I have a feeling we'll be revisiting Vice President Vance's Munich speech with some regularity, given the ongoing pertinence of its themes. We've already written about it twice, and here comes round three. By way of background, Vance put European teeth on edge and noses out of joint when he showed up at a security conference in Germany earlier this year -- and rather than addressing subjects they wanted to hear, he called them out for their anti-speech, pro-uncontrolled-migration, and anti-democracy impulses and policies. Many of the attendees and other cross-Atlantic elites were reportedly irate and aghast over what they heard, but Vance didn't just have a bit of a point. He had a big one. If you missed it, here's part of what the Vice President said about open expression and free speech:
"...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, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values—values shared with the United States of America...when we see European courts canceling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask 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...In Britain, and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat....How will you even begin to think through the kinds of budgeting questions if we don’t know what it is that we’re defending in the first place?"
Among the West's 'shared values,' open debate, free elections (more on that below), conscience protections and speech rights ought to be at or near the very top of the list. But in mentioning the UK, amid other examples, Vance noted how Britons have been arrested for silent prayer in the vicinity of abortion clinics, with the Scottish government even warning that certain unauthorized prayer in private homes could constitute an illegal act. We wrote about a man who allegedly lost his job for condemning Hamas after the terror group's October 7th slaughter because he was supposedly the one who was sowing divisions and causing offense. Peaceful counter-protesters at Hamas mob hate rallies were taken into custody, while the pro-terrorism masses spewed their bigoted bile. A social media gripe about Palestinian flags festooning a British neighborhood resulted in an arrest.
There was also an infamous incident in which a prominent British columnist and journalist received a visit from the police over a year-old tweet that had long since been deleted. Imagine being a media personality and receiving a knock on your door about something you'd tweeted 12 months prior, then deleted? That actually happened in the United Kingdom, and we know that such practices are commonplace in Germany, for instance. Here's the latest abusive example out of Great Britain. If raising concerns about decision-making processes at your your kid's school in a public forum can cause half a dozen cops to show up on your property -- followed by the sources of the speech spending hours in a jail cell -- it's fair to ask whether such a society is actually, meaningfully free. Well and truly nuts:
Police kept them in a jail cell for eight hours. https://t.co/oROFwC0ZU0 https://t.co/1EfSEDrVIR pic.twitter.com/CoXmPM7bX4
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) March 29, 2025
Here is one of the victims, who works for a news organization, explaining the 'Kafkaesque' ordeal in his own words. Watch all the way through:
I complained about my daughter's school on WhatsApp then 6 police officers turned up.@TimesRadio producer @MaxieAllen_prod explains how he ended up in a police cell.#TimesRadio pic.twitter.com/1kYiG4zjHD
— Times Radio (@TimesRadio) March 28, 2025
Thank goodness this man has a credible platform on which to blow the whistle here. How many parents with no voice have been targeted with this authoritarianism? What's striking is that at the end of the video, the authorities didn't dispute his story at all, or call into question any of his characterizations. They defended the arrests and detainment as "necessary" to investigate the alleged "crimes," which were parents asking pointed questions about decisions made at their disabled child's school. The police seem rather proud of themselves that they've decided not to take further action, as if that's some sort of acceptable excuse for throwing parents in a squad car and holding them in a cell for hours. Utter madness. Finally, in his speech, Vance also warned about anti-democratic actions like this:
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...Now we’re at the point, of course, that 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.
A Romanian election was annulled due to Russian tinkering, and the leading candidate has since been banned from the ballot in the do-over election. I carry no brief for any Romanian political candidate, and know quite little about the specifics of that situation. But it looks like this is now happening again within the EU, this time in France:
French far-right leader Marine Le Pen has been sentenced to a five-year ban on running for public office for embezzling EU funds, a major political earthquake. The ruling, which takes effect immediately, is likely to bar her from running in France’s next presidential election. Le Pen, who was twice runner-up to French President Emmanuel Macron, has enjoyed growing support in recent years. Monday’s verdict will weigh heavily on political life, both in France and more widely in Europe, and on her own future as a political force...The 56-year-old daughter of the late far-right totemic figure Jean-Marie Le Pen was sentenced to two years under house arrest while wearing an electronic ankle bracelet, and an additional two-year suspended sentence, and five years’ ineligibility for public office with immediate effect. Le Pen’s lawyer said she would appeal the verdict but she will remain ineligible while she does and so could be ruled out of the 2027 presidential race...Le Pen and other National Rally party officials stood trial for having used money intended for European Union parliamentary aides instead to pay staff who worked for the party between 2004 and 2016, violating the 27-nation bloc’s regulations.
I trust both of these observers' judgment. On this front, it looks like Europe is once again vindicating Vance's admonitions:
I have no idea whether Marine Le Pen was scamming the European Parliament. God knows it happened often enough, though an unwritten rule meant that Europhiles were almost never investigated.
— Daniel Hannan (@DanielJHannan) March 31, 2025
I do know that banning leading candidates on technicalities is what autocracies do.
I’m sure Le Pen was mixing party and parliamentary funds. But the thing is: a) so does everyone else in the EU parliament; b) the elevation of this into “embezzlement” is absurd and cynical; and c) the sentence is clearly pretextual. It may well be overturned at appeal.
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) March 31, 2025
I'll leave you with more words on this general subject from Vice President Vance: "We don’t have to agree with everything or anything that people say, but when people represent—when political leaders represent an important constituency, it is incumbent upon us to at least participate in dialogue with them. Now, to many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old, entrenched interests 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."
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