When Vice President JD Vance took the stage at the Munich Security Conference on February 14 to speak to the political, military, and business leaders gathered to discuss international security policy and the future of the West, most expected him to focus on the Russia-Ukraine war and Europe’s badly neglected security obligations. He barely mentioned them. Instead, Vance delivered a bombshell speech rebuking Europe for their rejection of freedom of speech, enthusiastic censorship, and increasingly anti-democratic attempts to suppress political outcomes they do not like.
Vance began by offering his prayers for the victims of the terrorist attack in Munich the day before, in which a 24-year-old Afghan asylum seeker drove a vehicle into a crowd near the central train station, injuring at least 28 people. He then offered a mere two sentences on Europe’s security obligations and the Russia-Ukraine war and stated that the concern he most wanted to address was: “The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.” He went on:
I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election. He warned that if things don’t go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany too.
Now, these cavalier statements are shocking to American ears. For years we’ve been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values. Everything from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship is billed as a defense of democracy. But when we see European courts cancelling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard. And I say ourselves, because I fundamentally believe that we are on the same team.
We must do more than talk about democratic values. We must live them. Now, within living memory of many of you in this room, the Cold War positioned defenders of democracy against much more tyrannical forces on this continent. And consider the side in that fight that censored dissidents, that closed churches, that cancelled elections. Were they the good guys? Certainly not.
This is the sort of speech I have heard at the National Conservative conference, but for the vice president of the United States to confront Europe’s elites with their own hypocrisy is simply unprecedented. There is a joke in EU circles about referendums: If you don’t get the result you want, keep on asking the voters until you do. And of course, when you do run a referendum, use the full force of the state, the press, and Brussels to persuade the public that there really only is one choice. This is precisely what happened in Ireland with the 2018 abortion referendum.
Vance then went a step further. I have been writing about the censorship of Christians in Europe for years; some of my colleagues have been doing so for decades. I will admit to being both stunned and thrilled when JD Vance confronted Europe’s leaders with their attacks on freedom of speech and forced them to listen as he detailed their abysmal record of political persecution.
“Unfortunately, when I look at Europe today, it’s sometimes not so clear what happened to some of the Cold War’s winners,” he told them:
I look to Brussels, where EU Commission commissars warned citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest: the moment they spot what they’ve judged to be ‘hateful content’. Or to this very country where police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online as part of ‘combating misogyny’ on the internet.
I look to Sweden, where two weeks ago, the government convicted a Christian activist for participating in Quran burnings that resulted in his friend’s murder. And as the judge in his case chillingly noted, Sweden’s laws to supposedly protect free expression do not, in fact, grant – and I’m quoting – a ‘free pass’ to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief.
And perhaps most concerningly, I look to our very dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons, in particular, in the crosshairs. A little over two years ago, the British government charged Adam Smith Conner, a 51-year-old physiotherapist and an Army veteran, with the heinous crime of standing 50 metres from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes, not obstructing anyone, not interacting with anyone, just silently praying on his own. After British law enforcement spotted him and demanded to know what he was praying for, Adam replied simply, it was on behalf of his unborn son he and his former girlfriend had aborted years before.
Now the officers were not moved. Adam was found guilty of breaking the government’s new “buffer zones” law, which criminalizes silent prayer and other actions that could influence a person’s decision within 200 metres of an abortion facility. He was sentenced to pay thousands of pounds in legal costs to the prosecution.
Now, I wish I could say that this was a fluke, a one-off, crazy example of a badly written law being enacted against a single person. But no. This last October, just a few months ago, the Scottish government began distributing letters to citizens whose houses lay within so-called “safe access” zones, warning them that even private prayer within their own homes may amount to breaking the law. Naturally, the government urged readers to report any fellow citizens suspected guilty of thoughtcrime in Britain and across Europe.
Vance defended Christians. He defended pro-lifers. He humanized an aborted child, standing before an audience made up primarily of abortion extremists. He emphasized that even thoughtcrimes were now punishable by law in the U.K., the nation that produced George Orwell. Vance went on to note that even the attempts by Europe to combat Russian “disinformation” – the most extreme and shocking example being Romania’s recent cancellation of a presidential election for fear of foreign influence (or perhaps a fear that the wrong people might win) – highlight that Europe seems to have lost faith in the vitality of her own democracies.
Vance got explicit about this. “Now, to many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation, who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion or, God forbid, vote a different way, or even worse, win an election,” he told the stunned conference. The security budget is an important conversation, Vance emphasized, but they are pointless “if we don’t even know what we are defending in the first place.” He pulled no punches: “I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions, and the conscience that guide your very own people.”
Democracy, Vance stated, must be paramount. Democratic mandates must be genuine. “In America, you cannot win a democratic mandate by censoring your opponents or putting them in jail. Whether that’s the leader of the opposition, a humble Christian praying in her own home, or a journalist trying to report the news. Nor can you win one by disregarding your basic electorate on questions like who gets to be a part of our shared society.” That final shot was directed at the censors desperately trying to silence growing public resentment about the migration crisis.
Vance closed his speech with a clarion call to return to the values of freedom of speech. His words are (once again) worth reading in their entirety:
I believe that dismissing people, dismissing their concerns or worse yet, shutting down media, shutting down elections or shutting people out of the political process protects nothing. In fact, it is the most surefire way to destroy democracy. Speaking up and expressing opinions isn’t election interference. Even when people express views outside your own country, and even when those people are very influential – and trust me, I say this with all humour – if American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.
But what no democracy, American, German, or European will survive, is telling millions of voters that their thoughts and concerns, their aspirations, their pleas for relief, are invalid or unworthy of even being considered. Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There is no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle or you don’t. Europeans, the people have a voice. European leaders have a choice. And my strong belief is that we do not need to be afraid of the future.
Many of those gathered immediately fled to their preferred media outlets to sputter with outrage about Vance’s speech – but Vance could have quite easily filled several hours with additional details of censorship and political suppression. He could have mentioned, for example, the Finnish politician and former cabinet minister Paivi Rasanen, who has been prosecuted for years simply for quoting the Bible on marriage and sexuality.
He could have also cited the case of Vassilis Tsiartas, widely considered to be one of the greatest Greek soccer stars of all time, who was convicted in 2022 of “transphobic” social media posts and given a 10-month suspended prison sentence and 5,000 euro fine for “violence or hatred for reasons of gender identity.” Or the persecution of Norwegian filmmaker and actress Tonje Gjevjon, who was criminally investigated for stating that men cannot be lesbians; her compatriot, the feminist Christina Ellingsen, was investigated for saying that men cannot become women. Or the Scottish construction worker hammered with a hefty fine merely for laughing at a man in a dress.
The list is endless – and that’s not even to mention the ongoing chaos in Poland, as Prime Minister Donald Tusk targets his political opponents with all of the tools at his disposal, or the EU’s attempts to force LGBT ideology on the once-sovereign governments of member states.
Europe’s elites are not used to being called out this way. It is fashionable to sneer at America as a nation of flag-waving fundamentalists who lack the sophistication of their continental counterparts while simultaneously relying on them for international security. To be challenged on their stinking hypocrisy by the 40-year-old American vice president at one of their most prestigious gatherings is a rebuke they will not take well – but in the homes of the marginalized and the persecuted across Europe this weekend, there is hearty laughter and great cheer.
