Vance cozies up to Germany’s far-right, scolds E.U. leaders for not engaging with extremists

Vice President JD Vance has taken his tacit support for Germany’s far-right political party up another troubling notch. On Friday, he met with a leader of the extremist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in Munich — but not before scolding European leaders for what he characterized as an intolerance for differing viewpoints.

Vance, who was on his first international trip as vice president this week, declined a meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and instead privately met with Alice Weidel, the co-leader of AfD, his office confirmed. Late last year, Scholz intentionally failed a vote of no-confidence in the German parliament, forcing a snap election to be held later this month. Weidel, as the AfD’s candidate for chancellor, seems poised to help shape whatever coalition winds up being formed out of the results.

Vance’s meeting with Weidel came one day after he chastised European leaders at the Munich Security Conference for shunning far-right parties in their countries, effectively keeping them from gaining too much power behind a political firewall. Vance singled out German leaders for refusing to engage with the AfD, and said that restrictions on free speech were a bigger threat to the continent than Russian or Chinese actions.

“To many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, 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,” Vance said.

The vice president, who has infamously mocked a subset of women voters in the U.S., went on to say that a democracy could not survive by dismissing voters’ concerns as “invalid or unworthy of even being considered.”

“If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you, nor for that matter is there anything you can do for the American people,” he said.

Vance’s speech, The New York Times reported, was met with stunned silence from the attendees.

Yet as Vance scolded European leaders for stifling free speech and not engaging with “alternative viewpoints,” the Trump administration has continued to rapidly institute changes across the federal government that critics say undermine free expression and punish those whose views it disagrees with.

Those moves include removing references to trans and nonbinary people across government agencies; eliminating federal diversity programs; threatening to deport students who protested Israel’s assault on Gaza; banning books in schools that serve military families; and directing the Federal Communications Commission to revive complaints against media outlets that don’t report on the president favorably.

This article was originally published on MSNBC.com