(Luis Cornelio, Headline USA) Margaret Brennan is at it again with another hot political take, this time blaming not Hitler or Nazism, but free speech for the Holocaust.
Brennan, host of CBS News’s Face the Nation, made the unsubstantiated claim Sunday during an interview with Secretary of State Marco Rubio while discussing Vice President J.D. Vance’s rebuke of global censorship at a German conference.
Brennan asked Rubio what Vance had accomplished “other than irritating our allies” by making the apparently controversial pledge that the U.S. would stand behind free speech in the development of artificial intelligence.
“Why would our allies or anybody be irritated by free speech and by someone giving their opinion?” Rubio fired back. “We are, after all, democracies. The Munich Security Conference is largely a conference of democracies, in which one of the things that we cherish and value is the ability to speak freely and provide your opinions.”
Brennan quickly jumped in to present her puzzling take on what caused the Holocaust: “Well, he was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide.” Who would’ve thought: Hitler, a free speech warrior.
Expanding on her claims, Brennan added, “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.”
Rubio wasted no time correcting Brennan’s historically flawed assessment, lecturing her on basic world history: Nazism—not free speech—led to the Holocaust, one of the most vile crimes in human history.
“Free speech was not used to conduct a genocide,” he stated. “The genocide was conducted by an authoritarian Nazi regime that happened to also be genocidal because they hated Jews and they hated minorities.”
Rubio added, “There was no free speech in Nazi Germany. There was none. There was also no opposition in Nazi Germany. They were the sole and only party that governed that country. So that’s not an accurate reflection of history.”
Brennan’s ahistorical fallacy was met with widespread ridicule on social media, including CBS News’s own YouTube channel.
One of the comments read: “Her position that Free Speech was used to conduct a genocide in Germany is the most insane, dangerous, divisive and ahistorical sophism I have ever heard in my life. Fire her immediately, that is beyond anything I could ever imagine hearing.”
Tellingly, Brennan did not respond to Headline USA’s request for comment before this article’s publication.
Her latest blunder follows a series of widely criticized takes. Among them are claims that the U.S. could be missing out on the next Albert Einstein by banning refugees and that the U.S. should have open borders because some of the Founders were not born in American land.
She was also publicly corrected after falsely suggesting that USAID, the now-defunct federal agency, had not funded leftist initiatives.
