Would Europe Rather Have AOC?

Is AOC Stupidly Smart?

Feb 17, 2026

Certainly Marco Rubio’s fortunes are continuing to ride high after the contrast he brought to Munich across from AOC’s word salad, but don’t expect the Europeans to recognize that. They’re still miffed, and the tone AOC set with her blather about the “rules based order” — while her gaffes were indeed stupid — is much closer to what they’d prefer.

From the Financial Times:

When US secretary of state Marco Rubio took to the stage at the annual Munich Security Conference on Saturday, he laced his address with reassurance, hailing the “unbreakable link” between the US and Europe dating back to the arrival of European settlers on the American continent.
“We will always be a child of Europe,” he said.
The crowd of European leaders, ministers and senior officials rose to their feet to applaud, but it was less out of admiration than pure relief.
The first 13 months of Donald Trump’s second term in office have created the biggest crisis in the transatlantic relationship for decades, as his aggressive foreign policy and transactional relationships with allies rattle long-standing US partners in Europe and disrupt their eight-decade-long security pact.
While Rubio’s tone was politer than the diatribe delivered by US vice-president JD Vance on the same stage the previous year — the first of a year-long series of blows dealt by Trump’s administration to the EU and Nato — the substance of the US message was little changed.
Rubio repeated the administration’s talking points, including lambasting European energy policies to “appease a climate cult” while “impoverishing our people”, and claimed that mass migration raised the prospect of “civilisation erasure”.
“Rubio is the best we can hope for from the [US] administration,” said a senior European minister who was in the room. “But he was still pretty clear that if the transatlantic relationship is not broken, it’s significantly different from what we are used to.”
European officials said that in many ways Vance’s 2025 speech was easier to handle because it was so overtly aggressive that it ensured unity in response. Rubio’s nuance made it harder to determine the threat, they said.
“That’s the thing: if you break stuff, it’s not so easy to put it back together,” said one European minister who was in the audience. “It is nice that [Rubio] held out a hand instead of poking us in the eye . . . but nothing has changed.”

“Rubio sent the right message of reassurance and got a standing ovation, but behind closed doors Europeans say that there is no going back because the Greenland fiasco cut to the bone,” said Alina Polyakova, president of the Center for European Policy Analysis, a Washington-based think-tank. “The good news is that the tone from Europe this year is focused and pragmatic rather than reactive and emotional: that’s a positive change.”

And here comes the fallout:

The scale of unease is such that even Germany, a country that has always refused offers from Paris to join the French nuclear umbrella and counted on the US atomic shield, is considering changing tack. Merz announced on Friday he had “initiated talks” with French President Emmanuel Macron about the continent’s nuclear deterrence.
There is also anxiety in European capitals that the Trump administration fundamentally dislikes the EU as an institution and would rather deal with individual states — an approach that many in Europe believe undermines decades of European integration designed to ensure peace and prosperity.
Roderich Kiesewetter, a German conservative MP, said: “The impression of the speech of Rubio was more a damage control exercise with regard to the statements of Trump. But he clearly doesn’t appreciate the EU. He has a very nationalist view of Europe.”

How Academia Replaced the Church For the Left

The New Yorker:

In the past thirty or so years, the academy has replaced the church as the center of the liberal moral imagination, providing the sense of a community bound by ethics, a firmament of texts and knowledge that should inform action, and a meeting space for like-minded people. This isn’t an entirely new development, of course—American history is full of student-protest movements—but, rather, a consolidation of the university’s influence. Young people not only stopped going to church in large numbers, they also got fewer and fewer union jobs—and unions were the other institution in America that has historically produced a great deal of progressive change. College, particularly for middle-class and upper-middle-class kids, is now often the first and perhaps only place where young people are told that they are part of a community of their choosing, one that will prepare them to be “leaders of tomorrow” and instill in them a moral and ethical code of conduct.
So, if we accept that the university has become the incubator for social-justice movements in America, is it actually good at this job?
I began thinking about this question while reading about the effects of education on political polarization. It’s a familiar story by now: the more years of education you’ve received, the more likely you are to be a Democrat. In the past few election cycles, this correlation has become more robust. A number of conservative commentators, including Roger Kimball, Peter Wood, and Chris Rufo, maintain that political conformity overtook élite institutions of higher learning and turned every seminar room into some radical struggle session where students dutifully read Karl Marx and bell hooks. Even if you disagree, as I do, with their prescriptions to root out so-called radicalism wherever they find it, you can recognize that what they’re describing is not imaginary. In 1969, around the height of anti-Vietnam War protests and the Third World Liberation Front movement on campuses, the faculty at American universities were closer in political alignment to the general public. This held true until the end of the century, when a combination of factors—including the expansion of the social sciences, which tend to attract more liberals—led to the left-leaning academy that you see today. The extreme effects of this shift have been especially visible at élite universities; according to one conservative group’s report, seventy-seven per cent of faculty at Yale, for example, are or have largely supported Democrats, compared with just three per cent who are Republicans. But most forms of higher education have seen at least a doubling of its liberal-to-conservative gap since the nineties.
Wood argues that colleges are not only staffed with a disproportionate number of radicals who indoctrinate the students but also have turned everything from dormitory management to the dining halls over to the left. In this view, even students who might disagree with their radical professors will eventually succumb to progressive politics because it is embedded in every part of campus life. Wood and others—such as John McWhorter, who, in his book “Woke Racism,” contends that “wokeness” has become a religion on college campuses—understand that the contemporary university functions in some respects as a church, and they believe that it has taken up a dangerous and wrongheaded set of doctrines. (Wood co-authored a three-hundred-and-seventy-page study on my alma mater, Bowdoin College, because he believed that the school had become hostile to the teachings of Western civilization.) These critics do not want to change the basically religious function of the university so much as they want to swap out the sermons.
I would argue something more fundamental. Rather than fighting about so-called viewpoint diversity in higher education, and swapping different ideologies back and forth to match our political beliefs, we need to ask whether the university should have this role at all. To answer the question posed at the start of this column: the university is not good at incubating social-justice movements, or acting as a moral and ethical center of our culture. This is not only because its priests are mostly cloistered faculty but because not everyone goes to college, and many of those who do attend community colleges and commuter schools that do not play this role. The élite public and private universities are intentionally exclusionary, which is why seemingly every one of their commencement speakers talks about the assembled, in their caps and gowns, as the future leaders of America and the best of the best. The institutions that are fostering supposedly egalitarian politics limit upward mobility as much as they facilitate it. This has encouraged a type of blinkered and oftentimes unambitious style of activism among young people, which asks for many changes but does not challenge the system that provides them with their own lofty status.

Does Colbert Want To Have to Interview Ken Paxton?

The Hollywood Reporter:

CBS‘ Late Show host Stephen Colbert says that lawyers for the network blocked him from interviewing Democratic U.S. Senate hopeful James Talarico, citing the FCC’s new guidance for political candidates on talk shows.
Colbert opened his show Monday by explaining the situation. “You know who is not one of my guests tonight: That’s Texas State Representative James Talarico. He was supposed to be here, but we were told in no uncertain terms by our network’s lawyers, who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast,” Colbert told the audience. “Then I was told in some uncertain terms that not only could I not have him on, I could not mention me not having him on, and because my network clearly doesn’t want us to talk about this, let’s talk about this.”
Colbert went on to explain the FCC equal time guidance change, citing The Hollywood Reporter’s story on the matter and noting that historically talk shows like his (and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live and The View) had been exempt from the equal time rules, going back some 30 years.
“In his letter, Carr said he was thinking about dropping the exception for talk shows because he said some of them were motivated by partisan purposes. Well, sir, you’re chairman of the FCC, so FCC U because I think you are motivated by partisan purposes yourself, sir,” Colbert said. “Smelt it because you dealt it. You are Dutch ovening America’s airwaves. Let’s just call this what it is. Donald Trump’s administration wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about Trump on TV, because all Trump does is watch TV.”

Keep in mind that these same rules were deployed under Joe Biden, when Kamala Harris appeared on Saturday Night Live. But that’s ancient history, Donald Trump hadn’t won again yet.

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It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation
To call upon a neighbor and to say:—
“We invaded you last night—we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away.”

And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you’ve only to pay ’em the Dane-geld
And then you’ll get rid of the Dane!

— Rudyard Kipling

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