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In a recent episode of the Freedom Center’s podcast The Right Take with Mark Tapson, journalist Michael Walsh declared unequivocally that journalism is dead. Certainly legacy journalism is, and definitive evidence of that came this last Sunday on Face the Nation when CBS news anchor Margaret Brennan boldly declared that freedom of speech had been “weaponized” under Adolph Hitler to enable the Holocaust.
This came in the wake of Vice President JD Vance’s epic, very presidential speech at the Munich Security Conference last Friday in which he warned the assembly of European diplomats against abandoning our shared democratic values, including suppressing freedom of speech by tightening a vise of systemic censorship on citizens for expressing politically incorrect views.
On Face the Nation, guest Marco Rubio, our newly installed Secretary of State, was in the process of defending Vance’s remarks about declining freedom of speech among our European allies when Brennan interrupted Rubio with the eye-opening claim that Vance had been “standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide.”
Did you catch that? A top news personality at one of the Big Three TV networks made the outrageously idiotic (or intentionally misleading – take your pick) assertion that free speech under the Nazi regime enabled the Holocaust.
Brennan went on to criticize Vance for meeting with Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, which she claims has “far right views.” Of course, everyone knows by now that the legacy media use the nebulous smear “far right” to describe anyone more conservative than Chairman Mao. Vance also met with leaders of other major German political parties, by the way, but Brennan wants you to believe that Vance is a Nazi, even though the Nazis – the National Socialists – were not “far right.”
Rubio admirably shot back, more politely than her historical revisionism deserved:
I have to disagree with you. Free speech was not used to conduct a genocide. The genocide was conducted by an authoritarian Nazi regime that happened to also be genocidal because they hated Jews and they hated minorities…
There was no free speech in Nazi Germany. There was none. There was also no opposition in Nazi Germany. They were the sole and only party that governed that country, and so that’s not an accurate reflection of history.
Rubio finished by defending Vance’s point about the “erosion in free speech and intolerance for opposing points of view” in Europe. When he was done, Brennan ended the segment without further comment, stating only “I’m being told that we are out of time.” Maybe it gradually dawned on someone in the CBS control room that Brennan would only further humiliate herself and the network by continuing.
Social media roasted Brennan. Commentator Jim Hanson tweeted, “Marco Rubio rightly calls her out on one of the most deranged analogies ever.” White House communication director Steven Cheung wrote, “Margaret Brennan of CBS News is going through some bizarre episode as she makes disgusting excuses for Nazis and the Holocaust.” Vance himself weighed in, calling it “a crazy exchange.”
As Jonathan Turley, author of The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in the Age of Rage, explained at The New York Post,
One of the first things that the Nazis did in coming to power in 1933 was to crack down on free speech and criminalize dissent. Censorship is the harbinger of authoritarianism and Germany is the ultimate example of how no censorship system in history has ever succeeded in killing one idea or stopping a single movement.
Brennan could not have picked a better country to utterly destroy the point that she was trying to make in favor of limits on free speech.
In the country which Margaret Brennan claimed conducted a genocide by “weaponizing” free speech, a poll found that only 18% of German citizens feel free to express their opinions in public; only 17% felt free to express themselves on the internet. In Germany, public insults are considered a crime. Check out the video below in which German prosecutors laugh as they confirm for 60 Minutes, another CBS propaganda outlet, that it is a crime to insult people online or to repost a lie on social media. 60 Minutes then joins German police as six armed officers raid a man’s home and remove his electronic devices for sharing a “racist” cartoon online:
Meanwhile in the UK, citizens are routinely harassed, if not arrested, by police for social media posts deemed insulting to the protected victim classes, primarily Muslims, or for praying silently in the vicinity of an abortion clinic. Under multiculturalist elites like Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the UK is now on the verge of adopting blasphemy laws to protect Islam from criticism.
The propagandists of the legacy media, and the globalist elites that they prop up everywhere throughout the Western world, view freedom of speech as a threat to democracy – by which they mean one-party political hegemony – and therefore it must be tightly circumscribed by state power. This is why conventional journalism is dead and why JD Vance’s challenge to the increasingly totalitarian European nations we call our allies was so courageous and vital.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior