CBS News Is Fantasizing About Soviet-Style Censorship in America | Bobby Burack
Last week, the legacy media consensus declared Donald Trump's presidency a "constitutional crisis." Apparently, all the "Trump and Musk are forming an oligarchy" talk didn't cut it.
This week, the press has pivoted to the idea that free speech is evil, must be restricted, and will lead to a rebirth of Nazi Germany.
Wait, what?
Let's back up.
On Sunday morning, CBS anchor Margaret Brennan criticized Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in Germany last week, during which he denounced European allies for adopting a "Soviet"-style approach to censorship.
"Well, he was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide," Brennan told Secretary of State Marco Rubio. "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."
Before we could properly react to Brennan claiming that free speech led to the Holocaust, CBS's other flagship Sunday program, "60 Minutes," released a fawning review of Germany's recent efforts to conduct police raids against individuals suspected of "insulting" people in person or online.
Consider that Germany is not the only European nation arresting people for speech with which their leaders don't agree. The United Kingdom also ramped up censorship efforts last year by jailing people for social media posts that the government considers "hate speech."
"Think before you post!" warned the communist wannabes at the Crown Prosecution Service. "Content that incites violence or hatred isn’t just harmful — it can be illegal."
Yet instead of condemning Germany and the UK's totalitarian measures to silence its Western citizens, one of the oldest and largest news operations in America celebrated them.
OutKick asked CBS News if Brennan and "60 Minutes" represented the network's official stance on free speech and censorship. The network did not respond by the time of publication.
But the fact that such questions even exist about an American-based journalism outfit is distressing.
CBS attempted to recast the Holocaust as a consequence of free speech, seemingly in an attempt to argue that the US should adopt similar speech laws to Germany and the UK.
Amusingly, telling viewers that free speech is responsible for the genocide of Jews--not the aftermath of World War 1 and Adolf Hitler convincing the defeated Germans that Jewish people were responsible for the woes of their state--is exactly how a totalitarian regime would order the press to depict the events of the Holocaust.
Journalistically, CBS failed.
Morally, no American news outlet should ever be in the business of defending, yet celebrating, censorship. Free speech is the bedrock of democracy. There is a reason free speech is enshrined as the first constitutional amendment.
It is your birthright as an American to say exactly what you think without fear of government retaliation. Without that right, you are something less than an American.
There is nothing, and we mean that literally, more threatening to a democratic nation than the possibility of using government forces to limit our speech.
If Margaret Brennan, the producers of "60 Minutes," and the executives of CBS truly believe otherwise, they deserve to be viewed as nothing more than pieces of propagandistic filth.
In fact, CBS's editorial was so egregious on Sunday that other mainstream news outlets owe it to their viewers to a) correct Brennan's historical illiteracy about the Holocaust and b) criticize CBS for its coverage of free speech.
And if they are extra ambitious, there is also room to warn about the likely effects of our European allies elevating the most fragile among them to the most powerful, the inevitable symptom of a nation that enforces punishments for "hate speech" and "insults."
Few priorities should be higher for a news organization than combating anti-free speech activism. We can hardly think of one.
In the simplest terms, if you are an American media outlet glamorizing the idea of jailing Western citizens for their speech, you are in the wrong. You are, by definition, an actual threat to our democracy.
And nothing you say after that should be taken seriously.