“I don’t really care, Margaret…”
—Vice President JD Vance
Though counterintuitive, Margaret Brennan of CBS News isn’t bad at her job.
In fact, she has been quite good at her job as a corporate TV journalist anchoring a Sunday political talk show – until recently.
Indeed, just as DOGE continues to break the federal bureaucracy of unneeded jobs, Vice President JD Vance broke Brennan’s job by understanding her assignment better than her.
So, what was her assignment? What is the role of a corporate TV journalist in such a prominent position?
One role a Sunday morning TV talk host must play is training the average viewer how to emotionally react to particular arguments and political messages regardless of their content. Arguments to a corporate TV journalist aren’t necessarily literal; they are more fashionable poses to strike in just the right way to prevent any actual argument from breaking out.
That’s the mistake most conservative politicians made for years whenever engaging with the corporate press – they thought they were having good faith arguments with simply biased liberal journalists, while the journalists understood that clever condescension and emotional framing of the issues could lay waste to even the best arguments.
For example, one need not engage Aristotle's logic when one can simply dismiss his arguments as the problematic musings of another dead white man that experts say shows the sign of an authoritarian cast of mind.
Similarly, a few weeks ago, Brennan didn’t see the need to engage Vance’s arguments on the dangers of mass migration; she thought any counterpoint, delivered with just the right tone of voice and facial expression, would do – enough to at least cue her audience to dismiss Vance as uncool, unserious, untrustworthy and dangerous.
But Vance beat her at her own game with his dismissive “I don’t really care, Margaret…” that is now the stuff of memes.
Vance understands that when sparring with corporate journalists (or European elites), one must sometimes fight fire with fire — or condescension with condescension. Though it would be better to engage in a good-faith argument sans posturing, sometimes the political game is a paradox that requires one to play dirty.
That brings us to this past Sunday, wherein Brennan while interviewing Secretary of State Marco Rubio, revealed just how much Vance broke her as a corporate TV journalist.
While discussing Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference, Brennan unsurprisingly took the side of the European elites and thought she could play their same censorious guilt-by-association game, evoking the mother of all emotional frames, the Holocaust.
“Well, he was standing in a country,” Brennan said of Vance in Germany, “where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide.”
I suspect not even philosopher Karl Popper would agree with Brennan’s ham-handed allusion. Popper, the progenitor of the paradox of tolerance in his book, “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” may have very well provided the philosophical foundations of European hate speech and censorship laws with his paradox – but “freedom of speech,” weaponized or otherwise, isn’t exactly what Popper experienced before he fled Nazi Germany.
“Before he had left Vienna two years earlier,” writes historian Arthur Herman of Popper, “he had seen the groups of swastika-armbanded Nazis wandering the streets.”
Herman continues:
They were young Austrians, drawn to the vision of an Aryan National Socialist state the way young Rousseauians had been drawn to the French Revolution 150 years earlier. Most had been singing Nazi songs and accosting anyone they thought might be a Jew. With a studied brutal hostility, one of them had come up to him and waved a pistol.
“Where are you from? Karl Popper asked. Carinthia, the young man replied contemptuously. Popper was about to say something when the young man stuck the pistol under his nose. ‘What, you want to argue?’ he sneered. ‘I don't argue, I shoot.’
Indeed, free speech wasn’t weaponized by the Nazis, it was trampled underfoot by their true threats and relentless acts of mass violence. The Nazis didn’t freely and honestly argue their way into power; they dishonestly threatened, beat, cheated and shot their way into power – just as Lenin’s Bolsheviks had done in Russia.
“Free speech was not used to conduct a genocide,” a stunned Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in response to Brennan’s contemptuous framing of Vance’s Munich speech. ”The genocide was conducted by an authoritarian Nazi regime…. There was no free speech in Nazi Germany.”
So, what did Vance actually say to cause such a hullabaloo?
“Free speech, I fear, is in retreat,” he said in Munich.
To many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet era words like misinformation and disinformation, who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion or, God forbid, vote a different way—or even worse, win an election.
…
“And I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions, and the conscience that guide your very own people.
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.
If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you.
Vance’s argument in a nutshell: European governments have taken the paradox of tolerance too far and are now dancing with a form of bureaucratic authoritarianism that erodes their legitimacy and leaves European democracy sickly – an abscess growing within as ominous as any authoritarian threat from without:
This is th’ impostume of much wealth and peace,
That inward breaks and shows no cause without
Why the man dies.
As much as Vance may be guilty of responding to the condescension of journalists and European elites with his own condescension, I suspect he does so to open debates that have been closed for too long.
By touching political third rails, Vance hopes to bring down the fourth wall of Western politics and allow good faith arguments to breathe unrestricted by the false framing of corporate media or the tired norms of Atlanticist discourse.
Sorry, Margaret, but free speech didn’t lead to the gas chamber. Frankly, Europe, we are tired of the well-worn post-war norms and agreements as well as the self-destructive policies leading to your strange death.
All this can be addressed openly and honestly without backsliding into the horrors of the totalitarian early 20th century. To prevent intolerance from breeding more intolerance, hard discussion and rough truths must be broached – free speech is most needed when one must say ugly and offensive things others do not want to hear – else we let our internal problems, passions and prejudices silently fester only to eventually, violently burst.
Whether in MAGA country or a decadent “open society” Europe in decline, we in the West must learn to freely argue again, long before those who may say, “I don’t argue, I shoot,” ever have a chance to break their silence again.
Joey Clark is a native Alabamian and is currently the host of the radio program News and Views on News Talk 93.1 FM WACV out of Montgomery, AL M-F 12 p.m. - 3 p.m. His column appears every Tuesday in 1819 News. To contact Joey for media or speaking appearances as well as any feedback, please email joeyclarklive@gmail.com. Follow him on X @TheJoeyClark or watch the radio show livestream.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News. To comment, please send an email with your name and contact information to Commentary@1819news.com.
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