Rubio's amazing defense of Western civilization | Hour 2

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Peter Boghossian, who was one of the guys who did the grievance studies papers along with James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose where they exposed these social science publications as the utter claptrap that they are with no standards and all of that. Like they wrote fake pieces about critical race theory, just made up stuff, and they got published for it. So Peter Boghossian, he sums it up as such. That relativism, which is at the heart of the Democrat Party, which is why I say they don't have any natural immunity to Marxism, because they are relativists. And what they posit, what relativism posits, is that no civilization is better than another. We've heard Democrats say this very thing, right? No civilization is better than any other. Postmodernism posits that truth is just power. Everything is power dynamics, right? As such, we should all feel guilt and apologize for both. But Rubio went to Athens, Greece, stood where democracy was born, and rejected all of it. All of it. Here's the first part. There are great ruins all across the world. Wait a minute. Why does it sound like this? This is going to be awful. This is going to be awful. Why does it sound like this? This is terrible. I'm going to have to find better audio and play it. We're just going to have to do it live. I do have it someplace on the Twitter machine here. It's under my history, under my bookmarks. If it loads. which it's not loading. Data centers, what's going on with you guys? Like, I love you and this is how you're treating me. I don't get it. All right, well, I will pivot because it's live radio. We work without a net. So I'm going to pivot and I'm going to find the audio, a cleaner version of it. I don't understand what happened. It sounded fine when I recorded it all. For some reason, it's not sounding good now. So let me do this. Rubio also posted In conjunction with his speech, he also sent an op-ed, basically, over to Fox News. He says on Wednesday, okay, and I don't know how to pronounce this. Okay, I'm assuming it's Greek. So insert it's all Greek to me joke here. P-N-Y-X. P-N-Y-X. How would I pronounce that? No help from producer Nick, no help from producer Bernie on this. No help from me either, so I can't cast stones here. Pnyx? Nyx? Is the P silent? It could be silent, right? So it could be Nyx or Nyx. I don't know. P-N-Y-X. It's a hillside overlooking the towering columns of the Acropolis in Athens. There, he says, I delivered a simple message that the West is at a crossroads. The decisions we make in the next decade will define the next century and determine whether our civilization maintains its place at the head of the world or resigns itself to a future of servitude and decline. So like Rubio is my spirit animal on this. What he is able to articulate in these moments, in these speeches, he, cause he also, there was, I saw, he went to Germany the day before and he, He delivered a speech there. He got a standing ovation in Germany. And Trump posted the standing ovation. According to the account, the Patriot Oasis, the crowd erupted after Rubio told them to cut off the mass third world migration and embrace their Christian roots. That is the whole argument that Europe has been refusing to have. People need to wake up and recognize that the cultural water that we swim in comes from Christianity. It comes from Greece and Rome. but it comes from Christianity as well. These, these are the, the, the pillars upon which the Western civilization and the culture that we have here in America and in the West, that's where this stuff comes from. Okay. All cultures are not the same. They are not all, they are not all equal quote unquote, when it comes to how they treat their people, the highest order principles that they recognize and reward and the lowest things that they punish, how they punish, how they value human life. Even for atheists living in America, you have the freedom to go about your life as you see fit because of the fundamental infrastructure provided to you by these ideals. I'm not saying you have to believe in Christianity, although you should, But you have to recognize that it has benefited you in a way that living in a different society that rejects Christianity would not otherwise afford. And Europe does not want to have this conversation. Have you been watching what's happening in France? I saw today, yeah, here it is, Reuters podcast. Protest in Paris demanding better school facilities. Yeah. No, that's not what's happening in Paris, France. Okay. I, first off they, those people, they riot way too much. Just like as a general rule, they riot all the time. Um, just there's something about French. Like as long as they're not busting out the guillotine at this point, like that's a win as far as like, you know, French behavior goes. Um, it's not about better schools. This is about all of the migrants, quote unquote, that they have taken in from other parts of the world. What's happening in Britain? You have towns that are now erecting barriers. They're trying to guard their own little villages from the mass importation of migrants that the British government is forcing into the villages, overrunning the local populations with foreign populations and paying for it. taking from the native population, taking their money, taking housing, and then redistributing it to new arrivals. Oh, and by the way, those new arrivals, they're not allowed to work. So you have British people having to work, unable to afford things because the cost of government is so high, and the cost of government is so high because they are providing all of these benefits, these payments, to... Legal and illegal immigrants who are literally loading up into little boats, little dinghies, and going across the channel from France. You now have reports of British people going over into France to try to stop the boats, the dinghies. And then I saw the report out of the British media that somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 plus percent of women who make the crossing into the UK from France, which apparently like is so like it's a war zone or something. So like they're fleeing it, seeking asylum in the UK, which is absurd. Like you were already in a safe country. Why are you coming to the UK? Right. Colonization. Cause that's the, Like that's the common denominator here. It's Islam. OK, so they're they're colonizing Europe, as they promised they would in the plans that they've laid out through the Muslim Brotherhood. So anyway, they they like 90 plus percent. of the women that make this trek. Are raped. Which would make the men with them. Anyone, anyone? Yeah. The holidays will be here before you know it, and so now is the time to create precious and priceless family heirlooms that will last for generations. 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And they will tell others to come who you are. Visit createavideo.com. All right, let's go to the audio now. Here's Marco Rubio in Athens starting off his speech. This is C-SPAN. Clean audio. Thank you, C-SPAN. There are great ruins all across the world. In many cases, they are places where history seems to have exhausted itself, remnants of distant cultures that have long passed beyond a living memory. But the Acropolis is different. For thousands of years, the civilization that built what stands behind me has captivated, the imagination of the Western world. Generations of our statesmen, artists, and philosophers have looked to it. They've looked to it with wonder, and they've looked to it with awe. Now, time has a tendency to dull the senses. Great victories and catastrophic defeats, they seem to shrink to becoming like a footnote in a textbook. Another fact for our schoolchildren to memorize and forget But the Greeks of antiquity, they seem to have an almost mystical hold on our memory. They call us back to them again and again. 480 years before Christ, the armies of Xerxes arrived in this city and they put its sanctuaries to the torch. Most Athenians had by then evacuated by ship to a nearby island but there was a handful of them that refused to leave their home. So instead, they barricaded themselves in the rocky fortress of the Acropolis to fight an extraordinary last stand, heaving massive stones down the cliffs onto the Persian invaders and holding the greatest empire of that age at bay for days. They were eventually overwhelmed. The Persians plundered the temples. They burned the shrines. They raised the Acropolis to the ground. Persians, man. But when the Athenians returned, they gathered the broken remains of the old Acropolis and buried them in the hill where it had stood. And decades later, under Pericles, they raised the Parthenon. For 25 centuries since, the Parthenon has stood. Empires have risen and fallen beneath its shadow. and the progeny of the men who built it, the sons of Athens and Rome, have carried their civilization with them to the. Ends of the earth. Two and a half centuries after the founding of the American Republic, halfway across the world from where I stand now, I stand here today as the Secretary of State of that Republic and as the great grandson of settlers who arrived in the New World from Spain I stand here to testify to a debt that no lapse of time, no distance of space can ever extinguish. The history of America, the history of my country is covered with the fingerprints of antiquity. Greece is literally carved into the architecture of our government. In the towering columns in the domes and the monuments. Across our capital city, the city where our Constitution was born, Philadelphia, is itself a Greek name. The men who founded my country were fascinated by the heritage we inherited from yours. They were exceptionally well-read in history. They are vividly aware of their unique place in it. But no other age of the past held their attention or their imagination quite like. That of antiquity. Many people are surprised to learn that the most commonly cited author in the Federalist Papers was not an Enlightenment philosopher or a political theorist. The most commonly cited author in the Federalist Papers was Plutarch, the Greek biographer of Greece and Rome's great men. Now, much has been written and said about the influence of ancient Greece on the ideas of the American founders. and for that matter, on all of the Western philosophers and statesmen that preceded them. Most of us are familiar with the basic history. Athens gave us democracy. Plato and Aristotle gave us Western philosophy. Our ideas of law, of virtue, of citizenship, and republican government were shaped in the Greek city-states. Even much of our political vocabulary, words like democracy, tyranny, the word politics itself. Found its origins here. All of that is true. But the things we owe to this place as Americans and as Westerners are actually far, far deeper. These institutions and ideas, these institutions and ideas were the outward expression of more fundamental qualities we see in the ancient Greeks, qualities that can't be reduced to any particular political system or theory. Here in Athens, we found the first full realization of all the essential traits that would come to define the West. Fierce individuality and relentless ambition, daring exploration and invention, a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory, an insatiable curiosity about the world and the principles by which it operates, a hunger to know the mysteries of nature and grasp the secrets of the cosmos, an impatience with the notion of impossibility chafing at all boundaries, at all limits, straining to peer into the depths of the unknown. These were not just the formulas or precepts of a particular school of philosophy. They were the characteristic of a people, expressed in their tradition, their stories, their imagination, and the qualities that they demanded of their citizens, and the things they lived and fought. And died for. All right, so Marco Rubio, reminding us of what we are and what we aspire to. All right, real quick. Every government number gets revised, right? Every projection gets walked back. Gold does not file corrections like GovCo. 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And he talks about how to know the ancient Greeks and the things that they built and what they valued and, you know, their individualism, their ambition to know them is to know ourselves. He says to know, them is to know ourselves. I mean, I just said that, but yes. What blossomed here, in this place, was the Western desire to uncover all that ignorance, darkness, and distance had kept hidden from the mind of man. The Greeks did not just shape history. The Greeks gave us history itself. Much of what we know about many ancient civilizations comes almost entirely from the records of Greek explorers and historians. Explorers and historians who. Didn't just chronicle the histories of their own people, but ventured outward to observe and record the sagas of foreign peoples and cultures all across the world. Where others looked inward, The Greeks were the first to direct their focus outward, to chase the thrill and glory. Of seeing all that was strange and new. It was this trait, it was this trait that would push the West to create and build things that others could not. Marking us out from so many other cultures and civilizations where stability and subsistence were the highest. Ends of life. But it is not just the ambition to explore the unknown that we inherit from the Greeks. It is the conviction that the unknown can be known. The confidence that the world can be charted and measured and mapped and understood. And that there is a rational order to the cosmos governed by certain fundamental laws, laws that men can observe and the mind can come to understand. This was the foundation of the Western mind. Our math, our science, our medicine, our philosophy, ethics, and religion, it paved the way for the gospel of Jesus Christ to find fertile soil in Europe and flourish into the empire of Christendom. It was the foundation of the riches of Christian theology of Augustine and Aquinas and the whole tradition of natural law. It gave birth to a civilization marked not just by a common culture, it was marked by a common anthropology, a common view of man and of his place in the universe. Its descendants would share not just the idea of a natural order, but a distinct understanding of virtue, of destiny of faith, of truth, of goodness, and beauty, of a code that dictates how men ought to live of objective standards and ideals to strike towards. For the Greeks of antiquity, the pursuit of excellence was the very principle of man's existence. They organized all of civic life around contest and ambition and competition and philosophy and poetry and sculpture and drama and athletics and art and war and statescraft. The classical Greek city was. An arena For great men to test and prove themselves, to hone their potential through perpetual struggle, to be the best, the strongest, the most beautiful, straining to inch ever closer to perfection. All right, I'm going to pause it there. So he's building to something. You can, you probably guessed that, right? He's building towards something. He's reminding us of what these people were, what they valued, how they It affects us to this day. These are the foundational pillars upon which our society has been built, and we are losing it. We are forgetting it, some purposefully so. Eric Dougherty, who is the chief content officer at Rightline News and Florida Voice News, He said Secretary Marco Rubio, with the backdrop of the Acropolis, is ripping into the open borders globalists who made nationalism a bad thing and outsourced national sovereignty to global bureaucracy. He says, I love this address. It's pure Western exceptionalism. Greatness is a choice. Rip apart the globalist order, raise nationalism, and be proud of our countries again. Marco Rubio from the Acropolis just went full Christian civilization mode, saying the West has a common culture that must be preserved at all costs. Listening to the speech delivered by Marco Rubio, the U.S. Secretary of State, He delivered this. I mean, it's a beautiful background. I mean, people are in awe of the timing of it. The sun is setting on the Acropolis behind him. I think they call it the golden hour or something. I mean, it's just beautiful. And he's defending Western civilization, and he's calling on Western societies to recognize the thing that we have that is exceptional, the principles and the ideals of that were bestowed upon us by our ancestors are worth preserving, but we have to wake up and recognize those principles and ideals. He said, the classical Greek city was an arena for great men to test and prove themselves, to hone their potential through perpetual struggle, to be the best, the strongest, the most beautiful, straining to inch ever closer to perfection. Now I know that to modern ears what I just described this way of life may sound odd, it may even sound cruel. The ideal of many ideologies in our time is frankly become a world of perfect safety, a world devoid of risk or failure, where neither the glory of victory nor the shame of defeat. Too often these days we build downwards. We design our standards to ensure that no one will lose. We preoccupy ourselves. More with the comfort of the worst than the potential of the best. We hold the most exceptional things among us hostage to the average, the ordinary, the mediocre. The men who made the Parthenon, they built upwards. They held that the highest and most noble aspiration in life was to surpass all others, to strive to be the best in all things. The ancient Greek city-states were filled. They were filled with intense passion and rivalry and faction and conflict. But from that constant struggle for distinction, from that came the great flowering of art and philosophy. And political and intellectual energy. That would transform a collective of Mediterranean cities into the birthplace of the greatest civilization in the world. The Thumos, as the ancient Greeks called it, the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride, is the heart of great civilization. And without it, without it, nations lose their will to fight, the will to strive. The will to survive. Strength, courage, and pride. That's what he's talking about. That we are losing. Today, too much of the West has forgotten this quality. Over time, we in the West came to feel ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional. We felt embarrassed that our achievements set us apart from the rest of the world. Our prosperity somehow became a source of guilt. We no longer believed we deserved and had earned our greatness. The word nationalism became a dirty word. And so we tore down our monuments. We condemned our own history. And in too many places, we taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit. In the process, we opened our borders and outsourced our industry and allowed our militaries to wither and to decay. And with every passing year, we seem to outsource more of our sovereignty transferring our decisions to global bureaucracies far. Beyond the reach of our control. But others were all too happy to fill the vacuum that we left. Exactly. The vacuum left behind by our weakness. And as the West's confidence faltered, its adversaries and its rivals only grew more assertive, building up their own wealth and their own power in our stead. And now, today, We find ourselves at. A crossroads because the next decade and the decisions we make will write the story of the next century. The course we take will determine whether the West maintains its place at the head of the world or resigns itself to a future of atrophy and servitude and decline. We will either choose to act now or lose the choice to act. At all. Under President Trump, the United States has made its choice. We choose the unapologetic pursuit of national power to take back control of our critical supply chains, to re-industrialize our economy, to rebuild our defense, to fight for dominance of the technologies and industries of the future, We choose to reach for new frontiers in advanced manufacturing and superintelligence, in drones, weapons, and warfare, in chips, minerals, cyber, and every other domain of human possibility to unleash our energy, to rebuild our factories, to return our astronauts to the moon, and launch a new age of exploration in space. Now, for all their lofty ideals, the ancient Greeks were not naive. They understood that nations have interests. They understood that statecraft requires prudence and diplomacy. But they also understood that it requires the ability to wield force when prudence and diplomacy fail. They understood that power requires not only having the means to defend yourself. It requires the credibility that you are willing to use it. This is the classical understanding of politics and of statecraft that the Trump administration hopes to reclaim. Reclaim not just for our country, but for the whole of our civilization. We believe that. Europe can awaken from its long slumber and rekindle the fire that was lit here millennia ago. There are already signs. Across this continent, we are witnessing what we hope will be the beginning of a generational shift skyrocketing defense spending, a flurry of new partnerships and programs, expanded manufacturing and production, following on the historic defense commitment. Oh my gosh. Why would I praise C-SPAN and now you go and do that? It was made last year in The Hague. Sorry. Greece has been at the center of this shift. The people of this nation have proved themselves once again to be an indispensable friend to Europe and to the United States alike on everything from energy to migration to defense, where Greece has been a model ally. It is our sincerest hope that all of Europe will follow your example. Though passions may at times have strained the bonds of affection between the United States and Europe, it must not be allowed to break them. Together, we must strengthen an alliance capable of confronting the threats of our age. And we can. Because we do not believe transatlantic friendship should be zero-sum. Quite the opposite. Our vision is an alliance whose strength is greater than the sum of its parts. It is a vision we saw in action just last month in an unprecedented. New agreement between the United States, Denmark, and Greenland. An agreement that will reshape the Arctic and bolster the security of all of NATO. All three partners in that deal emerged victorious. All of Europe and NATO and the United States emerged safer, stronger, and more secure because of it. We want to win together. All right. So we're going to pause it there. There's only about nine minutes left here on his address from Athens. I get... All right. So. Like he's reclaiming the word nationalism because he said it's been turned into this dirty word, right? And it's not, it's a love of country. I understand, you know, people do terrible things. They do terrible things in the name of all sorts of stuff. But the idea that quote unquote nationalism, that you should put your nation's interests ahead of other nations, that concept, like, That is not an unethical or a bad view to hold. And so he is not only reclaiming it, but I suspect he's also offering an olive branch to some of the people who think that he's not sufficiently nationalist enough. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them, too, and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to the Pete Kaliner show dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening and don't break anything while I'm gone.