JD Vance blasts ‘crazy exchange’ after CBS’ Margaret Brennan tells Marco Rubio that Nazis weaponized free speech

Vice President JD Vance has slammed CBS News’ Margaret Brennan for what he called a ‘crazy exchange’ she had with Secretary of State Marco Rubio Sunday morning.

Brennan was questioning Rubio about the vice president’s remarks at the Munich Security Conference, in which he argued that free speech and democratic institutions were being eroded, when she erroneously linked the Holocaust to free speech.

‘He was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct genocide and he met with the head of a political party that has far-right views and some historic ties to extreme groups,’ the news anchor said.

‘The context of that was changing the tone of it,’ she said of Vance’s speech. ‘And you know that.’

Rubio then defended Vance, who later took to X to write that it was a ‘crazy exchange.’

‘Does the media really think the Holocaust was caused by free speech?’

For his part, Rubio confronted Brennan, saying he would have to ‘disagree’ with her.

‘Free speech was not used to conduct a genocide,’ he argued on Face the Nation. 

‘The genocide was conducted by an authoritarian Nazi regime that also happened to be genocidal because they hated Jews and they hated minorities…

‘There was no free speech in Nazi Germany, there was none,’ Rubio argued. 

‘There was also no opposition in Nazi Germany, they were [the] sole and only party to govern that country.

‘So that’s not an accurate reflection of history.’

In his speech on Friday, Vance accused European politicians of forcing people to shut down social media accounts and urged leaders to do more to stem illegal immigration. 

He reserved particular scorn for America’s closest ally, and the case of Adam Smith-Connor, a British man arrested after praying near an abortion clinic, which he claimed was an attack on the ‘basic liberties of religious Britons’ that ‘criminalizes prayer.’

‘Europe faces many challenges, but the crisis this continent faces right now, the crisis I believe we all face together, is one of our own making,’ he said.

‘If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you, nor, for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump.’

He went on to accuse European Union officials of ‘canceling elections and asked whether ‘we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately higher standard’.

Vance also accused European leaders of echoing communist language by acting against ‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation,’ and he hammered home Trump’s longstanding demand that European

‘While the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine, and we also believe that it’s important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way,’ he said. 

‘The biggest threat to Europe isn’t external—it’s internal. A retreat from its own fundamental values, values shared with the U.S.’ he argued.