According to Senator Eric Schmitt, that’s not a hypothetical—it’s the chilling reality uncovered in Missouri v. Biden, a landmark lawsuit he spearheaded as Missouri’s Attorney General.
On this week’s episode of Breaking Battlegrounds, Schmitt joined Sam Stone and Chuck Warren to discuss his new book, The Last Line of Defense: How We Beat the Left in Court, and to pull back the curtain on what he calls the “largest censorship enterprise in American history.”
The case revealed something shocking: on day three of the Biden administration, federal officials began coordinating with social media giants to silence Americans. Topics like the COVID lab leak theory, the Hunter Biden laptop, vaccines, masks—even election questions—were quietly targeted. Discovery uncovered reams of emails, secret portals to platforms, and direct pressure campaigns from Washington insiders.
Schmitt described depositions with Anthony Fauci and FBI agent Elvis Chan, who admitted that officials knew the Hunter Biden laptop was real as early as 2019—yet still worked to “pre-bunk” the story and label it Russian disinformation.
“This wasn’t happening in some faraway country,” Schmitt explained. “It was here, in America.”
For him, the case wasn’t just about COVID rules or political narratives. It was about the fundamental American right to free speech—and what happens when government overreach threatens it. His book serves as both a record of those legal victories and a playbook for how to fight back the next time censorship rears its head.
Whether you agree with Schmitt or not, his warning is clear: the fight for free speech is far from over.
Transcript
**Chuck Warren: **Senator, in your book you talk about censorship and specifically you talked about Missouri versus Biden and how this was the most important free speech case in American history. To remind our listeners, the Biden world really did do censorship. They did it on the COVID lab leak theory. They did it on the Hunter Biden laptop. They did it on mask and et cetera. Tell us about that case and why it's important for free speech.
**Senator Eric Schmitt: **Yeah, so, the reason I wrote the book, Last Line of Defense, How We Beat the Left in Court was I think it's easy to sort of believe that all of this was inevitable, right? That all the great things we were talking about with President Trump were, you know, America’s back and we're talking about those things. But, you know, there were some dark days, right? When President Trump's out of office, as allies are out of office, the left was truly on the march. It was a time of COVID lockdowns, of compulsory COVID shots, of mass mandates, of censorship of ESG requirements, of DEI struggle sessions. All this stuff was in our face. And, when I was a Missouri attorney general, we stood up and we fought back against all of it and we won.
We took the vaccine mandate, you know, to the Supreme court, we won. We took the student loan death forgiveness case, the Supreme court, and we won. And we filed this Missouri versus Biden lawsuit that exposes censorship enterprise. It was shocking. I mean, they, on day three of the administration, the read about in the book, they began this, they started you deplatforming RFK Jr.
They started going after people who had a different view on, on masks or vaccines or had a question about the election. I mean, this was not like, this isn't like guesswork. Like we got discovery that showed it reams and reams of emails and text messages and secret portals to social media companies. I mean they were in this.
And we had the depth you could read about. took the deposition of Anthony Fauci. We took the deposition of Elvis Chan, who was the FBI agent who was pre-bunking the Hunter Biden laptop story. They knew it was real. They had it in 2019 and they were acting like this was a Russian hack and leak operation to get it censored. And so you just can't let this happen again. This wasn't in some far away place like we were talking about in Europe. This was here and it really takes it. So the book Last Line of Defense is really a playbook, honestly.
For moving forward. It's experiences of what we did to stop it then and expose it then. But also this won't be the last time the left engages in this kind of sort of lawfare and tactics. And so we got to know how to push back and win. But I think the censorship piece for me is somebody that really believes in free speech was chilling. I mean, they, they, you they were talking about creating a ministry of truth, you know. The disinformation governance board, you know, and I think, you know, we want to kind of memory hold that in some ways because it was such a weird time. But you know, you had police tape around playgrounds, and you had censorship, and the guy working the forklift was going to lose his ability to provide for his family because he didn't want to take the COVID shot. You know, I mean like and they were lied to as it would prevent transmission It didn't prevent transmission. Look you can choose to take it not take it. You can choose to wear a mask or not wear a mask. This is America But the idea was that you're being forced to do all this is crazy.
Check out Senator Schmitt’s new book, The Last Line of Defense: How to Beat the Left in Court
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