J.D. Vance On 'Live Not By Lies'

A Report From The Washington Premiere Of The Documentary

Click here to watch this clip of his speech

Gang, that was just amazing. Last night’s Heritage Foundation premiere of Episode One of the Live Not By Lies documentary was one of the highlights of my life. The vice president and I met backstage with Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation (which was so generous in hosting the event) and Jeff Harmon, a co-founder of Angel Studios.

(L to R) Kevin Roberts, Jeff Harmon, Area Fathead, J.D. Vance

J.D. introduced me and the film. He spoke of our friendship, and even told the audience that he is today the vice president because of me. Can you imagine? It’s a true story: about how Hillbilly Elegy had been out for a few weeks, and had made not much of a splash, until my 2016 American Conservative interview with him went mega-viral. Suddenly his book shot to the top of the bestseller list, where it remained for a year, and he was all over the national news shows. A star was born! He talked about how we stayed friends after that, and I helped him navigate media appearances early in his career. It meant the world to me.

He also talked about the importance of living not by lies, and how finally brave people everywhere are standing up to the left-wing bullies, both in America and in Europe. Here is the full video of his speech, which I recorded. It’s rough — I shot it with my smartphone, from my seat in the audience. I will post a cleaner version if I can find one — I know Angel recorded the whole thing.

It was a great, great gift my friend gave me. He left after his speech. When we embraced on stage, we told each other that we loved each other, which is true. That man is the future of America, I believe. I’m so grateful to God that He let me play a small but meaningful part in his rise.

In my brief, unscripted remarks, I told the story about how this entire project came about because of one woman, the late Milada Schirger, told her son, Dr. John Schirger, that what she was seeing happen in the United States today (this was 2015) reminded her of what it was like in her native country, Czechoslovakia, when the Communists came to power. That brave Catholic lady, imprisoned and tortured as a “Vatican spy” because she defied their orders to stop going to church, was imprisoned and tortured for years. Last night, I asked her granddaughter Rosie to stand and be recognized:

Remember: these stories happened to flesh and blood people. This is history written in blood and suffering.

The audience seemed to love the episode. Remember, that was the first of four episodes. You can watch it anywhere in the world if you join the Angel Guild. There will be a new episode rolling out each Tuesday for the month of April. It will remain there for Guild members for a while. Not sure when and how it will go broader.

I’m hearing this morning that there is real interest in Europe in this series. And why not? We are all seeing what is happening in France, where French judges just knocked off the right-wing candidate for the presidency in 2027, Marine Le Pen. There will be mass protests in France soon.

The Eurocratic regime in Brussels quashed the will of the people in Germany. Former EU commissioner Thierry Breton said just prior to the German election in January that they did just that, and if the German people vote the wrong way, Brussels is prepared to do the same there. And now they’ve taken out Marine Le Pen, leader of the most popular political party in France.

Where does it end? J.D. Vance’s Munich speech is being vindicated with each passing day! Excerpt:

Now, I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election. He warned that if things don’t go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany, too.

Now, these cavalier statements are shocking to American ears. For years, we’ve been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values.

Everything from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship is billed as a defense of democracy, but when we see European courts canceling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard. And I say “ourselves” because I fundamentally believe that we are on the same team. We must do more than talk about democratic values. We must live them.

Now, within living memory of many of you in this room, the Cold War positioned defenders of democracy against much more tyrannical forces on this continent. And consider the side in that fight that censored dissidents, that closed churches, that canceled elections. Were they the good guys? Certainly not, and thank God they lost the Cold War.

They lost because they neither valued nor respected all of the extraordinary blessings of liberty, the freedom to surprise, to make mistakes, to invent, to build.

As it turns out, you can’t mandate innovation or creativity, just as you can’t force people what to think, what to feel, or what to believe. And we believe those things are certainly connected.

And unfortunately, when I look at Europe today, it’s sometimes not so clear what happened to some of the Cold War’s winners.

I look to Brussels, where EU commiss—commissars warn citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest the moment they spot what they’ve judged to be, quote, “hateful content.”

Or to this very country, where police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online as part of, quote, “combating misogyny on the internet, a day of action.”

I look to Sweden, where, two weeks ago, the government convicted a Christian activist for participating in Quran burnings that resulted in his friend’s murder. And as the judge in his case chillingly noted, Sweden’s laws to supposedly protect free expression do not, in fact, grant—and I’m quoting—“a free pass to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief.”

And perhaps most concerningly, I look to our very dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons, in particular, in the crosshairs.

A little over two years ago, the British government charged Adam Smith-Connor, a 51-year-old physiotherapist and an army veteran, with the heinous crime of standing 50 meters from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes—not obstructing anyone, not interacting with anyone, just silently praying on his own.

And after British law enforcement spotted him and demanded to know what he was praying for, Adam replied, simply, it was on behalf of the unborn son he and his former girlfriend had aborted years before.

Now, the officers were not moved. Adam was found guilty of breaking the government’s new “buffer zones” law, which criminalizes silent prayer and other actions that could “influence” a person’s decision within 200 meters of an abortion facility. He was sentenced to pay thousands of pounds in legal costs to the prosecution.

Now, I wish I could say that this was a fluke—a one-off, crazy example of a badly written law being enacted against a single person. But, no, this last October, just a few months ago, the Scottish government began distributing letters to citizens whose houses lay within so-called “safe access zones,” warning them that even private prayer within their own homes may amount to breaking the law.

Naturally, the government urged readers to report any fellow citizens suspected guilty of thoughtcrime.

In Britain, and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat.

In the opening segment of the first LNBL episode, we hear from Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, the English pro-life campaigner who was arrested twice for praying silently in the vicinity of an abortion clinic. Isabel admits in the documentary that she perfectly understands why people thought at first that surely there must be more to it, that surely she was guilty of more than that. But she wasn’t. That’s what it means to live in Britain today.

This morning I gave a talk to a group of Republican Congressmen who are interested in the film and the topic. They asked me what they could do to spread the word. I suggested holding hearings, and inviting Kamila Bendova, Timo Križka, and others to testify about what they endured and why it matters to us today! I hope they can make that happen. It’s so important — and it’s also important to remember that even though the new administration in Washington is pushing back hard on the soft totalitarianism of wokeness, this is not primarily a political problem. We need to inform people today about history — how many documentaries about Communism are on Netflix? — and help them grasp why history is repeating itself in a softer (but still totalitarian!) way.

The battle is deep and broad. Yesterday in France, the Catholic philosopher who won the Grand Prize of Catholic Literature for a book he wrote on love, gave a speech saying that his book is opposed to J.D. Vance, who believes that one ought to love one’s own before the stranger. This is a reference to the Vice President’s remarks about immigration, in which he quite rightly said that while we do have a Christian responsibility to love our neighbor, we must first care for those who are nearest to us — our families, our actual neighbors, and our countrymen. Pope Francis and the liberal Catholics jumped on him … but he was and is correct. Here is Paragraph 2241 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

The more prosperous nations are obliged, to the extent they are able, to welcome the foreigner in search of the security and the means of livelihood which he cannot find in his country of origin. Public authorities should see to it that the natural right is respected that places a guest under the protection of those who receive him.

Political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible, may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions, especially with regard to the immigrants' duties toward their country of adoption. Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws and to assist in carrying civic burdens.

This is manifestly NOT the case in Europe! Politicians, media figures, and academics aren’t the only ones insisting that we all live by lies — even if it destroys our communities and our countries.

I’m flying back to Europe in a few hours, and will have one night in my own bed in Budapest before heading to Oxford for the Oxford Literary Festival, where I will appear with the great Iain McGilchrist (buy tickets here), to talk about Living In Wonder. Please order Live Not By Lies if you haven’t yet read it — there are far, far more stories in there than we could tell in the film, and they remain highly relevant today, five years after the book was first published. And do sign up for the Angel Studios Guild, so you can watch the entire documentary series. British readers, I especially encourage you to do so! You are on the front lines of the battle now.

Many, many thanks to director Isaiah Smallman for his work on this film, and to producers R.J. Moeller and David Jacobson. Thanks also to the Heritage Foundation for hosting us, and for all the people who donated to make this film a reality (I’m looking especially at you, Ed and Jana Grier). I really think this documentary is going to make a difference. I had friends come in from New Orleans, Birmingham, and Nashville for the event. It is good to have friends. It is good to love and be loved.