The Biggest Free Speech Case of Our Lifetimes

Hey everybody, it's Anna Charlie Kirk Show.

Senator Schmidt joins us, and also we reflect on the Munich Security Conference and a suggestion for someone to become Trump's Vice President that you probably haven't heard of, well, you've heard of, but you probably haven't thought of it. Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com. Subscribe to our podcast, open up your podcast app and type in charliekirkshow. Get involved with Turning Point USA at tpusa.com.

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That's why we are here. Joining us now is Senator Eric Schmidt from the great state of Missouri. Senator, thank you for taking time. Senator, there's been a lot of talk about censorship and the censorship industrial complex. When you were Attorney General, you filed the Missouri v. Biden case and you exposed a vast censorship enterprise. Please tell us all about that.

I think it's very timely right now. Yeah, so we filed that lawsuit when I was Attorney General almost two years ago now. And what we sought out to prove, which we have, is that two of the more corrupt institutions, big government, big tech were in cahoots to censor millions of Americans. And so we were able to get discovery early on that showed reams and reams of emails, tens of thousands of pages of emails and text messages, just to just show the links that they went to censor people.

There's probably two big buckets, Charlie. First was, the Hunter Biden laptop story. You know, that was pre-bunked. The FBI, Elvis. Elvis Chang was the guy that briefed Silicon Valley over and overtone those Russian hack and leak operation. And then on the COVID, on COVID, whether it was on the vaccine mandates or the mask mandates or the lab leak theory, government was working hand in hand with big tech to censor Americans.

I just think it's incredibly scary. The links that they went to, to silence Americans. And so that lawsuit was filed.

It brought all this to life. Then, of course, Elon Musk thankfully buys Twitter. Then you have the Twitter files and all this stuff is out in the open.

If those two things didn't happen, if we didn't file a lawsuit and he doesn't buy Twitter, this stuff would still be in the shadows and would still be happening. But thankfully, we were able to expose it and we got to make sure this never happens again. So I'm sure you've seen bits and pieces of the Mike Benz interview talking about the interconnectedness of the censorship regime. What is your reaction to that and how should we proceed?

Yeah, I would encourage everybody if they haven't. Tucker Carlson interviewed Mike Benz, who has really made a career now of exposing sort of this enterprise, this censorship enterprise. It's an hour long, but get some popcorn and some Kleenex maybe for the tears that may come because it's scary stuff. It's scary stuff. And I would say the last 20 minutes or so, Mike does an incredible job of talking about how these agencies, CISA, for example, which no one's ever heard of, was part of this scheme. But you also had Jen Psaki, Charlie, I think it's important to point out, was at the podium talking about how we're flagging posts. I mean, they weren't hiding this. You had the Disinformation Governance Board stood up by DHS, Department of Homeland Security. And Mike goes into that of how they didn't want to have the FBI do this.

They didn't want to have the CIA do this. So they turned it over to DHS and CISA to essentially to try to censor Americans. So it's scary stuff.

It's vast. It crosses a number of different agencies. But I think what people need to understand is that they had weaponized these agencies of government to suppress dissent. And in this country, we can hold that in the First Amendment to be a really important concept, right?

This pressure release valve. People can speak their minds. The government isn't in charge and shouldn't be responsible for what people can see or hear or say. And that's what they want to do to control the narrative. And you're going to see this play out again over this election, this current election cycle. They're already talking about these threats to democracy that Donald Trump poses. The real threat to democracy is trying to put your opponents in prison for the rest of their life, censoring Americans. I mean, that's the stuff the Biden administration is actually doing. So they're accusing, of course, Republicans of doing the very things that they do. Have we seen any evidence that they have suspended these censorship activities? And what was amazing about the Mike Pence interview is that this was a national security playbook that was then inverted against the American people.

Is this ongoing? Yeah, so we were able to get an injunction for a while, but they fought that, right? So now the Supreme Court is hearing this case, oral arguments, actually a month from today at the Supreme Court, so people will be able to tune in on that. That case hinges, essentially, it's illegal for the government to censor, okay?

It's just, it's illegal. We're alleging that they coerced, they essentially outsourced that censorship to these big tech giants, some of the biggest companies in the history of the world. So that case, we did a little bit different.

We didn't go after the social media coverage, we went after the government. And so it's a really, really important case. I think it's the most important free speech case in our nation's history, certainly in a generation, because the virtual town square is every bit of the town square now where people used to go out on the courthouse steps and speak their mind.

Now people are doing it online. So it's a very important principle. So they want to do this. They're fighting it. They've appealed it.

You know, they claim that it's in, you know, whether it's a national security interest or a threat to democracy or their interest in making sure people only hear what they want them to hear, they're in it. I mean, they've appealed. We won at the district court level. They've appealed the Court of Appeals decision all the way to the Supreme Court.

So here we are. Yeah, and that's what's really important is that they thought they could get cute by outsourcing the censorship to third party groups. And they literally went through, oh, we can't use the CIA, we can't use the FBI, so we're going to use the DHS Disinformation Governance Board and go out to other partner 501 C3s.

And I think we're still just trying to get an idea of the Web. What I believe firmly it had a determinative impact on 2020. My fear is that we have not done enough to fix it coming into this election year. And they're going to have the censorship Leviathan in full force.

According to Mike Benz, he says that the two most censored events in history were the 2020 election and Covid, and they were happening simultaneously. And now they have broadened this to threats to democracy, threats to democracy. Elon Musk liberating Twitter or X has been a massive and positive development in this regard. Are there any action items for the U.S. Senate to work on this? I suppose some sort of oversight, but that seems to be slow moving in the Senate.

Yeah, I've tried to carry that work into the Senate. I just think that the First Amendment is foundational. I mean, it is what it means to be an American to speak your mind. It doesn't happen in other places in the world because tyrants since the beginning of time have tried to control what people can say and what they can hear. Right. We can't let that happen here. America is supposed to be an exception.

One of the reasons why we believe in American exceptionalism. Right. And so I've got a couple of bills in the Senate. One is on the social media side. Look, if you're going to not be a platform and you want to be a publisher and you want to engage in this kind of activity, you lose your Section 230 protections. You're no longer immune from lawsuits. So that's one piece of it. And on the government side, I have a bill that would say, if you're an individual government bureaucrat and you've been involved in this, you individually can be sued.

So if Charlie Kirk, for example, were censored or whoever were censored, you can sue an individual government actor like a Section 1983 claim. That would be, you know, all of a sudden these bureaucrats start weighing cost benefit for themselves individually. I think that would go a long way in curtailing this.

So those are two things, two ideas, certainly open to more. But this Supreme Court ruling will be really important. But I think just exposing this, Charlie, because this would have been on the fringes, labeled a conspiracy theory by so many, it's hard for the media to ignore this. They're part of it. I mean, you just look at the Hunter Biden laptop story. It was real. The FBI had it in November of 2021. They had it.

They knew it was real. Yet we're still going to these social media companies saying, get ready, there could be this BS story that's coming out. And then when that happened, the prebunking of that, then you saw, you know, the sort of these former national security people, Anthony Blinken being one of them, saying this is ridiculous. They were able to put that off. People didn't see it before the election. So I think we're going to see more of that.

But it's important, I think, for us to have structural reform in addition to the oversight and exposing it. The table is being set right now for another censorship campaign that will begin in the summer and fall. They have a deeply unpopular president. They have an ascendant dissident political movement. They're not winning on issues that really matter.

They talk about defending democracy, which is their kind of code word for mass censorship. Elon Musk has liberated Twitter and X. I believe that if Twitter remains free, that we have a fighting chance coming into November. I just I really hope we're prepared for when they turn this machinery back on. They're going to get desperate.

And around July and August, if we're able to call it their BS and really make this regime exposed, I think they're going to do 2020 again on steroids. Hey, everyone, Charlie Kirk here for 10 years, Patriot Mobile has been America's only Christian conservative wireless provider. And when I say only trust me, they are the only one. Glenn and the team have been great supporters of this program, which is why I'm so proud to partner with them. Patriot Mobile offers dependable nationwide coverage, giving you the ability to access all three major networks, which means you get the same coverage you've been accustomed to without funding the left. When you switch to Patriot Mobile, you're sending the message that you support free speech, religious liberty, the sanctity of life, Second Amendment, our military veterans and first responder heroes.

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Join me and make the switch today. That is Patriot Mobile dot com slash Charlie and free activation using offer code Charlie. So, Senator, the irony is not lost on me that your name is Eric Schmidt and one of the great villains of the censorship industrial complex is also named Eric Schmidt. Obviously, one of the Google people. He spells it. Yeah, he spells it DT, though, and it's always that right. But yes. Yeah, for sure.

It's phonetically very similar. So, Senator, regardless of people's opinions on Ukraine, that's fine. It just seems the fixation and the obsession is what is noteworthy that I want to talk to you about. This is something that I'm I know that you agree with. Why is it the most important priority? Where does that come from? I know that you're you're new to D.C. Again, you might think that it's the most important thing ever.

That's fine. But the fixation and the energy and the passion, the zeal for the Ukraine war is perplexing to me. Help me understand. It's hard to understand, Charlie, but I think that's right.

I mean, you just look at what happened over the last couple of weeks. You know, we were demanding border security. And by the way, the language that they came out with made things worse. It essentially created an express lane for illegal immigration, deputizing these asylum agents to essentially give asylum at the border. It took jurisdiction away from Texas.

The Democrats got everything they wanted. The open borders crowd loved that. And we rightfully said we're not going to do that because Joe Biden has every tool that he needs right now to close the border. He does. He could reinstitute remain in Mexico. He could stop abusing parole authority.

There's a lot of things that he could do, but he doesn't want to do it because that's actually not in their DNA. Right. So I'm of the belief that we ought to handle these issues separately.

And that's guess what? When that fell apart, what did we go to within hours funding for Ukraine? It was always the center of gravity. I think the border negotiations were merely to give sort of a fig leaf to people who wanted to vote for it. It would make it a slightly better vote for them. But it turns out it was so bad it made it a worse vote.

So they ditched that. And then we ended up on Ukraine. And I just, for me, cannot in good conscience send 61 billion dollars on top of the 112 billion that's already been sent there when we're 34 trillion dollars in debt. And we have a wide open southern border. And I think that's where most Americans, that's certainly where most Republicans are at.

But we ended up in a situation where they moved out of the Senate to do it. I can't explain it. I mean, I know the Democrats sort of blame Putin for Trump or so. I don't I don't know.

But the truth is, you should we should have a debate about that. But they, you know, they basically call you a Putin lover if you want to have any conversation about, OK, what is the likelihood of success? What are the goals here? Does this actually accomplish what needs to be accomplished?

You know, none of that stuff. You can't even talk about it. It just gets bulldozed by this desire to send more and more money. And by the way, we've been briefed. Another 100 billion is the next ask. So I just think these blank checks are endless wars. People have had enough. There's a generational shift happening, Charlie, too.

I tweeted this out or posted it on X that nearly every Republican under the age of 55 voted no. I think we're learning things that have worked and haven't worked. It doesn't mean we're and I'm not an isolationist, but I think we ought to ask critical questions. And by the way, while all this is happening, China continues to rise. If you care about American national security, it's China and our southern border. And we ought to be focused on that.

So just really quick, I haven't seen that reported. One hundred billion dollars being asked for next. When? What is what is the timeline on that? That's that's going to make the total near four or five hundred billion totally invested.

Yeah, right. So when we were briefed last year, because remember, they were trying to get this on all these continuing resolutions. They were trying to get 60 billion or something less than that of these continuing resolutions in 2023. That didn't happen. So all that got rolled over to 2024. But what they were saying was later in 2024, there could be an ask for another 100 billion. So what that tells me is there's not a plan. And I just think as a senator for a state in the United States of America, that these are important questions to ask, but they don't have good answers. They don't even want to acknowledge it. I mean, Zelensky has been in, you know, I think he's come into the Senate and talked to us like two, maybe three times. This is just it is in our lunches.

It devours everything. And I'm sitting there saying, why are we talking about things that affect the American people? It's not to say that these issues around the world aren't important to talk about. But, you know, Israel is different than Ukraine and China is different than Ukraine. Right.

Absolutely. So we ought to have these separate debates. But what they do is they hold Israel hostage. They hold the China stuff hostage because Ukraine, because Putin.

And there's really not a good explanation as to why this is such an obsession. Instead, one of your colleagues from North Carolina said that you have to be a well-briefed senator and, you know, there's no way our base can know the complexities of that. Well, I'm speaking to a well-briefed senator and just this every time it's kind of this argument from elitism and just pomposity.

I don't like that. I think it's really destructive to the country. If you have a good point, then let's hash it out. That's what the Senate should be. And it's a disappointment because the Senate should be this place of heated arguments and points and counterpoints.

And now it's just kind of thuggish tactics. I don't like it. Absolutely.

It's deadline. Yeah, it's put it all together because guess what? Our European allies should be doing more. We should have more accountability. The industrial base needs to be expanded.

But all that stuff's taken out. But you see this on these C.R.s and omnibus bills, Charlie, they just mush it all together and try to jam it through. We've got to stop infuriating. Senator, excellent work.

Even though you're a Cardinals fan, I'm a Cubs fan. Sorry. You're excellent. Oh, no.

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Relief factor dot com. This last weekend was the you could call it the CPAC or the globalists, kind of the main gathering of every single person that wants to continue the campaign in Ukraine. It is called the Munich Security Conference. The Munich Security Conference is a mixture of intellectuals and heads of state and U.S. senators. The Munich Security Conference, the consensus is very unified.

They say that they have a debate, but it almost is never a debate. However, there was a contrarian voice that was platformed this weekend at the Munich Security Conference. Munich Security Conference wrapped up yesterday.

It was three days. And they say, quote, on their Web site at the moment, there is a real risk that more and more countries end up in a lose lose situation, which is no longer about who gains more, but about who loses less. They have an entire exhibition. U.S. senators go and they talk about the fight for democracy and shoring up our defenses. The Munich Security Conference gave out a this is to give you an idea of really the folk that go there, the John McCain Dissertation Award. They have a an award named after John McCain that they give out every single year. This year, John McCain Award is awarded to this woman, I don't know her, Sarah Denise Rosenblum and Moritz Greffa. OK, so at a conference where they literally have an award named after John McCain, was talking about how the most important thing happening on the planet is the war in Ukraine.

But there was a fascinating wrinkle, a wrinkle that we did not see in recent years. And it goes to show how important it is to win these primary elections. And I was very involved in this primary election. And I remember we received some nasty emails and nasty emails and people said, oh, I like Josh Mandel. And I said, no, no, J.D. Vance is the man.

I said, just wait. J.D. Vance will show you how terrific he is.

We held the line. He won the primary, won the general. And J.D. Vance was invited on a codel, which is a congressional delegation trip for senators. And J.D. Vance was probably like, why not? He has a completely different worldview, a completely different approach. And he went to the Munich Security Conference to have a completely and 180 different perspective than the Munich Security Conference consensus.

Here's a little taste here while I'm watching it. I got to be honest, I said J.D. Vance would make a pretty good vice president for Donald Trump from the heartland. He's young. He's still in his 30s. He's a father. He's a venture capitalist. He wrote an incredibly powerful book. He understands the working class very well. He's well respected in the Senate, despite having rather contrarian views. What would your thoughts of J.D.

Vance for a V.P. email me freedom at Charlie Kirk dot com. Play cut 16. I know people have heard what Trump said and they've criticized and they said, well, Trump is going to abandon Europe. I don't think that's true at all. I think Trump is actually issuing a wake up call to say that Europe has to take a bigger role in its own security. Germany just this year will spend more than two percent of GDP. OK, that, of course, is something that we had to really push for in the United States. And it just now has finally cleared that threshold.

But it's not just about money spent. How many mechanized brigades could Germany feel tomorrow? Maybe one. Maybe one.

OK. The problem with Europe is that it doesn't provide enough of a deterrence on its own because it hasn't taken enough of a. It hasn't taken the initiative in its own security. I think that the American security blanket has allowed European security to atrophy. And again, the point is not we want to abandon Europe. The point is we need to focus as a country on East Asia and we need our European allies to step up in Europe. That very crisply. Just kind of neutral, steady opinion is considered to be bombastic at the Munich Security Conference. Being that measured, you're supposed to go there with pom poms and cheerlead.

That's what you're supposed to do. We want war. More of J.D.

Vance. Play cut 15. Germany is the one country, maybe in NATO, that did not follow the stupid Washington consensus and allow their country to be deindustrialized during the 70s, 80s and 90s. And yet at the very moment that Putin is more and more powerful, where the Russian army is invading European countries en masse, this is the point at which Germany starts to deindustrialize. Look at the number of people working in manufacturing in Germany now versus 10 years ago. Look at the critical raw materials produced in Germany now versus 10 years ago.

The energy dependence now versus 10 or 20 years ago. We have got to stop deindustrializing. We want Europe to be successful, but Europe has got to take a bigger role in its own security.

It can't do that without industry. It is hard to put into words the psyche of a German citizen and German leader when confronted. And I had other friends at the Munich Security Conference texting me and there was a consensus. Any time there was a private conversation about Germany restricting mass migration, Germany having its own armored divisions, Germany paying more for defense. It was always this harkening back to, well, we can't repeat the mistakes of the 20th century. As if there is no spectrum, that there is no middle ground, that it's so radical without any nuance whatsoever, German leadership will say, well, we can't repeat the mistakes of the 20th century. What they're trying to say and they are fixated, it dominates them and it's honestly intellectually lazy and it's driven by German guilt. What Germany did in the 20th century and the German regime was one of the great evils in the history of the species.

I don't hold any of those people accountable for what happened in the mid-20th century. Germans seem incapable of being moderate. They have to conquer Europe or abolish Europe.

There's almost no middle ground. That's the take of their leaders anyway. Their government right now is talking about sweeping crackdowns on the AfD. They're literally calling them Nazis. The Germans are the most radical in the sense of either we are going to go full fascist like they did in the 1930s, 1940s, or we're just going to have no borders, no industrial capacity and allow what Douglas Murray beautifully calls the strange death of Europe. In Germany, they're talking about freezing bank accounts and banning far-right groups from traveling abroad, vastly more strict than what we even have here at our worst. When the actual solution is very simple, just allow elections, don't ban parties and let people oppose immigration. So Germany had this Munich Security Conference and J.D.

Vance was very respectful and he was one of the few voices that decided to push back against this. But there is this timidity that is built into the DNA of European leadership where they are so afraid, they're so terrified, that they might have to have their own army and defend themselves and have their own industrial and military capacity. You want to truly stand up against Putin? Build some form of a German standing army. And this is one of the buried truths, again college students don't get taught this, about European socialism, is that American defense spending is a subsidy of European welfare state socialism. Imagine how much money you could spend on benefits, pensions, paying people to stay at home, universal government welfare, if you don't have to spend a serious amount of money on military.

We spend around 850 billion dollars a year on our military. Some of it is about protecting Europe. Now remember, Munich is the city where Neville Chamberlain caved into Hitler. Now Europeans carry on that tradition of being weak and pathetic. And I want to kind of meet some of the neo-liberals halfway. They're so convinced that the post-World War II order is orthodoxy and cannot be challenged, that all material wealth and success is a growth and extension of this World War II order, that America must defend every country, that we must have mass migration. Here's J.D.

Vance challenging this consensus, play cut 17. It's very hard, the juxtaposition between the idea that Putin poses an existential threat to Europe, compared again against the fact that we're trying to convince our allies to spend 2% of GDP. Those ideas are very much in tension. I do not think that Vladimir Putin is an existential threat to Europe. And to the extent that he is, again that suggests that Europe has to take a more aggressive role in its own security.

That's number one. But again, I go back to this question about abandoning Ukraine. If the package that's running through the Congress right now, 61 billion dollars of supplemental aid to Ukraine goes through, I have to be honest to you, that is not going to fundamentally change the reality on the battlefield.

No one wants to acknowledge that reality. All these other senators that are there, all these other neo-cons that are there, they know that 60 billion is not even a start. Not to mention, we as American taxpayers are going to be on the hook to rebuild Ukraine. So it's not just a matter of breaking a bunch of stuff and using poor Ukrainian men and boys as human shields. It's also a matter that we're going to be on the hook to rebuild Ukraine while our own country falls apart. Winning wars requires going all out. Russia is going all out. Are we prepared for that? Do we really want to? And again, at what cost and what price? I got in a debate the other day and they said, we must stand with Ukraine.

I said, what does success look like? They said, until all Ukraine is returned to Ukraine. I said, does that include Crimea? He said, of course, that's deranged.

That is deranged. Crimea, that Vladimir Putin annexed under Obama, and Obama actually did the right thing. He kind of shrugged his shoulders, like, I don't want to go to nuclear war over what is rightfully Russia's, which is Crimea. That's a much better argument, by the way, for Putin. Crimea being part of Russia than even eastern Ukraine is part of Russia.

It's literally where Russian wine is from, their naval ports were there. World War Two military installations. For years, I've been talking about how our nation's public schools have been captured by progressive ideologues, especially true of your Christian family. For those of you worried about the best educational path for your kids and grandkids, I want to tell you about how Turning Point Academy is working with the Herzog Foundation, how you, at home, can also benefit from it. They have an online publication called The Lion, and also Making the Leap, the Herzog Foundation offers a wide range of advice and information for Christian parents to make the best education decisions for your kids.

Go to HerzogFoundation.com, that is HerzogFoundation.com, so check it out right now, HerzogFoundation.com. Portions of The Charlie Kirk Show are brought to you in part by the Stanley M. Herzog Foundation, that is HerzogFoundation.com. So understand this, that the great American empire that has existed in the post-World War Two order, with the dollar as the world reserve currency status, with us paying for the defense spending around the planet, it can work, it's made us very wealthy, but there's a major issue, is that it requires perpetual saber rattling, and it requires villain creation, requires for us to create villains where they otherwise don't exist. In the Tucker Carlson Vladimir Putin interview, it was really perfectly put, there was a de-Sovietization campaign that was occurring in the late 90s, early 2000s, where we thought that Russia would become one of our allies. Used to be where Americans could easily fly to Russia, Americans used to visit Russia, and Russia was still kind of run by gangsters and criminals.

So what changed? Was it that Vladimir Putin wanted to wall himself off to the West? No, what changed is the defense industrial complex, the military industrial complex. They needed a very big and scary enemy, and it couldn't be China, because China was paying the bills, because China was paying the bills of the American ruling class, paying the bills of the bankers and private equity, the consulting class.

A lot of people are comparing 2024 to 1944, and you're missing a key element. We were allies with the Soviet Union to defeat the Nazis. We were allies with these people that we are now supposed to hate to such an extent that they're going to roll through the plains of Europe and roll through the plains of Poland. Is it in the best interest of the Russian Federation to want to reclaim Poland?

Why would they possibly do that? Vladimir Putin wants to reconstitute parts and aspects of the Soviet Union. He thinks it was one of the greatest mistakes in Russian history. Why are we not trying to broker peace right now? And the most important thing that I hope somebody can answer is why is it that the American government via Boris Johnson and Tony Blinken in Istanbul, Turkey, obliterated a peace deal that could have prevented this conflict in the first place? We are now about to enter what is called the thaw.

Temperatures are about to increase, and there's about a 90 to 100 day period where the killing is going to get horrendous. Right now, it is major advantage Russia. They are licking their chops, and there will be tens of thousands and God forbid hundreds of thousands of more Ukrainian deaths. So what?

So that we could advance the mile this way and advance the mile this way and oh, you go one mile this way? TheGuardian.com, a lot higher than expected Russian arms production worries European war planners. Moscow has massively ramped up its industry, giving its advantages in Ukraine and leading to a redistribution of wealth. It turns out, this is what one of the great paradoxes is, by the way.

It's so interesting. On one hand, the consensus in Washington, D.C. is that Russia is this unbelievable threat, this demon, this enemy that we must hate. On the other hand, it's that they're like a paper tiger and they're not actually strong and just another 60 billion dollars is going to defeat the Russians.

So which is it? Well, it turns out Russia has a lot of wealth, fair amount of people, they've ramped up industrial war capacity, and we are not going to be able to meet it. If we want to spend a couple trillion dollars, we might be able to get close. Quote, as Ukraine has scrambled to source ammunition, arms and equipment for its defense, Russia has presided over a massive ramping up of industrial production over the last two years that has outstripped what many in Western defense planners expected when Vladimir Putin launches invasion. Just as kind of a side note, have the American, have the Western planners been right about anything the last four years?

Whether it be COVID and masks and lockdowns, vaccines, stock market predictions, inflation, have they been right about anything? Oh my goodness, Russia is a lot stronger than we thought. So how much money is it going to take to defeat Russia? We won't. It's not going to happen. Our Western leaders met in Munich under a delusion, a delusion that we can keep on pumping money, use Ukrainians as human shields, and somehow that's going to beat Russia and keep us safe.