ICYMI: Ranking Member Raskin Delivers Remarks at Chatham House Calling on the Defenders of Democracy Across the World to Stand Together Against Rising Authoritarianism
Washington, D.C. (September 2, 2025)—ICYMI, on July 30, 2025, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, delivered remarks at Chatham House in London regarding the pressing need for transnational solidarity to defend global democracy against authoritarian threats.
Below are Ranking Member Raskin’s remarks, as delivered.
WATCH Ranking Member Raskin’s speech.
Well, thank you for such a lovely introduction, Bronwen. I’m delighted to be here. I just wanted to say at the beginning, never having been here before, that Chatham House rules. I’m very grateful to you, to Max Yoelli, and Andrew Payne for this wonderful invitation. And I think I have a couple of my colleagues who have come with me on this CODEL who are here, including Congressman Lou Correa from California, and Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett is in the house somewhere.
So, I am especially grateful to be here after hearing Vice President JD Vance’s lecture at the Munich Security Conference on Valentine’s Day 2025, because it wasn’t clear to me that any American politician would ever be invited back to speak in Europe after that one. So, I’m going to do my best today to try to answer his very instructive provocation and to defend and recover our historic alliance for democracy and freedom on Earth, and at least not to aggressively insult my hosts and the people and values of Europe.
Now, we just visited Churchill’s war room, which was really extraordinary—to see where the war cabinet met. And Churchill observed during the war that the beating heart of the Anglo-American alliance is the hatred of dictatorship. But it took JD Vance no more than the first two minutes of his speech to whitewash the world’s top autocratic dictatorships and to train his rhetorical fire on our European allies, proclaiming that the threat that worries him is “Not Russia, it’s not China” it’s the “threat from within,” which he described as Europe’s “retreat” from our historic free speech values. He then proceeded to give a completely distorted reading of the state of free speech in Europe, which is obviously galaxies away from the state of free speech in Russia or China. If you have any doubts about that, just ask the family of Alexei Navalny or the people of Tibet.
But Vance’s bizarre framing of our security situation invited the world to ignore Vladimir Putin, the former KGB chief behind the curtain, and his bloody invasion of Ukraine which threatens to destroy the rules-based international order that Europe and the democratic nations have fought to sustain since World War II. His framing also invited the world to ignore the profound implications of Chinese attacks on freedom in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and Tibet, and its raids on our security, technology, and intellectual property.
The trivialization of the stakes of our fight with the authoritarian world has a clear political logic to it and is part of a clear political program. Vance, Trump, and their MAGA allies are aggressively promoting far-right parties in Europe like Alternative für Deutschland, Reform UK and Rassemblement National Français, the authoritarian partners and kindred spirits of Vladimir Putin. This new authoritarian internationale seeks to align the United States with Russia and China against the U.K., France, Germany, and our real democratic allies in Europe.
Putin has used social media and his Internet Research Agency to inject racial, ethnic, and ideological poison into the political discourse of American democracy and other Western democracies. But Vice President Vance remains essentially passive and silent when it comes to defending America against Putin’s campaign of disinformation, destabilization, and sabotage. As long as Putin’s interference is designed to help MAGA, then Vance sees no evil and he hears no evil. He and Putin share a common enemy: strong liberal democracy. The Kremlin’s propaganda and disinformation campaign has been so successful in our country that last Congress, two leading Republicans—one the chair of the House Intelligence Committee and one the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee—expressed alarm about how the Kremlin’s talking points were regularly parroted and amplified on the floor of the House of Representatives by their own conference members in the MAGA wing of the Republican Party.
Vance has no time to spare on China’s crushing of political freedom and dissent in Hong Kong or among the Uyghurs and the Tibetans. Here, he follows President Trump, who calls China’s President Xi “smart, brilliant, everything perfect.” In his first term, Trump assured President Xi that sending Uyghurs to forced labor camps was “exactly the right thing to do” and that violently cracking down on pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong was acting “very responsibly.” To Vance, China’s efforts to repress and torture its own people, and its no-holds barred approach to strategic competition against the United States are trivial and irrelevant matters—at least compared to the gigantic threat he perceives in the European democracies’ efforts to balance their traditional commitment to wide-open political free speech with their work to oppose the dangerous content proliferating online, including child pornography, business scams, frauds, and rip-offs, and foreign propaganda and disinformation.
Even on their own terms, Vance’s key examples of Europe’s “woke” thought crimes against freedom are pathetically weak. His main evidence focuses on the controversial Romanian decision to postpone a presidential election in the face of massive Russian spending and social media subversion on behalf of an ultra-right neo-Nazi candidate. While Vance is delighted to lecture Romania about postponing its election, he proposes no plan to mobilize the free world against the Russian sabotage and propaganda which prompted the postponement in the first place, and which should be the main concern of the United States.
Moreover, when you think about it, it’s terribly odd that Vance even brought up the matter of canceling a presidential election, given that’s exactly what Donald Trump tried to do after he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden by more than 7 million votes, 306 to 232 in the Electoral College. The violent attack on the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, was the culmination of Trump’s plan to execute a political coup by getting Vice President Pence to reject the electoral college votes of tens of millions of people in several major swing states and then throw the election into the House of Representatives, despite the fact that more than 60 federal and state courts had already rejected every claim of electoral fraud which had been advanced by Donald Trump.
That lawless coup attempt was accompanied by a violent mob riot incited by Trump, a riot which wounded, disfigured and disabled more than 140 police officers and interrupted the peaceful transfer of power for the very first time in the history of the United States and that includes the Civil War. You would think that Vance might have the good judgment not to raise the electoral issue given that the only reason there was a vacancy on Trump’s ticket for him to fill his running mate in 2024 was because Trump’s mob tried to “hang Mike Pence,” who was driven out of the Capitol by the Proud Boys and driven off the ticket by Trump’s unrepentant anger and contempt for Vice President Pence’s old-fashioned devotion to the rule of law, which we continue to salute him for.
But for Vance, Britain’s decision to fine one prayerful protester for violating a buffer zone around an abortion clinic in England as he lamented the abortion that he and his girlfriend had procured two decades before is justification for declaring that our European allies have abandoned their centuries-old commitment to human rights in a way obviously more grating to him than anything taking place by Russia or China. Never mind that the U.S. Supreme Court in Hill v. Colorado in 2010 upheld precisely such a buffer zone around abortion clinics in America. And we can certainly share some insights about evolving First Amendment jurisprudence in our Supreme Court about this question with our friends and allies in England, something our congressional delegation actually was attempting to do yesterday when one of the putative champions of free speech, presumably an ally of Vice President Vance in the UK, shouted me down and abruptly terminated our dialogue which was about freedom of speech.
But the truth is that Vance’s determination to conjure up and denounce “woke” thought control by bureaucrats in Europe is nothing more than an Orwellian projection of everything that Donald Trump has been doing in America. With Trump and his team, you know, every ideological accusation is an ideological confession, and repression is not their target, it is their agenda.
In just a half-year of the new Administration, we’ve seen sweeping political thought control measures imposed in the United States. Trump has gutted the civil service, sacking thousands of career, non-partisan, professional civil servants for doing their jobs and staying faithful to the Constitution, to science, and the rule of law. He’s imposed his will on media companies and private universities and forced them to accept government minders and spies to ensure their compliance with the Administration’s political orthodoxies. He’s attacked lawyers and law firms for representing clients and causes he doesn’t like. And he’s attacked federal judges for making rulings that he opposes, and they call for the impeachment of the dozens of federal judges who have struck down his incessant lawless executive orders. He’s purged libraries of books that he considers politically incorrect, like 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s interesting to me that they always insist on censoring the books about censorship. He’s rewritten history at displays in museums and national parks in totally Orwellian fashion. He has sent masked federal agents in unmarked vans without arrest warrants to round up and deport lawful permanent residents and foreign students on visas simply for writing editorials or attending rallies he disagrees with.
One of Trump’s first actions was to dismiss a dozen career civil service protected, experienced federal criminal prosecutors at the Department of Justice simply because they had worked on the criminal investigation and prosecution of the violent white supremacists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6th.
It’s hard to imagine a more dangerous assault on the rule of law and political freedom than to fire prosecutors for doing their jobs, especially when the job they’re doing is to prosecute a violent political insurrection supporting a coup against the government. But the firing of these prosecutors was preceded by Trump’s shocking first Executive Order in which he pardoned or released all 1,600 convicted J6 insurrectionists. He described the extremists who assaulted our officers and tried to overthrow our constitutional order as “political prisoners” and “hostages,” assuming we would just forget that a hostage is someone who’s been illegally abducted by a criminal or terrorist organization and held for ransom. Trump wiped away the felons’ prison sentences and forgave all their fines and restitution payments still owed to their victims. With this sweeping use of the pardon power, not only did Trump seek to sanitize MAGA’s bloody attack on American democracy, but he created a functional private militia for his use going forward, a reserve army of extremists ready to “stand back and stand by” for future street fighting engagements against the rule of law and Trump-designated political enemies.
Trump has weaponized the machinery of government against the media, any media that he believes are not acting in his political interests or are in his scopes for a financial shakedown. His recent $15 billion lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal for reporting about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein is devoid of any merit, of course, but it’s a key part of the campaign to bring the free press to heel, which has merged with his enterprising personal corruption. Amazingly, he’s figured out a way to use the bureaucratic power of the Federal Communications Commission (the FCC), as leverage to shake down major news organizations to the tune of millions of dollars paid to him as settlement for completely bogus private nuisance lawsuits, which he files against the media—something that no other president has done in the history of our country.
Consider the 60 Minutes case. In October of last year, Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS and its parent company, Paramount, because he thought that its interview with Kamala Harris made her look too good. That was the sum and substance of his complaint. Not only did he personally sue CBS, he got the FCC to hold up the proposed merger of its parent company, Paramount, with Sky Dance Media. And only after Paramount agreed to settle his personal lawsuit and pay $16 million directly to Trump’s presidential library did the FCC grant permission for the merger to proceed.
This $16 million tribute was not the only concession he extracted. As part of the deal, Paramount was required to eliminate any programs advancing diversity, equity, or inclusion and to accept a “minder,” a spy essentially, empowered to monitor and report perceived anti-Trump bias in CBS’s reporting and editorial decisions. That’s a blatant violation of the First Amendment, whose core meaning is to prevent administrative prior restraints on journalism. Imagine how the MAGA forces would react if President Obama or Biden had required newspapers and TV stations to accept government-mandated monitors installed in their offices.
These outrageous attacks on the press are actually surpassed in severity by Trump’s full-blown assault on academic freedom, deploying executive orders denouncing specific universities for alleged antisemitism—while harboring and coddling antisemites, like neo-Nazi Nicholas Fuentes and threatening sweeping cutoffs of billions of dollars in research funding. Trump has tried to seize control of college student admissions, faculty hiring and curricular content at major universities in the country.
Columbia agreed to a $200 million settlement with the Administration in a desperate effort to unblock $1.3 billion in research funding that Trump was holding hostage. Once again, as part of the settlement, the Administration demanded Columbia agree to install an on-site independent monitor to ensure its compliance with the Administration’s demands.
Surrenders like this are not only humiliating for the entities that undergo them, but they’re dangerous for everybody’s freedom. Neither the press nor universities can play their vital truth-seeking functions under the thumb of government-mandated minders and censors deployed to guarantee their submission to the state’s ideological straitjacket.
While some institutions, like Columbia and CBS’s parent company, have capitulated to such demands, others have bravely—and successfully—stood up to them. There is no safety in appeasing the Trump Administration or any other bully. But there is dramatically more safety in resistance and collective solidarity.
Harvard fought back against a panoply of outrageous coercive demands relating to its admissions process, its faculty hiring, and its curricular decisions. It must continue to hang tough. It carries a high burden of hope for maintaining academic freedom in our country.
After Trump attempted to prevent foreign nationals from enrolling at Harvard and cut off more than $2.5 billion in research funding, Harvard sued. In Harvard v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, a federal court sided with the university, agreeing that the Administration had, with its strong-armed tactics, trampled on “core constitutional rights that must be safeguarded” in America: “freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and freedom of speech.”
In the face of Trump’s vindictive attacks against lawyers and law firms who represented clients or causes he disfavors, several firms, including Perkins Coie, Wilmer Hale, Jenner & Block, and Susman Godfrey fought back. Federal judges ruled in their favor, finding that the Executive Orders to strip thousands of lawyers and firms of federal security clearances, deny them entry to federal buildings—including courthouses, which makes it a little bit difficult to practice law—and permanently bar them from federal employment and contracts, violated not just the First Amendment free speech rights of the lawyers but the basic Due Process and Right to Counsel rights of the clients.
These attacks on freedom are not just fits of pique from the irascible president. They are strategic operations designed to clear away opposition to Trump’s consolidation of power.
The strategy draws heavily from Hungarian strongman Victor Orbán, the world model now for establishing one-party control of government and running society as an “illiberal democracy” in Hungary, illiberal democracy meaning elections without freedom.
Trump’s moves also bear striking resemblance to President Xi’s agenda for eradicating liberal democracy in China. His secretive Document Number 9, “Communique on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere,” which leaked a decade ago, identified “seven perils” faced by the CCP: constitutional democracy and the separation of powers, universal values like civil rights and civil liberties and human rights, the existence of independent media control and active civil society, and efforts to replace the Party’s own account of history with oppositionist “nihilist” history.
This document for authoritarianism in China now reads like one of Donald Trump’s executive orders. It pretty much articulates all of the liberal institutions and values under attack in our country.
It’s important for our European allies and friends to see that this authoritarian march through our institutions seeks to crush the essential dynamic hope that has driven the American democratic experiment. They are trying to destroy what makes America truly great and will always make America great. Our revolution overthrew monarchy and broke from centuries of religious warfare, holy crusades, and witchcraft trials to separate church and state and to establish government by the people and with the consent of the governed. We fought a civil war to end slavery, agitated for women’s right to vote, dismantled Jim Crow apartheid, fought for marriage equality, and launched the modern environmental movement. These were not exercises in the dread “woke” political correctness, but rather the essential civilizing movements of our history that have defined American politics as the quest for a more perfect union. As Dr. King put it during the civil rights movement, “the greatness of America is the right to protest for what is right.”
But Donald Trump now wants to restore the names of Confederate traitors removed over the last few years from American military bases like Fort Bragg and Fort Lee. Trump and Vance can see nothing that honors or redeems America in the movements waged by Abolitionists, Unionists and Suffragettes, the Bonus Marchers and New Deal, the Civil Rights Movement, the labor movement, the women’s movement. To MAGA, these are just “woke” heresies that need to be whitewashed out of our history and literature. But the civilizing movements are, in fact, what makes America exceptional. We are not exceptional because we are somehow magically immune from fascism or racism. We are obviously not. We are exceptional because our founders began with the self-evident truths of the unalienable rights of the people, the consent of the governed, and all of us being created equal. And successive generations of American patriots have fought with all of their might to realize these ideals and indeed to create a more perfect union.
Vance dishonors the whole meaning of the U.S.-British alliance in World War II and disgraces our heroes. Churchill and Roosevelt stood strong for civilization against the barbarism of fascism coming from the Axis powers, but they also stood strong against fascist sympathizers and racists and antisemites in their own societies too. They did not pander to men like Elon Musk who perform Roman salutes, promote eugenics, make jokes about Nazism, and idolize apartheid South Africa. They did not embrace pro-fascist isolationist movements. They fought the America First Committee and Father Coughlin and they defeated the pro-Nazi isolationist movements. And when Nazi hooligans marched down the Boulevards of Europe, they did not see “very fine people on both sides.” They knew which side the UK and America must be on together.
So, what would FDR and Churchill be saying today? Who would their heroes and friends be? Not Vladimir Putin and not Viktor Orbán, but President Zelensky and Alexei Navalny. Not Kim Jong Un or Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, but the leaders of a free Europe standing strong for democracy and human rights all over the world. People like Chancellor Merz, President Macron, and Prime Minister Starmer. NATO and the European Union are not instruments of oppression as our far-right friends claim. They are the defenders of freedom against authoritarianism.
This moment calls for transnational democratic solidarity. All the bullies and oligarchs have found each other; they are networked together in a dark web of anti-democracy. From the autocrats in Moscow to the kleptocrats in Mar-a-Lago, from the far-right extremists of the National Rally to the techno-broligarchs of Silicon Valley, the enemies of freedom are on the march for autocratic state power and social control, creating gangster states and fascist networks to try and intimidate people all over the world.
But every day, resilient Democratic parties and people are fighting back. The unwavering efforts of our European and NATO allies appear to have prevailed on President Trump in the past month to temper his disgraceful embrace of Putin and to offer Ukraine some limited measure of renewed support in defending itself against Russia’s imperialist invasion.
In America, Trump’s attack on democracy, freedom, and the rule of law has been blunted repeatedly in the courts by Americans fighting back. Whether it’s his blatantly unlawful executive order purporting to deny birthright citizenship, which has been part of our Constitution since 1868, his mass illegal firings of civil service-protected federal workers, his attempt to remove permanent residents because of their political speech, his unconstitutional tariffs and global trade war waged without congressional authorization, or his repeat episodes usurping congressional spending powers, we have been winning every day in the courts. More than 350 lawsuits against the Administration have racked up more than 200 court orders blocking his lawlessness. The federal District Courts and Circuit Courts have stood strong against this reign of lawlessness. But the Supreme Court itself, stacked, packed, and gerrymandered by the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate, has wavered and buckled in some of the cases, offering, we must admit, an uncertain final destination for constitutional justice.
Our true backstop has been the American people who have fought every provocation everywhere and who assembled in record numbers of millions of protesters all over the country on No King’s Day, June 14th, and have appeared in communities across the country to reject the attack on Medicare and Medicaid, the great achievements of progressive democracy in the 20th century, the vilification and scapegoating of members of the LGBTQ+ community, especially our trans brothers and sisters, and the reckless, dangerous policies of mass deportation without due process.
The mass movements unleashed by this fight create the political energy we need to transform the Democratic Party and perhaps the party system all over the world. We may not be able to be founding fathers in the 18th century, but we can all be founding fighters in the 21st century.
We have a whole host of new problems related to climate change, the Internet, AI, economic monopolization and market concentration, housing and health care, rising prices, and we must develop policy responses that fit the times. “As our case is new,” said President Lincoln, “so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves,” from propaganda and confusion and then we shall be able to save our democracy.
But when we say “save democracy,” it implies that democracy is a static collection of rules and practices. But that’s just part of it. Democracy is a project, an always unfinished draft, a process in motion in every democratic nation in the world. Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America that democracy and voting rights in our country are either shrinking and shriveling away or they are growing and expanding and we have to get back on the growth track again. John Dewey said the only solution to the ills of democracy is more democracy. And what we are suffering from is not democracy, but the impediments to it.
Aggressive defense of democracy and freedom today means our case must be made new for this century. But we have the great alliance we need to succeed. We’ve got the young people in America and Europe and all over the world cheering for new structures of opportunity, for redesign of our environmental and energy systems, for less inequality, and for a lean, nimble government that is a powerful instrument for the common good of all.
On June 18th, 1940, in his Finest Hour Speech, Churchill rallied this great nation by saying,
“Upon this battle depends the survival of civilization, and upon it depends our own British life and the long continuity of our institutions. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age, made more sinister and perhaps more protracted by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was our finest hour.’”
Our great freedom fighter through the Civil War and Reconstruction in America was Frederick Douglass, who was born into slavery at the Wye River Plantation about a half an hour away from where we live in Maryland on the Eastern Shore. He escaped from slavery to devote his life to freedom and rebuilding a great new society out of the horrors of slavery.
And Douglass said, “If there’s no struggle, there’s no progress. [And] the struggle may be moral or physical, or moral physical, but there must be struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will.”
And I’ll leave you finally with the words of the great Tom Paine, who was born here, but came to America and fell in love with the promise of our land. He said that if America lived up to its great values and ideals, it would become, he said, “an asylum to humanity—not an insane asylum, mind you, but a place of refuge for people seeking freedom from political, religious, and intellectual repression from all over the world. And he wrote the greatest pamphlet of our history—Common Sense. By which he meant not just the five senses that we are born with, if we’re lucky, but the sixth sense, the sense we have in common if we’re willing to reason and speak together without dogma and superstition or what we would call today propaganda and disinformation and fake news.
But 1776 was a tough year all around, and our nation, contrary to popular belief, was split over the right thing to do. I’m reading an interesting book right now about this by H.W. Brands, who’s an historian in Texas. It’s called Our First Civil War, and it’s about how the colonists were split, and half the people were saying you can’t beat the greatest empire that ever existed. You can’t beat the kings and the queens and the lords and the monarchs, and it’s just never happened. Nobody’s ever lived without it, it’s not possible. And half the people said, let’s give it a try. Let’s try to put government on a different principle here on the consent of the governed, with respect for the unalienable rights of the people and the idea that all of us are created equal.
So anyway, he wrote this other pamphlet in 1776 to give people hope during a time of very difficult, protracted struggle. And so he wrote this pamphlet called The American Crisis. I just want to quote you a little passage from it. I’m going to update the language pursuant to instructions from Speaker Pelosi, who said Tom Paine was a feminist and he wouldn’t mind if we made the adjustment so as not to offend modern sensibilities, but he said:
“These are the times that try men and women’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will shrink at this moment from the service of their cause and their country, but everyone that stands with us now will win the love and favor and affection of every man and every woman for all time. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered, but we have this saving consolation: the more difficult the struggle, the more glorious [in the end will be] our victory.”
Let’s make that victory ours in the 21st century. Thank you very much, Chatham House.