ArcaMax

MOSCOW — The Western establishment treats its endless parade of summits the way the fashion industry treats runway season — as an excuse for vapid sound bites and showing off their latest recycled talking points while sipping champagne. But U.S. Vice President JD Vance wasn’t on the European conference circuit over the last week to blow air kisses. Instead, he turned them into full-blown roasts on the global stage of European leaders’ worst decisions. And did he ever have a lot of material to work with.

It all started in Paris, at a summit on artificial intelligence attended by Europe’s top brass, including French President Emmanuel Macron and the European Union’s unelected de facto queen, Ursula von der Leyen — the head of Brussels’ army of unaccountable and equally unelected bureaucrats who “defend democracy” by issuing policy edicts to 27 countries that never voted for them.

Vance called out the EU’s regulatory stranglehold on digital innovation — notably its obsession with policing online speech. “It is one thing to prevent a predator from preying on a child on the internet,” he said. “It is something quite different to prevent a grown man or woman from accessing an opinion that the government thinks is misinformation.”

Macron and von der Leyen sat there looking around the room like two puppies who just got caught tearing up the couch cushions and were being confronted with a rolled-up newspaper.

For folks who never stop lecturing their citizens about democracy, Europe’s ruling class sure does have a habit of black-bagging anything remotely inconvenient and stuffing it into the trunk of their “freedom” mobile — which, at this point, is less high-performance Mercedes and more windowless van.

At first, they just censored anything explicitly Russian. Then, anything Russian-adjacent. Then, anything that sounded like a Russian talking point. If he wasn’t the actual US VP, they’d be sizing up Vance himself right now for a one-way trip to Cancellationville – or Moscow. Same thing, really. Here I am, an EU resident, sitting in a cafe in Moscow, on the other side of the EUSSR’s digital iron curtain, and agreeing with the US leadership that Brussels needs to tear it down. Oh, the irony.

Meanwhile, the EU’s own meddling — like that of its American cousin, USAID, which Trump is now gutting for being a corrupt slush fund — means spending billions bankrolling “independent” organizations and outlets which just happen to push Brussels’ talking points. And, by sheer coincidence, these same groups are always on the ground in places where the locals risk behaving in ways in which the EU disapproves — most recently Ukraine, Georgia, Romania and Slovakia.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal during his trip, Vance gave a glimpse into his behind-closed-doors talks with EU officials. And since they can’t cancel him or slap a “misinformation” warning label on the vice president of the United States, they’ve apparently settled for the next best thing — trying to gaslight him. Spoiler alert: it isn’t working. “I’ve been struck by some of our European friends who really do think that the Russians buying $200,000 worth of Facebook advertisements is going to take down their entire democratic society,” Vance said of those conversations. “If your democratic society can be taken down by $200,000 of social media ads, then you should think seriously about how strong your grip on — or how strong your understanding of — the will of the people actually is.”

Brussels knows exactly what the will of the people is. That’s why they’re working overtime to suppress it, even if it means torching their own so-called values in the process. Case in point: the Romanian presidential election, the specific example cited by Vance. The EU is currently in full panic mode over a right-wing populist winning the first round of voting — a politician with a Ph.D. in agronomy and an expert on farming at a time when Romanian farmers are being gutted by Brussels’ regulations and Ukraine-first economic policies that have flooded their markets. Rather than address why their policies are failing, European elites went full conspiracy theorist, blaming a supposed $200,000 TikTok campaign on Russian meddling.

But here’s the kicker. It turns out the ad campaign wasn’t bankrolled by shadowy Russian operatives. Politico reported, citing the Romanian investigative press, that it was paid for by Romania’s own pro-EU ruling party. And they were apparently so unbelievably bad at teenager-grade social media that their hashtag for their campaign ended up getting hijacked by the opposition.

The EU didn’t just wring its hands over the election — they wanted the entire first round canceled before a second round could even take place. And, according to a top EU official, they pulled it off. Former European Commission Vice President Thierry Breton openly bragged on French TV that if European voters make the “wrong” choice, Brussels can simply step in and scrap the results. He even suggested they might do the same in Germany, where populist parties on both the right and left are gaining ground ahead of a national election this month. A similar move happened in France last year, when anti-establishment parties won a parliamentary election, only for Macron to install a handpicked establishment prime minister.

“For years, we’ve been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values,” Vance said in his Munich Security Conference speech, referring to Breton’s remarks. “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.”

Translation: If this is democracy, then what exactly does the EU think authoritarianism looks like? Globalists, especially the Europeans, are up in arms over the suggestion. But there’s no better wake-up call than a close friend with the courage to hold up the mirror. And it's taken Trump and Vance to come along and point out how ugly it looks for Europe to be trying desperately to copy the same kind of globalist makeover from which they’re trying to rescue Americans.