You Won’t Believe The New York Times’ Take on Rubio’s Munich Speech

In my last piece, I wrote about the contrast between Marco Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference and the Democrats’ embarrassing attempt to counterprogram him. 

Rubio’s speech was masterful. It demonstrated why so many of us think he is presidential material. Not only can he hold four important jobs at once, including the Viceroy of Greenland, but he can stir the soul when he puts his mind to it. 

The central theme of Rubio’s speech was that Europe and the United States are tied together by shared heritage and culture, and that the strain in our relations is not rooted in any hostility toward European interests and culture in the Trump administration, but by a determination to save the collective West from cultural decline and extinction. 

Never in my life did I think I would be a Marco Rubio fan, but this is just so damn good. pic.twitter.com/uYG4IzwBUz

— Viktor Bunin 🛡️🇺🇸 (@ViktorBunin) February 15, 2026

Even the Europeans welled up a bit from the speech. They gave Rubio a standing ovation, which is hardly the usual thing for any Trump administration official in the heart of the European establishment, and the German Defense Minister put things into context well. 

  

The New York Times’ reaction to the speech mirrored that of AOC: Western values suck, and Europe is no longer Western because its population is being replaced by third worlders. AOC said it outright, giving an explicitly Marxist race and class-based analysis, while the Times sanded the sharp corners down a bit. 

Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription. https://t.co/QZqzY4qWjP

— David Strom (@DavidStrom) February 16, 2026

I’m not kidding. Here is how Jim Tankersley’s story on Rubio’s pitch regarding a shared culture begins:

There is 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 European people, look like today. And a different Europe from the one the Trump administration says it wants to be friends with.

Marco Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state, tried to soothe a year of friction between the United States and its trans-Atlantic allies on Saturday at the Munich Security Conference. His speech there reiterated America’s commitment to Europe but wrapped it in historical and cultural ties that seemingly exclude large sections of the current European population.

“We are part of one civilization: Western civilization,” Mr. Rubio told a crowd of anxious diplomats in Munich. “We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry.”

The United States and Europe are indeed pillars of what historians refer to as Western Civilization, which has roots typically traced to ancient Greece.

Their modern relationship — and the bonds Mr. Rubio said held it together — has been changed by demographic trends, including new arrivals and rising secularization.

It’s a remarkable lede, amounting to both a confirmation of and rebuke to Rubio’s (and the Trump administration’s) point: Europe isn’t Western anymore. The Great Replacement is here. 

No doubt many of the European technocrats share this point of view, but just as surely many Europeans do not, and a lot of politicians there are “getting” the message, whether they like it or not. 

   

The Times, speaking for those technocrats who are in love with the Great Replacement, crows that Europe is de-Christianizing, and that the Jewish population barely exists there, while Islam is on the rise.

Christianity is declining across much of the continent. In Europe’s three largest economies — Britain, France and Germany — less than half of residents now identify as Christian, according to survey data by Bertelsmann Stiftung, a nonpartisan foundation. The ranks of the religiously unaffiliated are growing, according to data by the Pew Research Center and others.

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 percent in 2020, according to Pew. The Jewish population has declined slightly and remains below 1 percent.

See, Marco?! Europe is rejecting the Judeo-Christian tradition! Yay!

The NYT has come up with an amazing critique of Rubio’s Munich speech. In short: “akshually, your appeal to shared Christian heritage between USA & Europe is false because we replaced the Christian population with Afghans”

Didn’t see this one coming. I’m impressed. pic.twitter.com/0dXqEe592e

— Maxwell Meyer (@mualphaxi) February 15, 2026

No doubt Ursula von der Leyen was thrilled to hear AOC give the Marxist response to Rubio.

This is my lane of expertise so let me help you translate what AOC is saying here:

It’s Marxism.

She claims that the foundation of Western culture is “thin” and that culture is really nothing more than a perpetual state of evolution in response to material causes.

Your… pic.twitter.com/RxR00R3aWe

— Paul Anleitner (@PaulAnleitner) February 15, 2026

This is my lane of expertise so let me help you translate what AOC is saying here:

It’s Marxism. 

She claims that the foundation of Western culture is “thin” and that culture is really nothing more than a perpetual state of evolution in response to material causes. 

Your primary marker of identification should not be tied to religion or the place you live but to your “class.”

This is textbook philosophical Marxism.

AOC versus Rubio. That conflict of visions best characterizes the tensions at the Munich Security Conference. Either you believe that Rubio is right and that what binds the US to Europe is a shared history and heritage that is worth preserving, or you believe in the Marxist class struggle where the dispossessed should displace the dominant and live off the fat of the land before it all gets consumed. 

Alex Soros had a busy Munich Security Conference. pic.twitter.com/9d4ACcKFNU

— Byron York (@ByronYork) February 16, 2026

Rubio’s speech was a call to renewing a shared greatness, and was unashamed of the West’s values, including our colonial past. The Times and AOC are pointing to the Islamic tide rising in Europe and declaring that to be the future. Europeans should learn to live with grooming gangs, Sharia law, and banning dog parks to accommodate their new overlords. 

Leftist Spanish MEP: “I hope for ‘replacement theory,’ I hope we can sweep this country of fascists and racists with immigrants.”

You see this more and more now. France’s far-left leader Melenchon also boasts that he wants replacement.

pic.twitter.com/24GM9vQHqG

— Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 (@DrewPavlou) January 31, 2026

At least you can appreciate the fact that the left is becoming ever more explicit about its hatred for Western Culture and white people. Spain just regularized half a million illegal migrants and put them on the path to rapid citizenship in an effort to fight the “far right,” and Democrats here at home are openly, in some cases, calling for a race war. 

Rep. Gene Wu (D) goes mask off:

“Non-whites share the same oppressor and we are the majority now. We can take over this country.” pic.twitter.com/CrxsPqlkLI

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) February 8, 2026

The battle lines within the West are drawn. There are those who want to drive a stake through the heart of Western culture, and those who want to see it rise again. 

Do you want a future of Afghan grocery stores and mosques everywhere? Do you want MS 13 and Tren de Aragua take over “only a few” apartment complexes? How about those Pakistani rape gangs? Aren’t they awesome?

Or do you want a revitalization of Western Judeo Christian culture? You know, the one that built the First World to which everybody is fleeing because their own countries suck?

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