New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke to students at the Munich Security Conference over the weekend amid speculation that she has her eyes set on the White House in the coming years. As she spoke to German students from TU Berlin at the conference, she told them that Western Culture is “thin,” called essentially for the rise of the “global south,” objected to Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech appealing to the shared history, values and culture between the US and Europe, and called whiteness “imaginary.”
During the interview with Isabel Cademartori of the German Bundestag, she said “You are starting to see the ascent of the right, even in places like Munich. Marco Rubio’s speech was a pure appeal to Western culture. My favorite part was when he said that American cowboys came from Spain. I believe the Mexicans and descendants of African enslaved peoples would like to have a word on that.”
She was widely laughed at in the press for this remark, given that there were no horses in the Americas until Christopher Columbus brought them along on his second voyage to the new world in 1493. Just last year, in October 2024, Ocasio-Cortez called to eliminate Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous People’s Day, which would erase from history the very man who brought the Mexicans horses in the first place.
“But, you know, I think it’s also important to note how thin that foundation is,” Ocasio-Cortez went on in what’s become a viral clip. “Culture is changing. Culture always changed. Culture for the entire history of human civilization, has been a fluid, evolving thing that, that is a response to the conditions that we live in. And so they want to take this mantle of culture at the end of the day, though, is, you know, is very thin.”
Rubio told European leaders on Saturday “For the United States and Europe, we belong together. America was founded 250 years ago, but the roots began here on this continent long before.”
“We are part of one civilization – Western civilization,” Rubio went on to say. “We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks throughout the conference were in opposition to that. In response to Rubio’s elucidation of shared values, Ocasio-Cortez that “the alliance must be built on values and the Alliance and that relationship could either be built on this, a historical, nostalgic, make, whatever that is ‘great again’ idea, and that’s, that’s the Marco Rubio thesis of what the values of the US European Alliance are built on, or our alliance can be built on, values of democracy and respect for international law.”
To the students, she said “And so the response that we have to have is, again, it’s material, it’s class based, it’s common interest,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “There was certainly more openness to what I was saying than probably there would be in years past. We can’t underestimate the appeal of going back to these well worn grooves. A lot of what we talk about when we talk about a class-based internationalist perspective also means ending the hypocrisy towards the global south.”
After railing against “whiteness” for years, Ocasio-Cortez now told students it’s “imaginary.” She told them “There’s a very big difference between whiteness and national like your actual culture, right? Whiteness is an imaginary thing. Being German is real. Being Italian is real. You know, being English, these are rich cultural heritages that are based on values, and they are so much a part of what make our, our cultures and our societies what they are.”