There seems to be an outbreak of historical ignorance among TV talking heads. MSNBC’s Ali Velshi denounced Queen Elizabeth II for the British practice of slavery, even though the British Empire abolished it a century before her birth. Tucker Carlson sarcastically asked Piers Morgan whether Adolf Hitler had plans to invade Britain, which, of course, the Nazi dictator did.
And then CBS’s Margaret Brennan outdid them while interviewing secretary of state Marco Rubio during the February 16 edition of Face the Nation. She claimed that Vice President J.D. Vance had delivered a critique of European censorship in Munich while “standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide.”
The point, presumably, was that the Nazis had exploited freedom of speech to gather more adherents and destroy democracy under the Weimar Republic. There ought to be a word for a remark like this, which managed to be both sophomoric, in its attempt to play gotcha with Rubio, and moronic in its historical ignorance: sophomoronic, perhaps?