Vice President JD Vance is deeply committed to free speech (for his friends). Free speech (for JD Vance’s friends) is the bedrock of western society.
Vance, pretending his contempt for America’s allies is rooted in a nobler principle than isolationism, warned the Munich Security Conference that Europe’s lack of free speech protections is a more serious threat than Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. Two weeks later, Vance revisited this theme while dressing down Britain’s prime minister at a White House meeting.
“Shutting down free speech will destroy our civilization,” Vance’s office wrote in one of several posts highlighting clips from the vice president’s March 3 interview with Sean Hannity.
Vance’s criticisms of European speech regulations are largely accurate — and few Americans are as ill-suited as Vance is to make them.
“I can’t get over how many weak-willed ‘conservatives’ defend the right of ‘private companies’ to censor US citizens. Wake up,” Vance wrote in a July 2021 post (archived here).
“Raise their taxes and do whatever else is necessary to fight these goons. We can have an American Republic or a global oligarchy, and it’s time for choosing,” Vance shrieked (archived here) in response to April 2021 news of corporations expressing political views he disliked.
“At this very moment there are companies (big and small) paying good wages to American workers, investing in their communities, and making it easier for American families. Cut their taxes,” Vance added (archived here). “No more subsidies to the anti-American business class.”
During a September 2021 interview on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Vance suggested the federal government should “seize the assets” of nonprofits whose political views Vance disagrees with.
In a Newsweek column the following month, Vance explained:
Our laws should promote organizations that serve our society, and reduce the power of those that harm it. The Ford Foundation and the Harvard endowment don’t have a constitutional right to tax advantages that are unavailable to the vast majority of American citizens. They have amassed a fortune that is used as a weapon against conservatives (and even moderates) in the media, the academy and in business.
The time for complaining has passed. The time for action is now. These organizations have declared war on America; now, we fight back.
When Carlson platformed a Hitler apologist last September, Vance leaned on his principled belief in “free speech” as an excuse for not criticizing Carlson — or canceling either of his two interviews with Carlson later that month.
Often, Vance spins his opposition to free speech for the owners of social media platforms as support for free speech for their worst users. Vance will rightly note that the government should not be in the social media content moderation business, and in the next breath demand heavier federal regulation of social media companies.
When Twitter suspended Holocaust-denying white supremacist Nick Fuentes in July 2021, Vance wrote (on Twitter; archived here), “Tech companies control what we’re allowed to say in our own country. It has to stop.”
“We can have a First Amendment, or an information economy controlled by tech oligarchs. We can’t have both,” Vance wrote in December 2022 (archived here).
When his friend Marjorie Taylor Greene was suspended from Facebook in January 2022, Vance wrote, “Our ancestors founded, bled for, and sustained the world’s greatest constitutional republic. And we’ve given control of it to corporate tyrants” (archived here).
Bemoaning Trump’s 2021 suspension from Facebook and complaining that the social media platform “simply has too much power in our society,” Vance wrote, “Just a private company exercising quasi legal control over the flow of information in our Republic, and the platform of a former US president” (archived here and here).
What is Vance’s solution to social media companies being “corporate tyrants,” whose control over their own platforms is “too much power?”
“These companies need to be crushed,” Vance screeched (archived here) when Twitter suspended Greene in January 2022.
“We won’t save our country unless we rein in the technology oligarchs,” Vance posted in June 2022 when Instagram added a misinformation warning to his friend Donald Trump Junior’s posts (archived here).
“Time for defamation reform for the media, and to break up their Big Tech enablers,” Vance wrote when The Washington Post outed an anonymous pro-Trump influencer (archived here).
During his brief Senate tenure, Vance promoted a bill to hike taxes on university endowments as punishment for the universities choosing “to push DEI and woke insanity” (archived here).
“Long overdue, but it’s time to break Google up,” Vance asserted (archived here) less than a year before flying to Munich to chew out European leaders for their lack of devotion to free speech. “The monopolistic control of information in our society resides with an explicitly progressive technology company.”
It was necessary for the federal government to “break up” one of America’s most successful businesses because, Vance said, Google’s search results “will be explicitly biased towards Democrats” (archived here).
In case it doesn’t go without saying, JD Vance’s concerns about Big Tech oligarchs are as cynical as his free speech posturing: Vance’s Senate seat was purchased for him by billionaire PayPal founder Peter Thiel at a cost of $15 million, and Vance is vice president because billionaire PayPal founders David Sacks and Elon Musk helped Tucker Carlson convince Trump to pick him.