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Margaret Brennan’s Plan to Stop Genocide

“Well, he was standing in a country where free speech was
weaponized to conduct a genocide”

—Margaret Brennan, February 16, 2025 on “Face the Nation”

Miss Margaret Brennan just proved she is wise,
and her brilliance has finally opened our eyes.
She has found a new weapon that killed all those Jews,
it was having the right to speak opposite views.

The Nazis loved free speech, encouraged debate,
and they never lost only because they were great.
It’s bad luck that no loser was heard from again
which is plain to a person with her acumen.

She has shown that the way to prevent genocide
is to put her in power and let her decide
when free speech should be free, or curtailed just a bit,
with her hand on the dial, we would all benefit.

If this all sounded proper and didn’t confuse
you, you’ll fit right in over at CBS News,
or you may choose the Times, from New York or LA.
None of them allow logic to get in their way.

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Warren Bonham is a private equity investor who lives in Southlake, Texas.

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25 Responses

  1. Brian A. Yapko

    I’m very glad you wrote this well-crafted, timely poem, Warren. The delusions and moral inversions offered by the legacy media are insane and as destructive as can be. The Third Reich was the most speech-repressed society on the face of the Earth, one in which all opposing views were snuffed out by the gestapo; one where the anti-science presented by eugenics and Mein Kampf were vaunted as “settled science” and books from the Bible to Gone with the Wind were burned; one where the Final Solution of the mass murder of Jews and other undesirables was hidden from its own people as well as the world. “Weaponized free speech…” indeed. If only Germany had had free speech, the brute who became its dictator might never have come to power.

    I saw a meme on Facebook this morning. It was an image of the von Trapp family fleeing the Nazis and “climbing every mountain” to get to Switzerland. The caption read “the von Trapp family flees encroaching free speech before it’s too late.”

    Reply
    • Warren Bonham

      You nailed it. I’ve looked for, but not yet seen a response from CBS News to see if they’ll provide more context for the context Brennan provided, or whether they’ll find a bus to throw her under. My guess is that they’re at work parsing her words to find the least offensive way of explaining them.

      Great von Trapp meme!

      Reply
    • C,B. Anderson

      And just imagine how things might have been different if the Jews had adopted something like our Second Amendment rights and had been armed to the teeth. The free speech issue is akin to Dr. Salemi’s recent essay where he essentially makes a great case for free speech in poetry — as if any poetry at all can exist without it.

      Reply
  2. Joseph S. Salemi

    If this dumb broad Margaret Brennan thinks that Nazi Germany was a haven for free speech, she hasn’t read a single thing (whether book, article, report, analysis, memoir, or collected letters) about that period of human history.

    Can Brennan really be that stupid? In the light of those Catholic White Rose students who were guillotined just for spreading some leaflets? Or those Jewish-owned newspapers that were wrecked, ransacked, or burned? Or those opposition party members in the Reichstag who were arrested, or sent to concentration camps, or shot? Or those Bible students who were executed en masse for not signing up for the draft? Or even the murder of those Nazi party members like Strasser and Rohm, who simply held some political views different from those of Hitler?

    If Brennan is this ignorant about German history, I don’t think we should trust her on any subject at all. Maybe she should go back to school. Lots of older women do.

    Reply
    • Warren Bonham

      More education would definitely help, but I’m not sure which institutions currently teach history as you’ve accurately expressed it above. You won’t be surprised to hear that she attended well-regarded institutions of learning and apparently received very good grades for absorbing what they fed to her.

      Reply
    • Warren Bonham

      I’m glad you enjoyed the effort. It wasn’t particularly polished but at least it was timely.

      Reply
  5. Roy Eugene Peterson

    Great timely poem that hits home, Warren. I just caught up with the strange postulate today and was surprised at your immediate and clever response. As I recall speech was only free when it was spoken on behalf of Nazi propaganda and beliefs. Glad you took on the apathetic news organizations as well!

    Reply
    • Warren Bonham

      The Free Speech pendulum appears to be swinging in the correct direction here, but alarming counterexamples continue to pop up in other countries that were originally founded on this core principle. Hate speech laws in various countries now make it illegal to make insults. I’m not smart enough to see how this is going to play out.

      Reply
  6. Morrison Handley-Schachler

    Thanks for expressing this so well, Warren. It is ridiculous that someone who works as a journalist in the United States of America should claim that allowing people to express diverging opinions is an encouragement to crimes against humanity. Suppressing debate is totalitarianism worthy of the Chinese Communist Party.

    Reply
  8. David Whippman

    Warren, thanks for this acerbic (deservedly so!) poem. Here in Britain as in the USA, there are people who view free speech and democracy not as sacred principles, but as a nuisance. You highlight this effectively.

    Reply
    • Warren Bonham

      The pendulum has started to swing in the right direction, but it hasn’t yet gathered much momentum. We all need it to keep going.

      Reply
  9. Margaret Coats

    Good catch, Warren! The only logic in evidence is the idea of linking something the speaker dislikes (free speech, though Brennan dare not say so directly) with something everyone can hate (Nazism). This was the whole point of the references to Trump as Hitler. The sole bit of good in this is the media acknowledgement, during days of growing antisemitism, that Nazism and Hitler are hateful.

    Reply
    • Warren Bonham

      It does seem very Pavlovian. Many people have been conditioned to respond in a certain way to carefully chosen stimuli. It seems distressingly hard to uncondition people who don’t seem aware that they’re little more than lab rats in some psychological experiment gone wrong.

      Reply
  10. Joseph S. Salemi

    I think Margaret Coats has hit the nail directly on the head. When Brennan speaks of “weaponizing free speech,” this is simply the new left-liberal rhetoric for ATTACKING free speech as a tool of the left’s enemies. If something is “weaponized,” it means that it has become a malign and hostile tool that is being used against the things that you support. Any conservative or rightist speech is thereby stamped with the condemnatory label of “hate” or “bigotry” or “prejudice.” By contrast, anything at all that the left says is virtuous.

    Rubio cleaned Brennan’s clock in his reply to her stupid remark.

    Reply
    • Warren Bonham

      Great summary and I’ve not yet seen Margaret not hit the nail directly on the head.

      Reply
  11. Susan Jarvis Bryant

    Thank you for this lightning-response poem, Warren. This is an example of mis/disinformation on steroids – oh, the irony! Wasn’t it only a second ago I heard the shrieks of the faux fact-checkers wanting to shut down free speech that smelt a little off for their liking? Oops!

    Reply
    • Warren Bonham

      It’s unfair of you to look back several minutes and expect such people to be internally consistent. Those who believe that truth is relative never have to admit they have ever said anything untrue.

      Reply
  12. Carl Kinsky

    A poet suggesting that Margaret Brennan poses a threat to free speech seems to me like an environmentalist complaining that a mosquito exhaling is creating global warming. The Nazis used the free speech they had under the Weimar Republic to get Hitler elected, then to destroy free speech and commit genocide.

    History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Brennan alone may be unable to destroy free speech, but she is representative of an influential and numerous clique of left-liberal persons, in very high and well-established positions, who are completely in favor of limiting the free speech of those whom they consider a threat to their hegemony.

      Free speech is for everybody, no matter what their opinions. Saying that free speech was “weaponized” by the Nazis is nothing but a left-liberal rhetorical trick to justify the denial of free speech to parties that left-liberals dislike and fear.

      If you don’t like the Nazis destroying free speech, that’s just fine. Now let’s hear you say that you don’t like a powerful left-liberal establishment doing the same thing.

      Reply

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