Germany’s Speech Police, Margaret Brennan, and the Speech Challenge For Us All

​Like a seven-layer gelatin salad in the aftershocks of an earthquake, the European commentariat is still quivering from Vice President J.D. Vance’s tongue-lashing on their abandonment of the principles of free speech. The vice president spoke boldly of “a retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values” as “a threat from within.”
 
Dominic Green of The Wall Street Journal nailed it when he said that this is “really, a threat from above.” European governments and the meta government of the European Union in Brussels are imposing a host of policies – from heavy-handed overregulation to mass immigration policies, to speech codes – that are unpopular among European voters.
 
But the disconnects are here in America as well as in Europe. Vance’s critique identified an intellectual short-circuit on the nature of free speech. This disconnect is one suffered not just by progressive European elites, but also American journalists, a celebrated conservative Italian prime minister, and even some in the Trump Administration who would do well to read Vance’s speech and take it to heart.
 
Germany’s Speech Police
 
CBS’s 60 Minutes did an in-depth exploration of Germany’s speech code regulation, interviewing German prosecutor Dr. Matthäus Fink, who said he tells people he arrests for speech violations, “you have free speech as well, but it also has limits.”
 
The German government’s stated concern is that hateful speech can lead to violence. The segment reported that a local German politician, Walter Lübcke, was shot to death in 2019, four years after he gave a speech in favor of immigration. But Lübcke had been the target not just of criticism, but also death threats. In the United States, as in Europe, such explicit threats against individuals are crimes – as well they should be. Beyond that, policing speech becomes not just a slippery slope.
 
It becomes a slope slathered in Crisco for a Vaseline-coated sleigh.
 
Consider: Germans can now be prosecuted not just for violent threats, but also for “public insults against politicians” – “spreading malicious gossip,” “inventing fake quotes,” or even reposting “lies” online. For such “crimes,” Germans can receive fines, suffer the confiscation of their devices, and go to prison.
 
Among the crimes, Dr. Fink told 60 Minutes, are “comments like ‘you’re a son of a bitch,’ excuse me for using, but these words have nothing to do with political discussions or a contribution to a discussion.” Protect The 1st begs to differ. We think that any prosecutor who would put someone in prison for calling a politician an SOB is, himself, an SOB.
 
Did Free Speech Cause the Holocaust?
 
Many commentators have harshly criticized CBS’s Margaret Brennan for explaining in a recent interview with Secretary of State Marco Rubio that “free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide …”
 
It was left to Secretary Rubio to correct Brennan by noting that the Nazis were the ones who shut down free speech. The shuttering of newspapers, the infiltration and takeover of churches, the dispatching of editors, journalists, intellectuals and academics, along with dissenting pastors, priests and nuns to concentration camps led to a vacuum. In that vacuum-echo chamber, when the Nazis spoke about “the Jewish problem,” there was no one to counter “actually, we have a Nazi problem.”
 
To be fair, Brennan was probably not talking about the Nazi era, but the Weimar Republic that preceded it. If only, she seems to suggest, someone had shut up the Nazis before they gained adherents. But that perspective is also flawed. The Weimar Republic did cancel Hitler speeches, shut down some Nazi publications, and outlawed hate speech. And the Weimar Republic learned what we now seem to have forgotten – that suppressing speech is like squeezing water in your hands. It always slips through your fingers and finds another channel. Indeed, for misfits and outsiders of all sorts, outlawing speech gives it the erotic allure of the forbidden.
 
There’s Still Free Speech Work to Do in Romania, Italy, and at Home
 
The vice president spoke of the recent Romanian election that was cancelled 48 hours before people were set to go to the polls. The reason? It was reported that Russia had invested in Tik Tok videos in support of a presidential candidate who favored withdrawing support for Ukraine. Vice President Vance said, “But if your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.”
 
But it isn’t just stripey-pants, tea-sipping progressives who seem to lack a firm grasp of free speech. The decidedly non-progressive prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, is taking British rocker Brian Molko to court for “contempt for institutions” by calling her a “fascist” during a concert in Turin. The prime minister’s action, to quote Curly from the Three Stooges, says, “Who me? I resemble that remark!”
 
Then there is our own country and Vice President Vance’s administration. President Trump made a clear, powerful statement with his Executive Order “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship.” But not every member of the president’s administration seems to have received the president’s memo.
 
For example, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr is “fast-tracking” a probe of CBS over whether it is guilty of “news distortion” in its editorial decisions on which portions to air from an interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris. The White House press office has even excluded AP from some events for refusing to adopt President Trump’s new moniker for the Gulf of Mexico.
 
Around the world, on the right as well as on the left, the intellectual disconnect is the inability to always accept that a commitment to free speech means allowing speech you find offensive, stupid, and wrong. 
 
Like Fight Club, free speech in a democracy has three rules: I will not attempt to censor people and ideas I don’t like. I will not attempt to censor people and ideas I don’t like. I will not …

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