Stop me if you’ve heard this before: The German government strictly polices citizens’ speech, conducting raids of people’s homes, confiscating their things, fining them, and sometimes jailing them. The “wrong” sorts of people are not permitted to say certain things, upon penalty of law. Enforcing the law often depends on a tip line for citizens reporting their neighbors for infractions against the state. Authorities argue they are making the world a better place by rooting out undesirable ideas and people.

If you said, Hey, that sounds like the Nazis’ Third Reich, move to the head of the class.

If you think totalitarian tyranny is a good idea, you might work for CBS.

Thanks to “60 Minutes,” we learned that CBS host Margaret Brennan isn’t the only one at the eyeball network who’s very confused about Germany, Nazis, and free speech. Over the weekend, Brennan infamously told Secretary of State Marco Rubio that “free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide” — the Holocaust.

Contrary to this horribly revisionist history, Rubio correctly replied, “There was no free speech in Nazi Germany.” Unfortunately, today’s German government is cracking down on free speech in a manner uncomfortably reminiscent of the Nazis. Haunted by their past, the Germans seem doomed to repeat some of it.

“60 Minutes” reporter Sharyn Alfonsi interviewed several hate speech prosecutors, and a network crew joined the German jackboots conducting anti-free speech raids and reported it like it was reasonable. One raid subject was accused of “posting a racist cartoon online.”

Quick, where are my smelling salts?

“If you’ve ever dared to read the comments on a social media post, you might start to wonder if civilized discourse is just a myth,” Alfonsi began the segment. “Aggressive threats, lies, and harassment have unfortunately become the norm online, where anonymity has emboldened some users to push the limits of civility.”

She’s not wrong about that, but she almost laments that such behavior, “even if it’s hate-filled or toxic, is protected by the First Amendment as free speech.” She adds with a sense of relief that at least “Germany is trying to bring some civility to the world wide web by policing it in a way most Americans could never imagine.”

She interviewed three intrepid prosecutors who are deeply convinced of their own righteousness. They even shared a chuckle at how “shocked” suspects are when police seize their phones. Hilarious.

To be fair, Alfonsi wasn’t completely oblivious. She asked Josephine Ballon, “CEO of HateAid, a Berlin-based human rights organization that supports victims of online violence,” to respond to accusations that “this feels like the surveillance that Germany conducted 80 years ago.” Ballon shot back, “There is no surveillance.”

Apparently, Ballon is oblivious. She proceeded to argue that the work is necessary because “already half of the internet users in Germany are afraid to express their political opinion, and they rarely participate in public debates online anymore.”

Well, yeah, because they might be prosecuted for saying — or even sharing — something!

At one point in the feature, Alfonsi specifically focused on an episode where German citizens started calling a politician a “pimmel,” which she disapprovingly notes is “a German word for the male anatomy.”

What is it with legacy media women and this sort of thing? Harry Bōlz (a.k.a. Elon Musk) must be proud.

Near the end, Alfonsi concludes, “Prosecutors argue they are protecting democracy and discourse by introducing a touch of German order to the unruly world wide web.” That sounds far too much like 1930s Germany and the modern American Leftmedia “fact-checking” genre.

Yes, hateful things are being said all over the place, and, as one of the prosecutors argues, the Internet is more permanent and far-reaching than a face-to-face conversation. People say ugly, mean, and false things all the time. (Breaking news from Genesis 3.) It’s not good, and I wish that human discourse weren’t so coarse.

Yet like almost anything else on this planet that is either good, bad, or neutral depending on human use, the Internet should be a free place for speech that is not literally harmful or exploitative. Counter bad speech with better speech.

German authorities are not going to save the country from Nazis by behaving like Nazis themselves. Totalitarians punish speech. Free, anti-Nazi societies do not.

It’s no wonder JD Vance felt it necessary to make an impassioned defense of free speech in a speech in Munich. It’s also unsurprising that he weighed in on the CBS report, saying, “Insulting someone is not a crime, and criminalizing speech will strain European-U.S. relations. This is Orwellian, and everyone in Europe and the U.S. must reject this lunacy.”

German elections are next week, and the nation’s center-right Christian Democratic Union is poised to win. We’ll see what changes that brings to Germany’s crisis of illegal immigration, economic recession, and free speech suppression.

Follow Nate Jackson on X/Twitter.