We Shall Fight on the Beaches of Free Speech, Lest Europe Falls to Silence

WATCH: J.D. Vance's historic address at the Munich Security Conference

"Everyone is in favour of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage." - Winston Churchill

On February 14, Vice President J.D. Vance delivered a remarkable speech at the Munich Security Conference, railing against European leaders who are allowing their democracies to wither by failing to protect, or even actively prohibiting free speech.

Here are some memorable quotes, but really, watch and share the whole thing (and notice the very faint applause from the audience, as they were being admonished).

"To many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old, entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation,’ who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion or, God forbid, vote a different way, or even worse, win an election."

"How will you even begin to think through the kinds of budgeting questions if we don’t know what it is that we are defending in the first place?"

"I’ve heard a lot about what you need to defend yourselves from, and of course that’s important. But what has seemed a little bit less clear to me… is what exactly it is that you’re defending yourselves for."

"I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions, and the conscience that guide your very own people."

"The crisis this continent faces right now, the crisis I believe we all face together, is one of our own making."

"You need democratic mandates to accomplish anything of value in the coming years. Have we learned nothing that thin mandates produce unstable results? But there is so much of value that can be accomplished with the kind of democratic mandate that I think will come from being more responsive to the voices of your citizens."

"You cannot win a democratic mandate by censoring your opponents or putting them in jail, whether that’s the leader of the opposition, a humble Christian praying in her own home, or a journalist trying to report the news. Nor can you win one by disregarding your basic electorate on questions like, who gets to be a part of our shared society."

"We saw the horrors wrought by these decisions yesterday in this very city… It’s a terrible story, but it’s one we’ve heard way too many times in Europe, and unfortunately too many times in the United States as well: an asylum seeker, often a young man in his mid-twenties, already known to police, rammed a car into a crowd and shatters a community."

"How many times must we suffer these appalling setbacks before we change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction?"

"No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants."

"More and more, all over Europe, [people] are voting for political leaders who promise to put an end to out-of-control migration."

"Contrary to what you might hear a couple of mountains over in Davos, the citizens of all of our nations don’t generally think of themselves as educated animals or as interchangeable cogs of a global economy. And it’s hardly surprising that they don’t want to be shuffled about or relentlessly ignored by their leaders."