Margaret Brennan Is Ignorant

This really cannot wait until tomorrow.

Every once in a while, a prominent and highly paid member of the elite American press corps says something so ignorant and foolish that one must marvel at the combination of arrogance and stupidity and wonder how anyone can take this person seriously on any topic.

Margaret Brennan is the host of CBS News’s “Face the Nation” and, for all the problems you or I may have with her, today she exceeded those problems and showed herself incapable of covering any issue, including but not limited to the Trump Administration, fairly, capably, and competently.

Brennan asserted that Nazi Germany not only had free speech but weaponized free speech against Jews to commit the Holocaust.

Margaret Brennan should spend some time reading the Holocaust Encyclopedia, to wit:

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.

Despite the German constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech and press in pre-Nazi Germany, Eric Berkowitz’s definitive book Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients to Fake News shows the Germans gave lip service to “free speech,” but did not practice it.

In fact, the Weimar Republic had hate speech laws that specifically prohibited hate speech directed at Jews. Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher were sentenced to prison for violating Germany’s speech code, and Adolph Hitler himself was banned from public speaking. The Weimar Republic even shut down newspapers despite the constitutional guarantee of a free press.

When Hitler came to power, he abandoned lip service to freedom and engaged in massive censorship and massive propaganda.

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.

Margaret Brennan should apologize for her gross mischaracterization of speech in Germany and for the audacity to use that factual falsity to attack the American Vice President for supporting free speech.

If the anchor of Face the Nation is so wrong about free speech and blames free speech for the genocide of the Jews, which she clearly did, there is no reason for anyone to treat Margaret Brennan seriously on any subject.

Any credibility she had is now gone, and as she will realize she is free to be both arrogant and ignorant, and with that must come consequences. Anyone of her stature in the press asserting the Nazi regime had free speech cannot be trusted with the truth.