‘Cheap Journalism and Bad History’: World War II Historian Roasts Margaret Brennan for Sinking to ‘New Low’

Andrew Roberts, the famed English historian and author, excoriated CBS News’ Margaret Brennan over her interview with Secretary of State Marco Rubio last Sunday in a new column for The Free Press.

After Vice President JD Vance lectured European leaders over their suppression of free expression during a speech in Munich last week, Brennan asserted that Vance had been “standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide.”

Rubio seemed taken aback by Brennan’s statement; Roberts was outraged by it.

“The point, presumably, was that the Nazis had exploited freedom of speech to gather more adherents and destroy democracy under the Weimar Republic,” wrote Roberts. “There ought to be a word for a remark like this, which managed to be both sophomoric, in its attempt to play gotcha with Rubio, and moronic in its historical ignorance: sophomoronic, perhaps?”

“What could possibly have been going through Brennan’s mind?” he wondered. “The lesson of Germany’s descent into genocide during the 1930s and 1940s is the opposite of what she implied to Rubio, as of course she should have known. The National Socialists took power when Hitler was appointed chancellor on January 30, 1933. Soon thereafter the party began to assert control over newspapers, magazines, books, art, theater, music, movies, and radio.”

Roberts continued:

Hitler took Bolshevik Russia as his template, turning Nazi Germany into a state no less totalitarian than Stalin’s Soviet Union already was. All opposing views were ruthlessly expunged from German society. Meanwhile, Goebbels ensured that radios became cheap enough to enter almost every home, so that the regime could target the population with propaganda to a previously unparalleled degree.

If there had been true freedom of expression in Germany and German-occupied Europe during the Third Reich, the Holocaust would have immediately been exposed and would have been that much more difficult to carry out. Articles in the newspapers and questions on the radio would have addressed what was happening in the “zones of interest” of Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia. People would have wanted to know where millions of European Jews had been sent, and why they were not responding to efforts to track them down.

“It was thus the absence of free speech, not its so-called weaponization, that enabled the greatest crime in the history of mankind,” concluded Roberts. “For Brennan to invoke the Holocaust to bolster her criticism of Vance was cheap journalism and bad history. If there is such a thing as the ‘weaponization’ of free speech for political purposes, the CBS anchor’s remark defines it.”

In the days since Brennan used her perch to propagate a historical myth, a video of former ACLU president Nadine Strossen debunking it has also been circulated on social media.

“It is in fact not true that there was free speech for hate speech, including Nazi speech, during the Weimar Republic,” explained Strossen before walking viewers through a number of examples.