A Gaffe for the Ages

A journalist weaponizes the Holocaust against freedom of speech

What as that you just said, Margaret…?

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When Democrats and progressives talk of “our democracy” and the Constitution, you have to wonder what they understand those words to mean.

Though with no intention of doing so, Margaret Brennan of CBS News cleared that up for us during her interview with Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Face the Nation last Sunday. The subject under discussion was Vice President J.D. Vance’s pointed criticism of Europe’s less than firm commitment to principles of liberal democracy such as freedom of speech. Brennan found his remarks objectionable. After all, as she reminded Rubio:

Well, he was standing in a country [Germany] 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—

“Free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide”: Mr. Orwell would have loved that one! Let us pause for a moment to contemplate the degree of ignorance and the thoughtless stupidity that led Brennan to say such a thing. Outside the cocoon of her progressive ideology, I suppose that Margaret Brennen’s a reasonably intelligent person. But confronted with an argument from a politician whom she so obviously loathes, Brennan behaved like an idiot.

And Marco Rubio had no problem fielding her pop fly:

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 and they hated those that they—they had a list of people they hated, but primarily the Jews. There was no free speech in Nazi Germany. There was none. There was also no opposition in Nazi Germany, they were a sole and only party that governed that country. So that's not an accurate reflection of history.

Got that, Margaret?

There was a time when any American high school graduate would have known that much about National Socialist Germany. But the host of Face the Nation, an honor graduate of the University of Virginia with a bachelor’s degree in foreign affairs and Middle Eastern studies, a seasoned journalist hosting CBS’s flagship news and public affairs show, professes to see in the Holocaust an example of the dangers inherent in freedom of speech!

Margaret Brennan first came to my notice as co-moderator along with Norah O’Donnell of the 2024 vice-presidential debate. Neither of them could be described as impartial—but O’Donnell was a model of objectivity compared to her colleague. Brennan’s hostility to J.D. Vance was right out in the open, and it intensified as, to her evident dismay, he fielded question after question with aplomb. A low point was reached when Brennan, driven to despair by the misfire of yet another gotcha moment, cut off Vance’s microphone before he finished his answer.

Brennan greatly deserved the criticism she received after the debate, my favorite example of which came from Megyn Kelly: "Margaret Brennan, not only do you desperately need some bronzer, you need to understand how to moderate a fair debate when you have half the county rooting for the other guy."

Claws out!

But it wasn’t just hatred of J.D. Vance that led Brennan to associate free speech with the Holocaust. For today’s progressives, freedom of speech is…problematical. Why? Because the First Amendment gives voice to “far right extremists” like J.D. Vance. Because it subverts approved narratives. Because it enables people to question official proclamations and narratives. In a none too felicitous manner, Brennan was expressing a view widely held on the broad Left: Speech is dangerous and must somehow be regulated. After all, that’s what democracies in Europe do!

True enough; that’s indeed what they do. We hear a lot of talk about “liberal democracy” that includes countries like Britain, France, and Germany, whose claim on the title is dubious. With the partial exception of Britain, no country in Europe has a political tradition that enshrines civil liberties as natural rights, outside the authority of government. Britain, indeed, evolved such a tradition over many centuries, But, since the British constitution is unwritten, civil liberties were never so firmly based there as they are in America. And today in Britain, they’re being steadily undermined. A country where a politically incorrect social media post can result in a visit from the police can hardly be called a liberal democracy.

Nor can a country—or a multinational entity like the European Union—that’s afraid of its own people lay claim to democratic values. Just ask the voters of Romania, whose “constitutional court” summarily annulled a presidential election. That the winning candidate was a pro-Russian right winger is beside the point. If the people’s choice is conditional on other people’s judgement of its propriety, there is no democracy. And the precedent having been established, any election can now be annulled.

In America during the pandemic, there was a serious attempt to undermine freedom of speech, supposedly for the sake of public safety. It became impermissible to question the commands of the Authorities. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter colluded with the government to suppress impertinent questions about lockdowns, masking, social distancing, vaccines.

And this whetted the progressive appetite for regulation of speech. “Disinformation” suddenly became a serious threat. “Fake news” was confusing the American people. So once again, the media in partnership with the government stepped in to manage the news. For instance, by manufacturing a fairy tale that the notorious Hunter Biden laptop was a Russian plant. For instance, by reassuring the public that President Biden had more spring in his step than the Energizer Bunny.

But this campaign against freedom of expression backfired in a spectacular manner. Rather than bolstering the authority of experts and elites, it undermined them. Rather than suppressing a rising tide of populism, it helped to deliver the presidency to Donald J. Trump. Thanks to the Constitution, thanks to the Bill of Rights, it was not possible in America to regulate speech and manage the news right out in the open. It had to be done in the shadows. And that was its undoing.

Margaret Brennan and CBS have been notably silent about her egregious gaffe. Perhaps they think that if they say nothing, no one will notice that a top journalist, whose livelihood enjoys the explicit protection of the First Amendment, had the nerve to link the Holocaust to freedom of speech.

Newsflash, ladies and gentlemen of the press: We noticed.