When an establishment media propagandist makes an assertion this asinine, one struggles to find a single explanation for it.
Sunday on CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” during an interview with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, host Margaret Brennan made one of the most shocking and indefensible claims in recent memory when, in a bewildering attempt to smear Vice President J.D. Vance, she blamed the Holocaust on too much free speech in Nazi Germany.
“Well, he was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide,” Brennan said of Vance, who delivered a brilliant speech in defense of freedom and national sovereignty to a room full of European authoritarians at the Munich Security Conference in Germany on Friday.
Brennan then stuttered and sputtered for 20 seconds or so as she tried tying Vance to Germany’s “far-right” extremists. But Rubio did not stand for it.
“Well, I have to disagree with you,” Rubio replied, interrupting Brennan’s open endorsement of censorship.
“Free speech was not used to conduct a genocide,” he continued. “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 had a list of people they hated but primarily the Jews.”
“There was no free speech in Nazi Germany; there was none,” he added.
Readers may view the exchange in the clip below, posted to the social media platform X.
Utterly bizarre assertion from Margaret Brennan. She claims the Nazi Holocaust occurred because “free speech was weaponized” in Germany, thus making Vance’s comments all the more worrisome. Recasting the Holocaust as a consequence of excessive free speech is just totally bonkers pic.twitter.com/2vefGlzT6s
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) February 16, 2025
Is Margaret Brennan one of the most dishonest mainstream media figures?
Yes: 99% (469 Votes)
No: 1% (3 Votes)
In his address on Friday, Vance chronicled Europe’s numerous and chilling violations of free speech and freedom of conscience.
The vice president’s comments rankled the European leaders in attendance. German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, for instance, ironically helped prove Vance’s point by calling the comments “not acceptable.”
“This democracy was just called into question by the U.S. vice president, not just the German democracy but that of Europe as a whole,” Pistorius said, thereby laughably insisting that nations whose leaders find a defense of free speech “not acceptable” somehow qualify as democracies.
For his part, Vance could only marvel at Brennan’s assertion.
“Does the media really think the holocaust was caused by free speech?” Vance posted on Sunday.
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
Indeed, Brennan’s comment strikes the sensible observer as so pathologically absurd that it probably requires more than one possible explanation.
Thus, three such explanations, none of them mutually exclusive, could help account for that comment.
First, Brennan might have acted from a combination of simple idiocy and pettiness.
For years, establishment politicians and their media minions have used the most grotesque hyperbole against President Donald Trump. With no regard for how stupid they sound, they have blasted Trump as a “Nazi” and a “fascist.”
Thus, to a simple-minded establishment propagandist, everyone in Trump’s orbit must do “Nazi” things. It really involves nothing more complicated than that.
Moreover, Brennan probably has an ax to grind against Vance. After all, during an interview last month, the vice president so thoroughly humiliated the CBS propagandist that X users made her the subject of hilarious memes.
Of course, both idiocy and pettiness reflect weakness. If true, therefore, this first explanation would qualify as the least alarming of the three.
Second, and far more sinister, Brennan might have known but not cared that she made an inflammatory and indefensible statement, for she has effectively prostituted herself in order to advance the interests of the establishment masters who pay her salary. Thus, she will say most anything for money.
In this case, the establishment’s collective interest springs from intense hatred of peasants who challenge their power.
For instance, federal bureaucrats who inhabit Washington, D.C.’s disproportionately wealthy suburbs cannot have peasants questioning how they amassed their wealth. Likewise, if the peasants ask too many questions, then the post-Cold War trans-Atlantic security state must justify its continued existence.
Hence, European leaders and their establishment allies in America claim to defend something nebulous that they call “democracy.” That justifies their existence. In their minds, it also means that everyone who opposes them, peasants included, opposes democracy.
This, of course, amounts to pure projection. After all, those advocates of phony “democracy” can scarcely conceal their own authoritarian sensibilities.
Thus, according to this second explanation, Brennan knew that free speech did not exist in Nazi Germany, but she made her asinine statement anyway for the simple reason that free speech threatens the trans-Atlantic establishment, so she and other media minions must discredit the very concept of open debate.
Third, and most sinister of all, Brennan’s comment felt like a coordinated assault on truth itself. That would imply a spiritual quality of which Brennan herself might or might not have an inkling.
For instance, if you insist that men can turn themselves into women and if you enforce that insistence by policy or even by law, then you can convince a large segment of any society that even the most fundamental truths have no validity. Nihilists, in other words, can destroy the reality they despise and replace it with whatever they wish.
The assertion that Nazi Germany used free speech to commit genocide falls into this same category. It has so little basis in truth that it actually qualifies as truth’s inverse. And that makes it a useful weapon in a war on truth itself.
In short, any of these three factors could explain Brennan’s otherwise unfathomable statement about free speech in Nazi Germany.
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