How JD Vance Betrayed Our Values in Munich

Few Americans would welcome an elected leader from Germany or France who gave a speech on our soil, urging politicians here to stop shunning the Ku Klux Klan. Yet that isn't so far from the message delivered to European officials by Vice President JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 14 -- which understandably provoked outrage among our allies, just as Vance and his boss, President Donald Trump, must have intended.

Instead of addressing Europe's security concerns, such as Trump's impending abandonment of Ukraine to Russian aggression, Vance lectured his audience on domestic issues such as "free speech," immigration and the rejection of ultra-right extremism.

Nobody familiar with Vance, a man known for spreading false stories about migrants eating pets in his home state, could have been surprised to learn that he uttered numerous falsehoods in Munich. In warning against infringements on religious speech, for instance, he claimed that Scotland had intimidated its citizens from privately praying in their own homes. Scottish officials instantly rebutted that absurd lie, which referred to a carefully drafted law creating small "buffer zones" for protesters at abortion clinics.

But the thrust of Vance's remarks represented a brazen attempt to interfere in the German national elections that will occur next week, signaling Trump administration support for the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, party.

"Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters," Vance intoned. "There's no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle or you don't." Although he didn't mention the AfD by name, his inference couldn't have been clearer. Every mainstream political party in Germany has quarantined that party's antisemites and Nazi apologists behind a political firewall for decades, symbolizing their nation's commitment to prevent any resurgence of fascism before it can occur.

And immediately after his appearance, greeted with stony silence from the Munich conference delegates, Vance met with AfD leader Alice Weidel. A banker who has defended her party's worst racists and bigots, while pretending that the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler was "a communist," Weidel then praised Vance's speech as "excellent."

The comparison between the KKK and the AfD is all too appropriate, and not only because the German party echoes the racist rhetoric of thugs in white hoods. Back when Nazi spies in this country spent millions to subvert the United States during the years before World War II, their "German American Bund" forged a secret alliance with the Klan. It was a time when many American politicians, especially in the South, openly described the KKK as a legitimate expression of "the voice of the people." No doubt Vance would have been among them.

Today, the AfD members elected to public office in Germany don't hesitate to exploit anti-immigrant hatred and racial bigotry against both Muslims and Jews. No less an authority than the U.S. State Department -- during the first Trump administration -- repeatedly reprimanded the vile racism of AfD figures in its annual reports on human rights in Germany.

"While senior government leaders continued to condemn anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim sentiment," the State Department noted in 2018, "some members of the federal parliament and state assemblies from the Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party again made anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim statements."

So typical were the poisonous outbursts from AfD officials that they drew the attention of the Anti-Defamation League in the United States, which has described the party as a "radicalized" entity "whose leaders have made antisemitic, anti-Muslim and anti-democratic" statements.

The European leaders offended by Vance reiterated their determination to defend their continent against totalitarians of all varieties -- as did Chancellor Olaf Scholz, whose rebuke reminded everyone why most Germans will have nothing to do with the AfD. "Never again fascism, never again racism, never again aggressive war," he said. "That is why an overwhelming majority in our country opposes anyone who glorifies or justifies criminal National Socialism."

Glorifying Nazism doesn't seem to trouble Vance, Trump or their designated hitman Elon Musk, who has publicly endorsed an AfD victory as "the only hope for Germany." But Vance's interference in German politics is more than a token of the Trump administration's fascist inclinations, as if any more were needed.

Like Trump's urge to back Russian aggression against Ukraine in his "peace" initiative, the White House embrace of German fascists again shows the American president promoting the interests of a foreign power hostile to the United States and the West. What Vance said and did enraged our longtime allies in Europe, but his words aligned perfectly with Russian President Vladimir Putin's Kremlin -- whose assistance to German fascism defiles the sacrifice of all the Russians and Americans who died to defeat Hitler.

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To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.