The New Neo

A few days ago I did a couple of more tweaks on the blog that – hopefully – may have ended that periodic “too many requests” glitch. So my first question is whether you’re had any problem with that in the last day or two.

However, one of my adjustments has caused a possible cache problem, but only on cellphones and not on desktops or laptops. Weird, but my cellphone doesn’t always update the blog when I go to it. Sometimes I have to hit “refresh,” and then it updates just fine. I’m curious whether any of you have encountered that problem. Thanks!

Very teeny and very tiny.

You may have already heard the story of the folly of CBS’s Margaret Brennan. It occurred during an interview with Marco Rubio, in which Rubio defended J. D. Vance’s Munich speech in which Vance had criticized the current anti-free-speech policies of much of Europe. Brennan “interrupted Rubio with the claim that Vance was ‘standing in a country [Germany] where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide.'”

She must have thought she had him there. Obviously, she did not, and the criticism of Brennan came fast and furious, not just from Rubio but from the right in general:

“I have to disagree with you,” [Rubio] responded. “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 … There was no free speech in Nazi Germany. There was none. There was also no opposition in Nazi Germany. They were the sole and only party that governed that country, and so that’s not an accurate reflection of history.”

The ignorance and arrogance of most people in the news business doesn’t surprise me anymore. It’s gotten them far, after all. And yes, Brennan said something really stupid. The Nazis’ genocide of the Jews was committed when there was no free speech in Germany, so she was correctly excoriated for that statement.

But what if she really had meant that the rise of the Nazis was helped along by free speech in Weimar Germany? I have no idea whether Brennan even knows what the Weimar Republic was, but let’s imagine that she does, and that what she really meant was that maybe if the Nazis had been suppressed much earlier, they couldn’t have gotten as far as they did. That would be a very basic example of an argument sometimes made against freedom of speech, which it that it sometimes allow evil to triumph.

Of course, that’s an argument available to evildoers as well – that it’s they who are clamping down on the real evildoers.

Libertarians and classical liberals – and I count myself among the latter – believe that the best remedy for bad speech is to counter that speech with better arguments and better performance in the real world. But we all know that doesn’t always work, and that a lie can often get halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its boots on. But allowing free speech is still better than not allowing free speech.

What’s more, did the Weimar Republic even have free speech? Well, on paper they did because it was protected in their constitution, but in reality they didn’t, as FIRE (an organization devoted to free speech principles) explains:

Richard Delgado, an early champion of speech codes and now more famous as a founding scholar in the field of Critical Race Theory, cites the Rwandan genocide … along with Weimar Germany, as cautionary tales against free-speech purism. The problem is that neither historical precedent supports the idea that speech restraints could have prevented a genocide.

As I [Lukianoff] explained in my review of Eric Berkowitz’s excellent book, “Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients to Fake News,” Weimar Germany had laws banning hateful speech (particularly hateful speech directed at Jews), and top Nazis including Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch and Julius Streicher actually were sentenced to prison time for violating them. The efforts of the Weimar Republic to suppress the speech of the Nazis are so well known in academic circles that one professor has described the idea that speech restrictions would have stopped the Nazis as “the Weimar Fallacy.”

A 1922 law passed in response to violent political agitators such as the Nazis permitted Weimar authorities to censor press criticism of the government and advocacy of violence. This was followed by a number of emergency decrees expanding the power to censor newspapers. The Weimar Republic not only shut down hundreds of Nazi newspapers — in a two-year period, they shut down 99 in Prussia alone — but they accelerated that crackdown on speech as the Nazis ascended to power. Hitler himself was banned from speaking in several German states from 1925 until 1927.

In [a] 1920s cartoon by Philipp Rupprecht, Hitler is depicted as having his mouth sealed with tape that reads “forbidden to speak.” The text beneath this image reads, “He alone of two billion people on Earth may not speak in Germany.”

Far from being an impediment to the spread of National Socialist ideology, Hitler and the Nazis used the attempts to suppress their speech as public relations coups.

And of course, when the Nazis were in power, they were able to use the Weimar anti-free-speech precedent against the Nazis’ own opponents:

The laws mentioned earlier that allowed Weimar authorities to shut down newspapers, and additional laws intended to limit the spread of Nazi ideology via the radio, had their reins turned over to the Nazi party when Hitler became chancellor. Predictably, the Nazis used these preexisting means of censorship to crush any political speech opposing them, allowing for an absolute grip on the country that would have been much more difficult or impossible with strong legal protections for press and speech.

I actually think that, even without those Weimar speech-suppression laws, the Nazis would have managed just as easily to clamp down on the opposition. They did it through violence and threats of violence, through the declaration of emergency powers (allowed by the German constitution), and ultimately by the fact that Hitler manipulated the Reichstag into dissolving itself, making him a complete dictator.

However, I like that phrase “the Weimar Fallacy.” The nicest thing I can say about Brennan is that she may indeed suffer from it.