Rubio destroys CBS News anchor with facts after she tries blaming Holocaust on free speech

CBS News' Margaret Brennan did her apparent best last month to corner or to extract concessions from Vice President JD Vance. In the "Face the Nation" interview, Vance rejected both Brennan's dated liberal presumptions and the shaky premises shoring up her various lines of attack, proving the host's best was not good enough.

Brennan, evidently still committed to hitting Vance with a critique that sticks, attacked the vice president during her interview with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, which aired on Sunday. The CBS News host concern-mongered about the impact of Vance's Friday speech at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, particularly his criticism of European censorship, and suggested that free speech set the stage for the Holocaust.

Rubio, like Vance before him, refused to indulge Brennan's fantasy and instead pointed out the falsity of her revisionist history.

In his Friday speech, Vance blasted European nations for their ruthless suppression of political movements and ideas; their destructive mass migration policies; their dismissal of citizens' concerns; and their attacks on religious liberties. Vance further expressed concern that Europe is turning its back on the values that it once shared in common with America.

While largely well received on this side of the Atlantic, various European officials took umbrage at the vice president's fact-based observations.

Germany's socialist defense minister Boris Pistorius, for instance, claimed that Vance's doubts about European democracy were "not acceptable," even though authorities in Pistorius' country have worked to ban, vilify, disarm, de-bank, and criminalize Alternative for Germany, a massively popular right-leaning populist party set for another electoral success later this month.

"He lectured about what he described as censorship, mainly focusing, though, on including more views from the right," Brennan told Rubio over the weekend. "He also met with the leader of a far-right party known as the AFD, which, as you know, is under investigation and monitoring by German intelligence because of extremism. What did all of this accomplish, other than irritating our allies?"

Rubio told Brennan that the European apoplexy over Vance's speech more or less proved the vice president's point.

'I have to disagree with you.'

"Why would our allies or anybody be irritated by free speech and by someone giving their opinion? We are, after all, democracies," said Rubio. "I think if anyone's angry about his words, they don't have to agree with him, but to be angry about it, I think, actually makes his point."

The secretary of state noted further that European leaders frequently criticize the United States, but "we don't go around throwing temper tantrums about it."

Brennan tried contextualizing European officials' irritation over Vance's speech with the help of a revisionist history, stating that Vance "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."

Rubio prevented the host from skating past the insinuation that Europeans, Germans in particular, are sensitive about critiques of censorship because the Holocaust was somehow the result of free speech.

"I have to disagree with you. Free speech was not used to conduct a genocide," said Rubio. "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," continued Rubio. "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."

'People are losing their minds.'

According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's Holocaust Encyclopedia, the Nazi regime abolished freedom of speech and freedom of the press in the early 1930s, shuttering or seizing anti-Nazi publications and controlling all forms of media content, including burning books deemed un-German.

Not only was free speech virtually nonexistent when the Nazis ran Germany, but in the preceding years, there were numerous limitations on speech — certainly enough to torpedo a modified version of Brennan's thesis.

Responding to an argument from a critical race theory scholar that resembled Brennan's insinuation, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression President Greg Lukianoff noted that nothing about the rise of Nazism or the Holocaust supports the claim that speech restraints could have prevented a genocide.

Lukianoff wrote:

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.

Critics blasted Brennan for her apparent historical illiteracy.

Vance wrote, "This is a crazy exchange. Does the media really think the holocaust was caused by free speech?"

Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) tweeted, "Free speech caused the Holocaust in an insanely stupid take."

"People are losing their minds," wrote investigative reporter Matt Taibbi. "It's mass hysteria."

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