RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/02/15/jd-vance-has-signed-the-death-warrant-of-the-status-quo/

Well, that was a delicious spectacle. America’s self-made VP gloriously roasting the wizened technocrats of Europe. A Yank from dirt-poor origins sticking it to Europe’s turbo-smug ruling class. How they squirmed as the boy from Ohio who somehow made it to the top of US politics chastised them for their indecent desertion of the ideals of liberty, democracy and security. It was like an intellectual waterboarding, and I loved every minute of it.

This is JD Vance’s stirring speech at the Munich Security Conference yesterday. But you already knew, given it’s gone wildly viral. For 20 minutes, the millennial vice-president upbraided the assembled grey-faced dignitaries over their backsliding from the virtues of the Enlightenment. He lamented ‘the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values’. He invited us to rediscover ‘the blessings of liberty’. Judging by the fits of pique in certain quarters – Vance ‘shocked delegates’ with his ‘blast at Europe’, wailed the babies at the BBC – many an ear is still deaf to his cry for freedom. But some of us are listening.

It was on the liberty to utter, the bedrock virtue of every civilised society, that he issued his most stinging rebukes. ‘Free speech, I fear, is in retreat’, he said. He recounted Europe’s recent acts of nutty censorship. He reminded his audience that German cops raided the homes of citizens ‘suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online’. The old Stasi felt your collar if you criticised your Stalinist betters – the new one comes a’knocking if you mock PC ideologies.

He spoke, with righteous alarm, about how Sweden recently convicted a Christian activist for the blasphemy of burning a Koran, shortly after his friend was murdered for doing the same. He seemed genuinely aghast, as well he might be, that modern Europe would do something as heartless as convict a man for the ‘speechcrime’ his pal had just been killed for. He reserved his greatest concern for ‘our very dear friends, the United Kingdom’. The ‘basic liberties of religious Britons’ are being sacrificed to PC, he said. He cited the arrest of Christians for the thoughtcrime of ‘silently praying’ close to abortion clinics that have had ‘buffer zones’ erected around them. Prayercrime, if you will.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/16/j-d-vances-munich-wake-up-call-democracy-censorship-and-the-will-of-the-people/

Everyone agrees that Vice President J. D. Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference on Friday was remarkable.

I do not mean that everyone liked it.

For example, Boris Pistorius, the German Defense Minister, sniffed—or perhaps “smoldered” would be a more accurate term, that Vance’s remarks were “not acceptable.”

And then there is Bill Kristol, a sort of Greta Thunberg of the rancid former right, who thundered that Vance’s speech was “a humiliation for the U.S. and a confirmation that this administration isn’t on the side of the democracies.”

“The democracies.”  What do you suppose Kristol means by that?

While you ponder that question, note that other people thought rather well of Vance’s speech.  I thought it was excellent myself, but forget about my opinion.  Jonathan Turley said that Vance’s speech was “perhaps the greatest single declaration uttered since ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’” It was, Turley wrote elsewhere, “truly Churchillian—no less than the famous Iron Curtain speech in which Churchill dared the West to confront the existential dangers of communism.”

How can we explain the discrepancy: the outraged Pistorius/Kristol reaction and what I will call the Kimball/Turley reaction (though many people besides me applauded Vance’s speech)?

I think it comes down to how one understands that overdetermined, familiar yet often only half-understood word “democracy.”

Kristol said that Vance’s speech showed that the Trump administration was not “on the side of the democracies.”

What do you think of that claim?

I think poorly of it because I believe that a democracy is a political arrangement in which the people are sovereign.

I suspect that Kristol and European bureaucrats of all descriptions believe that it is a form of government in which only the right people, i.e, themselves, are sovereign.

Vance’s speech argued for the former. It also contained several admonitions about what he thought were threats to democracy. For the balance of this column, I’ll gather a little chrestomathy of his observations and let you decide who was right.