Vice President JD Vance said the message in a new docuseries echoed the direction of the Trump administration’s recent actions – and the rest of the world would be wise to take notice.
He offered remarks Tuesday night at an exclusive screening of the film adaptation of author Rod Dreher’s ‘Live Not By Lies’ – first-hand interviews with civilian figures throughout the postwar period who embraced Christian values to blunt totalitarian regimes and efforts from Great Britain to Czechoslovakia when it was part of the Soviet bloc
Vance said he got to know Dreher after the writer asked to interview him about his book, ‘Hillbilly Elegy,’ before the now-vice president was a fixture on the political scene.
Before boarding a flight back to the U.S. from a vacation in the United Kingdom, Vance submitted written answers to Dreher and hoped for the best – his book was hovering around No. 1,000 on the Amazon list. By the time he landed in the U.S., Dreher’s write-up had propelled it to No. 16.
‘Hillbilly Elegy’ later inspired a Ron Howard film, and helped launch Vance into the spotlight as a nationally recognized figure. He would go on to win a seat in the Senate and eventually become vice president.
Dreher’s book and film, which featured interviews with notable dissidents of communism and totalitarianism in the Soviet bloc and even in England today, is a lesson for people of Christian and democratic values not to lose hope and ‘never stop fighting,’ Vance said.
He said that, without the courage 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.’
Without speaking up, people who seek liberty over tyranny cannot defeat the left-wing foreign policy groupthink that has become the ‘animating concept’ in too many Western nations, the vice president added.
‘We’re not going to solve any of these problems unless we have the courage to speak the truth, unless we have the courage to live the truth.’
One thing the traditionalist right struggles with is submitting to despair, Vance said.
‘This idea that because things were not going great in 2020, because things weren’t always going in our way electorally, we would give into this sense that the country that we love, the civilization that we love was always on a negative trajectory,’ he said.
‘And I say that as not a criticism of Rod, because I, myself, have sometimes felt in the lowest moments of American politics that, maybe, this country is just not going in the right direction.’
‘But I think that what we’ve learned over the last few months is that the American people, and I think Western peoples, are a hell of a lot more resilient than our elites give them credit for.’
Vance said ‘Live Not By Lies’ – a phrase itself coined by Soviet exile Alexander Solzhenitsyn in one of his famous oratories – means to maintain the same optimism that is at the root of Judeo-Christian theology and therefore the root of American traditions.
‘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 said.
‘If we keep on fighting and we keep working and we keep on having faith and we keep on pursuing the values that we know are right, I really do believe that we are going to see great things happen… all across the West. I know the president knows this.’
Vance said the message of ‘Live Not By Lies’ has been proven in the first months of the fledgling Trump-Vance administration.
‘We’ve gone from a country where we would harass and threaten and investigate and even arrest pro-life protesters to one where we’re encouraging pro-life activists to do what they can to persuade their fellow Americans,’ Vance said.
The film and book show British pro-life leader Isabel Vaughan-Spruce recounting being arrested essentially for praying outside an abortion clinic, and feature video of London police interrogating her on the street to find out what she was praying about.
‘A couple of months ago, we had social media censorship run amok. We were threatening people’s right of free expression for not saying the things that Silicon Valley technology companies told them to say,’ Vance went on.
‘Now I believe that we have more free speech on the internet today than we’ve probably had in 10 or 15 years. So we’re making progress.’