By Noah Rothman
Friday, July 17, 2026
Democratic Representative Adam Smith ended up voting with
103 of his fellow Democrats for a failed measure designed to zero out U.S. aid
to Israel. But he wants you to know that he did so under extreme duress.
In a statement
explaining what was “a very close vote for me,” Smith revealed that the
“tactics used by those on the far left” to push him into the position he
ultimately took amounted to a menacing intimidation campaign. His home has been
“vandalized.” A “fire has been set” in his driveway. Demonstrators harassed him
and his neighbors in all-night demonstrations. His town halls have been “shut
down.” One of his staff members was “physically assaulted.”
He didn’t say it outright, but the subtext was a pleading
appeal to his co-partisans. Please believe me, he seemed to say. This
isn’t a right-winger telling you this. Left-wing arm-twisting, harassment, and
even violence are real.
Those on the right who are victims of these tactics are
not nearly as coy about it. Amy Coney Barrett wasn’t this week when she testified about her experience: actionable threats that
compel her to wear a bulletproof vest, bomb threats targeting her sister,
threatening deliveries to her home invoking assassination victims, and swatting
incidents.
Nor was Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent. “I’m
going to remind everyone in this room — and all the media — that I was the
subject of an assassination attempt,” he explained
with uncommon patience, “by an addled left-wing activist two hours after
being sworn into my job.” Why the didactic tone? Because he knows that some of
the reporters in that room “want to report that this is a fiction and doesn’t
exist.”
If my new book, Blood & Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in
America, has a single objective, it is to dispel the notion that
leftist political violence is a negligible phenomenon. That is, after all, what
a cottage industry within center-left media so often contends:
“The extreme right
has held a near-monopoly on political violence” since the 1980s, as The
Nation’s Joshua Holland tells it. The growing threat posed by “right-wing
extremists” coincided with a “decades-long drop-off in violence by left-wing
groups,” the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism averred. The very
idea of a “violent left” is a “myth,” according to the Southern Poverty Law
Center. A Washington Post analysis in 2018 also identified a
long-running “drop-off in violence by left-wing groups.” By contrast, “violence
by white supremacists and other far-right attackers has been on the rise since
Barack Obama’s presidency.”
The growing threat
posed by “white supremacist and far-right violence,” PBS reported at the outset
of the Biden administration, represents “the biggest domestic terrorism threat
facing the country.” As late as 2023, Biden himself maintained that “the most
dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland is white supremacy.” That same year,
the FBI “created a new category of extremists that it seeks to track and
counter: Donald Trump’s army of MAGA followers,” Newsweek reported. The
threat posed by right-wing “anti-government activists” was so acute that it
rivaled even the prospect of foreign-directed plots.
It was against this backdrop that Secretary of State
Marco Rubio delivered an impassioned appeal to reason this week as the
Trump administration rallied Western democracies to confront the epidemic of
domestic as well as transnational leftist violence.
In a vitally important address to the delegates to a
60-nation conference on the threat posed by socialistic and anarchistic
violence, Rubio took square aim at the “blind spot” that contributed to
Smith’s, Barrett’s, and Bessent’s ordeals.
“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,” the secretary observed.
“You will no doubt see the dogma rear its head in the
coverage of this very conference,” he added presciently (we
have). And when “this kind of organized violence” is not being “dismissed
as a partisan fiction,” the secretary continued, it’s excused as “merely a
tragic excess of idealism.”
In a series of refrains that could have been drawn
straight from the pages of Blood & Progress, Rubio brought a
mountain of evidence to bear in support of his contention that “far-left
political terrorism” is and has been for decades “the dominant form of
political violence.”
That’s true in America, and not just today. The rise of “assassination culture,” the small-cell terroristic attacks
on law enforcement, and the mob violence that typified the 2020 George Floyd
riots and the Occupy Wall Street movement are evocative of the Marxist
guerrilla movements of the 1970s or the Bolshevik and anarchist sects of the
1910s. What’s more, America’s experience is not unique.
Latin Americans will remember the scourge of violent
revolutionary Marxian sects like FARC, the ELN, Shining Path, and the seditious
insurrectionists “trained to kill in [Fidel] Castro’s terrorist camps.”
Europeans will recall Italy’s Red Brigades, the Baader–Meinhof Gang (a.k.a. the
Red Army Faction), and the Leninist 17 November gang.
Nor is any of this ancient history. Rubio connected this
history to the recent deadly firebombing of a Greek woman who offended leftist
reactionaries when her daughter ran for office. He recalled a blackout in
Berlin caused by a leftist attack on infrastructure, the sabotage of railways,
the beating of police and civilians in the streets, and the bombings of
businesses.
Rubio could have gone on for longer than he did if he’d
cited the director of national intelligence’s assessments of the
attacks conducted quite recently by militant leftist factions. Among them,
Italy’s Informal Anarchist Federation (FAI) and the International Revolutionary
Front (FRI), Greece’s Armed Proletarian Justice (APJ) and Revolutionary Class
Self-Defense networks, Germany’s Antifa Ost, and Turkey’s Revolutionary
People’s Liberation Party/Front (DHKP/C).
“In Germany, far-left violence has jumped by more than 40
percent in just the last year alone,” Rubio observed. “In Greece, more than 80
percent of radical violence is now driven by far-left and anarchist actors.
These are not abstract statistics.” Moreover, these networks are being
exploited by and working with anti-American state and non-state actors, Rubio
explained, including Cuban intelligence (which midwifed the Marxist guerrilla
movement into existence in the 20th century) as well as Iran’s terrorist proxy
groups.
To all this, the insouciant Eurocrat has no response.
“Our law enforcement authorities have not focused on left-wing terrorism
because this is not considered a high-priority threat in our country,” one
effete example of this phenomenon told the Washington Post’s reporters.
As another European diplomat explained, “We don’t have antifa.”
These aren’t defenses of European recalcitrance. Rather,
statements like these are confessions of the blindness on this issue to which
Western elites are prone. They also confirm Rubio’s contention that far too
many in the Western gentry classes are either unconcerned by or comfortable
with a certain level of left-wing street violence and political terrorism.
More than an impassioned appeal to recognize the evidence
of our own eyes, Rubio set out to shame the dominant Western political culture
for convincing itself that the Marxists’ hearts are in the right place.
“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. “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.”
It was a scintillating speech — a bravura example of
anti-communist oratory befitting America’s chief diplomat. But it is not at all
clear that it will achieve what should not be all that difficult: convincing
the left to see what’s right in front of their faces.
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