Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech on February 14 at the Munich Security Conference—in which he criticized European nations for what he described as a “retreat” from free speech principles and an embrace of mass migration—drew disagreement and public rebukes from some foreign leaders,

The AfD’s appeal to Vance, Musk and others in President Trump’s orbit is its shared distrust of E.U. regulations, limits on speech as they apply to the far right, and, perhaps above all, the AfD’s signature opposition to immigration.

Vice President J.D. Vance on delivered a speech at the Munich Security Conference in which he lobbed culture-war criticisms at European allies but said very little about the core security issues facing the continent,

Vice President J.D. Vance called Germany’s free speech restrictions “Orwellian” and said Monday that other European countries should join the U.S. in rejecting such laws.

This may be the year the firewall collapses. The AfD is now polling at about 22 percent nationally and seems destined for a strong showing in Sunday’s federal parliamentary election. No other party will deign to form a coalition with it. But if the AfD performs well enough, it will be impossible to exclude altogether from decision making.

Vance was complaining about how, in Germany, mainstream political parties don’t work with their most extreme right-wing colleagues.

Vance also gave a speech in Munich, hypocritically scolding Europe’s leaders for many actions Trump has engaged in.

You look better than I do, and I’m 40,’ Vance told 97-year-old Abba Naor outside the gates of the former concentration camp.

In April 1928, Joseph Goebbels, later the Third Reich’s chief propagandist, wrote a newspaper essay addressing the question of why the National Socialists, despite being an “anti-parliamentarian party,” would nonetheless compete in that May’s parliamentary elections.

Vance's speech came after he visited Dachau, a Nazi concentration camp, and just before Germany's national elections.

The Munich Security Conference was supposed to be a foreign policy forum. Instead, the vice president lectured Europeans about democracy.