OPINION — “This December, Romania straight up cancelled the results of a presidential election based on the flimsy suspicions of an intelligence agency and enormous pressure from its continental neighbors. Now, as I understand it, the argument was that Russian disinformation had infected the Romanian elections. But I’d ask my European friends to have some perspective. You can believe it’s wrong for Russia to buy social media advertisements to influence your elections. We certainly do. You can condemn it on the world stage, even. But if your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.”
That was Vice President JD Vance speaking last Friday at the Munich Security Conference, an annual gathering of European policy and national security leaders.
Vance’s speech has drawn widespread criticism for its attack on U.S. European allies, such as when the newly-elected American Vice President said they were “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.”
However, I want to focus on another element of Vance’s 20-minute talk, and the number of inaccurate facts he used to justify his controversial statements about the Europeans.
I do this because I also believe false information is a characteristic part of many of President Donald Trump’s pronouncements, and also a feature in statements by others in his new administration.
Vance’s Romania story
Let’s start with Vance’s statement above, about the cancellation and rescheduling of the Romanian presidential election.
Romanian Călin Georgescu, an obscure far-right nationalist, unexpectedly became the favorite to win the country’s presidency after the November 24 first round of voting. The Romanian Constitutional Court approved a second round for December 8, with Georgescu running against reformist Elena Lasconi, the leader of the Save Romania Union party.
However, the Court reversed itself and cancelled the runoff on December 6, citing a newly-declassified intelligence report from Romania’s internal intelligence services that said “cyber attacks with the aim of influencing the correctness of the electoral process” had taken place in the first round and, separately, that a “candidate for the presidential elections benefited from a massive exposure due to the preferential treatment that the TikTok platform granted him by not marking him as a political candidate.”
Among the intelligence disclosures was a report that a single individual had donated the equivalent of $1.05 million for Georgescu’s electoral campaign on the TikTok platform, along with similar messages by paid influencers in favor of Georgescu, who were said to be Russian fronts.
This effort, which was well-publicized in Romania and worldwide, was far greater than the “few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country” that Vance referred to in Munich. Last December in the U.S., Secretary of State Antony Blinken publicly stated that “Romanian authorities are uncovering a Russian effort, large in scale and well-funded, to influence the recent presidential election.”
Vance’s Scotland story
Vance, in another example cited in his speech, said he took issue with “our very dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons in particular in the crosshairs.”
“This last October,” Vance said, “the Scottish government began distributing letters to citizens whose houses lay within so-called safe access zones [to abortion clinics], warning them that even private prayer within their own homes may amount to breaking the law.”
It turns out Vance was wrong. A Scottish government spokesperson said: “The vice president’s claim is incorrect. Private prayer at home is not prohibited within safe access zones and no letter has ever suggested it was.” It is not clear where Vance got his information. Scottish law states that the actions are banned if they are likely to cause alarm or distress to someone accessing abortion services. Silent prayer in a home which caused no distress and alarm to others would not fall under this category.
Other stories, other falsehoods
Vance also said that in Brussels, “EU (European Union) Commission commissars warned citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest the moment they spot what they’ve judged to be ‘hateful content.’”
It’s unclear where Vance found that EU Commission warning about shutting down social media by connecting “hateful content” to “civil unrest.” Social media platforms under the EU Digital Standards Act can be shut down, but only by getting a judge and using “due process” to order a temporary restriction. The EU Commission can bypass a judge in an “urgent situation,” but only after following its own “due process” and for only a limited time.
Vance also spoke of a case in Sweden where he said, “Two weeks ago, the government convicted a Christian activist for participating in Koran burnings that resulted in his friend’s murder.” Vance continued, “As the judge in his case chillingly noted, Sweden’s laws to supposedly protect free expression do not, in fact, grant, and I’m quoting, ‘a free pass to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief.’”
What Vance left out was that the “friend” who was killed, Salwan Monika, was a declared aetheist, not a Christian activist, who had participated in not one but four public Koran burnings in 2023. At the time of the burnings, Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson accused outsiders of exploiting the country’s freedom of expression laws to spread hate, and “dragging Sweden into international conflicts.”
Monika and Salwan Najem were convicted in January of not just burning Korans, but also creating a series of demonstrations that violated a law prohibiting “agitation against an ethnic group.” On February 3, in a Stockholm court, Judge Göran Lundahl gave Najem a suspended sentence and small fine.
I must add, however, that the full quote of Judge Lundahl was far from “chilling,” as Vance described it. After the verdict was delivered, Lundahl said: “There is a great deal of scope within the framework of freedom of expression to be critical of a religion in a factual and valid debate. At the same time, expressing one’s opinion about religion does not give one a free pass to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief.”
Towards the end of his talk in Munich, Vance said, “Speaking up and expressing opinions isn’t election interference, even when people express views outside your own country and even when those people are very influential. And trust me, I say this with all humor, if American democracy can survive ten years of [Swedish climate activist] Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.”
Vance was talking about Musk’s critiques of British and French leaders, but more so of Musk’s support for Germany’s far right AfD Party in the face of this coming Sunday’s federal election for members of the Bundestag. Given that Musk is now a virtual U.S. government official and a well-publicized Trump intimate and adviser, it was unprecedented for him to appear, however briefly, via video at the AfD Party campaign launch meeting in late January and call the AfD the “best hope for Germany.”
Musk and the facts
Musk, I will say, is among those who has passed out false information, but shows no embarrassment in doing so.
For example, in the Oval Office with Trump on February 11, a reporter asked Musk about his X post in January referencing $50 million in USAID money going to Gaza for condoms. The reporter pointed out that fact checkers had found the condoms were for Mozambique not Gaza, and the purpose was for protection against HIV – and would he correct this false information?”
Not pausing, Musk responded, “Some of the things I say will be incorrect and should be corrected. Nobody is going to bat 1,000. We’ll make mistakes. I’m not sure we should be sending $50 million worth of condoms anywhere, frankly. I’m not sure that’s something Americans would be really excited about. That’s really an enormous number of condoms when you think about it. But if it went to Mozambique instead of Gaza, it’s not as bad, but still why are we doing it?”
The Gaza condom false story has had a long run within the Trump world.
It started on January 28, during White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s first press conference. She was describing why USAID activities had been halted and cited that “DOGE [Musk’s group] and OMB also found that there was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza. That is a preposterous waste of taxpayer money.”
Musk immediately Had put it on X commenting, “Tip of the iceberg.”
The next day, after a bill signing, Trump said of the search for waste, fraud and abuse, “In that process, we identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas.”
Meanwhile, the AP reported. “Official figures showed the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) had not provided any condom aid to the entire Middle East from the 2021 fiscal year through the 2023 fiscal year.”
On February 3, during one of his informal press conferences after Executive Order signings, Trump expanded the story again saying, “He’s found [meaning Musk] 100 — think of it, $100 million on condoms to Hamas, condoms to Hamas, and many other things that are frankly even more ridiculous.”
It turns out that Mozambique did not get $50 million for condoms, either. According to CNN, no condoms went to Mozambique in 2023, although it received about $5.4 million worth of non-condom contraceptives that year from USAID.
Trump himself, as shown above, is willing to pass on false information or make claims without providing facts. During the February 11 Oval Office meeting with Musk he referred to “tens of billions that we’ve already found” in fraud and abuse, but gave no facts to support it.
He also twice mentioned “a man with a contract for three months and it ends, but they keep paying him for 20 years because nobody ends the contract. You have a lot of that.” Again, no facts.
Back in college, I wrote a paper for a European Diplomatic History class on Joseph Goebbels, Adolph Hitler’s propaganda chief. I used a quote attributed to Goebbels that went, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie.
Goebbels continued, “It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” We are, I believe, in the first stage of Goebbels’ quote. Stage two, repressing dissent, has not yet come.
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