Senator Eric Schmitt: Exposing the Biggest Censorship Scandal in US History

The hosts introduce their guest as Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri. They say they met him through J.D. Vance, a former senator and now vice president, who entered the Senate at the same time as Schmitt. Their freshman group still has dinner once a month. The occasion for the interview is Schmitt's new book, The Last Line of Defense, about his previous job as Missouri's attorney general. In that role he brought the censorship lawsuit the hosts remember discussing on the show around 2022, which the conversation calls both "Biden v. Missouri" and "Missouri versus Biden."

The discussion frames the lawsuit as a free speech fight. One host asks whether the guest acted on intuition or on a leak when he decided to pursue discovery. At that point there were only rumors and a general sense that people were being censored, and nobody knew how it worked. The answer starts with why the book was written. It opens in November 2024, when "the fever broke," and looks back at the previous four years, which it describes as a period of lockdowns, compulsory COVID shots, forced masking of five-year-olds, and a large censorship operation.

in my view, was the greatest affront to the First Amendment we've ever seen in the history of our country.

The public signals came first. The discussion cites White House press secretary Jen Psaki saying from the podium that the administration was flagging content for Facebook, and the proposed disinformation governance board linked to Nina Jankowicz, whom the speaker mockingly calls "the Mary Poppins herself." The reasoning was that if officials would say this much in public, much more had to be happening out of sight. In May 2022, speaking as Missouri's attorney general, the guest says the state sued the Biden administration and what he calls a "leviathan of agencies" working to censor American speech.

The guest calls one strategic choice central to the case. A suit like this would normally open with a request for a temporary restraining order or a preliminary injunction to stop the conduct. Missouri asked for discovery first, because the complaint contained only allegations and the state expected critics to dismiss the case as conspiracy theory. The judge granted discovery. According to the guest, it produced tens of thousands of documents, emails and text messages describing a working relationship between government officials and big tech companies to silence Americans.

The state then took depositions. The ones named in the conversation are:

Anthony Fauci. Elvis Chan, described as the FBI agent in charge in Northern California, who the guest says was "pre-bunking" the Hunter Biden laptop story even though the FBI had the laptop in 2019. A CDC official described as flagging specific words and phrases for censorship. Agencies such as CISA, which the guest counts as part of the same operation.

The guest says the book takes readers into those deposition rooms and the preparation for them: what Missouri was trying to learn and how it learned it. The timing matters to the guest's argument, because all of this came before Elon Musk bought Twitter and before the Twitter Files. One host notes that Missouri saw the government's side through government documents and witnesses, and that the Twitter Files showed the platform's side about six months later. The guest adds that the same thing was happening at Meta and YouTube.

The guest explains the background through Section 230. In the 1990s, he says, Congress decided that internet companies were platforms, not publishers, so they could not be sued over what users posted. He calls this a huge advantage, and a good thing when a company actually behaves as a platform committed to free speech. The problem, in his account, is that many of these companies started acting like publishers: throttling content they disliked and removing opinions they did not support.

He then describes the pressure from the government side. He says President Biden suggested there might be criminal liability. He also cites text messages in the lawsuit from Rob Flaherty, the White House deputy communications director, who swore at company staff and told them the highest levels of the White House could see they were not doing enough. The guest grants that some people at these companies were willing participants, but argues that coercion was also involved. That coercion is the basis of the suit.

we all know the government can't censor speech. But you also can't outsource that censorship to private companies, which is exactly what was going down.

Later he separates two kinds of contact. Officials could make companies aware of something, or they could coerce them with threats of investigation or loss of Section 230 protection. Missouri's argument was that the government went past informing into colluding and coercing, which crosses the First Amendment line on what the government may do.

The guest says that exposing the arrangement, together with Musk's changes at Twitter and the congressional hearings that followed, prepared the ground for what he calls a free speech renaissance. He describes how the politics have shifted. As a conservative college student in the late 1990s, he envied liberals for holding the high ground on free speech, at a time when even the ACLU defended it. He says that is gone now, and that the issue has become about power, control, and labeling speech as misinformation or disinformation in order to suppress it. He presents the working-class coalition that elected President Trump as the new home for the cause.

A host offers a counterargument. For decades, under both parties, foreign adversaries have tried to interfere in US elections, and the guest agrees they at least try to influence them. The host adds that actually tipping an election is hard when 50 states run elections under 50 sets of rules. The host suggests that protecting democracy was the cover officials wanted, while their real motives were personal and partisan. As evidence, the host cites the share of Democrats among employees at these companies, put at "80, 90, 95%." The host then asks what the proper channel would be for the FBI or CIA to tell Twitter or Facebook that foreign adversaries are running accounts that should be watched or removed, as opposed to a covert back channel backed by threats.