What's Really Disturbing About Rubio's Crazy-Ass Speech
When I read Rubio’s speech I simply sat down and started typing. I was worked up. Like I still am. However, one of the things that really jumped out at me—and which I flagged—was the bit about “racing boldly into the future.” That is a typical Heideggerian (as in Martin Heidegger) theme: being (Dasein) as coming to us from the future. I knew that couldn’t be a coincidence—I mean, who do you know who talks about “racing boldly into the future?”
So I did a search on ‘who is rubio’s speechwriter’. Rubio’s speechwriter is Darren Beattie.
Now, it’s possible that a really important guy like the combined SecState/NSA has more than one speechwriter, but how many of multiple speechwriters do you think would have written a doctoral dissertation in political theory titled "Martin Heidegger's Mathematical Dialectic"? Right. That was Beattie. The director of Beattie’s dissertation was Michael Allen Gillespie. A glance at bibliography for Gillespie’s many books and articles will quickly show that his area of expertise is Nietzche and Heidegger. (Full disclosure: I own a copy of Gillespie’s The Theological Origins of Modernity.) So now you know why I made those references to the Superman/UeberMensch. Rubio may make a few references to Christianity, but on any reasonable reading of his speech it has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with Christianity.
Lest you think that this is much ado about not really much, the idea of “racing boldly into the future” is actually quite important. Heidegger, in the early 1930s, came to the conclusion that Hitler was being (Dasein) coming to us from the future. For example:
Or to put it slightly differently:
OK, here’s another way to put it:
Heidegger, Martin | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
When Heidegger urges us to stand in being, he does not merely ask us to acknowledge our own place in being’s history, but to be future-oriented and see the future in a unity with the past as having-been and the present.
Heidegger wants us to race boldly into the future—which is being (Dasein) coming to us.
Don’t look at me like that—I don’t buy into any of that. This is the shit that Beattie inserted into dumbass Little Marco’s speech.
However.
Don’t kid yourself. Crazy as it all sounds, Heidegger was and remains one of the must influential ideologues—I refuse to dignify him with the title ‘philosopher’—in the modern Western world. No matter about his Nazi past. So, read this from the standpoint of someone who wants to “authentically” be. Heidegger decided that to “authentically” be he should join the Nazi party.
Heidegger’s Being and Time: Understanding Dasein and Temporality
Heidegger’s “Being and Time” explores Dasein and temporality, revealing how human existence is deeply intertwined with time and authenticity.
Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time transformed philosophy in the 20th century by attempting something huge: trying to understand what it means to exist. Or, as Heidegger puts it, to be Dasein. He asks: how do our experiences in the past and present, our hopes and fears for the future, shape our understanding of what it is to “be” at all? The result is a text that asks us many difficult questions, including whether we have understood anything he has said. Let’s analyze this question in detail.
…
In 1927, Martin Heidegger published Being and Time, which changed philosophy forever. It broke completely with how things had always been done. In this book, Heidegger introduces concepts like Dasein (often translated as “being-there”), saying we should think about humans’ place within the world they live in.
Instead of focusing only outward at objects around them, he suggests people also consider themselves—what does being here mean anyway? What is my experience right now? Am I living authentically or not so much?
However, there is also a negative aspect to Heidegger’s legacy. In the 1930s, he joined the Nazi Party, something that has since caused furious debate about his philosophy and morals. Nevertheless, few can rival the impact he had on philosophy itself.
His thinking helped shape existentialism, hermeneutics, and postmodernism—influences echoed in the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, among many others. When a thinker of this stature comes along, people have to pause for thought: What does existence mean anyway?
I hope you can see from this that this way of thinking has absolutely nothing to do with what most of us understand as morality. Genocide? C’mon, it’s about authentic being—inventing who we are and being successful at doing that. There’s no other measure, and don’t kid yourself that Rubio’s references to Christianity change that. Amassing wealth and power, which Rubio advocates, would be one way of proving that to yourself. In a weird way it’s a very “Old Testament” way of thinking—just ask Job.
Having read this far, I hope, it may not surprise you to learn that Beattie—who injected this bullshit into Little Marco’s speech—is somewhat controversial for some of his views. For example, in October 2024, Beattie tweeted,
"Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men."
and
Trump State Department official has repeatedly called for mass sterilization of ‘low-IQ trash’
Darren Beattie previously served as a speechwriter for Trump, but he was fired in 2018 after he spoke at a conference attended by white nationalists
Wow. Thanks for the research, Mark. I am quite stunned by Rubio's speech and had wondered who could come up with such a dangerous "mishmash of misconceptions" (as you put it) - and a contradictory and offensive and historically inaccurate mishmash at that.
So Beattie was fired in 2018 for racist remarks and views and yet hired back into the State Department. I wonder who hired him? No matter I guess as Rubio no doubt had to approve and has just endorsed his ideas.
Now it appears Beattie has in one speech announced to the world a U.S. policy of neocolonialism and intended world domination. The damage this could do is incalculable. I'm sure the Chinese will really appreciate Beattie's view that "Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work."
As for Heidegger, I always thought he was a nutcase and not a legitimate philosopher either. He basically had to invent his own set of terms to present concepts that no one else could understand or make sense of... at least that is my recollection from study of him in college many decades ago.
Thanks very much for bringing the very disturbing Rubio speech to our attention.
Rubio is exactly what he's been since day 1, immersed in GOP "elegant papers". Voters rejected him and his elegant papers in 2016 but in 2026 he's on top:
3/15/2016, "Rubio’s demise marks the last gasp of the Republican reboot," Washington Post, Robert Costa, Philip Rucker, West Miami, Fla.
"Rubio, whose ascent was propelled by a network of powerful players for years, was supposed to be the candidate best positioned to stop Trump and prevent a Republican rupture....
.......... .
"Those very elegant papers it published and conferences it held may have been good and smart, but they didn’t really matter,” said William J. Bennett, a conservative talk-show host and former education secretary in Ronald Reagan’s administration. “Instead, everyone who’s been prominent for the last 15 to 20 years finds themselves getting pushed out.”...
.......
Years of carefully laid plans to repackage the Republican Party’s traditional ideas for a fast-changing country came crashing down here on Tuesday when Sen. Marco Rubio suspended his campaign for the presidency after a crippling defeat in his home-state primary.
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Since Mitt Romney’s devastating loss in the 2012 presidential election, the Republican National Committee and leading voices at think tanks, editorial boards and Capitol Hill symposiums have charted a path back to the White House based on inclusive rhetoric and a focus on middle-class issues.
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Nobody embodied that vision better than Rubio, a charismatic standard-bearer for conservative orthodoxy who readily embraced the proposals of the right’s elite thinkers. The senator from Florida spoke urgently and eloquently about raising stagnant wages and eradicating poverty. He had an immigrant’s tale to match the rhetoric. And on foreign affairs, he was a passionate defender of the GOP’s hawkish tilt.
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But Rubio’s once-promising candidacy, as well as the conservative reform movement’s playbook, was spectacularly undone by Donald Trump and his defiant politics of economic and ethnic grievance. The drift toward visceral populism became an all-consuming rush, leaving Rubio and others unable to adjust.
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Rubio’s fall comes weeks after others who advocated for conservative reforms, such as former Florida governor Jeb Bush and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, dropped out of the race, and as the donors and institutions who have long supported hawkish fiscal and foreign policies find themselves scrambling to hold onto the consensus that has shaped the GOP for decades.
For many of them, Trump represents a threat to the traditional order of the party and its platform. He does not support overhauling Social Security — a key plank for Romney and GOP congressional leaders — and he was a vocal critic of the 2003 invasion of Iraq in its aftermath, setting him apart from much of the party’s high command....
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Following Romney’s defeat in an election many Republicans thought they should have won, party leaders concluded the only way to regain the presidency would be to engage the growing and diverse electorate that President Obama had won over twice. The RNC drafted an “autopsy” that recommended bolstering appeals to women and minority voters, while reform conservatives drafted their own manifesto.
Rubio had been building his base among these Republicans since January 2011, when he began his Senate term. He joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and began to speak at think tanks and meet with scholars, most of them former staffers from George W. Bush’s administration. He hired a number of them for his own staff.
During his breaks in the Senate, Rubio would often tell colleagues how he was reading papers sent to him from former Republican officials or how he was about to have lunch with another bold-faced name from the Bush years. On his computer, he kept a “drop box” of related policy files compiled by his advisers....
Rubio followed a similar path with foreign-policy hawks as they began to look for a favorite ahead of the 2016 contest: a flurry of meetings and op-ed articles and, most critically, solidarity on the issues as they bubbled up.
Although Rubio entered 2015 hobbled with parts of the GOP base because of immigration, he carried goodwill among those two constituencies that were driving the Republican establishment: the reformers and and the hawks.
“The critique was there: The Republican Party was out of touch,” said Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and former George W. Bush speechwriter. “But the breakdown occurred because we got into a cycle where policy didn't matter at all. Policy was not just secondary, but it was almost not even in the conversation. And when people tried to interject policy — whether it was Rubio or Bush or others — there was just no appetite for it. It didn’t catch on.”
Former House speaker Newt Gingrich said that Rubio campaigned in a way that quickly became obsolete.
“Rubio was prepared, much like Jeb Bush, for a reasonable dialogue in Washington policy language, offering positions that
reflect 40 years of national security and foreign-policy experts. All of that disappeared. The market didn't care,” Gingrich said.
Rubio’s hawkish foreign policy footing, thought to be an asset, was challenged. Trump’s claims of being “militaristic” even though he was inclined against intervention muddled how voters perceived the candidates, disassociating American power with the hawkish ideology of Rubio and the Bush orbit. Trump’s denunciations of George W. Bush’s decision to go into Iraq did not make the hawkish cause any easier."...https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/rubios-demise-marks-the-last-gasp-of-the-republican-reboot/2016/03/15/e0a6413c-ea3d-11e5-a6f3-21ccdbc5f74e_story.html