On the evening of Tuesday, January 31, 2023, the House of Representatives held a one-hour special order. It was called "Threats Facing Conservative Speech." Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado ran it, eighteen members spoke, and the last one to the microphone was a freshman from southwest Missouri less than a month into his first term.
Eric Burlison started with Harry Truman. He quoted the Missourian's line about how a government that silences opposition ends up "a source of terror to all its citizens." He talked about Big Tech, the Twitter files, and the FBI. Then he got to the thing he had actually come to talk about: a satellite TV company had stopped carrying a cable channel.
And this is how he ended:
"There is a famous quote about what happened during the Holocaust when the Nazis first came for some individuals and people said nothing. Then, eventually, they will come for you."
The Springfield News-Leader wrote it up the next morning. It was four days after International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The poem he was reaching for is about something else entirely
The words Burlison mangled belong to Martin Niemöller. Niemöller was a Lutheran pastor in Germany who supported the Nazis early on, turned against them, and spent 1937 to 1945 inside Nazi concentration camps for it. He survived. Afterward he wrote the lines everybody half-remembers:
"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists... Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, it is a confession. Niemöller was accusing himself, and other German Protestants, of staying quiet while their neighbors were rounded up and murdered.
Burlison used it to talk about a channel lineup.
What actually happened with Newsmax
Here is the whole story he was describing.
DirecTV's contract to carry Newsmax was expiring. Newsmax wanted to be paid a carriage fee. By Newsmax's own account, it was asking for about a dollar per subscriber per year. DirecTV said the demand ran into the tens of millions of dollars and would raise prices for its customers. The two sides didn't agree, and in late January 2023 the channel came off the lineup.
That's it. That's the persecution.
Nobody was arrested. No government agency ordered anything taken down. Newsmax kept broadcasting everywhere else, including on its own website — where it ran an endless stream of stories attacking DirecTV over the whole thing. DirecTV kept carrying Fox News the entire time.
And then, on March 22, 2023, the two companies announced a multi-year deal and Newsmax went back on the air. DirecTV's CEO called the settlement "a reflection of the free market at work." Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy — who had spent two months accusing DirecTV of censoring conservatives — turned around and said DirecTV "clearly supports diverse voices, including conservative ones."
Two companies argued about money. Then they agreed about money. Burlison had compared it to the Holocaust.
He made the same argument on the channel he said was being silenced
Three weeks after the floor speech, on February 20, 2023, Burlison went on Newsmax to talk about it. The show was "The Record With Greta Van Susteren."
"It's a horrible decision," he said. "This woke-leftist-cancel culture is causing us to lose the channels we want to watch. So I encourage everyone to call and let them know exactly how you feel. Let them know that you're gonna cancel your cable subscription."
Read that twice. A congressman who says a company's programming decision is censorship is telling viewers to punish that company by canceling their subscriptions. That is a boycott. It is customers using their money to pressure a business — which is exactly, precisely the thing he was calling an assault on free speech when he thought DirecTV was doing it to Newsmax.
He also delivered this message about being silenced on national television, on the very network in question, in prime time.
The people with subpoena power were the ones applying pressure
While Burlison was warning about government coming for speech, his own side was the government coming for speech.
On January 20, 2023, forty-two House Republicans — Burlison was not among the signers — sent a letter to the CEOs of AT&T, DirecTV, and TPG Capital demanding they hand over ratings data and the fees they pay every news network they carry. On February 1, Sens. Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Mike Lee, and Tom Cotton sent their own letter asking the companies to preserve and hand over their communications with the White House and with Democratic members of Congress. Other Republicans floated hauling DirecTV executives in for hearings.
Elected officials with power over a company's business leaning on that company about which channels it carries — that is the actual scenario the First Amendment is about. It was happening in the same week, in the same building, on the same side of the aisle.
And it isn't history. Missouri's Mark Alford went on cable news in February 2026, announced that House Republicans were investigating a Super Bowl halftime show, admitted he doesn't speak the language it was performed in, and said he'd be calling the FCC chairman about the broadcasters who aired it. Alford sits on the subcommittee that writes the FCC's budget. Nobody on that side called it censorship.
Fifteen months later, an actual antisemitism bill came up
On May 1, 2024, the House voted on the Antisemitism Awareness Act. The bill required the Education Department to use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition of antisemitism when it investigates discrimination complaints at colleges. It passed 320 to 91.
Burlison voted no.
He had company on both sides — PolitiFact counted 21 Republicans and 70 Democrats voting against it, with the Democratic objectors worried about chilling campus speech and some Republicans worried the definition could sweep in Bible passages. We could not find any public statement from Burlison explaining his vote.
So the record reads like this. Cable fee dispute: worth a Holocaust reference on the House floor. Bill about how the federal government handles antisemitism complaints: no.
Who he actually won't listen to
There is one more piece of this, and it's the one that costs people in southwest Missouri something real.
Burlison presents himself as a man being denied a voice. He does not extend the same concern to the people who elected him. He holds his town halls by telephone, and he has explained why he doesn't do them in person: town halls, he told St. Louis Public Radio, "create a dynamic where only political nutjobs show up." When constituents stood outside his Springfield office in March 2025 asking for a face-to-face meeting, his spokesperson said in-person town halls "have become a target for organized opposition groups."
Meanwhile, in his district, an estimated 32,626 people are projected to lose health coverage because of the cuts he voted for, according to the Joint Economic Committee. About 33,379 households in MO-7 rely on SNAP to buy groceries, USDA data shows.
Those people don't get a special order on the House floor. A cable channel did.
What the poem was actually warning about
Niemöller's list starts with socialists and trade unionists and ends with Jews — groups singled out and hunted because of who they were.
In December 2025, House Republicans launched something called the Sharia Free America Caucus. Within a few months it had fifty members. Two of them, Andy Ogles and Randy Fine, dropped the legal argument entirely — Ogles called Islam "a religion of violence, abuse of women, and ruthless political conquest," and Fine wrote that "we need more Islamophobia, not less." We traced where the panic came from: a hate group's blog post about a subdivision that has been there for two decades.
Eric Burlison is on the roster.
The poem he quoted on the House floor is about what happens when people stay silent while a religious minority gets targeted. He recited it over a fee dispute. He joined the caucus.
This is a pattern with him — the grand principle in public, the opposite in the voting record. He was one of only two members of the entire House to vote against a bill protecting victims of revenge porn and AI deepfakes, on the grounds that Missouri already had a law covering it. Missouri didn't.
We deserve better.
Source
Southwest MO's congressman invokes Holocaust quote during speech about Newsmax — Galen Bacharier, Springfield News-Leader, February 1, 2023. Photo: Springfield News-Leader. Burlison's remarks are reproduced in full in the Congressional Record, Volume 169, Number 20, pages H560–H566.
