After Vice President J.D. Vance made his commitment to free speech clear during an address in Munich, CBS News’s Margaret Brennan did not take to it well.

During an interview with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Brennan compared Vance to Nazis. “[H]e was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide,” she said. “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.” Rubio promptly disagreed with the news anchor, emphasizing how “free speech was not used to conduct a genocide.”

He was also quick to explain that, “there was no free speech in Nazi Germany. There was none.” The tussle with free speech at CBS did not end with Brennan.

In a “60 Minutes” episode, a production of CBS, a German lawyer argued that “free speech needs boundaries.” In another episode, three German prosecutors touted similar claims. “They say, ‘No, that’s my free speech,’” remarked Dr. Matthäus Fink. “And we say, ‘No, you have free speech as well, but it also has its limits.’” The episode also featured a police raid on an individual for something they posted online. With the full support of CBS, they characterized the fact that it’s a criminal offense to insult someone in Germany as an effort “to bring some civility to the world wide web” through “policing speech online.”

On Tuesday’s “Washington Watch,” Family Research Council President Tony Perkins addressed this issue head on. “So,” he asked, “why does the Left have such a significant issue with free speech?” Mary Hasson, the Kate O’Beirne senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, replied that part of the Left’s problem with free speech is that “they’ve lost their sense of moral clarity.” Ultimately, “if you don’t have a sense of what’s good … right … [and] true,” then “you don’t understand speech as being part of that search for the truth.”

As Hasson explained, speech that stops seeking after truth is “all about power. And that’s what we see here. … [W]hen you lose your moral clarity, when you no longer appreciate the truth, or even the sense that there is a truth, then it’s all about maintaining your power. And that’s where censorship comes in.”

Perkins agreed, stating that this kind of perspective makes it so that “up is down, down is up. Good is evil, evil is good.” The fact that Brennan asserted “that Nazi Germany was the product of free speech” is a clear example, he said, especially when Adolf Hitler’s Germany “suppressed any type of voice that was counter” to the regime.

In addition to the “lack of moral clarity,” Hasson suggested another factor is “a weakness of political will.” For instance, she pointed out that Germany has had “a terrible problem with criminal migrants,” which has caused their crime to spike. “[A]nd yet,” she added, “here they are spending all this energy trying to police what people are saying [online as] they’re doing a very poor job of policing criminality and actually protecting their own people.” As she put it, Germany is “no longer willing to call some things wrong and some things right.” And this, Perkins emphasized, is largely because, like with many leftist ideologies, “their ideas are indefensible.” “[T]hey don’t want to be challenged by free speech.”

Perkins noted that Hasson has experienced this “firsthand.” Hasson has been at the center of what it looks like to be called “hateful” just for disagreeing with someone. “For example, I was recently speaking at ASU and there was a segment of people among the faculty and students who protested my mere presence, even though I wasn’t there to talk about gender ideology per se. … [B]ecause I disagreed with them,” Hasson said, they felt “they were in danger and … not safe because of my ideas.” It all points to this “sense of trying to protect themselves from hurt feelings or from having their ideas challenged,” which is “not how you arrive at the truth.”

“That’s not how we have a free society,” she continued. A society “where we know what’s good and what’s true.” In fact, “we want to have this open conversation to be able to persuade others. But when you’re simply trying to avoid feeling bad, you don’t want to hear what other people have to say,” so conversation gets shut down. As Perkins stressed, “the freedom of speech, which is a part of our First Amendment freedoms, is critical.” It’s like “a pressure valve [that] allows people to vent … [and] express themselves. And when that is short circuited or suppressed, that’s when we have real problems.”

“I completely agree with you,” Hasson emphasized. “And in fact, if you look back at the … political regimes that have suppressed free speech, they don’t … stop people from thinking or seeking the truth or trying to share that truth with others. It all goes underground.” Instead of controlling society, the more authorities try to suppress these pursuits of free speech, the more likely “you’re going to have a rebellion, a revolt.”

Perkins said, “[W]e need more speech, not less, in my view. So, … how can those of us who cherish this First Amendment freedom work together, growing America’s respect for this freedom?” Especially when considering “some of the younger generation … don’t [seem to] have a healthy understanding of the importance of the First Amendment.”

“[A]gain,” Hasson stated, “part of it goes back to this idea that they’ve come to believe that they are too fragile to hear ideas that they disagree with, or that make them uncomfortable.” As such, “we need to be bold and … speak the truth, and to encourage our children to be resilient, to understand that they can and should engage with ideas that they disagree with.” If anything, she concluded, the skill of “self-censorship” often comes into play when talking to “people who are very different from [us.]”

In any conversation, Hasson concluded, we need “to listen, to engage, but then … be confident in speaking the truth.”