censorship. Somebody's got to sue the feds here. Even before the New York Post released the now infamous October 2020 article, which included evidence that Hunter Biden introduced his father to a Ukrainian businessman, FBI officials pressured Twitter management to censor the story. Indeed, there existed an organized effort, quote, an organized effort by representatives of the intelligence community aimed at senior executives at news and social media companies to discredit leaked information about Hunter Biden before and after it was published. According to independent journalist Michael Shellenberger, the FBI also paid Twitter more than three point four million dollars for their quote unquote legal process response, apparently referencing the time Twitter executives spent coordinating with the agency.

Did you? This is Twitter executives coordinating with the FBI. Now, that is this is like McCarthyism. This is black ops, big government, big brother shutting down free speech, controlling the narrative, controlling information in order to control the American people.

So the America of our founding fathers is in the ground. OK, this is something different. FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan sent 10 documents to former Twitter head of site integrity Yole Roth on the evening October 13th, hours before the New York Post article would be released. Chan urged Roth that the documents were not spam and asked him to confirm receipt. Two minutes later, Roth replied, received and downloaded.

Thanks. Beyond the communications on October 13th, Shellenberger pointed to legal testimony from Roth and recent comments from Metta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. They indicated that FBI officials had spent months priming Twitter and Facebook leadership to expect hack and leak operations from state actors ahead of the 2020 election, even though Chan had admitted that no new intelligence had prompted them to reach such a conclusion. This is the swamp people inside the bureaucracy, inside the FBI and the DOJ and other places who hate Trump. This was about Trump, ultimately, and control of the country. And as long as you get Trump in there, you don't have control. OK, you got a big problem there named Donald J. Trump.

Twitter executives repeatedly reported very little Russian activity of concern in the months before the election. So they're setting them up. That's what it looks like. Hey, this stuff's going to come out and there's a lot of Russian activity out there.

Oh, yeah, we got some stuff. The New York Post and Hunter Biden, this laptop thing. Oh, no, that's Russian. Russia, Russia, Russia, as the former president likes to say. Of concern, very little Russian activity of concern in the months before the election and emails to the FBI, according to Shellenberger, until multiple news outlets that negligible election interference had been occurring through Russian accounts. So the reality was Russia wasn't really all that active.

Nevertheless, the FBI worked relentlessly to influence journalists and social media executives. See, they're priming the pump before the Hunter stuff comes out. Why? Because they want Joe Biden in there, not Donald Trump. One workshop hosted by the Aspen Institute in September 2020 prepared Roth, the head of security policy at META, that's Facebook, and the top national security reporters for The New York Times and The Washington Post on how to handle a purported document dump from Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company where Biden provided scant services for enormous paychecks. Everybody's covering for who? The Democrats and in this case, Joe Biden, because you got to get Trump out of there. Chan arranged in July 2020 for Twitter executives to receive temporary security clearances one month before the election.

Oh, my goodness. Former FBI General Counsel Jim Baker had been working at Twitter, and there were so many FBI alums that they had started a new Slack channel to onboard new arrivals from the law enforcement agency. Twitter hired a bunch of former FBI people. Now, this sounds like a James Bond movie. It isn't.

This is your country. Roth and Chan eventually created a virtual war room for Internet executives, as well as officials from the FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, also known as the ODNI. When the New York Post article was published on October 14th, Roth said in an email that the story was not clearly in violation of the company's hacked materials policy or anything else. But added that the story felt, oh, got to follow your feelings, a lot like a somewhat subtle leak operation. Baker, the former FBI guy, insisted to Roth that the materials from the laptop were either faked or hacked. We now know they were real, even though the New York Post had included a receipt from the pair shop signed by Hunter Biden himself.

A subsequent now listen, this is this is the kicker here. A subsequent poll of Biden voters in critical swing states commissioned by the Media Research Center found that forty five point one percent said they were unaware of the financial scandal enveloping Biden and his son Hunter. While awareness of the scandal would have led nine point four percent of voters to abandon Biden as their preferred candidate. Oops.

Nine point four percent. Steve, that's not a big deal. It is in certain states. The current commander in chief won states such as Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin by extraordinarily narrow margins, implying that knowledge of the story could have changed the outcome of the race. Oh, I wonder if perhaps that is what the deep state, the FBI, the Department of Justice, all the anti Trump people in Washington, D.C., I wonder if that's what they were trying to do. Any comment on that, Mr. President?

I think that's ridiculous. Where am I supposed to stand now? There's two other articles here that I want time for. Maybe I will tomorrow.

A little up in the air about what I'm doing tomorrow. Why Twitter really banned Trump is because they wanted to. Nothing he tweeted on January six violated their actual rules. They let other people talk about killing all Israelis, killing Jews. They didn't do anything with those people.

They left them on. But Trump, they got rid of. Why? Because you have a company run by ninety eight, ninety nine percent liberal Democrat progressives.

And they hated the guy just like the establishment in D.C. hated the guy. And you've got to get rid of them. It's like what every unbeliever on the planet does for the most part. You've got to kill God.

In this case, you've got to kill the one thing that's in your way. That's another Trump presidency. So talk about collusion. The FBI, ostensibly, the Department of Justice, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, all of them. They're all communicating.

That's what we're learning from all this. Why Twitter really banned Trump? Because they hated them.

And they knew that if they banned them, they could affect things in the country. This is all about power and control. Just like our friends at Called to Peace Ministries talks about power and control, which is abuse. Remember, we talked about the power and control wheel with our friends at Called to Peace Ministries.

Power and control wheel. It's all about power. Abuse is all about power.

And that's what this is. Why do you think Republican and Democrat Party exists in the first place? To win. Because unless you win, you have no power. And if you have no power, you can't do anything. We want power. You want power. I want power. I want power in Washington, D.C. Why? I want power in the North Carolina governor's mansion. Why? I want power in the North Carolina state legislature and the North Carolina Supreme Court.

Why? Because with power, you can change things. No power, no change.

And now because we're talking about the expansive, unbelievable, shocking power and influence of the United States federal government, you will do whatever you have to do to control it. You will spend as much money as you need to spend in order to get a guy who had a stroke in May to be a sitting U.S. senator. The guy can't get to a regular conversation. He can't listen to you effectively.

He has to see your words on a screen because of his stroke. That's Fetterman. It was never about Fetterman. It was about his seat. And it's about his seat because it's about power. Look at the U.S. Senate. This is about power. Unadulterated, raw power and the abuse that invariably happens. And then this other article, Twitter's secret blacklist.

I posted both of these on the Facebook Live page today. If you can find it. So just remember, and I was talking about this in one of my classes last week, the overall arc of history is down. Everything is the Titanic will sink and then Jesus comes back.

OK. And in the meantime, you can have little blips, little upticks here and there. But if you're a Christian, you still fight for truth no matter what. You're still salt and light no matter what. You still speak truth to power no matter what. Even when the power you're speaking to is driving its own boat into the ground at the bottom of the ocean. You still speak truth to power.

And I don't grieve over this stuff as somebody that has no hope. I have ultimate hope because I know this is all temporary. The kingdom is forever. We'll be right back. Welcome back at Steve Noble, the Steve Noble Show, just taking a gander right quick at the the market for the last five days because they raised interest rates a half a point last week. And so if you just go look at the last five days, you're like, wow, look at that last Tuesday, last Wednesday in the markets at like thirty four thousand.

Now it's down to thirty two thousand seven hundred fifty seven. So a lot going on there continues to go on there. And so for us to try to be good stewards of whether you have very little, just enough, a little bit extra, a medium amount of extra.

Maybe you have a lot of extra wherever you happen to be with that. The Bible talks to us a lot about money and possessions, which is why we talk about it on a regular basis with our good friend David Fisher from Landmark Capital. David, how are you, buddy? Hey, I'm doing great. Merry Christmas to you, my friend. Merry Christmas. Thank you so much. It's always great to hear from you.

So before we jump into some some really important things going on with the Fed raising rates just last week, the market reaction, everything we've seen there. Let's start back in some of our should be some of our favorite passages of scripture this time of year and any time of year. I'd love thinking about talking about the incarnation. Why did Jesus come on this rescue mission to save us? Why were we at sinners? Christ died for us. I love this passage. Matthew, too. We'll start there.

Thanks. So do I. Verses one and two in verse 11. Now, when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem, saying, Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the east and have come to worship him. Verse 11. And when they came into the house, they saw the young child with Mary, his mother, and fell down and worshipped him. And when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts, gold and frankincense and mirth. So I want to make sure we understand some significance here. You know, the wise men, they brought these three things, gold, frankincense, the mirth, and I think gold is symbolic of Christ's deity as king. Frankincense represents his purity of the priesthood of God, and mirth suggests his anointed work as a prophet and of his death.

But I think those are important. The wise men also, at the beginning, immediately they fell down and worshipped him. They knelt down and worshipped him. So let's apply gold, frankincense, and mirth to our lives today in the aspects of worship, too. I think gold represents really money, or stewardship, and also giving. Giving is a way to worship. Frankincense is, I think it represents purity, you know, living a purer life.

I want to encourage anybody to strive for that. That's a type of worship. Mirth, God's anointing. We should all believe that he has anointed us. Let's just receive it. Let's walk in that anointing.

So this is our worship, our spiritual service to the Lord, and I do want to be practical when we talk about worship. And so I'm going to give a challenge out today. Steve, you touched so many lives.

It's such an honor for me to be called your friend and come on your program. And I'm going to challenge people because I'm going to do something. Mary and I are going to, in fact I've already done this, I wrote out a check out this morning for $1,000 for your ministry above what we normally give. I want to encourage other people to sow good seeds in your ministry, in other ministries, whatever you think, and give a worship unto the Lord through stewardship. But also, you know, I'm not saying don't forget the other areas that we just mentioned, because this is our spiritual service is unto the Lord. You just touched so many lives, and I want to keep that going. Well, God bless you, David. And you and Mary Ann, please pass that on to her. You guys have been such great encouragers to me. The vast majority of our friendship and our brotherhood is not the time that we spend on the radio. It's just the bond that God has given us over these several years and walking with you through the challenges you've faced and just being on the wall together for the kingdom, more so than any financial gain either one of us could ever hope for. God gives us so much more, and I just praise the Lord for that. And thank you for your generosity and for the encouragement, especially on the air. I can't say thank you enough. You know how much I love you, so thank you. And please pass that on to Mary Ann.

Let me ask you this, and then we'll go to some of these things that we need to talk about. But what's your favorite thing that you do at Christmas? Well, so here's what we do every year, which is two things. The obvious is either New Year's or Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. We gather family together, and that's a very important time. But there's something that my wife and I do together, almost always alone, and that's when she puts up the Christmas tree and decorates the house. I'm there to help her, but usually I get in the way. So I sit down and I play the piano more than I ever played at the time of year.

This time was like three hours. My hand is tired. I play Christmas music. And so this is kind of like this background interaction with the Lord as my wife's doing her blessing for her family.

She loves music. And so that's probably one of the highlights. Yeah, that's so cool. That's just a great vision to capture you doing that while she's decorating. And that's good for both of you.

Praising the Lord and you're staying out of her way, which is wise. We like that. So I mentioned that last week. The Fed raised the rates half a point. The markets obviously haven't liked that. It's been in the red ever since. But usually, David, it seems like there's kind of this year-end Christmas going to New Year's kind of rally, kind of turn around right there at the end of the year. Can we expect that, or are we just such in a different season that that's not going to happen?

Yeah, it's a different season. I mean, since last Wednesday, eventually it was a lot of red. So the numbers is the Dow's down 4.5% since last Wednesday.

The NASDAQ 6.5% and the S&P 5.3% down. So this is just less than a week, all because of the Fed. So there's this millionaire CNBC Club survey. This puts it into perspective.

It's a survey that happens every year around this time. Millionaires own 89% of U.S. stocks. In other words, they can control the market. But the millionaires are being bearish right now. 56% of them expect the S&P to drop 10% or more in 2023. A third of them say 15% or more. And the last time the wealthy investors have been this bearish every year, going back, you have to go all the way back to 2008.

Oh, boy. Their biggest threat to their wealth is stocks, they say. Not real estate, not gold, not silver, not annuities or any other investment.

Not cash. It's stocks. So they say few of them are planning to invest in stocks, more money in 2023. In fact, just the opposite. They're moving more money towards cash in their portfolio this year than last year.

Except for the age gap of millenniums, 81% of millennial millionaires expect that the market will be higher in 2023, while baby boomers say it's going to be much lower. So that's the poll. Interesting.

It's very interesting. So I don't expect the market rally this year at the end. And I don't think, you know, next year, in the first week in January, when you have a long segment, I'm going to give what I call the good, the bad and the ugly. We're going to go over all three of those things, what I think is the good things are going to happen, some okay things and some ugly things. We'll go into depth on that.

Oh, boy. Do you want to do the full first show of the year? Do you want to do that on January 2nd or January 9th? Totally up to you. I'm good either way.

Let me see here real quick. I'll look at my calendar. No, figure it out later. Just let me know. We'll do it either way.

It's fine. If we want to do it the 9th. We're closed on January 2nd, so it might be the 9th. Oh, yeah. Let's do the 9th.

Okay, cool. We'll do that. Now, at the end of the year, David, you usually talk about, there's usually a bunch of discounts involved in the gold and silver market.

Is that happening now or, again, are we in a different kind of season so that's not happening? So it's kind of weird this year again, but here's what we're doing as Landmark Capital. I'm buying a significant amount of metals at discounts from the wholesalers, and we're going to do a full-blown discount to everybody as a way of saying thank you and also passing the savings on that we get. We're passing it on to the clients. Most companies don't do this.

We do this. So the first, instead of doing it between Christmas and New Year's because of the way the holiday lands this time and the limited work week we have next week, we're going to have a full-blown discount of a whole bunch of different products the first week in January, not the Monday because we're off on the Monday because it's New Year's. So on the 3rd of January, if you want to learn about that discount, it's Fast and Furious, and products are there until the discount, you know, they're sold.

Yeah, until you're out of products. It's in the first week. Yeah, and then for people that are kind of newer to this, David, and maybe they're newer to the show or one of the newer stations, what's the best way for them to kind of just get their toes in the water to start to understand, okay, what place does actual physical gold and silver, taking possession in this case, taking possession in terms of coins, to understand the value of that, the use of that, its placement in a portfolio, overall strategy. What's the best thing that they can do?

Is it a conversation, is it kind of a white paper, or what's their kind of first step for people? So I encourage if you're thinking about investing and you never have, don't call us to anticipate like you're going to invest. Let's get some education.

People perish for lack of knowledge or wisdom. Call us between now and then, this week, or, you know, the Tuesday and Wednesday next week, because we're going to be closed the Thursday and Friday of next week. Call us just to get some education, an interactive conversation. You're going to learn, and then if you want to invest in January, you can do that. We can send you out a packet. But yeah, interactive conversation. Yeah, just get a 411, just a 101 on how to do this.

How can people initiate that, David? Simple, call us 844-604-2575, 844-604-2575, or landmarkgold.com, and there's no obligation. Got it. Thank you, my brother. Have a very merry Christmas. Thank you for your generosity more so. Thank you for your friendship. I love you. I love you, too.

Blessings to you and your bride also. Okay, pal. Thanks again. We'll talk soon. This is Steve Noble on The Steve Noble Show. If you're willing, we'll talk again real soon.