Free speech and censorship continually made the headlines this past week.

Vice President JD Vance attended the Munich Security Conference in Germany where he excoriated European leaders for cracking down on “hate speech” and censoring their own citizens. Vance’s speech shook up many in attendance, who expected Vance to champion the cross-Atlantic support for Ukraine in the ongoing war with Russia. That’s not, however, the agenda Vance arrived with.

In addition to the speech, which was newsworthy in its own right, Secretary of State Marco Rubio went on air with CBS host Margaret Brennan, who, when commenting on Vance’s remarks, claimed that the weaponization of free speech led to the holocaust in Nazi Germany.

Rubio gently pushed back and noted that no, the Third Reich was an authoritarian regime that allowed no free speech while it was in power. Any resistance against Hitler meant almost certain encampment and death.

Brennan’s remarks were met with widespread bafflement. How could free speech have led to one of the most horrific injustices ever perpetrated? Brennan and her allies might say that if the Nazis hadn’t been allowed to freely speak their views, they would have never risen to power. However, as America This Week host Matt Taibbi pointed out, clamping down on a certain group’s free speech tends to increase its popularity. Policing speech will eventually backfire against the elites who think it necessary to enforce.

As if this all wasn’t enough, CBS released a 60 Minutes episode featuring a panel of German prosecutors who monitor online hate speech and hit violators with fines and other punishments.

In Germany, insulting someone online is now considered a crime. Even sharing someone’s insult is considered a crime. Prosecutors can fine violators and may also deprive them of their electronic devices.

Free speech continues to be a hotly contested topic in America and abroad. Jacob Mchangama writes in Persuasion that censoring speech isn’t limited to the political left; he writes that the current presidential administration is also attacking speech it doesn’t like. Mchangama notes that for Vance’s speech to resonate more deeply, we have to be bipartisan in our advocacy for free speech and call out censorship wherever it occurs.

In any case, the suspicion over absolute free speech among so many Westerners today is a strong cause for concern. The science fiction writer Ray Bradbury illuminated the censorial mindset brilliantly in his classic novel Fahrenheit 451. In a dystopian society filled with white noise, fast cars, and random nuclear exchanges, books are banned, so the authorities say, because of their tendency to offend people. People can’t bear having their worldviews challenged or disrupted by intellectual dissent. However, for Bradbury, books also delight, illuminate, inspire, and redeem human perspective. A free literary culture is vital to the health of the whole culture.

We often debate about whether Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or Orwell’s 1984 gives a more accurate diagnosis of the Western malaise. Fahrenheit 451 needs to be in the conversation, too.

In addition to reading Bradbury, perhaps we as Americans can collectively revisit what the First Amendment of the Constitution really says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Free speech can indeed be “weaponized,” but according to the founders of the United States, it was intended to be a weapon against government overreach.