What JD Vance said and what he means
Some thoughts for our most committed supporters
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Sometimes, a speech really cuts through. It not only captures the new zeitgeist of the time —‘the spirit of the age’— but shatters the old established consensus.
And that is exactly what JD Vance, vice president of the United States, delivered in his speech to the Munich Security Conference, a gathering for Europe’s elite class.
Vance, as I explain below, pulled no punches. Like this Substack, he took aim at the elite consensus that has dominated Europe for decades and did not hold back.
He tore into mass immigration.
He tore into the censorship and hate laws that are used to curb free speech.
And he tore into Europe’s virtue-signalling elite class for refusing to talk to national populists who are breaking through across Europe —including in Germany—and for treating hardworking, tax-paying citizens with suspicion, if not open contempt.
Unsurprisingly, the elite class could not handle it.
One irony that simply became unavoidable over the weekend —as I pointed out on X—was watching the same elite class which JD Vance suggests has a problem with free speech scrambling to say that JD Vance should not speak so freely about the problems facing Europe —and which the elite class is failing to resolve.
In fact, more than a few members of Europe’s establishment appeared to spend the entire weekend denouncing Vance on social media while some, this morning, even broke down in tears, displaying the palpable weakness that China, Russia and Islamist regimes around the world have now, sadly, come to expect from Europe’s elite.
Yet Vance is clearly onto something.
Afterall, if somebody says something that simultaneously has the likes of Alastair Campbell, Rory Stewart, Emily Maitlis, and Europe’s left-leaning elite class spitting feathers then that person, in my view, is probably worth listening to.
In fact, I suspect that while Europe’s elites have suffered a kind of mental breakdown this weekend many people from outside the elite were quietly nodding their nods in agreement with the new vice president.
So here, exclusively for our committed supporters, I wanted to share what I think were the most significant parts of Vance’s speech along with my own thoughts about what all of this means about this new zeitgeist that we all find ourselves in.
There is, as you will see, enormous overlap between what JD Vance said in Munich and what we’ve been arguing right here, in this newsletter, for the last two years.
Once again, we’ve been well ahead of the curve in both calling out the broken elite consensus and advocating for the same change of direction that the likes of Vance are now calling for …
VANCE: “… while the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine – and we also believe that it’s important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defence”
I made the same point last week on BBC Question Time, pointing out the absurdity of Europe’s insular elite class endlessly criticising Donald Trump’s call for a resolution in Ukraine while consistently failing to invest, seriously, in Europe’s own defences and weakening our already vulnerable energy markets, usually in the name of Net Zero. Instead of strengthening Europe, this has just left Europe even more dependent on the likes of China and Russia. Europe’s elites, in short, have spent too long virtue-signalling to one another instead of protecting their own people and now Vance (and by extension Trump) are finally calling this out. A good move in my view.
VANCE: “the threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s 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: values shared with the United States of America”
Civilisations do not only crumble in the face of external threats; they often crumble from within, as leaders lose sight of what it is that holds them together. This is what Vance is saying. There’s no point obsessing endlessly about the likes of Russia and China when Europe’s elite class simultaneously appear wholly invested in weakening and dividing their nations from within, not least by subjecting the European people to the extreme experiment of mass uncontrolled immigration along and open borders.
Vance’s speech took my mind to the question that was once asked by American intellectual Samuel Huntington — ‘Who Are We?’ Huntington’s answer, in regard to America, was a distinctive people united by shared Protestant values.
But by the 2000s, Huntington had become deeply worried about how these unifying values were being eroded by a toxic cocktail of mass uncontrolled immigration, the devaluation of citizenship, and, crucially, what he called ‘the denationalization’ of American elites —an elite class that had started to hate America and its own people.
This was a precursor to later debates, during the 2010s, about the rise of “woke” and then, partly in reaction to that, Donald Trump, as well as debates here in Europe about the ‘Anywheres’ —elites who were not only apathetic about national identities but who now appeared to actively loathe everything about their nations.
In Europe, as Vance essentially pointed out, we now see the same process playing out —a distinctive sense of identity, values, history, collective memory, and ways of life being systematically eroded not only by mass immigration and the rapid influx of legal and illegal immigrants from mainly Islamic nations but also by …
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