What JD Vance had to say about the dire state of Europe
The response was particularly frosty mid-speech as Vance listed some particularly egregious recent cases in European states where the government has cracked down on liberties, from arresting Christians for silent prayer to cancelling elections, and when he outright accused the leaders of the continent of Soviet, anti-democratic attitudes. Worst of all, he said, they held these feelings towards their own people.Well if that's the case, it just compounds what's wrong with the conference he attended to boot. They're going to have to reevaluate that, and maybe the best way they can mend fences is simply to resign from jobs they don't deserve. Vance has done the right thing, to call out Europe's failed leftist politicians for their disastrous policies that have only plunged the continent into darkness even more. And we've got to hope he'll continue making vital points about it for years to come.
If Europe’s paternalist elites hated this shock therapy, populists in Europe loved it. Britain’s Nigel Farage amplified the notion Vance had better articulated the future of Europe than those elites could, while Reform MP Rupert Lowe called it a “brutal” tour-de-force of “Truth, after truth, after truth.”
Beyond a laundry list of failings by European governments to respect freedom for their own people, Vance diagnosed a continent lost for its own failure to understand what it stands for any why, and even worse one that scorns the views of its own people. He said: “If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you, nor for that matter is there anything you can do for the American people”.
Of the terror attack that took place in Germany just the day before, Vance nodded at the long and shameful history of such assaults in Europe, stating: “How many times must we suffer these appalling setbacks before we change course and take our shared civilisation in a new direction?”.
“In Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat”, the Vice President said, in a rallying cry for Europe to find new respect for democracy — real democracy, where voters have a voice to be respected no matter if what they say is agreeable to the paternalistic elite or not — and told leaders to have more respect for their own nations. Vance said: “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 hundreds-of-thousands [of dollars] of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.”
But there’s good news, Vance said, because democracy can be strong as long as the general attitude towards voters isn’t that they are bad people with bad opinions to be denegrated and ignored. Telling European leaders, and those in Germany in particular — which is nine days out from its national elections — to respect populists, not fear them, he continued: “the organizers of this very conference have banned lawmakers representing populist parties on both the left and the right from participating in these conversations.”
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