Posted on 02/15/2025 4:06:26 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
"Democracy and free speech are certainly under challenge in many European countries.. The challenge is not coming from governments"
"These criticisms are pretty rich coming from a President who is quite uniquely authoritarian"
"Democracy and free speech are under challenge in a much bigger way in the United States, and his boss, Donald Trump, is the man who is mainly responsible for that"
(Excerpt) Read more at x.com ...
“ We need an amicable separation from all European nations”
+1
“William Brooke Joyce”
Interesting enough he was born in New York.
I saw both of Vance’s speeches in Paris and Munich and they were spot-on. Clowns like this are speaking out because Vance struck a nerve that unwinds itself to the Truth. They don’t like hearing the truth from anyone, much less a Colonial.
Sneering without offering evidence and arguments (just fact-free “conclusions” that are really just expressions of prejudice) is one way to respond when you don’t have a case. And this poor fellow doesn’t have a case.
Excerpt from full transcript of the speech that JD Vance gave at the Munich Security Conference this afternoon.
We gather at this conference, of course, to discuss security. And normally we mean threats to our external security. I see many, 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 – and 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 defence – 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 actor. 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.
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 defence of democracy. But when we see European courts cancelling 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. Now, within living memory of many of you in this room, the cold war positioned defenders of democracy against much more tyrannical forces on this continent. And consider the side in that fight that censored dissidents, that closed churches, that cancelled elections. Were they the good guys? Certainly not.
And thank God they lost the cold war. They lost because they neither valued nor respected all of the extraordinary blessings of liberty, the freedom to 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, or 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.
If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you
I look to Brussels, where EU Commission commissars warned 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.
I look to Sweden, where two weeks ago, the government convicted a Christian activist for participating in Quran burnings that resulted in his friend’s murder. And 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, 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 Conner, a 51-year-old physiotherapist and an Army veteran, with the heinous crime of standing 50 metres 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.
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 criminalises silent prayer and other actions that could influence a person’s decision within 200 metres of an abortion facility. He was sentenced to pay thousands of pounds in legal costs to the prosecution.
Some guy with a hereditary title in the 21st century, with a prominent role in his government based solely on that title, doesn’t really have much standing to lecture anyone on “democracy”.
Not all. I, for my part, was very grateful to VP Vance🙂
Wasn’t it Lord Haw Haw?
Which has me wondering just how much Amerucan taxpayer money has been laundered to the EU to prop up their failing welfare state.
I include the UK in that, too, BTW, because they Brexited in name only.
Who cares about Lloyd Simpleton.
Stand up against the russians yourself, mr maturity.
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