President Joe Biden regularly fell asleep during diplomatic meetings. Vice President J.D. Vance debuted on the international stage Friday morning with a powerful speech aimed at awakening foreign elites to their violation of pro-life advocates’ rights, censorship of Christians, and “running in fear of your own voters.”

Vance fearlessly faced down the assembled powers of Europe at the Munich Security Conference, highlighting one nation’s Orwellian prosecution of pro-life Christians for the crime of silent public prayer, and the members’ collective determination to preserve “Our Democracy,”^TM without respecting civil liberties or the will of the people.

After mentioning President Donald Trump intends to reach “a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine” to end the nearly three-year-long war between the two Orthodox Christian nations, Vance pivoted to the true specter haunting Europe. “The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia; it’s not China; it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within: the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America,” said Vance. (The vice president’s wording shed light on President Trump’s use of the phrase “the enemy within,” which Democrats attempted to morph into a promise to use the U.S. military against American citizens.)

The vice president placed two unalienable rights at the heart of his critique: the right to life and freedom of religion.

Vance Calls out Europe’s ‘Backslide Away from Conscience Rights’

“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,” said Vance. “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.”

Police arrested the British Army Reserves veteran, who deployed in Afghanistan, in November 2022 after he admitted he was, in fact, praying silently outside an abortion facility in Bournemouth for his son, Jacob, who had been aborted 22 years earlier. “The officers were not moved. Adam was found guilty of breaking the government’s new buffer zones law, which criminalizes silent prayer,” said Vance. Although Smith-Connor spoke not a word and stood with his back to the abortion facility, police prosecuted him for violating a Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO) that bans any hint of disapproval within 150 meters (almost 500 feet) of an abortion facility. Bournemouth Magistrates’ Court convicted him last October and imposed a fine of £9,000 ($11,330 U.S.). The veteran appealed his case to the Bournemouth Crown Court, which is scheduled to hear his case in July.

The case bears similarities to that of Isabel Vaughn-Spruce, whom courts convicted twice of the same “crime” of silent prayer inside a “buffer zone,” only to pay a £13,000 (about $16,800) settlement last August for violating her human rights.

“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,” noted Vice President Vance. “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 thought crime in Britain and across Europe.” The Scottish government’s letter threatens anyone who prays “in a private place (such as a house)” if the prayers “can be seen or heard within the Zone and are done intentionally or recklessly.”

‘There Is a New Sheriff in Town’: Vance to Europeans

Vance proceeded to highlight yet more cases of European nations stifling free speech and religious liberty. “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,” he said.

The threat extends to online speech, “where EU Commission commissars warned citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest, the moment they spot what they’ve judged to be ‘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 ‘combating misogyny’ on the internet.”

In years past, the U.S. government (under the Biden-Harris administration) encouraged and engaged in censorship. “The prior administration threatened and bullied social media companies to censor so-called ‘misinformation’ — misinformation, like, for example, the idea that coronavirus had likely leaped from leaked from a laboratory in China. Our own government encouraged private companies to silence people who dared to utter what turned out to be an obvious truth,” noted the vice president, reminding listeners of the precedent in quashing disfavored speech by the Soviet Union.

The EU’s problem with freedom extends beyond criminalizing speech to disregarding citizens’ votes, Vance diagnosed. “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.” Indeed, Romanian nationalist candidate Calin Georgescu won the first round of the nation’s presidential election. But on December 6, the nation’s Constitutional Court chillingly annulled the election, alleging that foreign intelligence boosted social media messages to favor Georgescu, thereby stealing the election. (Sound familiar?)

Former European Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton seemingly threatened a similar future if the populist Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) wins the German elections, saying, “We did it in Romania, and we will obviously do it in Germany if necessary.” That seems particularly ironic, since “everything from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship is billed as a defense of democracy,” said Vance, yet “we see European courts canceling elections.”

“No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants,” Vance continued, noting the terrorist attack that took place in Munich the morning he arrived. (“We’re praying for you,” the vice president added.) He highlighted eight-and-a-half years of efforts to cancel Brexit, the 2016 popular referendum to leave the European Union just months before President Trump’s first election, largely based on open borders and stifling economic regulations imposed by Brussels. “Contrary to what you might hear a couple of mountains over in Davos, the citizens of all of our nations don’t generally think of themselves as educated animals or as interchangeable cogs of a global economy.”

Vance warned the Eurocrats, literally, “There is a new sheriff in town” in the White House. “In America, you cannot win a democratic mandate by censoring your opponents or putting them in jail, whether that’s the leader of the opposition, a humble Christian praying in her own home, or a journalist trying to report the news.”

Some in the EU have protested that Elon Musk has interfered in foreign elections by supporting AfD in Germany and Nigel Farage’s Reform Party in the British elections. “If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk,” Vance half-joked. “But what no democracy, American, German or European will survive, is telling millions of voters that their thoughts and concerns, their aspirations, their pleas for relief, are invalid or unworthy of even being considered.”

The vice president also previewed a new foreign policy, requiring Europe to step up its own defense, largely provided by the U.S. taxpayer since the end of World War II. At the time, Americans saw the arrangement necessary to prevent Western Europe from being overrun by Soviet troops stations in the Warsaw Pact. More than three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Americans have finally reconsidered whether they should police squabbles between European nations that bear little impact on our national interests. “President Trump has made abundantly clear, he believes that our European friends must play a bigger role in the future of this continent,” the vice president declared. That will mean Europe paying more for its own defense, like any other nation.

The Best Trump Administration Speech since Warsaw

Vance closed his exhortation for Europeans to reclaim their ancestral rights to freedom of speech and religion with the words Pope John Paul II told his native Poland shortly after his election as pontiff: “Do not be afraid.” In an echo of the Polish pontiff’s address, Vance delivered the best speech delivered by anyone associated with the Trump administration since President Donald Trump’s remarkable address in Warsaw in July 2017. “We put faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, at the center of our lives,” declared President Trump, who culminated the speech by leading the crowd in a chant of, “We want God!”

Conservatives lauded the vice president’s address. “This is American leadership like we’ve never seen before,” said Aaron Baer, president of the Ohio-based Center for Christian Virtue. Douglas Carswell, a former U.K. Conservative Party Member of Parliament, now president of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, called Vance’s address “the most consequential speech in Europe since Thatcher at Bruges. And essentially an updated version of it.”

British Pro-Life Advocates Grateful for Vance’s Speech

Perhaps the highest praise came from the British pro-life advocate Vance mentioned. Adam Smith-Connor told London’s conservative Telegraph newspaper that he was “deeply moved” and “tremendously grateful that the vice-president is showcasing the deterioration of fundamental freedoms in the U.K. and … holding the U.K. accountable for prosecuting innocent people.”

“As a fellow Catholic, I assume like me [Vance] acknowledges that every abortion is a tragedy not just for the baby whose life is lost but also for their family,” said Smith-Connor. “These laws do nothing to protect women,” he added. “They are targeted to go after peaceful expression.”

His attorney, Jeremiah Igunnubole of ADF International, agreed, “The policing of people’s very thoughts in ‘buffer zones’ is the most extreme example of censorship across the West. While crime festers on the streets of England, it’s unbelievable that police time and resources are focused on criminalising peaceful Christians, who simply want to pray.”

“Nobody can deny that we are riding roughshod over freedom of speech and of thought,” added Igunnubole. “I thank VP Vance for issuing this wake-up call to our government — we must restore basic standards of human rights.”

Events seemingly conspired after Vance’s speech to prove him right. Over the weekend, after Isabel Vaugn-Spruce admitted merely to “silently saying some prayers,” police repeatedly asked her to leave the thoughtcrime zone around an abortion facility and refused to tell her why she had to leave. Although it would be a triumph for human rights if police would agree to keep all people away from an abortion facility, the police were not implementing the law that way.

Vance’s speech was book-ended by immigrant terror. The morning he arrived, a suspected radical Islamic “migrant” from Afghanistan plowed through a crowded street of pedestrians in Munich, killing a woman and her two-year-old daughter. On Saturday, a suspected radical Islamic Syrian “migrant” attacked five people in Austria with a knife, killing a 14-year-old boy.

The dangers Vance highlighted are not going anywhere. Thankfully, for the next four years, neither is the Trump-Vance administration’s principled, faithful leadership on these issues.