Vice President JD Vance stated that the message in a new docuseries reflected the course of recent Trump administration activities and that the rest of the world would be smart to pay attention.
At a private showing of the film adaptation of author Rod Dreher’s “Live Not By Lies,” first-hand interviews with civilian people across the postwar era who embraced Christian values to blunt totalitarian regimes and efforts from Great Britain to Czechoslovakia when it was part of the Soviet bloc, he spoke Tuesday night.
Vance claimed he came to know Dreher when the author requested to speak with him regarding his book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” before the now-vice president became a mainstay on the political stage.
Vance sent written responses to Dreher and wished for the best before flying back to the United States from a holiday in the United Kingdom; his book was floating about No. 1,000 on the Amazon list. Dreher’s write-up had pushed it to No. 16 by the time he arrived in the United States.
“Hillbilly Elegy” eventually motivated a Ron Howard movie and allowed Vance to rise into the public eye as a nationally known person. He would later become vice president and obtain a Senate seat.
Vance said Dreher’s book and film, which included interviews with prominent dissidents of communism and authoritarianism in the Soviet bloc and even in England today, is a reminder for Christians and democrats not to lose faith and “never stop fighting.”
He claimed that unless one has the bravery to act in the face of government-compelled groupthink, the traditionalist West cannot “reclaim our civilization… rebuild prosperity and opportunity [or] rebuild the kind of society where we teach children the important virtues and skills to thrive; as opposed to trying to tear our kids down, which is what I think our education system does all too often.”
The vice president said that without speaking out, those who want freedom over tyranny cannot overcome the left-wing foreign policy groupthink that has become the “animating idea” in too many Western countries.
Unless we have the bravery to say the truth and live the truth, we will not fix any of these issues.
Vance noted that one area where the conservative right stumbles is in surrendering to despair.
“This notion that because things weren’t going well in 2020, because things weren’t always going in our favor electorally, we would give into this feeling that the country we love, the civilization we love was always on a negative trajectory,” he continued.
Rod is not to be criticized for this, but I have occasionally thought in the lowest point of American politics that perhaps our nation is simply not heading in the correct way.
However, I believe what we have discovered over the past several months is that the American people—and I believe Western people as well—are a heck of a lot more resilient than our elites let them credit for.
Vance stated that “Live Not By Lies”—a term first used by Soviet exile Alexander Solzhenitsyn in one of his renowned speeches—means to keep the same optimism at the foundation of Judeo-Christian religion and thus the foundation of American heritage.
“You have Western peoples calling out their governments pushing back on issues like migration and religious freedom in a way that we haven’t seen in 20 or 30 years – if we’ve ever seen it,” he added.
I truly think that if we continue to fight, work, have faith, and pursue the ideals we know are good, we will witness wonderful events all throughout the West. The president is aware of this.
Vance claimed the first few months of the young Trump-Vance government had shown the theme of “Live Not By Lies.”
Vance remarked, “From a nation where we would harass, threaten, investigate, and even arrest pro-life demonstrators to one where we are encouraging pro-life activists to do what they can to influence their fellow Americans, we have come to a country where we are encouraging pro-life activists to do what they can to influence their fellow Americans.”
The movie and book include footage of London police questioning Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, a British pro-life advocate, on the street to learn what she was praying for and show her getting arrested practically for praying outside an abortion facility.
A few months ago, social media censorship ran rampant. We were endangering people’s right to free expression for not voicing the things Silicon Valley tech firms instructed them to say, Vance continued.
I now think that the internet offers greater free expression than it has had in probably 10 or 15 years. That means we are advancing.
