Last week at an event at the European Parliament, an MEP asked me a question that I hear often: “Does JD Vance hate Europe?”
My guess is that he does not hate the Europe of tête de veau in a Rive Gauche brasserie in Paris, of Sunday mass at the Duomo in Milan, of Alpine lakes in Switzerland, or of paintings at the Alte Pinothek in Munich. What he hates is Brussels, or rather, “Brussels”—the symbol of official, bureaucratic Europe, and the dictatorship of managerial liberalism administered from there. He hates the Europe of decrees from the European Commission, of the Digital Services Act circumscribing the access of EU citizens to knowledge and information, and of the EU ruling class refusing to face the overwhelming problem of mass migration, and act to stop it.
In that sense, Vance is on the same side as most of my conservative European friends, for whom “Brussels” is a symbol of a kind of globalist Mordor.
My visit to the parliament last week was my first, and I came away with a greater understanding of why so many European conservatives hate it. The strangest thing is how much the people who run the parliament propagandize for its existence. Everywhere you turn are visual exhortations to act on this or that EU priority, and reminders that what happens inside that building is a very good thing. I’ve been to parliaments all over Europe, and none of them strongarm visitors into approving of their mission and existence.
On the plaza facing the building’s entrance is a selfie spot set up so that young Europeans can be photographed by their friends in an Instagrammable act of European patriotism. “Democracy In Action” reads the frame behind which one is to stand.
A friend pointed out the selfie spot, and said, “That’s Orwellian. The very last thing that happens inside this building is ‘democracy in action.’”
An Englishman in our group pointed out that the arrangement of parliamentarians’ seats in the legislative chamber is in a half-circle—unlike the British parliament, in which opposing parties face each other: “The idea here is achieving consensus. The consensus is always to ratify whatever the European Commission wants.”
Over the course of the morning I spent there I heard the same basic story: that the European Parliament is a large and very expensive (over €2 billion annually) façade of democracy dressing up the transnational autocracy of the European Commission.
In official Washington, a “Kinsley gaffe” is when a politician inadvertently tells the truth and reveals something he did not intend to. Former European commissioner Thierry Breton made this kind of error when he said on French TV earlier this year [that if German voters make a mistake by voting for the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, then Brussels would fix their error just as it did earlier in Romania when the voters chose a populist candidate disfavored by the European establishment.
Breton, the EU’s censorship czar, simply said the quiet part out loud: Brussels is ruled by liberal democrats in theory, but if they have to choose between liberalism and democracy, they will go with liberalism every time, to save the people from themselves.
“If this is not really a democratic body, and it is sucking so much tax money from European citizens, why do Europeans keep voting for it?” I asked someone.
The answer came in various forms, depending on my interlocutor, but it boiled down to this: Because nobody knows what it does, and nobody cares about it enough to protest.
“Here’s the difference between Europeans and Americans,” one of my guides told me. “In Europe, we might see the problem with something, but we sit passive in front of it, unmotivated to do anything. You Americans are usually ready to take action to fix it.”
That morning, I gave a short talk about the importance to democracy of fighting for free speech, and against the onerous restrictions Brussels has placed on it. I found out later that the center-right European People’s Party bloc had initially co-sponsored the event at which I appeared, but withdrew their support at the last minute because of … me.
Specifically, an EPP researcher discovered that I had written critically of gender ideology and of the attempt to redefine the family for the sake of advancing LGBT rights. This alarmed party officials, who did not want to be associated with such so-called bigotry. I learned that an EPP interlocutor told the event organizers that many of those in the EPP, which was founded by Christian Democrats, agree with my positions, but the “optics” of associating with me would be bad.
Such a profile in courage! But then, in my talk earlier to MEPs, I cited something Kamila Bendova once told me. She and her late husband Vaclav were the only Christians in the inner circle of the Charter 77 movement resisting Communism. In 2019, researching my book Live Not By Lies, I asked the former dissident if it was hard for them, as Catholics and conservatives, to work with the unbelievers and leftists within Charter 77.
Not at all! she said. When you are fighting totalitarianism, the most important quality to look for in allies is courage, she explained. Most of their fellow Catholics kept their heads down to avoid controversy. The Bendas felt strongly that they could not remain silent—so they made an alliance with Czechs who didn’t share their faith or their political conservatism, but who did share their commitment to stand up to dictatorship.
In Brussels last week, members of the Patriots bloc stepped in when the EPP ghosted the conference over the revolting presence of a writer and journalist who dares to stand up for traditional Christian values. Please don’t tell Thierry Breton.
I spoke to an old German friend, a Christian Democrat, in the halls of the European Parliament and asked her, “Two years ago, you warned me that the AfD was bad news, and to stay away from them. Do you still feel that way?”
“Not at all,” she said. “There are still parts of the AfD I don’t like, but the crisis in Germany is so bad now that if we have any hope from politics at all, it’s going to come from the AfD.”
In another conversation, a faithful Catholic pointed to a beautiful old Catholic church in the center of Brussels and said he goes to Mass there. “The priest is pious,” said the man, “but only a handful of old people are there.” As we made our way through the city center and crossed the gorgeous Grand Place—the Baroque square that truly is one of Europe’s glories—it was hard to miss the striking number of women in hijabs. There are no reliable statistics on the size of Brussels’s Muslim population, but the best estimates are around 25%. This once-Catholic city will likely be theirs one day.
My taxi driver taking me back to the airport was a Pakistani migrant. Noticing the LGBT Pride Month propaganda splashed everywhere in Europe’s capital, I suggested to the man, obviously a Muslim, that it must be difficult to be religious in this country.
“Yes sir,” he said, modestly. “They start with the gender ideology when the children are very young. My daughters came home from school saying that teacher told them they could be boys. My wife said no, God made you as girls. The children wanted to argue with her.”
“And the schools police the parents,” he went on. “When you go in for the mandatory parent-teacher conferences, they want to know if you, as parents, support transgenderism. I’m embarrassed to tell you that my wife and I lied, and said we do accept it.”
“Why on earth?” I asked.
“Because we have experience in our community with parents who had their kids taken away by the state over this.”
“That’s totalitarian!”
“Yes, sir.”
This totalitarianism is what Brussels—official Europe—wants. To this tweet from earlier in May, the European Commission president appended a video in which she promises to continue fighting for a Europe “where you can be who you are.”
Unless you are a traditional Christian, a social conservative, a nationalist and sovereigntist, a mum and dad who don’t want their children taught in schools that they could be the opposite sex, or any other person who would walk into the European Parliament and feel that they were strangers in a strange land. But then, that’s what so many Europeans across the continent say they feel like as their countries continue to be overrun by mass migration—while their leaders at the national and European level do nothing. “Democracy In Action”? Sure, and one comes away from the dreary Capital of Europe understanding more clearly why, when voters in one European country or another choose candidates who threaten to skunk up the European project, the Bretonnistes of Brussels are more than happy to dissolve the people and elect another.
Brussels feels like an apt symbol of Europe in crisis. It’s broke, woke, politically paralyzed, Islamicizing as it de-Christianizes, and full of empty slogans about its utopian dreams, which few people other than the ruling class, its servants, and janissaries believe.
If Europe—real Europe—is ever going to live free again, Brussels and its monstrous, soul-sucking, money-burning bureaucracy has to die. Alas, the Eurocracy is the only living thing not subject to euthanasia in Belgium.
That said, the beer in that city remains fantastically delicious. So there’s that. Empires come and go, but Tripel Karmeliet is forever.
