Marco Rubio argued that Western counterterrorism has had a longstanding “blind spot” toward left-wing violence.
During a speech before 66 countries on Thursday, the Department of State head described a new transnational wave comparable in character — though not yet scale — to the revolutionary terrorism of the 1970s.
“Between 1970 and 1980, 93% of terrorist attacks in the West came from the far extremist left,” he said. “These are numbers that would shock most Americans today because we’ve been taught to believe that this kind of political violence, it simply doesn’t exist, or it’s being exaggerated. But it does exist, and we’re actually underestimating it. And our nations bear the scars to prove it.”
Rubio reflected on recent tragedies, including the shooting at a Catholic church in Minneapolis where schoolchildren were praying, the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and the multiple attempts to take President Donald Trump’s life — violence he said is inappropriately justified by many as “legitimate forms of political expression.”
He also mentioned crimes abroad, including countries such as Germany and Greece, places he said have since seen a spike in far-left violence in the last year.
“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,” he said. “It is a poisonous resentment, cloaked in the language of equality and justice, 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.”
Pushback on State Department priorities
Prior to the State Department’s political terrorism event, a group of congressional Democrats wrote a letter to Rubio in which they disagreed with his implication that left-wing violence has become the primary terrorist threat and that the Trump administration is politicizing the issue.
The letter said the department’s counterterrorism strategy “makes no mention of neo-Nazi or other violent far-right extremist groups that continue to pose threats.”
Following Kirk’s death last year, the Center for Strategic and International Studies published a report that left-wing violence was on the rise, and that 2025 was the first year it outnumbered far-right attacks. But, it added, “(left-wing) violence has risen from very low levels and remains much lower than historical levels of violence carried out by right-wing and jihadist attackers.”
Rubio said in his remarks that radical Islamic extremism has been the West’s priority in the fight against terrorism for the last 25 years, but is no longer the threat it used to be; in thanks, he said, to the global coalition that fought it.
“The threat has not disappeared. Of course, it will continue to exist, particularly so long as we tolerate immigration systems that import these threats directly into our respective homelands, but this threat has been severely diminished,” he said.
To the international leaders in the room, Rubio said, “You are here because your political leaders are being attacked, and stabbed, and shot in your streets because your businesses have been bombed, because your railways have been sabotaged, because your police officers have been beaten and burned, you are here because this is real, and it is getting worse, and it can no longer be denied.”
He continued, “The simple fact is, none of this that I’ve just described is new. Far left political terrorism is not a recent day modern novelty. It is not a fiction manufactured by conservative politicians. For most of the modern era, it was in fact the dominant form of political violence.”