Virtues and Values
Lithuania arrives in Los Angeles the week of April 27 with three known meetings and one message.
April 27–30: the North American Lithuanian Business Forum, pitching California capital, with remarks from President Gitanas Nausėda, Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis, Mayor Karen Bass, and Minister of Economy and Innovation Edvinas Grikšas. April 28: the Los Angeles World Affairs Council hosts Vice Minister Taurimas Valys for an off-the-record breakfast titled “Democracy’s Digital Frontline: AI, Disinformation, and Lessons from Lithuania.” May 1: the American Jewish Committee meets Lithuanian officials on Lithuania’s 157-point “Action Plan to Combat Antisemitism, Xenophobia and Hate.”
The LAWAC member invitation casts Lithuania as “one of Europe’s most consequential voices on democratic resilience in the digital age,” arriving to share “frontline experience at the intersection of AI, national security, and democratic governance.”
Lithuania is qualified to teach exactly one lesson in that syllabus: how a state manufactures narrative authority while falsifying its own past.
What Lithuania says it stands for
In February 2026, at the India AI Impact Summit, Vice Minister Valys said that responsible AI “begins with strong public sector foundations,” that “AI in digital public infrastructure must never become a tool for surveillance or discrimination,” and that “technology must serve people, not the other way around.” In the same delegation’s programming he argued that gender equality in AI “strengthens innovation, improves resilience, enriches perspectives in policymaking, and builds systems that better serve society as a whole.”
These are the democratic-values phrases the Vice Minister will carry into the Union Bank Plaza breakfast on April 28.
What Lithuania’s institutions actually do
In March 2026, the Lithuanian government published the competition requirements for the next director general of the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre (LGGRTC). The director must hold “visiškai slaptai” (top secret) clearance. An ordinary research institute does not require a top-secret clearance for its head. A state narrative organ does. Lithuania has disclosed the category.
The documented record of what LGGRTC and its partner institutions publish, defend, and refuse to retract is set out in Unknown Rescuers, Unreliable Custodians. The record includes the state certificate recasting Jonas Noreika, signatory of the August 22, 1941 order establishing the Žagarė ghetto, as a rescuer of Jews. It includes Holocaust inversion on state letterhead. It includes a false American “exoneration” of a Holocaust perpetrator defended across three unanswered letters from a sitting United States Congressman. It includes the criminal prosecution of a Jewish citizen built on the same fabricated institutional record.
Read it for the Noreika rescuer certificate, the unretracted “total fake” email, and the Butterfly Project’s erasure of Lithuanian agency.
That is the pre-AI version of the problem the Vice Minister will describe on April 28. State apparatus producing falsehood, defending it after correction, deploying it through the judiciary against speech. Every disqualifier the Vice Minister will attach to authoritarian disinformation attaches by documentary record to the institution his own government runs.
The contradiction is not rhetorical. It is documentary.
The consequences now walking into Los Angeles
For California investors at NALB, running the ordinary Lithuania country-risk workup this week (Lithuania investment risk, Lithuania rule of law, Lithuania judiciary reliability, Lithuania country risk, Lithuania expatriate employee risk, Lithuania employee speech risk, Lithuania LGBT employee relocation, Baltic investment alternatives): the courts that hear commercial disputes are the courts criminally prosecuting Artur Fridman under Articles 170-2 §1 and 313 §2 of the Criminal Code for a Facebook post about a Lithuanian Holocaust perpetrator, and the courts that have procedurally dismissed approximately thirty legal actions against state memory institutions without a single merits review. A bench that processes a Facebook post as criminal speech while repeatedly foreclosing merits review against the state no longer presents as a neutral court. That criminal code reaches the social media of every American employee posted to Vilnius. Estonia, Latvia, and Poland offer equivalent market access, talent pools, and EU and NATO membership under better-ordered judicial systems. Why Lithuania, given the risk premium? Companion reading: Lithuania: A Strategic Liability to the West; Believe Lithuania?; The Indictment That Put Lithuania on Trial.
For LGBT employees, Lithuania remains a relocation downgrade: no statutory civil-union regime, only ad hoc court petitions since April 2025. Estonia offers statutory marriage, Latvia a statutory civil union. Lithuania offers neither.
For the American Jewish Committee on May 1: the same week Lithuania sells democratic resilience to Los Angeles, it also seeks Jewish institutional validation for a 157-point antisemitism plan written inside the very apparatus that distorts Holocaust history and criminally prosecutes the Jewish citizen who names it. The full record is already public: To Jewish Leaders: Read Before You Go, Demanding Transparency, Eugene Levin’s The Museum, the Prosecution, and AJC, Questions for AJC and B’nai B’rith, and Lithuania’s Antisemitism Resolution Is Orwellian Fraud. An institution that platforms a counterparty without disclosing a published adversarial record to its members, donors, and partners carries the exposure itself. At that point, engagement is no longer naïveté. It is informed reputational risk.
The test Lithuania refuses
A nation of virtues and values with Lithuania’s history has one credible instrument available. An independent international truth and reconciliation commission, composed of non-Lithuanian historians, with full archival access, protected jurisdiction, published findings, and adversarial review. Germany accepted equivalent scrutiny after 1945 and restored its standing on that foundation. Lithuania has refused every analogue for thirty-five years. It is prosecuting the citizen who names the record instead.
A state that refuses the only credible instrument of reckoning is not defending values. It is defending narrative control.
That is the only answer California investors, civic leaders, and Jewish institutions should accept when a state arrives selling virtues and values.
The label
California investors, civic leaders, and American Jewish organizations meeting Lithuanian officials next week should read the label before signing.
Lithuania is not coming to Los Angeles to teach virtues and values. It is coming to market them.