Feb
19
2025

Margaret, the First Amendment Says Nothing About Television News

Jeffrey Blehar observes: Europeans Don’t Get Free Speech, and Neither Does CBS News, Apparently. Let's skip down to our Big Eye Network, after his (correct) assertion about German government being deathly afraid of, well, Germans.

You know who also is terrified of the people? CBS News. Yes, CBS had a true banner Sunday for itself this weekend by tagging along with Vance to Munich. And they made it clear they were on the side of the Europeans weeping about having to listen to the angry voices of their constituents. Margaret Brennan made headlines pontificating about the origins of the Holocaust from too much “free speech” — a topic for tomorrow’s Carnival of Fools because few in the media have more willingly donned clown makeup in recent weeks — but really it was 60 Minutes’ remarkable praise of Germany’s anti-free-speech laws that took the cake for me.

Now, 60 Minutes has had a pretty rough go of it lately, to be fair. I don’t think Donald Trump has a leg to stand on in his lawsuit against them (for editing a Kamala Harris interview), and I refuse to dignify the matter with serious comment — everything I said about that was already said when I discussed his equally repulsive “revenge lawsuit” against Ann Selzer.

But watching 60 Minutes’ hosts nod sympathetically along with German state prosecutors and investigators as they calmly explained that every random racist internet insult in their country was a prosecutable crime was both mildly horrifying — they presented this to America as a preferable alternative — and perfectly explanatory as to their current position at the bottom-most tier of American public respect: They fear us and think we, as citizens, deserve to be informationally “managed.” Why shouldn’t we hold them in equal contempt? They’re as post-democratic in their impulses as Elon Musk, the man they hate, who happily avers they should be sent to prison. Musk, whatever his other qualities, is clearly a megalomaniac with zero respect for anything except the gratification of his own impulses. CBS theoretically aspires to something more.

Also contemptuous of CBS is Robby Soave at Reason: CBS is wrong about free speech in Germany and the rise of Nazism.

The weekend programming over at CBS was unusually focused on speech norms and censorship in Germany. First, Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan casually asserted that free speech is what empowered the Nazis to take over the government and implement the Holocaust; then, 60 Minutes conducted an interview with present-day German authorities in which they detailed their efforts to suppress not just Nazi speech but also misinformation, gossip, and insults toward politicians.

It was an alarming degree of contempt for cherished free speech principles, to say the least. News organizations are free to evince a preference for Europe's pro-censorship policies, but the criticism they attract from the right—from Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in this case—was quite deserved.

Moreover, CBS had its facts wrong. Brennan's claim that "free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide" in Nazi Germany is a profound misreading of history.

Robby quotes a tweet from Michael Tracey, noting that Margaret's assertion was not just wrong, but "just totally bonkers".

But maybe there's more than just newsgirl craziness? Jonathan Turley says there might be method in the seeming madnes: “Listen Carefully it’s Actually Much Darker”: How the Left is Framing Free Speech as a Front for Fascism.

While the narrative failed in spectacular fashion, the script has not changed. Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) expressed sympathy for the “absolute shock, absolute shock of our European allies” to be confronted in this fashion. Rather than address the examples of systemic attacks on free speech, Moulton reached again for the favorite talking point: “if you listen, listen carefully it’s actually much deeper and darker. He was talking about the enemy within. This is some of the same language that Hitler used to justify the Holocaust.”

Like Brennan, Moulton is warning that free speech can be a path to genocide. However, his take is that anyone claiming to be the victim of censorship is taking a page out of the Nazi playbook. The logic is simple. The Nazis complained about censorship. You complained about censorship. Thus, ipso facto, you are a Nazi.

Others joined the mob in denouncing Vance and supporting the Europeans. CNN regular Bill Kristol called the speech “a humiliation for the US and a confirmation that this administration isn’t on the side of the democracies.”

By defending free speech, you are now viewed as anti-democratic. It is part of the Orwellian message of the anti-free-speech movement. Democracy demands censorship, and free speech invites fascism.

It was only a couple months ago that we said something nice about Seth Moulton. Sorry, he seems to be reverting to Massachusetts Democrat-norm.

Also of note:

  • Apparently it helps to be ensconced at UMass-Amherst. Jon Miltimore wonders: How Did 108 Economists Predict Milei's Results Exactly Wrong?

    In November 2023, the warning came, as clear as an omen.

    A political upstart was seeking office and, if elected, his policies were likely to cause “devastation” in his own country and “severely reduce policy space in the long run.”

    The threat was a chainsaw-wielding disciple of Austrian economics from Argentina who embraced laissez-faire economics. The predictions of doom came not from Old Testament prophets, but 108 economists who signed a public letter saying his anachronistic ideas had long ago been discredited.

    Jon points to David Henderson's critique of the critics: Critics Of Milei’s Policies Strike Out. He does a detailed takedown of their major objections to Milei's positions. Including a man of straw:

    The signers also made a criticism that we often hear from critics of the free market: the idea of market failure. They wrote:

    The laissez-faire model assumes that markets work perfectly if the government does not intervene. But unregulated markets are not benign—they reinforce unequal power relations that worsen inequality and hinder the application of key developmental policies—including industrial, social, and environmental policies.

    Whose laissez-faire model? No economist I know of who believes in laissez-faire or something close to it also believes that “markets work perfectly.” We understand that they work imperfectly. Our argument is more sophisticated: markets work imperfectly and so do governments. Moreover, the imperfections of government, due to bad incentives, poor information, and poor incentives to get information, are typically much worse than the incentives of for-profit providers.

    The 2023 statement is here. I noticed that of the 108 signatories, only 19 are identified as being from the USA. And of those 19, fully 11 are affiliated with University of Massachusetts Amherst. Including the #1 signer, Jayati Ghosh.

    I have no idea what that says about UMass Amherst.

  • But… But… Good Will Hunting said… Marx-inspired textbook used by 1 in 4 history classes ‘aims to misinform’: report.

    The textbook, “A People’s History of the United States,” used in as many as one [in] four high school history classrooms, misinforms students and borrows from Karl Marx to present American history as a “conflict between capital and labor,” according to a new report.

    The report by the Goldwater Institute compares “A People’s History” by the late Howard Zinn to Hillsdale College Professor Wilfred McClay’s alternative and less used textbook “Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story.” The institute is a conservative think tank in Arizona, focused on free market policy and Americans’ constitutional freedoms.

    The "1 in 4" number comes from this New York Times story: Social Studies Teachers Rely on Online and Sometimes Ideological Sources.

    For example, 42 percent of the survey respondents had used materials from Learning for Justice, a project from the Southern Poverty Law Center. About a quarter had used the Zinn Education Project, which was inspired by the work of the historian Howard Zinn and which often celebrates left-leaning activist movements.

    Yeesh, that SPLC figure is even worse.

    I've had a couple takes on this Zinn stuff: here and here.

Recently on the book blog:

We Have Never Been Woke

The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite

(paid link)

I picked this book up at Portsmouth (NH) Public Library, expecting that I'd dislike it. I was pleasantly surprised. The author, Musa al-Gharbi, is an honest, sharp-eyed observer of the self-proclaimed "woke" fractious faction. And he makes a convincing case that their nostrums are ineffective at solving the problems they describe.

Briefly: the "woke" are largely "symbolic capitalists", dealing in services, ideas, and concepts, not concrete products. They are largely white, male, cishet, and extremely well-off. In any honest telling, they are an elite, holding down the commanding heights in academia, media, and (increasingly) at tech businesses. They tend to be located in geographically compact regions: Silicon Valley, New York City, Seattle, …

And, even though they "talk the talk", their walking of the walk leaves much to be desired. Their remedies do not raise up the American downtrodden, even in places, like California and New York, where they seem to have a firm grasp on political power. And (to a certain extent) this is intentional.

(I say: "they". Which is a little misleading. al-Gharbi fully admits that he's in that elite "symbolic capitalist" group. So am I, for that matter. But I've never, ever, claimed to be "woke".)

In certain spots, al-Gharbi seems to echo critiques made by us "right-wingers". He's brutal on folks like Elizabeth Warren, Jussie Smollett, Rachel Dolezal. And he quotes folks like Thomas Sowell and Bryan Caplan approvingly. (There's also a positive blurb from Tyler Cowen on the back.)

Once you get the gist of al-Gharbi's thesis, it's hard to avoid seeing confirming evidence. Do DEI efforts actually work, or are they just noisy virtue-signalling? From the February 7 WSJ: DEI Didn’t Change the Workforce All That Much. A Look at 13 Million Jobs. Subtitle: "For all the controversy that diversity programs stir up, most senior managers are still white men."

How about the notion that the Democrats have become the favored party among the well-off "symbolic capitalists", concentrated in their small-area conclaves? That can't be true, can it? We're always being told that Republicans are the party of the fat cats!

Exercise for the reader: click over to smartasset's 2024 list of America’s Richest Congressional Districts. Go down the list of districts, ranked by affluence, and look for the first one represented by a Republican.

I had to go down to #15: New Jersey's 7th Congressional District sends Thomas Kean Jr. to D.C. He squeaked by Democrat Susan Altman in last year's election 51.8%-46.4%. (Trump also edged Kamala in NJ-7, 49.8%-47.8%.)

On Kean's House page, as I type: "Kean Fighting to Restore SALT Deduction". Is that fighting for the poor and downtrodden? Not exactly. From the Tax Policy Center: Repealing The SALT Cap Would Overwhelmingly Benefit Those With High Incomes. (And, for the record, Sue Altman, Kean's opponent, came out in favor of that too, although that involved a hypocritical flip-flop.)

But if I have to gripe about something: al-Gharbi's analysis of "inequality" unfortunately involves some usual lefty stat-hacking. Without getting into the weeds on that, the book could have used some insights from a recent book by Phil Gramm, Robert Ekelund, and John Early: The Myth of American Inequality.

al-Gharbi is also short on recommending policy prescriptions; he admits this upfront. Which is fine, his goal is to describe, however imperfectly, the state of play.