Conservative Columnist Blasts Vance as a ‘Disgrace’ Over Munich Speech: ‘A Monument of Arrogance’

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Conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens blasted Vice President JD Vance as a “disgrace” over comments he made last week at the Munich Security Conference.

Vance delivered remarks in which he accused European leaders of chilling free speech and warned the continent’s true enemies were not in some foreign land but rather from “within.”

Stephens, in a piece headlined “Vance’s Munich Disgrace,” dragged the vice president for the speech and for meeting with leaders of Germany’s far-right AfD party. He also challenged his knowledge of 20th-century European history.

In a piece published by the Times on Tuesday, the columnist noted the Nazi Party unapologetically used Germany’s democratic system to seize power prior to the Second World War. Stephens wrote:

The vice president’s speech last week at the Munich Security Conference — in which the man who refuses to say that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election lectured his audience about Europe’s retreat from democratic values — combined with his meeting with the leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, party, has caused a scandal because it is a scandal, a monument of arrogance based on a foundation of hypocrisy.

Stephens noted that even some German conservatives are hesitant to support the AfD:

This record explains, in part, why all of Germany’s mainstream parties refuse to go into any sort of coalition government with the AfD, even as it is polling in second place in this month’s federal elections. Vance may seem to think it’s the responsibility of democracy to embrace any party or point of view; it’s worth wondering what he might have said if, instead of the AfD polling at around 20 percent, an antisemitic and anti-democratic Muslim Brotherhood-style party was drawing a similar percentage of voters.

The piece summarized Vance’s Munich comments as “a monument of arrogance based on a foundation of hypocrisy.”