It has been one year since Vice President JD Vance laid a smackdown on European nations over the issue of free speech. You may remember that last year, when Vance spoke at the Munich Security Conference (MSC), he castigated the countries in attendance for their interpretation of freedom of speech, among other things.
JUST IN: Vice President JD Vance rips European leaders to their faces at the Munich security conference, calls them out for criminalizing free speech.
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) February 14, 2025
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Vance specifically called out the United Kingdom for being the worst of them all.
“I wish I could say that this was a… pic.twitter.com/1bj9TKxP4q
The BBC remembers that Vance told the audience that the “greatest threat the (European) continent faces comes from within,” and that “the audience were visibly stunned.”
Since then, Europe has intensified its enforcement of the oppressive and Orwellian Digital Services Act (DSA), which mandates the censorship of speech over allegations of “illegal content,” “hate speech,” and “disinformation.”
Against this backdrop, Poland's Minister of Foreign Affairs Radosław Sikorski showed up at this year’s MSC and, during a panel discussion, offered his own rebuttal of sorts to what Vance said last year.
NOW - Poland's FM Radosław Sikorski says the U.S. should not impose its free speech values on Europeans: "In the U.S., it's almost absolute... whereas in Europe, for good historical reasons... we believe in freedom of speech with responsibility." pic.twitter.com/QobdTIkqtb
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) February 14, 2026
That’s a lot to “unpack,” as the kids say, but it’s something we need to do in order to better understand where Europe is coming from and just how wrong they are even by their own so-called standards.
We have a genuine civilizational difference on how we understand freedom of speech. In the United States, it's almost absolute. It's almost impossible to win a case of defamation or libel...In Europe, for good historical reasons, for example, in Poland it is forbidden to speak up on behalf of fascism and communism for very good historical reasons, Sikorski said.
Walesa has had a lot to say about free speech over the years. Like the time he said, “When you silence people, you weaken your own country.” Or when he said, “We wanted freedom, and freedom includes the right to criticize.” Or that time he shared, “Censorship is the enemy of truth.” And finally, when he said, “Freedom of speech is the foundation of every democracy.”
Listening to Sikorski, it feels like he either forgot about Walesa’s words, or he wants us to do so.
Using Sikorski’s logic, and that of the people who made it illegal to praise fascism and communism, if you allow people to openly praise that thing you don’t like, your own values and systems of governing aren’t capable of mounting an effective defense. Therefore, you must suppress these things.
To arrive at these conclusions, you have to ignore the timeless messages that Lech Wałęsa shared: that you cannot have freedom or democracy if you do not allow people to say what you dislike; that you will likely lose the truth once you start down the path of governmental censorship.
We believe in freedom of speech with responsibility. And what happened here a year ago was that the vice president of the United States was telling us that our notion of free speech was censorship, and I just don’t accept that. So, the difficulty we now have is that one side of the Atlantic is trying to impose on the other side, Sikorski added.
For an American to read that or to hear that, it would be easy to misunderstand where “freedom of speech with responsibility” comes from. At first, it sounds like a trite justification for the unjustifiable denial of free speech rights, but the term does have a history.
Viktor Frankl was a Holocaust survivor and the author of the classic Man’s Search for Meaning. He was held in Nazi concentration camps, includubf Auschwitz (in Sikorski’s Poland) and Dachau (in Germany, not that far from where Sikorski made his comments) between 1942 and 1945.
Frankl said two things about “responsibleness” that may provide necessary context for Sikorski’s comments. First, he said, “Freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.” And second, he stated, “Responsibleness is the very essence of human existence.”
When Frankl talked of “responsibleness,” he was saying that with freedom comes responsibility – not responsibility in the form of following rules or being prepared to take blame – but something deeper. He was talking about something that must come from within each of us and cannot be imposed on us. If we want freedom, we must personally accept responsibility for how we handle that freedom. This is a natural counterbalance he often described.
What Frankl did not mean was that if the government grants you a freedom – like free speech – it should then assign certain responsibilities and conditions for the exercise of that freedom.
When Sikorski described “freedom of speech with responsibility,” he was jumping to the wrong conclusion about what Frankl intended. Sikorski doesn’t see free speech as a right, but as a privilege granted by government that can be taken away by government. He sees free speech “with responsibility” as a compliance issue, not a freedom issue.
Last year, when Vance took the whole of Europe out to the woodshed to make the point that it’s not government’s job to interfere with free speech rights, that wasn’t absolutism. He was simply recognizing that there are certain limits to government power – such as censorship – in a healthy democracy.
Sikorski heard that and now says that when Vance was telling Europe that its “notion of free speech was censorship,” he didn’t accept that.
That’s where Sikorski totally exposed his ignorance on the very issue of free speech as a human right. When you advocate for controls and limits on speech, that is by its very nature censorship. It doesn’t matter what your history is or your stated intent now. It’s still censorship. If you believe in the meaning of words and logic itself, you have to accept that. But Sikorski and the rest of Europe do not.
This is the mindset that enables Europe to slide from censoring speech on fears over the potential for a return of another Hitler or Stalin, to arresting and censoring a man who’s praying to himself in public over the loss of his unborn son. Only a European could miss the absurdity of this and the potential peril that comes with it. When you suppress the populace in the name of combatting fascism, you become that thing you hate.
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