Nearly two weeks after the moderator of the CBS News program Face the Nation suggested in an interview in Jerusalem with Marco Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state, that free speech was to blame for the Holocaust, the news organization has yet to issue a correction or clarification.
During the Feb. 16 interview, Margaret Brennan told Rubio that in Germany, “free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide.”
“Well, I have to disagree with you. No, no, I have to disagree with you,” the secretary of state said. “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,” Rubio added. “There was also no opposition in Nazi Germany.”
The Nazis, he said, were “the only party that governed that country. So that’s not an accurate reflection of history.”
Six days after the interview, Eliana Johnson, editor-in-chief of The Washington Free Beacon, and Chris Stirewalt, politics editor for The Hill and NewsNation, and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, discussed the CBS moderator’s quote on their Ink Stained Wretches podcast.
Johnson said Brennan characterized the Holocaust as “an outgrowth of the Third Reich’s unrestricted speech.”
“Too much free speech in the Third Reich led to the Holocaust,” Johnson said. “It was funny. I just so happened to be reading a history of Nazi Germany, when this aired, that talked about Hitler coming to power and cracking down on Jewish artists. This was in 1933, when Jewish artists began to be discriminated against. Many fled Germany. So not exactly.”
“Things got more and more and more restricted from there. (Joseph) Goebbels not exactly known for his love of free speech,” Johnson said, calling Brennan’s comment a “stupid claim.”
“Since then, there’s been no retraction or apology from CBS News. Rubio shot it down,” she said. “It’s sort of strange that there’s been nothing from CBS said in the wake of this glaring factual misstatement from a major Sunday show anchor. But it came in the wake of their executives cracking down on Morning Show anchor Tony Dokoupil, who did a tough interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates over his book on Israel-Palestine, and he was reprimanded in front of the staff for being insufficiently hospitable on the air to Coates.”
Per Free Press reporting, CBS also provided “internal guidance on how to refer to Israel, Palestine, Gaza, Hamas,” Johnson said. “They clearly have editorial problems at CBS News.”
“The idea that free speech was the problem that created the Holocaust, though, is a preposterous leap, is a ridiculous leap forward,” Stirewalt said.
“How a Sunday morning anchor can be so ignorant is astonishing,” Johnson responded.
Nearly two weeks after the program aired, JNS sought comment from CBS News.
The program has drawn criticism, including from JD Vance, the U.S. vice president, who called it a “crazy exchange. Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, wrote that Brennan “is going through some bizarre episode as she makes disgusting excuses for Nazis and the Holocaust.”
“When the host of Face the Nation says that the Nazis weaponized free speech to commit a genocide, one must stop and notice,” wrote Michael Rappaport, a professor and director of the Center for the Study of Constitutional Originalism at the University of San Diego School of Law.
“There should have been an immediate correction,” he wrote. “The mainstream media appears to be worse than its already poor reputation.”
“This is the first time I’ve heard the theory that the Holocaust wasn’t conducted with gas chambers but with free speech zones,” wrote Michael Brendan Dougherty, a senior writer at National Review Online.