Marco Rubio Exposes the Threat of Leftist Terrorism and the Institutions That Covered for It

Winston Churchill warned about the threat of Nazi Germany before Britain’s establishment was willing to listen. Ronald Reagan horrified the foreign policy establishment by plainly calling Soviet Communism evil. This week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio challenged a similarly entrenched dogma that leftist terrorism isn’t a serious threat.

Speaking to leaders from more than 60 countries and to the American people, Rubio exposed the elites’ ideological blinders on leftist terrorism and rightly called on world leaders to combat it.

America and its allies haven’t just experienced leftist terrorism, we’ve developed entire academic disciplines essentially dedicated to ignoring it or excusing it, while rightly condemning terrorism perceived as coming from the Right.

The Institutional Double Standard on Political Violence

Rubio argued that many academic, media, and policy institutions have treated right-wing political violence as uniquely dangerous while minimizing leftist terrorism.

Rubio is spot-on. NewsNation host Batya Ungar-Sargon analyzed the data from the University of Cincinnati’s Prosecution Project—one of the legacy media’s favorite sources for claiming that most political violence comes from “the Right”—and found glaring omissions when it came to leftist political violence. The project did not mention the assassination attempts against President Donald Trump, the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, nor the George Floyd riots of 2020. Meanwhile, it exaggerated examples of “right-wing political violence.”

The Justice Department delivered an arrow to the heart of the leftist narrative earlier this year, when it indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC spent decades positioning itself as an authority on extremism while demonizing the Right. Yet according to the indictment, the SPLC was itself funding remnants of the KKK through shell companies and allegedly lying to a bank about it. The SPLC has moved to dismiss the charges and has said it was paying informants in the groups.

TRENDING ARTICLES

breaking

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham Dies at 71

Tyler O’Neil

opinion

Damning Reports Show How Deep New York Is Mired in Blue State Doom Loop

Jarrett Stepman

news

Vance Takes Shots at Senate on Joe Rogan Episode for Delaying SAVE America Act

Francesca Cella

Under the elites’ double standard, Rubio warned, “Left-wing violence was not just excused. It was treated as sacrosanct, a protected class unto itself.”

The Evidence Busting the Dogma on Leftist Terrorism

Unfortunately, the dogma has become so ingrained, Rubio needed to reacquaint both Americans and our allies with our own history.

He highlighted many examples of political violence, from the Marxist militants of the Shining Path in Peru, who hacked “pregnant women and newborn infants to death with axes and machetes,” to the Marxist Red Brigades, who captured Italy’s prime minister and executed him in a farcical “people’s trial” in 1978.

American leftist political violence also did not begin with assassination attempts against Trump. The Weather Underground bombed the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Capitol. In 1977, a jury convicted Assata Shakur, a Black Panther Party revolutionary, of first-degree murder of a New Jersey state trooper. Many on the Left now hail Shakur as a hero. Her autobiography appears in almost 500 university courses.

Is it any wonder, then, that even when threats of political violence from the Left have reached a fever pitch, many of America’s elite institutions are asleep at the wheel?

The Heart of Leftist Terrorism

Perhaps the most important part of Rubio’s speech came at the end.

“Communism does not sound good in theory,” he argued. “The world it envisions for all of us is small, flat, gray, leveled of all exceptionalism, drained of all that is good and noble in the human soul.” It envisions a world without courage, creativity, heroes, and—most importantly of all—a world without God.

Rubio argued that “a hatred of civilization itself” drives communism. “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 radical-left ideology isn’t somehow excusable because America isn’t a perfect country. It isn’t idealistic. It isn’t the rational conclusion of well-educated people.

Why have so many institutions minimized this threat for so long? A deep hatred of America—the false claim that “white supremacy” still defines our country—has taken root in our intellectual culture, and we must combat it.

Rubio’s speech exposed the threat, and our elite institutions must take it seriously. This issue goes beyond politics. We must combat terrorism, no matter its ideological cause—and recent events underscore why we cannot ignore leftist terrorism any longer.

Rubio’s speech echoed Churchill and Reagan in boldly identifying an evil many influential people would prefer to ignore.

I beg my fellow Americans to listen.