The Supreme Court is now weighing the First Amendment and the future of free speech in America. They began oral arguments on Murthy v. Missouri, arguably the most important free speech case in the history of the country. The plaintiffs say the Biden White House and dozens of federal officials and agencies colluded with social media companies, including Facebook and Twitter, to censor millions of American citizens.
00:04:28.320Well, look no further than the people who are on the wrong side of this Biden administration.
00:04:33.140I don't think we've ever seen an administration in the history of the country that's been so willing to go after political opponents, right?
00:04:39.920I mean, you know, Catholics, political, I mean, you know, President Trump.
00:04:45.820I mean, those are just a couple of examples, but the sort of the weaponization of the Justice Department that we've seen,
00:05:24.580This was a massive operation that, again, was all meant to silence critics.
00:05:31.360And that is the un-American aspect of this.
00:05:33.480That's why it violates the First Amendment, because these companies weren't doing it on their own.
00:05:36.980Some of them were, but they were also being coerced by a big government.
00:05:41.180And we watched story after story being watched by big media.
00:05:47.120And in point of fact, traditional media sort of following in suit, in lockstep, even though they weren't directly approached in many instances.
00:05:57.900Whether it be the 51 intel officers who were maintaining that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.
00:06:06.260These are scurrilous and frankly, easily determined falsehoods that could have been unwound at the moment, except for the coercion of the federal government.
00:06:19.540Yeah. I mean, look, think about these things.
00:06:37.400We know that to be, you know, by and large, people accept that to be true now.
00:06:40.840So all in the Hunter Biden laptop story, which they were trying to pre-bunk before the election, that's all true.
00:06:46.660So the fact of the matter is, this is why it's dangerous for the government to get involved and start telling people everything that they should believe or hear or say.
00:06:55.960Because the point of free speech is that people have an opportunity to prove the case, right?
00:07:00.740And you combat speech you don't agree with, with more speech, not censoring that speech.
00:07:06.340This is a fundamental tenet of what it means to be an American.
00:07:09.220And that's, in many ways, what's on the line here.
00:07:11.780So I also think, Lou, it's worth pointing out.
00:07:13.940There was a hit piece in the New York Times about this past weekend about some of the work that I've done as AG and others who've moved this case along.
00:07:21.700And it is, it's stunning to me that publications that, you know, I'm 48, right?
00:07:27.960So I'm old enough to remember when liberals actually believed in free speech.
00:07:32.260But there's, we've reached this weird place now, almost crossed a Rubicon, where that doesn't matter anymore.
00:07:38.940It's about defending the narrative because you believe in that ideology, not protecting people's ability to disagree.
00:07:45.800And so we're in a scary place, I think, in the country for that.
00:07:52.120I mean, this is about an ideology, not about a constitution.
00:07:55.980It's about forwarding the ideology, the Marxist-dim goals that are destructive of everything the country rests upon, including the constitution.
00:08:07.920And we're listening to justices actually saying things that they don't see that there is a coercive element here.
00:08:15.900I mean, saying it out loud for crying out loud.
00:08:18.680Well, one of the justices, yeah, one of the justices, Lou, said, you know, doesn't this, you're, you're, are you saying that the First Amendment can, you know, hamper the government's ability to deal with these things?
00:08:29.160And that's sort of the point, the whole point of the First Amendment.
00:08:32.940If you think about where we came from, we were rebelling against an all-powerful king, right?
00:08:38.740And there were printing presses back then, and there were ways to get information out.
00:08:43.300But the founders believed it was so important to make sure that even in an emergency, even in a crisis, that people's speech wasn't suppressed by the government.
00:08:53.560And this is, those are exactly the times that our constitution is supposed to matter the most.
00:08:58.580And there's no, there's no pandemic exception.
00:09:01.560There's no, you know, this is, this is a fundamental belief we have.
00:09:04.740And so, you know, that question, I think was kind of stunning, but revealing about how many people on the left view this now, which is, it's all about power and control.
00:09:14.540It's about outcomes in the process and protections that the constitution afford don't really matter to them, which is why I think it's so important for us to stand up and fight back.
00:09:22.960And we're talking with Senator Eric Schmidt.
00:09:25.480He is the man who joined early the fight over the First Amendment case that he calls, in point of fact, the most important First Amendment case of our lifetimes.
00:09:38.380We'll be right back with Senator Schmidt right after these quick words.
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00:11:19.820We're back now with Senator Eric Schmidt.
00:11:22.480And Senator, we know that this case is going to have huge implications.
00:11:28.900Some are trying to style it as an Internet case, for crying out loud.
00:11:32.720Others are trying to at least be dismissive because of the overstatements, they argue, of the capacity of the federal government to bring its awesome power to bear.
00:11:43.940It is mind-boggling the degree to which the left-wing national media, the Marxist media in this country, Marxist and corporatist at the same time, are actually trying to dilute the importance of this in the public mind.
00:11:59.220It is a propaganda, a disinformation campaign, as far as I'm concerned, that's being waged across the breadth of media, social media, legacy media, you name it.
00:12:11.600And I think it's sort of revealing, too, Lou, that the dying print corporate media, they, for a long time, viewed themselves as the gatekeepers, right, of what the public should know.
00:12:26.720And that's gone away in this diffusion of information now, which I think is a good thing, allows people to sort of make their own decisions about what's top of the news feed and what's on the nightly news.
00:12:41.640You know, those sort of decisions from the corporate media elites, they don't have that anymore.
00:12:45.980And so I think that's playing into this a little bit, too.
00:13:03.140And it's sort of, if we go back into COVID, it's sort of like the idea of vaccine mandates or mask mandates, right?
00:13:09.560We believe, as conservatives, that individuals should take all this information and make their own decisions.
00:13:15.620If you want to, you know, walk in Central Park on a beautiful day with eight masks on your face outside, you know, I think that would be kind of crazy.
00:13:47.780That's why we have the First Amendment to protect individual liberty.
00:13:51.320And we're not supposed to be, and I hope we can not go down this road, a country that believes in sort of collectivist mentality.
00:13:59.460But I think the left and their media allies certainly do believe that and why this case is so threatening to them because they want the government to be able to tell us what we can say and what we can hear because it's for our own good.
00:14:09.660And the same people, by the way, who are clamoring and calling out these so-called threats for threats to democracy are the same ones that are willing to bulldoze the Constitution along the way.
00:14:25.200And frankly, it's disturbing deeply when you think about the history of the First Amendment in this country, in particular recent history.
00:14:34.620We go back to 1971 and the Pentagon Papers and two of the country's most important newspapers, the Washington Post and the New York Times, reporting exactly what the government said do not report.
00:14:50.280That is the truth behind the Vietnam War that made liars out of three administrations that were involved in Vietnam.
00:15:00.900I don't believe right now under the ideological atmosphere that has gripped the left-wing media and government right now,
00:15:11.580I don't believe that the Washington Post and the New York Times could have published without horrible consequence.
00:16:07.960It's a threat to them in their sort of power structure that they've had for a long time.
00:16:12.500But I think for the individual who wants to make their own decisions, it's a good development.
00:16:17.760One individual, one of the world's wealthiest, Elon Musk, making a statement that he believes that unless there is a red wave in November, that the republic is doomed.
00:16:28.900He did not then follow that with a statement that he believes that he should be donating to Donald Trump or to Joe Biden.
00:16:37.960He demurred, which I think is intellectually, I would have preferred a more aggressive openness to the realities we face.
00:16:49.700But just to say it was important for Elon Musk because of the position he holds and the ownership he has of X, formerly Twitter.
00:17:02.380Yeah, I mean, look, we're not debating little stuff.
00:17:05.920There are big things on the line right now.
00:17:08.080We're not talking about, you know, what's the difference between the corporate tax rate between being X or Y.
00:17:14.120I mean, those are important debates to have.
00:17:16.160But what we're talking about in this country right now are fundamental things.
00:17:20.820I mean, the Democrats are on record saying that if they actually had the presidency, the House and the Senate, because Manchin and Sinema are going to be gone after 2022.
00:17:40.380And then we'd have open borders for, you know, as far as the eye can see.
00:17:43.640That would fundamentally change this country forever.
00:17:47.420And so, again, that is where they've come from.
00:17:51.180They've gravitated to this place now where the radical left who used to just write white papers are now in positions of real authority in this administration.
00:18:00.240And why it's so important for President Trump to get back in office.
00:18:04.180We hit a reset, get this thing back in order.
00:18:07.020And so I just think that it's an opportunity and take on the administrative state.
00:18:10.760And we saw in this lawsuit, you see the tentacles of the administrative state and all the things that they're willing to do to make sure that their preferred policy position or person, you know, reigns supreme.
00:18:23.920And so, again, this is why it's important to fight back.
00:18:26.840And as you've said, it is an expansive enterprise, this effort to roll back the First Amendment, this effort to maintain coercive power over private institutions that, in point of fact, up against the awesome power of the federal government, hasn't got a chance in the world.
00:18:48.980And think of the individual citizen, as I know you do throughout and have throughout this lawsuit.
00:18:57.820The individual citizen stands no chance unless we come to terms right now in deciding this case in favor of a Constitution and our Bill of Rights.
00:19:07.940We're talking with Senator Eric Schmidt.
00:19:37.420I hope you'll be joining us for Lou Dobbs Tonight as our fight to save this country has only begun.
00:19:45.080We're back now talking with Senator Eric Schmidt, one of the authors of this all-important case before the Supreme Court.
00:19:58.180Now, the justice is weighing whether or not, in point of fact, the First Amendment will be encroached upon further.
00:20:06.420Senator, and what will be the disposition as the ideology is preserving itself across a broad array of institutions, whether it be what we call the deep state, the permanent bureaucracy, or simply the Marxist party that controls so much of what is the federal government.
00:20:24.060Senator, this case is being heard before the Supreme Court, while across the way, the Biden regime has made it very clear that they believe that the First Amendment is an impediment to effective policy and governance.
00:20:44.740It's straightforwardly, they say it, they acknowledge it, and they insist upon it through their actions.
00:20:52.240It is no less than the survival of the Bill of Rights, it seems to me, in this case.
00:20:59.820Yeah, and look, if you take this sort of all together and pull yourself sort of 30,000 feet and where we're at in history, we have an administration that has supercharged the administrative state.
00:21:15.640Anything from, you know, the Green New Deal that Congress didn't pass that they want to push by way of rule and regulation.
00:21:23.620And I think the solution to all that is make, if these are such good ideas, make Congress vote on it, right?
00:21:27.900And as opposed to these agencies doing all that, they've supercharged the administrative state.
00:21:31.620They've tried to kick the chief political rival, President Trump, off the ballot.
00:21:36.860They're trying to throw him in jail for the rest of his life.
00:21:39.660And now you have an administration that has overseen the Orwellian, breathtaking in scope, censorship enterprise.
00:21:49.400And that's why I get a little tired of being lectured by Joe Biden, whether it's at the State of the Union or wherever he's on the campaign trail, saying that this is about, you know, authoritarian versus democracy.
00:21:59.820I think we've seen, we've seen the enemy as far as like enemies to democracy in our constitutional republic.
00:22:06.580It's the same people that, again, have bulldozed their constitution to silence dissent.
00:22:11.240And I just think it's such a fundamental aspect of what it means to be an American.
00:22:15.240And this should be something that brings us together, right?
00:22:19.520I really do believe that as a country, that one of the things is that we're a creedal nation, right?
00:22:24.640We're the first of its kind that we believe, you know, the Declaration of Independence is our mission statement.
00:22:29.920The Constitution is the structure that protects individual liberty.
00:22:33.220The first protection in the Bill of Rights is your right to speak your mind, fundamental human expression.
00:22:38.480And that means that we're willing to defend the ability for somebody that we vehemently disagree with to say something that we abhor, right?
00:22:52.140But what we see now is liberals, those on the left, that's not who they are anymore.
00:22:57.820Just like it's not who they are anymore when you had presidents stand up there and say it was important Democrat presidents to secure our border.
00:23:04.620They don't actually believe that anymore.
00:23:07.280And so we've reached a kind of a critical point in this country, to your earlier point, of these are big choices.
00:23:13.900And November is going to determine a lot of where we head as a country, because I don't know how you can keep going down this road for four more years.
00:23:24.360Biden himself, I'm not sure how he personally could do it.
00:23:27.320But as the march of history, the things that they want to get done, there is a point where you go so far, it's hard to reclaim the things that, you know, reclaim the things back.
00:23:39.600And certainly, you know, the idea that the government would be able to use the biggest companies in the history of the world as an additional tool for them to silence dissent, to outsource censorship is really antithetical to the American idea and the American experiment.
00:23:55.140And as you note, the use of corporate power here, whether it be to stymid them, to insist upon policy adherence, whether it's social media, legacy media, whether it's big pharma in the case of the epidemic.
00:24:10.720We are watching a coalition that has been formed of the most powerful economic institutions in the country, along with the most powerful government, the federal government, all aligned.
00:24:25.280And in both instances, whether we are talking about the First Amendment or whether we're talking about all of the abuses of government under the epidemic and big pharma, we are watching awesome power be reorganized against the individual citizen.
00:24:45.980And all we can cling to is that constitution.
00:25:31.100You know, tyrants since the beginning of time have used, quote, unquote, emergencies or perceived emergencies to aggregate power they didn't have before and exercise it in a way that no one imagined.
00:25:42.400And that's what you know, when you believe that the state is all powerful and you don't really respect individual rights, this is a very dangerous road to go down.
00:25:51.700And again, why this case is so important and why I think as Americans, we have to push back.
00:25:56.520There's it's in our DNA to resist this kind of thing.
00:25:59.540But we've got to be willing to stand up and fight back and push back in this case, to me, has always represented that this willingness to stand up and say, not here, not now.
00:26:10.920And every American needs to be watching this case and watching this court as it weighs the future of the of the nation, the future of our our republic, because no less as is at stake.
00:26:22.700I think also it's important for everyone to understand the backdrop that's that is now current.
00:26:30.020And that is a Homeland Security Department that has created a truth ministry even after several abortive attempts.
00:26:37.920It has cybersecurity and infrastructure agency now that is performing precisely that role as the arbiter of truth, the arbiter of the limits of rights.
00:26:49.940We are also watching a party that has become far more than an opposition party.
00:26:55.780They are a party that it is committed ideologically as Marxists to destroying this nation, its foundation in the Constitution, this constitutional republic itself.
00:27:08.720And if it were not for Senator Eric Smith and a few others who have stood tall in this moment, this might have an adverse ending that none of us want to contemplate.
00:27:21.920Senator, I want to just say personally to you, thank you for all that you're doing and all that you've done.
00:27:27.560You're a great American and we appreciate you being with us today.
00:27:31.080Thanks so much, Lou. Good to talk to you again.
00:27:33.060Thanks, everybody, for being with us here today.
00:27:35.120Please join us tomorrow for The Great America Show, our guest investigative journalist, Laura Loomer.