TYLER O’NEIL: Rubio’s Rousing Athens Speech Highlights the Infrastructure Demonizing the West.

Rubio contrasted the ancient Greek “thumos”—the “fire of passion, strength, courage, pride” that helps civilizations succeed—with the current malaise often associated with the “woke” movement.

“Over time, we in the West came to feel ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional,” he warned, noting the tearing down of monuments. “We felt embarrassed that our achievements set us apart from the rest of the world. Our prosperity somehow became a source of guilt. We no longer believed we deserved and had earned our greatness.”

Rubio warned that modern ideologies seem to aim at “a world of perfect safety, devoid of risk or failure, with neither the glory of victory nor the shame of defeat.” He lamented that such an approach leads the West to “design our standards to ensure that no one will lose,” and ultimately “hold the most exceptional things among us hostage to the average, the ordinary, the mediocre.”

It was an excellent condemnation of the ideology behind “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Rubio wasn’t just rejecting the mentality that says we must count every university applicant or every member of a corporate boardroom by race, sex, and sexual orientation; he was condemning the underlying assumption that America is inherently biased against certain groups and that we must atone for this national sin by elevating them.

This critical race theory isn’t cloistered away in some isolated ivory tower. It recently held sway in the commanding heights of American culture, and its institutional framework persists even today.

Earlier, from Glenn at his Substack: Marco Goes Hard — About what really matters.