Rubio Goes Viral as Millions Watch, Share His Rousing Speech on the Evils of the Modern Left
Left-wing extremists are a major terrorist threat to a world that too often looks upon them as patriots, not terrorists, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Friday.
Speaking at a conference on political terrorism, Rubio said that while the world must remain on guard against Islamic jihadis, “extremist violence from the political left” remains “treated as a right-wing fever dream” by the media and academia, according to a text of his comments posted on the State Department website.
Rubio said that according to the media, “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.”
SECRETARY RUBIO: “This is a distinctive and unique evil. It has always been driven by a hatred, above all else, for civilization itself.” pic.twitter.com/3t75pzaSRE
— Department of State (@StateDept) July 16, 2026
Rubio fumed that “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.”
During the George Floyd-inspired riots of 2020, “Left-wing violence was not just excused; it was treated as sacrosanct, a protected class unto itself.”
“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,” he said, reminding his audience that “between 1970 and 1980, 93 percent of terrorist attacks in the West came from the far extremist left.”
Rubio noted that in 2026, “we face a new wave of this old evil” that includes “multiple assassination attempts on a sitting president.”
“And the murder of the greatest conservative activist of a generation, a man who happened also to be a husband and the father of two young children, shot and killed while speaking to a crowd of students,” Rubio said, referring to Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.
“This is a distinctive and unique evil. It has always been driven by a hatred above all else, a hatred for civilization itself. It is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good,” he continued.
“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,” Rubio said.
Radical leftism, Rubio said, “is a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice and 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.”
“Through violence and through terror, they once again seek to impose their ugliness on all of us.”
In speaking of communism, Rubio noted, “One of the criticisms you sometimes hear of communism, for example, is that it sounds good in theory, but it never works in practice. That’s actually not true. Communism does not sound good in theory.”
“The world it envisions for all of us is small, flat, grey, leveled of all exception, drained of all that is good and noble in the human soul. The world it envisions is a world without courage, a world without creativity or ambition, a world without heroes or glory or great causes to strive towards, without — a world without miracles, without myths, without men who rise above the rest to do incredible and extraordinary things. And the world communism envisions is a world without God,” he said.
Today, I convened leaders from around the world for a ministerial meeting on the resurgence of political terrorism—driven by a rising tide of violent left-wing extremism. Together, we must rebuild our counterterrorism architecture to defeat the new wave of this old evil. pic.twitter.com/SfIMKk84hs
— Secretary Marco Rubio (@SecRubio) July 16, 2026
Rubio noted that left-wing extremists have a global reach.
“Today’s far-left terrorists can raise money in one country; they can host their communications in a second country; they can receive training in a third country; they can recruit militants in a fourth country, and then together strike a target in a fifth country.”
“And so, we have no choice but to confront this menace together. We will either cooperate across our borders or the terrorists will continue to exploit the gaps between them,” he added.
“It is easy to destroy great things; it is far more difficult to make them. The enemies of civilization are only capable of the former. They are only capable of destroying great things. All they know is destruction. But we have built great things together. We have done it time and again. We know what we must do, and now we must do it,” Rubio said.
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