I Love Rubio

A third short exercise.

Everything the empire believes but is not supposed to say, Rubio writes down. He puts it in prepared remarks, runs it past the lawyers, publishes it in the Wall Street Journal, and files it under the seal of the United States Department of State.

Consider his July. On the thirteenth, he announced a campaign to destroy the International Criminal Court. The State Department promised a whole-of-government response to systematically disable the court’s ability to operate. His op-ed, and I want you to appreciate that a sitting secretary of state chose this title himself, was called “Why We’re Dismantling the ICC.” In it he promised to take the court apart “brick by brick, if necessary.” On camera he explained what the court had done to deserve demolition. It was, he said, waging a war against America,

“not with bullets or missiles, but with statutes, compacts, and the force of so-called international law.”

— Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, July 13, 2026.

So-called international law. Palestinians have spent decades saying that international law, as practiced, is a courtesy the strong extend to themselves and a leash they fasten on everyone else, and we were told this was cynicism, extremism, a failure to believe in the rules-based order. It took the chief diplomat of the United States to confirm it on official letterhead. The law is so-called. It binds no one who matters. The court that indicted the men starving Gaza is a hostile weapon, run, in his words, by smug globalists and hostile Third World governments, and it will be dismantled because it attempted to apply one standard to everyone. He even explained the principle underneath, with a lawyer’s care: for 250 years, Americans who are accused of a crime stand for judgment before a jury of their own peers. Read it twice. No one may judge the empire but the empire itself.

Three days later he convened sixty-six countries to hear the rest of it. The occasion was the discovery of a new terrorism, a left-wing one, and here I must simply stand aside and let the man work, because no enemy of the United States has ever said anything about the United States as damning as what its own secretary of state said from its own podium. The people who oppose all this, he explained, whatever they call themselves, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, whatever, share one fundamental character. It is,

“a poisonous resentment, cloaked in the language of equality and justice, liberation, an overwhelming need to tear down what greater men have built... It is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good.”

— Marco Rubio, Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism, July 16, 2026.

Greater men. The weak against the strong. Empires have run on exactly this equation for five hundred years and have spent the entire time denying it, wrapping it in civilization, in security, in democracy promotion, in the rules-based order that Rubio has now filed under so-called. And here is their secretary, saying it plainly into a microphone: humanity is divided into greater and lesser, the greater build and the lesser resent, and any language of equality or justice or liberation is a cloak. It is the equation beneath Gaza, beneath the sanctions, beneath every century of empire. No critic could have stated it more precisely, because the critics were always guessing, Rubio simply read it off the page. In the same speech he mocked the way violence gets sorted: a neo-Nazi bomb is nefarious evil, he complained, but a Marxist bomb is merely a tragic excess of idealism. He offered this as an indictment of his enemies. He was describing, exactly, the accounting by which every American and Israeli bomb of my lifetime has been booked. Idealism, regrettable, precise, self-defense. He knows the ledger intimately. He keeps it.

Trump wants credit for the power, Ben Gvir wants the blood, but Rubio is the clerk who proves the crime was policy. A blurted boast can be disowned and a frothing minister can be called an aberration, but a doctrine with a title, a byline, prepared remarks, and sixty-six briefing folders is the institution speaking in its own hand. Watch him deliver it, the suit crisp, the oversized shoes shined to a costume-department gleam, everything about him issued, nothing his own, and you understand that Rubio is a man the state dressed.

And we know the clothes are rented, because we have watched him wear the opposite ones. In 2016 this same man toured the country warning that the movement he now serves was a swindle.

“He’s a con man. He’s a con man. He’s a con man.”

— Marco Rubio on Donald Trump, Oklahoma City, February 26, 2016.

“It’s time to pull off his mask so that people can see what we are dealing with here... He is a con artist. He runs on this idea he is fighting for the little guy, but he has spent his entire career sticking it to the little guy.”

— Marco Rubio, Dallas, February 26, 2016.

A world-class con artist, he called him then. A scam. Erratic, wholly unprepared. People file this under hypocrisy, as if the lesson were that Rubio lacks conviction. The lesson is worse. His convictions were never the point in either year, because the words were never his in either year. In 2016 he said what the party establishment needed said, and in 2026 he says what the man he called a con needs said, and the only constant across the decade is that Marco Rubio’s mouth is available to power at its prevailing rate. A believer might garble the doctrine with sincerity. Rubio transmits it clean.

So yes, I love him, the way you love the accountant who keeps honest books for a cartel. Somewhere in the future there is a reckoning, a tribunal or a history, that will need to establish that all of it, the starving, the sanctions, the two-tier law, the sorted humanity, was by design. The defense will say it was never policy. And the prosecution will not need a single witness. It will need a folder. Rubio wrote the confession, titled it, signed it, and had it translated and distributed to sixty-six governments, and he will have spent his whole career believing he was writing a threat.

Little Marco and his employer. He has never looked happier than the day he stopped meaning anything he says.