How's it going America,
Check out the latest episode of The Pod Millennial in which I talk to Phil Labonte, lead singer of All That Remains and co-host of Timcast IRL, all about American music. I also talk to Olympian Katie Uelander about what cost her a spot on the US Skeleton team this year and Pamela Garfield-Jaeger about the crashing end of the trans craze. And tomorrow we have a brand new show!!! You won't want to miss it! Subscribe, rate (5 stars, of course), and listen.
Let's get into it:
Two speeches, given a year apart in Munich, reveal the true substance of American leadership on the global stage. In 2025, Vice President JD Vance scolded European leaders about the value of individual European dignity and the need to heed the voices of European citizens when crafting and implementing policy. In 2026, Secretary of State Marco Rubio reminded European leaders that the United States and Europe have a shared culture, history, and heritage, saying, "the United States and Europe, we belong together.
"We are part of one civilization – Western civilization," Rubio said. "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, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir."
Vance gave a lesson in the present when he said, "of all the pressing challenges that the nations represented here face, I believe there is nothing more urgent than mass migration. Today, almost one in five people living in this country moved here from abroad. That is, of course, an all-time high. It’s a similar number, by the way, in the United States, also an all-time high. The number of immigrants who entered the EU from non-EU countries doubled between 2021 and 2022 alone. And of course, it’s gotten much higher since."
He said it was "the result of a series of conscious decisions made by politicians all over the continent, and others across the world, over the span of a decade."
Rubio focused on the past to cultivate a sense of commonality between American and European leaders, saying that the events of the late 20th century led the collective European and American consciousness to believe that we had hit the "end of history," where global conflict was over, and every nation would become a "liberal democracy."
"This was a foolish idea that ignored both human nature and it ignored the lessons of over 5,000 years of recorded human history. And it has cost us dearly," Rubio said. Just as Vance had condemned European leaders for eschewing the individuals who comprise their democracies, Rubio blasted them for "shuttering our plants, resulting in large parts of our societies being deindustrialized, shipping millions of working and middle-class jobs overseas, and handing control of our critical supply chains to both adversaries and rivals."
"We increasingly outsourced our sovereignty to international institutions while many nations invested in massive welfare states at the cost of maintaining the ability to defend themselves," Rubio said jointly of the US and Europe. The big difference between Vance's remarks in 2025 and Rubio's in 2026 is that Rubio put America in the same boiling pot of water as Europe, and European leaders seemed at least more open to the ideas when they were not being rebuked for their failures.
"And in a pursuit of a world without borders, we opened our doors to an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people. We made these mistakes together, and now, together, we owe it to our people to face those facts and to move forward, to rebuild," Rubio said.
His speech is worth listening to in its entirety, as is Vance's. Both taken together give a clear vision for how America should address the world, tend to our relationships with our European allies, and save Western Civilization from the brink of outright disaster.
Libby