CBS Is Wrong About Free Speech in Germany and the Rise of Nazism
Margaret Brennan should immediately Google the Weimar Fallacy.
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.
This remark from Brennan came during her interview with Rubio, in which she challenged him to respond to Vance's speech on Friday at the Munich Security Conference, where the vice president delivered a thunderous condemnation of European leaders. It is fair to criticize Vance for being overly friendly with Germany's far-right party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), during his visit to Europe; much of the speech, however, focused on the European Union's contempt for free speech and betrayal of "some of its most fundamental values." Indeed, EU commissioners have taken increasingly brazen steps to police speech on social media and have drawn criticism from American civil liberties groups.
Brennan prompted Rubio to defend Vance's conduct, and made the claim that the Nazis "weaponized" free speech to conduct a genocide.
Utterly bizarre assertion from Margaret Brennan. She claims the Nazi Holocaust occurred because "free speech was weaponized" in Germany, thus making Vance's comments all the more worrisome. Recasting the Holocaust as a consequence of excessive free speech is just totally bonkers pic.twitter.com/2vefGlzT6s
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) February 16, 2025
Brennan is wrong, however.
This idea that Germany, during the period between World War I and World War II, was some free speech paradise—and that the Nazis used this to their advantage—is utterly false. In fact, historians of the interwar period have a name for this false claim: the Weimar Fallacy.
On the contrary, fears about rising Nazi influence caused Weimar Germany to take increasingly authoritarian steps to outlaw and censor Nazi speech during the 1920s. Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, wrote an excellent article about this in 2022. Far from permitting Nazis to practice free speech, the German government "shut down hundreds of Nazi newspapers—in a two-year period, they shut down 99 in Prussia alone," wrote Lukianoff. "They accelerated that crackdown on speech as the Nazis ascended to power. Hitler himself was banned from speaking in several German states from 1925 until 1927."
Similarly, former American Civil Liberties Union president Nadine Strossen found little merit in the idea that aggressively censoring Nazi speech and advocacy was an effective strategy. Instead, she wrote, the German government failed to take appropriate action to curtail Nazi violence; violence is not speech, and the government could have and should have done more to prevent what was in effect political terrorism.
In any case, Brennan's argument was that free speech empowered the Nazis. It's obvious she's incorrect, because there were significant restrictions on Nazi speech during the relevant time period. The German government tried desperately to censor Nazis; it didn't work. Then, of course, when the Nazis achieved political power, they were able to use the government's vast censorship apparatus to silence their own critics.
To this day, Germany still prohibits certain kinds of Nazi speech. A different CBS show, the Sunday evening news program 60 Minutes, spotlighted the German authorities current efforts to police such speech. What they revealed was fairly alarming; indeed, the German government censors not just Nazi speech but also hate speech more broadly, misinformation, gossip, and even "insults" toward politicians.
Posting or reposting false information in Germany can be a crime, and the punishment for repeat offenders can include jail time. pic.twitter.com/25OLFeLfna
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) February 17, 2025
The interviewees further clarified that Germans can be prosecuted for sharing and liking illegal content on social media.
CBS reporter Sharyn Alfonsi offered minimal pushback; at one point, she did suggest that surveilling citizens to this degree and prosecuting them for wrongthink was itself sort of Nazi-esque. No one could accuse the segment of being overly critical of the German approach to online speech, however.
Even so, the German prosecutors clearly undermined their own case by astutely demonstrating why any restriction on speech inevitably results in a slippery slope situation. Progressives start by saying that they are all for free speech, they just want to create a new, narrow category of unprotected speech: say, Nazi speech. Next, that is inevitably broadened to include hate speech more generally, and extremism, and misinformation, and so on. In the case of Germany, the authorities also prohibit insults about politicians. The interviewees detailed an infamous 2021 case in which the police raided the home of an individual who had called a local politician an ugly name—a nickname for the male reproductive organ—on Twitter.
Alfonsi summarized the German approach thusly: "So it sounds like you're saying, it's okay to criticize a politician's policy but not to say 'I think you're a jerk and an idiot.'"
This is a textbook example of why Americans are rightly proud of our robust First Amendment traditions, which stand in the way of such nonsense. Never forget that the European bureaucrats who assert the importance of censoring Nazi speech are the same people who want to arrest their citizens for saying a politician is a dick.
