Politics
WATCH: Rubio Torches CBS Host After Bizarre Attack On Free Speech
Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a sharp rebuttal to a bizarre assertion from CBS News host Margaret Brennan, who claimed that “free speech” was a driving cause of the Holocaust.
Brennan was speaking in reference to Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech in Munich, Germany earlier this week, in which he chastised European governments over draconian “hate speech” laws and growing authoritarianism. “I wish I could say that this was a fluke, a one-off crazy example of a badly written law being enacted against a single person. But no… Free speech, I fear, is in retreat,” the vice president told European leaders after listing a number of speech crimes.
“To many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation, who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion or, God forbid, vote a different way, or even worse, win an election,” Vance added.
During Sunday’s episode of “Face The Nation,” Brennan falsely labeled Germany’s AfD party — which has advocated for deportations and an immigration moratorium — as “far right.”
“Vice President Vance gave a speech and he told U.S. allies that the threat he worries about the most is not Russia. It is not China. He called it the threat from within and he lectured about what he described as censorship, mainly focusing though on including more views from the right,” Brennan said. “What did all of this accomplish other than irritating our allies?” the CBS Host asked after pointing to the German government’s censorship as evidence of “extremism” on the part of the AfD
“Why would our allies or anybody be irritated by free speech and by someone giving their opinion? 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,” Rubio answered.
“And so I think if anyone’s angry about his work, they don’t have to agree with him, but to be angry about it, I think actually makes his point. I thought it was actually a pretty historic speech, whether you agree with him or not. I think the valid points he’s making to Europe is we are concerned that the true values that we share, the values that bind us together with Europe are things like free speech and democracy and our shared history in winning two world wars and defeating Soviet communism and the like. These are the values that we shared in common,” the nation’s top diplomat continued, adding that he agreed with Vance’s speech.
The interview then took an outlandish turn when Brennan claimed that Vance was “standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide,” before again comparing the moderate right-wing AfD party to Nazi Germany. Before Brennan could finish the bizarre question, Rubio made it known that he disagreed with the framing of the question.
“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,” Rubio shot back.
“There was none. 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.”
He then circled back to the theme of Vance’s speech, which was meant to serve as a warning against documented speech and thought crimes in Europe.
“The point of his speech was basically that there is an erosion in free speech and intolerance for opposing points of view within Europe. And that’s of concern because that is eroding. It’s not an erosion of your military capabilities. That’s not an erosion of your economic standing. That’s an erosion of the actual values that bind us together in this transatlantic union that everybody talks about.”
