J.D. Vance DEMOLISHES Europe’s Deep State
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So, Vance took Europe out to the woodshed. have never, I’ve never seen this before and it’s high time. Actually, you know what? know, Donald Trump called out Europe in his first president regards to spending on NATO. But this was extraordinary. I want to go through some of this.
We gathered at this conference to discuss security and normally we mean threats to our external security. I’m just going to go through parts of the speech. I see many great military leaders gathered here today, but while the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine, we also believe that it’s important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defense.
The threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external factor. What I worry about is a threat from within. The enemy within. I think it was a Michael Savage book for crying out loud. The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America. 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 canceling elections,
and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask ourselves 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 the continent. And consider the side in that
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fight that censor dissonance, the closed churches, the canceled elections. Were they the good guys? Certainly not. Again, you could, you’re watching this and you can go online and watch it. All these European diplomats squirming in their chairs. And thank God they lost the Cold War. They lost because they neither valued nor respected all of the extraordinary blessings of liberty, the freedoms of surprise to make mistakes, invent to build.
As it turns out, you can’t mandate innovation or creativity just as you can’t force people what to think, what to feel, what to believe. And we believe those things are certainly connected. And 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 Commission 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 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. Look to Sweden. Two weeks ago, the government convicted a Christian activist for participating in a Quran burning that resulted in his friend’s murder. And as a 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 dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons in particular crosshairs. Two years ago,
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. 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.
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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 meters of an abortion facility. He was sentenced to pay thousands of pounds in legal costs to the prosecution. So I wish it was a fluke, a one-off, a crazy example of badly written law being enacted against a single person, but no.
A 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, 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 thought crime in Britain and across Europe. Free speech, I fear, is in retreat and in the interests of comedy, my friends, but also in the interest of truth.
I will admit that sometimes the loudest voices for censorship have not come from within Europe, but within my own country, where the prior administration threatened and bullied social media companies to censor so-called misinformation. Misinformation, for example, like the idea coronavirus had likely leaked from a laboratory in China. Our own government encouraged private companies to silence people who dared to utter what turned out to be an obvious truth. This is a lie and it’s great.
This is like from 48 hours with Eddie Murphy at Torchies Bar. In Washington, there’s 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 in the public square. Agree or disagree? Now we’re at the point, of course, that the situation’s got so bad that this December, Romania straight up canceled the results for presidential election.
based on the flimsy suspicions of an intelligence agency and an 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
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can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, it wasn’t very strong to begin with. Again, that was the same playbook that they were using in Europe that the Democrats used here in the United States as well, Russian misinformation. Anyway, now the good news is that I happen to think your democracies are substantially less brittle than many people apparently fear.
And I really do believe that allowing our citizens to speak their mind will make them stronger still, which of course brings us back to Munich, where the organizers this very conference have banned lawmakers representing populist parties on both the left and the right from participating in these conversations. Now, again, we don’t have to agree with everything or anything that people say, but when political leaders represent an important constituency, it is incumbent upon us to at least participate in a dialogue with them.
The old entrenched interests, deep state in Europe, he’s basically saying, 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. And again, he says this is a security conference and I’m sure you all came prepared to talk about how exactly you intend to increase defense spending.
over the next few years in line with some new target. And that’s great because as President Trump has made abundantly clear, he believes that our European friends must play a bigger role in the future of this continent. We don’t think you hear this term burden sharing, but we think it’s an important part of being in a shared alliance together. That the Europeans step up while America focuses on areas of the world that are in great danger. Damn straight, pay your fare, pay your bills, Europe.
But let me also ask you, how will you even begin to think through the kinds of budgeting questions if we don’t know what it is that we are defending in the first place? For a lot already in my conversations, and I’ve had many great conversations with many people gathered here in the room, I’ve heard a lot about what you need to defend yourselves from, and of course that’s important. But what has seemed a little bit less clear to me, and certainly I think to many citizens of Europe, is that what exactly is it that you’re defending yourselves for? What is the positive vision that animates
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this shared security compact that we all believe is so important. I believe deeply there is no security if you are afraid of voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people. 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. If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you.
Nor for that matter, there’s nothing that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump. You need democratic mandates to accomplish anything of value in the coming years. So much value can be accomplished with this kind of democratic mandate. And I think it will come to being more responsive to the voices of your citizens. You’re gonna enjoy competitive economies. If you’re gonna enjoy affordable energy.
and secure supply chains, and you need mandates to govern because you have to make difficult choices to enjoy all of these things. And again, he’s basically really taking shots at France and Germany right now, who are basically unwilling to form coalitions with certain parties. Again, it’s the old school deep state in Europe. Anyway, of course we know that very well. 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 part of our shared society? And here he gets into migration. Today, almost one in five people living in this country, Germany, moved here from abroad. That’s an all-time high. It’s a similar number, by the way, in the United States. Also an all-time high.
The number of immigrants who entered the EU from non-EU countries doubled between 2021 and 2022 alone, and of course it’s gotten much higher since then. We know the situation. It didn’t materialize in a vacuum. It’s a result of a series of conscious decisions made by politicians all over the continent and others across the world over the span of a decade. We saw the horrors wrought by these decisions yesterday in this very city. If you’re not familiar, there was another terror attack
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in Munich, Germany. A person ramming a car over some 30 some odd people. And of course I can’t again bring that up with thinking about the terrible victims who had a beautiful winter day in Munich ruined. Our thoughts and prayers are with them and will remain with them. But why did this happen in the first place? It’s a terrible story, but it’s one we’ve heard too many times in Europe and unfortunately too many times in the United States as well.
An asylum seeker, often a young man his mid-20s, already known to police, rammed a car into a crowd and shatters a community. Unity? How many times must we suffer these appalling setbacks before we change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction? No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants. But you know what they did vote for? In England, they voted for Brexit. And agree or disagree, they voted for it.
And more and more all over Europe, they are voting for political leaders who promise to put an end of out of control migration. Now I happen to agree with a lot of these concerns, but you don’t have to agree with me. I just think that people care about their homes, they care about their dreams, they care about their safety and their capacity to provide for themselves and their children, and they’re smart. And this is one of the most important things I learned in my brief time in politics. Contrary to what you might hear a couple of mountains over in Davos,
Another shot. The citizens of all our nations don’t generally think of themselves as educated animals or as interchangeable cogs of a global economy. And it’s hardly surprising that they don’t want to be shuffled about or relentlessly ignored by their leaders. And it is the business of democracy to adjudicate these big questions at the ballot box. Talked about dismissing people, dismissing their concerns, shutting down the media, shutting down elections, shutting down people out of the political process.
protects nothing. In fact, it’s 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 humor, if American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk. Woo!
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And again, he’s slam dunking on them right now. They don’t have anything. But what no democracy, American, German, or European will survive is telling millions of voters that their thoughts and concerns or aspirations or 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’s 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. Embrace what your people tell you, even when it’s surprising, even when you don’t agree. And if you do so, you can face the future with certainty and with confidence, knowing that the nation stands behind each of you. And that to me is the great magic of democracy. It’s not these stone buildings or beautiful hotels.
It’s not even in a great institutions that we built together as a shared society. To believe in democracy is to understand that each of our citizens has wisdom and a voice. And we refuse to listen to that voice. Even our most successful fights will secure very little. As Pope John Paul II, in my view, one of the most extraordinary champions of democracy on this continent or any other, once said, do not be afraid. We shouldn’t be afraid of our people even when they express views that disagree with their leadership. Thank you all.
Afterwards, and I’m a dork, I watch this stuff. But you had several European, one German president coming up there. I disagree with this and I witnessed democracy every day and this is not, again, they’ve got nothing. They’ve got terrorist attacks. You’ve got once safe countries like Sweden,
completely overrun. It’s a mess. And again, what Europe did, what Europe did is they empowered these people in Brussels, these unelected bureaucrats there in Brussels to dictate what’s going on.
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They have to get their act together. They have to. Again, this is Donald Trump laying basically the law down. And if you don’t think that Donald Trump is gonna start trying to pick off, what I mean by pick off, certain economies in Europe that wanna start, hey, we’ll do business with you. What would you do? Would you rather do business with us?
have a trade relationship with us, or would you rather have, you know, deal with all of this nonsense in Brussels and you’re starting to see it. Again, I’m a dork, I watch some of this stuff and some of the speeches being given from certain countries in Europe and European parlance, ripping the shreds, socialism and what they’ve done with energy policy right on down the line and the failure that it is. This is a good step.
It’s a good stuff. I’m you know, again, it’s going to be the media over there in Europe. And it’s the same thing. I mean, they have their own watchdog on Wall Street Axis of Evil over there, too. We get a lot of it’s paid for by the government or paid for by USAID, as we have learned, are going to, you know, they’re going to get up in arms about this. But I think the European people can see this.
I think that the tide is starting to turn over there as well. That whole concept, make Europe great again. Well, this is how you start doing it. Watchdog on wallstreet.com.
