I have to ask myself: When will Vice President JD Vance judge his own administration?
Last month, Vance, a self -described foreign policy “realist”, who describes the practice of the description of countries as “good boys” and “villains”, caused a sensation at the Munich Security Conference in Germany. However, he invited a controversy, not by using a more amoral, real -political foreign policy, but by giving a finger -switzerland, highly moralist lecture on the free expression of the free expression. “In Great Britain and all over Europe, the freedom of speech I fear is on the retreat,” he said more in mourning than anger.
In the attempt to be fair He even admitted America is not perfect. “And in the interests of community, my friends, but also in the interest of the truth, admit that sometimes the loudest voices for censorship come from Europe, but from my own country, where the former administration threatened and bullied social media companies to censor so -called misinformation.”
The implication was, of course, that his own administration would be an unvarnished advocate and defender of the liberal value of freedom of speech.
Now I should say that many of Vances have criticized our allies and bidges. But I think it was bizarre that the man who thinks we should be less about the internal affairs of the oppressive regime who chose our democratic allies like a Wilsonian scold. It is enough to say that only because he was wrong to say this event location does not mean that everything he said was wrong.
What is more relevant is that it seems that he didn't mean a word of it.
On Friday, the boss of Vances, President Trump, spoke the employees of the Ministry of Justice. A large proportion of the speech aimed to initiate his complaints about previous investigations of his behavior.
The president showed the rhetorical discipline and analytical precision, for which he is famous, and described various former officials as “scum” and the like. Of the judges who ruled against his interests, he said: “It is not even conceivable how corrupt they were.”
And according to Trump's view, this corruption is tightened by the “really corrupt” media that the judge, who prevailed against him. He synchronized the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN and “MSDNC” as “fake news” and explained that “what they do is illegal.
“It is completely illegal what you do” he said to the assembled prosecutors in the audience. “I just hope that you can all look after it, but it's completely illegal.” And again: “It has to stop. It must be illegal. It affects the judges and really changes the right, and it just can't be legal. I don't think it's legal. “
Spoiler: It's legal.
In short, the president told the country's highest law enforcement officer, who answered him that the negative reporting on him is illegal and that they should “be careful” for such illegality.
But it doesn't end there.
The president, his campaign website promised to “end censorship and to regain freedom of speech” and who praised a joint meeting of the congress that he “brought with him” Freedom of speech Back to America ”, a pretty great effort started to punish not only protests on the American college campus – one thing that arouses some sympathy of me when these protests outside the boundaries of mere language – but also on School Curricula And Internal guidelines.
His Ministry of Justice sent one threatening Letter to a member of the congress that criticized Elon Musk.
The white house also crawled the way the press covers the president. deny The Associated Press Access on major events, since he calls the Gulf of Mexico, the waters, the Trump, not renamed Golf in America, according to his new name.
The government undertook to fight “misinformation” and have partisans “fake news” Registration information The most cartoonist pro-trump branches such as gateway experts and pillow magnates (and election conspiracy theorist) Mike Lindells Lindelltv. In the meantime, Trump made an order over the weekend formwork The voice of America for his “Anti-trump. ““ The VOA was founded with the mission to counter propaganda with factual reporting. It first began as a bulwark of truth against Nazis, but later against authoritarian and totalitarian regime all over the world.
Now you don't have to agree with all these steps. However, the pattern is difficult to squares with a vice president who insisted that the largest threat to Europe was largely supported by some anecdotes, “the threat from the inside, the withdrawal of Europe from some of its fundamental values” – ie from freedom of speech – “divided by the United States of America”.