Marco Rubio has made the fight against far-left violence an international priority. The US secretary of state brought together representatives from more than 60 countries in Washington and called for closer cooperation against the renewed threat of left-wing terrorism.
Rubio said Western security services had a blind spot. Right-wing violence had long been recognized as terrorism, while violence from the left was too often dismissed as misguided idealism. Washington now intends to end that leniency.
The State Department conference focused on Antifa networks, anarchist groups, sabotage, attacks on politicians, arson and assaults on police officers and critical infrastructure.
Rubio described the threat as transnational. Militants could raise money in one country, communicate in another, train elsewhere and strike in yet another.
Antifa Ost Placed on US Terror List
The Trump administration has already designated Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. Washington has also listed four European groups as foreign terrorist organizations: Antifa Ost in Germany, the Informal Anarchist Federation/International Revolutionary Front in Italy and Armed Proletarian Justice and Revolutionary Class Self-Defense in Greece.
Rubio announced that further designations would follow. The administration is also imposing new visa restrictions on members of far-left extremist groups and those who support them by facilitating terrorism, sabotage, recruitment or financing.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the United States intended to use tools developed to combat terrorist financing against these networks.
Germany was a major focus of Rubio’s speech. He pointed to a rise of more than 40% in far-left violence within a single year.
Rubio also cited the attack on Berlin’s electricity network. It caused a power outage lasting several days, left tens of thousands of households without electricity and struck at the critical infrastructure of the German capital.
Democratic lawmakers accused Rubio of politicizing counterterrorism and overlooking right-wing violence. Several US media outlets portrayed the conference as a campaign issue ahead of the midterm elections.
Rubio’s response was clear: left-wing violence does not cease to exist merely because the media refuse to call it what it is.
Rubio’s Speech in Full
“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 opens fire on Catholic elementary school students as they pray, his gun marked with slogans like, ‘Where is your God now?’ A healthcare 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.
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-capitalist or anti-imperialist or communist or anarchist or Marxist, 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. 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, a world without ambition. A world without heroes, 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.”