Face The Nation’s Weimar Fallacy
Host Margaret Brennan repeated the myth that free speech caused the Holocaust — here’s why it’s wrong.
Last week, in a speech at the Munich Security Conference, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance argued that free speech in Europe was “in retreat” and that the most significant threats come from “within” instead of from foreign actors like Russia or China. I write more about Vance’s speech over at Persuasion, but the media's reaction to it in both Europe and the U.S. was largely one of shock and anger.
In one instance on this weekend’s Face the Nation, CBS host Margaret Brennan engaged in a particularly egregious form of pearl-clutching when she made the bold claim that Vance was “standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide,” referring to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.
But Brennan commits a common historical error, often referred to as the Weimar Fallacy — the mistaken belief that unrestrained free speech led to the rise of the Nazis.
In reality, as I have previously addressed, the Weimar Republic did not provide a free-speech haven for extremists. Instead, it cracked down on speech through emergency decrees, banned Nazi newspapers, and even outlawed Hitler himself from speaking publicly in many German states. Far from stopping the Nazis, these censorship measures played into Nazi propaganda, allowing them to paint themselves as persecuted truth-tellers.
Worse, the very free speech restrictions that were meant to protect democracy ended up being used to destroy it once the Nazis came into power. The infamous Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, designed initially as a safeguard against extremism, allowed the president to suspend civil liberties—including free speech—during times of crisis. Hitler and the Nazis seized on these powers to crush opposition, dismantle democratic institutions, and consolidate their totalitarian rule under a veneer of legality.
In short, censorship and emergency powers didn't prevent the rise of the Nazis—they helped them take over. Of course, there’s much more to this story. If you want a deeper dive into how Weimar Germany’s approach to speech suppression failed—and what lessons it offers today—you can:
Pre-order the paperback edition of my book, Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media (out March 18, 2025), which contains an in-depth discussion of the Weimar Fallacy as well as a new epilogue covering free speech battles in the U.S., Europe, China, Brazil, Russia, and beyond.
Listen to Episode 39 of my podcast, Clear and Present Danger, for a detailed account of free speech during Weimar Germany and the Third Reich.
Censorship didn’t stop the Nazis. But understanding history just might help us avoid repeating its mistakes.
Jacob Mchangama is the Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech and a research professor at Vanderbilt University. He is also a senior fellow at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and the author of Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media.
Free speech is an ideal. And it is one thing among many, as an ideal. It supposes etiquette for example. In good manners not always forthcoming. It is not the key to everything. For example ending violence. It won't end human violence. So clutching at it as if it is the bed rock of democracy is just a soap box mantra. Empty-headed while reality continues.