By Joshua Arnold

As Democrats resume their ineffectual strategy of instinctively attacking Donald Trump at every turn, the mainstream media has followed suit, though with a sorely depleted hand. But the administration’s nearly perfect pitch has complicated this fault-finding mission. On Friday, Vice President J.D. Vance descended into a European den of censorious socialists to deliver a principled lecture on free speech and free elections at a Security Conference in Munich, Germany. In the wicked world of national media, this good deed did not go unpunished.

Vance excoriated European officials for arresting pro-lifers as they prayed silently outside of abortion clinics, annulling election results in Romania over social media “disinformation,” and investigating Elon Musk’s attempts to restore free speech on “X.”

“There is a new sheriff in town,” Vance warned. In America, you cannot win a democratic mandate by censoring your opponents or putting them in jail, whether that’s the leader of the opposition, a humble Christian praying in her own home, or a journalist trying to report the news.“

Far from appreciating this commitment from the Trump administration not to imprison hostile journalists, CBS News’s Margaret Brennan seemed offended — enough to compare Vance to the Nazis.

"He was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide,” she told U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday. “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.”

During Vance’s Munich visit, he met with members of Germany’s second-largest political party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), MSNBC reported. Like Brennan, MSNBC managed to label AfD as both “far-right” and “extremist” in a single sentence, and most press coverage includes similar language. Such uniform language suggests that the media is deliberately crafting a narrative and — given how they apply these terms domestically — imprudently crying “wolf.”

In fact, cursory research suggests that “populist” is a more accurate label for the AfD, which takes a hardline stance on immigration, a conservative approach toward cultural controversies, and arose in 2013 as grassroots opposition to debt-fueled bailouts — rather like a German “Tea Party movement.” (I don’t know whether the AfD has connections to actual extremist groups. I only know that the mainstream media’s unhelpful reporting ignores the “show, don’t tell” principle, casting a thick veil of insinuation which is beyond the scope of this piece to pierce.)

Rubio let Brennan speak her piece, but at her condescending comment, “and you know that,” he interjected a contradiction. “I have to disagree with you,” Rubio insisted. “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.”

Points to the secretary for correcting the reporter — if points are awarded for reciting such basic facts. Adolf Hitler seized unilateral power through the Enabling Act, passed in March 1933 after his street army detained more than 100 members of parliament. He then effectively abolished the constitutional freedom of speech and the press, criminalizing any criticism of his government, shutting down dissenting newspapers, and literally burning banned books. By 1934, Hitler had outlawed all political parties but his own, bundled political opponents into concentration camps, and even purged political rivals from within his own party. The Nazis did not begin widespread massacres of Jews until 1941, long after Hitler had extinguished the last embers of free speech.

So, no, free speech was not “weaponized to conduct a genocide.” On the contrary, Hitler’s regime ruthlessly suppressed free speech and flooded the airwaves and newspapers with government-backed propaganda — a policy more akin to Vladimir Putin’s Russia than the U.S. under the First Amendment.

Charity requires us to assume that Brennan is intelligent enough to recognize this obvious conclusion. Despite her condescending façade, it was she, not Secretary Rubio, defending an indefensible, un-American position.

For his part, Vance, who already sparred with Brennan three weeks ago, reacted curtly, “This is a crazy exchange. Does the media really think the holocaust was caused by free speech?”

If the media really thought that, they would be implicating their own profession, because the freedom of speech is constitutionally, logically linked to the freedom of the press. For those who need a refresher of High School Civics 101, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads as follows: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Notice how the very grammar of the sentence links together the dual freedoms of speech and the press. Semicolons segment the guarantees of the sentence into three related pairs — religious establishment and free exercise; freedom of speech and the press; rights of assembly and petition. Notice also how “of speech” and “of the press” modify the same word “freedom.” Whatever this word freedom means, it must mean the same thing for both speech and the press. In fact, to even construct the phrase “freedom … of the press” out of this amendment, one must necessarily edit out the words “[freedom] of speech,” found in the middle of the phrase.

These observations about the grammar of our Constitution’s text also make sense logically. After all, the freedom of the press is simply an organized, institutionalized way to exercise the freedom of speech. Its separate inclusion in the First Amendment serves to underscore the comprehensive nature of the freedom of speech. Freedom of the press means that freedom of speech applies not only to words spoken in private conversation but also to words written, copied, and disseminated to a wide audience.

The whole point is to safeguard a public space open to diverse viewpoints, in which positions stand or fall based on their truthfulness and prudence, not based upon whether it has the endorsement of public officials. This is why the Trump administration sends Vance and Rubio onto CBS programming to debate Margaret Brennan, instead of censoring its unfairly hostile coverage. This is what makes America the leader of the free world, in contrast to the harsh despotism of Russia, the comprehensive repression of China, or even the nagging nanny states of Europe.

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.