CBS Endorses Censorship—Is America Next?

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NEW YORK CBS HQ: CBS’s weekend coverage made one thing clear: free speech is under attack, and they’re more than happy to cheer it on. Margaret Brennan of Face the Nation set the tone by bizarrely claiming that free speech enabled the Nazis to rise to power and commit genocide. Then 60 Minutes followed up with a segment featuring German officials who proudly detailed their efforts to censor not just Nazi rhetoric but also misinformation, criticism, and even casual insults toward politicians.This is a stark warning about where speech suppression leads, yet CBS framed it as progress. The network, like any media outlet, is entitled to its editorial slant, but its attempt to sanitize state censorship deserves scrutiny. Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio rightfully took issue with these distortions, as Brennan’s claim that free speech led to genocide is not just misleading—it’s historically inaccurate.

Utterly bizarre assertion from Margaret Brennan. She claims the Nazi Holocaust occurred because “free speech was weaponized” in Germany, thus making Vance’s comments all the more worrisome. Recasting the Holocaust as a consequence of excessive free speech is just totally bonkers pic.twitter.com/2vefGlzT6s

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) February 16, 2025

Brennan’s argument was an attempt to trap Rubio into disowning Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference, where Vance criticized the European Union’s increasing hostility toward open expression. While some objected to Vance’s interactions with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), the substance of his speech was undeniable: Europe is sliding further into speech control, and American civil liberties groups have sounded the alarm about the precedent being set.

But rather than engaging with this issue, Brennan pushed the debunked “Weimar Fallacy,” suggesting that unchecked free speech allowed the Nazis to seize power. The reality is the opposite. Weimar Germany didn’t tolerate Nazi rhetoric—it actively censored it. Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has extensively documented how German authorities shut down Nazi publications, banned Hitler from speaking in multiple states, and aggressively prosecuted far-right speech. None of it worked. If anything, the suppression fueled Nazi propaganda, making martyrs of Hitler and his movement.

The real lesson here is that censorship doesn’t stop extremism—it hands it a grievance and an excuse for radicalization. When the Nazis finally took power, they simply co-opted the existing censorship apparatus to crush their opposition. It was government-controlled speech, not free speech, that allowed tyranny to thrive. Yet Germany still hasn’t learned from its past, and now, as CBS highlighted, it has expanded speech laws to criminalize not just dangerous ideologies but also “hate speech,” misinformation, and even public criticism of politicians.

The 60 Minutes segment showcased German prosecutors explaining how individuals can be punished simply for sharing or liking “illegal” content online. There was only minimal pushback from CBS’s Sharyn Alfonsi, who meekly suggested that such measures seemed vaguely authoritarian. Otherwise, the piece presented this erosion of speech rights as a noble pursuit.

If anything, the German authorities exposed just how quickly speech laws spiral out of control. Censorship never stops with its initial target. Once governments gain the power to regulate speech, they always find new justifications to expand those controls. What starts as restrictions on Nazi ideology soon morphs into bans on undefined “hate speech,” then policing of extremism, then suppression of misinformation. Before long, even calling a politician a name is deemed illegal.

Posting or reposting false information in Germany can be a crime, and the punishment for repeat offenders can include jail time. pic.twitter.com/25OLFeLfna

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) February 17, 2025

Germany has already crossed that threshold. In 2021, police raided the home of a citizen who called a politician an offensive term on Twitter. That’s where censorship leads—not to a safer society, but to a government that shields itself from scrutiny. It’s the kind of authoritarian impulse the First Amendment was designed to prevent in America.

CBS’s coverage wasn’t just biased—it was a preview of what could come if Americans ever accept the idea that free speech is a problem that needs fixing. The same European bureaucrats who claim to be fighting extremism are the ones enforcing laws against citizens who insult elected officials. And CBS, instead of questioning this overreach, applauded it. If that’s the future they want, they should at least be honest about it.