From CNN:
"Vance turns on European allies in blistering speech that downplayed threats from Russia and China
Vance used his first major speech as vice president to lambast European politicians, claiming they are suppressing free speech, losing control of immigration and refusing to work with hard-right parties in government.
The audience at the Munich Security Conference was expecting to hear about the Trump administration’s plans to end the war in Ukraine, but instead were treated to a bombastic rejection of liberal orthodoxies that have prevailed in Western Europe since the Second World War, in a speech that downplayed the threats to the continent posed by Russia and China.
“The threat that I worry most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values,” Vance told a stone-faced audience...
“If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk,” he said...
Trump’s early moves – including threats of retaliatory tariffs, a pullback in international aid and an improbable overture to acquire Greenland, the autonomous Danish territory – have increasingly concerned America’s allies. Compounding tensions, Elon Musk, the tech billionaire and prominent Trump ally, has amplified far-right movements across Europe without facing public reproach from the White House...
Some anticipated Vance to address the administration’s position on the path to a Russia-Ukraine settlement. Instead, he delivered a jarring blow.
Vance listed a string of what he cast as an oppressive European responses to political expression, from the United Kingdom arresting a man for praying near an abortion clinic to Sweden convicting an anti-Islam campaigner for burning Korans in public.
While many had expected the vice president to echo Hegseth’s calls for European countries to hike their defense spending as a precondition for continued American support, Vance’s message was blunter: “If you are running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you.”
Strikingly, Vance compared today’s democratically elected European leaders to the tyrants that led swaths of the continent during the Cold War.
He zeroed in on a decision by Romania’s constitutional court to cancel the country’s presidential election last year, after its intelligence service uncovered a campaign “coordinated by a state actor” to help elect Calin Georgescu, an ultranationalist virtually unknown before the election who unexpectedly won the first-round vote.
“When we see European courts canceling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we need to ask whether we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard,” Vance said.
Vance asked “what happened to some of the Cold War’s winners,” suggesting they had abandoned the values that allied them to prevail against “tyrannical forces” on the continent.
Notably, Vance did not criticize countries like Russia and Belarus, which have been ruled by the same leaders for decades and allow only stage-managed elections...
Asked to respond to Vance’s remarks later Friday, Trump said he believed they were “brilliant” and “well received.”
“And I think it’s true, in Europe, they’re losing their wonderful right of freedom of speech,” Trump said."
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If these two weird fellows had any intelligence, common sense or compassion, they would know that, first, no one country can have a perfect democracy during a war that poses an existential threat, and second, that the cancel culture they are complaining of was imported to Europe from the USA, where it went to bizarre extremes until the American voters, driven by desperation, elected this off-the-wall tandem to deal with it.
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