During the Munich Security Conference last week, Vance accused the leaders of Britain, Germany, and other allies of censoring free speech, “shutting down media, shutting down elections, or shutting people out of the political process.”

Although the vice president’s speech drew swift censure from enraged European politicians, Truss publicly rose to his defense on Thursday. 

Vance “is right,” the former British leader said in a post to social media. “Europe’s governments — especially Britain’s — are treating George Orwell’s 1984 like an instruction manual.”

Truss also disclosed that she is establishing “a new free speech media network, with some help from our American allies.”

The once-prime minister revealed further details of the network during a speech later that afternoon in the United States at the Conservative Political Action Conference, in which she said she wanted to enlist X owner Elon Musk’s help in targeting the British “deep state.”

Musk has long criticized Britain’s speech laws, which are among the strictest in the West. The British government has demanded that social media companies, including Musk’s X, be held accountable for information deemed harmful or false posted on their platforms.

“The U.K. has become a police state,” Musk said last November in response to news that a British citizen had been arrested for livestreaming a protest.

During his Munich speech on Feb. 14, Vance criticized Romania for canceling its presidential election, slammed the British government for arresting a man silently praying outside an abortion facility, and called out Brussels, where “EU commissars warn citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest the moment they spot what they’ve judged to be, quote, ‘hateful content.’”

The vice president also targeted Germany for prohibiting populist parties on both the Left and the Right from participating in the Munich conference and criticized Sweden for “distributing letters to citizens whose houses lay within so-called safe access zones, warning them that even private prayer within their own homes may amount to breaking the law.”

“In Britain, and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat,” Vance said. “To many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and 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.”

Vance was condemned by European establishment leaders following his remarks.

The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said at the Munich event that Vance “was trying to pick a fight with us” with his speech. Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook, a former head of the German Council on Foreign Relations, told DW that Vance’s speech was riddled “with conspiracy theories, misinformation, and the demand that these misrepresentations be taken seriously.”

And German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said that “if I understood [Vance] correctly, he is comparing conditions in parts of Europe with those in authoritarian regimes.”

“That is unacceptable, and it is not the Europe and not the democracy in which I live and am currently campaigning,” Pistorius said.

HOW ELON MUSK HELPED WILL TRUMP BACK TO THE WHITE HOUSE

Vance, for his part, called on Europe to renege on strict laws governing speech, saying they undermined democracy.

“To believe in democracy is to understand that each of our citizens has wisdom and has a voice. And if we refuse to listen to that voice, even our most successful fights will secure very little,” Vance said. “Europeans, the people have a voice. European leaders have a choice. And my strong belief is that we do not need to be afraid of the future.”