JD Vance’s Free Speech Hypocrisy in Munich
He berates Europe about the “threat from within” and questions liberal democracy.
JD VANCE’S VICE PRESIDENTIAL DEBUT on the international scene—his belligerent February 14 speech at the Munich Security Conference, in which he chided Europeans for their failings on democracy and free speech—elicited strong reactions from current and former European leaders as well as effusions of joy on the American right. (“Almost Reaganesque,” the Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway asserted on Fox News. Funny, I don’t remember Ronald Reagan ripping into America’s European allies while giving the dictator in the Kremlin a pass.) Vance’s culture-war tirade was not only pointlessly confrontational and ill-informed; it was also delivered at a moment when lectures on democracy from America have inevitable “Physician, heal thyself” overtones.
Case in point: The day after Vance’s lecture, the president of the United States declared himself a national savior who doesn’t have to worry about little things like laws when he’s busy saving the country.
Whatever inspired that tweet—which, as some have noted, resembles a line from Napoleon in the 1970 film Waterloo—it’s a justification for dictatorship, not a statement of democratic principles. It’s certainly the antithesis of a constitutional republic. (Remember “a government of laws, and not of men”?) One might also recall that the same president ended his first term in office by doing everything he could to sabotage the peaceful transfer of power—and that Vance himself has argued that Trump’s first-term vice president, Mike Pence, should have broken the law and refused to certify a legitimate election. None of this bespeaks a democracy healthy enough to serve as a model to the world.
VANCE’S SPEECH INSINUATED nothing less than the creeping Sovietization of Europe. The bad guys in the Cold War, he pointed out, were “the side in that fight that censored dissidents, that closed churches, that canceled elections”—and today, “some of the Cold War’s winners” are supposedly doing the same:
The situation has gotten so bad that this December, Romania straight-up canceled the results of a presidential election based on the flimsy suspicions of an intelligence agency and enormous pressure from its continental neighbors. Now, as I understand it, the argument was that Russian disinformation had infected the Romanian elections. But I’d ask my European friends to have some perspective. You can believe it’s wrong for Russia to buy social media advertisements to influence your elections. We certainly do. You can condemn it on the world stage, even. But if your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.
In fact, Communist-bloc countries during the Cold War didn’t cancel elections; they simply had fake ones. And while November’s first-round vote annulled by Romania’s constitutional court wasn’t fake, there was plenty of evidence that it was severely compromised by Russian meddling on behalf of far-right, pro-Kremlin, anti-European Union candidate Călin Georgescu, who had skyrocketed from unknown to frontrunner. The “flimsy suspicions,” as Vance called them, were actually five separate, previously classified reports detailing an aggressive Russian strategy to interfere in Romania’s election not only through coordinated advertising but through cyberattacks; the constitutional issues included illegal campaign financing to the tune of nearly $400,000 in a single month. (Georgescu had bragged about “zero campaign spending.”) Vance’s dismissive reference to “a few hundred thousand dollars” ignored the fact that such an amount, a drop in the bucket in an American presidential campaign, could have a massive impact in a country with a population of 19 million and a GDP less than 1.5 percent of ours.
Vance’s claim of “the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America” also focused extensively on freedom of speech, with several examples of speech suppression: the arrests of anti-abortion activists for silently praying inside abortion-clinic “buffer zones” in the United Kingdom, raids against “antifeminist” Internet posters in Germany, and the conviction of a Swedish anti-Islam activist for a public Quran-burning.
Is there some truth in this broadside? Well, it’s true that speech protections in Europe are less robust than in the United States, thanks to our First Amendment. Two days after Vance’s speech, for example, 60 Minutes reported on online speech-policing in Germany that revealed a troubling willingness to censor offensive speech far below the threshold for harassment, threats, or defamation. But it’s far from clear that this reflects a “retreat” rather than an application of longstanding curbs to a new area of speech. Germany’s law prohibiting public insults, which sometimes results in steep fines and has been used to go after racist internet posts, dates back to 1871. (It is also worth noting that our current interpretation of the First Amendment protecting nearly all speech with a few narrow exceptions is itself relatively recent—and a product of the 1960s liberal jurisprudence conservatives often deplore.) Several European countries actually repealed blasphemy laws in the 2010s, though critics have argued that measures against vandalizing religious texts, generally directed at Quran-burning, amount to stealth blasphemy laws. Holocaust denial and Nazi propaganda have been illegal in many European states for decades; British faux-historian David Irving served one year of a three-year sentence for Holocaust denial in Austria twenty years ago.
However, Vance’s examples of persecuted “dissidents” in Europe had a particular and obvious slant: They were all on the right (though not so far right as to be obviously abhorrent, such as Holocaust deniers). He didn’t mention, for instance, that in the past year Germany has shut down nonviolent pro-Palestinian protests and other events because of hate-speech concerns, or that activists calling for a boycott of Israeli products have been prosecuted under anti-discrimination laws in Germany and France. Nor did he mention that in Viktor Orbán’s MAGA-friendly Hungary, a law against demeaning religious feelings has been used to target abortion-rights protests and fine a newspaper for a cartoon critical of the government that included an image of the crucified Jesus. Dutch editorial cartoonist Tjeerd Royaards has reported that Hungarian cartoonists, while not formally charged, have “faced threats and harassment from government officials and people close to the regime” for such offenses as “depicting Orbán as a painful boil on the body of Europe” or “drawing the Hungarian people as pigs.”
Vance did acknowledge, “in the interests of comity [and] in the interest of truth,” that some of the “loudest voices for censorship” had come from the United States, not Europe; but, of course, his “comity” extended only so far as to attack the Biden administration for pressuring social media companies to police “so-called misinformation” on COVID-19. Let’s concede some validity to this accusation, even if the Supreme Court found no First Amendment violation in the Biden administration’s actions—and even if Vance fudged the truth by claiming that the alleged censorship targeted the lab-leak theory of COVID-19’s origins rather than anti-vaccine propaganda.
However, Vance’s solemn pledge that the Trump administration, as the “new sheriff in town,” will never seek to “silence people for speaking their minds” and will even “fight to defend” their right to do so surely qualifies for a chutzpah award. Are we talking about the same “sheriff” who is currently barring the Associated Press from Air Force One and from a number of White House media events because the wire service won’t call the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America”? As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression points out: “When the government shuts out journalists explicitly because it dislikes their reporting or political views, that violates the First Amendment.”
Vance also remained silent on Trump’s use of litigation to punish and intimidate media outlets that have published things he dislikes, such as a poll that erroneously showed Kamala Harris with a lead in Iowa shortly before the election or a television interview supposedly edited to cast Harris in a more favorable light—a charge exposed as nonsensical by the release of the full transcript. Worse, there is little doubt that Trump is using the authority of the Federal Communications Commission to pressure CBS to settle and to turn over evidence that he believes can help him in his lawsuit.
Meanwhile, key administration figure Elon Musk has declared that CBS staffers involved in the interview engaged in “deliberate deception to interfere in the last election” and “deserve a long prison sentence.”
IN A WAY, VANCE’S DIATRIBE was addressed less to his audience at the security conference than to the MAGA base in the United States and perhaps to populist audiences in Europe, with its depiction of Europe as a place where free speech is routinely muzzled by the woke left, “mass migration” continues to wreak havoc despite the voters’ will, and democracy is thwarted when it threatens the elites. This broad caricature is grotesquely hyperbolic even when it touches on real problems. But, perhaps most insidiously, Vance coupled it with a contemptuous dismissal of the threat from Russia, at a time when there is growing evidence of Russia’s increasingly aggressive subversion campaign against European democracies—a hybrid war that includes not only the corruption of media and politics but potentially devastating sabotage and vandalism and even assassination attempts.
Of course this doesn’t mean that Europe shouldn’t turn a critical eye inward. But when Vance counsels the Europeans to look at a “threat from within” that endangers the fundamental values of a liberal society, perhaps he should follow his own advice.