He came, he saw, he rattled. I’m talking about JD Vance, of course, the hillbilly done good who has lit a fire under the arse of Europe’s lazy, illiberal elites. He gave them the telling-off of their lifetime and they’re still not over it.
A whole week later they’re still blubbing into their macchiatos about the bad man from America who told them to do better on free speech and democracy.
The grey-faced bureaucrats of the Euro-regime shaking with rage because the fresh-faced VP of America dared to suggest they embrace “the blessings of liberty”.
I haven’t enjoyed European politics this much since us Brits voted for Brexit and likewise had Europe’s ruling classes running for the fainting couch.
It was at the Munich Security Conference last Friday that Vance did the rhetorical equivalent of chucking a bucket of cold water over Europe’s rulers. He reprimanded them, in friendly but firm tones, for their failures on freedom.
He lamented “the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values”. Free speech especially. “Across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat,” he told his squirming audience.
He did a brief but brutal roll-call of some of Europe’s maddest assaults on liberty. Like when German cops raided the homes of citizens “suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online”.
Or when Sweden, three weeks ago, convicted a Christian activist of the “blasphemous” crime of burning a Koran, just days after his friend had been murdered for doing the same.
Vance looked righteously alarmed that a European nation would do something as heartless as convict a man of the “thoughtcrime” his buddy had just been killed for. He took Britain to task too, slamming our arrest of Christians who silently pray near abortion clinics.
This really is happening. Invisible “buffer zones” have been erected around these clinics and you can be nabbed by the cops just for standing there and conversing with God in your head. Even George Orwell never conjured up anything as mad as prayercrime.
The “basic liberties of religious Britons” are being trashed, said Vance. Britain is on a “backslide away from conscience rights”, he said, with sorrow in his voice.
Then he really stuck it to the assembled dignitaries: there’s a Soviet vibe to this continent you govern, he told them. He referred to the “commissars” of the European Union. Oof. Just imagine how hopping mad the suits of Brussels will have been when this uppity Yank likened them to the apparatchiks of the old Soviet regime.
These people, with immeasurable vanity, fancy themselves as the cool, good, small-l liberals who bravely chased off the Soviet tyranny. And yet here was Vance, the boy from Ohio who dragged himself out of poverty to become one of the most powerful men on Earth, telling them they’ve become a sad tribute act to Joe Stalin.
Too many European officials hide behind “ugly Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation” to silence people who just have an “alternative viewpoint”, he said. This is bang on. On almost every issue, from the Covid lockdowns to the gender lunacy, what our censorious rulers call “misinformation” is very often just thinking that’s different to their own.
“Misinformation” has become a sly euphemism for ideas the elites don’t like.
Vance called out their doublespeak too. You claim, he said, to be clamping down on “misinformation” in order to “protect democracy”. But such brazen assaults on the liberty to utter do the precise opposite: they strangle democracy. “Dismissing people, dismissing their concerns … shutting people out of the political process” – this “protects nothing”, he said. In fact, it’s a “sure-fire way to destroy democracy”.
He had a radical proposition for this gathering of the powerful – how about, just for once, you trust ordinary people? “We shouldn’t be afraid of our people,” he said. For to believe in democracy is to “understand that each of our citizens has wisdom and has a voice”.
People are wise – it shouldn’t feel revolutionary to hear a politician say that. But in our era of ceaseless elite sneering at the “bogans”, “chavs” and “rednecks” of the Western electorate, it really does.
That Vance’s plea for more faith in ordinary people has caused such a storm in Europe is so telling.
Europe’s rulers, cosseted in their committee rooms, rarely deigning to rub shoulders with the plebs, genuinely can’t believe they’re being asked to trust the little people. What, those oiks who vote for populist parties and oppose mass immigration and think it’s acceptable to crack jokes about Islam? Why would we engage with such frightful people?
This is what’s motoring the Euro-fury over Vance’s speech: he exposed, in 20 thrilling minutes, just how aloof and imperious Europe’s political class has become. And they’ll never forgive him.
The fury really is intense. A week on, the high-minded press is still publishing hissy fits masquerading as columns about how Vance “disrespected” Europe. He “attacked Europe”, cried the BBC. “Fury as JD Vance attacks European leaders” in “rant at Munich conference”, wailed one headline.
Oh, keep your wigs on. He didn’t “attack” us. He talked to us. He’s like that sensible friend who’ll tell you when you’re going off the rails. And modern Europe, this lost, drifting continent, this creaking technocracy, really needs friends like that right now.
They’re mad because they know Vance was giving voice to concerns that are shared by millions of people in Europe itself.
It is not so much Vance they fear – they can just sneer at him as the “far right” American whose speech was an “assault on European democracy”, as a loon, as The Guardian did. No, it’s their voters they dread. They know there are swarms of people out there who agree with JD. Who agree that censorship is out of control, democracy is in peril, and our rulers view us with the most snooty contempt, if not outright fear.
German historian Katja Hoyer pointed out that the response to Vance’s speech in Germany was split along “class lines”. “There was outrage among journalists and other intellectuals,” she said, while “a lot of the more ordinary people” were saying “well, he was right”.
It’s the same vibe in Britain: the BBC, The Guardian and other self-styled guardians of moral virtue are up in arms over Vance’s “attack” on Europe. But elsewhere, among those who read the tabloid papers and never declare their pronouns, there is a vigorous nodding of heads.
This is the true “Vance effect”, and it’s why the opinion-forming set is so irate over what he did.
They fear he has breathed more life, if not fire, into people’s feelings of populist frustration. They worry he has signed the death warrant of their staid status quo. The rest of us hope that’s exactly what he’s done. From this European: thank you, Mr Vice-President.
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