Leftist Political Violence is Exploding in the West

Marco Rubio on political terrorism:

We are witnessing an alarming rise of hatred, intolerance, violence, bloody protests, and even assassinations all throughout the West. And for the most part this is coming from the political left. We see few if any conservatives or Christians burning down cities in rage, physically attacking opponents, or calling for the death of their political enemies. See more on this here: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2026/07/14/leftist-haters-gonna-hate/

This is becoming such an alarming problem that an important conference was recently held in Washington D.C. that spoke to this reality. At the Resurgence of Political Terrorism conference leaders from some 60 nations gathered to assess this matter and offer solutions for it.

They heard people like the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller and the US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessant discuss these issues. Their talks are well worth listening to, but here I highlight one other.

Conference members also heard the U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio deliver a powerful speech. It is worth sharing much of his presentation here. For those so inclined, his 20-minute talk can be seen and listened to here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIY_Digw9Jo

Rubio began his remarks this way:

The most essential duty of the state, the first responsibility, frankly, of any government of any kind, is the protection of its people. It’s the protection of its country. This is a sacred obligation that should transcend all political and all ideological divisions. It is why, for example, we have militaries. It’s why we have intelligence agencies. It’s why counter-terrorism bureaus exist, why police forces exist. Keeping our people safe is the reason why every country represented here has all of these things.

 

We are all very well acquainted … with what has been described as “traditional terrorist threats.” For 25 years, the term “counter-terrorism,” at least in the West, has meant first and foremost the fight against radical Islamist extremism. And there’s a very poignant reason for that: on the 11th of September, in the year of 2001, 19 men murdered 3,000 people here in my country. Then that same enemy struck Europe, murdering nearly 200 commuters aboard trains in Madrid in 2004 and 52 more aboard London buses and the underground in the following year. The entire architecture of western counter-terrorism was rebuilt from the studs around the singular, traumatic event. That made sense at the time. Our job was to keep our people safe, and the realm of terrorism, the spectre of global jihad, was the premier threat to their safety.

 

And so we went to work. And we assembled a global coalition, working with many of the friends that are represented here in this room today….

He went on to say that there is another equally important challenge that must be addressed:

For far too long, however, our counter-terrorism doctrine has had a blind spot. A blind spot when it comes to extremist violence from the political left. 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. It’s treated this way by many in the press, by many in academia and our universities, and by many of our legacy institutions. You will no doubt see the dogma rear its head in the coverage of this very conference. In spite of the clear and the 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 just 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, so entrenched in the mainstream conventional wisdom that it came to be regarded as an apolitical fact.

 He offers a few figures on this growing threat:

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 per cent in just the last year alone. In Greece, more than 80 per cent 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 the father of two young children, shot and killed while speaking to a crowd of students.

The communist menace is alive and well

Rubio looks at the ideology propelling so much of this:

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’s 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, grey, levelled 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 towards. 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 achievement of our civilization, for them, it’s an unbearable humiliation, a reminder of what they cannot do and a reminder of what they cannot be.

 

So they choose instead to destroy. They attack pipelines, they attack railroads, they attack power grids and laboratories — the physical, embodied symbols of power and invention and achievement. This is the nature of the terrorism we face today. They despise the West because the West is great. This is an international conference because we are facing … a transnational threat. These are not distinct and isolated cells. They are interconnected networks. They do not recognize our borders. They do not believe, in fact, in the nation state itself. They co-ordinate, they communicate, they travel, they train and they act together, sharing the same infrastructure, sharing the same enemies, sharing the same mission.

And all this is about international militancy:

Today’s far-left terrorists can raise money in one country. They can host their communications in a second country. They can receive training in a third country. They can recruit militants in a fourth country, and then together strike a target in a fifth country. And so we have no choice but to confront this menace together.

Rubio concludes:

Just as we have done together before, now we must do it together again. Through intelligence and information sharing, through co-ordinated law enforcement strategy, through financial targeting and disruption, we will dismantle these networks brick by brick. It is time for the people of the civilized world to defend ourselves, to stand united against this encroaching darkness and fight — fight for what is ours. It is easy to destroy great things. It is far more difficult to make them. The enemies of civilization are only capable of the former. They are only capable of destroying great things. All they know is destruction. But we have built great things together.

We have done it time and again. We know what we must do. And now we must do it.

I am so thankful the free world has someone like Marco Rubio fighting the good fight on our behalf.

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