The U.S. State Department held a summit in Washington D.C. Thursday, focused on countering far-left political terrorism, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio declaring that the threat must be dismantled to defend civilization.
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During his remarks before the inaugural “International Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism,” Secretary Rubio declared that the threat of left-wing violence “can no longer be denied or ignored.”
Far-left terrorism, he said, “is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good.”
Diplomats from 67 countries attended the summit to discuss strategies to deal with the threat, including “stronger joint action among nations to reinforce frontline defenses and close the gaps the terrorist actors continue to exploit,” according to a statement from the State Department.
The Secretary stated that the West has long had a “blind spot” when it comes to counterterrorism, noting that “even today, the very idea that far-left terrorism could be a serious threat is treated as a right-wing fever dream, or worse—as a dangerous, fascist conspiracy.”
“You will no doubt see the dogma rear its head in the coverage of this very conference,” Rubio said. “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.”
The Secretary pointed out that while acts of left-wing violence and terrorism are routinely dismissed, right-wing violence is always treated as “a murderous act of evil.”
He pointed out how violent antifa and Black Lives Matter rioters were not prosecuted during the George Floyd “summer of love” in 2020 as a prime example of the double standard.
“A whole industry grew up in our countries around the study of extremism,” he explained. “We have thinktanks 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.”
“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,” Rubio continued. “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.”
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“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.”
The Trump administration has made countering far-left terrorism a top priority. Since November 2025, the United States has designated four violent far-left antifa groups—the German based Antifa Ost, the Informal Anarchist Federation/International Revolutionary Front (FAI/FRI), Armed Proletarian Justice, and Revolutionary Class Self-Defense—as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists, as well as offered a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to the disruption of their financial mechanisms.
The Ministerial hopes to expand coordination, enhance information sharing, and strengthen international law enforcement mechanisms to counter the threat of transnational far-left terrorism.
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