Vice President JD Vance denounced German censorship after a major legacy media player acted as an apologist for the authoritarian practices in the European country.
Vance responded to a clip from a Sunday segment of CBS News’s 60 Minutes, which featured German prosecutors shamelessly bragging that they jail individuals for insults and so-called lies. “Insulting someone is not a crime, and criminalizing speech is going to put real strain on European-US relationships. This is Orwellian, and everyone in Europe and the US must reject this lunacy,” Vance wrote on X.
Vance’s rebuke follows his speech at the Munich Security Conference, where he condemned similar actions by Germany and the United Kingdom. The vice president specifically criticized the European Union for pushing censorship on individuals and tech companies alike.
In the segment Vance criticized, 60 Minutes also showed a “pre-dawn wakeup call from the police” where officers stormed a German’s home and seized electronics because of a cartoon posted online. CBS News correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi noted that over 50 other similar raids went down around the same time. The segment revealed that the Lower Saxony office responsible for policing speech—one of 16 such units—had around 3,500 cases. A German prosecutor admitted that a man was fined 3,750 euros (nearly $4,000) based solely on a single post as evidence of his supposed guilt.
Throughout the 60 Minutes episode, Alfonsi was seen repeatedly laughing and smiling as Germans belittled victims of government censorship and draconian fines.
Additionally, CBS News reported that German authorities engage in extensive social media surveillance, utilizing government data and taking tips from the public and police.
The news channel also spoke to Josephine Ballon, the CEO of the Soros-funded German nonprofit HateAid, who denied that there was any surveillance and called for limits on free speech. Ballon claimed that half of Germans were afraid to speak up online, attributing this fear to trolls rather than acknowledging the fact that the state prosecuting online insults, so-called misinformation and memes creates a climate of fear.
Notably, CBS included the story of a German citizen whose home was raided because a politician didn’t like being called a “pimmel,” a slang term for male genitalia. The report also included an interview with German politician Renate Kuenast, who successfully convinced a court to force Meta to censor negative posts about her globally.
Vance also reacted to an absurd case of German censorship against writer CJ Hopkins who was investigated for “spreading propaganda” for satire about the pandemic. Vance said that “the free world should be repulsed” by the German state’s pursuit of Hopkins.
Tellingly, this 60 Minutes episode aired the same day that CBS News anchor Margaret Brennan blamed free speech for the Holocaust during an interview with Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Vance wasted no time, slamming this absurdity as well. He wrote, “This is a crazy exchange. Does the media really think the holocaust was caused by free speech?”
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