U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance is brushing off pushback from Germany’s Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, who called his speech at the Munich Security Conference last week “not acceptable.” In an exclusive interview with The National Pulse Editor-in-Chief Raheem Kassam, Vice President Vance described Pistorius’s reaction as “too rich”—but revealed he understood his speech would “piss a lot of people off.”
“My criticism was Europeans need to be more accepting of free speech. And his response was not to engage with anything that I said but to say this is not acceptable,” Vance explained. “So, almost endorsing the censorship regime at that very moment and not doing what I counseled our European friends to do, which is actually debate ideas and engage with some of the public criticisms a little bit more.”
“I mean, look, I knew that it would piss a lot of people off,” Vance said, adding: ” I knew that there were a lot of dissidents in Europe who would be invigorated by it.”
While the Europeans, especially the Germans, appear to have not necessarily taken the criticism of their censorship in stride, Vance expressed surprise that many of the leaders did not pick up on his equally stern words for the previous U.S. government under former President Joe Biden. “The one thing that I’m a little surprised by is the thing that I said midway through the speech, give or take, is that the biggest driver of this was actually the Biden administration,” the Vice President said.
“Like, my goal was not to sort of wag my finger at Europe and say, you guys have become too censorious,” Vance continued. “My goal was to say, [it was] the Biden administration and the transatlantic alliance together. This is an American and European problem. It has stopped in America because of the leadership of Donald Trump. And we want it to stop in Europe too because we really do believe in the values of free expression and free exchange.”
