There was a time—before modern journalism became a contest in elite conformity—when invoking Nazi Germany carried a certain weight. There was an unspoken rule: unless you were discussing genocide, actual brownshirts, or totalitarianism in its purest form, you didn’t go there. It was a matter of basic historical literacy and, frankly, decorum.

But CBS’s Margaret Brennan, host of Face the Nation—or as it increasingly resembles, Face the Nonsense—has no such qualms. With all the confidence of a sophomore who just discovered Howard Zinn, Brennan recently claimed that Nazi Germany “weaponized” free speech, as though Goebbels spent his afternoons battling for blue checkmarks on Weimar Twitter.

Let’s be clear: Nazi Germany didn’t weaponize free speech. It obliterated it. The regime burned books, criminalized dissent, shut down newspapers, imprisoned political opponents and exterminated them, and tightly controlled every broadcast, publication, and public utterance. Free speech in the Third Reich had all the freedom of a man handcuffed to a radiator with a Luger pressed to his temple.

For a brief moment—perhaps thanks to a satellite feed delay and a generous dash of sheer disbelief—Senator Marco Rubio looked like he was running an internal diagnostic. Did I really just hear that from a supposedly educated American journalist? Then, like a teacher correcting a wayward student, he pointed out the obvious: Nazi Germany didn’t have free speech. It had the Gestapo.

The Nazis didn’t “weaponize” free speech any more than they “weaponized” due process. They crushed it, erased it, and replaced it with state propaganda enforced by terror.