U.S. Vice President JD Vance addresses the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland, U.S., February 20, 2025.
When Vice President J.D. Vance lectured European leaders at the Munich Security Conference last week on the “threat from within” posed by efforts to combat disinformation and contain far-right extremism, one far-right activist in particular was elated.
Martin Sellner, an Austrian leader of the far-right identitarian movement who is linked to the Christchurch shooter who slaughtered 51 Muslim worshipers in New Zealand in 2019, complained on X that the government in his country had subjected him to raids, a criminal investigation, and “hate speech” sanctions.
He lamented that he has been banned from entering multiple countries, including the United States, that his public appearances are shut down by riot police, and that he is treated as “a social pariah.”
“@JDVance was right,” he concluded. “The real enemy is within.”
In another post, Sellner approvingly quoted Vance’s declaration, “There’s no room for firewalls,” while forwarding a memetic video set to a techno beat that showed the vice president with fire shooting out of his eyes as European leaders appear to reel in response.
Sellner had reason to cheer.
He’s one of the most prominent advocates for “remigration” — a concept for mass expulsion of immigrants, with strong racist overtones — that has become a rallying cry for the European far right. And with Vance meeting the leader of the German far-right party Alternative for Deutschland, or AfD, he gave a boost to the group best positioned to put plans for “remigration” in motion.
The so-called “firewall” that Vance lambasted is a tacit agreement among political leaders in Germany and other European countries since World War II to maintain a center-right bulwark against far-right extremists for the purpose of preventing a repeat of the Holocaust, in which an estimated 6 million Jews were killed, and to prevent the resurgence of national socialism.
Vance’s broadside against mainstream European political leaders and meeting with AfD leader Alice Weidel on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference came just over a week before German nationwide elections scheduled for Feb. 23, in which AfD is expected to take second place.
Vance’s effort to pressure German leaders to share governing power with AfD — whose leaders have downplayed the Holocaust and uttered Nazi slogans, and which remains under investigation for extremism by the state security apparatus — presented a jarring contrast to his visit one day earlier to the Dachau concentration camp.
During the visit, Vance reportedly described what took place at the camp during the Third Reich as an “unspeakable evil” and said those who are alive today “should commit ourselves to do everything to prevent it from happening again.”
That didn’t escape the notice of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who excoriated Vance on the second day of the Munich Security Conference.
“A commitment to ‘never again’ is not reconcilable with support for the AfD,” Scholz said. “This ‘never again’ is the historical mission that Germany as a free democracy must and wants to continue to live up to every day. Never again fascism, never again racism, never again war of aggression.”
Vance and his representatives could not be reached for comment about his seemingly contradictory statements.
Vance’s call for German leaders to remove barriers to AfD’s march towards political power comes at a time when the party appears to be increasingly emboldened and vocal about its plans to expel immigrants, providing a transatlantic echo of President Trump’s promise for mass deportation in the United States.
Only a year ago, the AfD was reeling from a bombshell report that some of its members had participated in a secret meeting at a hotel outside Potsdam to discuss a “masterplan” for “remigration.”
The presenter was none other than Sellner, whom Correctiv describes as a “neo-Nazi.”
Among the attendees was Roland Hartwig, a personal aide to AfD leader Weidel.
The shared goal of the meeting participants, according to Correctiv, was “the forced deportations of people from Germany based on a set of racist criteria, regardless of whether or not they have German citizenship.” Correctiv reported that Sellner’s speech named three target groups that should be expelled. They were asylum seekers, non-Germans with residency rights, and, most controversially, “non-assimilated” German citizens.
Sellner has said that the report didn’t capture the full context of his remarks. He reportedly wrote in an email to the Reuters news agency: “I made very clear that no distinctions can be made between citizens — that there can be no second-class citizens — and that all remigration measures have to be legal. Unassimilated citizens like Islamists, gangsters, and welfare cheats should be pushed to adapt through a policy of standards and assimilation.” He reportedly added that the program could include incentives for voluntary return.
Weidel disavowed the meeting amidst the ensuing backlash, telling the Wall Street Journal: “No one wants that. That would be unconstitutional, as far as I’m concerned, a breach of human rights.”
But only a year later, during a party conference in the eastern German state of Saxony last month, Weidel reportedly said: “And I have to be honest with you: If it’s going to be called remigration, then that’s what it’s going to be — remigration.”
The AfD did not respond to an email from Raw Story seeking clarification on whether Weidel’s recent embrace of “remigration” includes the removal of German citizens, but the party issued a position paper on Jan. 29 stating that “all Germans are part of our nation, regardless of their origin, ancestry or religious affiliation,” and that the party rejects “the deportation of German citizens with a migration background.”
Despite the AfD’s assurances that the party would carry out “remigration” through only legal and constitutional means, the phrase comes out of an unmistakably violent history. The phrase gained widespread currency among European far-right activists following a 2012 gathering in Paris called “Assises de la Remigration,” or Annual Meeting on Remigration, according to a report by HuffPost. The conference featured a speech by writer Renaud Camus, who coined the phrase “great replacement,” which is a white supremacist hoax falsely claiming that white people face extinction. Conference attendees reportedly discussed “remigration” as a solution.
Génération Identitaire, the host organization for the Annual Meeting on Remigration, would later provide the model for Identity Evropa, a U.S. white nationalist organization that helped organize the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. in 2017. Members chanted “Jews will not replace us” before clashing with left-wing antifascists, and before a rally attendee rammed his car into a peaceful march and murdered an antifascist activist.
In 2018, Brenton Tarrant, who would go on to carry out a massacre against Muslim worshipers in Christchurch, New Zealand, reportedly made a donation equivalent to more than $1,500 in U.S. dollars to Sellner’s identitarian organization, Identitaire Bowegung Österreichs.
Sellner reportedly thanked Tarrant for the donation, and invited Tarrant to join him for a beer or coffee if he were to ever Austria.
When Tarrant murdered 51 Muslim worshipers during a livestreamed shooting at two mosques in Christchurch more than a year later, he left behind a manifesto. It’s title: “The Great Replacement.”
Sellner could not be reached for comment for this story.
Even before AfD’s Weidel embraced “remigration,” the phrase found its way into a Truth Social post by Donald Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign.
Trump’s post in September 2024 pledged that his administration would “return [opponent Kamala Harris’] illegal migrants to their home countries (also known as remigration).
“I will save our cities and towns in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and all across America,” he added.
Around the same time, Vance spread baseless and false rumors about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio eating pets, and claimed that they were “illegal aliens” despite being in the country under the Temporary Protected Status program, which was established by Congress in 1990.
Raw Story reached out to Vance for comment on his position on “remigration,” but did not receive a response.
Amy Spitalnick, a U.S. Jewish leader who led the successful lawsuit against the Unite the Right organizers for conspiracy to commit racial violence, criticized the Trump administration for normalizing the AfD.
“History has made clear that our safety as Jews is inextricably linked with inclusive, pluralistic democracy,” said Spitalnick, who is the CEO of the Jewish Council of Public Affairs. “The Trump administration’s embrace of extreme right policies at home and extreme right political movements abroad — including a German party that openly trivializes the Holocaust and rejects its lessons — is deeply dangerous for the global Jewish community.”
In his remarks at the Munich Security Conference, Vance made arguments that sounded virtually indistinguishable from AfD’s platform. He admonished the mainstream European leaders that they wouldn’t “win” a democratic mandate “by disregarding your basic electorate on questions like who gets to be part of our shared society.
“And of all the pressing challenges that the nations here face, I believe that there is nothing more urgent than mass migration,” Vance continued.
He went on to bemoan the share of people living in Germany and the United States who had moved to the countries from abroad. During his speech, Vance cited a car-ramming attack by an Afghan asylum seeker in Munich that took the lives of a 2-year-old girl and her mother. But he did not mention a mass shooting earlier this month at an adult education center in Örebro, Sweden that took the lives of 10 people, most of whom were immigrants.
“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,” Vance said. “An asylum seeker, often a young man in his mid-twenties, already known to police, rams a car into a crowd and shatters a community. How many times must we suffer these appalling setbacks before we change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction?”
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