Vance's speech to European leaders in February 2025:
For years, we’ve been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values.
Everything—from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship—is billed as a defense of democracy.
But when we see European courts canceling elections, and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard.
And I say “ourselves” because I fundamentally believe that we are on the same team. We must do more than talk about democratic values. We must live them.
Within living memory of many of you in this room, the Cold War positioned defenders of democracy against tyrannical forces on this continent.
Consider the side in that fight that censored dissidents, closed churches, and canceled elections. Were they the good guys?
Certainly not. And thank God they lost the Cold War. They lost because they neither valued nor respected all of the extraordinary blessings of liberty—the freedom to surprise, to make mistakes, to invent, to build.
As it turns out, you can’t mandate innovation or creativity, just as you can’t force people what to think, what to feel, or what to believe.
We believe those things are certainly connected. Unfortunately, when I look at Europe today, it’s sometimes not so clear what happened to some of the Cold War’s winners. I look to Brussels, where EU commissars warn citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest, the moment they spot what they’ve judged to be “hateful content.”
Or to this very country, where police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online, as part of "Combating Misogyny on the Internet: A Day of Action."
I look to Sweden, where two weeks ago, the government convicted a Christian activist for participating in Quran burnings that resulted in his friend’s murder. And as the judge in his case chillingly noted, Sweden’s laws to supposedly protect free expression do not, in fact, grant a free pass to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief.
And perhaps most concerningly, I look to our very dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britain in the crosshairs.
A little over two years ago, the British government charged Adam Smith-Connor, a 51-year-old physiotherapist and army veteran, with the heinous crime of standing 50 meters from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes.
Not obstructing anyone. Not interacting with anyone. Just silently praying on his own. After British law enforcement spotted him and demanded to know what he was praying for, Adam replied simply: “It was on behalf of the unborn son he and his former girlfriend had aborted years before.”
Now, the officers were not moved.
Adam was found guilty of breaking the government’s new “buffer zone” law, which criminalizes silent prayer and other actions that could influence a person’s decision within 200 meters of an abortion facility.
He was sentenced to pay thousands of pounds in legal costs to the prosecution.
Now, I wish I could say that this was a fluke—a one-off crazy example of a badly written law being enacted against a single person.
But no.
This last October, just a few months ago, the Scottish government began distributing letters to citizens whose houses lay within so-called Safe Access Zones, warning them that even private prayer within their own homes may amount to breaking the law.
Naturally, the government urged readers to report any fellow citizen suspected guilty of thought crime.
In Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat.
And in the interest of comity, my friends, but also in the interest of truth, I will admit that sometimes the loudest voices for censorship have come not from within Europe, but from within my own country, where the prior administration threatened and bullied social media companies to censor so-called misinformation.
Misinformation like, for example, the idea that coronavirus had likely leaked from a laboratory in China.
Our own government encouraged private companies to silence people who dared to utter what turned out to be an obvious truth.
So, I come here today not just with an observation, but with an offer.
And just as the Biden administration seemed desperate to silence people for speaking their minds, so the Trump administration will do precisely the opposite.
And I hope that we can work together on that.
