The New Terror Network

Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech at the opening of the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism to an audience that included representatives from 67 countries is a reminder to the West that the greatest threat to our civilization comes from within. The great political philosopher James Burnham diagnosed the threat more than 60 years ago in his book . Whittaker Chambers revealed what we are up against and what is at stake in his autobiographical masterpiece . Paul Hollander provided evidence of Western intellectuals’ sympathy with the enemies of our civilization in . And Claire Sterling exposed the tactics of left-wing terror groups in .

Secretary Rubio began his speech by noting that while the United States and some of its Western allies have had some success in combatting Islamic jihadist terrorism, the West’s counterterrorism efforts have had a “blind spot when it comes to extremist violence from the political left.” Left-wing terrorism often gets a pass from Western intellectuals, academics, and legacy media, Rubio said. Indeed, the threat of left-wing terrorism, he noted, “will be dismissed as a partisan fiction.” The only terrorism threat Western progressives perceive comes from the political right. 

For Modern Western progressives, the French Revolutionary slogan “pas d’ennemis à gauche” (“No enemies to the Left”) guides their every utterance and political outlook. Secretary Rubio rightly characterized this as an “ideological prejudice” that has become “accepted as the neutral and objective baseline” that is now “entrenched in the mainstream conventional wisdom.”

This ideological prejudice, Rubio explained, is why in the United States and other Western countries “so many people in positions of power have repeatedly dismissed acts of violence and even terrorism as legitimate forms of political expression so long as they served a left-wing cause.” Rubio provided examples: the George Floyd riots, left-wing attacks against immigration officers, transgender violence, multiple assassination attempts on President Trump, the murder of Charlie Kirk, deadly political violence in Greece, the terror during the Berlin blackout, and left-wing violence in France