Marco Rubio’s Munich Security Conference speech championed a U.S.-Europe alliance rooted in Judeo-Christian values, rule of law, and shared heritage, earning a standing ovation, while AOC stumbled through foreign policy questions—mocked for calling Venezuela south of the equator and praising Hamas. Tim Scott slammed her as ideologically confused, contrasting Rubio’s statesmanlike vision with Democratic figures like Hillary Clinton (who called America "white male capitalist") and Gretchen Whitmer (criticized for Ukraine ignorance). Obama’s library pivot to "social change" was dismissed as empty rhetoric. The divide reveals Democrats’ struggle reconciling radical policies with Western defense, risking instability if self-reliance and shared values are abandoned. [Automatically generated summary]
Secretary of State Marco Rubio goes to Munich and delivers a speech for the ages.
AOC goes to Munich and makes a complete ass of herself and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
They're back trying to guide their party.
We'll see how it went.
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On Saturday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio went to the Munich Security Conference over in Germany.
It was attended by a wide variety of politicos, both from the Trump administration and, as we'll see, from the Democratic side of the aisle.
And he was the adult in the room.
Marco Rubio is the best-spoken member of the Trump administration.
It doesn't happen to be particularly close when it comes to foreign policy.
And he gave a truly bang-up speech about the relationship between America and Europe.
So you'll recall that last year, JD Vance, vice president, he also went to Europe.
And at Davos, he proceeded to give a speech blistering the Europeans.
Some for good reasons, some for not such great reasons, but it appeared to draw the hackles of a bunch of Europeans because it was basically saying, guys, you seem to be kind of on your own.
America is drawing back.
And that is not what Rubio said.
What Rubio said is we have strong bonds, centuries-long bonds with the continent of Europe and many of the countries thereupon.
And we also are going to have common interests with those countries, but we need strong allies to stand up for themselves.
And he actually attempted to draw a definition of what it meant to be in consonant with Europe that I think Vice President Vance in some ways failed to advance.
Secretary of State Rubio receives a standing ovation for this, which, of course, is a good thing because his defense of the Trump administration policy was quite muscular over at the Munich Security Conference.
So he did a bit of a QA as well.
He shared his own family history.
Again, one of the things that people tend to forget is that, for example, Latinos and Hispanics in the United States are of Spanish, at least in part, descent.
Spain is a country that is on the continent of Europe, which is why people from South and Latin America generally speak Spanish.
It is why, as we will also see from Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, there are horses on this continent.
In any case, here was Secretary of State Rubio talking about his own family history.
The year that my country was founded, Lorenzo and Catalina Giraldi lived in Casa Monferrato in the kingdom of Piedmont, Sardinia.
And Jose and Manuel Arena lived in Sevilla, Spain.
I don't know what, if anything, they knew about the 13 colonies which had gained their independence from the British Empire.
But here's what I'm certain of: they could have never imagined that 250 years later, one of their direct descendants would be back here today on this continent as the chief diplomat of that infant nation.
And yet here I am, reminded by my own story that both our histories and our faiths will always be linked.
Secretary of State Rubio also suggested that the U.S. and Europe have a great history of cooperation.
And a bit, I want to explain sort of the history of European identification because one of the things that the Secretary of State says is that people don't fight for ideas.
That's not really quite true.
People definitely fight for ideas, but those ideas do have to be rooted in a time and a place and in a loyalty to family and kinship and nation.
Anyway, here was Secretary of State Rubio talking about the history of U.S.-European cooperation.
Together, we rebuilt a shattered continent in the wake of two devastating world wars.
When we found ourselves divided once again by the Iron Curtain, the Free West linked arms with the courageous dissidents struggling against tyranny in the East to defeat Soviet communism.
We have fought against each other, then reconciled, then fought, then reconciled again.
And we have bled and died side by side on battlefields from Kapyong to Kandahar.
The Secretary of State went on to explain that a U.S.-European alliance should be growing and building and burgeoning and ruling the new century.
Together, we can reindustrialize our economies and rebuild our capacity to defend our people.
But the work of this new alliance should not be focused just on military cooperation and reclaiming the industries of the past.
It should also be focused on together advancing our mutual interests and new frontiers, unshackling our ingenuity, our creativity, and the dynamic spirit to build a new Western century.
Now, what Rubio said there is that we definitely need strong allies, that it can't just be the United States picking up the check for everybody else.
You can't build gigantic welfare states on the back of American taxpayers.
You need to be strong because strong alliances require strong allies.
And those strong allies are capable of providing deterrence against, for example, a wayward Russia.
Here was the Secretary of State.
We want allies who can defend themselves so that no adversary will ever be tempted to test our collective strength.
This is why we do not want our allies to be shackled by guilt and shame.
We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization and who together with us are willing and able to defend it.
Rubio called out a bunch of problems that the continent has brought upon itself, ranging from its subjugation of itself to the green revolution, the green new deal sort of thinking, to the mass migration that it brought in upon itself largely through a bizarre sort of blood guilt, the idea that Europe, because it had destroyed so much of the world during World War II, somehow owed it to the rest of the world to open its borders and bring everyone in.
Here is Rubio speaking up against that.
Mass migration is not, was not, isn't some fringe concern of little consequence.
It was and continues to be a crisis which is transforming and destabilizing societies all across the West.
And then he talked about the sort of values that are supposed to unite the United States and Europe.
This, I think, was the key section of his speech.
The fundamental question we must answer at the outset is what exactly are we defending?
Because armies do not fight for abstractions.
Armies fight for a people.
Armies fight for a nation.
Armies fight for a way of life.
And that is what we are defending.
A great civilization that has every reason to be proud of its history.
Ramarco Rubio is the adult in the room.
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Roman Empires in Opposition00:06:55
Okay, so the question is: what are the ideas that unite that civilization?
So, he says armies don't fight for abstractions.
I beg to differ somewhat.
Obviously, armies do fight for abstractions.
There are armies that have fought for communism, there are armies that fight for Islamic fundamentalism.
There are armies that have fought for Catholicism and for Protestantism.
There are armies all over the world that fight for ideas.
The question is: what are the ideas of Western civilization that are worth upholding and preserving?
Because if you don't know what it is you are defending, it is very difficult to fight for it.
So, here is how he characterized civilization: he said, For the United States in Europe, we belong together.
America was founded 250 years ago, but the roots began here on this continent long before.
The man who settled and built the nation of my birth arrived on our shores, carrying the memories and the traditions and the Christian faith of their ancestors as a sacred inheritance, an unbreakable link between the old world and the new.
We are part of one civilization, Western civilization.
We're bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.
And a little bit later on in the speech, he again describes Western civilization: quote: It was here in Europe where the ideas that planted the seeds of liberty that changed the world were born.
It was here in Europe where the world, which gave the world the rule of law, the universities, and the scientific revolution, it was this continent that produced the genius of Mozart and Beethoven, of Dante and Shakespeare, of Michelangelo and DaVinci, of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
I agree with a lot of this.
The Beatles and the Rolling Stones apart.
And this is the place where the vaulted ceilings, said the Secretary of State, of the Sistine Chapel and the towering spires of the Great Cathedral in Cologne, they testify not just to the greatness of our past or to a faith in God that inspired these marvels.
They foreshadow the wonders that await us in our future.
But only if we are unapologetic in our heritage and proud of this common inheritance, can we work together to begin the envisioning and shaping of our economic and political future?
And this is some interesting stuff here.
And it requires a little bit of a breakdown because the truth is that Europe itself is a bit of an idea.
And there are times when members of the European continent have been fighting each other tooth and nail in bloody centuries-long war.
It is true that Europe itself was divided in the middle of the 20th century.
So what exactly is the concept of Europe?
What is the American-European common heritage, ideological heritage that actually counts?
Because if you're talking about heritage heritage, then let's just be real about this.
The Germans and the French were fighting each other for several centuries.
The French and the English were fighting each other for several centuries.
The Italians and the French and the Spanish and everybody else were fighting each other for several centuries there.
And so if you're going to talk about Europe as a holistic concept, you have to sort of define your terms.
If you were going through the history of Europe, going all the way back to the Roman Empire, what you'd see is that the Roman Empire was its own civilization.
It considered outlying areas to be barbarians, which means people who are sort of speaking gibberish.
It at that time applied to the Germans, right?
The Germans were the barbarians.
And the Germans now, of course, are considered part of European civilization.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, what rose in its wake was Christendom, which was basically the idea of Catholic dominance of the European continent.
And that grew over the course of the Carolingian Empire and then grew over the course of the subsequent centuries up until the Protestant Reformation.
The Protestant Reformation ushered in an era of religious warfare that lasted well over 100 years and then with the Peace of Westphalia that basically ended Christendom.
There's sort of a new concept of Europe that was formed in the aftermath.
And the question is always in opposition to what?
So whenever you are defining a civilization, civilizations have an internal definition and then they have a definition with regard to others.
So the reality is the Roman Empire was not only defined as that which was under the sway of Rome, but also in opposition to other empires, in opposition to other armies, German armies, or Assyrian armies or Persian armies or whatever the case may be.
Christendom was largely forged in opposition to Mohammedanism and to Islam in the aftermath of the fall of the Roman Empire because Islam was actually a dire threat to Europe and spread all the way in deep into Europe, all the way into France, actually.
After the Peace of Westphalia, then about a century later, you started to get the rise of the Enlightenment.
And then the West became identified with these Enlightenment ideas, a history of Christianity that bled over into a sort of secularized version of many of the key values of Christianity, but with a critical eye toward the idea that religion could answer all questions and therefore a sort of Aristotelian approach towards science that looked to evidence first.
And you get the separation of church and state in many of these countries.
You get the rise of the scientific revolution, the rise of the industrial revolution, the rise of free economies and all the rest.
And then, of course, the West tears itself apart.
Europe, with the rise of nationalism, falls into war, world war, many times, actually, but two big ones, right?
World Wars I and II.
And then you have a West redefined in opposition to Soviet communism.
And in the aftermath of Soviet communism, what is the West?
What are these values that we hold dear?
So it is not just a matter of quote-unquote common heritage.
It is not just a matter of common language, because the truth is that for virtually all of this history, there wasn't really a common language.
It is not really just a matter of sort of cultural inheritance because there are similarities in cultures and pretty significant differences in these cultures.
So much so that, again, people were fighting bloody wars that killed off significant portions of the continent for centuries on end.
But to pretend that Europe doesn't exist as a concept or as a civilization is, of course, silly.
So what is Europe today?
Obviously, it has a shared Christian history.
It grew out of Christendom.
But also, it has an enlightenment history and it has shared values.
And if those values wane, so too will the alliance between the old world and the new.
And those values include things like the rule of law and freedom of speech and yes, freedom of religion and property rights and yes, democracy and small art republicanism.
This is one reason, among many, that Russia has never quite ever entered the world of Europe.
It has always sort of existed on the fringes of Europe, but as Vladimir Putin's brain, Alexander Dugan, has explained, European ideas, or what he calls Atlanticist ideas, are not, in fact, Russian ideas.
It's a very different set of things.
And that's why trying to integrate the Russian empire into Europe has always been a failed experiment.
United States Values Upheld00:15:38
What does this mean?
Well, it means, number one, that Europe needs to uphold its own values.
It means the United States needs to uphold its own values.
And it needs to understand, we all need to understand, that a shared history and a shared experience and a shared set of values are all necessary in order to have an increasingly powerful alliance.
The Secretary of State Rubio, again, for laying this out, received a standing ovation in Munich, which is a very different response than the vice president received.
Again, the vice president came in with a two by four and started clocking people.
Secretary of State Rubio came in and he said, listen, here's all the things that we share.
And also, you need to actually strengthen yourselves.
You need to not empty yourselves out because of dumb environmental regulations or through mass migration or through bad trade deals.
Here is the secretary of state receiving a standing ovation.
Again, for all those who seem to believe that the Trump administration has offended all of our European allies beyond recognition that there's no future there, that obviously is not true.
You need a well-spoken advocate of that relationship and a realist advocate of that relationship, not some sort of pie-in-the-sky Wilsonian dreamer who believes that America ought to foot the bills for our allies such that, again, they can slip into quietude and senescence.
They can slip into old age, into the welfare state decay into which they have slipped endlessly, and we'll continue to foot the bill.
That is not real.
What Rubio did there is he fucked up Europe.
He encouraged them.
He said, listen, you can be great again.
We can help make you great again.
We want to sit alongside you and hold hands and walk forward into the future together.
He said that.
He said, quote, I'm here today to leave it clear that America is charting the path for a new century of prosperity.
And that once again, we want to do it together with you, our cherished allies and our oldest friends.
We want to do it together with you, with a Europe that is proud of its heritage and of its history, with a Europe that has the spirit of creation of liberty that sent ships out into uncharted seas and birthed our civilization, with a Europe that has the means to defend itself and the will to survive.
And that is the proper conclusion, of course.
So again, this is the right approach for the Trump administration to take.
It is a big difference between there are differences inside the Trump administration.
Trying to pretend there are not is, I think, foolhardy.
Elbridge Colby, who is depending on Under Secretary for Policy and more aligned with the advance wing of the Republican Party, told attendees in Munich that he is not sure that the one-time quote, hosanna's and shibboleths about shared values between Europe and the U.S. are true.
Like that, that is, that is some dicey stuff right there.
If you wish to build alliance with people with whom you have historically had alliance, then you ought to look to shared values.
On the other hand, you don't want it to be that the sort of nostrum of shared values substitutes for actual real shared values because then you end up with people who are living high off the hog while you foot the bills.
On the other hand, you don't want to break the chain of shared values with Europe because if you do that, then you end up in an isolationist position without any allies.
It's a fascinating gap inside the Trump administration.
I think that there's no question from my perspective that the Secretary of State has the best of it.
And I think that is why you saw him get such a warm reception there.
Now, that is a very different vision for the world than the world presented by the left.
The left showed up en masse.
The American left showed up en masse in Munich.
And there they presented a different vision of quote-unquote world order.
And that world order is a West that is apologetic for its own existence, that believes that it has committed grave evils, unrectifiable evils, and that all the evils of the rest of the world are somehow to be laid at the foot of the West.
That actually what the West ought to do is become sort of a repository for anyone who wants to come in and subsume its own values under the rubric of multiculturalism.
The New York Times took this position: quote, there's an Afghan grocery store on the blocks outside the main train station in Munich, how all food counters are sprinkled amid the cathedral spires and beer halls.
Nearly one of every three residents you meet in town is not German.
It's a decent approximation of what many European cities and European people look like today, and a different Europe from the one the Trump administration says it wants to be friends with.
Now, again, notice the loaded language there.
European people look like Afghan grocery stores in the train station in Munich.
I mean, what values are there?
Can there be assimilation to European values?
In this view, there is no Western civilization.
There's just a group of people who exist inside a certain geographical area.
The New York Times admits the United States and Europe are indeed pillars of what historians refer to as Western civilization, which has roots typically traced to ancient Greece.
Now, to be fair, I wrote an entire book about Western civilization, the right side of history.
It's not just to ancient Greece.
It is also to ancient Jerusalem.
Because if you're going to look to Christian civilization, you can't just look to Greece, because Greece is not where Christianity arose.
You also have to look to its Judaic roots in Jerusalem.
Their modern relationship and the bonds that Rubio said it held together, according to the New York Times, has been changed by demographic trends, including new arrivals and rising secularization.
After a decade-long influx of migrants from the Middle East and elsewhere, the share of Muslims across Europe has ticked up to about 6% in 2020, according to Pew.
Countries across Europe have struggled with questions of migration, culture, and heritage in recent years.
And of course, the idea here is that Europe should basically wither away into nothingness.
Well, apparently bankrolling the rest of the world.
This is the perspective of the American left.
So AOC again took that 2028 bicycle out for a ride and she proceeded to smash that directly into an embankment.
They go head over heels down a mountain.
It was not a good showing for Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who, of course, is the heir to the Bernie Sanders wing of the party.
According to the New York Times, however, she did an amazing job.
Quote, Representative Alexander Ocasio-Cortez had anticipated a potentially frosty reception to her anti-establishment arguments at the Munich Security Conference, a venue she called, quote, an elite place of decision makers that, frankly, are not responsive to a class-based message.
And this, of course, was her stick.
Her stick was that workers of the world unite.
There's nothing that she is saying that the wobblies weren't saying prior to World War I, or that Marxists haven't been saying for a century and a half at this point that the workers of the world are going to unite and rise up and that all of the problems on planet Earth are caused by a class basis.
That, of course, is nonsense.
It has been eminently defeated by history itself over and over and over again, but bad ideas never die.
They just sort of fade and then come back even stronger.
But according to the New York Times, the visit to Germany felt high stakes.
It was the most prominent foreign trip to date by the progressive New York Congresswoman, who had mostly focused on domestic priorities until now.
Her remarks last week about addressing working class concerns around the globe and the reception from world leaders were both eagerly awaited and highly scrutinized.
But rather than the substance of her arguments, it was her on-camera stumbles when answering questions about specific world affairs that rocketed around conservative social media and drove plenty of the discussion about her visit as potential observers speculated whether they would make a dent in a potential presidential run in 2028.
Okay, so the problem here, apparently, is Republicans pounce.
Of course, according to it's not that she screwed it up.
It's that Republicans pounce.
Now, she had been preparing for this, according to Politico, for literally months, quote, to prepare for her Munich debut.
AOC has been advised by Matt Duss, the former foreign policy advisor to Bernie Sanders, an EVP at the Progressive Think Tank Center for International Policy.
The two have met roughly half a dozen times over Zoom and in person since she received her invitation.
Now, I'm just going to point out at this point, Matt Duss is a horrifyingly bad peck as your advisor.
Bernie Sanders is the stupidest person on foreign policy in modern American history, truly a dullard.
His economic policy is bad enough.
His foreign policy has the United States basically siding with every terrible regime on planet Earth and also blaming America simultaneously for every bad thing that happens on planet Earth.
He's a low IQ Noam Chomsky, Bernie Sanders.
AOC tried to run interference with the New York Times.
She did an interview with the Times in which she tried to backtrack all of her failures.
Quote, the story is less about the opponents being some hypothetical primary.
To me, my opponents are the networks that link Orban, Trump, Millay, Bolsonaro, all these folks.
We need to be able to be very angry at each other and also know what the real enemy is.
We have to grow our ranks and we have to persuade.
If we go separately, we'll lose it all.
Okay, I'm just going to point out again.
Javier Millay is not an authoritarian leader.
He is not.
Javier Millay is a libertarian.
Victor Orban has been repeatedly elected in Hungary.
You may not like Victor Orban.
He has been repeatedly elected in Hungary.
And if you want to learn more about Victor Orban, go watch the interview that I did with him in Hungary or the interview that I did with Millay.
Now, linking together every leader you don't like and then just saying all bad is simpleton stuff.
But of course, she is not particularly bright.
I know we're not supposed to say it.
She isn't.
I'm sorry.
She isn't.
Can we just call stupid people stupid sometimes?
She is not very smart.
That doesn't mean that she can't speak cogently for 37 seconds in the middle of a congressional hearing when all her material has been pre-written.
She can, but on her feet, she is a tortoise.
She cannot move.
She is stuck to the ground.
Gravity has inordinate effect on her mind, apparently, when she is asked to stick and move.
So, for example, here she was asked about whether the United States should defend Taiwan if China seeks to make a move on Taiwan and brain freeze.
Would and should the U.S. actually commit U.S. troops to defend Taiwan if China were to move?
You know, I think that this is such a, you know, I think that this is a very long-standing policy of the United States.
And I think what we are hoping for is that we want to make sure that we never get to that point.
And we want to make sure that we are moving in all of our economic research and our global positions to avoid any such confrontation and for that question to even arise.
And the Iraq and the Iraq.
Bad look there from Alexandra Ocasia-Cortez losing some of the fresh and losing some of the face.
No longer so fresh face.
Trademark.
Man, that is some bad stuff.
But of course, she's done this before.
You can recall that one time when she interviewed with Margaret Hoover and she was asked about Israel and the Palestinians, and she did the exact same thing.
She doesn't know things.
Okay.
She doesn't.
She doesn't read books.
She doesn't study.
She is not particularly smart.
This is our politics now.
Dumb people who are good on TikTok.
This is our politics now.
Congrats to everybody.
You did great.
Also, by the way, apparently the reason the United States went after Nicolas Maduro is because Venezuela is below the equator.
Oh, wait.
It isn't.
You know, we look at what happened in Venezuela, for example.
It is not a it is not a remark on who Maduro was as a leader.
He canceled elections.
He was an anti-democratic leader.
That doesn't mean that we can kidnap a head of state and engage in acts of war just because the nation is below the equator.
And it's not below the equator.
Also, it's not an act of war to capture a person who is a criminal and bring him back to the United States.
We are not at war with Venezuela.
We are currently working hand in glove with the Venezuelan government, actually.
All of this, of course, was secondary to the actual stupidity, which was the big statement from her.
The big statement from her is that, again, America, Europe, these are negative forces in the world.
They are exploitive.
They are capitalistic.
And this means that they are bad.
Here she explained that whiteness is an imaginary thing.
Now, there's a complexity here that could theoretically be explored, but not the way she's doing it.
There's a very big difference between whiteness and national, like your actual culture, right?
Whiteness is an imaginary thing.
Like, whoa, like, like, hey, like, eh.
Hey, by the way, if we're going to do that, then there is no such thing as Latino-ness, because it turns out that there are a bunch of different variations there.
It turns out that people from Cuba, not exactly the same as people from Puerto Rico, not exactly the same as people from Argentina or from Venezuela or from Peru.
What point?
Why is it only whiteness is not a thing?
Blackness is a thing, even though, again, great variation in the so-called black community.
I say so-called because a Nigerian American who got here 20 years ago is not exactly from the same group of people as American descendants of slaves, which is why we have a term, ADAS, American descendants of slaves.
Whatever.
Trying to delve into the depths of Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez's thought is like trying to jump from a diving board into a kiddie pool headfirst.
You're likely to crack your neck.
But in the end, AOC only wants a world order without hypocrisies.
In a rules-based order, hypocrisy is vulnerability.
And so I think what we are seeking is a return to a rules-based order that eliminates the hypocrisies around when too often in the West, we look the other way for inconvenient populations To act out these paradoxes, whether it is, you know, kidnapping a foreign head of state, whether it is threatening our allies to colonize Greenland,
whether it is looking the other way in a genocide.
Hypocrisies are vulnerabilities and they threaten democracies globally.
And so I think many of us are here to say we are here and we are ready for the next chapter, not to have the world turn to isolation, but to deepen our partnership on greater and increased commitment to integrity to our values.
Okay, so apparently non-hypocrisy would be allowing Venezuela to continue to be a communist dictatorship, allowing Hamas to rule the Gaza Strip with an iron hand and invade Israel.
Values Tethering Alliances00:10:34
Those would be the non-hypocrisies, according to AOC.
This is what Democrats have to offer.
Good luck to them.
Seriously, good luck to them.
Joining me on the line to discuss all of this is Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina.
Senator Scott, thanks so much for taking the time.
Really appreciate it.
Hey, man, how are you doing today?
It's good to be with you.
I think God's doing well.
So let's talk about the shocking contrast between the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, in Munich and AOC and other Democrats in Munich.
Secretary of State Rubio laid out a common vision for the United States and Europe in Munich, which was very warm.
It was also demanding on the Europeans.
What did you think of the Secretary of State speech?
I thought it was incredibly statesmanlike.
He did a fantastic job talking very much about the shared value system that created the greatest Western alliance.
And it was based upon this Judeo-Christian ethos that permeates in the soil, led by America.
And it's when we stand strong on our foundation, we succeed as an alliance.
When we deter from that, when we take a detour from that, everything seems to fall apart.
I thought he did a fabulous job of foreshadowing the future of America if we get immigration wrong and or foreshadowing the future of Europe if they come back to this Western alliance, this ethos that permeates.
By doing so, what you do, and Ben, is you start focusing on what we have in common.
That purpose is incredibly important.
We see that in the immigration policy here at home.
We see that with the closed borders by President Trump here at home.
We see that in focusing on free markets, capitalism.
But most importantly, it is the foundation of values that has made America the most prosperous country on the planet.
And it is what tethers us to this Western alliance.
It's a value system that has to be protected.
I've said it several times.
You can't have multiple missions in a simple, singular alliance.
It has to be one mission.
That mission comes from our shared values.
And anytime you allow immigration to confuse, to distort, and to try to have multiple missions, you always destroy the underlying country or alliance.
And that's what I thought he did really well, speaking about our shared values and talking about how we can succeed together if we stand on those shared values.
And Senator Scott, one of the things that was pretty astonishing is the reception.
So obviously, he's a European audience, and the European audience was extraordinarily warm towards Secretary Rubio.
He spoke many of the same sort of harsh truths to the Europeans, actually, that the vice president did a few months back.
But this time, they seem to be willing to hear them because, again, he began with the realization and the reality that the United States and Europe ought to be on the same side.
He wasn't starting sort of from the point of taking a two by four to them.
It was, listen, we want you to do better if you are strong allies.
If you join us in this mission, then we'll be able to walk into the future together.
I thought it was a very encouraging, optimistic message.
And I think that the Europeans responded to that, even though, again, he was saying some pretty harsh things to them.
I know, disagree with you, Ben.
One of the reasons why I thought it was really important to reflect on why it was so successful.
I think the foundation matters, but he also used a really important word, we.
He said we a lot.
Why?
Because when you are talking, if you're going to be critical of someone and you start with the conversation, we need to do these things better, looking at what we've done well, contrasting where they've departed from what we're doing really well.
That is a place where you can lean into the conversation.
If you're going to critique your friends, you got to do so with love in your heart.
You've got to do so with this shared concept at the top of your mind.
He did a really good job of articulating the necessary change in direction that we need to see from our European allies.
And at the same time, reinforcing the fact that it has been a Western coalition that has transformed everything we know in modern history since World War II.
If we're going to have the kind of success we need to defend true, strong universal values, it is better done as a team.
But if you're not going to play by the same rules, the same values with the same objectives, the team will not abide.
And I thought he did a really good job of articulating that with the concept of we, which is very important.
You know, by contrast, the Democrats in Munich, I thought, did a pretty shockingly bad job.
Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, as I said earlier on the show, was taking her 2028 car out for a spin.
It kind of spun out.
It hit the embankment a few times.
It was not a good look for AOC, aside from her pretty obvious gaffes saying that Venezuela was south of the equator and such.
The general vision that she laid out for Western civilization is basically that the West is wrong.
The West is bad.
The West is the harbinger of evil.
The West has been responsible for all the world's problems.
And this is somehow why she should be a leader in the West.
It's a bizarre, self-contradictory notion.
What did you make of her speech in Munich and the rest of the Democrats in Munich?
Yeah, Ben, you hit the nail on the head.
AOC did a terrible job.
She seemed confused.
She seemed to be completely without facts.
And frankly, when she was talking about Taiwan, she was talking about a genocide.
And she was sympathetic to Hamas when answering questions about Taiwan and China.
It was really strong, clear that she had no clue what she was talking about.
But imagine being the split screen between AOC on one side and Marco Rubio on the other side.
It gave America a great contrast on what we could have for a future and what we would be afraid of for a future.
I think President Trump made a fantastic decision choosing Marco Rubio as our Secretary of State and seeing him on one part of the split screen and AOC talking about everything that seemed to be un-American while he was talking about everything that makes America great.
She was talking about things that were confusing and he was very clear.
She was talking about sympathetic, having sympathy for Hamas and for people who caused nearly a genocide while he was talking about defending the values pure that are clear.
He did such a great job, Job.
We almost breathe a sigh of relief that President Trump in his infinite wisdom has chosen well for our nation and for our future.
And at the exact same time, Democrats say AOC.
That's why as a party, the Republican Party, we need to remember that the road to socialism runs right through a divided Republican Party.
And it is incredibly important that we keep America's future as paramount and winning elections as the next major step in the right direction of having the kind of future that Marco Rubio articulated and laid out for this Western alliance.
It starts all in America, though.
I think that's exactly right.
One of the things that AOC was doing over there, she was talking a lot about class consciousness.
It was a very Bernie Sanders speech.
Obviously, some of the people who helped her craft it are on the Bernie Sanders team, including one Matt Dust, who is a former foreign policy advisor to Bernie Sanders.
The Bernie Sanders view of the world is essentially a class-based view of the world in which any country that is rich is exploitative, that the people who have made that country rich are the exploiters, and that there must be some sort of gigantic class uprising.
If that sort of philosophy is mirrored on the right, that is a gigantic category error.
The right in the United States and in Europe has to be based on, again, that shared fundamental value system that includes things like rule of law and equal protection of the laws.
And yes, private property and the possibility of upward mobility and economic progress.
Yes.
Well, without any question, if you look back at the 250 years of American history, the one thing we have to conclude is that starting with the right foundation is a necessary component for all the success that we've seen.
Going back to our Declaration of Independence and having a conversation about how our creator gave us inalienable rights, that is the value proposition that the world needs to take a strong look at.
And from that, you can create an objective standard that has the rule of law applied fairly across the board, makes America the envy of the world.
It is that value system that allows for me, a poor kid born in 1965 in the deep south, to believe that the American dream is coming not only to the South, but to my zip code.
And as a result of that, I sit in front of you as a United States Senator.
Why?
Because America's values, we had to fight for them.
We had to fight, frankly, in our own country for them, but we did that.
And the last 30 to 40 years of American history has been the fastest in the history of progress for all people.
Something the world looks back and says, how did that happen?
It happened because we stood on the right foundation and we were willing to fight for the future that our Declaration of Independence said should be ours.
And AOC and the Democrats fight against our value proposition, against a singular focus of purpose for our nation.
They fight for something we as Americans would call un-American.
And that is the contrast that we'll see in 28 and beyond.
When I say the road to socialism, Ben, I mean it sincerely.
The thought of meritocracy is something the Democrats and the liberals are allergic to.
I am so thankful that we have rules of the road, that we have an objective standard that allows for the poorest kid like me to literally start a business and change my financial future.
I am so thankful that we have a contrast between strong education systems around the country and the weakest in the nation in places like Chicago, 13 school districts in Maryland where the average, well, frankly, only 1% of the kids can read at grade level.
We have an opportunity to see what works in America versus what doesn't work in America.
And what you'll find very consistently, what works in America comes from conservative values and what doesn't work comes from a socialist paradigm spreading throughout parts of the country by AOC Mamdani and others.
Why We Left America00:14:35
Well, that's Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina.
Senator, thanks so much for your time and thanks for your hard work in the Senate.
God bless.
Gretchen Whitmer, who now apparently has the same look as Catherine Hahn, like she's, she looks like she's going to turn to camera and wink.
I don't know what she's going for here, but in any case, it was not a great moment for her either.
She was asked about Ukraine and she didn't know where the Ukraine, what is a Ukraine?
Why is a Ukraine?
Can Ukraine?
Can I crane?
Can anyone crane?
Here's Gretchen Whitmer.
On Ukraine, what does victory look like?
Ambassador?
No, please.
I'd love to hear your answer.
It is.
The two that I am on the panel with are much more steeped in foreign policy than a governor is.
But, you know, I do think that Ukraine's independence, keeping their land mass and having the support of all the allies, I think, is the goal.
Man, this month's wattage on what, on one panel?
This kind of wattage could toast a piece of bread lightly if properly channeled into a toaster.
Like, really, really well done here.
Gavin Newsom showed up also.
He's just making the rounds now, Gavin Newsom.
He's basically doing his presidential tour now.
Any place that will give him a microphone, he is.
He showed up in Munich to explain that the term pluralism might be banned one day in the United States, which, oh, dude, come on.
You don't believe he doesn't believe this.
He doesn't.
I've met him.
He doesn't believe this.
This is nonsense.
27% of the state is foreign-born, which is an important point.
We practice pluralism.
That's a word that might be even banned one day in the United States, but not currently.
We're a universal state.
Really important stuff there.
He also suggested that American law enforcement, while he's abroad, he compared them to the Nazis.
He literally said to me on his show that he shouldn't do this, and then he went and he kind of did it.
All those images of masked men, the secret police, something familiar in Germany.
Those first images came out of my state, the second largest city in the United States of America.
We saw 4,000 National Guard federalized first time.
We've never seen anything like this.
And 700 active duty Marines sent not overseas, but to the second largest city in the United States of America.
It was just like, it was just like Nazi Germany, except for how it wasn't at all like Nazi Germany, like at all.
But other than that, exactly the same.
He also then suggested that President Trump is temporary, but California is reliable.
Reliable to do what?
Precisely.
As a former resident, I ask.
Reliable to do what?
Steal more wealth from its citizens to spend on gigantic boondoggles?
Oge.
I'm here in many respects to remind everyone that Trump is temporary.
He'll be gone in a matter of years.
States like California are permanent.
We're reliable, stable partners.
Had a chance just a moment ago to be on a panel talking about climate policy.
We saw what Trump just did with the endangerment finding, completely rolling back progress the last half century, wants to recreate the 19th century.
And we want to transform our economy.
We want to dominate in the next great global economy, low-carbon green growth.
And I'm reminding world leaders of that.
Oh, boy.
So low-carbon green growth, more regulation, and open borders, gigantic immigration.
Yeah, that's going to work out well.
It's worked out great for Europe.
Hillary Clinton is back from the grave to speak in Munich as well.
And there, she explained that President Trump had betrayed the West and human rights as well, which is a hell of a statement coming from a woman who served as Secretary of State under the Obama administration, which repeatedly abandoned our allies to the predations of our enemies.
He has betrayed the West.
He's betrayed human values.
He's betrayed the NATO Charter, the Atlantic Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
A lot of what has been done before to try to make sense of how difficult it is to restrain people who want unaccountable power.
And none of us in this room, including all of us on this panel, would choose to live under a regime that was so unaccountable that it could act with impunity the way that Putin does, except that's who Trump is modeling himself.
Trump is modeling himself after Putin, according to Hillary Clinton, who once held a reset button that didn't say reset with Vladimir Putin.
The Czech foreign minister actually challenged Hillary at one point.
It got awkward.
We saw the cancel culture.
We saw the vogue revolution.
I don't agree with the gender revolution, the climate alarmism.
Gender women having their rights.
No, Peter, go on.
I think there are two genders, but half of us can't.
Some of us think that there is more than one or more than two, sorry, more than two gender.
I think there is male and female, and the rest probably is a social construct.
So this is something that went too far.
But does that justify selling out the people of Ukraine who are on the front lines dying to save their freedom and their two genders?
If that's what you're worried about.
Can I please finish my points?
I'm sorry that it makes you nervous.
I'm really sorry for that.
It makes me nervous.
It makes me very nervous.
But seriously, I have to.
Can we let me finish please?
Okay, now it is amazing how she immediately responds with rage at this.
Why can't she just say, yes, you're right, there are men and there are women, and also we should defend Ukraine.
But this is the biggest problem for the Democrats.
They cannot, they are a divided party.
They are divided between this radical worldview about women and men and open immigration and socialism and between the real world.
And they can't bridge the gap.
The same Hillary Clinton, who is saying that Donald Trump has betrayed the West, says that America was designed for white male capitalists.
I'm sorry, this is just nonsense.
It's trash.
Very often, the ideological impulse to try to protect the status quo or return making America great again in some nostalgic past that existed for white men and capitalist enterprise was not exactly open and welcoming to people who look like me and a lot of other people who are part of our national fabric.
I have no argument with the necessity of trying to figure out how do we form families.
I'm very proud of my family.
I'm proud of my three grandchildren.
I am proud to be part of that tradition.
That doesn't mean everybody has to be.
That doesn't mean everyone who doesn't have children is somehow an illegitimate human being.
So how do we make the case in a positive way, not a bullying and very shameful way?
Okay, but again, the left has become famous for his bullying and shameful attacks on people who wish to form families.
And by the way, yes, a society does have a stake in saying that it is better to have a family than not have a family.
Yes, a society has a stake in saying it is better to have babies than not have babies.
Yes, it is better for a society to say there are men and there are women and no men cannot become women.
These are things that are the fundamental basis of any growing and thriving society.
And the fact that Democrats can't see this is why they keep losing over and over.
Listen, even Hillary had to admit that mass migration under Joe Biden went too far because reality sometimes sets in.
There is a legitimate reason to have a debate about things like migration.
It went too far.
It's been disruptive and destabilizing.
And it needs to be fixed in a humane way with secure borders that don't torture and kill people.
And don't torture and kill people.
Okay.
Speaking of retreads, the Democrats also over the weekend brought forth Barack Obama, who is back better than ever.
He has decided, by the way, that he is going to use his presidential library, which is a gigantic monstrosity that looks like it's directly created by the Harkinen family in Dune.
I mean, it really is horrifying looking.
It looks like a gigantic monolith rising out of the Chicago skyline.
It's a terror.
He says his presidential library will now be used to create activists, a social change university.
Yay, we're going back to community organizing for the former president.
Young people will be exposed to world leaders who are coming through and can talk about their own journey.
And what that does is it builds a community of activists and it reminds people you're not alone.
You're not alone in your sorrow when you see some of the stuff that's been happening in this country over the last year.
But you're also not alone in being able to figure out how do we push back and come up with new solutions and how do we remake these institutions so that they work for this generation.
And that kind of spirit is what we hope this presidential center will constantly refresh and renew.
This is kind of a social change university.
You want to know the reason why Barack Obama was a successful politician?
The reason is because he spoke in platitudes nonstop all the time.
Please identify the content in what he was just saying.
You can't.
It's not possible.
It's not possible.
All he does is speak in vagary and then angrily condemn things that most people don't like.
That's all.
That's all he does.
So, for example, he will say the Democrats need to stop virtue signaling.
I think there was a certain way of talking about issues for Democrats where we sounded like scolds.
And I've said this before.
There was a virtue signaling that made it seem as if ordinary folks, if they did not say things exactly the right way or meet this litmus test, that they were being chastised, pushed away.
And the truth is, most of us, all of us, are complicated and we have blind spots.
And sometimes we say dumb stuff.
And if you want to create an environment that is welcoming and makes people feel, okay, there's room for me here, then the message and the story we tell has to be: all right, none of us are perfect.
All of us count.
Okay, I mean, again, platitude after platitude after platitude.
But then, of course, he will say that it's Republicans who are divisive after the Super Bowl if they're a little miffed that the entire Super Bowl show was in Spanish and had twerking butts.
The other side does the mean, angry, demagoguery, you know, exclusive, us-them, you know, divisive politics.
That's their, that's their home court.
Yeah.
Our court is coming together.
Our court is, look, you know, a great example.
Wasn't political.
Bad bunnies halftime too.
I knew you were going to say that.
Well, it resonated.
It was smart Because it wasn't preaching.
It was showing.
It was demonstrating and displaying.
This is what a community is.
Oh, the gaslighting.
Oh, the gaslighting.
Again, this is the best Democrats are going to do.
The best they're going to do is have somebody who is high IQ, Barack Obama is a high IQ guy, who glosses right over the top of all the politics and avoids all answers.
That is the best version because if they ever get dragged down into the depths of having to define their policy, their policy makes no sense and very often is directly opposed to the interests of the United States.
All they can really do is be an anti-Trump coalition.
And in the end, that's all they want to do at this moment.
James Carville, he's out there suggesting that Democrats are going to win come November.
They may well do that, but if they do, it will not be because they have somehow come together around a set of values Americans like.
And never forget that if we don't develop a sense of like, I don't know, you call it gallows humor, then the bastards have won.
But they're not going to beat us because we're going to laugh at these motherfuckers and we're going to do it a lot.
And we're going to laugh heartily and we're going to laugh out loud.
And then we're going to beat their fists come November and the November after that.
Well, standing for nothing will presumably be the thing that they go for.
Okay, well, we'll see how it works out for them.
All righty, coming up, we'll get into yet another horrifying shooting committed by a person who identifies as transgender and the entire media decide this is not worth covering.
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Okay.
No, not even close.
Two.
Three.
Whatever.
You know what?
Two.
Three.
I cannot believe we're back here again, Ben.
If the Ben Shapiro shows a mom, then Ben After Dark is a cool mom.