Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended Vice President JD Vance’s recent speech in Germany, where Vance criticized Europe’s approach to censorship, during an appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” Fox News reports the exchange became heated when CBS host Margaret Brennan suggested that free speech had been “weaponized” to enable the Holocaust in Nazi Germany.
“There is just this weird conceit that I see among these usually extra democratic institutions of Europe, like NATO and so forth, this idea that the will of the people is somehow a threat to democracy,” Vance said at the conference. “The will of the people is the expression of democracy. It’s not a threat to democracy. And that’s something that President Trump and I, of course, campaigned very explicitly on, is this idea that if the people are crying out for a particular type of reform, that is, definitionally, not a threat to democracy.”
“And while you’ve seen European leadership, and again, American elite institutions very skeptical of the will of the people on things like energy policy and migration, you’ve simultaneously seen this ramp up in calls for censorship,” he continued.
Brennan questioned the value of Vance’s comments, asking “What did all of this accomplish, other than irritating our allies?”
Rubio called out the absurdity of Brennan’s assertion, questioning why democracies would be upset by free speech.
“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 said. “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 responded by arguing that Vance was speaking in a country where she claimed free speech had been misused to perpetrate genocide, seemingly (and falsely) suggesting that free speech was the issue in Nazi Germany. Rubio strongly disagreed with Brennan’s assertion that free speech caused the Holocaust.
“Free speech was not used to conduct a genocide,” Rubio informed Brennan. “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.”
“There was no free speech in Nazi Germany. There was none,” he continued. “There was also no opposition in Nazi Germany. They were the sole and only party that governed that country. So that’s not an accurate reflection of history.”
Rubio reiterated Vance’s core message that allies should be able to withstand criticism while maintaining cooperation, and on that note, Brennan concluded the segment.
