WILL JONES
US Vice President J.D. Vance has slammed European leaders for “criminalising” free speech, opening the immigration floodgates and brutally clamping down on dissent in his landmark address to the Munich Security Conference. The Mail has more.
Vice President J.D. Vance took his culture war to Europe on Friday, warning that its greatest threat came not from China or Russia but from within as he delivered a blistering attack on what he said was the continent’s retreat from its traditional values.
Vance said free speech and democratic institutions were being eroded in an address to the Munich Security Conference.
He accused European politicians of forcing people to shut down social media accounts and urged leaders to do more to stem illegal immigration.
Vance reserved particular scorn for America’s closest ally, and the case of a British man arrested after praying near an abortion clinic.
“Europe faces many challenges, but the crisis this continent faces right now, the crisis I believe we all face together, is one of our own making,” he said.
“If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you, nor, for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump.”
If his audience of European VIPs had expected Vance to discuss the future of the war in Ukraine, outlining Donald Trump’s peace plan, they were in for a shock.
Some shifted in their seats as he attacked European politicians head on.
He accused European Union officials of “cancelling elections and asked whether ‘we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately higher standard’”.
“There is a new sheriff in town,” he said referring to President Donald Trump. “We may disagree with your views but we will fight to defend your right to offer it in the public square.”
The hall was packed to hear Vance speak. Audience members sat on the stairs or stood three deep in the aisles, sending temperatures soaring even before Vance turned up the heat.
He cited the example of a British man, Adam Smith-Connor, who was arrested after he refused to leave a safe zone around an abortion clinic designed to protect vulnerable women.
Vance claimed it was an attack on the “basic liberties of religious Britons” that “criminalises prayer”.
“British law enforcement spotted him and demanded to know what he was praying for,” said Vance.
“Adam replied simply, it was on behalf of the unborn son that his former girlfriend had aborted years before.”
He accused European leaders of echoing communist language by acting against “disinformation” and “misinformation”.
And he hammered Trump’s longstanding demand that European nations spend more on their own defence.
“While the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine, and we also believe that it’s important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way,” he said.
“The biggest threat to Europe isn’t external — it’s internal. A retreat from its own fundamental values, values shared with the US.”
He delivered his speech at a moment of world peril, as the established world order is in danger of crumbling under Putin’s assault on Ukraine.
Worth reading in full.
The Telegraph notes that Vance criticised Europe over mass migration and a lack of defence spending, condemning the UK for betraying Brexit voters by opening “the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants”.
See Related Article Below
JD Vance is right: the anti-democratic West is no longer worth defending
Europe is the birthplace of liberalism; it seems only right that it dies here, too
The Telegraph: continue reading
Featured image: x.com
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Yesterday a car was deliberately driven into a crowd of bystanders, injuring 30. Attacks of this nature – violent, random, nihilistic – have become commonplace, even mundane, in Europe; the identity of the alleged perpetrator (reported as a Afghan failed asylum seeker) grimly predictable even as the motive remains obscure.
That this particular attack received so much coverage reflected less the scale of the violence and more the location and timing: in the centre of Munich, a day before the Security Conference.
Perhaps it may have given some pause to the delegates of the liberal Western order, travelling to the city to discuss Europe’s external security threats, to be reminded in such a brutal fashion that the greatest danger to our civilisation operates within our borders. Or perhaps not: much easier to offer thoughts and prayers, and turn our eyes to the undoubtedly urgent questions of the future of Ukraine and Nato.
But one attendant – arguably the most important, and certainly the most closely-watched – did pay attention to the chaos on the intersection of Seidlstrasse.
As attendants waited for clarity on America’s new position on Russia, JD Vance railed against European complacency of a different kind: “why did this [attack] happen in the first place?” How much more blood must be spilt before “we change course, and take our shared civilisation in a new direction?”
It is hard to overstate the significance of a US Vice President attacking the suicidal immigration policy favoured by his country’s European allies. But Vance would go further: EU commissioners were rebuked as “commissars” unable or unwilling to recognise the importance of “democratic mandate”.
What little strained applause Vance had so far garnered from the audience retreated into a stunned silence. He went on. “The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia. It’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. And what I worry about is the threat from within”.
In a phrase, Vance flipped the attention from abroad to home, laying the blame for our increasingly unstable and fractious world solely at the feet of our governing class.
European leaders responded to America’s populist turn with revulsion, accusing Trump of a form of democratic backsliding. What this meant, however, was always uncertain. Europe is no stranger to attempts to subvert or outright overrule democratic decision making: the success of the AfD in Thuringia provoked the co-chief of a rival political party to push to ban it, while a constitutional court in Romania recently cancelled a presidential election to prevent the expected victory of the hard-Right Calin Georgescu.
Our own country is no better. We shared a populist moment with the US in 2016 with the success of the Brexit referendum. Our political class, like their Atlantic counterparts, responded not with introspection but in the spirit of shameless reaction, demanding a second referendum in order to obtain a better result.
Each social ill – and the subsequent reaction from voters – can be dismissed by invoking the magic word of “disinformation”. Feverish conspiracism over foreign intervention, be that Kremlin-controlled “bots” or Elon Musk’s dastardly algorithms, can be engaged with in polite company with hardly a raised eyebrow. We have wilfully blinded ourselves to our own insanity.
JD Vance is perfectly clear on what America really thinks about us. We are no longer the continent of Shakespeare or Goethe, Churchill or Metternich – not even of JK Rowling. What interest international observers still take in our affairs revolves not around our constitutional or cultural strengths but our imminent collapse.
We are a continent that jails protestors for praying outside of abortion clinics, systemically downplays the mass rape of women and children for the sake of upholding “community relations”, and terrorises our own citizens for daring to insult politicians on the internet. Europe is the birthplace of liberalism; it seems only right that it dies here, too.