Every journalism student knows the lessons of John Milton’s ode to free speech, The Areopagitica. There we learn about the marketplace of ideas and how truth triumphs over lies when people have a right to make that judgment for themselves. The best way of ensuring the ascendancy of lies is to try to suppress them because people will then assume that someone—usually the government—is hiding something good from you, something it doesn't want you to know about. The Areopagitica and George Orwell’s 1984: these were the twin bookends of a journalism dedicated to freedom of thought, speech and assembly.
At least that was the case. They were mandatory reading in my first year but perhaps that only ages me. Support for free speech is no longer reflexive or even assumed among a lot of left-leaning journalists who have become not friends but foes of the concept.
Speaking of Vice President JD Vance’s speech in Germany, where he warned about censorship laws and legislation aimed to curb “misinformation and disinformation,” CBS News’ Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan had the gall to suggest a little less free speech would have stopped Hiter and the Nazis from promulgating the Holocaust.
“Well, he was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide, and he met with the head of a political party that has far-right views and some historic ties to extreme groups. The context of that was changing the tone of it. And you know that,” Brennan said.
She made the remarks while interviewing Secretary of State Marco Rubio about Vance’s warning, who was having none of this. Rubio responded, “Free speech was not used to conduct a genocide. 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 hated those that they- they had a list of people they hated, but primarily the Jews. There was no free speech in Nazi Germany. There was none. There was also no opposition in Nazi Germany.”
Have we heard this nonsense about free speech creating a lack of free speech and democratic freedom? Well, it’s been the theme of much of the mainstream media and the Democratic Party for years. It’s been foundational to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s internet censorship laws, including the Online Harms Act which would actually codify a restriction on thought crime in Canada if the bill is passed by Parliament. NPR’s chief executive Katherine Maher called the First Amendment the “number one challenge” in American journalism: an incredible statement even from somebody pretending to be a journalist because the First Amendment is integral to journalism. Without it, you have not journalism but unbridled propaganda, which of course is what Nazi Minister of Propaganda and Popular Enlightenment Joseph Goebbels created for Germany. You either worked with him to uphold the Nazi narrative in the German media or you did not work at all.
But for Maher, that might not sound so bad because at least you wouldn’t have this problem of disinformation creeping into the news, and disinformation of course being defined as anything she disagrees with. With the state and the media working in tandem to suppress alternate views, disinformation is never a reality and "free speech" becomes the correct and approved speech. Mahar sadly noted, without a hint of irony, how the First Amendment provides a “fairly robust protection of rights,” and makes it “a little tricky to address some of the real challenges of where bad information comes from.”
Let’s be clear about this: the “challenge” arises when the government gathers and disseminates the news for us. The greatest purveyors of “bad information” are governments because they love to lie about their achievements and hide their mistakes. Throughout the Nazi era, there was nothing approaching free speech or freedom of the press. The newspapers, radio and film told German people the story that Adolf Hitler wanted them to see and hear. There was no unemployment and no complaints. The same was true in Soviet Russia, where Stalin managed to suppress any coverage of the famine that raged Ukraine and parts of Russia even as the Soviet press invented stories of spies and saboteurs who undermined production figures and the economy.
It is ironic that Brennan should think the Nazis were aided and abetted in their quest for power by free speech laws because Weimar Germany – the social democratic regime that the Nazis demolished – was very much like a progressive state today and was enamored with hate speech laws. Many leading Nazis were jailed for violating those laws. Hiter was repeatedly banned from speaking in parts of Germany and one poster from the era depicts Hitler with a gag over his mouth. The thesis that free speech facilitated the success of Hitler and Nazism and the eventual implementation of genocide against the Jews, is known as the “the Weimar Fallacy.”
Weimar, much like woke governments and media today, did not honor free speech but constantly tried to undermine it by justifying that doing so eradicated disinformation and contained dissidents. Nobody “weaponized” free speech during the Weimar era; rather, hate speech laws and censorship were used to shut down newspapers and regulate what was reported on the radio. The longer we look at the Weimar regime, the more we can see a fundamentally flawed government that pursued a host of elitist policies that did nothing to stop first hyperinflation and then the worst manifestation of the Great Depression. It wasn’t free speech that allowed the Nazis to become the largest political party in Germany but a proportional system of government that allowed maximum growth for fringe parties and premium political chaos that resulted from chronic minority governments that were constanty falling.
The journalists who decry the First Amendment are the same ones who equate populism with dictatorship and believe people need to be told what to think and never be allowed to discern truth on their own because they might run into some disinformation during the journey. Free speech does not cause dictatorship but dictatorships immediately cancel free speech because as a basic human right it is absolutely essential, the bedrock, of any democracy. We can have elections every four years but they are meaningless without free speech. The Soviet Union ran regular elections because it enjoyed the illusion of public affirmation.
Don’t blame free speech for tyranny and never for the Holocaust. Had there been something approaching free speech in occupied Europe during the Second World War, there might have been greater knowledge of the Holocaust and some real desire to stop it. The journalists who attempt to label diverse thought and not censorship as the clear and present danger to their profession are both dangerous and delusional. A smorgasbord of ideas is no threat to our freedom but a solitary establishment narrative is potentially lethal to liberty.
But no, I would not advocate for the silencing of any of these woke scribes. Just let them talk and the foolishness of words will soon be detected and ridiculed by that great mass of people who deserve the right to decide for themselves. Intentionally or not, people who fear free speech will erode democracy are dedicated to creating political systems that banish free speech from the public domain. Just as censorship and suppression cannot give birth to liberty, so free speech and free thought are the enemies of tyranny, dictatorship and yes, genocide.
