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Vice President JD Vance traveled to Europe recently, and on Friday, he addressed the Munich Security Conference regarding “our shared values,” a key one of which is free speech.
Anyone who’s paid attention to European politics in recent years knows that free speech is, at best, in decline. In the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and elsewhere, people can be arrested for speaking their minds if their opinions are what British author George Orwell once dubbed “thoughtcrime.”
“What I worry about,” Vance told his audience, “is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.” He spoke of having won the Cold War and the values that made the victory possible before lamenting that the Europeans have so thoroughly abandoned some of those values.
Unfortunately, when I look at Europe today, it’s sometimes not so clear what happened to some of the Cold War’s winners. I look to Brussels, where EU commissars warn citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest the moment they spot what they’ve judged to be, quote, “hateful content.” …
I look to Sweden, where two weeks ago the government convicted a Christian activist for participating in Koran burnings that resulted in his friend’s murder. 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 in 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-Connor, a 51-year-old physiotherapist and an army veteran, with the heinous crime of standing 50 meters from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes. …
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, free speech, I fear, is in retreat.
(Note: The author of the Scottish law called Vance’s characterization “nonsense and dangerous scaremongering.” Is it?)
Vance admitted that the U.S. has been little better in recent years, though he vowed that will change.
He concluded with an incredibly fundamental point about free societies: “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.”
Germany is once again headed down the well-worn road of crushing political dissent with the power of the state. Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party — the left-wing National Socialist Workers Party — effectively banned all political opposition, silencing critics and functioning as the only party in the country for nearly 15 years. We all know how well that worked out.
Or do we? So-called mainstream German politicians are currently considering whether to ban the Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, which stands accused of being “far-right” and “anti-immigrant.” The merits (or lack thereof) of the AfD are not my point here, though the historically illiterate and deliberately deceitful left-wingers falsely characterize the Nazis as “far-right,” too, so there’s that.
In fact, that brings me back to America, where CBS anchor Margaret Brennan offered the ignorant and utterly reprehensible premise that free speech was at the root of the Holocaust.
While interviewing Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who had traveled to Germany along with Vance for the conference, Brennan challenged him to explain Vance’s unvarnished championing of free speech, which was “irritating our allies.” Rubio replied by asking, “Why would our allies or anybody be irritated by free speech and by someone giving their opinion? We are, after all, democracies.”
He added some of the same thoughts Vance had communicated, but Brennan was unconvinced. “Well,” she huffed, “he was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide, and he met with the head of a political party that has far-right views and some historic ties to extreme groups.”
Rubio could hardly believe his ears. He politely but firmly rebuked Brennan, saying:
Free speech was not used to conduct a genocide. The genocide was conducted by an authoritarian Nazi regime that happened to also be genocidal because they hated Jews. … There was no free speech in Nazi Germany. There was none. There was also no opposition in Nazi Germany. They were the sole and only party that governed that country. So that’s not an accurate reflection of history.
This is the first time I’ve heard the theory that the Holocaust wasn’t conducted with gas chambers but with free speech zones. pic.twitter.com/mpWm6UH2F4
— Michael Brendan Dougherty (@michaelbd) February 16, 2025
Before Rubio could go much further in his accurate history lesson, Brennan suddenly ran out of time — the old media standby for what you do when your argument is getting obliterated.
Nevertheless, thanks to partisanship and our failed education system, millions of Americans either believe or roughly agree with Brennan’s misinformation. The solution to that, of course, is not to silence her but to correct her — exactly as Rubio did. And precisely as Vance told our European “friends” they should be doing.
Free speech isn’t easy, and, unfortunately, the truth does not always prevail. But the truth never prevails when free expression is squelched.
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