By Jarrett Stepman, The Daily Signal | February 18, 2025
It says a lot about America’s fast fading legacy media establishment leaders that they’ve decided to use up the last shreds of their credibility to glorify censorship. This dynamic is exactly what’s been playing out following Vice President JD Vance’s speech in Munich, Germany, on Friday. In that speech, he excoriated European governments for, among other things, retreating from the principle of free speech.
Vance pointed to specific examples where Western European governments trampled on free speech rights, like how the Germans have raided the homes of people who expressed “anti-feminist” commentary on the internet or how British authorities arrested a man for praying at an abortion clinic.
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Vance pointed out that the true threat to the West isn’t coming from China or Russia, but from within. Sacred and inviolable freedoms are being ruthlessly trampled in the name of political correctness while the continent brings in millions of people from the Middle East, many of whom are hostile to the societies they’re entering.
“To many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old, entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation,’ who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion,” he said of European censorship efforts.
He’s right. How can we take the threats of authoritarian regimes seriously when allegedly “free” countries are arresting people for posting memes on social media?
Vance’s speech wasn’t taken well by his audience of stone-face Eurocrats, some of whom were reduced to tears after this incredibly bright and articulate American “hillbilly” told them the truth right to their insufferable, hypocritical faces.
Sorry, I can’t help but dial up the rhetoric here. Watching a straight-talking Vance exemplify the best of the American spirit in front of a close-minded, collective European elite that long ago lost its way was a thing of beauty.
Now, one would think this moment would be an opportunity for the U.S. media, those proud guardians of the First Amendment, to investigate the matter and uncover whether Vance is indeed correct that freedom is under threat in Europe.
Shouldn’t they now be eager to cover more European free speech crackdown stories like this?
Well, this moment did prompt the media to cover more stories about censorship, sort of.
Of course, the media initially amplified the claim of the European elites that such harsh talk from the Trump administration means they want to “destroy” NATO and Europe. I’d post an eyeroll meme of some sort here but that might get me arrested in Deutschland.
As if that wasn’t enough, they went even further than to condemn the Munich speech. They gleefully revealed that free speech actually is under threat, and suggested that it’s spectacular.
CBS News’ “60 Minutes” put a spotlight on Germany where the government is reenacting scenes from the 1930s, but this time the country is unleashing stormtroopers in the name of anti-fascism instead of fascism. How enlightened.
You can see the joy on the face of CBS’s Sharyn Alfonsi as German bureaucrats explain how they’ve arrested hundreds of people in “hate speech” cases.
Again, just look at the glee from Alfonsi.
Remarkable. America’s legacy media exists in such a cloistered bubble that they don’t seem to understand that images of black-clad German police smashing down doors and literally trampling on sacred, God-given free speech rights isn’t going to go over well with the public.
You’d also think these networks would be a little wary of governments arresting people for spreading “disinformation” given how culpable they almost all were in promoting the “Russia collusion” hoax to malign President Donald Trump in his first term.
This wasn’t even the limit of CBS beclowning itself over the weekend in its effort to discredit the Trump administration.
CBS host Margaret Brennan, the same woman who absurdly tussled with Vance during the 2024 vice presidential debate, came up with an argument about free speech that’s an insult to the word “sophistry.”
In an interview with Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday in which she questioned him about Vance’s Munich speech she came up with one of the biggest historical doozies I’ve heard.
“[Vance] 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,” Brennan said (emphasis added). “The context of that was changing the tone of it. And you know that.”
Ah yes, everyone knows that the Holocaust was really the result of too much free speech.
I give some credit to Rubio for not letting this absurd statement go. He quickly explained that the Nazi Party’s crime was not that it “weaponized” free speech, but that it used government power to impose a totalitarian ideology.
To go even further into history here, Germany did try to crack down on the speech of the early Nazi movement and arrested its leaders. It didn’t work. Crackdowns on speech under the Weimar Republic didn’t stave off tyranny.
Maybe arresting people for holding unpleasant views isn’t the way to go if you want to preserve freedom? Germany seems to be unable to figure this out, but shame on American journalists for celebrating the destruction of free speech rights that allow them to do what they do.
These people truly have the gall to celebrate government crackdowns on speech while whining hysterically that the new president won’t give them unlimited access to White House press briefings.
This whole episode reveals a deeper problem that has led to the disintegration of trust in media institutions.
“Elite” liberal opinion that dominates legacy media newsrooms has become barely more than the recitation of tired dogmas uttered by historically illiterate ideologues to smear opponents of the modern Left.
They’ve used their privileged position to not only spread propaganda on behalf of one side of the political spectrum, but to squash anyone who would dare pierce through their gatekeeping and speak the truth.
COVID-19, the Great Awokening, and the not-quite-presidency of Joe Biden revealed the depths of media complicity in censorship and narrative peddling, along with their total disregard for the truth when the truth diminished the Left’s power.
They are so far gone that they’ve been reduced to cheerleading Europe’s censorship regimes and making up historically laughable arguments to falsely connect their critics to Nazi Germany.
That stuff doesn’t fly anymore. They’ve learned not a single lesson from 2024. They’ve chosen to clap for petty tyrants and cluelessly sail off into oblivion.
Jarrett Stepman is a columnist for The Daily Signal. He is also the author of "The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America's Past."
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