Brennan, JD Vance, and the Spirit of 1776

I’m sure most of you by now have heard of Margaret Brennan’s comment during her exchange with Secretary of State Rubio on “Face the Nation.”

“Well he was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide…”

Brennan got raked over the coals by the Right for that comment, since she seemed to imply that the Nazis 1) were in favor of free speech and 2) were using free speech to conduct the Holocaust in the same way they used gas chambers and bullets. Her point, that words are violent (I thought it was silence that was violence), was reinforced by the fact that Vance’s speech brought the chairman of the Munich Security Conference to tears.

Mr. Heusgen is obviously a man who doesn’t think about the Roman Empire every day.

I think we are being a bit unfair about Ms. Brennan and her comment because 1) she’s an idiot, and natural law dictates that no one should be held accountable for actions that they have no control over, and 2) I think her point is far worse than her historical illiteracy implies.

In case you are wondering, yes, this is the same Brennan who got memed by JD Vance a few weeks ago. I’m sensing a pattern here.

I think her point isn’t necessarily that the Nazis exploited free speech once they gained power, but rather that they used free speech to gain power. As I said, this interpretation is far worse.

For years we’ve been treated in this country to the whole Orange Man Hitler meme, that normalizing Trump as a legitimate part of the political system is a threat to democracy. We also have been hearing laments from Brennan’s colleagues in the media and the Left (but I repeat myself) that the right to free speech is not absolute, with the implication that Trump and his band were not to be allowed the same access to American rights and the democratic system as are others.

That view was echoed by German President Steinmeier, who opened the Munich Security Conference by saying:

“We Europeans demand that tech companies, just like everyone else, comply with EU law – whether their name be TikTok, X, or something else. We cannot and will not allow platforms to destroy our democratic societies”

I could joke that Brennan, Steinmeier, and the rest of the globalist blob are firm believers in the “Law of Yeah, But” as in “yeah free speech is important, but…” You know how that works, where everything after the word “but” contradicts everything that came before it.

In reality, though, it points to a deeper rift in the Western world in regard to free speech. Yesterday, Richard Fernandez said:

“But Free Speech is valuable precisely because the facts are often NOT known or if they are known are being withheld. The truth may lie in the realm of known unknowns or unknown unknowns or obscured by deliberate falsehood. In such cases free speech is the only way forward.”

This is not to pick on Fernandez who was trying to make a specific rebuttal to the anti-free speech crowd, but he outlines what the basis for free speech is to the globalist set, which is its utilitarian value based on positive law. If the benefits that result from speech are greater than their costs, then it will be allowed. Given that this belief rests on positive law, the existence of the right and its interpretation is based on those creating the law.

This is in contrast to the US, where the right to free speech is considered a natural law that predates both positive law and the Constitution; the First Amendment merely notes the existence of free speech. This means that my right to free speech is granted to me by nature, as part of my being a human, and not by an earthly authority.

For decades now, this division in the Western world could be largely ignored because the low state of technology and institutions largely confined the debate within national borders. With the advance of technology in the form of the internet and social media, as well as the rise of a centralized European Union, the rift between the competing visions has jumped national boundaries and become politically salient.

Go back last year during the US election, when in response to Elon Musk’s interview of Trump on X European Commissioner Thierry Breton threatened Musk:

“I am writing to you in the context of recent events in the United Kingdom and in relation to the planned broadcast on your platform X of a live conversation between a US presidential candidate and yourself, which will also be accessible to users in the EU…

We are monitoring the potential risks in the EU associated with the dissemination of content that may incite violence, hate and racism in conjunction with major political – or societal – events around the world, including debates and interviews in the context of elections.”

Given the breadth of the internet, the exercise of free speech in one country becomes of interest in another. Breton, Steinmeier, and Brennan would seem to agree that free speech is a very fine thing as long as it doesn’t cause too much trouble, and that Trump, AfD, and Tommy Robinson are too much trouble. Europe can imprison Robinson and exile AfD to political oblivion, but those pesky Americans, with their attitudes and Constitution, prevent them (and their American fellow travelers) from doing the same to Trump and his MAGA hordes.

In reality the past 72 hours is more than about an inconvenient speech in Munich, but is rather the recognition that America is out of step with the rest of the West. To American ears what Vance said might have been undiplomatic, but it would be have been uncontroversial. We should remember, as we approach the American Semiquincentennial, that at its heart America is a revolutionary nation. To send the Vice President of the United States to the European continent to remind those for whom we have spent amuch blood and treasure of that fact should be, no matter what Brennan says, a given.

Let’s be clear that in both his speech and his subsequent outreach to the AfD, Vance was acting in the best traditions of America and the New World in carrying the Spirit of 1776 to the Old.

As Reagan once said:

“We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness…”

As JD should have said last Friday in Munich, “Lafayette, we are here.”

10 thoughts on “Brennan, JD Vance, and the Spirit of 1776”

  1. Excellent linked article. As it explains, the 1920s German Weimar Republic as well as regional governments did in fact suppress the heck out of the NSDAP, but the Margaret Position, and per the other CBS content yesterday lauding current paramilitary anti-speech efforts, the Official CBS Position, is that Weimar Germans needed suppress their speech HARDER… even though that mustache dude himself assessed that the suppression was a positive for his party, enhancing NSDAP overall.

    It’s almost like they do t actually know what they are talking about on any and all subjects.

  2. What I find interesting re: the weekend events – from Vance’s speech to the reaction to it as symbolized by Brennan – is that Trump has opened up an additional front in his 4-week old battle.

    This time he has extended the conflict internationally.by tying his domestic opposition to authoritarians overseas. Why are spending all of that money to defend a bunch of authoritarian welfare queens… and people like Brennan and Steinmeier fall right to that trap not understanding that with Trump in office that NATO and the globalist agenda need to be justified to the American voter and taxpayer. For the past four weeks, Musk and the Dogeboys have unearthed one wasteful and unAmerican program after another and right now NATO seems to fit into that picture quite nicely.

    Steinmeier and the Europeans are talking about protecting Europe through NATO, Vance and the Americans are talking about protecting freedom. For the past four weeks, Trump has been defining the worth of American government bureaucracies in terms of what they actually do, now NATO and the Europeans are next to be put on notice.

    The other part of this new front is Trump reaching out to AfD. The European-American globalist alliance has worked together to push the ir various populist parties beyond the acceptable pale, witness their charming use of the term “far-right.” Despite their best efforts, Trump and his MAGA hordes have broken through and now they are looking to jailbreak AfD. Yes Vance met with each of the major German parties, but that’s the point… we, America, consider AfD a major German party as well.

    If AfD breaks through in the upcoming election, the DC establishment will take an enormous hit because they depend on the populist “far-right” to not be “normalized.” In fact you can argue that European politics for the past 10 years has been centered on keeping that populist riff-raff out. When that last emotional barrier is broken, you will see European politics realign and the final rout of the Democrats here

  3. Regulated speech, is nothing new in Europe, rather the opposite. A biography of Beethoven I read laid out how the Congress of Vienna essentially placed continental Europe under a collection of police states with close government regulation of the press and even music. Throughout the 19th century, there are recurring episodes of, mostly, operas being suppressed because they were a little too spot on.

    Subsequent to WWII, Germany has had well publicized laws trying to extinguish Nazism. These mostly criminalized display of symbols and explicit speech such as Holocaust denial but ignored underlying concepts. This basically drove all this underground into the counterculture, especially certain varieties of Heavy Metal music. The Germans have managed to add the allure of the forbidden that seems irresistible to the face tattoo demographic.

    So, the German establishment never enamored to free speech, now finds that fair elections are also inconvenient.

  4. MCS..”Regulated speech, is nothing new in Europe, rather the opposite”

    I’ve always tended to think of Britain as more free speech friendly than the Continent, but in Kaiser Wilhelm II’s memoirs, he expressed admirations for the British controls over the press and wished he had had something equally stringent in Germany.

  5. Censorship is evil. Obviously.

    The only possible defense for censorship is the hubris that some are morally superior, capable of knowing the unknowable and incapable of error.

    We should never let anyone play god in the lives of others. Period.

  6. After Covid infestation and government response, it is incomprehensible to me that anyone wants to trust a censor to “let only truth be spoken.”
    Not possible.
    As for semiquincentennial, I would prefer our Quarter Millennial Celebration.

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