We make no apologies for publishing a further response to JD Vance’s seminal, possibly epoch-changing speech to EU leaders in Munich last Friday. On Sunday Dr Frederick Attenborough relayed the Vice President’s devastating critique of the systematic suppression of dissent by Britain and its European allies. Yesterday Sean Walsh analysed Vance’s ‘massacre’ of the Euro commissars and their British counterparts. Today, from the USA, we have a vote of thanks from British-born Bernard Carpenter along with his excoriation of the outraged legacy media’s response.
THANK you, thank you, thank you so much, Vice President Vance, for expressing what so many ordinary Europeans feel. Your recent speech at the Munich Security Conference might have upset a few elitists but gave great pleasure to those who love free speech and freedom of conscience on both sides of the Atlantic and offered hope to those feeling crushed by open borders and the social pathologies to which mass immigration gives rise.
Thank you, too, for giving permission to those who lament the demise of their national cultures and the Western/Christian civilisation which once gave a sense of common heritage and belonging to a continent that created the modern world.
The horror on the faces of those gathered to hear the speech was a sight for sore eyes, a delicious pleasure for those of us who are supposed to keep our mouths shut and go along with all the woke nonsense for fear of being labelled as one of the myriad terms ending in ‘ist’. How lovely it was to see those smug, holier-than-thou, highly credentialled, gilt-edged globalist aristocrats looking so outraged. How dare a man who grew up in poverty in the Appalachian Rust Belt have the temerity to lecture so august a body of technocrats on subjects such as the freedom of citizens to criticise their lords and masters and reject the godless ideologies they foist on those they govern? But dare he did and many here in America and in Europe are loving him for it.
Needless to say, not all welcomed his speech. The legacy media reacted as you would expect. ‘Vance shocks Europe’, blasted America’s newspaper of record, the New York Times, accusing him of defending ‘a divisive far-right political party in Germany’, presumably AfD (Alternative for Germany), although Vance did not mention it by name. Incidentally, which Europe is Vance accused of shocking – anti-mass-immigration Eastern Europe, the Europe of men and women struggling to make a living, fearful to go out at night due to high rates of crime, people who fear being arrested for posting on social media or expressing their Christian faith, Europeans who resent the rewriting of their histories and are deeply troubled by the rubbishing of their distinctive cultures, Jews compelled to hide their identity on the streets of European capitals due to rising rates of anti-Semitism? Surely none of those just listed. It goes without saying that it has in mind the Europe of technocratic elites who are now determining the fate of a once great civilisation according to their godless visions of utilitarian dystopias ‘made more sinister’, to quote Churchill, ‘and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science’.
Elsewhere in the paper, Vance is accused of ‘attacking a German consensus on Nazis and speech . . . decades-long approaches to political extremism that were designed to prevent another Hitler’. CNN seeks to indict him for dealing in ‘half-truths’ and trying to reignite popularism in Europe, as if it needs any help from American politicians, but seriously undermines its journalistic authority when it describes the electoral disaster that the British Conservative Party suffered last year as proof that populism is past its peak in a Europe which is ‘a little wiser now’ than it was during Trump’s first administration. If the Conservative Party is an example of populism, then I’m in line to become the next living prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
When it comes to the legacy media and their negative reactions to Vance’s Munich speech, I could go on and on. It seems to have offended all the right people, the Guardian leading with the hysterical headline: ‘JD Vance stuns Munich conference with blistering attack on Europe’s leaders’. The BBC even used the adjective ‘weird’ to attack the speech, dusting off a word which was used to attack Trump and Vance last summer. It didn’t work then, and it’s unlikely to work now. The BBC at least got it right when it said that Vance ‘accused European governments of retreating from their values, and ignoring voter concerns on migration and free speech’, but failed to consider the veracity of his accusation.
Before I finish, allow me to list some of my thoughts on the now-infamous speech and why I and many others loved it.
I loved it because Vance mentioned specific examples of how ordinary men and women have been negatively affected by their governments’ authoritarian tendencies, people who have fallen foul of hate-speech laws that should have no place in a democratic society. Of course, such a list could become very long indeed, as we’ve seen over the last 20 years or so. But by naming people such as Adam Smith-Connor, found guilty of praying outside an abortion clinic in my home town of Bournemouth, and alluding to other examples of those prosecuted for exercising their God-given rights to express themselves freely, Vance has put a face on this Orwellian evil.
Above all, I loved his speech because he articulated what millions of Europeans are thinking but are too cowed by the increasingly authoritarian administrative state to express themselves for fear of the very real possibility of punitive consequences. And, my dear elites, stop using fear of another Hitler as an excuse to stifle free speech. Arresting people who criticise feminism or tell tasteless jokes will do nothing to prevent the return of fascism, but unrestricted immigration and draconian restrictions on free speech will drive decent men and women into the arms of those on the supposedly ‘far right’ that the left claims to be the greatest existing threat to liberal democracy at a time when Europe is importing millions of immigrants who despise everything liberal democracy claims to stand for.
The spell has been broken, and we must be grateful to Vice President Vance for making that clear to those assembled in Munich to hear him speak so plainly and so forcefully.
