Secretary of State Marco Rubio hit the ground running with a quick yet productive trip to Latin America earlier this month, while simultaneously taking over as the acting director of USAID, and it seems like he hasn't slowed down since. On top of that, on Thursday, while flying to Germany to meet with Vice President JD Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and attend the Munich Security Conference, there was a mechanical failure on his plane, and he was forced to turn around mid-flight and board another plane in order to get to Europe on time.
And this weekend, he spent much of his time meeting with numerous foreign ministers before taking his first trip to the Middle East as secretary of state and meeting with various Israeli officials, including President Isaac Herzog and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
My point is that this man is probably pretty tired, but he still managed to take time out of his busy schedule on Sunday to generously appear on "Face the Nation" with Margaret Brennan. I'm sure he expected plenty of dumb questions — it is Margaret Brennan after all — but what he probably didn't expect was having to teach her a basic history lesson.
After talking about the Middle East a bit, Brennan asked Rubio about Vance's now-infamous speech from last week, in which he lectured Europeans on the topics of free speech and censorship. She seemed a bit concerned that he was "irritating our allies." Rubio responded with a fair and common sense answer:
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. 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.
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 values that we’ve shared in common. And in that Cold War, we fought against things like censorship and oppression and so forth.
But Brennan being Brennan wasn't happy with this. At this point, I'm not sure if this woman is biased, ignorant, or just plain stupid, but she went on to say "you know who else liked free speech? Hitler." Okay I'm paraphrasing a bit, but this is what she actually said:
Well, he was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide, and 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, that the censorship was specifically about the right.
Rubio, who admittedly does look a little tired from his whirlwind travels, responded like an exhausted yet patient father who just got home from work and whose 14-year-old daughter just asked him for permission to have her new gender-neutral pronouns tattooed on her arm. "Well, I have to disagree with you. No, no, I have to disagree with you," he said before launching into a history lesson that is something I think most people learn by middle school at the latest.
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. 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 continues after that, getting a bit more in depth about free speech and what Vance said in Europe, but what do you know, Brennan was suddenly out of time. I'm sure that was entirely coincidental after he made her look like an idiot. You can watch that part of the exchange for yourself here or read the entire transcript on the State Department website:
Margaret Brennan embarrasses herself again
— John Hasson (@SonofHas) February 16, 2025
MB: “You’re standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to commit a genocide.”
Rubio: “Free speech was not weaponized to commit a genocide. The genocide was committed by an authoritarian Nazi regime.”pic.twitter.com/Yq8eji9YEa
To further hammer home Rubio's point — and Brennan's ignorance/stupidity/bias — here's a blurb from the Holocaust Encyclopedia entry on censorship:
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the German constitution guaranteed freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Through decrees and laws, the Nazis abolished these civil rights and destroyed German democracy. Starting in 1934, it was illegal to criticize the Nazi government. Even telling a joke about Hitler was considered treachery. People in Nazi Germany could not say or write whatever they wanted.
Examples of censorship under the Nazis included:
- Closing down or taking over anti-Nazi newspapers;
- Controlling what news appeared in newspapers, on the radio, and in newsreels;
- Banning and burning books that the Nazis categorized as un-German;
- Controlling what soldiers wrote home during World War II.
As Erick Erickson wrote on his Substack today, "To have an elite member of the American political press corps whose major news network gives her air time utter such a falsehood is not just journalistic malpractice but misfeasance with a microphone."
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