Ben Shapiro (8:08)
Marco Rubio is the adult in the room. Well, if you are the adult in the room, you know, you got to take care of your family. You look back on your life and you think, man, I've made a lot of progress, but what happens if, God forbid, something happens to me? Well, this is why you need life insurance. It's just very, very simple stuff. I have life insurance, my wife has life insurance. And you need it as well. Now you can freeze up because life insurance sounds complicated and bureaucratic and frankly, unpleasant. But our sponsor, Policy Genius can help with all of that. But policygenius is an online marketplace that lets you compare life insurance quotes from top companies side by side for free. No bouncing between websites, no awkward sales calls, no nonsense. Here's the key difference. Their licensed agents don't work for insurance companies. They work for you. 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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 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 da Vinci, 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. 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, 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. The word barbarian comes from a Latin root 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 a hundred years and end 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 an 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 Muhammadanism 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. Now, look 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 2. 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 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 r 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. 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 at 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 was 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, 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 will continue to foot the bill. That is not real. What Rubio did there is. He bucked 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, okay? Trying to pretend there are not is, I think, foolhardy. Elbridge Colby, who is the Pentagon undersecretary for Policy and more aligned with the Vance wing of the Republican Party, told attendees in Munich that he is not sure that the one time, quote, hosannas and shibboleths about shared values between Europe and the US 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, that there's no question from my, 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 on mass 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. Halal 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 Europe. 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. The loaded language there. European people look like Afghan grocery stores in the train station in Munich 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 and they go head over heels down a mountain. It was not a good showing for Alexander 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 Alexandra 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 shtick. Her shtick 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 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. 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 pounds. Of course, according to it's not that she screwed it up, it's that Republicans pounds. 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 and 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 Dass is a horrifyingly bad pick 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, Melee, 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 will lose it all. Okay, I'm just gonna point out again, Javier Milei is not an authoritarian leader. He is not. Javier Melee is a libertarian. Viktor Orban has been repeatedly elected in Hungary. You may not like Viktor Orban. He has been repeatedly elected in Hungary. And if you want to learn more about Viktor Orban, go watch the interview that I did with him in Hungary or the interview that I did with Milei. 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 US actually commit US.
