Countering Left-Wing Terrorism

National Review Online

Monday, July 20, 2026

 

Marco Rubio gave a great speech last week.

 

Addressing the delegates at a 60-nation conference on the threat posed by left-wing political violence, he argued that the Western world’s counterterrorism doctrine suffers from a “blind spot.” The global anti-terror apparatus has become adept at tracking and interdicting Islamist terror plots, and it is forever scanning the horizon for indications that violent elements on the far right are a threat. There is, however, no similar vigilance when it comes to political violence emanating from the 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,” Rubio said of the elite precincts of Western academia and culture. When “this kind of organized violence” is not being “dismissed as a partisan fiction,” the secretary of state continued, it’s excused as “merely a tragic excess of idealism.”

 

Rubio explained that the threat he identifies is both Marxian in nature and violent in its tactics.

 

Rubio anticipated that a variety of sneering left-wing observers would apply that dismissive “dogma” to “the coverage of this very conference.” They swiftly proved his point.

 

Yet, the evidence is on his side. The secretary outlined some of the recent incidents of left-wing terror in America: the attempted and successful assassinations of right-wing figures; the armed assaults on federal law enforcement; the insurrectionary mobs that have descended, with varying degrees of intensity, on urban America regularly since the infernal summer of 2020.

 

Rubio also related the threat to Europe: an elderly woman firebombed because her daughter ran for office on a platform that offended the radicals; a left-wing campaign of sabotage against rail lines and civilian infrastructure in which one attack left Berlin darkened for days; the beating and burning of civilians and police officers alike in the streets.

 

The secretary could have gone on longer. Rubio might have cited the director of national intelligence’s assessments of the violence committed recently by outfits with names that hearken back to the Marxist guerrilla movements of old: Italy’s Informal Anarchist Federation and the International Revolutionary Front, Greece’s Armed Proletarian Justice, Germany’s Antifa Ost, and Turkey’s Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party, among others.

 

Nonetheless, Europe is stubborn in its complacency. “Our law enforcement authorities have not focused on left-wing terrorism because this is not considered a high-priority threat in our country,” one typically complacent Eurocrat told reporters amid the international media’s attack on the conference and its organizers’ motives.

 

Rubio maintained that the left-wing extremists are part of a transnational network, linked by a shared ideology as well as their mutual contempt for individual liberty and personal property. This is nothing new. The secretary noted how the wave of left-wing violence today shares many of the features of the wave that crashed into the Western world in the 1970s.

 

In Latin America, there were the FARC rebels, the ELN, the Shining Path, and, in general, the seditious activities of those “trained to kill in [Fidel] Castro’s terrorist camps.” In Europe, there were crises instigated by Italy’s Red Brigades, Germany’s Red Army Faction, and Greece’s Leninist 17 November gang. And, in the U.S., there were the Weather Underground, the Black and Symbionese Liberation Army, the FALN, and the New World Liberation Front, among other left-wing terrorist groups.

 

“In one 18-month period between 1971 and 1972, the FBI counted some 2,500 bombings on American soil, a rate of nearly five a day,” Rubio said. He added, “Between 1970 and 1980, 93 percent of terrorist attacks in the West came from the far extremist left.”

 

In the finest anti-communist tradition, Rubio wed the geopolitical and moral dimensions of the West’s struggle against militant socialism.

 

“None of this is driven by idealism,” he explained. “Communism does not sound good in theory. The world it envisions for all of us is small, flat, grey, leveled of all exception, drained of all that is good and noble in the human soul.” He concluded, “They attack pipelines; they attack railroads; they attack power grids and laboratories, the physical embodied symbols of power and invention and achievement. They despise the West because the West is great.”

 

In short, it was a vitally important address at a time when the seeds of revolutionary resentment are once again taking root in Western soil.