JD Vance Is Right To Call Out European Censorship

Vice President JD Vance called out European censorship in his speech at the Munich Security Conference on Friday. In it, Mr Vance called out censorship against speech that governments subjectively determine is extreme, and arrests of citizens who oppose certain left wing social policy.

Notably, Vance mentioned the arrest and imprisonment of Adam Smith-Connor for silently praying 50 meters outside of an abortion clinic. Vance noted that Smith-Connor was “not obstructing anyone. Not interacting with anyone. Just silently praying on his own.”

“In Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat,” Vance said. “I wish I could say that this was a fluke—a one-off crazy example of a badly written law being enacted against a single person,” he said. “But no.”

Vance then contrasted the prior Biden administration’s attempt to bully social media into censoring so-called ‘misinformation,’ with the new Trump administration’s commitment to allowing all people to express their point of view.

He mentioned Romania’s decision to cancel the results of their election, under pressure from other EU nations, because of their determination that Russian propaganda influenced the voting.

The Vice President noted that “if your democracy can be destroyed by a few hundred thousand dollars of digital ads, it wasn’t very strong to begin with.” Of course, this speech was not well received by European leaders, but that was to be expected. Europeans are not accustomed to the US’, or at least conservative America’s, commitment to freedom of speech.

But it was an important speech, because it points out that an unelected group of people get to arbitrarily determine what views are, and are not, beyond the pale, effectively granting them dictatorial power.

This comes as quite the irony, from a political movement that claims to be fighting for democracy and the voices of everyone. This political movement, specifically that of the European establishment and the American left, has done the most censoring and the most to curtail the freedom of expression and even free thought of their citizens.

It is a political movement that cannot be allowed to stand, and should definitely not be in a position of great power. If JD Vance continues to call out these, and other hypocrisies of the cosmopolitan left in the West, he should be well on track to take up the mantle of the American conservative movement in 2028.