Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a strong rebuttal to CBS News host Margaret Brennan after she made the controversial claim that “free speech” was a driving factor behind the Holocaust. Brennan’s remarks were in response to Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech in Munich, Germany earlier this week, where he criticized European governments for their increasingly draconian “hate speech” laws and rising 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.”
During Sunday’s episode of Face The Nation, Margaret Brennan inaccurately characterized Germany’s AfD party—which has pushed 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 referencing 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 said, adding that he was in agreement with the vice president’s remarks.
The interview took a bizarre turn when Brennan claimed that Vance was “standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide” before once again likening the moderate-right AfD party to Nazi Germany. But before she could finish her question, Rubio quickly interjected, making it clear that he strongly disagreed with her framing.
“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.”
Rubio then circled back to Vance’s speech: “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.”
