Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) compared Vice President JD Vance’s recent speech at the Munich Security Conference to language used by Hilter.
“He was talking about ‘the enemy within.’ This is some of the same language that Hitler used to justify the Holocaust,” Moulton said during an interview on MSNBC.
Moulton said that following the speech, Vance visited the “old Nazi Party headquarters in Munich to meet with the leader” of what he claimed was the “modern-day Neo-Nazi party in Germany.”
“I think many of us Americans just felt totally embarrassed as VP Vance delivered really not a speech but a condescending lecture about the fundamental tenets of democracy to our European allies, and what was most remarkable is just how hypocritical this speech was,” he added.
Vance declared during his speech that the “threat from within” is the “retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.”
“Free speech, I fear, is in retreat and in the interests of comedy, my friends, but also in the interest of truth, I will admit that sometimes the loudest voices for censorship have come not from within Europe, but from within my own country, where the prior administration threatened and bullied social media companies to censor so-called misinformation,” Vance explained.
CBS News anchor Margaret Brennan similarly suggested that free speech is linked to the Holocaust.
Brennan stated that Vance was “standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide. He met with the head of a political party that has far-right views and some historic ties to extreme groups. The context of that was changing the tone of it. And you know that.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio asserted that free speech “was not used to conduct a genocide,” explaining that “genocide was conducted by an authoritarian Nazi regime that happened to also be genocidal because they hated Jews and they hated minorities and they had a list of people they hated, but primarily the Jews.” He noted that Brennan’s statement was “not an accurate reflection of history.”
