Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the threat of left-wing violence “can no longer be denied” during remarks opening the “U.S. Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism” on Thursday. “Here in my country, so many people in positions of power have repeatedly dismissed acts of violence and even terrorism as legitimate forms of political expression, so long as they served a left-wing cause,” he said. “It is why, during those so-called George Floyd riots in the summer of 2020, as criminals and extremists burned and looted their way through America’s great cities and nearly brought the country to its knees, city governments all across the country simply refused to prosecute the people conducting these acts of violence and terror.” “It is the reason for the now-infamous image. Maybe you all recall this: a news anchor from a very prominent agency standing in a neighborhood consumed in flames. Meanwhile, the chyron on the bottom read that the protests were ‘mostly peaceful.’ This was something worse than a double standard. Left-wing violence was not just excused. It was treated as sacrosanct, a protected class unto itself,” he said. “That era has to end.” “You are here because this is real, and it is getting worse, and it can no longer be denied, and it can no longer be ignored,” he said. “Because it is time to crush this evil forever. The simple fact is, none of this that I’ve just described is new. Far-left political terrorism is not a recent-day modern novelty. It is not a fiction manufactured by conservative politicians.” “This is a distinctive and unique evil. It has always been driven by a hatred above all else-a hatred for civilization itself,” Rubio said. “It is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good.” “It may wear various different slogans and ideologies across place and time. They can call themselves anti-capitalists or anti-imperialists, or communists, or anarchists, or Marxists. But the fundamental character is always the same. It is always the same. It is a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice and liberation, an overwhelming need to tear down what greater men have built, to wreck what is beautiful and what is right on behalf of people who are only filled with ugliness and have nothing else to offer the world.” “None of this is driven by idealism. It is not utopian. In fact, it is the opposite,” he said. “Communism does not ‘sound good in theory.’ The world it envisions for all of us is small, flat, gray, leveled of all exception, drained of all that is good and noble in the human soul.” “The world it envisions is a world without courage, a world without creativity or ambition, a world without heroes or glory or great causes to strive toward, a world without miracles, without myths, without men who rise above the rest to do incredible and extraordinary things. And the world communism envisions is a world without God.” “For these architects of revolutionary violence, the towering achievements of our civilization are an unbearable humiliation-a reminder of what they cannot do and a reminder of what they cannot be,” he said. “So they choose instead to destroy.” Here is the full event: Read: 2026 United States Counterterrorism Strategy

SECRETARY OF STATE MARCO RUBIO: You will no doubt see the dogma rear its head in the coverage of this very conference. In spite of the clear and undeniable reality, in spite of the objective numbers and statistics, in spite of the fact that in this room today there are representatives from across the political spectrum, we will hear that this kind of organized violence and terror will be dismissed. It will be dismissed as a partisan fiction. A whole industry grew up in our countries around the study of extremism. We have think tanks and fellowships and journals and consultancies, with the unspoken understanding among them that only one kind of political violence was a true threat to the system. A bomb planted by a neo-Nazi group was a nefarious and murderous act of evil. It is. But a bomb planted by a Marxist revolutionary? Well, that’s merely a tragic excess of idealism. Perhaps its means were misplaced or overzealous, but its ends were virtuous and just. That’s the implication of how they treat it. For years, this extraordinary ideological prejudice was embedded in the way we talked about political violence and extremism. It was repeated again and again until it was accepted as the neutral and objective baseline, so entrenched in mainstream conventional wisdom that it came to be regarded as an apolitical fact. It is the reason why, here in my country, so many people in positions of power have repeatedly dismissed acts of violence and even terrorism as legitimate forms of political expression, so long as they served a left-wing cause. It is why, during those so-called George Floyd riots in the summer of 2020, as criminals and extremists burned and looted their way through America’s great cities and nearly brought the country to its knees, city governments all across the country simply refused to prosecute the people conducting these acts of violence and terror. It is the reason for the now-infamous image. Maybe you all recall this: a news anchor from a very prominent agency standing in a neighborhood consumed in flames. Meanwhile, the chyron on the bottom read that the protests were mostly peaceful. This was something worse than a double standard. Left-wing violence was not just excused. It was treated as sacrosanct, a protected class unto itself. That era has to end. The coalition in this room today includes political leaders, experts and law enforcement officials from more than 60 countries across the world. You have come here from a wide range of governments, parties and political persuasions. Some of your governments and ours disagree publicly. Sometimes we disagree sharply about trade, about energy, about immigration. You did not come here today because you have been persuaded on every single aspect of the American view of the world. You are here because, two weeks ago, a 72-year-old woman was burned on over 80 percent of her body in her own home in Greece, and she died-executed by a firebomb because her daughter dared to stand for office. You are here today because, for five days this winter, the lights went out in Berlin-the longest blackout in the city since the Second World War-sparked by an attack that left tens of thousands of households without power in the freezing cold and left an 83-year-old woman dead. You are here because, a month after that Berlin blackout, a 23-year-old Frenchman succumbed to traumatic brain injuries, beaten to death on the streets of Lyon by a group of far-left militant thugs. You are here because your political leaders are being attacked and stabbed and shot in your streets, because your businesses have been bombed, because your railways have been sabotaged, because your police officers have been beaten and burned. You are here because this is real, and it is getting worse, and it can no longer be denied, and it can no longer be ignored. Because it is time to crush this evil forever. The simple fact is, none of this that I’ve just described is new. Far-left political terrorism is not a recent-day modern novelty. It is not a fiction manufactured by conservative politicians. For most of the modern era, it was, in fact, the dominant form of political violence. Every one of our friends here from the nations of the Western Hemisphere remembers the decades of kidnappings and bombings and assassinations and executions-the violent terror of the Tupamaros, of the Montoneros, of the FARC, of the ELN. You remember the inhuman savagery of Peru’s Shining Path, the Maoist fanatics who massacred the peasant villages of Peru, hacking pregnant women and newborn infants to death with axes and machetes. You remember the tens of thousands of Marxist guerrillas trained to kill in Castro’s terrorist camps. All of you here from Europe remember. You remember the machine-gun massacres of Italy’s Red Brigades, which held a five-time prime minister captive for 55 days before subjecting him to a revolutionary, so-called people’s trial and executing him in 1978. You remember the Red Army Faction’s nearly three-decade campaign of bombings, kidnappings and assassinations in Germany, murdering dozens and injuring hundreds more. You remember the 17 November organization in Greece, the Marxist extremists who terrorized Athens for more than a quarter-century, including, by the way, shooting my country’s CIA station chief dead outside his home, in front of his wife, as they were returning home from a Christmas party. And here in America, we remember. We remember the same reign of deadly terror, justified by the same slogans, motivated by the same wicked ideas. We remember the Weather Underground, which bombed the Pentagon, which bombed the State Department and bombed the Capitol. We remember the Black Liberation Army, which staged armed robberies and executed police officers at point-blank range. We remember the Symbionese Liberation Army, which shot a public school superintendent to death with cyanide-packed hollow-point bullets. In an 18-month period between 1971 and 1972, the FBI counted some 2,500 bombings on American soil, a rate of nearly five a day. The overwhelming share of that violence came from left-wing extremists. Between 1970 and 1980, 93 percent of terrorist attacks in the West came from the far extremist left. These are numbers that would shock most Americans today because we’ve been taught to believe that this kind of political violence simply doesn’t exist, or that it’s being exaggerated. But it does exist, and we’re actually underestimating it. Our nations bear the scars to prove it. Today, we face a new wave of this old evil. Here in the United States, the share of left-wing terrorist attacks and plots has risen to levels not seen in decades. In Germany, far-left violence has jumped by more than 40 percent in just the last year alone. In Greece, more than 80 percent of radical violence is now driven by far-left and anarchist actors. These are not abstract statistics. Americans have seen what those numbers mean: an all-out assault on our immigration officers; sniper attacks; explosives; armed ambushes; a transgender shooter opening fire on Catholic elementary school students as they pray, his gun marked with slogans like, Where is your God now?; a health care executive executed in cold blood in the streets; multiple assassination attempts on a sitting president; and the murder of the greatest conservative activist of a generation, a man who happened to also be a husband and a father of two young children, shot and killed while speaking to a crowd of students. This is a distinctive and unique evil. It has always been driven by a hatred above all else-a hatred for civilization itself. It is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good. It is perpetrated by those who cannot build, who cannot create, who cannot achieve great things, and take their revenge upon the world for their own inadequacy by seeking to destroy those who can. This is what radical leftism is. It may wear various different slogans and ideologies across place and time. They can call themselves anti-capitalists or anti-imperialists, or communists, or anarchists, or Marxists. But the fundamental character is always the same. It is always the same. It is a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice and liberation, an overwhelming need to tear down what greater men have built, to wreck what is beautiful and what is right on behalf of people who are only filled with ugliness and have nothing else to offer the world. Through violence and through terror, they once again seek to impose their ugliness on all of us. The old dogma was wrong. The old dogma was wrong. None of this is driven by idealism. It is not utopian. In fact, it is the opposite. One of the criticisms you sometimes hear of communism, for example, is that it sounds good in theory, but it never works in practice. That’s actually not true. Communism does not sound good in theory. The world it envisions for all of us is small, flat, gray, leveled of all exception, drained of all that is good and noble in the human soul. The world it envisions is a world without courage, a world without creativity or ambition, a world without heroes or glory or great causes to strive toward, a world without miracles, without myths, without men who rise above the rest to do incredible and extraordinary things. And the world communism envisions is a world without God. For these architects of revolutionary violence, the towering achievements of our civilization are an unbearable humiliation-a reminder of what they cannot do and a reminder of what they cannot be. So they choose instead to destroy.

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