Sen. Eric Schmitt Denounces Biden's 'Vast Censorship Enterprise'

A Democrat lawyer argued on behalf of government-funded censorship of speech it disagrees with at a Senate subcommittee Tuesday, defending former President Joe Biden's "censorship industrial complex" and drawing a rebuke from Republicans and experts.

"Protecting Americans' freedom of speech is critical," Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on the Constitution that held the "Censorship Industrial Complex" hearing, wrote on X.

"The Biden Administration created a vast censorship enterprise to silence disfavored speech online. NGOs help to fuel that censorship."

A guest of Democrats on the panel, George Washington University law professor Mary Anne Franks, drew Republican objections when she argued on behalf of government "persuasion, encouragement, and funding" of censoring speech it disagrees with.

"No official can dictate what Americans can say, think, or believe," Franks said in the hearing. "The First Amendment constrains the government from interfering with freedom of speech.

"[But] the government has the right to prefer certain viewpoints, and it is even allowed to communicate those preferences through persuasion, encouragement, and funding.

"What the government may not do is compel private actors to think or speak a certain way through coercion or threats."

There is a fine line between persuasion or encouragement versus "coercion or threats," Republicans have long rebuked of the Biden administration's coordination with Big Tech under the Section 230 protections that were under governmental review.

"NGOs launch pressure campaigns to crush wrongthinkers," RealClear Investigations reporter Benjamin Weingarten told the hearing. "Federally funded 'fact-checkers' work with social media companies to algorithmically suppress disfavored media. 'Risk-raters,' operating with the government's imprimatur, create blacklists of such outlets to starve them of ad revenue.

"For-profits too, often fueled by our tax dollars develop analytics to support industrial-scale censorship.

"These entities have worked in overlapping and mutually reinforcing ways to control the American mind."

Weingarten, a frequent Newsmax guest, called out the liberal-biased NewsGuard, which had consistently targeted conservative media for defunding campaigns, including Newsmax.

"'Risk-raters' like NewsGuard and GDI, recipients of government largesse, have reportedly hobbled disfavored media companies — generally on the right — causing them to lose partners, traffic, and revenue," Weingarten told the panel.

Weingarten not only wants the "censorship industrial complex" defunded and dismantled, but he wants the Biden-era culprits of censoring conservative viewpoints in social media to be held criminally accountable.

"As I noted in my testimony, the speech police persist; they refuse to disarm; and their victims by and large have received little justice," Weingarten wrote Wednesday after the hearing.

"That must change."

The government-pushed censors are a "faceless adversary," according to Schmitt.

"The faceless adversary in America today is the sprawling labyrinth of NGOs, foundations, and activist groups," he wrote in an X post, sharing clips from his opening statement hearing, where he calls out the "permanent left-wing activist class" that includes "the same names, the same groups, time and time again."

Schmitt took pointed aim at Franks, too.

"At today's censorship hearing, Democrats invited a witness that believes that the First Amendment is essentially a white male fetish," he wrote on X, linking to another hearing clip calling out his open bias when he denounced the "government outsourcing what it cannot do" in censoring speech because of the First Amendment of the Constitution. "You can't make this stuff up."

When Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., attempted to mock conservative reporter Molly Hemingway for giving Democrats "way too much credit for being that organized" creating a "massive enterprise," she shot back in a pointed rebuke.

"You can rely on the censorship industrial complex to do the work for you," she said.