Vice President J.D. Vance warned European leaders in Munich the greatest challenges threatening democracy today are the internal impulses of western governments to dismiss constituent frustrations over unchecked immigration and their moves to censor dissident speech.
“While the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine,” Vance said, “the threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe … is the threat from within.”
The vice president characterized the threat at the Munich Security Conference as “the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.”
Vance went through a series of episodes wherein European leaders celebrated the kind of censorship and election interference once condemned by the West.
“For years, we’ve been told that everything we fund, and support is in the name of our shared democracy values,” Vance said. “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.”
Vance referenced the December annulment of elections in Romania, the cancellation of which was upheld by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in January. The vice president also admonished leaders in Brussels, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, including Scotland, where European governments have engaged in the censorship and prosecution of political opponents. Later in the speech, Vance even called out “the organizers of this very conference,” for having “banned lawmakers representing populist parties on both the left and the right from participating in these conversations.”
“Free speech, I fear, is in retreat,” Vance said, “and in the interest of comity, my friends, but also in the interest of truth, I will admit that sometimes the loudest voices for censorship have come not from within Europe but from within my own country.”
Vance condemned the Biden administration’s bureaucratic pressure on Silicon Valley that “threatened and bullied social media companies to censor so-called ‘misinformation.’” The vice president gave the previous administration’s efforts to dismiss the lab-leak theory of COVID-19’s origins as an example, “where our own government encouraged private companies to silence people who dared to utter what turned out to be an obvious truth.”
In January, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) corroborated what other federal agencies had begun to admit, which is the most probable explanation for the origin of the novel coronavirus was a Chinese laboratory in Wuhan.
“So, I come here today not just with an observation, but with an offer,” Vance said. “In Washington, there is a new sheriff in town.”
“And under Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer it in the public square,” he said.
But after warning European leaders about the democratic consequences of their own censorship, Vance said “there is nothing more urgent than mass migration.”
“No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants,” Vance said, “but you know what they did vote for? In England, they voted for Brexit … and more and more all over Europe, they are voting for political leaders who promise to put an end to out-of-control migration.”
The vice president concluded by calling on the continent to step up in its own defense and eliminate Soviet-style censorship.
“It is the business of democracy to adjudicate these big questions at the ballot box,” Vance said. “I believe that shutting down elections or shutting people out of the political process protects nothing.”
“In fact, it is the most surefire way to destroy democracy,” Vance added.
The vice president also finished by mocking the outrage over Elon Musk.
“If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you can survive a few months of Elon Musk,” he said.
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