Veep Vance Tells Germany: “Vote Nazi”

His speech is like something out of The Producers

Author

Matt Davis
February 15, 2025

Vice President JD Vance has stunned a security conference in Germany by urging European countries, and Germany especially, to accept “extreme parties.”

The West Village: a nice setting to read a horrible news story.

The piece by Jim Tankersley, Steven Erlanger and David E. Sanger reads like parody. It is jaw-dropping.

Vance “singled out his German hosts, telling them to drop their objections to working with a party that has often revealed in banned Nazi slogans and has been shunned from government as a result.”

Parts of the “alternative for Germany” or AFD party have been deemed extremist by German intelligence but Vance told the gathering “there is no room for firewalls.” Groups like this are “legitimate vessels of voter resentment,” Vance said. Google the AFD if you dare. Then reflect on what that actually means.

Vance’s messaging is reminiscent of the anti-democratic, anti-establishment messaging “Russia has pumped onto social media in an effort to destabilize democratic politics in America and Europe,” the story notes.

The Germans responded with fury. The German Defense Minister Boris deviated from his planned remarks to rebuke Vance. There are elections next week in Germany.

“If I understood him correctly he is comparing parts of Europe with authoritarian regimes—this is not acceptable,” Pistorius said. “This is not the Europe, the democracy, where I live.”

Here’s the most mindblowing part of the story.

“Particularly since the start of the war in Ukraine, European intelligence agencies have raised alarms about what they consider to be a systematic effort by Russia at mass disinformation and propaganda, often using fake social media accounts to sow division and doubt about democratic systems.”

Vance rebuked that idea using language that sounds parroted from Russia.

“It looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet era words like misinformation and disinformation, who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion or, god forbid, vote a different way, or even worse, win an election,” he told a largely stony audience.

This story alarms me. I realize most of us are too exhausted to read the newspaper right now for this very reason but it seems to me that Vance is acting as an obvious vessel for Russian interests abroad. That is so appalling and so shocking that we should all be outraged and disgusted by it. And yet Trump responded by saying he had heard Vance’s speech and that it was about “free speech.”

That’s not what it was about. It was about undermining democracy in Europe and celebrating Nazism. That a majority of Americans voted for this is also utterly crazy, and I would urge you to thrust this story in the faces of your Trump-supporting friends today and to ask them whether they’re ashamed to be associated with this kind Of thing. I don’t expect them to say much, really. But when you allow something like this to be said without challenging it, then it grows more powerful. When you point out that a man we used to mock for fancying his furniture is now in Germany giving lectures about the value of voting for the Nazis? Well. I hope they feel a bit like they maybe… bought a lemon? The sad thing is I bet some of them might even be pleased. But I do believe that a majority of Americans still repudiate nazism. Right?

Matt Davis lives in Manhattan with his wife and kid.