Vice President J.D. Vance told Europeans at the Munich Security Conference on Friday to stop intentionally censoring their citizens’ rights to free speech and expression.
The vice president told the Europeans in attendance that their nations have abandoned “some of their most fundamental values,” such as Romania canceling its presidential election to guard against Russian interference and the arrests of citizens for freely expressing themselves. He warned that free speech, expression and religious liberties are being replaced with government censorship and the arrests of their citizens for “thought crimes.”
“For years, we’ve been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values. Everything from Ukraine policy, to digital censorship is built as a defense of democracy,” Vance said. “But when we see European courts canceling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask ourselves whether we are holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard. And I say ourselves because I fundamentally believe we are on the same team. We must do more than talk about democratic values, we must live them.”
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The vice president openly called out Great Britain, Germany, Sweden and other European countries for the suppression of so-called “hateful content” and for targeting religious citizens. He criticized the arrest and conviction of military veteran and father Adam Smith-Connor for silently praying within a “buffer zone” surrounding an abortion clinic in the United Kingdom, causing him to pay 9,000 euros in prosecution fees.
“And perhaps most concerning, I look to our dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Brits in particular in the crosshairs,” Vance said. “A little over two years ago, the British government charged Adam Smith-Connor, a 51-year-old physiotherapist and an army veteran with the heinous crime of standing 50 meters from an abortion clinic and silently praying for 3 minutes. Not obstructing anyone, not interacting with anyone, just silently praying on his own … Now I wish I could say that this was a fluke, a one-off crazy example of a badly written law being enacted against a single person.”
Vance further pointed to the Scottish government’s law prohibiting prayer within 200 meters of an abortion clinic, accusing the nation of targeting their citizens for a “thought crime.”
The vice president said the U.S. government has also engaged in the censorship of its citizens by working alongside social media companies, such as Twitter and Facebook, to combat so-called “misinformation” and “disinformation” about the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines in 2020. Former President Joe Biden’s administration directly worked with Facebook in 2021 to flag posts about so-called vaccine disinformation and to suppress the belief that the coronavirus originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, though evidence later corroborated that theory.
“Our own government urged private companies to silence people who dared to utter what turned out to be an obvious truth. So I come here today not just with an observation but with an offer, and just as the Biden administration seemed desperate to silence people for speaking their minds, so the Trump administration will do precisely the opposite and I hope that we can work together on that,” the vice president continued. “And in Washington, there is a new sheriff in town. And under Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views but we will fight to defend your right to offer it in the public square, agree or disagree.”
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