Vice President J.D. Vance has been widely criticized in the mainstream media, both at home and abroad, for his remarks at the Munich Security Council on February 21. In that speech, Vance criticized Europe’s democratic governments for imposing excessive restrictions on the expression of political opinions, in speech, in print, and online.

In fact, the much-admired ... democracies of Western Europe have long been far less responsive to the people’s wishes than our own government.
The immediate context of the controversy was the February 23 elections for the German parliament, in which the right-wing Alternatives for Germany (AfD) party was forecast to come in second. Even though no party is likely to win an absolute majority, Friedrich Merz, the candidate of the leading conservative-centrist party, the Christian Democrats, has vowed that he will not enter a formal coalition with the AfD.
Merz has taken this position because the AfD stands against the mass Muslim immigration encouraged by previous Chancellor Angela Merkel and has in the past sometimes downplayed Adolf Hitler’s atrocities. Some AfD members have been arrested for plotting to overthrow the government.
There can be no question of where Vance’s sympathies lie with regard to Nazism: the day before his Munich address, he laid a wreath at the Dachau death camp, and stated that his deep hatred for the “unspeakable evil” of the Holocaust had been fortified by the visit.
Nonetheless, his Munich address was condemned by ex-Neocon and Never Trumper Bill Kristol as “a humiliation for the U.S.” and as proof that the Trump administration “isn’t on the side of the democracies.” Going further, CBS anchor Margaret Brennan went after Secretary of State Marco Rubio over the vice president’s support for freedom of speech, given that he was “standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide.”
Of course, Brennan’s remarks were absurd, as Rubio pointed out, since well before Hitler launched his geno...