By John Oyewale
Secretary of State Marco Rubio clashed Sunday with CBS host Margaret Brennan over Vice President J.D. Vance’s Friday speech at the Munich Security Conference.
Rubio appeared on “Face the Nation” while in Jerusalem on the second leg of his tour of Europe and the Middle East. Brennan’s had asked what Vance’s speech and meeting with a leader of Alternative for Germany (AfD), a right-wing German populist political party, “accomplish other than irritating our allies.” Rubio responded by emphasizing Vance was right to point out European countries’ perceived backsliding on free speech.
“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,” Brennan replied. “The context of that was changing the tone of it. And you know that, that the censorship was specifically about the right.”
“Well, I have to disagree with you. No, no, I have to disagree with you,” Rubio told Brennan. “Free speech was not used to conduct a genocide. The genocide was conducted by an authoritarian Nazi regime that happened to also be genocidal … There was no free speech in Nazi Germany … There was also no opposition in Nazi Germany … So that’s not an accurate reflection of history.”
Nazi Germany’s leaders censored the free press, criminalized the public’s access to foreign media and hijacked the media and universities to spread propaganda as early as five years before World War II was ignited in 1939, according to the Holocaust Encyclopedia.
Moreover, before the Nazis took over, Germany had many restrictions on speech, including laws against hate speech, but this did not stop the Nazis from coming to power. “Weimar Germany had laws against hate speech, closed down hundreds of Nazi papers, jailed” Nazi propagandist Joseph “Goebbels for antisemitism, and even banned Hitler from speaking. However, Nazi ideology still spread, and the Nazis still rose to power.”
Rubio voiced his agreement with Vance that the perceived backsliding on tolerance for opposing views across European countries that shared Western values with the U.S. mattered as it was a case of “an erosion of the actual values that bind us together in this transatlantic union that everybody talks about” and not a case of decreased military might or economic height.
“And I think allies and friends and partners that have worked together now for 80 years should be able to speak frankly to one another in open forums without being offended, insulted, or upset,” Rubio continued.
Brennan’s claim that “free speech was weaponized to conduct” the Holocaust drew criticism online. (RELATED: CBS Reporter Regrets Media Misinformation On Biden For All The Wrong Reasons)
Journalist and commentator Michael Tracey described the claim as “[u]tterly bizarre” and a revision of history that was “just totally bonkers.”
“[I]t’s historically illiterate, antagonistic to a fundamental value, and done so condescendingly from a highly paid ‘news’ desk,” journalist Will Cain wrote.
Vice President Vance weighed in, too, calling it “a crazy exchange.”
“Does the media really think the holocaust was caused by free speech?” Vance posted on X. He also said foreign ministers from various European countries continued to work with the U.S. on various other issues of joint concern even though “[m]any of them probably didn’t like the speech or didn’t agree with it.”
This is a crazy exchange.
Does the media really think the holocaust was caused by free speech? https://t.co/EBUKx75Wfm
— JD Vance (@JDVance) February 16, 2025
CBS News also drew significant flak when two different versions of an Oct. 5, 2024 interview with 2024 Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Haris appeared on the outlet’s initial and primetime broadcasts of “60 Minutes” segments. The outlet ultimately released the unedited version of the interview at the behest of the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission on Feb. 5, 2025.
Pre-Holocaust Germany was not a place of unlimited freedom of speech. The lawyer Greg Lukianoff explains,
Weimar Germany had laws banning hateful speech (particularly hateful speech directed at Jews), and top Nazis including Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch and Julius Streicher actually went to jail for violating them. The efforts of the Weimar Republic to suppress the speech of the Nazis are so well known in academic circles that one professor has described the idea that speech restrictions would have stopped the Nazis as “the Weimar Fallacy.” The Weimar Republic not only shut down hundreds of Nazi newspapers — in a two-year period, they shut down 99 in Prussia alone — but they accelerated that crackdown on speech as the Nazis ascended to power. Hitler himself was banned from speaking in several German states from 1925 until 1927.
Far from being an impediment to the spread of National Socalist ideology, Hitler and the Nazis used the attempts to suppress their speech as public relations coups. The party waved the ban as a bloody shirt to claim they were being targeted for exposing the international conspiracy to suppress “true” Germans.
