Read a History Book, Margaret

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, February 18, 2025

 

Yesterday, I wrote about JD Vance’s trip to the Munich Security Conference, where he delivered a rather impressively stern lecture to European functionaries about their increasingly obvious and desperate hypocrisy regarding the suppressed populist desires of their own electorates. Much of Vance’s argument was couched in a critique of Europe’s weakening commitment to free speech, particularly if/when said speech threatens to upset well-established ruling-class applecarts. (What’s the mere annulment of a democratic election between EU friends, after all?)

 

My one quibble with Vance was that, as an extremely educated man, he knew well enough as he delivered his words that Europe had never had an American-style commitment to free speech; the concept is largely alien to the continental tradition of “democracy” and has eroded desperately in England — the land where it was first partially conceived, if never perfected. I made that argument even though I know the barest amount about modern European history, just enough to get me past my AP exams in high school. Margaret Brennan, however — the host of CBS News’ Face the Nation — apparently doesn’t even know that much. She argued to Secretary of State Marco Rubio that the sort of “free speech” JD Vance spoke in favor of is what caused (you guessed it!) the Holocaust:

 

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.

 

Give Rubio his due, he wasn’t willing to put up with Brennan’s absurdity for a moment. He immediately shot back: “Free speech was not used to conduct a genocide. . . . There was no free speech in Nazi Germany. There was none. There was also no opposition in Nazi Germany.” An excellent response, but one that of course didn’t go far enough: There was no free speech in Weimar Germany either. Hitler was banned from public speaking after the Beer Hall Putsch until 1927; he used his legally enforced “silence” to portray himself during that time as a populist martyr, until his influence grew to overwhelming levels.

 

What brought Hitler to power wasn’t “free speech”; it was German politics, and most especially the Germans themselves (which is why I’m closer than most to Norm Macdonald in my attitude toward Deutschland). In fact, there is no free speech in modern Germany, certainly not as we Americans understand it, for precisely the same reason. Free speech is not the problem, and the aggressive and heavy-handed censorship of “bad speech” is guaranteed to only make matters worse. I strongly agree with CBS News in rejecting the Alternative für Deutschland party; my problem is that CBS News seems to believe that Germany’s repulsive anti-free-speech police regime is a proper alternative for America.

 

I’ll also confess — as a cord-cutter and immensely slothful political columnist — that I was largely unfamiliar with Margaret Brennan until she started blowing herself up in public like this repeatedly over the past few weeks. I’m not proud of my ignorance, mind you, so I went back to search my archives here at National Review just to see if she had popped up in my writing before.

 

And as it turns out, she had: in a piece about the 2024 vice-presidential debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz. Brennan caught my attention — and that of others in the media — for cattily flipping a kill-switch to cut off Vance’s microphone after she had attempted to “fact-check” him (incorrectly) during a debate where the moderators had explicitly promised they would dispense with their transparent biases. His answer was so smoothly prepared that the moderators visibly panicked and tried to prevent him from finishing his sentence. Vance had already won the debate by the time of the exchange, but it was the icing on the cake for him that night, as the man who had to be silenced for being too good at this.

 

The next time Brennan came to my political attention, of course, was with her inaugural interview with . . . none other than JD Vance, on January 26, 2025. This is the one that resulted in Vance’s infamous “I don’t really care, Margaret” line, the one that has quickly become a national political meme as a paradigmatic example of the contemptuous dismissal of the mainstream media. (This is another way of saying that I quite enjoyed the moment.)

 

And now here we are, with Brennan blowing her own intellectual credibility with the public in the worst possible way — this time opposite Marco Rubio — and it sure cannot help but seem strangely coincidental that, once again, her flash point is JD Vance. A colleague of mine theorized that Brennan intensely resents Vance for successfully turning her into a joke, the embodiment of every tut-tuttingly officious Democratic apparatchik in the media, and that this motivated her to slip her rhetorical leash, resulting in her on-air humiliation on Sunday. I think he is correct. But I think Brennan conceived her dislike for Vance long ago — during, if not before, the vice-presidential debate — and now seems ready to go Captain Ahab on him . . . the consequences to the rest of her crew be damned.

 

David Hogg Is Already at the Trough

 

A week and a half ago, I wrote about David Hogg, spindle-armed youth anti-gun crusader and now the newly elected vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee. I wrote it up as a celebration, obviously; I am no more interested in the Democrats’ sorting out their electoral problems than I have ever been.

 

I left most of my best insults on the page, but circumstances compel me to return for at least one last lick. We’re not even finished with the month of February, and Hogg is already exploiting his new position to slop himself at the fundraising trough. The New York Post reports that Hogg has used his newly official elected position within the DNC to solicit donations . . . for his own private PAC, not the official Democratic one. Hogg’s using the DNC’s contact list to fundraise for his Leaders We Deserve PAC — under his control and not the party’s — is not technically illegal; it’s just sleazy, amateurish, and alienating. Much like David Hogg himself, as it turns out.

 

I stand by my contention that Democratic fortunes in 2026 will not be affected in any event by what Hogg does or does not do. He is a symptom of the Democrats’ inability to craft a counter-message to Trump, not the cause of it, which is evidence enough of their present irrelevance to the national discourse — to the point where it seems as if the only move Democrats have is sitting back and waiting for Trump to overplay his hand.

 

The Great Canadian Hockey Massacre of 2025

 

Well, at least Donald Trump managed to make hockey interesting.

 

I’ve been more than a little bit nonplussed about Trump’s rhetoric recently — as is fair when the president of the United States starts ominously quoting Napoleon (or Machiavelli, or whoever it was) on social media — so I want to thank him for at least making the NHL’s replacement for its All-Star Game this year, the 4 Nations Face-Off tournament, take on geopolitical significance. The idea was to divide NHL rosters into four teams representing the bulk of their professional talent (the U.S., Canada, Sweden, and Finland) and create a “national” face-off instead of the more traditional all-star exhibition.

 

And I’m sure NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman expected this to be an “exhibition” tournament as well. A bit of friendly competition! Instead, because of Donald Trump’s recent tariff demands, online insults, and farcical threats to annex Canada as the 51st U.S. state, we got something a bit more like blood sport. The Americans took to the ice in Montreal on Saturday only to hear themselves and America’s national anthem riotously booed by enraged Canucks.

 

Our unflappable American boys refused to take the bait; instead of charging the stands as the Indiana Pacers did during the Malice at the Palace back in 2004, they kept their cool and responded by immediately pummeling the ever-loving stuffing out of the Canadian players with their fists once the puck dropped. Three fights broke out in the first nine seconds of the game — with the two Tkachuk siblings doing their best Hanson brothers imitation — and we defeated these bedraggled Stanley Cup–less thugs by a 3–1 margin. The Americans move on to the championship game on Thursday, where they will once again face off with Canada. I predict carnage — and lots of boos for “O Canada.”