The weekend programming over at CBS was unusually focused on speech norms and censorship in Germany. First, Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan casually asserted that free speech is what empowered the Nazis to take over the government and implement the Holocaust; then, 60 Minutes conducted an interview with present-day German authorities in which they detailed their efforts to suppress not just Nazi speech but also misinformation, gossip, and insults toward politicians.
It was an alarming degree of contempt for cherished free speech principles, to say the least. News organizations are free to evince a preference for Europe's pro-censorship policies, but the criticism they attract from the right—from Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in this case—was quite deserved.
Moreover, CBS had its facts wrong. Brennan's claim that "free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide" in Nazi Germany is a profound misreading of history.
