Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech at a security conference in Munich touched on the many ways Europe has become more authoritarian and elitist, from annulling elections in Romania, to throwing people in jail for online wrong-think, to outlawing silent prayer vigils in Scotland. Yet the New York Times treated the speech with utter contempt, ignoring Vance’s call for freedom while painting him as a quasi-Nazi supporter.
A Sunday print story by Berlin bureau chief Jim Tankersley, “Vance, Like Musk, Attacks German Norms on Nazis and Extremism,” set Vance up for a fall. Would an Ivy League liberal receive the same condescending coverage that Ivy League conservative Vance has?
The American vice president visited a concentration camp on Thursday afternoon. He laid a wreath at the foot of a statue, made the sign of the cross and paused before a memorial wall where in multiple tongues, including German and English, the words “Never Again” were written.
JD Vance told reporters he had read about the Holocaust in books, but that its “unspeakable evil” was driven home by his trip to Dachau, where more than 30,000 people died at the hands of the Nazis. “It’s something that I’ll never forget, and I’m grateful to have been able to see it up close in person,” Mr. Vance said.
But after Mr. Vance spoke in Munich the next day, Germany’s leaders effectively questioned if he had understood what he had just seen.
Eighty years after American soldiers liberated Dachau, top German officials this weekend all-but accused Mr. Vance -- and by extension, President Trump -- of boosting a political party that many Germans consider to be dangerously descended from Nazism.
That party, called the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, is sitting second in the polls for next Sunday’s parliamentary elections, with about 20 percent of the public saying they support it....
The reporter eventually got around to Vance's actual words.
“I look to Brussels,” Mr. Vance said, “where E.U. Commission commissars warn citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest the moment they spot what they judge 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.’”
The paper can’t admit Vance has a point about free speech in Germany, where cultural submission to Islamic immigration has resulted in grotesque double standards like a case from Hamburg where a German woman was given “a harsher sentence than a convicted rapist after she was found guilty of defaming him.”
The Times consistently ignores such legal atrocities, even though there’s much that needs saying regarding immigration and religious extremism. Germany has been hit by several terror attacks by immigrants of late. Bordering Austria recently suffered a deadly knife rampage in the name of ISIS.
Tankersley did note Vance and Trump adviser Elon Musk are trying to forge an international alliance over “a hard-line opposition to mass migration” and trying “to sweep away laws and social norms in Europe against speech, online or otherwise, that governments deem hateful or ‘misinformation’ but that conservatives say are meant to suppress their political opinions…”
Sunday’s separate lead story, authored by Tankersley and Kiev bureau chief Andrew Kramer, took the side of the European elite against that of America’s pro-speech vice president. “German Leader Rebukes Vance Over Far Right” focused on Vance’s indirectly expressed opinion that Germany stop suppressing AfD.
A day after Mr. Vance stunned the Munich Security Conference by telling German leaders to drop their so-called firewall and allow the hard-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, to enter their federal government, Mr. Scholz accused Mr. Vance of effectively violating a commitment to never again allow Germany to be led by fascists who could repeat the horrors of the Holocaust.
And yet the main anti-Semitism on the ground in Europe today is coming from the pro-Hamas left.
The paper managed to avoid entirely the awkward topic of Vance’s criticism of the annulment of the Romanian election, in which the country’s top court scuttled last December’s presidential election after the first round of voting was won by a pro-Russian candidate who ran on a promise to stop support for Ukraine. Elections are only legitimate if the results are pleasing.
