Retribution: Sen. Eric Schmitt Believes Censors Are ‘On the Run’

Quipped the chairman, now back behind the dais, “Who was the attorney general leading that?” Answering his own question about the lawsuit, he added, “Oh yeah, his name was Eric Schmitt. My glory days I suppose.” Schmitt had just voted to confirm his old client.

It was “the irony of all ironies,” and it was more evidence that the censors “are on the run,” Schmitt tells RealClearPolitics. His lawsuit, the one that temporarily blocked the Biden administration from communicating with social media companies, “was playing defense.” Those once censored are now ascendent, Republicans are now the party of free speech, “and now we are playing offense.” At least, according to Schmitt.

Another moment of ironic levity from the hearing:

“Mr. Chairman, just for the record when I was here alone, I was getting drunk with power,” joked Sen. Cory Booker, the Democrat who presided over the committee in Schmitt’s absence.

“Thank you for showing restraint,” the Missouri Republican replied.

The unspoken, and perhaps unrealized, subtext of the moment: The right is still furious that the left didn’t show any such restraint when the world went mad, allowing and facilitating what Schmitt describes as “the darkness that enveloped a core tenet of our American experiment.” Yes, the pandemic is over, but there won’t be any amnesty for infringing on free speech.

“This instinct that is on the left hasn’t gone away,” Schmitt says of the temptation to curb free speech. The difference, as he sees it, is that his opponents “just have fewer levers of power to do it.” Fast forward four years, he predicts, and another Democrat “will try to do it again.” His goal, then, is to shatter the aforementioned censorship industrial complex and scatter it to the winds. But first Republicans must define it. Democrats insist it does not exist.

The term was coined by author Michael Shellenberger to describe a shadowy network of ideologically aligned academics, Big Tech companies, NGOs, and government agencies, each with the stated goal of defending the democratic process but with the effect of undermining it. Their byword is “misinformation.” The commonality? Taxpayer funding. An example: The National Science Foundation awarded no less than 64 grants worth $31.8 million to countering “misinformation” and “disinformation.”

Schmitt likens it to nothing less than “a second state,” an apparatus that is “faceless” but motivated by “collective purpose,” a system with “dispersed power” but collective purpose operating beyond “the limits and liberties of our Constitution.” Stories of abuse come to hand easily for Republicans. Chafing under the yoke of alleged censorship has become intertwined with the core of their party identity.

When the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020, detailing the overseas business dealings of the Biden family, they were not heralded as the New York Times had been in 1971 when that paper put the Pentagon Papers on the front page. Instead, they were censored.

The Stanford Internet Observatory, a now-defunct academic outfit funded by taxpayer dollars for the study of “abuse in current information technologies,” cautioned that the basis of the story might be part of a “hack-and-leak” operation. The Aspen Institute, which received taxpayer dollars, had held a “tabletop” exercise ahead of the election that year, attended by Facebook and Twitter executives, to prepare for the possibility of foreign interference. NewsGuard, a company that purports to evaluate the credibility of news outlets and previously received taxpayer dollars, dismissed the laptop story as “a hoax perpetrated by the Russians.”

Twitter listened. Under pressure from the FBI and Biden administration, the social media giant locked the account of the New York Post. Journalists who simply shared the story, like Jake Sherman, then of Politico, were suspended from the website until they deleted their tweets. Even Kayleigh McEnany, spokesman for the president, was similarly muzzled – during an election year no less.

But what was dismissed as a hoax was verified by the federal government. Years later, that is. Mum during the censorship of the New York Post, the Department of Justice prosecutors introduced the laptop as evidence in their case against Hunter Biden. The FBI had the laptop in their possession for more than a year. “They knew it was real, and they were working with these companies so that when this came out, it would be dismissed,” Schmitt complains.

It was not just one story. Opposition to medical face coverings, or support for the Wuhan lab leak theory, or objection to the vaccine mandate – and any number of lingering COVID controversies – all trigger an avalanche of raw anecdotes of censorship by social media at the behest of a shadowy network in the ether – funded by a bubbling glut of money built on what George Washington University Law professor Jonathan Turley calls a “a cottage industry of disinformation experts.”

Free speech was “commoditized,” censorship was “monetized,” and partisan advantage was taken often in the name of public health. “Suddenly, the market was awash with money for those who could offer systems or staff to combat viewpoints deemed misleading or false,” Turley testified.

Organizations such as NewsGuard and a British-based NGO called the Global Disinformation Index thrived. Both received federal funding, both leaned on Big Tech to deplatform alternate voices, and both launched pressure campaigns to push advertisers away from publications that even gave voice to dissent on anything from the election to the pandemic. It was, conservatives allege, government censorship with extra steps. Other times, there was a direct line.

Biden spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters as much. She admitted the administration was actively flagging what they saw as problematic posts for Facebook to remove. “It is life and death,” Psaki told RCP in July of 2021. “It is a public health issue in the country.” Schmitt came to a different conclusion: “It just didn’t feel like America.”

As Missouri AG, he filed suit in May of 2022, alleging that the Biden administration was colluding with Big Tech companies to censor and suppress free speech, related not just to public health information but also to the previous election. “I was just honestly shocked,” he recalls, “that it could take hold in America like it has over the last five years.”

It was never supposed to be this way, he says as he talks fondly about a time when “liberals used to believe in free speech.” There was the political correctness in the 1990s when Schmitt was a law student, and while that was an attempt to “narrow the bandwidth of what was acceptable,” he never believed that the American mind had closed.

Then came “the Great Awokening.” And then came COVID. “It just blew the lid off,” Schmitt says. The guise of policing misinformation during a national health crisis, he says, “just gave them an excuse.”

Republicans have gotten pretty good at telling this kind of dystopian story. The examples are well worn, but memories of the abuses are still fresh. For Democrats, well, they have heard it all before. An unseen but also all-powerful Orwellian octopus working in concert with a Democratic Machine to police wrong-think? Massachusetts Sen. Peter Welch almost finds the idea amusing.

“I’m part of the Democratic Party,” Welch protested in committee. “You give us way too much credit for being that organized to be able to put this whole massive enterprise together.”

“Because you can rely on the censorship industrial complex to do the work for you,” shot back Mollie Hemingway, editor-in-chief of the Federalist, who testified in committee that the conservative website had been the target of censorship.

Asked about that exchange, an affable Schmitt gives his Democratic colleague an out. “Do I think he was the one connecting all the dots?” he asks of Welch. “No, but the point is that there’s a whole network that is very well funded where that is their purpose.” He alleges also that the censorship apparatus marches in lockstep with Democrats and shares a goal of “absolute power and control with no room for dissent.”

Salvation in this telling came not in court, but from Donald Trump. A loyal surrogate who helped Trump with debate prep, Schmitt was standing next to then-Sen. J.D. Vance in Butler, Pennsylvania, when an energetic Elon Musk barreled onstage. The election was a referendum on democracy itself, the world’s richest man told the crowd as Trump stood by beaming. “The other side wants to take away your freedom of speech,” said the owner of X, the social media website formerly known as Twitter. A Trump loss, Musk warned, would end the First Amendment and end democracy altogether.

Schmitt agrees. Earlier that summer, he had lost at the Supreme Court.

More specifically, his successor, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, lost; Schmitt had been elected to the Senate the year prior. But notably, they did not lose on the merits. The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the states suing Biden did not have standing. All the same, writing in his dissent, Justice Samuel Alito complained that the court had just allowed “the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think.”

Yet Schmitt still counts the case as a victory.

Because before the “Twitter Files,” before the admissions from the Biden White House, before any congressional testimony, he won the right of pre-trial discovery, which allowed him and his legal team access to the censors’ internal communications. This, in turn, gave Americans their first look behind the curtain to see exactly how the government leaned on Big Tech. “You’ve got to remember, at that time, nobody had done it,” he recalls. “It was called a conspiracy theory.” Once granted discovery, Schmitt was able to peer into the communications between the Biden administration and Big Tech, revealing what he calls “the worst instincts of folks who should have never had that much power” and laying bare “what they were willing to do with it.”

In March 2021, Rob Flaherty, White House director of digital strategy, wrote an unnamed Facebook official to accuse that company of “hiding the ball.” He complained that they weren’t doing enough to police social media posts that ran counter to the administration’s public narrative. The White House, he wrote ominously, had become “gravely concerned that [Facebook] is one of the top drivers of vaccine hesitancy.” He wasn’t alone.

On the same email chain, Andy Slavitt, a senior Biden administration COVID advisor, then fumed that White House officials did “not sense [urgency] from you at all,” adding that “100% of the questions I asked have never been answered and weeks have gone by.” He then dangled what some read as a threat: “Internally we have been considering our options on what to do about it.” Facebook listened – and promptly got in line.

Internal emails from the company, Alito wrote in his dissent, “paint a clear picture of subservience” as the Big Tech giant worked to stay in the government’s good graces.

To Republicans these emails showed prima facie evidence, they argued, that Biden was willfully violating the First Amendment. “The government really was coercing these companies to do their bidding,” Schmitt explains. “We all know the government can’t censor speech, but they also can’t outsource that to private companies, which is what they were doing.”

For Schmitt, the peek behind the curtain revealed an elite defined by “their loathing of regular people to make decisions.” A far cry from live-and-let-live liberalism, the political correctness of his youth had blossomed into a censorship regime governed by an expert class whom he says “want their beliefs to be shoved down the throats of everyone,” telling anyone of a dissenting opinion to “shut the hell up.”

But Schmitt isn’t the quiet type.

Hence the hearing where two radically different visions emerged, and where what has solidified into consensus among conservatives and libertarians is dismissed as overblown hype by many of those on the left.

The emails brought forward by his lawsuit didn’t reflect poorly on anyone in government or tech, insisted Mary Anne Franks. A constitutional law professor at George Washington Law School – and Turley colleague – she testified in committee that the censorship industrial complex was a “myth” used by conservatives to harass academics and nonprofits working to put up “safeguards against foreign and domestic misinformation and media manipulation.” She read the same emails that Schmitt obtained in discovery. Her conclusion: “There’s no evidence to support collusion between the Biden administration and Big Tech.”

That’s news to Mark Zuckerberg. The Meta founder told Joe Rogan earlier this year that “people in the Biden administration” would “scream at them and curse” his team in an ultimately successful attempt to pressure Facebook to censor posts the White House considered COVID misinformation. The social media giant has since loosened its speech standards.

Jack Dorsey would be similarly surprised. The former Twitter CEO has expressed regret with how his company censored the New York Post, writing after his exit from the company that Twitter failed to withstand “corporate and government control.”

Schmitt sees a window as a result, one that would never have opened if Kamala Harris had won in November. With Trump in office and Musk at the helm of DOGE, the Republican administration has instead started a long march through bureaucracy. It started on Inauguration Day when the new president signed an executive order condemning his predecessor for “trampling free speech rights” and ordering his administration to immediately “identify and take appropriate action to correct past misconduct.”

Hours earlier, the same Silicon Valley CEOs whom conservatives consider little more than co-conspirators in the censorship racket gladhanded at the inauguration. While members of Congress watched remotely in another room, inside the Capitol Rotunda Big Tech had the best seats.

Musk attended, too, though he had already been canonized after turning Twitter into a safe space for conservatives. Then there was Zuckerberg, who after his very sudden, very public mortification on Rogan, had donated $1 million to the Trump inaugural committee. Google CEO Sundar Pichai also enjoyed a first-class seat despite long-standing conservative skepticism of his digital behemoth.

President Biden complained, incongruously, that his biggest regret was failing to do more to police misinformation, and in his final address, he warned the nation of a rising “oligarchy” driven by a “tech-industrial complex.” For his part, Trump welcomed his billionaires. “They were all with him, every one of them,” he told reporters of his new supporters, “and now they are all with me.”

Should Republicans trust those elites too? Schmitt struggles to make sense of the dizzying realignment. “I don’t know. That’s the answer,” he replies while holding out hope that the conversion, and the condemnation of censorship, is legitimate. “Maybe they’ve been red-pilled,” he speculates. He isn’t naïve, though. “It could very well be that it’s just because President Trump’s in power now,” the senator says. “There’s no way of knowing that. Time will tell.”

In the meantime, the new administration advertises the fight for free speech as a battle for Western civilization. A less-than-diplomatic Vice President Vance brought that blunt message with him to the Munich Security Conference during his first diplomatic mission. Existential threats abound on that continent, but what Vance told the assembled leaders he worries the most about is the “threat from within,” specifically “the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values.”

He castigated the United Kingdom for charging an anti-abortion protestor with demonstrating silently outside a clinic. He attempted to shame the government of Scotland for encouraging citizens to report on neighbors guilty of prayer in private homes located in so-called safe access zones. He said that across Europe “free speech is in retreat.”

And while Vance claimed the previous U.S. president was sympathetic to such capitulation, he warned Europe that they would not find a partner in Trump: “There is a new sheriff in town.” The assembled elite were aghast. Schmitt beamed.

Watching from the audience in Bavaria that day, the Missouri Republican thought each word his former Senate colleague delivered was pitch-perfect. “You can’t say to the American people, to the American taxpayer, that their generosity should be unlimited in defense of these ‘Western values’ and of these borders that are nowhere near ours when, at the same time, Europe is rejecting core values like free speech,” Schmitt says of the “hypocrisy” Vance was confronting.

While allies back stateside were thrilled, critics at home complained that the new administration shouldn’t have gone abroad lecturing allies. The real threat to free speech, they say, is at home. Here Democrats cite their own, more recent examples.

The Trump administration threw the Associated Press out of the White House press pool for refusing to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” The president swore to defend and uphold the Constitution one moment but complained the next, during a speech at the Department of Justice, that news organizations who criticize him are “scum” and their actions “illegal.” Foreign college students who protest American foreign policy are being rounded up off the street and targeted for deportation.

“These attacks on free speech and association have a chilling effect,” said Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, warning that the actions “signal to others that if they don't fall in line with the Trump administration’s preferred views, they could be next.”

Schmitt has ready rebuttals for those critiques:

The Associated Press doesn’t have a First Amendment right to be included in the press pool, the rotating group of reporters who travel with the president daily, he notes. As things stand, he says, “the AP can write all the stories they want – informed or ill-informed.” The president, meanwhile, is still allowed to speak his mind. Press criticism is a far cry from press censorship, the senator replies when pressed on Trump’s DOJ speech, insisting that “the fact that President Trump has an opinion about them is not a ‘threat to democracy.’”

Deportations of foreigners over their speech is a thornier issue. Schmitt is not familiar with the case of Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts University doctoral student from Turkey arrested by DHS last month for allegedly engaging in activities in support of Hamas. The administration hasn’t yet provided detailed evidence, but Ozturk did write an op-ed in the school newspaper condemning Israel for “the Palestinian genocide.”

“I don’t know the specifics, but I think writ large, if somebody’s here on a student visa, that is a privilege,” he says. “If you’re not a citizen, you’re guests in this country.” And unruly guests, like the ones who shut down campus buildings and intimidate others with political violence, he adds, should not be tolerated. “I don’t think this gets to a place where somebody who has dissenting views is being deported,” he qualified. “That’s not happening. That’s not the case.”

These views are foundational to Schmitt and his current political project. They cannot be quickly abandoned. Defending free speech wasn’t just his springboard to the Senate, it remains his work there. “I’m about as free speech absolutist as you’re going to find,” he says. “I’m not threatened in any way shape or form by somebody having a different point of view.”

The problem, and the reason for his ongoing work, he insists, is that “I just don’t think you find – sadly – all that many people on the political left who believe that anymore.”