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Secretary Marco Rubio Joins Breitbart News, Oct. 19, 2026

October 19, 2026 · U.S. Department of State · 0:30:44

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Secretary of State Marco Rubio sat for a full interview with Breitbart News’ Matthew Boyle in the Thomas Jefferson Room at the State Department on October 19, 2026, carried on the department’s own channel. The conversation opened with his Acropolis speech in Athens days earlier and the message he said sits “at the core of a lot of what we’re trying to instill in our foreign policy”: that American government, culture, and values are “backed up by thousands of years of civilization.”

“We are the heirs — we inherited from Greece and from Rome, and ultimately through Europe, many of the values that today are in our country,” Rubio said. The West, he argued, is “the only culture, the only civilization in the world today who seems apologetic about its history and its achievements,” and that posture, he said, is “having a dramatic impact on foreign policy.” Under President Trump, he said, the United States is rediscovering and embracing that inheritance — and wants more Western leaders to do the same, a message he linked to his and the Vice President’s Munich Security Conference addresses.

Why it matters

The interview is the Secretary’s fullest at-home exposition of the civilizational argument behind the Athens address — foreign policy as the defense of a shared Western inheritance — given to a friendly outlet on the department’s own channel, and it ties the Vance Munich line and the Rubio Acropolis line into a single stated doctrine.

Sources: U.S. Department of State, “Secretary Marco Rubio Joins Breitbart News” (official upload, embedded above; the Department of State). Interview as broadcast; transcript reviewed in the site’s private research store; full transcript at state.gov.