Terrorism, President Ronald Reagan once said, is the preferred weapon of weak and evil men. Its use by the far-left has been growing, and it is a clear and present danger to the United States and its values. To its credit, the State Department is finally doing something about it.
On July 16, Secretary of State Marco Rubio convened officials from more than 60 countries to address the threat. The conference came during what Rubio called an “unprecedented moment in our history,” as the nation confronts a “rising tide of violent left-wing extremism.”
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Far-left terrorism accounts for more attacks and plots than any other ideological category, according to State Department calculations. In 2025, far-left terrorists were responsible for 63% of recorded anti-government attacks or plots, and three out of every four deaths resulting from such attacks.
The problem is not confined to the United States.
“This is an international conference because we are facing an international, a transnational, threat,” Rubio warned, “These are not distinct and isolated cells; they are interconnected networks.”
In 2021, 21 terrorist attacks in the European Union were attributed to far-left and anarchist terrorists, according to Europol. Of the 45 terrorist attacks reported on the continent in 2025, 12 were attributed to the far-left.
The human cost of this increase cannot, however, be understood from statistics alone. As Rubio told attendees: “You are here because two weeks ago, a 72-year-old woman was burned on over 80% of her body in her own home in Greece, and she died, executed by a firebomb because her daughter dared to stand for office. You are here because for five days this winter the lights went out in Berlin, the longest blackout in the city since the Second World War, sparked by an attack that left tens of thousands of households without power in the freezing cold and left an 83-year-old woman dead.”
“Political leaders are being attacked and stabbed and shot in your streets,” Rubio said. “The problem is real, and it is getting worse, and it can no longer be denied, and it can no longer be ignored, because it is time to crush this evil forever.”
The danger and bloody cost of left-wing terrorism have metastasized because self-appointed experts in academia and news media portray terrorism as the province of the Right. It is not, and it never has been.
For much of the modern era, far-left terrorism was the “dominant form of political violence,” as Rubio noted. Between 1970 and 1980, for example, far-left terrorists were responsible for 93% of terrorist attacks and 58% of terrorism-related deaths.
Groups such as the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Baader-Meinhof Group, and others targeted and murdered politicians, business leaders, and diplomats. Marxist-Leninist terrorist organizations bombed the U.S. Capitol in 1971 and 1983, engaged in dozens of shootouts with police, and kidnapped heirs to capitalist fortunes, including Patty Hearst.
This era of revolutionary terrorism has largely been memory-holed, papered over, and even romanticized by the Left and the many institutions it now controls.
Several old terrorists, including Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, and Angela Davis, went on to become prominent professors and lionized political figures in our warped culture, within which the opinion-forming class tends to excuse and admire leftist rebellion. After years on the FBI’s Most Wanted list or time in prison, they received tenured professorships, book deals, and advanced degrees, honorary and otherwise.
That such infamous figures went on to be celebrated and granted honors, accolades, and political influence goes a long way toward explaining how we arrived where we now stand.
The resurgence of left-wing terrorism can also be traced to foreign influence. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and its satellite states funded, trained, and promoted Marxist-Leninist terrorist groups such as Baader-Meinhof, the Japanese Red Army, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat was a Soviet agent — and others that gloried in murder and mayhem to achieve their ends.
Little has changed in that respect. As Rubio noted, present-day enemies of America, including Iran and Cuba, maintain networks that are “intimately tied to leftist militant groups around the world.”
Left-wing terrorism is a “distinctive and unique evil,” Rubio said, one that “has always been driven by a hatred, above all else, for civilization itself.” It has been allowed to thrive, in part, because of the West’s growing self-hatred.
To confront evil, one must first name it. To triumph over it, the West must learn to believe in itself again. Rubio’s remarks and the State Department’s new focus are an important and welcome first step.
