Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a strong rebuttal to CBS News host Margaret Brennan after she made the controversial claim that “free speech” was a driving factor behind the Holocaust.

Brennan’s remarks were in response to Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech in Munich, Germany earlier this week, where he criticized European governments for their increasingly draconian “hate speech” laws and rising authoritarianism.

During Sunday’s episode of Face The Nation, Brennan inaccurately characterized Germany’s AfD party—which has pushed for deportations and an immigration moratorium—as “far right.”

“Vice President Vance gave a speech and he told U.S. allies that the threat he worries about the most is not Russia. It is not China. He called it the threat from within and he lectured about what he described as censorship, mainly focusing though on including more views from the right,” Brennan said.

“What did all of this accomplish other than irritating our allies?” the CBS Host asked after referencing the German government’s censorship as evidence of “extremism” on the part of the AfD.

“Why would our allies or anybody be irritated by free speech and by someone giving their opinion? We are, after all, democracies. The Munich Security Conference is largely a conference of democracies in which one of the things that we cherish and value is the ability to speak freely and provide your opinions,” Rubio answered. 

The interview took a bizarre turn when Brennan claimed that Vance was “standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide” before once again likening the moderate-right AfD party to Nazi Germany.

But before she could finish her question, Rubio quickly interjected, making it clear that he strongly disagreed with her framing.

“Free speech was not used to conduct a genocide. The genocide was conducted by an authoritarian Nazi regime that happened to also be genocidal because they hated Jews and they hated minorities and they hated those that they, they had a list of people they hated, but primarily the Jews. There was no free speech in Nazi Germany,” Rubio shot back. 

“There was none. There was also no opposition in Nazi Germany. They were a sole and only party that governed that country. So that’s not an accurate reflection of history,” he said.