‘Sophomoronic’: Historian Blasts CBS, Brennan and Media Over Free-Speech Claim

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Remember this moment of sheer journalistic idiocy? Well, thanks to historian Andrew Roberts, it has a new name. And it doesn’t just apply to Margaret Brennan and CBS News.

But it does apply oh so well to them both:

Utterly bizarre assertion from Margaret Brennan. She claims the Nazi Holocaust occurred because “free speech was weaponized” in Germany, thus making Vance’s comments all the more worrisome. Recasting the Holocaust as a consequence of excessive free speech is just totally bonkers pic.twitter.com/2vefGlzT6s

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) February 16, 2025

MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, he 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. The context of that was changing the tone of it. And you know that, that the censorship was specifically about the right.

SECRETARY MARCO RUBIO: Well, I have to disagree with you. No, I have – I have to disagree with you. 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 and they hated minorities and they hated those that they – they had a list of people they hated, but primarily the Jews. There was no free speech in Nazi Germany. There was none. There was also no opposition in Nazi Germany. They were a sole and only party that governed that country. So that’s not an accurate reflection of history.

David wrote a sharp response the next day to this absolute ignorance. Now we get to hear from Roberts, who lashes the Protection Racket Media for not bothering to study history, let alone learn from it. As Rubio and Michael Tracey pointed out more gently, the idea that the Nazis succeeded through weaponizing ‘free speech’ is so bizarrely wrong that one has to be a dunce to even conjure it up.

And Roberts has a great term for it, too:

There seems to be an outbreak of historical ignorance among TV talking heads. MSNBC’s Ali Velshi denounced Queen Elizabeth II for the British practice of slavery, even though the British Empire abolished it a century before her birth. Tucker Carlson sarcastically asked Piers Morgan whether Adolf Hitler had plans to invade Britain, which, of course, the Nazi dictator did.

And then CBS’s Margaret Brennan outdid them while interviewing secretary of state Marco Rubio during the February 16 edition of Face the Nation. She claimed that Vice President J.D. Vance had delivered a critique of European censorship in Munich while “standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide.”

The point, presumably, was that the Nazis had exploited freedom of speech to gather more adherents and destroy democracy under the Weimar Republic. There ought to be a word for a remark like this, which managed to be both sophomoric, in its attempt to play gotcha with Rubio, and moronic in its historical ignorance: sophomoronic, perhaps?

Works for me, on multiple levels. But it’s not just ignorance, either. Roberts goes on in his Free Press essay to attempt to educate everyone on the Nazi approach to speech, which they modeled on Stalin’s USSR, but don’t expect the media to learn much from actual facts. As Aristophenes once wrote, in a quote featured in the film The Emperors Club with the caveat “roughly translated”: Youth ages, immaturity is outgrown. Ignorance can be educated and drunkenness sobered, but stupid … lasts forever.

And more to the point, malice lasts forever, too. That’s precisely what we have seen from the Protection Racket Media towards debate and dissent over the last several years. The American news media went all-in on policing speech in America for “misinformation,” and have barely acknowledged that the government-influenced censorship cracked down on arguments that turned out to be true. 

The suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story as “Russian disinformation” by almost the entire American media industry and their self-serving “fact check” operations is one obvious example, but there are plenty of others. Remember when media painted as ‘racist’ anyone suggested that a viral outbreak near the Wuhan Institute of Virology resulted from a lab leak? Or when the media treated the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration that dissented from COVID policies were “anti-science” extremists? How about the industry-wide effort to paint Anthony Fauci as an unchallenged prophet, even while he contradicted himself on masking, shutdowns, and the like?

Stupid lasts forever. Malice lasts just as long with American media orgs that resent the use of free speech by anyone other than themselves. Sophomoronic is an excellent term, but let’s not pretend that it’s just idiocy at play here. This is outright malice in pursuit of ideological and political objectives, and it’s those impulses that put a ‘sophomoronic’ figure like Margaret Brennan on the air in the first place. 

To offer another quote that applies here from the same film, one of my favorites: Not to know what happened before you were born is to be forever a child. The Protection Racket Media puts intellectual children on the air to offer ignorance as fact and malice packaged as a product. ‘Sophomoronic’ may give them too much credit. 

Addendum: This is why we push so hard to ensure our independence from the Big Tech platforms that capitulated to censorship, and buffer ourselves from the outcome of advertiser boycotts from corrupt “misinformation” services. As David wrote last week, we aren’t getting gold bars at taxpayer expense to keep our operations afloat like the Protection Racket Media does, nor do we want it. We keep fighting to keep independent voices and dissent alive in the face of enormous pressure, and our members are right there on the front lines with us. 

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