Vice President JD Vance urged European leaders on Friday to fight back against censorship, declaring that their contempt for and even criminalization of free speech was posing the biggest threat on the continent — more even than Russian aggression.
“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,” Vance said in an address at the Munich Security Conference.
“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.”
Vance accused European leaders of using “Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation” to suppress dissenting ideas — rather than engaging in debate with their own people to figure out what they are fighting for.
“I believe deeply that there is no security if you’re afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people,” he said, adding there’s “nothing” Europe can do for the US if they are “afraid” of their citizens.
Vance also brushed off concerns from European leaders about tech billionaire Elon Musk engaging in their own political debates on the continent.
“If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg scolding, you can survive a few months of Elon Musk,” he said of the 22-year-old environmental activist from Sweden.
The vice president went on to call out Romania for cancelling its elections due to concerns about Russian interference, religious persecution in Europe, cases where those praying in front of abortion clinics were fined thousands and the Munich Security Conference banning populist lawmakers from taking the stage.
On Russian interference in Romania, Vance downplayed the concerns that led to the cancelling of elections, saying, “if your democracy can be destroyed by digital advertising from a foreign country, it wasn’t very strong to begin with.”
Former Romanian President Klaus Iohannis had declassified intelligence documents showing hundreds of TikTok accounts were created in the weeks before the election, and intelligence officials had said Russia was the “enemy state” behind the accounts trying to influence the election.
Vance also said there is “nothing more urgent” than countering the issue of mass migration that has come to Europe, which took on new urgency after an Afghan migrant drove through a crowded street in Munich on Thursday, injuring 30 people.
Turning to US politics, Vance further slammed former President Joe Biden for partnering with social media companies to censor “misinformation” — including the claim, now backed by several US agencies, that the virus causing COVID-19 likely leaked out of a lab in Wuhan, China.
“In Washington, there’s a new sheriff in town,” he said. “Just as the Biden administration seemed desperate to silence people for speaking their minds, the Trump administration will do precisely the opposite, and I hope that we can work together on that.”
