“We have to be the guardians of free speech.” Former Missouri Attorney General and new senator Eric Schmitt slammed Big Tech censorship and issued a call to protect free speech at CPAC 2023 Thursday.
Schmitt emphasized in his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that Big Tech censorship and collusion with the government are severe threats. “They want to coordinate with social media companies to censor your speech because it doesn’t fit the ‘narrative,’ or the ‘Science,’” Schmitt said. “And that, ladies and gentlemen, should scare the hell out of everybody in this room.”
He said that as Missouri’s attorney general —before he was elected senator — “I never shied away from the fight.” He mentioned his “landmark lawsuit” against the Biden administration to uncover the “vast censorship enterprise,” as Schmitt previously called it, between Big Tech and the federal government.
“We sued the Biden administration, and the FBI, and [the Health and Human Services Department], and other alphabet agencies for colluding with social media giants to censor freedom of speech on their platforms,” Schmitt stated. “And what we found, folks, was unbelievable…direct, blatant, and brazen coordination between the federal government and social media companies.”
In May 2022, then-Missouri AG Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry filed their lawsuit against government-Big Tech censorship. The White House and other federal agencies were implicated. The lawsuit specifically cited original research from Media Research Center and its unique CensorTrack database to support its case.
Schmitt lambasted how “government agencies had special portals to quickly report posts they disagreed with.” He asserted that his lawsuit helped depose former NIAID director Dr. Anthony Fauci. “[We] demanded answers for the lives and livelihoods that he ruined,” Schmitt said. The senator warned that such collusion between Big Tech companies and government must be stopped permanently, “When Fauci speaks, Big Tech censored. And this can never happen again, and not on my watch.”
Schmitt also said his lawsuit helped expose the activities of FBI special agent Elvis Chan, who admitted that the FBI had regular meetings with social media companies leading up to the 2020 election. A Media Research Center poll found in November 2020 that Big Tech and liberal media censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story, which occurred after FBI priming, helped steal the 2020 election for Joe Biden.
The senator noted later that if social media can ban even the then-sitting president of the United States Donald Trump, “imagine what they could do to you.” He asked the crowd how many of them had been censored, and after a show of hands, added that, “We, conservatives, the people in this room — we have to be the guardians of free speech. That is our mission, that is our call,” he concluded. “If you control the flow of information and limit speech, you can control people. And that’s exactly what their aim is.”
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that government agencies and Big Tech be held to account to uphold the First Amendment. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
