The new American vice president JD Vance just gave a remarkable talk at the Munich Security Conference on free speech and mass immigration. It did not go over well with many European politicians, some of which immediately proved Vance's point, and labeled the speech "not acceptable". All because Vance dared poke at two of the holiest taboos in European politics.
Let's start with his points on free speech, because they're the foundation for understanding how Europe got into such a mess on mass immigration. See, Europeans by and large simply do not understand "free speech" as a concept the way Americans do. There is no first amendment-style guarantee in Europe, yet the European mind desperately wants to believe it has the same kind of free speech as the US, despite endless evidence to the contrary.
It's quite like how every dictator around the world pretends to believe in democracy. Sure, they may repress the opposition and rig their elections, but they still crave the imprimatur of the concept. So too "free speech" and the Europeans.
Germany is not much better. It's illegal to insult elected officials, and if you say the wrong thing, or post the wrong meme, you may well find yourself the subject of a raid at dawn. Just crazy stuff.
But despite all of these examples and laws, I'm constantly arguing with Europeans who cling to the idea that they do have free speech like Americans. Many of them mistakenly think that "hate speech" is illegal in the US, for example. It is not.
Another common misconception is that "misinformation" is illegal over there too. It also is not. That's why the Twitter Files proved to be so scandalous. Because it showed the US government under Biden laundering an illegal censorship regime -- in grave violation of the first amendment -- through private parties, like the social media networks.
In America, your speech is free to be wrong, free to be hateful, free to insult religions and celebrities alike. All because the founding fathers correctly saw that asserting the power to determine otherwise leads to a totalitarian darkness.
We've seen vivid illustrations of both in recent years. At the height of the trans mania, questioning whether men who said they were women should be allowed in women's sports or bathrooms or prisons was frequently labeled "hate speech".
During the pandemic, questioning whether the virus might have escaped from a lab instead of a wet market got labeled "misinformation". So too did any questions about the vaccine's inability to stop spread or infection. Or whether surgical masks or lock downs were effective interventions.
Now we know that having a public debate about all of these topics was of course completely legitimate. Covid escaping from a lab is currently the most likely explanation, according to American intelligence services, and many European countries, including the UK, have stopped allowing puberty blockers for children.
Which brings us to that last bugaboo: Mass immigration. Vance identified it as one of the key threats to Europe at the moment, and I have to agree. So should anyone who've been paying attention to the statistics showing the abject failure of this thirty-year policy utopia of a multi-cultural Europe. The fast changing winds in European politics suggest that's exactly what's happening.
These are not separate issues. It's the lack of free speech, and a catastrophically narrow Overton window, which has led Europe into such a mess with mass immigration in the first place. In Denmark, the first popular political party that dared to question the wisdom of importing massive numbers of culturally-incompatible foreigners were frequently charged with claims of racism back in the 90s. The same "that's racist!" playbook is now being run on political parties across Europe who dare challenge the mass immigration taboo.
But making plain observations that some groups of immigrants really do commit vastly more crime and contribute vastly less economically to society is not racist. It wasn't racist when the Danish Folkparty did it in Denmark in the 1990s, and it isn't racist now when the mainstream center-left parties have followed suit.
The state of Sweden today is a direct consequence of suppressing any talk of the downsides to mass immigration for decades. And while that taboo has recently been broken, it may well be decades more before the problems are tackled at their root. It's tragic beyond belief.
The rest of Europe should look to Sweden as a cautionary tale, and the Danish alternative as a precautionary one. It's never too late to fix tomorrow. You can't fix today, but you can always fix tomorrow.
So Vance was right to wag his finger at all this nonsense. The lack of free speech and the problems with mass immigration. He was right to assert that America and Europe has a shared civilization to advance and protect. Whether the current politicians of Europe wants to hear it or not, I'm convinced that average Europeans actually are listening.