Vice President J.D. Vance told Raheem Kassam, Editor-in-Chief of The National Pulse, that he will reiterate the Trump administration’s commitment to freedom of speech when Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer visits the U.S. next week. This follows Vice President Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, in which he warned against the erosion of free speech in Europe, and the subsequent imprisonment of a British man for sending emails intended to “insult and offend” London Mayor Sadiq Khan and government minister Jess Phillips, from Starmer’s Labour Party.
Asked by Kassam if he planned to reiterate his comments t Starmer and his team next week in person, Vance responded, “We certainly will,” adding, “[T]his is not hard, Raheem. We’re simply telling them to respect the values on which our civilization was founded, that you ought to debate with one another, you ought to, you know, your government should respect when the people have a dissenting viewpoint. It’s very simple, and it’s very obvious.”
“And I think that, when we talk about shared values, I think one of the most important shared values is that we, again, ought to listen to our people and not try to throw them in prison when they disagree with what the government’s doing,” he stressed.
Vance said the strong, adverse reaction to his Munich speech “from some of our European friends” indicates that “frankly, they’ve taken too much leadership from the Biden administration” and “leaned too much into the censorship regime.”
Earlier in his interview with Kassam, the Vice President highlighted that the purpose of his speech in Munich was not to “wag my finger at Europe and say, ‘You guys have become too censorious,'” but to note that the U.S. and its transatlantic partners together had developed a censorship problem, led by the Biden-Harris government.
“[A]s I said in Europe, President Trump is going to take a much different view on this stuff,” Vance emphasized.
