What JD Vance meant by 'free speech'

In Munich, on Valentine’s Day, Vice President JD Vance gave what wags regard as a “major speech.” It wasn’t a long speech, or a particularly surprising one for those of us who’ve been watching and understanding Trumpist turn for the last ten years or so. But the audience of European military and political leaders at the Munich Security Conference was alarmed: first by Vance’s hints of a pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian policy swing in Washington (an intimation borne out by the president’s statements since), and then by his support for a burgeoning far-right German party with a history of Nazi nostalgia and close ties to active neo-Nazis.

The latter came at the end of the speech when Vance told the room that "there is no room for firewalls" in a democracy. This was a reference to the so-called Brandmauer of postwar German politics — an informal agreement among mainstream German parties and civil society to avoid cooperation with far-right groups; a tradition rooted in Germany's historical understanding of the Nazis' rise to power. Vance’s intent became clearer after the speech, when he met with the leader of the aforementioned Alternative for Germany — a far-right anti-immigrant, Islamophobic, and antisemitic party flagged as a “suspected extremist” party by German intelligence, that is vying for power in the upcoming national election. (Its German initials — AfD — are likely a reference to an old Nazi slogan.¹ )

On this side of the pond, though, news and social media, led as always these days by influencers and capital on the right, spun it another way. As former liberal darling turned reactionary talking head Matt Taibbi told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham: “[Vance] went there to stand up for free speech … for free-speech rights in every European country. And for that he gets criticized as a Hitlerian figure.” This reframing was furthered when new Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended Vance’s remarks on CBS’s Face the Nation, only to be told by host Margaret Brennan: “Well, he was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide.”

Brennan didn’t get that history right, for reasons I’ll get to in a subsequent post. But Taibbi’s aw-shucks credulousness toward Vance's framing was even more historically illiterate, not to mention intellectually dishonest. There has always been a deep and functional link between the rhetoric of free speech and the rise of fascism, including in the case of Nazi Germany. What authoritarians count on is us not recognizing it.

Let’s start with what Taibbi got right. Vance indeed spent most of his speech inveighing against European censorship. He also made sure to check the two main rhetorical boxes of right-wing “free speech absolutism,” accusing British officials of pursuing “citizens suspected guilty of thoughtcrime,” and putting a MAGA spin on the fake Voltaire quote: “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.”

But if Taibbi was still the honest broker he was once reputed to be, he’d also have noted that the sentiment wasn’t remotely true. In its first month, the Trump administration has already:

• banned a major news organization (The Associated Press² ) from the Oval Office and White House briefing room for refusing to bow to its unilateral decision to change the 475-year-old name of the Gulf of Mexico,
  

• launched investigations into every major network (NBC, ABC, CBS), as well as PBS and NPR, in at least several cases to probe whether the stations are promoting racial, ethnic, gender, or religious diversity, equity, or inclusion, with an eye toward revoking their broadcast licenses,
  

• issued an executive order banning references to transgender and non-binary people from government websites, as well as terms like “undocumented noncitizen” and “integration,”
  

• ordered K-12 schools that receive federal funds to stop teaching “subversive, harmful, and false ideologies” (such as the fact that, historically, members of one race in American history have subjugated any other as a class); and to substitute for such lessons “patriotic education,” which must include “an accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling characterization of America’s founding and foundational principles” that imparts to students that “the United States has admirably grown closer to its noble principles throughout its history,”
  

• issued yet another executive order to deport international students who participated in protests against Israel’s aggression in Gaza and U.S. support for the same, which included an order for universities to monitor students and report to the federal government any who may be eligible for such measures,
  

• looked for private contractors to monitor social media using A.I. for criticism of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, including indications of “empathy or affiliation with a group which has violent tendencies,” and if so to provide ICE with a “photograph, partial legal name, partial date of birth, possible city, possible work affiliations, possible school or university affiliation, and any identified possible family members or associates.”
  

• Vance also, hilariously, accused Europeans of simply not liking “the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might … God forbid vote a different way or, even worse, win an election” — which, well, lol.

Suffice it to say, one would be hard-pressed to say with a straight face that this is an administration that takes free speech or any of the other principles of democracy seriously. So what did Vance mean by it?

A big clue is in the examples of speech restrictions that he namechecked. All of them — a British anti-abortion protester arrested and made to pay court costs for refusing to leave a “buffer zone” next to an abortion clinic; German police raiding the homes of trolls who posted misogynistic hate speech, including rape threats; a Swedish anti-Muslim activist fined for incitement while burning copies of the Quran — have been bugbears of the online transatlantic right; examples, in their minds, of liberal states suppressing efforts to put women and minorities in their “place.” The Romanian presidential candidate whose campaign he defended, Călin Georgescu, happens to be a pro-Putin extremist who opposes teaching the Holocaust and praised Romania’s Nazi collaborationist leaders as “heroes” and “martyrs.” (Vance also threw in a little COVID lab-leak nonsense as a treat, falsely claiming that a hypothesis contradicted by mounting genomic and epidemiological evidence was “an obvious truth.”)

He could have, by contrast, highlighted the extreme German crackdowns on pro-Palestinian demonstrators, including Jews, or the arrest of activists just days before his speech reportedly for playing music and giving speeches in Arabic. But that might have drawn uncomfortable comparisons to his own administration’s policies.

Also important was how Vance portrayed the stories. For instance, he claimed that the British protester, Adam Smith-Conner, was arrested for “silently praying for three minutes.” The Guardian reports rather that he was asked by a community officer to move farther away for an hour and forty minutes. The law he was violating is meant to protect clinic patients from harassment that had become commonplace. (Indeed, there are similar anti-harassment laws in place in the United States, which anti-abortion activists are also challenging here.) Smith-Connor is appealing his conviction with support for an appeal from the Alliance Defending Freedom, the right-wing Christian advocacy group³ that wrote the model legislation in Mississippi that was used to overturn Roe v. Wade. Nor is the ADF’s⁴ overriding goal to protect freedom of speech: the last president of the organization was a major organizer of efforts to ban books containing LGBTQ themes from school libraries, as Catherine Ross wrote in the Stanford Law Review.

Vance also falsely claimed, twice, that a related Scottish law would somehow ban “a humble Christian [from] praying in her own home.” That’s a debunked claim originally made by a pro-Trump U.S. TikToker; the Scottish government told the BBC that the law only targets intentional or reckless harassment near abortion clinics.

He used similarly goading language in the Swedish case, claiming that “the government convicted a Christian activist for participating in Quran burnings that resulted in his friend’s murder.” Whether the demonstrators—both of whom were Iraqi refugees—were “Christian activists” is unclear. The one who was killed was reportedly a member of the Kata’ib Rouh Allah Issa Ibn Miriam, a nominally Iraqi Christian militia that fought ISIS under the Iran-backed Shi’a cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr, but more recently identified as an atheist. Highlighting their putative Christian identity over their status as Arab refugees, in a speech otherwise laden with anti-immigrant dog whistles and demonization of asylum-seekers, was a choice.

More importantly, Vance left out some key details that go to the incitement charge, including that the demonstrators burned their Qurans in front of Stockholm’s Central Mosque on Eid al-Adha, one of the holiest and busiest days of the Muslim year, while taunting worshipers with insults and bacon. Or that videos of the burnings show that they were, in fact, carried out with the protection of the Swedish police. Or that the “chilling” conviction resulted in a fine and a suspended sentence. Or that, in reaction to the fine, one of the convicted demonstrator’s Swedish allies tweeted: “Ban Islam now.”

And look if you believe, as I do, that free speech is a fundamental human right and a cornerstone of democracy, then you must also accept that it applies even to would-be authoritarians. However, if your defense of free expression is reserved only for would-be authoritarians — while simultaneously helping lead a regime that is otherwise busy suppressing speech, assembly, and the press — then it becomes difficult to ignore the suspicion that you might be one yourself.

Stay tuned for part 2.

1  The German initials of “Alternative für Deutschland” is a nod to "Alles für Deutschland,” the slogan of the Nazi brownshirts in the 1930s. A senior AfD official and candidate used the full slogan at a campaign rally in 2021.

2  Disclosure: My former employer, which I left 14 years ago to write my first book.

3  They have been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center

4  Not to be confused with the AfD