Editors at National Review Online respond to recent comments from Vice President J.D. Vance.
At last week’s Munich Security Conference, Vice President JD Vance delivered some harsh truths to the Europeans within the audience. “If you are afraid of the voices, the opinions, and the conscience that guide your very own people,” Vance said, then “there is nothing America can do for you.” Among the problems that Vance went on to adumbrate were governments “dismissing voters’ concerns,” “shutting down their media,” and violating the “basic liberties” of the “religious.” Most provocatively of all, Vance accused Europe of having begun to borrow tactics from that old enemy of the transatlantic alliance, the Soviet Union. In practice, he submitted, Europe’s thicket of censorship laws represented little more than “old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation.”
In response, the German defense minister, Boris Pistorius, said that Vance’s words were “not acceptable.”
This rather made Vance’s point. There was the vice president of the United States, arguing that the Europeans had become far too comfortable telling people what they could and could not say, and, instead of developing a counter-theory, the first official to issue a rejoinder told him that he shouldn’t have said that. Quod erat demonstrandum, Mein Herr!Vance’s harsh words drew condemnation from the usual circles. But he was correct. Europe is bad on free speech — and with no exceptions to speak of. As a matter of fact, other than the United States of America, everywhere is bad on free speech. Internationally, the First Amendment stands alone. Naturally, the U.S. is not perfect. But, compared to all of the other countries on earth, it is infinitely preferable. America has stronger protections for speech, better safeguards for religious liberty, and more robust shields for conscience than anywhere else — and, better still, those protections are chiseled into our foundational law.
