Vance came, Vance spoke, they cried

Most, if not all, of you already know about VP Vance's speech at the annual Munich Security Conference the other day and the immediate fulminations on the part of his targets in response to it.

What many, if not most, of you may not have yet had the pleasure of being apprised of is one particular reaction to his speech: that of the Chairman of the MSC, a gentleman by the name of Christoph Heusgen.

Here's Mark Steyn, in the inimitable style that I could never hope to duplicate, setting the scene:

For one thing, Vance was speaking at the MSC. The Mark Steyn Club? Ah, sadly not. This was supposed to be the 'Munich Security Conference', which is the western world's most prestigious beano on "international security", where heads of government and the like are supposed to identify "emerging global threats" so that Bill Kristol and David Milliband can get their updated funding applications in to USAid. Yet, instead of volunteering the next bunch of illiterate goatherds who'll get to spend twenty years kicking Nato's butt, the Vice President argued that the greatest threat to Europe came from Europe's leaders - and totally ruined the weekend for everybody else. The court eunuchs of the elite "international security" media treated this as the greatest faux pas on the public-speaking circuit since my late Spectator colleague Auberon Waugh, invited to give a speech in Senegal, misheard the desired topic - "press freedom" - and so landed in Dakar and delivered an address on 'breast feeding'. Decades later, the author of Hillbilly Elegy landed in Munich, and had the affrontery to deliver an elegy to all the non-hillbillies in the room. They did not take it well. In his concluding remarks, the MSC chairman declared that it's his party and he'll cry if he wants to. You would cry too if Vance happened to you: ...

Yup. The poor chap actually ... cried. So emotionally discombobulated was he that he couldn't even continue reading whatever prepared remarks were to follow "Let me conclude, ..." and instead gingerly stepped off the stage, whereupon he was (as Mr. Steyn hilariously puts it) "comforted by one of those Aryan hotties who should be on the endangered-species list in the New Germany." (Note: video clip thereof provided in the above-linked piece.)

Good grief.

But wait, there's more!

Remember that time, back in 2019, when Trump delivered a speech at the UN, during which he remarked that "Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course"? And do you remember the camera panning to the German delegation's mocking expressions? Well, guess who was Germany's ambassador to the UN at the time, smirking dismissively? Yup, you guessed it, none other than the aforementioned Herr Heusgen himself.

From crowing to crying. What a difference a few years makes.

And lest anyone be tempted to shed even a single figurative — let alone literal — tear in sympathy with Herr Heusgen's fragile state of mind, let me note that he is widely considered to have been the "most influential foreign policy and security adviser" to the chief architect of Germany's (and, in general, Western Europe's) disastrous immigration policy: Angela Merkel. The very immigration policy the latest "fruit" of which splashed onto the news "pages" the very day before the conference, in the very town in which it was held: "Suspect in Munich vehicle ramming shouted 'Allahu Akbar' to police after attack: Prosecutor". Note: 39 people injured, a mother and her 2-year-old child died.

The very immigration policy which Vance spotlighted during his speech:

And of all the pressing challenges that the nations represented here face, I believe there is nothing more urgent than mass migration. Today, almost one in five people living in this country moved here from abroad. That is, of course, an all time high. It’s a similar number, by the way, in the United States, also an all time high. The number of immigrants who entered the EU from non-EU countries doubled between 2021 and 2022 alone. And of course, it’s gotten much higher since. And we know the situation. It didn’t materialise in a vacuum. It’s the result of a series of conscious decisions made by politicians all over the continent, and others across the world, over the span of a decade. We saw the horrors wrought by these decisions yesterday in this very city. And of course, I can’t bring it up again without thinking about the terrible victims who had a beautiful winter day in Munich ruined. Our thoughts and prayers are with them and will remain with them. But why did this happen in the first place? It’s a terrible story, but it’s one we’ve heard way too many times in Europe, and unfortunately too many times in the United States as well. An asylum seeker, often a young man in his mid-20s, already known to police, rammed a car into a crowd and shatters a community. Unity. How many times must we suffer these appalling setbacks before we change course and take our shared civilisation in a new direction? No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants. But you know what they did vote for? In England, they voted for Brexit. And agree or disagree, they voted for it. And more and more all over Europe, they are voting for political leaders who promise to put an end to out-of-control migration...

No tears, let me note in closing, sprang forth from Herr Heusgen's eyes at any point before, during, or after, as he opened the conference and called upon the audience to rise and offer their 10 seconds' worth of "thoughts and solidarity" to the victims of last Thursday's Munich massacre.

Ugh.