Ep 125: Sen. Eric Schmitt on Exposing Mass Censorship & Outsmarting the Far-Left

0:00There are these secret portals between social media execs and high-ranking government officials. It's the most important free speech case in the history of our country. The FBI authenticated the laptop for Hunter Biden. They knew it was real in 2019. The FBI starts having monthly, then weekly meetings with big tech platforms. They really wanted to control the narrative. You really exposed a lot of censorship here between big tech and the Biden administration. What was going on? A lot of these people who had opinions they didn't like were being shadow banned or deplatformed altogether. I was honored to be throttled by the same people as well.

0:31It's the biggest affront to the first known we've ever seen. The one thing that worries me the most probably about AI is the censorship piece. So I think having a more robust marketplace for tech is really important. Civilizations come and go based on who kind of develops and utilizes technology. We're not guaranteed to be what we are now 100 years from now.

0:57Eric Schmidt is a U.S. senator from Missouri. He's a bold fighter for our country. He famously sued the Biden administration in the famous case Missouri versus Biden in 2022 when he was the AG in Missouri, fighting back against censorship, against big tech collusion with our government. The discovery uncovered some amazing things that led to the Twitter files and a lot else. He also sued China over the COVID conspiracy. He actually won in the courts, won$24 billion. He's a fighter on so many fronts. He's on the Judiciary Committee. He's on the Senate Armed Services Committee. He just feels strongly about fighting for the American worker.

1:29He just published a book called The Last Line of Defense about his battles in the court system and what we have to do next. Great guy to talk to to hear what's going on in America, and he's feeling optimistic about our future. Welcome to American Optimist. Really excited to have here today U.S. Senator from Missouri, Eric Schmidt. Mr. Senator, thank you for joining us. It's great to be with you, Joe. I've followed your work for a long time. Of course, we've been in touch. You're a former Attorney General of Missouri. Made me really happy with some of the aggressive things you did there. You're an author of a new book, The Last Line of Defense, How to Beat the Left in the Court.

1:59So we're going to talk about that today too. But I want to start with the personal side of your story. I understand your father actually, he worked the night shift at Anheuser-Busch seven days a week and you got one family vacation per year. So you started off working class in Missouri. So what about how you grew up, inspired you to want to run for office? Well, yeah, I mean, I think that absolutely shaped who I am. I saw how hard my dad worked and yeah, he worked the midnight shift seven days a week. I tell him the story how he had one week of vacation a year and we would go, we'd drive somewhere, but we'd go down to Silver Dollar City in Branson, Missouri, and you'd see these blacksmiths forging something out of heat and pressure and create something.

2:38And I feel like my time as AG, I felt like there was a forging process there. But no, I'm very blessed to have had two great parents, my mom and my dad. And I was the first person in my family to go to college out of high school, let alone law school, became a lawyer, was practicing law and became a partner. And all those things were great. And then I became a dad for the first time. And Steven, my son is, was born with a rare genetic condition as something called tuberous sclerosis. He's nonverbal as epilepsy on the autism spectrum. And then that, of course, seeing him go through all those challenges, including a four hour seizure one time kind of spurred me into doing something more with my life.

3:16So I ran for office and to try to make a difference. So, so here I am. It's the adversity that shapes us the most, especially when it's that close to us. Your new book is called The Last Line of Defense, How to Beat the Left in the Court. You know, we talk a lot about institutional decay in this podcast and institutions that once were great and that are broken. It started at a high level. How did the courts get to be captured? How did they get to be more broken? What's going on here? What's your playbook for fighting back? Well, I think for a long time, conservatives honestly have sort of ceded a lot of territory to the left.

3:43I mean, there's so many of the institutions that you've talked about that the left has sort of captured over time. And the point of the book is that we've got to have the courage to fight back and win in our court system. And so the book's not written for lawyers. I mean, I hope lawyers read it, but it's really about about, you know, sort of normal people understanding some of the decisions you make, strategic decisions, but sort of directional decisions to stand up and fight back. I think now that we're in this place, Joe, where I start the book by saying in November of 2024, the fever broke.

4:14So we're kind of like on the other side of this fever dream with a lot of the successes we're seeing from the Trump administration. But I think it's important to remember what happened the four years previous to that. What did the Democrats do when they were in power? And this was a time of lockdowns and compulsory COVID shots and open borders and DEI struggle sessions and ESG and a censorship enterprise that they created that was so vast. It's the biggest affront to the first event we've ever seen. And so when I was AG, we stood up. We pushed back against all that stuff. We won at the Supreme Court on student loan debt forgiveness, on COVID stuff.

4:47We brought the Missouri versus Biden lawsuit. So the point is, if you have the guts to stand up and fight back, we can win. And this is a playbook to go do that. And I want to jump in and talk a little bit about Missouri versus Biden, something a lot of us were a huge fan of your work there starting, I think, in May 2022. You filed that lawsuit. But before we jump into that with a book again, just understand what does it mean otherwise to beat the left in the court? Because there's a lot of judges. Fortunately, the Supreme Court's pretty sane right now. And it's a lot of Trump appointees. Overall, it's good.

5:14But there's a lot of judges we're not going to be able to remove. We're not going to be able to impeach. So given that there's all this corruption going on, all this broken stuff, like how do we actually beat them? How do we make this stuff work? Well, I think, you know, I got asked this a lot in the first, especially the first couple of months of the Trump administration. You'd have some random district court judge make some ruling here or there. But ultimately, on the programming side, think of what the Doe's stuff was all about on the personnel side, also on the illegal immigration front. As those cases have made their way through the courts, by and large, President Trump has been successful because what he's trying to do are clear Article 2 authorities, right?

5:50Of course, the chief executive can make these kinds of decisions. The left is trying to constrain his ability to do it. But you might have a district court judge there that was a radical appointed by Joe Biden. But as they make their way through, especially at the Supreme Court, he's been vindicated. I mean, one of the best examples so far is on this universal injunction, this nationwide injunction issue, where you saw like some random judge in some district somewhere trying to direct the foreign policy of the United States of America. It's crazy. And so the separation of powers works that way, too, right?

6:19It's a lot of times the courts are the arbiter between the branches of government here. Their power isn't limitless either. And so the Supreme Court, I think, has kind of checked a lot of the abuses that we saw at the lower courts. And so we're not going to win 100 percent of the time. But I think by and large, on the things we care about, the stage is set now. If we fight back with the right arguments, we can win. You had a lot of funny memes for a while on this one where it's where I think I think they'd say, like, you know, judge orders Trump to rebuild Iranian nuclear program. I mean, these guys were going against everything he was doing for a long time.

6:51I guess it looks like we have fought back. We made that illegal, which is great. Let's jump into the lawsuit you filed, because this was something that a lot of us were really terrified by the previous administration kind of using its power to intimidate people and block free speech and effectively kind of force companies to censor things and get permission to do things because otherwise they would come at them. And so I guess through discovery, you really exposed a lot of censorship here between big tech and the Biden administration. Take us through the case. What was going on? Yeah. So in the last line of defense, I think this is probably, I mean, it probably occupies the most pages in the book because I think it's the most important free speech case in the history of our country.

7:29So in 2021 and 2022, you know, we're sort of watching this kind of unfold. You see Jen Psaki at the podium saying, we're flagging this for Facebook. And Joe Biden's saying that these tech companies are killing people. They're threatening to take section 230 protections away. If they don't do more, you have a disinformation governance board. Remember, this was floated. Yeah. Where that, you know, terrible Mary Poppins figure was, you know, singing songs about censorship. It was tied to a nonprofit at Stanford, right? I mean, there's literally these nonprofits on the left and the universities like helping this go forward.

8:03Yes. And so that is what so basically. So November 2022, we filed a lawsuit, Missouri versus Biden. We allege some pretty significant abuses of power with the federal government, including and coercing big tech companies. We made a strategic decision. Normally, in those kind of cases, you seek an injunction, which is to stop the government or somebody from doing something you think is unlawful. We actually sought discovery first because we knew it was being lampooned as a conspiracy theory or I was just trying to get attention. So, we got the discovery. And that, to me, was the moment that was truly eye-opening because there were these secret portals that were established between social media execs and high-ranking government officials.

8:44The Surgeon General is texting back and forth. And all of this stuff, they really wanted to control the narrative on the Hunter Biden laptop, on COVID-related issues, on a whole host of things to really sideline half the country and censor them through a way that they, the government, can't do. But then outsourcing that to big tech companies. And to your point, it went beyond that. Stanford, University of Washington were part of this coalition that was doing the dirty work for him, too. Right. They said they were basically giving them grants to do the flagging of stuff they wanted censored. And we had the opportunity to take the deposition of Anthony Fauci.

9:18We took the deposition of Elvis Chan, who was the FBI agent in Northern California, who was pre bunking the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020. This is a really important story. I think the left would love to memory hole what happened here. And I think it's really important. We don't forget as a country what you discovered there. So basically, basically what happened is the FBI knew Hunter Biden's laptop was real. They knew it would hurt Biden in the election. And so they purposely ahead of time brought everyone together, I guess, with Elvis doing this. They told everyone there could be stories like this, such as this laptop that Russia pretends to have found and pretends to be a big deal.

9:51This could come up before the election as Russian disinformation. We want you to be ready to censor that and don't let the Russian disinformation interfere with the election. So they did this knowing that this was real and knowing that it would come out in order to try to prepare them to help the Biden regime censor for the election. This is actually insane stuff that you have here, right? Yeah, it's like it's like you would imagine the Soviet Union, right, or something. And and you had again, this is kind of the legacy of the original sin of the Russiagate stuff, right, which was they concocted this nonsense.

10:22and then everything they didn't like later on, whether it's about President Trump or other things, became Russian disinformation or Russian misinformation or Russian malinformation, all this stuff. So yeah, you're right. So basically, the FBI authenticated and knew the laptop for Hunter Biden with all the crazy stuff in it. It could have, by the way, implicated Joe Biden in some bad stuff. They knew it was real in 2019, in November of 2019. the FBI starts having monthly then weekly meetings with big tech platforms about this topic in particular, which is look out for this Russian hack and leak operation.

10:58Yole Roth, who was the former like integrity guy at Twitter in an affidavit said, yes, he specifically mentioned Hunter Biden laptop. And by the way, it's also worth noting when you start connecting some of these dots, which is kind of crazy. There's a guy by the name of James Baker, who was the general counsel at the FBI and during the Russiagate stuff, who's now been implicated in leaking classified information in 2016. In 2020, he's the general counsel for Twitter. Yikes. So the, like, you know, like it's just kind of crazy, but that's what was happening. Let's jump into that for a second. Cause what you mean is that they do this very effectively.

11:33So they have different organizations that are all sort of political ideological allies and they capture. So Twitter was very clearly by anyone's metrics captured by the left. So And then they have someone who's like helping the left in sketchy ways in the government, then helping the left in sketchy ways in Twitter. And it's the same cabal, right? It's the same group of people. It's not a conspiracy. They clearly are doing this. And they're clearly coming between those places, between the nonprofits, especially funded by Soros and others, and the universities, right? It's all together. One of the reasons why axing a lot of what USAID was was so important, because what happens is you have these lefties in the, like a Democrat administration they're in.

12:08Then they go out to these nonprofits and they come back in. It's sort of like one hand washing the other. And I think a lot of this stuff needs to be exposed. But when we got those documents, when we started taking those depositions, Joe, you've got to remember, you go back in time. This was before Elon Musk had bought Twitter. This is before the Twitter files, which further amplified it, by the way, and showed additional ways by which they were trying to control speech and sort of suppress people's First Amendment rights in working with the government. So, and this is, of course, before the investigation.

12:41So, yes, this was sort of an all of government effort. And it wasn't just like one agency, Joe, like the CDC. We took the deposition of somebody at the CDC. Like there were words and phrases that they specifically wanted censored. It got censored. You had CISA. What's CISA for your audience? Your audience might know. It's basically a cybersecurity agency to protect us from cyber attacks and critical infrastructure. They weaponized that against the American people to do censorship work also. And it kind of came from this election integrity project, which was this kind of weird thing. But again, in 2020, was working to censor speech.

13:17So then Biden comes in on day three. We discover in the discovery that the censorship operation began on day three of their administration. They started taking down RFK Jr. They started taking down Tucker Carlson. And a lot of these people who had opinions they didn't like were being shadow banned or deplatformed altogether. And it was truly chilling. And so Missouri versus Biden exposes all that. And as a judge said in one of the lower courts, it was the most, you know, the biggest affront to the First Amendment in American history. I mean, it's just crazy. When my friends bought Twitter with Elon, they actually, my account was also throttled.

13:53I'm a more minor player in this whole thing, but I was honored to be throttled by the same people as well. So it's totally, totally crazy stuff. What ended up happening with the lawsuits? You uncovered all these amazing things. We all can kind of see that there's more conspiracies going on. But then what did the courts do? Like where did it go? We wanted the district court level. We wanted the appellate court level, the Fifth Circuit. And then the Supreme Court took the case up and then essentially punted based on standing. They said, well, we need to send it back down to the lower court to further establish whether or not Missouri and the other plaintiffs have standing.

14:23One interesting side. So as far as I'm concerned, exposing all of it was the big win. It's still kind of rattling around, but the government never wanted that stuff exposed. One interesting sort of side note from it, we can talk about Fauci's depot too, but one of the plaintiffs is a guy by the name of, I'm sure you know, is Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. It was a Stanford guy who came up with this radical theory along with others that said, you know what? Natural immunity is still a thing, even for COVID. And they tried to wreck his life. And now he's the director of the NIH, which I think there's some nice historical symmetry to all of that, I suppose.

14:57That's good. It's poetic justice. He gets to be in charge after showing that courage because it's tough for academics, especially to show courage. They really come at them in those areas. Well, that was a really big shift. And how do we think about this for the future? Unfortunately, these people may be in charge again in our lifetimes. I hope not, but there's a good chance the way politics works is things swing back and forth. And eventually, some of them are going to get into government again. What have we fixed to make us that can't do this again? Is this going to be something we're dealing with in the 2030s?

15:24Well, my worry is, and one of the reasons I wrote the book, The Last Line of Defense, How We Beat the Left in Court, is that, you know, as the Czech writer, Milan Kodaro once said, the struggle against power is a struggle against memory and forgetting. So we can't forget the lessons and what they did with the power they had, Joe, when they had it. You think of COVID, the consolidation of power that happened. You think of this censorship enterprise. It's really about power and control. You think about what they would do in the United States Senate if Democrats had what we had right now. Like at this point, they would pack the Supreme Court and add states to the union to maintain permanent control.

16:01So like and what do they do with it? Then it becomes, you know, an emergency. Then you other people. And then, of course, you're suppressing speech. So we've got to be pretty vigilant moving forward because you're right. I think we're winning right now. And I'm proud to have been played at least a small part in this kind of renaissance of free speech. You know, I've always been a conservative and I was in college in the late 90s. And I was always remember a little jealous of liberals that kind of had the high ground on free speech, you know, but I don't think that's the case anymore. Like, and that was also the beginning of this sort of like crazy political correctness movement that it just morphed into this woke mind virus that exists now.

16:37So I think we're winning. And I also think you look at younger voters right now, especially, you know, 18 to 24 year olds who live through these dark, crazy times. They're I mean, they're they're the most conservative or they vote Republican more than any generation previous to them, because I think they saw a lot of the abuses and excesses and reject it. They really have seen and have gotten it. Yeah, it's interesting you say that it seems like the left in the US, their values are based more on power. So it turned out free speech was useful for them, for their power and their messages in the 1960s and 70s.

17:10And that was their platform. And then by the time it was no longer useful for them, then they tried to ban it. And, you know, the political correctness point is interesting. Peter Thiel once told me this. I guess it was originally came out of the Marxists. And so if you were politically correct in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, it means you got the little booklets the Marxists would give out about the correct things to say. And so and that kind of morphed into our leftist culture and media in general, where you're politically correct by saying the correct things. And so for me, I love going against it and purposely not being politically correct because it's kind of signaling against the power of these people who want to run our society.

17:40I totally agree with you. I've had this conversation with Peter, too. I think in that at the time they disguised a lot of that in flowery language and it was just about, you know, being respectful and all that. Of course, we should be respectful, but you're right. It's a it's a it's an issue of control, because if you can control what people say, that's a powerful, powerful thing. And I'm the same way. I'm sort of almost a free speech absolutist and a bit of a contrarian anyway. That's kind of my nature. So that's why this stuff in particular for me really struck a chord and why it was so important to fight back.

18:11Even when people were saying, oh, this is loony, this is a conspiracy theory, it turns out it was all true. And I think, you know, the left, think about what they were doing in Hollywood. I mean, just the canceling of anybody that would say something they didn't agree with, they couldn't get jobs. It's just wild. This was Ronald Reagan's thing he was fighting against, right? He was against the commies there. That's how he started his career. I want to ask a little bit more about power in the Senate and different things we could do. You'll have to forgive me here. Maybe these are too crazy. But for example, I agree.

18:38I'm really worried that if we lose again, they will make two new states. I'm really worried they'll pack the court. And so the question becomes like, what do we do to counter it? Just for the sake of argument, you could say, well, there's arguments for why there's 13. We could put 13 in ourselves first. Or you could say, if you guys don't want us to do that, we can all agree on a constitutional amendment that there's only going to be nine. Those would be two ways to protect ourselves. It seems like the third option of doing nothing is bad. And similarly, we could say, well, we don't think there should be a new state in D.C.

19:03That's ridiculous. But if you want to give some more people to vote, you could take a part of D.C. that's not part of the government and put it in Maryland because that's like, you know, Senator Lee has been talking about this. So it seems like there's things we could be doing to protect ourselves in the Senate that we're not. How should we be thinking about this? No, I think that's right. I think I support a constitutional amendment that would enshrine it at nine. I think that makes the most sense because because here's the other thing is, let's say they do it. Let's say they add four. Well, when we come in power, then we're going to add then why not 50?

19:30Yeah. Like, why not 100? Yeah. You know, then you become like there's no limiting principle. You become kind of a banana republic and that's a dangerous road. It seems like an obvious miss in the constitution that someone would abuse that. Like, I think we kind of messed that up. And that's what the founders missed it. Well, I think that, but again, like I come from Missouri, this isn't Harry Truman's Democrat party, right? Like this is like, this is a different iteration. I hope for the sake of the country that they, that they move more a little bit to the center, but politically, I mean, they're about ready to elect a, like a legit commie in New York.

20:03Like, I don't think they're coming back. And this is what Hugo Chavez did in Venezuela. He stacked the courts and we just interviewed the opposition leader last week. They didn't let her run because they stacked the courts. But let's go back to that if you're in favor. So I think there's some things to do there. And I also think one of the things that we absolutely this is, by the way, within the rules. The difference is they want to shatter the rules. I think we have to be much more aggressive within the rules. It's one of the reasons I wrote the book, Last Line of Defense, How to Beat the Left in Court, because these are current and people can get it now.

20:27These are current systems that exist that we had. Quite frankly, I think we've been a little soft on that. We need to have the courage to fight. Take redistricting. Yep. Perfectly, perfectly constitutional to redistrict right now. And the Democrats have a lot more to lose than we do. If you look at the red states that could redistrict, Missouri is one of them. We would stand to gain more if you we wanted to be aggressive on the census. There's no reason in the world why we should accept the idea that illegal immigrants are counted in the census. California has way too many representatives than it should have because we count illegal immigrants.

21:05Like if we actually are tough here and are aggressive within the rules, that's how we win. Their only avenue is to sort of bust up the rules. Yeah, we'll totally agree. Well, I hope we can, it seems like the only way they'll agree to a constitutional amendment, for example, to hold it to nine is if we actually come very close to meaningfully threatening to do the extra ones while pushing for that. So I hope you can get your colleagues to be more aggressive. I know you're very aggressive and I feel like the party needs to be aggressive at these things. I want to, speaking of aggression, I want to ask, I think you were the first to sue China after the COVID thing.