CBS News anchor Margaret Brennan suggested that free speech is linked to the Holocaust during a discussion with Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday.
Brennan criticized Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference, where he drew attention to Europe’s censorship practices.
“Why would our allies or anybody be irritated by free speech and by someone giving their opinion? We are, after all, democracies,” Rubio told Brennan. “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. And so, I think if anyone’s angry about his words, they don’t have to agree with him, but to be angry about it, I think actually makes his point.”
Brennan stated that Vance was “standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide. 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.”
Rubio noted that 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 had a list of people they hated, but primarily the Jews,” he explained, emphasizing that Nazi Germany had no free speech.
“There was also no opposition in Nazi Germany. They were the sole and only party that governed that country,” Rubio said. “So that’s not an accurate reflection of history.”
Vance drew attention to the discussion on X, calling it a “crazy exchange.”
