In just a few days, Germans will vote in one of the most important elections in their country’s history. For the first time since the Second World War, a true nationalist party — one the media dubs “far-Right,” which is a term that’s never been defined, and will never be defined — stands to win a significant number of seats in parliament.
This party, called “Alternative for Germany,” promises to end unrestricted migration into the country. They’ll stop destroying Germany’s nuclear plants to appease climate cultists, and focus instead on energy independence. They’ll reject the fiction that people can change their gender whenever they want to. Above all, they’ll affirm that there’s nothing shameful or embarrassing about being German.
This is all very basic stuff. In this country, largely because of the political rise of Donald Trump, “America First” has been a rallying cry for tens of millions of voters for more than a decade. But in Europe, this kind of thinking isn’t just taboo. It’s basically heresy. That’s why the “Alternative for Germany” party is currently being investigated by several German intelligence agencies.
It’s also why JD Vance just gave what may be the single most consequential speech by a U.S. politician in Europe since Reagan was in office. Just before Germans head to the polls, Vance delivered a message at the Munich Security Conference that the media could not censor. He was speaking to European elites in the room, but his message was actually directed at voters — and particularly, voters in Germany. Watch:
After this speech, it’s not an overstatement to say that European elites lost their collective minds.
One European official told the Economist that the speech was a “direct assault on European democracy.” Meanwhile a senior diplomat stated, “It’s very clear now. Europe is alone.” He added that Europe now regards the U.S. as an “adversary.”
Perhaps the best reaction came from a guy named “Christoph Heusgen,” who’s the chair of the Munich Security Conference. Apparently he’s retiring, so he delivered a speech about how America’s values don’t align with Europe’s anymore. Then, at the end of the speech, he did something that no grown man should ever do in public: He broke down crying. Watch:
In response to this footage, the Munich Security Conference put out a statement that — for my money — is the single most humiliating statement that a “security conference” can possibly put out. Keep in mind, this is supposedly a very serious conference about saving the world from Russian military aggression, keeping us out of nuclear war, making sure we’re not all speaking Chinese in five years, and so on. The Munich Security Conference is the real deal.
With that in mind, here’s the official statement from the Munich Security Conference, after that footage went viral online:
Our former Chair Christoph Heusgen did not shed a few tears out of ‘frustration’. It was his farewell speech as he was leaving the [Munich Security Conference] after this year’s conference. He was saying goodbye to the team at this very moment.
In other words, the Munich Security Conference is taking a break from keeping the world secure, in order to clarify that the footage you may have seen online was edited unfairly. They’re saying that their fearless leader wasn’t crying in public over anything JD Vance said. That would just be ridiculous. Instead, he was crying in public because he’s leaving his job.
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
Of course, that explanation doesn’t change the fact that Christoph Heusgen is not a child under the age of 12. He is, in fact, a 69-year-old man. And by the way, he’s only held this particular job since 2022. So he’s breaking down in public because he’s leaving a job after a period of time that qualifies, at best, as a short stint. This is what broke him. He had to just walk off stage, head in his hands, because he’s really going to miss being the “chair of the Munich Security Conference” after three whole years.
At this point, they should probably just admit that JD Vance made him cry, honestly. That would actually be less embarrassing than whatever they came up with.
Not to rub it in, by the way, but this guy — Christoph Heusgen — is the same German diplomat who laughed at Donald Trump back at the United Nations in 2018, when he warned that Germany was dangerously dependent on Russian energy. Watch:
We all know what happened next. When Russia invaded Ukraine and cut off a majority of Germany’s energy, the Germans had to re-open a bunch of coal plants and delay the shutdown of their nuclear plants. They also had to find natural gas elsewhere — including from the United States. So it’s fitting, I guess, that a few years later, this same guy isn’t laughing on camera anymore. Instead he’s crying, for one reason or another.
It’s obviously a flattering comparison for JD Vance. It’s almost like Europe’s leaders wanted to appear as weak as possible, in the wake of his speech — and right before this weekend’s elections in Germany.
But Europeans weren’t the only ones giving JD Vance a big assist this weekend. Over at CBS News, Margaret Brennan suggested that Vance was wrong to extol the virtues of free speech, because the Nazis used free speech, and that’s how you got the Holocaust.
To be clear, yes, this is a real segment that actually aired on national television. Watch:
Keep in mind, the woman who asked this question moderated the VP debate, in which she cut off JD Vance’s microphone because he refuted one of her lies about immigration. Now here she is, claiming that the Nazis somehow “weaponized” speech to “conduct a genocide.”
On reflection, it’s actually impressive how little her question makes sense. First of all, it doesn’t actually mean anything to “weaponize free speech to conduct a genocide.” The words don’t come together in a way that makes any sense. It’s like saying the Nazis “weaponized air to conduct a genocide.” So therefore we need to ban air, I guess, since the Nazis used it.
But in this case, she’s just wrong on the basic facts. Before the Nazis rose to power, Weimar Germany had laws against so-called “hate speech,” including laws that prohibited hate speech against Jews. Prior to the rise of the Nazis, they shut down something like 100 newspapers in Prussia alone, over a two-year period. In 1925, Hitler was banned from speaking in some states because of his rhetoric. In the end, all of these speech restrictions actually emboldened Nazis. People assumed that, because these Nazis were being censored, maybe they were onto something. Censorship had the exact opposite of its intended effect. Then, of course, when the Nazis took over, they eliminated freedom of speech, as Rubio said. You couldn’t criticize Hitler in any way.
So there are about a million reasons why Margaret Brennan’s question is complete nonsense. I could go on and pick apart Brennan’s logic some more. But I really don’t need to, because her own network — CBS — did it for me. This weekend CBS just so happened to do a whole segment about how Germany cracks down on free speech. They conduct pre-dawn raids on people who post offensive content on the internet. Watch:
Try to imagine how CBS would be covering raids like this if they came at the direction of Donald Trump. Let’s say Trump decides that he wants to ban hate speech, so he’ll conduct pre-dawn raids against anyone who posts hateful content about white people on the internet. How do you think “60 Minutes” would react to something like that? Imagine Joy Reid or Jemele Hill getting carted away by armed law enforcement officers in the middle of the night because they made their one millionth post about how white people are evil. How do we think CBS might respond?
I can tell you this. Margaret Brennan wouldn’t come out and declare that Trump was doing his part to prevent another Holocaust. That’s because the corporate press isn’t actually concerned about the rise of an authoritarian government. They just want to make sure they’re the ones running it.
If you doubt that, watch how the CBS anchorwoman reacts as German officials explain their draconian laws to her:
In case you missed it, here’s a screen-grab of the glee on her face:
Screenshot: 60 Minutes/CBS
She’s being told that people in Germany are shocked to realize that their electronic devices are being seized. And she’s smiling throughout the whole thing. If you watch this entire segment, you won’t find any pushback whatsoever from CBS. They didn’t bring on a guest to explain how, actually, this is a horrible idea. Instead the whole segment came across like a promotion for state censorship. As it continued, it became more and more bizarre. Watch:
Conservatives are reacting with shock and horror to footage like this, which is understandable. We can’t forget, however, that something very similar has already happened here, in this country. And we would have gone full-Germany if Trump hadn’t won.
Everyone on the Left understands this. That’s why they’re lying to their viewers about what life is like in Germany at the moment. Here for example is MSNBC talking head Rick Wilson, explaining that Germany — despite the pre-dawn raids over memes — has a far better free-speech environment than America does. Watch:
Rick Wilson claims Germany has more free speech than us: “HOW DARE JD LECTURE GERMANY!?” pic.twitter.com/UnjXkBWDOO
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) February 17, 2025
He says that America is rated “55th in the world” for freedom of expression. I have no idea where he got that figure. My assumption was that some Left-wing group rated us 55th because some states ban drag queens from performing strip teases in front of children. But after looking into it, he could be referencing something called the “World Press Freedom index,” which basically surveys journalists and asks them if they feel threatened. Of course, all the journalists here say that Trump is going to put them in camps tomorrow, so we rate poorly as a result. Somehow this survey has Canada ranked 40 spots higher than the U.S., which is a pretty good indication that the survey is completely useless, given that Canada was arresting journalists who covered the trucker convoy just a couple of years ago.
Of course Rick Wilson is pointing to this useless survey because he knows that, by every actual metric, Americans have far more free-speech rights than Europeans. And people like Wilson want to change that. But there’s an even deeper issue here, which often gets lost as conservatives justifiably resist restrictions on speech: What makes the Left’s assault on free speech so insidious (whether in this country or in Germany or anywhere else in the Western world) is not just that they seek to ban open expression, but that they specifically want to ban the expression of true and morally right ideas. That’s the key element that will always separate Left-wing assaults on free speech from alleged Right-wing assaults on free speech.
Whenever someone claims that the Right is waging an assault on free speech, it always means that some conservatives are advocating for restrictions on pornography, or trying to ban adults from staging burlesque shows for children. On the other hand, when the Left bans free speech, they’re trying to stop us from saying that men can’t have babies, or they’re demanding that we show religious reverence to the pride flag. They’re arresting people for leaving tire marks on rainbow colored crosswalks, just as one example.
The alleged Right-wing restrictions on speech aren’t really restrictions on speech at all. But even if they were, it’s still a very different kind of speech. There is no equivalency here. This is the point that promoters of the “woke Right” narrative seem to consistently miss. The Atlantic, for example, just ran a big think piece entitled, “How the Woke Right Replaced the Woke Left.” They equate Republicans’ dismissal of fake words like “Latinx” with Democrats’ many, many attempts to dictate what words people can and cannot use, for example.
But the reality is that the “far-Left” and the “far-Right” are not, in fact, two sides of the same coin. They are not equally delusional and dangerous. One side denies and seeks to suppress the most basic and fundamental realities of human existence. One side manipulates language and denies statistical data in order to hide the truth. The other side does not. The people demanding that you use the word “Latinx” because they think Hispanic people can be non-binary superhumans or whatever are not, in fact, identical to the people who understand that the entire concept of “Latinx” is ridiculous and incoherent.
But the Left has to draw an equivalence because they have no other response. When JD Vance points out that so-called “asylum seekers” are constantly murdering innocent Americans and Europeans, they know it’s true. In fact, just hours before Vance spoke in Munich, a girl and her mother were mowed down by an Islamic terrorist in the city. Dozens were injured. Then, after Vance’s speech, a Syrian “asylum seeker” murdered a 14-year-old boy in Austria. He was grinning as the police arrived.
Again and again, reality intrudes on Left-wing narratives. That is the fundamental problem with their ideology. It’s why they’re so insistent on censorship. It’s why JD Vance’s speech has European elites in tears, whether they’ll admit it or not. And it’s why, in just a few days, Germans will send a message that in Europe — as in this country — tens of millions of regular people have had enough.
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In just a few days, Germans will vote in one of the most important elections in their country’s history. For the first time since the Second World War, a true nationalist party — one the media dubs “far-Right,” which is a term that’s never been defined, and will never be defined — stands to win a significant number of seats in parliament.
This party, called “Alternative for Germany,” promises to end unrestricted migration into the country. They’ll stop destroying Germany’s nuclear plants to appease climate cultists, and focus instead on energy independence. They’ll reject the fiction that people can change their gender whenever they want to. Above all, they’ll affirm that there’s nothing shameful or embarrassing about being German.
This is all very basic stuff. In this country, largely because of the political rise of Donald Trump, “America First” has been a rallying cry for tens of millions of voters for more than a decade. But in Europe, this kind of thinking isn’t just taboo. It’s basically heresy. That’s why the “Alternative for Germany” party is currently being investigated by several German intelligence agencies.
It’s also why JD Vance just gave what may be the single most consequential speech by a U.S. politician in Europe since Reagan was in office. Just before Germans head to the polls, Vance delivered a message at the Munich Security Conference that the media could not censor. He was speaking to European elites in the room, but his message was actually directed at voters — and particularly, voters in Germany. Watch:
After this speech, it’s not an overstatement to say that European elites lost their collective minds.
One European official told the Economist that the speech was a “direct assault on European democracy.” Meanwhile a senior diplomat stated, “It’s very clear now. Europe is alone.” He added that Europe now regards the U.S. as an “adversary.”
Perhaps the best reaction came from a guy named “Christoph Heusgen,” who’s the chair of the Munich Security Conference. Apparently he’s retiring, so he delivered a speech about how America’s values don’t align with Europe’s anymore. Then, at the end of the speech, he did something that no grown man should ever do in public: He broke down crying. Watch:
In response to this footage, the Munich Security Conference put out a statement that — for my money — is the single most humiliating statement that a “security conference” can possibly put out. Keep in mind, this is supposedly a very serious conference about saving the world from Russian military aggression, keeping us out of nuclear war, making sure we’re not all speaking Chinese in five years, and so on. The Munich Security Conference is the real deal.
With that in mind, here’s the official statement from the Munich Security Conference, after that footage went viral online:
Our former Chair Christoph Heusgen did not shed a few tears out of ‘frustration’. It was his farewell speech as he was leaving the [Munich Security Conference] after this year’s conference. He was saying goodbye to the team at this very moment.
In other words, the Munich Security Conference is taking a break from keeping the world secure, in order to clarify that the footage you may have seen online was edited unfairly. They’re saying that their fearless leader wasn’t crying in public over anything JD Vance said. That would just be ridiculous. Instead, he was crying in public because he’s leaving his job.
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
Of course, that explanation doesn’t change the fact that Christoph Heusgen is not a child under the age of 12. He is, in fact, a 69-year-old man. And by the way, he’s only held this particular job since 2022. So he’s breaking down in public because he’s leaving a job after a period of time that qualifies, at best, as a short stint. This is what broke him. He had to just walk off stage, head in his hands, because he’s really going to miss being the “chair of the Munich Security Conference” after three whole years.
At this point, they should probably just admit that JD Vance made him cry, honestly. That would actually be less embarrassing than whatever they came up with.
Not to rub it in, by the way, but this guy — Christoph Heusgen — is the same German diplomat who laughed at Donald Trump back at the United Nations in 2018, when he warned that Germany was dangerously dependent on Russian energy. Watch:
We all know what happened next. When Russia invaded Ukraine and cut off a majority of Germany’s energy, the Germans had to re-open a bunch of coal plants and delay the shutdown of their nuclear plants. They also had to find natural gas elsewhere — including from the United States. So it’s fitting, I guess, that a few years later, this same guy isn’t laughing on camera anymore. Instead he’s crying, for one reason or another.
It’s obviously a flattering comparison for JD Vance. It’s almost like Europe’s leaders wanted to appear as weak as possible, in the wake of his speech — and right before this weekend’s elections in Germany.
But Europeans weren’t the only ones giving JD Vance a big assist this weekend. Over at CBS News, Margaret Brennan suggested that Vance was wrong to extol the virtues of free speech, because the Nazis used free speech, and that’s how you got the Holocaust.
To be clear, yes, this is a real segment that actually aired on national television. Watch:
Keep in mind, the woman who asked this question moderated the VP debate, in which she cut off JD Vance’s microphone because he refuted one of her lies about immigration. Now here she is, claiming that the Nazis somehow “weaponized” speech to “conduct a genocide.”
On reflection, it’s actually impressive how little her question makes sense. First of all, it doesn’t actually mean anything to “weaponize free speech to conduct a genocide.” The words don’t come together in a way that makes any sense. It’s like saying the Nazis “weaponized air to conduct a genocide.” So therefore we need to ban air, I guess, since the Nazis used it.
But in this case, she’s just wrong on the basic facts. Before the Nazis rose to power, Weimar Germany had laws against so-called “hate speech,” including laws that prohibited hate speech against Jews. Prior to the rise of the Nazis, they shut down something like 100 newspapers in Prussia alone, over a two-year period. In 1925, Hitler was banned from speaking in some states because of his rhetoric. In the end, all of these speech restrictions actually emboldened Nazis. People assumed that, because these Nazis were being censored, maybe they were onto something. Censorship had the exact opposite of its intended effect. Then, of course, when the Nazis took over, they eliminated freedom of speech, as Rubio said. You couldn’t criticize Hitler in any way.
So there are about a million reasons why Margaret Brennan’s question is complete nonsense. I could go on and pick apart Brennan’s logic some more. But I really don’t need to, because her own network — CBS — did it for me. This weekend CBS just so happened to do a whole segment about how Germany cracks down on free speech. They conduct pre-dawn raids on people who post offensive content on the internet. Watch:
Try to imagine how CBS would be covering raids like this if they came at the direction of Donald Trump. Let’s say Trump decides that he wants to ban hate speech, so he’ll conduct pre-dawn raids against anyone who posts hateful content about white people on the internet. How do you think “60 Minutes” would react to something like that? Imagine Joy Reid or Jemele Hill getting carted away by armed law enforcement officers in the middle of the night because they made their one millionth post about how white people are evil. How do we think CBS might respond?
I can tell you this. Margaret Brennan wouldn’t come out and declare that Trump was doing his part to prevent another Holocaust. That’s because the corporate press isn’t actually concerned about the rise of an authoritarian government. They just want to make sure they’re the ones running it.
If you doubt that, watch how the CBS anchorwoman reacts as German officials explain their draconian laws to her:
In case you missed it, here’s a screen-grab of the glee on her face:
Screenshot: 60 Minutes/CBS
She’s being told that people in Germany are shocked to realize that their electronic devices are being seized. And she’s smiling throughout the whole thing. If you watch this entire segment, you won’t find any pushback whatsoever from CBS. They didn’t bring on a guest to explain how, actually, this is a horrible idea. Instead the whole segment came across like a promotion for state censorship. As it continued, it became more and more bizarre. Watch:
Conservatives are reacting with shock and horror to footage like this, which is understandable. We can’t forget, however, that something very similar has already happened here, in this country. And we would have gone full-Germany if Trump hadn’t won.
Everyone on the Left understands this. That’s why they’re lying to their viewers about what life is like in Germany at the moment. Here for example is MSNBC talking head Rick Wilson, explaining that Germany — despite the pre-dawn raids over memes — has a far better free-speech environment than America does. Watch:
Rick Wilson claims Germany has more free speech than us: “HOW DARE JD LECTURE GERMANY!?” pic.twitter.com/UnjXkBWDOO
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) February 17, 2025
He says that America is rated “55th in the world” for freedom of expression. I have no idea where he got that figure. My assumption was that some Left-wing group rated us 55th because some states ban drag queens from performing strip teases in front of children. But after looking into it, he could be referencing something called the “World Press Freedom index,” which basically surveys journalists and asks them if they feel threatened. Of course, all the journalists here say that Trump is going to put them in camps tomorrow, so we rate poorly as a result. Somehow this survey has Canada ranked 40 spots higher than the U.S., which is a pretty good indication that the survey is completely useless, given that Canada was arresting journalists who covered the trucker convoy just a couple of years ago.
Of course Rick Wilson is pointing to this useless survey because he knows that, by every actual metric, Americans have far more free-speech rights than Europeans. And people like Wilson want to change that. But there’s an even deeper issue here, which often gets lost as conservatives justifiably resist restrictions on speech: What makes the Left’s assault on free speech so insidious (whether in this country or in Germany or anywhere else in the Western world) is not just that they seek to ban open expression, but that they specifically want to ban the expression of true and morally right ideas. That’s the key element that will always separate Left-wing assaults on free speech from alleged Right-wing assaults on free speech.
Whenever someone claims that the Right is waging an assault on free speech, it always means that some conservatives are advocating for restrictions on pornography, or trying to ban adults from staging burlesque shows for children. On the other hand, when the Left bans free speech, they’re trying to stop us from saying that men can’t have babies, or they’re demanding that we show religious reverence to the pride flag. They’re arresting people for leaving tire marks on rainbow colored crosswalks, just as one example.
The alleged Right-wing restrictions on speech aren’t really restrictions on speech at all. But even if they were, it’s still a very different kind of speech. There is no equivalency here. This is the point that promoters of the “woke Right” narrative seem to consistently miss. The Atlantic, for example, just ran a big think piece entitled, “How the Woke Right Replaced the Woke Left.” They equate Republicans’ dismissal of fake words like “Latinx” with Democrats’ many, many attempts to dictate what words people can and cannot use, for example.
But the reality is that the “far-Left” and the “far-Right” are not, in fact, two sides of the same coin. They are not equally delusional and dangerous. One side denies and seeks to suppress the most basic and fundamental realities of human existence. One side manipulates language and denies statistical data in order to hide the truth. The other side does not. The people demanding that you use the word “Latinx” because they think Hispanic people can be non-binary superhumans or whatever are not, in fact, identical to the people who understand that the entire concept of “Latinx” is ridiculous and incoherent.
But the Left has to draw an equivalence because they have no other response. When JD Vance points out that so-called “asylum seekers” are constantly murdering innocent Americans and Europeans, they know it’s true. In fact, just hours before Vance spoke in Munich, a girl and her mother were mowed down by an Islamic terrorist in the city. Dozens were injured. Then, after Vance’s speech, a Syrian “asylum seeker” murdered a 14-year-old boy in Austria. He was grinning as the police arrived.
Again and again, reality intrudes on Left-wing narratives. That is the fundamental problem with their ideology. It’s why they’re so insistent on censorship. It’s why JD Vance’s speech has European elites in tears, whether they’ll admit it or not. And it’s why, in just a few days, Germans will send a message that in Europe — as in this country — tens of millions of regular people have had enough.
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