The first weeks of the Trump administration may seem like an odd moment for CBS News to launch its crusade against free speech — after all, why would liberal journalists want to give President Donald Trump more control over what people are allowed to say?

A closer study of the media’s behavior — and of Europe’s crackdown on dissent — helps it all make sense.

CBS’s Margaret Brennan provided the key by which to understand this censorship campaign when she attacked Vice President JD Vance for defending free speech in Germany “where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide,” Brennan said.

Whenever you hear someone lament that a fundamental right is being “weaponized,” you know that person doesn’t believe it is a fundamental right. When Brennan, or any media figure or commentator, complains of the weaponization of free speech, they are complaining that their side just lost a debate.

Like the rest of the elite media class (and the European ruling class), Brennan believes that the only way her side could lose a debate or an election is if the other side cheated. “Free speech,” you see, is only valid if the “good guys” win. Otherwise, there must have been some cheating. You know, “misinformation” or “interference.”

Thus, the ramped-up effort to rein in free speech, democracy, and dissent.

The 2025 campaign against free speech

“What I worry about is the threat from within,” Vance told European leaders at the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 14. “The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values—values shared with the United States of America.”

Vance lamented that Romania recently nullified an election on the grounds of “foreign interference,” and European officials were threatening to nullify a German election if it turned out wrong.

Vance assailed EU officials for threatening to shut down social media platforms for “hateful content,” and he criticized the German government for police raids “against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online … ”

Vance had particularly harsh words for the United Kingdom, where the police are cracking down on people praying too close to abortion clinics.

Later in the week, Scottish police arrested a woman for holding a sign outside of an abortion clinic that said, “Here to talk, only if you want.”

“In Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat,” Vance concluded.

For this, European officials attacked Vance.

Joining in this attack on Vance and implicit defense of European repression was Brennan, who brought on Secretary of State Marco Rubio and asked him to explain “what happened in Munich.”

Brennan complained: “He lectured about what he described as censorship, mainly focusing, though, on including more views from the Right.”

Let’s parse those words carefully.

First, Brennan refused to accept Vance’s statement that censorship was going on in Germany or Britain. One wonders how draconian the police state would have to be for Brennan to drop the “what he described as” qualifier there.

Second, there’s the “though.” He said he was upset about censorship, but he spoke about right-wing views being silenced. The implication is that it’s not really censorship if the ones being arrested or silenced are the Right.

Free speech, in this view, is for the decent folk. If the Right tries to claim “free speech” protection, that’s “weaponization.”

When Rubio explained that Vance was objecting to actual repression of dissent, Brennan came back with the classic retort of saying the Republican was like Hitler:

“Well, he was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide, and he met with the head of a political party that has far-right views and some historic ties to extreme groups. The context of that was changing the tone of it. And you know that, that the censorship was specifically about the Right.”

Again — and this is the lesser problem — her final objection is revealing: “Censorship was specifically about the Right.” Censoring the Right isn’t censoring!

However, the “context” she tried to add was her false argument that “free speech” caused the Holocaust.

Free speech did not, in fact, cause the Holocaust or Hitler. Weimar Germany did not have free speech. The government banned Hitler, which helped Hitler’s Nazis take power. Then the Nazis used existing censorship laws to crush dissent.

In any event, Brennan obviously doesn’t believe that Scottish church ladies reciting the Angelus in their own homes will cause genocide. She just believes that free speech is not for “the Right.”

That same weekend, CBS elevated Europe’s censors as heroes. 60 Minutes aired a glowing profile of the German government speech police. The segment featured no critical pushback, and the CBS host gushed over the European prosecutors.

“Free speech needs boundaries,” one of the Germans explained. “Without boundaries, a very small group of people can rely on endless freedom to say anything that they want while everyone else is scared and intimidated.”

It’s a crime to insult somebody in public or on the internet or to repost something that “is not true.”

“Punishment for breaking hate-speech laws can include jail time for repeat offenders,” the CBS host explained, “but in most cases, a judge levies a stiff fine and sometimes keeps their devices.”

In the oddest scene of the interview, the prosecutors all laugh at how upset folks are when the German State seizes their phones for bad speech, and the CBS host smiles along with them.

A brief history

This recent spasm of support for censorship echoes something similar from Trump’s first term.

The phrase “Fake News” is now an insult hurled by Trump and his fans against unfriendly media, but it really rose to prominence right after Trump won in 2016.

Former President Barack Obama traveled to Germany and condemned the spread of “Fake News” in America and Europe. This was partly a call to action for governments to battle this scourge, but it was also part of an explanation for how Trump could have won.

The liberal website BuzzFeed ran a story its editor billed as proof that “Fake news beat real news” in the weeks before the election. Other outlets were more explicit in suggesting that Trump only won because of “Fake News.”

The label at first had meaning. Odd websites carried stories — “Pope Francis Endorses Trump” — that weren’t merely misleading spin but actual total fabrications. Some of these fake stories went viral on social media.

This was a comforting explanation for liberals in the media. Hillary couldn’t have lost because of Hillary or because of liberalism. It must have been because Americans were fooled by lies. “Putin hacked the election” was one storyline.

The obvious response was to crack down on bad speech.

Liberal outlets deployed their own speech police. New York Times columnist Kevin Roose started a daily ritual of showing how dangerous Facebook was (Facebook took the blame as the purveyor of “Fake News”) by posting the top destination of Facebook links. That a lot of old people were watching Ben Shapiro videos was clearly a threat to our democracy.

Oliver Darcy at CNN lobbied cable carriers to drop Fox News, which he essentially branded as an illegitimate news outlet.

Taylor Lorenz popped around various prestige outlets warning about the dangers of “unfettered” conversations.

Ben Collins, the speech police officer for NBC News, was one of the most aggressive in warning that free speech would lead to fascism. Collins later argued that the media had a duty to ignore truths that were spread by people he believed were bad.

The riddle solved

This brief history explains what might otherwise be a riddle: Why would liberals get more enthusiastic about censorship when a Republican takes the White House? Shouldn’t the out-of-power party fear such power to quash dissent?

The answer has two parts.

First, the rush to attack misinformation, fake news, or hate speech is part of their coping mechanism. We only lost because the other side cheated. Let’s stop them from cheating — and it’s cheating when they rely on “free speech” because free speech is for the good guys.

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Second, they don’t actually believe they are out of power. Brennan in 2025 or Obama in 2017 still see themselves as the ones in charge. They control the news media. Their friends rule in Europe. They control academia. They control the bureaucracy.

From that elite perspective, even the democratically elected president can seem like an unseemly dissident, and surely the plurality of American voters can seem like a troublesome population that needs to be kept in line and certainly not empowered with unfettered free speech.