The Ben Shapiro Show - October 08, 2026


Marco Rubio Just Gave the Speech of His Career

Hosted by
Ben Shapiro
Mentioned
Marco Rubio Greco Roman Greeks Trump
The World's Response to October 7 Should Terrify You

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

169.32

Word count

1,617

Sentence count

120

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

9

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcripts from "The Ben Shapiro Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, gave what I thought was a pretty amazing speech yesterday outside the Acropolis in Greece.
00:00:06.000 I mean, first of all, the setting is unbelievable.
00:00:08.000 I've been over there.
00:00:09.000 It's just a beautiful area.
00:00:11.000 This, of course, is the outskirts of Athens.
00:00:14.000 And the backdrop is incredible.
00:00:17.000 If Marco Rubio is not running for president, then he certainly should think about it because the speech is great.
00:00:22.000 And honestly, this sort of stuff is great for America.
00:00:24.000 It wasn't just an amazing speech, by the way, at one of the great sites of our civilization.
00:00:29.000 It was a reminder that 2028, you know, I know everybody wants to kind of settle this thing before there's any debate over it.
00:00:33.000 I don't know, man.
00:00:34.000 I know.
00:00:37.000 The Secretary of State started off by talking about the Greco Roman history of the American experiment.
00:00:46.000 The history of America, the history of my country, is covered with the fingerprints of antiquity.
00:00:53.000 Greece is literally carved into the architecture of our government, in the towering columns, in the domes and the monuments across our capital city.
00:01:03.000 The city where our Constitution was born, Philadelphia, is itself.
00:01:08.000 A Greek name.
00:01:11.000 The men who founded my country were fascinated by the heritage we inherited from yours.
00:01:16.000 They were exceptionally well read in history.
00:01:18.000 They are vividly aware of their unique place in it.
00:01:22.000 But no other age of the past held their attention or their imagination quite like that of antiquity.
00:01:31.000 I mean, obviously, this is true. 0.76
00:01:32.000 By the way, the two most cited sources by the founders were the Old Testament and Plutarch.
00:01:38.000 Those were the two top sources.
00:01:39.000 The Old Testament, by the way, runs away with it.
00:01:41.000 But yes.
00:01:42.000 Plutarch.
00:01:43.000 And he is right.
00:01:44.000 You know, understanding the roots of our civilization is extraordinarily important to maintaining the vitality of the American experiment.
00:01:51.000 And then Marco Rubio listed the essential traits that define the West.
00:01:56.000 And you may notice a few of the essential traits that are not here government dependency, not on this list.
00:02:00.000 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.
00:02:16.000 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.
00:02:45.000 Again, this is right.
00:02:46.000 You know, the risk-taking nature of Western civilization, which is based again on a rational assessment of the world around us and rooted in the idea that human liberty and human freedom allow us to discover and conquer.
00:02:59.000 And that makes the less different.
00:03:01.000 And as the Secretary of State made clear, when you obliterate that in favor of quote-unquote the average, you end up destroying your civilization.
00:03:08.000 Here is the Secretary of State.
00:03:09.000 I gotta say that the visuals here are just astonishing.
00:03:11.000 I mean, just a beautifully, beautifully set up speech by the Secretary of State.
00:03:15.000 The ideal of many ideologies in our time.
00:03:18.000 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.
00:03:29.000 Too often these days we build downwards.
00:03:34.000 We design our standards to ensure that no one will lose.
00:03:38.000 We preoccupy ourselves more with the comfort of the worst than the potential of the best.
00:03:45.000 We hold the most exceptional things among us hostage to the average, the ordinary.
00:03:52.000 The mediocre.
00:03:55.000 The men who made the Parthenon, they built upwards.
00:04:00.000 Okay, again, this is right.
00:04:01.000 This is right.
00:04:03.000 Again, it feels as though the steam has come out of Western civilization.
00:04:06.000 We are so focused on tearing down those who are successful.
00:04:09.000 We are so hell bent on stopping our achievement oriented aiming for the stars in favor of redistribution of present resources, which eventually withers to nothing, that we are going to destroy the roots of the civilization.
00:04:23.000 But as Secretary of State Rubio makes clear, We should not be embarrassed that our achievements make us better in many ways in terms of culture than the rest of the world.
00:04:33.000 Like that, that is a good thing.
00:04:35.000 Again, an apologetic defense of the West.
00:04:38.000 I'm into it, man.
00:04:39.000 This is great.
00:04:39.000 This is good stuff here from the Secretary of State.
00:04:41.000 More of this, please.
00:04:42.000 Today, too much of the West has forgotten this quality.
00:04:47.000 Over time, we in the West came to feel ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional.
00:04:53.000 We felt embarrassed that our achievements set us apart from the rest of the world.
00:04:57.000 Our prosperity.
00:04:59.000 Somehow, it became a source of guilt.
00:05:02.000 We no longer believed we deserved and had earned our greatness.
00:05:07.000 The word nationalism became a dirty word.
00:05:10.000 And so we tore down our monuments.
00:05:12.000 We condemned our own history.
00:05:14.000 And in too many places, we taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit. 1.00
00:05:21.000 Again, this is right. 0.89
00:05:23.000 Get some more on this in just one second.
00:05:25.000 First, the Democratic Socialists of America, they've now won a bunch of primaries across the country.
00:05:29.000 And next, They are coming for Congress and they are coming for you.
00:05:32.000 If they win the midterms, they will defund the police.
00:05:34.000 They will reopen our border. 0.98
00:05:34.000 They will force men into women's sports. 0.98
00:05:36.000 All that's going to happen. 0.88
00:05:37.000 But you are the last line of defense and GOPvotes.org is your partner in that fight.
00:05:42.000 Head on over to GOPvotes.org right now.
00:05:45.000 Make a plan to vote early.
00:05:46.000 Okay.
00:05:46.000 Like if you vote early, it means that you're definitely going to vote, right?
00:05:48.000 You're not going to get distracted on the day of the vote.
00:05:50.000 Your vote will count.
00:05:51.000 If you live in critical Senate battleground states like Maine, Ohio, or Iowa, early voting is already happening this week.
00:05:57.000 Now the Democrats are energized and the stakes have never been higher.
00:06:00.000 We cannot afford to have all of AOC's allies or communist cronies joining, running the show.
00:06:05.000 It's why I need you to make a plan to vote early right this very second.
00:06:08.000 Head on over to GOPvotes.org, find your polling location, vote early, and stop the left-wing socialist takeover of the United States, paid for by SLF PAC, not authorized by any candidate or candidates committee.
00:06:20.000 Now, the Secretary of State did say that the next decade will determine what happens with the West. 0.60
00:06:25.000 And this, of course, is exactly true. 1.00
00:06:27.000 If we lose what we are, then there will be nothing left to fight for.
00:06:30.000 Here was the Secretary of State, again, outside the, the Acropolis in, in Athens.
00:06:36.000 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.
00:06:48.000 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.
00:07:01.000 We will either choose to act now or lose the choice to act at all.
00:07:09.000 Now, again, as the Secretary of State points out, that means a strong West, a strong America in the world.
00:07:15.000 The reason I'm thrilling to this is because, you know what, it sounds kind of old fashioned and hackneyed, but also it feels just familiar and like a throwback to a better time.
00:07:23.000 When you hear an American politician talking about freedom and liberty and aspiration and opportunity in a positive way and peace through strength, which is what he is talking about here.
00:07:35.000 Now, for all their lofty ideals, the ancient Greeks were not naive.
00:07:40.000 They understood that nations have interests.
00:07:42.000 They understood that statecraft requires prudence and diplomacy.
00:07:48.000 But they also understood that it requires the ability to wield force when prudence and diplomacy fail.
00:07:54.000 They understood that power requires not only having the means to defend yourself, it requires the credibility that you are willing to use it.
00:08:06.000 This is the classical understanding of politics and of statecraft that the Trump administration hopes to reclaim.
00:08:16.000 Reclaim not just for our country, but for the whole of our civilization. 0.87
00:08:23.000 And he made a throwback reference to the sort of citizen soldier of Athens, the idea that our heroes are in fact willing to do what they must in order to protect the West, but they don't worship death the way, say, radical Muslims do. 0.65
00:08:36.000 Our heroes may be willing to die for their cause, but our heroes do not worship death.
00:08:42.000 It is precisely because we value life that we come to recognize the heroism in those who would sooner sacrifice it than to betray their principles.
00:08:53.000 Yeah, again, the fact that the secretary of state is willing to say this.
00:08:57.000 Yeah.
00:08:58.000 If he runs in 2028, things are going to get interesting.
00:09:00.000 He's really, really good at this.
00:09:02.000 He is.
00:09:02.000 And he is speaking a language of actual conservatism rooted in American history and Western history that the, that honestly, a lot of members of the so-called right seem to be losing these days.
00:09:14.000 They're falling back on a, on a bizarre version of philosophy that is bereft of historical basis in American, in American thought.
00:09:23.000 What an amazing video you just watched.
00:09:25.000 Wasn't that amazing?
00:09:26.000 Well, you know, if you think so, head on over to dailywire.comslash subscribe to watch the full show ad free or check out this crazy story here.