Secretary of State Marco Rubio has never shied away from calling out where the vast majority of terrorism worldwide springs from. And on July 15, his State Department announced that it would hold an international ministerial conference on the subject to foster knowledge of, and lines of communication between, countries for identifying and working against the threats posed by far-left political terrorism.
On July 16, Secretary of State Marco Rubio will host governments for the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism. The event will focus on this renewed threat to our societies and encourage stronger joint action to reinforce frontline defenses and close the gaps the terrorist actors continue to exploit.
Far-left political terrorism is resurgent, manifesting in violent terrorist acts across the Western Hemisphere, Europe, Asia and beyond. These are not isolated incidents. They reflect a deliberate, ideologically motivated strategy to destabilize free societies by violently targeting our political and economic systems, including attacks against private citizens, government officials, police and law enforcement, businesses, and critical infrastructure around the globe. For too long, however, this threat has remained a blind spot in the international community’s counterterrorism focus, underestimated and under-resourced, despite the danger it poses.
The United States is taking a leading role in countering far-left terrorism. Since November 2025, the United States has designated four violent far-left groups — Antifa Ost, the Informal Anarchist Federation/International Revolutionary Front (FAI/FRI), Armed Proletarian Justice, and Revolutionary Class Self-Defense — as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists, as well as offered a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to the disruption of the financial mechanisms of these same four organizations. In recent months, the United States engaged also law enforcement, counterterrorism professionals, and prosecutors around the globe through direct engagements, as well as the inaugural Counterterrorism Law Enforcement Workshop (CTLEW) in May 2026, which convened 14 countries for a two-day, practitioner-focused workshop to exchange best practices for countering the threat of transnational far-left terrorism.
This Ministerial builds on that foundation, bringing together partners from across the Western Hemisphere, Europe, and Asia to expand coordination, enhance information sharing, and strengthen international law enforcement mechanisms to counter the threat. Secretary Rubio will highlight the importance of deepening cooperation with international partners to better map violent activity, disrupt terrorist financing, protect critical infrastructure, and promote collective action against a threat that respects no borders.
That day, Rubio stood in front of those gathered from all over the world and clearly explained the new direction the United States was taking in regard to fighting the threat of terrorism and politically motivated violence. There would no longer be two standards, where acts from one side of the political spectrum were harshly condemned and immediately punished. While those same or worse acts from the opposite side were excused as needed ideological venting or score-settling.
…A whole industry grew up in our countries around the study of extremism. We have think tanks and fellowships and journals and consultancies, with the unspoken understanding among them that the only kind of political violence that was a true threat to our system – I’m sorry – that only one kind of political violence was a true threat to the system. A bomb planted by a neo-Nazi group was a nefarious and murderous act of evil. It is. But a bomb planted by a Marxist revolutionary – well, that’s just merely a tragic excess of idealism. Perhaps its means were misplaced or overzealous, but its ends were virtuous and just. That’s the implication of how they treat it.
For years, this extraordinary ideological prejudice was embedded in the way we talked about political violence and extremism. It was repeated again and again, until it was accepted as the neutral and objective baseline, so entrenched – so entrenched in the mainstream conventional wisdom that it came to be regarded as an apolitical fact. It is the reason why, here in my country, 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.
It is why during those George Floyd – so-called George Floyd – riots in the summer of 2020, as criminals and extremists burned and looted their way through American great – America’s great cities and nearly brought the country to its knees, city governments all across the country simply refused to prosecute the people conducting these acts of violence and terror. It is the reason for the now infamous image – and you all recall this – of a news anchor from a very prominent agency – a news anchor standing in a neighborhood consumed in flames; meanwhile the chyron on the bottom read that the protests were mostly peaceful. This was something worse than a double standard. Left-wing violence was not just excused; it was treated as sacrosanct, a protected class unto itself. That era has to end.
A few minutes of that incredibly powerful speech here.
Marco Rubio Just Went OFF On Left-Wing Terrorism
He just called out:
-Transgender shooter that shot up a Catholic school.
-The far left radical that murdered Charlie Kirk
-Multiple deranged assassination attempts on President Trump“More than 80% of radical violence is now… pic.twitter.com/nMHS1kz3GS
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) July 16, 2026
…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’s always the same.
It is a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice, liberation, and 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.
He reminded the Europeans that they have their own groups still rampaging across the landscape, with very little interference. I covered both of the instances in Germany and France that the Secretary referenced.
…You came here – you are here – because two weeks ago, a 72-year-old woman was burned on over 80 percent 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 today 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.
You are here and you came because a month after that Berlin blackout, a French 23-year-old succumbed to traumatic brain injuries, beaten to death on the streets of Lyon by a group of far-left militant thugs. 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, and it can no longer be ignored, because it is time to crush this evil forever.
All of these terrorist actions echo the monstrous memories of the not-so-distant European leftist past.
…All of you here from Europe remember. You remember the machine gun massacres of Italy’s Red Brigades, which held the five-time prime minister captive for 55 days before subjecting him to a revolutionary, so-called “people’s trial” and executing him in 1978. You remember the Red Army Faction’s nearly three-decade campaign of bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations in Germany, murdering dozens and injuring hundreds more. You remember the 17 November organization in Greece, the Marxist extremists that terrorized Athens for more than a quarter century, including, by the way, shooting my country’s CIA station chief dead outside of his home in front of his wife as they were returning home from a Christmas party.
The representatives from Latin and South America received a similar jog of their memory chips with Shining Path, the Montoneros, and the ever-present Marxist trainees the Cuban government hires out into the world to this day.
FAR LEFT TERRORISM (FLT)
Kyle Shideler from the Center for Security Policy wrote a bang-up article for American Mind Tuesday, and he got to quiz a State employee afterward to try to get a handle on the focus of the networking, as most of the sessions were, for obvious reasons, closed to the public.
…The program wasn’t just a meet-and-greet. It was designed to bring diplomats and counterterrorism practitioners together to discuss shared concerns and best practices among countries dealing with the scourge of Far-Left Terrorism.
During the summit’s closed panels, participants identified four key “verticals” of shared concern. They were:
- The role of FLT in economic sabotage and attacks on critical infrastructure.
- The convergence of grievances and the issue of FLT foreign fighters.
- The use of Far-Left Terrorists by foreign actors to conduct attacks with plausible deniability.
- The growing trend of targeted FLT attacks against high-profile individuals.
The State Department official called the use of economic sabotage and attacks on critical infrastructure the “calling card” of FLT. Such groups target power grids, data centers, and parts of the military-industrial supply chain. Far-Left Terrorists who support Palestinian terror groups, for example, have attacked segments of the military supply chain purportedly linked to Israel.
Again, this past year, we saw that very infrastructure strike mode from the shadowy Vulkangruppe in Berlin during the dead of winter and in Paris as arsonists using ‘incendiary devices’ set strategic fires that crippled rail service during the Olympics.
NEW: 🇫🇷 French rail company SNCF confirms its diagnostics teams have found “incendiary devices” in several locations along the country’s high-speed rail network including in Eure-et-Loir, Meurthe-et-Moselle, Meuse, Pas-de-Calais, and Yonne.
The arson attacks have brought France… pic.twitter.com/ZQHv1xuKFc
— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) July 26, 2024
…The arson attacks have brought France to a standstill on the opening day of the Paris #OlympicGames.
As Shideler says in his wrap-up, this conference was not only important from an international communication standpoint but as a signal that the U.S. is shifting, too, and serious about the FLT response globally.
…The Trump State Department is moving forward on the FLT portfolio in a measured but aggressive manner. Public-facing presentations by Rubio and other Trump cabinet luminaries certainly provided a level of fan service for the president’s base. But they also stressed that the United States takes the developing threat of Far-Left Terrorism seriously and is prepared to use its influence and authority on the world stage to lead an international response. This indicates that Washington recognizes it needs foreign partners to successfully counter a sophisticated transnational network like FLT. It’s a realization that we have something to learn from other nations, many of whom are glad to see the United States awakening to a challenge they’ve been addressing quietly for some time.
He noted that this is something our friends and allies have been addressing ‘for some time.’
And almost right on cue came a creepy video out of the island of Corsica, the fourth largest island in the Mediterranean and a French territory (although it is on track for eventual autonomy).
The far-left National Liberation Front of Corsica (FLNC) has popped back up, and they are expressing their unhappiness with the autonomy process as it goes forward.
This group has been around since 1976, when two paramilitary Corsican nationalist groups joined forces…
…The group first appeared publicly in 1976 when they claimed responsibility for 18 attacks carried out during a ‘blue night’.
The term ‘blue night’ is locally used to describe a coordinated series of explosions and bombings carried out over a single night and across various targets.
The movement has fragmented into different groupings since then, caused by internal conflict.
The last ‘blue night’ the group claimed was in October 2023, when 45 explosions targeted second homes and a former tax office in Ajaccio. No injuries were caused.
…and its various umbrella groups have a reputation for not playing nice.
…Typical militant acts by various FLNC organizations were bombings aimed at public buildings, banks, tourist infrastructure, military buildings and other perceived French symbols, in addition to armed bank robbery and extortion against private enterprises through so-called “revolutionary taxes”.[7] The attacks were usually performed against buildings and the island’s infrastructures, but it was also not uncommon for FLNC organizations to have individual people as targets. This was especially common during the tumultuous period of the “Years of Lead”, in which a large number of assassinations occurred between various warring factions, many successors of the original FLNC.
Understandably, when this video came out, Corsican and French authorities swung into defensive action.
#Corsica: The FLNC (National Liberation Front of Corsica) – Union des Combattants – has rejected the ongoing autonomy process between Corsica and the French government, dismissing the proposed “community of destiny” framework in a new statement.
The message was delivered during… pic.twitter.com/xTAPnxG4iS
— POPULAR FRONT (@PopularFront_) August 5, 2026
…The message was delivered during a clandestine press conference, attended exclusively by the Corsican newspaper Corse-Matin, in which the group also addressed several political issues concerning the island.
The far-left terrorist group also has an issue with the number of off-islanders purchasing vacation houses on their homeland, many of them French citizens. They had a truly gruesome warning for those people, too, and have proven perfectly willing to follow through with their threats.
This is a problem.
…The Corsican National Liberation Front-Union of Combatants (FLNC-UC) released a video on Thursday, in which around twelve armed, hooded members stand with submachine-guns and rifles.
In the footage, a man believed to be the group’s leader says in a muffled voice: ‘Until our national rights are recognised and respected, we have only one message for them: stay at home.
‘Otherwise, do not consider yourselves safe on our national territory.’
The FLNC-UC condemned the ‘insane’ flow of 5,000 foreigners who move to the island for work or to buy a second home each year, and said ‘the vast majority of whom are French’.
They deemed it as ‘rampant settlement-driven colonisation’, comparing it to ‘a weapon of mass dilution that colonialism has always used against the peoples it seeks to subjugate, or even wipe out’.
This nationalistic movement is coinciding with an anti-tourism sentiment building in many of these locations across the Mediterranean (there were violent protests in Mallorca’s capital last month). It could turn into an explosive mix in a situation such as Corsica’s, which already has an established FLT organization in situ.
Combine that with a lame duck president like Macron and a basically paralyzed French government at the moment?
Oh, dear.
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