I think Marco Rubio is great.
Whenever he sticks it to European leaders I’m yelling in appreciation at whatever screen his pithy missive is emanating from.
His latest turn couldn’t have been more delectable. Standing in front of The Acropolis in Greece, on the anniversary of October 7th, his references of the Ancient Athenians tumbling boulders down the hillside onto the marauding Persians reflected perfectly The West’s fight against Iran and its network of terrorist groups and the anti-Western axis.
For 25 centuries since, the rebuilt Acropolis under Perocles has survived, seeing empires come and go and symbolising the endurance of Western Civilisation and democracy (demokratis being Greek for ~demos / people and ~kratis / power).
Rubio cites the canon of great philosophers, borrowed terms, and the progenesis of Western systems and thought, to construct the macrocosm of Westernism.
What blossomed here in this place was the Western desire to uncover all that ignorance, darkness, and distance had kept hidden from the mind of man.
Whoever writes his speeches should publish an epic doctrine in iambic pentameter. I’d print it out and have it on my coffee table and make every visitor read it.
But if Rubio wants to fully interrogate with vigorous poetic conceit the muse Aletheia ( the Goddess of truth, or etymologically á-lēthē-ia / unveiledness) and use it to generate Aesopian fables of warning to Europe, he must also lift the shroud around the operations of Silicon Valley.
For I agree with his statement
National interests did not vanish in the face of international institutions. War did not disappear simply because we preferred peace. Other states continued to arm, to seek influence, to compete for territory, and technology, and resources, and markets, and energy, and power.
His repeated insistence that self-flagellisation, learned obsequiousness and servitude to corruptible supranational organisations has created a vacuum into which the warped ideologies of hostile entities can be poured is entirely true. Open borders, demilitarisation, deindustrialisation, and the associated inverted morality will destroy Western civilisation within decades.
But by what mechanism is this happening?
Mēkhanḗ in Ancient Greek means a siege engine. Pretty apt.
Because the siege engine against The West through psychological operations conducted online; information manipulation, synthetic dopamine, redrafting of morality itself in order to weaken, divide and eventually destroy our people - would not be possible without the Big Tech giants. The Goliaths of Silicon Valley. The Nephalims of San Francisco. American companies.
Hostile states have long used online psychological operations (psyops), social media amplification, and bot networks to exploit societal divisions in open democracies.
Russia, China, and Iran stand out for systematic efforts that blend inauthentic accounts, AI-generated content, and coordinated campaigns. These operations rarely invent grievances from nothing; they identify real tensions such as racial justice debates, protests, migration pressures, and foreign conflicts, and then intensify polarization, erode trust in institutions, and shape narratives favorable to their own geopolitical aims.
Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) and successor networks pioneer large-scale bot farms and troll operations. They create networks of fake personas that post, comment, and organize content at volume, often playing both sides of an issue to maximize conflict.
China relies on “Spamouflage” networks of inauthentic accounts that mimic local voices, push pro-Beijing narratives, and attack critics.
Iran has used IRGC-linked accounts posing as Western or Latin American users, fake journalist personas, and, more recently, AI agents built on open-source models to autonomously generate accounts and flood platforms with messaging.
Recent reporting shows Iran and China deploying AI agents that can independently create fake profiles on Instagram, Facebook, X, and TikTok, then seed them with political content.
Why is France on fire?
Fox News identified 50 organizations in the French student protest movement and its wider network of supporters and international amplifiers, revealing an activist ecosystem extending far beyond the students who launched the demonstrations. With foreign Communist provenance.
America spent an estimated $13 trillion fighting Communism in the last century. Now 3% of US GDP is generated by the very companies being used to spread its propaganda.
The recent invasion of Ceuta was coralled and coordinated using at least 10 Facebook groups and 50 Instagram accounts. Without Meta, the invasion could not have happened.
Does Rubio think Social Justice Movements, BLM and Pro-Palestine campus protests, are organised via ethereal osmosis?
After the October 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel and subsequent war, Iranian state-linked accounts and networks glorified the initial assault, framed Israel and the United States as aggressors, and pushed dehumanizing language. Russian and Chinese state media and affiliated accounts rapidly increased coverage, tying the conflict to accusations of Western hypocrisy (especially regarding Ukraine) and amplifying campus protests in the United States and Europe as evidence of internal American collapse. Researchers documented surges in coordinated posts, AI-generated imagery, and cross-amplification among the three countries’ ecosystems.
People trafficking is almost entirely conducted online. TikTok may be a primary offender, as a CCP linked company it is bound to participate in acts of greyzone warfare. So the West should simply ban it.
Although China has bought its way into so much critical infrastructure or holds alarming levels of Western debt I would imagine the reason this has not been done is so as not to ire Xi.
But what is the excuse of Meta? Or X? Is America also intent on flooding Europe with illegal invaders? Evidently not. But America is grotesquely weak at holding Big Tech to account.
Yet if it held its own companies’ feet to the fire first, imposing the same upon the likes of TikTok becomes far easier.
So why not?
Is it the symbiosis of Big Tech sops in return for electoral manipulation? But the Left were not afraid to force Dot Com bros to remove posts about Hunter Biden’s laptop and called social media to heel in a truly dystopian way during Covid. The Big Tech bros did as told.
Today, AI has lowered the cost and raised the speed of hostile campaigns, enabling more autonomous and harder-to-attribute activity. This issue will only expontentially grow more critical.
Psychological operations succeed most when they ride genuine domestic controversies - rather than invent them. And indeed Europe has a perverted establishment wedded to the sado-masochistic principles outlined by Rubio in Athens. Open borders, net zero, national shame.
And while the tyranny of the Leftist fraternity happily strips its native citizens of the freedom to choose these policies or vote them out, in some countries criminally prosecuting dissenting voices, gerrymandering democracy, and creating layers of benign looking bureaucracy to ram through its twisted designs, I am hugely in favour of Rubio’s bent for full fat freedom. Freedom for companies to innovate. Freedom of speech. Freedom writ large.
These are the features of free societies. Yet hostile governments that do not allow their own citizens such liberties turn freedoms against the societies that practice them.
There is a big difference between the sanctity of free speech, and permitting extremist propaganda to permeate the minds of youths online who then go about setting fire to schools, or enabling traffickers to smuggle terrorists, arms and dangerous men into the country, or radical trans activists who poison children into removing their genitals or wilfully brainwash adolescents into mental illness, or enabling The Muslim Brotherhood to propagate extreme Islamism across Europe, or Iran, China and Russia to corrode our societies from the inside out like a fast metastisizing cancer. The vile deranged kids that tried to assassinate Trump and killed Kirk will have doubtless been radicalised online.
Freedom is an end of itself. However the road to get there at times may require control.
A sweeping US government crackdown on social media bots and fake accounts would almost certainly wipe significant value off Big Tech share prices. I assume this is the primary cause for governance reticence.
Social media valuations are intrinsically tied to monetization metrics that fake accounts directly artificially inflate. A forced purge or stricter legal accountability would disrupt these core metrics, triggering immediate financial and structural vulnerabilities.
When Twitter began purging millions of locked and fake accounts in 2018 to improve platform health, its stock plummeted by nearly 20% in a single week due to fears of stagnating user growth.
A government mandate wouldn't just require a one-time purge, it would require ironclad infrastructure to prevent future bot registration.
But what cost ‘Saving The West?’
While an initial regulatory shock would cause a severe market sell-off, a long-term recovery is entirely possible. If a platform successfully eradicates bots, the remaining user base becomes 100% authentic with advertisers willing to pay a premium for hyper-accurate, high-converting human data.
It is surely a price worth paying.
America will have to take a hit.
She came late to the Second World War, and sacrificed her own to save the day.
The Third World War is already underway. Partly hot through kinetic aggression, but that is the tip of the iceberg. The vast hump of malign greyzone activity is hidden from view. And this is where the US must drop some bunker buster bombs to win the information war.
Bots kill. And not just individuals - but potentially an entire civilisation.
Rubio told European leaders that day
We believe that Europe can awaken from its long slumber and rekindle the fire that was lit here millennia ago.
Let’s hope America wakes up, too.
Brilliant essay once again Alex. We're living in very scary times, not looking good at the moment
Marco Rubio would make a better president than Vance for sure !