Another day, another craven political stunt from Missouri's top legal official. State Attorney General Eric Schmitt and his counterparts from five other red states sent a letter last week to DirecTV to "strongly recommend" that it continue carrying One America News Network. Leave it to Schmitt to side with a top right-wing disinformation organ in his continuing quest to demagogue his way into a U.S. Senate seat.

OAN is a rightist propaganda machine masquerading as a news network, catering to hyper-conservatives who find Fox News to be too mainstream. It promotes disinformation about supposed voter fraud in 2020, the supposed "false-flag" attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and supposed deaths linked to coronavirus vaccines — all lies, and dangerous ones, often in groveling service to former President Donald Trump. The network is currently facing two massive lawsuits from election-technology companies that it has smeared with its disinformation.

DirecTV announced in January it was dropping the network from its service, following "a routine internal review." The company didn't give a specific explanation and wasn't obligated to. This is a free-enterprise business decision (a concept Republicans used to respect), but it's not difficult to deduce that the bad publicity over hosting toxic lies was finally deemed to be bad for the balance sheet.

Yet rather than just keeping government's nose out of it and letting the market decide — once the mantra of good Republicans everywhere — Schmitt jumped on the bandwagon of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, signing onto a letter to DirecTV's chief executive and board of directors along with other attorneys general from Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana and South Carolina.

The letter called the decision to drop the network "highly troubling and disappointing," alleged without evidence that it was capitulation to "powerful left-wing voices," and ominously recommended the company "reconsider your present course and renew your contract with OAN."

The letter does pay lip-service to the market, warning fancifully that failure to keep OAN "will not only cause you to lose millions of dollars in business, but also drive many millions of Americans to simply cancel your services." But it's hard to miss the intimidating undertone of a letter like this from a half-dozen of the most powerful legal officials in America.

Schmitt is supposed to be Missouri's lawyer in court. Instead, he has used his post to bully school districts over their mask policies and curriculum, to grandstand in defense of parents who disrupt school board meetings, to file a ridiculous lawsuit against China and to generally throw whatever chunks of red meat he thinks might convince Missouri's Republican base to nominate him to the Senate. The fact that he thinks carrying water for professional liars might fit that bill says much about him — and about the base.

REPRINTED FROM THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

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