The Ben Shapiro Show - July 17, 2026


Rubio Just Delivered a Masterclass on the Radical Left


Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

173.79

Word count

1,706

Sentence count

110

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The White House held a symposium on radical leftist violence at the State Department yesterday, and Marco Rubio took aim at the radical left. The full speech is worth the watch, and it's a must-listen. We'll break it down for you.

Transcript

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Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Folks, Marco Rubio and the people over at the State Department, they've been taking President Trump's warnings on Chinese influence in our elections and they've been taking action.
00:00:07.000 Well, in an excellent speech yesterday, the Secretary of State nailed the envious, destructive nature of the left.
00:00:12.000 I've been talking about this for a very long time, as you know.
00:00:15.000 I mean, it's essentially the theme of my last book.
00:00:17.000 The full speech is totally worth the watch.
00:00:19.000 Rubio addresses head on the question of whether China is interfering in our elections, but also he takes on why and what the left actually wants.
00:00:26.000 So we're going to break it all down for you.
00:00:27.000 We'll explain what that has to do with Chinese election meddling and also just sort of general informational meddling.
00:00:34.000 There's not a nefarious government on the planet that doesn't have China pulling the strings in the background.
00:00:38.000 And so, yesterday, the White House held a symposium essentially on radical left violence, on the resurgence of political terrorism, largely on the left, at the State Department.
00:00:50.000 And Marco Rubio spoke, and it was quite a brilliant speech, actually.
00:00:53.000 Here was the Secretary of State talking about the radical left and its permission structures for violence.
00:00:59.000 This is a distinctive and unique evil.
00:01:02.000 It has always been driven by a hatred.
00:01:05.000 Above all else, a hatred for civilization itself.
00:01:09.000 It is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good. 0.63
00:01:18.000 It is perpetrated by those who cannot build, who cannot create, who cannot achieve great things, and take their revenge upon the world for their own inadequacy by seeking to destroy those who can.
00:01:32.000 This is what radical leftism is.
00:01:35.000 It may wear various different slogans and ideologies across place and time.
00:01:39.000 They can call themselves anti capitalist or anti imperialist or communist or anarchist or Marxist, but the fundamental character is always the same.
00:01:49.000 It's always the same.
00:01:50.000 It is a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice and liberation, an overwhelming need to tear down what greater men have built, to wreck what is beautiful and what is right on behalf of people who are only filled with ugliness and have nothing else to offer the world.
00:02:10.000 You might call it lions versus scavengers.
00:02:12.000 I mean, That is basically the entire theme of my last book.
00:02:16.000 And the Secretary of State, of course, is exactly right.
00:02:19.000 And he points out that terrorists are the sort of apex predators here, because when you take that ideology to its extreme, you actually have to violently destroy all the things you can't build.
00:02:33.000 The world communism envisions is a world without God.
00:02:37.000 For these architects of revolutionary violence, the towering achievement of our civilization, for them, it's an unbearable humiliation.
00:02:45.000 A reminder of what they cannot do and a reminder of what they cannot be.
00:02:50.000 So they choose instead to destroy.
00:02:53.000 They attack pipelines, they attack railroads, they attack power grids and laboratories, the physical embodied symbols of power and invention and achievement.
00:03:06.000 This is the nature of the terrorism we face today.
00:03:10.000 They despise the West because the West is great.
00:03:17.000 So, Secretary of State Rubio.
00:03:19.000 He pointed out one of these threats materializing in the United States is indeed Antifa.
00:03:23.000 Now, you'll recall back in 2020 that Joe Biden suggested that Antifa is not even an organization.
00:03:29.000 This is in September of 2020.
00:03:32.000 I'll tell you what, somebody's got to do something about Antifa and the left because this is not a right wing problem.
00:03:38.000 This is a left wing problem.
00:03:40.000 This is a left wing problem. 0.53
00:03:42.000 I'm a white supremacist.
00:03:44.000 Antifa's an idea, not an organization.
00:03:46.000 You got it, please.
00:03:47.000 Not malicious.
00:03:49.000 Okay, and the idea that Antifa is not a threat, again.
00:03:53.000 Downplaying the threat doesn't make it not a threat.
00:03:54.000 Secretary of State Rubio went after Antifa yesterday.
00:03:58.000 We are facing an international, we are facing a transnational threat.
00:04:03.000 These are not distinct and isolated cells, they are interconnected networks.
00:04:08.000 They do not recognize our borders.
00:04:10.000 They do not believe, in fact, in the nation state itself.
00:04:13.000 They coordinate, they communicate, they travel, they train, and they act together, sharing the same infrastructure, sharing the same enemies, sharing the same mission.
00:04:27.000 Antifa militants and their comrades travel from across Europe and to the Americas to participate in each other's attacks, to funnel propaganda and training materials and target information through shared encrypted channels, moving through underground networks of safe houses and finance, and sustain their operations through transnational funds.
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00:06:08.000 Stephen Miller, top advisor to the President of the United States, he pointed out that one of the hallmarks of left wing terrorism is taking advantage of the openness of our society, which of course is exactly right.
00:06:19.000 One of the hallmarks of left wing violence and terrorism is its completely pretextual and disingenuous appeal to civil liberties in an effort to shield its own violence.
00:06:36.000 This is the tactic that the left always uses to try to protect itself.
00:06:42.000 From facing criminal punishment.
00:06:45.000 It is essential that we are wise enough and strong enough to understand that these appeals must fall on deaf ears.
00:06:55.000 When the leftist who does not believe in freedom, who does not believe in civil rights, who does not believe in any ordered notion of justice, protests that we are violating his rights, understand that he is lying to try to persuade people who are not closely following the political scene that some injustice has been perpetrated against him.
00:07:18.000 I mean, this is right, and this is where our enemies really, really take advantage in a major way.
00:07:22.000 It's much easier to exploit an open society than to infiltrate a closed society, for sure.
00:07:27.000 Secretary of State Scott Besant made an appearance at this particular symposium, and he pointed out that there have been attempts against his life.
00:07:35.000 But I'm going to remind everyone in this room and all the media that I was the subject of an assassination attempt in February 2024 by an adult left wing activist.
00:07:47.000 Two hours after being sworn into my job.
00:07:51.000 So, any of you who want to report that this is a fiction and does not exist, be there for the sentencing this August.
00:08:02.000 Okay, well, again, the left wing violence and the uptick in left wing violence is, of course, very real.
00:08:07.000 And it is increasingly targeting precisely the targets that you would think China, for example, would want to target.
00:08:12.000 So, we've been talking for a while here about the Chinese effort to undermine AI development in the United States.
00:08:18.000 It is not a sort of natural outgrowth.
00:08:20.000 It's not a natural place for Americans to go.
00:08:22.000 A bunch of big centers get built that have a bunch of servers and data storage units in them and that create legitimately tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of jobs.
00:08:33.000 And they're basically built on land that is empty at the moment and all that.
00:08:38.000 And suddenly a national outcry grows.
00:08:40.000 I mean, now we've had this sort of thing before where people were very freaked out about big box stores like Walmart, for example.
00:08:48.000 At least with Walmart, you can make the case that Walmart was somehow putting the local guys out of business.
00:08:51.000 Here, you're just talking about additional jobs, and yet suddenly the AI backlash is growing.
00:08:56.000 The data center backlash is growing, for example.
00:08:59.000 So much so that, according to the Wall Street Journal, tech executives now fear for their lives.
00:09:04.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, the volume of digital threats targeting AI chiefs and data centers grew sevenfold between late February and May, according to LifeRaft, which scans social media and the dark web for Fortune 100 companies.
00:09:16.000 Some tech leaders have begun traveling with armed guards.
00:09:18.000 Some stay quiet on the topic of AI to avoid attention.
00:09:21.000 Industry leaders who had been issuing dire warnings about the risks AI poses to the workforce have pivoted to talking about its potential benefits.
00:09:29.000 So, again, those threats are quite real.
00:09:32.000 And I am not going to buy the idea that all of that is fully organic, that this is coming from nowhere.
00:09:40.000 What an amazing video you just watched.
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