Vance Speech: A Rhetorical D-Day Landing

And: David Starkey, Unreformed; Letter From An Angry Soldier; Wheaton's Travails

The Americans have landed!

Good morning from London, and the first day of the ARC conference. Big opening dinner for speakers and donors last night; as a speaker, I got to go. Was so, so great to see many old friends there, Ran into Jonathan Pageau last night standing around talking to folks after dinner (had to filter the party pic selfie; the original was even more orange, thanks to the lighting):

Just now, after breakfast, I walked out of the hotel restaurant, and there sat two of my favorite people in all the world, James Orr and Martin Shaw, kibitizing. Oh happy day! Oh happy next three days!

Everybody from this side of the pond last night was talking about the J.D. Vance speech, I only heard one negative comment, and that was from an eminent writer and speaker who thought Vance said the right thing, but delivered it too bumptiously. (My response: “There is no way to say what needs saying to these European elites without coming upside their collective head with it.”) Everybody else — and I mean everybody — was over the moon with joy. The basic attitude from the Brits and the Europeans I talked to last night was, “Finally, someone is going to shake our ruling class out of its complacency.”

I cannot say it often enough or strongly enough: if you are depending on the mainstream media to give you an accurate impression of how the speech was received in Europe, you are deceived. They will tell you how European officials, policymakers, and talking heads received it — but that’s not at all the same thing as how ordinary Europeans do. Matt Taibbi takes apart the way American elite journalists, and some UK and European ones, characterized the speech. The NYT, in particular, glommed on to the “Vance normalizes Nazis” line. Here’s Taibbi:

I watched the damn thing. You can too, right here — and I hope you will, so you can see and hear for yourself the difference between an event that happened, and the same event as filtered through the mainstream media.

More Taibbi:

Others, like Bertelsmann foundation analyst Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook, suggested Vance’s speech was not correct. “The first third of the speech was littered with conspiracy theories, misinformation, and the demand that these misrepresentations be taken seriously,” she said. You’re going to hear a lot about what the BBC called “dangerous” misinformation, specifically Vance’s suggestion that prayer in one’s own home could violate U.K. “buffer zone” laws about abortion clinics. The Beeb claims it would only impact things that that “could be seen or heard from the zone, such as displaying posters or banners, or protesting in their garden.”

I have many thoughts about Vance’s speech, which I think will be remembered as a moment of grave importance, but the most crucial immediate observation is how it was received by other formerly influential American figures. It’s never been a secret that postwar Europe has a different attitude toward speech and even democracy. But we’ve never seen institutional America so open in its backing of overruled elections, censorship, and the use of intelligence mechanisms to cut off voter decisions. It’s all out in the open now.

These people have no credibility anymore. I don’t think they are intentionally lying at all. This is truly how they see the world. This is why Europe is in the awful state that it is: its ruling class, in country after country, and across borders, lives in a bubble.

I don’t remember if I posted this the other day, but an English expatriate friend and reader of this newsletter sent me this short-ish commentary by an American man, summing up where Britain went wrong. The Englishman said this is the best single explanation for the crisis that has gripped his homeland:

In it are strong echoes of what the woke in power have done to America too, though the sickness is much further advanced in Britain. Similar stories can be told about the major countries of western Europe. The ARC conference is designed to come up with a better story, a life-giving story, to stimulate cultural and social recovery.

Listening to J.D.’s landmark speech, and assessing the hysterical negative reaction to it from the European leadership, I thought of that famous line by historian Arnold J. Toynbee: “Civilizations die by suicide, not from murder.”

This is what the prophetic French writer Renaud Camus has been trying for many years to say to his fellow Frenchmen. For his trouble, he has been roundly vilified by the ruling class, including the media. But he was right, and he is right, about the Great Replacement. It’s not even mostly about ethnic replacement. It’s about generations of postwar European political and cultural leadership wishing to erase all cultural particulars and cultural memory from the European mind, to replace it with a placeless, progressive, Houellebecqian pudding.

The distinguished German commentator Wolfgang Munchau is one of the few figures of his stature to understand what has happened. Excerpts:

Vance then repeated a threat he’d first made shortly after the American election — that any attempt to censor US-owned social media companies by the EU would lead to US disengagement from Nato. “I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions, and the conscience that guide your very own people,” he said. “Europe faces many challenges, but the crisis this continent faces right now… is one of our own making. If you are running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you.”

Europe was at a loss to respond. Its centrist governments are running out of ideas in the fight against the Right. They fear that uncontrolled free speech could turn into an existential threat to European integration. After all, the EU was never a bottom-up democratic project, and support for the euro was feeble from the outset. There was, for example, no majority in Germany in favour of the euro. This lack of popular support is what paralysed the EU during the sovereign debt crisis.

What sustains the EU is not a democratic mandate, but the mainstream media, academia, and think tanks — a blob of organisations that together exert indirect control over what gets discussed and published. You will not find editorials in German newspapers in support of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), despite the fact that this party now accounts for approximately 20% of popular support. The new Right-wing parties communicate through social media instead. This is why the EU is so focused on content moderation for social media, and it’s why we have seen a recent explosion of fact-checking units in broadcasting companies and media organisations.

But the Left is rarely subjected to such fact-checking. Quite a few members of the blob have abandoned X for the alternative Bluesky, which resembles the old Twitter. There, on a much smaller scale, the old echo chamber still works. There, users describe the Trump presidency as a coup d’état, and still think that Ukraine is winning the war. No one interrupts them — or checks any facts.

More:

The BBC described Vance’s speech “extraordinarily poorly judged”. And yet the intelligent way for the Brits and Europeans to respond to America’s new regime would be to stop hyperventilating and take matters into their own hands. …

There’s no denying that Trump is throwing Europe under the bus. Angela Merkel predicted this in 2018, when she gave an agitated speech in a Bavarian beer tent shortly after meeting with Trump. She said then that Europe needed to become less dependent on the US. But then she did nothing, as did everyone else. And so here we are, with EU leaders meeting to sit around yet another table. They are the Norma Desmonds of geopolitics — convinced that they are still the stars.

As I wrote the other day — and as many European fans of the Vance speech with whom I spoke last night agreed — the philosophical core of the vice president’s address was in these lines:

I’ve heard a lot about what you need to defend yourselves from, and of course that’s important. But what has seemed a little bit less clear to me, and certainly I think to many of the citizens of Europe, is what exactly it is that you’re defending yourselves for. What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important?

That’s exactly right! Europe doesn’t know what it’s for, only what it’s against (namely, everything that came before, everything that is not progressive, that is not an expression of managerial liberalism. Along those lines, here is an interesting Free Press essay from the retired CIA analyst Martin Gurri, writing about masculinity. Excerpts:

Since the species climbed down from the trees, ideals of manhood, always and everywhere, have been bound up with physicality and struggle. Each man has been expected to be a protector—or provider, which amounts to the same thing. He is the defender of all that is sacred and good, the bearer of virile virtues—courage, strength, loyalty. Thus, the soldier protects the nation. The husband protects the wife; the father, his children.

In the end, physicality prevails.

In modern times, the question arises: What are men supposed to protect against? …

Sure — but another way of saying this is: what are men supposed to protect?

Gurri meditates on unfiltered masculinity, and the figure of the Hero. The Hero is messy. It is he who confronts the “Man-Beast,” the nihilistic and violent figure that is masculine energy unbound. Gurri:

The hero slays the monster and so restores the moral balance of society, but he is rarely a bringer of harmony or domesticity. He smolders with an excess of the manly virtues, which he must constantly put to the test. He runs into the burning tower, not away from it. He leaps on the live grenade rather than seek cover. In him, the urge to protect is an almost pathological condition, leading in some circumstances to terrible crimes. Agamemnon sacrificed his own daughter so that the Achaean fleet could sail to conquer Troy. Romulus murdered his brother to ensure the foundation of Rome. James Bond leaves behind him a trail of corpses and forsaken beauties.

But the hero is indispensable. Let there be no question about that. A society deprived of heroic energy would lack the power of redemption and would soon be overrun by the Man-Beast. But the hero, by definition, is an exceptional man. He is the refutation of the democratic principle. He might be a model of certain virtues for all men to aspire to, but he is also a warning: Even the instinct to protect, central to manhood, can be deformed by a lack of conviviality.

The Hero became domesticated into the Gentleman — and this, says Gurri, was a good thing. More:

His ideal of manhood is to reduce, by personal effort, the wretchedness and cruelty of life—to push against the weight and wildness of nature until decency appears to be the default condition of the human race. He alone, the silent protector of civilization, stands between the Man-Beast and his prey.

Yet since mid-century, the Gentleman has become an object of contempt. Our culture has lost sight of the important distinction between the Gentleman — the civilized form of the Hero — and the Man-Beast. The Gentleman stood condemned as an archaism. Daniel Penny was a New York hero and gentleman who protected fellow subway riders by restraining a violent and insane black predator. Yet the state put him on trial, and the progressive cretins of Black Lives Matter turned him into a villain.

So, the Gentleman was sent away. Then, says Gurri:

In his place stood a slippery character, the technocrat, morally and sexually neutral but ready to rebuild society on a new basis. Instead of personal decency, we would get state-ordained welfare.

If you won’t have the Gentleman, you will get eventually the Man-Beast. And in that case, only the Hero will save you.

The core problem of contemporary Europe is that it rejected both the Hero and the Gentleman, and has accommodated itself to the welfare state and managed therapeutic liberalism. Result: No young man in Europe will fight for Brussels, or for a social and political order that believes in nothing higher than shopping, screwing, and DEI. It was possible for Europeans to live in denial about this as long as the United States military was willing to play the Heroes manning the front lines against the Soviet Man-Beast. In its long descent into decadence, Europe became entirely feminized, in the sense of preferring safety, care, and its own idea of compassion over all.

And it won’t even stand up for itself against the Man-Beasts it has invited to live within its borders: Muslim male fanatics who stab people in the UK and across Europe almost every day now. Its decadent leaders — Viktor Orban an honorable exception — won’t lift a finger to stop the madness (this happened over the weekend in Austria). When figures like Giorgia Meloni in Italy try to do something meaningful, the ideologically charged courts stop them on “human rights” grounds. Pope Francis is eager for Europe to roll over and die for the sake of “compassion”. Doing something meaningful about this crisis would force Europe to reckon with the bankruptcy of its own progressivism. One gets the idea that most of its leadership class would sooner die than abandon its ideology and fight for the survival of its own civilization. The chairman of the Munich Security Conference cried like a baby over Vance’s speech!

C.S. Lewis saw it all coming many decades ago. In The Abolition Of Man, he wrote:

We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

Europe is now a Man Without A Chest. And the new government in Washington is telling the Continent: Man up, become the heroes of your own story. J.D. Vance’s speech was the rhetorical equivalent of the D-Day landing. Now European patriots are preparing to fight to save their civilization from the enemies within.