Senator Eric Schmitt: Exposing the Biggest Censorship Scandal in US History

**David Sacks** (0:00)
I put on a jacket because we're interviewing a senator, but I see that...

**Jason Calacanis** (0:04)
It's Polo Day.

**David Sacks** (0:05)
Senator Schmitt's pulled a Zelinsky here.

**Eric Schmitt** (0:07)
I did, but I told him I do have these stiff collar on the polo, which is...

**Jason Calacanis** (0:13)
You look great. It looks great. And I lost the weight. Thanks for never saying, Senator. And I've been hitting the weights unlike Sacks. And so I am too trying to get the gun show going like you have achieved there.
We are giving people ground truth data to underwrite your own opinion. What did you guys think? That was fun. All right, everybody, welcome back to a very special interview. Yeah, you know, we're doing these interviews here with me, my amazing co-host and your czar of crypto. And AI, the Rain Man himself, David Sacks. David, how are you doing, brother? How's your summer wrapping up?

**David Sacks** (1:01)
Good to be here. The summer ended way too soon. Way too soon. So sad.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:05)
Isn't it? It's just like, kids going back to school, all that. And look, you're a civil servant now. You are working for the people and the people demand, you're a public servant. Yes. And the people demand results. And hey, we have another civil servant here. David, why don't you introduce our guest today?

**David Sacks** (1:22)
This is Senator Eric Schmitt from the state of Missouri. How did we meet? It was through another former senator, now Vice President JD Vance, I believe.

**Eric Schmitt** (1:31)
That's right. That's right. Yeah.

**David Sacks** (1:32)
And you guys entered the Senate together at the same time.

**Eric Schmitt** (1:36)
We did. And got to be very close and shared a lot of life experiences. And our freshman group got pretty tight. We go to dinner once a month and try to keep that going now that he's even VP, which is a lot of fun. But yeah, we got introduced to him and have enjoyed getting to know you.

**David Sacks** (1:52)
And you now have a new book called The Last Line of Defense, which is about your time in your previous job, which was as Attorney General of the state of Missouri. And I remember talking about before I even knew you on the All-In pod when we were dealing with censorship and talking about that issue, the Twitter files, this is back in, I don't know, this is like three or four years ago.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:12)
2022, I would say.

**Eric Schmitt** (2:13)
Yeah.

**David Sacks** (2:13)
Yeah, three years ago now.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:14)
My time is moving.

**David Sacks** (2:16)
We talked about the case Biden v. Missouri, which you were the one who brought that case when you were Attorney General. When I met you and then found that out, I knew that we had some views in common, let's say about free speech and the need to avoid censorship.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:28)
And you went right at the show me, don't tell me what your fans speak, what's going on. You went directly to discovery. So maybe you could talk a little bit about the approach from the Senator from the show me state. There were rumors and kind of this feeling people were being censored, but nobody knew exactly how it was occurring. So you had some intuition that if we do some discovery here, there's got to be something under the surface, or had somebody leaked something to you? How did you know to go after this? I guess was my question.

**Eric Schmitt** (2:56)
Yeah. And one of the reasons I wrote the book was just to, you know, I think it's it's easy. The book starts with, you know, in November 2024, the fever broke. And so if you think about the four previous years, you know, this was a time of lockdowns and compulsory COVID shots and forced masking of five-year-olds, but also this vast censorship enterprise that existed that, in my view, was the greatest affront to the First Amendment we've ever seen in the history of our country. And so if you go back in time, right, to in 2022, you had seen, to your point, Jason, you had seen sort of Jen Psaki at the podium talking about, hey, we're flagging this for Facebook. There were rumors of a disinformation governance board with the Mary Poppins herself, right, talking about how this misinformation and disinformation.

**David Sacks** (3:49)
You know, Jen Kovetz, I think, right?

**Eric Schmitt** (3:50)
Right.

**David Sacks** (3:51)
Wasn't there a...

**Eric Schmitt** (3:52)
That they needed to flag this stuff and do something about it. We knew that if they were willing to talk about that stuff so publicly, there had to be something much more beneath the surface. So in May of 2022, when I was Attorney General of Missouri, we sued the Biden administration and sort of this Leviathan of agencies that were working to censor American speech. And we filed the lawsuit and we knew that it would be, you know, highly scrutinized, be called sort of further in conspiracy theories. But we knew that there was something there. And a really important strategic decision in the case was, normally when you file a lawsuit like that, you immediately seek a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction to get the government or another party to stop what they're doing.