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Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., led the Senate hearing on the censorship industrial complex to investigate the Biden administration’s alleged actions of censorship against Americans, violating their Free Speech rights.
During the hearing, Schmitt disclosed that the Missouri v. Biden case forced the Biden administration to release 20,000 pages of evidence that included emails, Slack messages and other internal communications between the White House, big tech companies and Non-Government Organizations (NGOs).
He declared, “These documents revealed a vast censorship enterprise far larger in scope and scale than we could have previously imagined: A coordinated, well-oiled machine with the NGOs at the very center.”
“This machine is waging war on our free speech across multiple fronts,” he went on.
Schmitt noted that companies like News Guard and the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) blacklisted conservative outlets to prevent them from receiving advertising money that would help spread their messages. He said that their purpose was to feed blacklists to major advertising firms to “box out conservative or dissident outlets from access to the public square.”
He added that the GDI’s top ten blacklist members are all on the political right
In addition, he also described the coordinated manipulation of public narrative through NGOs. “Nonprofits worked with the press to justify mass censorship, manufacture hysteria about ‘right-wing disinformation,’ and smear and defame their critics.”
He named Stanford University and the University of Washington for perpetuating this and called out groups like The Atlantic Council for training journalists’ talking points regarding disinformation to instruct them to oppose conservative viewpoints.
Schmitt also pointed out that the “Stop Hate for Profit” campaign was led by a coalition of censorship groups that allied with advertisers and journalists to push for added censorship on Facebook in 2020, and the big tech company complied.
During her testimony, Editor of The Federalist Mollie Hemingway explained how the Hunter Biden laptop story was “violently suppressed.”
“In the 2020 election when the Hunter Biden laptop was under discussion there had been massive NGO participation in preparing journalists to say that if a story like that came out that they would suppress it. And they did.”
She explained how media outlets like NPR refused to cover it, big tech companies refused to allow the story to be circulated, and even the US press secretary wasn’t allowed to discuss it.
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, detailed that Senate members received communications about the story before it broke and were instructed to “not discuss it because it would be untrue.”
Journalist and Senior Fellow at the London Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Claremont Institute, Benjamin Weingarten investigated the situation and noted that, “The government should not be in the business of silencing us directly or by proxy.”
He reminded the Senate that in the Missouri v. Biden case, which was downgraded to Murthy v. Missouri, “The Supreme Court did not rule on the merits. In fact, they explicitly said they didn’t rule on the merits.”
“The government is force. It is power,” he added, noting the implicit threat that exists when a government instructs private companies.
Weingarten called to starve the censorship industrial complex of its funding to end its influence over the free press.
