Free Speech Is Good, Actually

National Review Online

Tuesday, February 18, 2025

 

At last week’s Munich Security Conference, Vice President JD Vance delivered some harsh truths to the Europeans within the audience. “If you are afraid of the voices, the opinions, and the conscience that guide your very own people,” Vance said, then “there is nothing America can do for you.” Among the problems that Vance went on to adumbrate were governments “dismissing voters’ concerns,” “shutting down their media,” and violating the “basic liberties” of the “religious.” Most provocatively of all, Vance accused Europe of having begun to borrow tactics from that old enemy of the transatlantic alliance, the Soviet Union. In practice, he submitted, Europe’s thicket of censorship laws represented little more than “old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation.”

 

In response, the German defense minister, Boris Pistorius, said that Vance’s words were “not acceptable.”

 

This rather made Vance’s point. There was the vice president of the United States, arguing that the Europeans had become far too comfortable telling people what they could and could not say, and, instead of developing a counter-theory, the first official to issue a rejoinder told him that he shouldn’t have said that. Quod erat demonstrandum, Mein Herr!

 

Vance’s harsh words drew condemnation from the usual circles. But he was correct. Europe is bad on free speech — and with no exceptions to speak of. As a matter of fact, other than the United States of America, everywhere is bad on free speech. Internationally, the First Amendment stands alone. Naturally, the U.S. is not perfect. But, compared to all of the other countries on earth, it is infinitely preferable. America has stronger protections for speech, better safeguards for religious liberty, and more robust shields for conscience than anywhere else — and, better still, those protections are chiseled into our foundational law. Here, the government is forbidden from engaging in viewpoint discrimination, banned from imposing blasphemy restrictions, and prohibited from banning undesirable political parties. Under the prevailing standard laid out in 1969’s Brandenburg v. Ohio Supreme Court ruling, even the most disgraceful figures imaginable remain protected by the Bill of Rights — a fact that was not regarded by its authors as a bug or a loophole or a mistake, but as the keystone that underpins the broader edifice.

 

Disgracefully, it is not only foreigners who are irritated by this exceptionalism. Within the American press, within American academia, and in much of the American Democratic Party, one can apparently find a whole host of figures who look abroad with envious eyes. Over the weekend, CBS News provided us with a couple of solid reminders of this fact and, in the process, illustrated exactly why it is so useful for our politicians to issue full-throated endorsements of our unusual status quo.

 

First, on Face the Nation, Margaret Brennan chose to embarrass herself once again by telling Secretary of State Marco Rubio that Vance’s comments had been inappropriate and wrong, given that, when he delivered them, “he was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct genocide.” Which, of course, is nonsense. As Rubio immediately pointed out, not only was there no such thing as free speech in the Nazi regime to which Brennan was referring, but there was no “opposition” at all. Far from being an example of virtuous liberty turning into dangerous license, Germany under Adolf Hitler was engaged in precisely the sort of undemocratic, illiberal authoritarianism that Vance was condemning. Nor is it true that Hitler’s rise was the product of his ability to “weaponize” untrammeled free expression. Indeed, before it took power, the Nazi party was suppressed in all manner of ways that, unfortunately, only made it more popular. Ultimately, Brennan’s argument served to substantiate, rather than to contradict, the position she believed herself to be attacking. Vance’s core complaint was that countries such as Germany are engaged in censorship, thought control, and the subversion of democracy. Instead of insisting that this was not true, Brennan’s immediate response was to acknowledge that it was, and then try to justify it.

 

A few hours later, CBS’s once-interesting 60 Minutes show doubled down on the approach by airing a sympathetic interview with a preposterous bunch of German censors who work for an outfit with the Monty Python-esque name, “HateAid.” “In the United States,” CBS explained, “most of what anyone says, sends, or streams online — even if it’s hate-filled or toxic — is protected by the First Amendment as free speech.” By contrast, “Germany is trying to bring some civility to the World Wide Web by policing it” in ways that “often begin with a pre-dawn wake-up call from the police.” Throughout this segment, host Sharyn Alfonsi smiled and nodded along as if scouring the internet for illegal discussions and then sending armed police to arrest the suspects was simply another way of doing things — like eating at 9 p.m. or driving on the left side of the road — rather than a tyrannical affront to everything that she, as a journalist and an American, is supposed to hold dear. Together with Margaret Brennan’s performance earlier in the day, the piece served as a solid reminder of why the approval rating of the American press is now scraping 20 percent.

 

Vance should ignore it — and everyone else besides. The claims that are made in the Declaration of Independence — and, by extension, in the Constitution — are universal. The United States does not have the power to bring the rest of the world into line with those claims by force, and nor should it. But it can evangelize rhetorically on their behalf. There is nothing incongruous or unwise about the American government reminding our allies in Europe that an organization that exists to protect liberty and democracy ought to be filled with members who believe in liberty and democracy — especially when those allies pride themselves on being the enlightened figures in the room. It is, indeed, unfortunate that the nations of Europe have begun to slip into illiberalism, but that it is unfortunate does not mean that it is untrue. JD Vance did not create the problem he was critiquing; he described it. He was right to do so — for the future of Europe, and of America, too.