Vice President JD Vance hammered home the importance of free speech during a Monday sit-down with Fox News host Sean Hannity.
Vance revisited his February speech that astounded the Munich Security Conference on Hannity. The vice president acknowledged America’s past role in promoting censorship globally but warned Europe against clinging to the ideology American voters defeated last November. “The biggest driver of mass censorship in the last five years actually wasn’t the Europeans; they were the victims of it in a lot of ways. It was coming from the Biden administration,” Vance said.
He went on to blast the censorship regime that still exists in the United Kingdom and the European Union: “This whole crazy left-wing idea—that we are not allowed to debate ideas, that we are not allowed to discuss things, that we have to silence people and censor them, throw them in jail for silently praying outside an abortion clinic—these ideas are going to destroy Western civilization. They’re going to destroy Europe and they would destroy the United States of America if we allow them to fester.”
On Feb. 14, Vance left the 2025 Munich Security Conference in an uproar by calling out Europe over laws that punish speech and push censorship on social media. Vance told attendees that “in Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat.” He condemned the EU’s draconian Digital Services Act, a canceled Romanian election and Germany’s rampant abuses of human rights.
Since the speech, Vance’s statements have been vindicated by recent events. A 60 Minutes segment on German censorship included German prosecutors admitting that spoken or posted insults are a crime, showed a pre-dawn police raid over online speech and showed the scale and agenda of the country’s censorship apparatus.
In Scotland, a politician denied that a prohibition on praying near abortion mills could punish people witnessed praying within their home, despite a government letter warning residents to avoid this behavior. In a later interview, the politician conceded that whether a resident praying should be punished “depends on who’s passing by the window.”
During his conversation with Hannity, Vance criticized European governments for silencing dissent against mass migration and terrorism, describing such censorship efforts as a “danger.”
“It was a danger under Joe Biden in the United States of America,” Vance added. As he did at the Munich Security Conference, Vance referred to this embrace of censorship as a critical weakness that Europeans must fix in order to tackle external challenges.
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