Programming note: Tonight, Tuesday, I'll be here with another episode of our current Tale for Our Time. Tomorrow, Wednesday, we'll have our regular Clubland Q&A with questions from Steyn Club members live around the planet at 3pm North American Eastern - which is 8pm Greenwich Mean Time/9pm Central European. Hope you can swing by.
~It's not the most burning topic of the hour, but, as my days dwindle down to a precious few, I confess I have always marvelled at how one can make a multi-decade career on American telly despite having no obvious talent or skill - or ratings. Take CBS News, which is still out there apparently: Dan Rather, the parody "hard news" anchor, was unable to read prompter in anything approximating the cadences of human vocal delivery. Yet it was no obstacle to spending seventy-three low-rated years hosting the CBS Evening News. Why? I've never had a convincing explanation other than that he must have had Polaroids of network execs.
Now Mr Rather has been replaced by, among others, Margaret Brennan. So Miss Brennan was in the chair for this surreal exchange with America's new Secretary of State:
Secretary of State Marco Rubio defends @JDVance's "historic" speech last week in Munich, leaves ABC's Margaret Brennan speechless after she tries to claim that free speech was "weaponized" by the Nazis. Incredible exchange: 👇 pic.twitter.com/GYLZfopVwP
— Scott Morefield (@SKMorefield) February 16, 2025
So, according to Margaret Brennan, JD Vance "was standing in a country where free speech was weaponised to conduct a genocide." Free speech is all very well, but we all know where it leads. As The Babylon Bee summarised Miss Brennan's argument:
Von Trapp Family Crosses The Alps Into Switzerland To Escape Free Speech https://t.co/0DnJ1fOzGp pic.twitter.com/PBvIEuXpEQ
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) February 17, 2025
But, wait a minute, weren't Brain-Dead Brennan's comrades boring on about free speech just the other day?
Media last week: The AP not being given rides on Air Force One is a blatant attack on free speech
Media this week: What makes Germany great is that they imprison people for posting memes
— Sunny (@sunnyright) February 17, 2025
Is it possible to be too stupid even for CBS News? Did Brain-Dead Brennan get it from America's hilariously inept Chronicle of Higher Education?
"We don't look back at the Weimar Republic today and celebrate them for allowing Nazis to have their free-speech rights," he says. "We look back and say, Why didn't they do something?"
Me eight years ago:
It is a testament to the wholesale moronization of our culture that there are gazillions of apparently sane people willing to take out six figures of debt they'll be paying off for decades for the privilege of being 'taught' by the likes of Professor Bray. The reason 'we don't look back at the Weimar Republic today and celebrate them for allowing Nazis to have their free-speech rights' is because they didn't.
The Weimar Republic was so hostile to freedom of expression you'd think the Chancellor was Mark Zuckerberg or that pre-Musk Twitter weirdbeard.
Me twenty ...okay, sixteen years ago:
In a letter to Maclean's, Jennifer Lynch, Q.C., Canada's chief censor, put it this way:
'Steyn would have us believe that words, however hateful, should be given free rein. History has shown us that hateful words sometimes lead to hurtful actions that undermine freedom and have led to unspeakable crimes. That is why Canada and most other democracies have enacted legislation to place reasonable limits on the expression of hatred.'
'Hateful words' can lead to 'unspeakable crimes.' The problem with this line is that it's ahistorical twaddle, as I've pointed out. Yet still it comes up. It did last month, during my testimony to the House of Commons justice committee, when an opposition MP mused on whether it wouldn't have been better to prohibit the publication of Mein Kampf.
'That analysis sounds as if it ought to be right,' I replied. 'But the problem with it is that the Weimar Republic—Germany for the 12 years before the Nazi party came to power—had its own version of Section 13 and equivalent laws. It was very much a kind of proto-Canada in its hate speech laws. The Nazi party had 200 prosecutions brought against it for anti-Semitic speech. At one point the state of Bavaria issued an order banning Hitler from giving public speeches.'
And a fat lot of good it all did.
For the benefit of Brain-Dead Brennan and her "Ooh, you were standing in a country where free speech led to the Holocaust" shtick, Vice President Vance was actually standing in Munich, which means he was standing in the aforementioned state of Bavaria, which means he was standing in the state that, far from "weaponizing" free speech, killed it in the interests of banning Hitler - the original Hitler, that is, not JD - from public speaking. Just like Sir Keir Starmer's done to Tommy Robinson.
Me, also from Maclean's, a little further back - April 2008:
Isn't it obvious that in the case of Adolf Hitler, 'hateful words' led to 'unspeakable crimes'? This argument is offered routinely: if only there'd been 'reasonable limits on the expression of hatred' 70 years ago, the Holocaust might have been prevented.
There's just one teensy-weensy problem with it: pre-Nazi Germany had such 'reasonable limits.' Indeed, the Weimar Republic was a veritable proto-Trudeaupia. As Alan Borovoy, Canada's leading civil libertarian, put it:
'Remarkably, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the Canadian anti-hate law. Moreover, those laws were enforced with some vigour. During the 15 years before Hitler came to power, there were more than 200 prosecutions based on anti-Semitic speech. And, in the opinion of the leading Jewish organization of that era, no more than 10 per cent of the cases were mishandled by the authorities. As subsequent history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it.'
Inevitably, the Nazi party exploited the restrictions on 'free speech' in order to boost its appeal. In 1925, the state of Bavaria issued an order banning Adolf Hitler from making any public speeches. The Nazis responded by distributing a drawing of their leader with his mouth gagged and the caption, 'Of 2,000 million people in the world, one alone is forbidden to speak in Germany.'
The idea that 'hate speech' led to the Holocaust is seductive because it's easy: if only we ban hateful speech, then there will be no hateful acts. But, as professor Anuj C. Desai of the University of Wisconsin Law School points out, 'Biased speech has been around since history began. As a logical matter, then, it is no more helpful to say that anti-Semitic speech caused the Holocaust than to say organized government caused it, or, for that matter, to say that oxygen caused it. All were necessary ingredients, but all have been present in every historical epoch in every country in the world.'
Just so. Indeed, the principal ingredient unique to the pre-Hitler era was the introduction of Jennifer Lynch-type hate-speech laws that supposedly protect vulnerable minorities from 'unspeakable acts.' You might as well argue that Weimar's 'reasonable limits' on free speech led to the Holocaust: after all, while anti-Semitism is 'the oldest hatred,' it didn't turn genocidal until the 'reasonable limits' proponents of the day introduced group-defamation laws to Germany.
One more, from page 250 of my ancient book Lights Out: Islam, Free Speech and the Twilight of the West:
Most of us have a vague understanding that Hitler used the burning of the Reichstag in February 1933 as a pretext to 'seize' dictatorial powers. But, in fact, he didn't 'seize' anything because he didn't need to. He merely invoked Article 48 of the Weimar Republic's constitution, allowing the state, in the interests of the greater good, to set — what's the phrase? — 'reasonable limits' on freedom of the press, freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom from unlawful search and seizure and surveillance of postal and electronic communications. The Nazis didn't invent a dictatorship out of whole cloth. They merely took advantage of the illiberal provisions of a supposedly liberal constitution.
Oh, and by the way, almost all those powers the Nazis 'seized' the morning after the Reichstag fire the [Canadian] 'human rights' commissions already have.
As genocidal monsters go, Hitler was not without a certain wit on the ironies of that last point. As my late friend, the great George Jonas, put it way back when:
The Weimar Republic had such laws. It used them freely against the Nazis. Far from stopping Hitler, they only made his day when he became Chancellor. They enabled Hitler to confront Social Democratic Party chairman Otto Wels, who stood up in the Reichstag to protest Nazi suspension of civil liberties, with a quotation from the poet Friedrich Schiller:
"'Late you come, but still you come,'" Hitler pointed at the hapless deputy. "You should have recognized the value of criticism during the years we were in opposition [when] our press was forbidden, our meetings were forbidden, and we were forbidden to speak for years on end."
Late you come, but still you come. I did not think it was possible to despise the "mainstream" media more than I already did. In a society thoroughly moronized by Brain-Dead Brennan and her ilk, Hitler is the sole remaining historical figure anybody's heard of. And they can't even get that right.
"Weaponising" free speech? What does that even mean? In Germany, tweets get you gaoled but rape is just part of your "cultural tradition". And CBS News knows which side it's on.
~In this eighth year of The Mark Steyn Club, we're very appreciative of all those who signed up in our first flush and are still eager to be here as we cruise on towards our first decade. We thank you all. For more information on the Club, see here.
