Secretary of State Marco Rubio is once again showing what a great choice he was for President Trump for this role. In an outstanding speech to leaders from multiple countries, Rubio warned of a resurgence in politically motivated, left-wing violence:
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.And today, we face a new wave of this old evil. Here in the United States, the share of left-wing terrorist attacks and plots has risen to levels not seen in decades. In Germany, far-left violence has jumped by more than 40 percent in just the last year alone. In Greece, more than 80 percent of radical violence is now driven by far-left and anarchist actors. These are not abstract statistics.Americans have seen what those numbers mean – an all-out assault on our immigration officers, sniper attacks, explosives, armed ambushes. A transgender shooter opening fire on Catholic elementary school students as they pray, his gun marked with slogans like, “Where is your God now?” A health care executive executed in cold blood in the streets. 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.
Conservatives have been waiting for a speech like this and the urgency has only grown since the attempts on Trump’s life and the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
From The Hill:
Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Thursday convened officials from more than 60 countries to raise alarm over what the State Department is warning is a resurgence of far-left political violence globally.Rubio called for an “international response” to the issue at the summit, which marks an expansion of President Trump’s focus on treating left-wing political violence as the priority terrorist threat facing the U.S. Civil rights group argue it’s a tactic to silence domestic opposition.Rubio attacked those criticisms as a “partisan fiction” and said that such “ideological prejudice” has left a blind spot in global counterterrorism efforts. In November, the administration designated four leftist groups in Europe as foreign terrorist organizations and offered a $10 million reward for information on their financing.
This is the opening of the speech:
SECRETARY RUBIO: Thank you very much. Thank you, all. Thank you, all, for joining us here today. I’m very honored that this distinguished group of people have traveled from around the world to be a part of this important conversation. We’re grateful to you.I also want to thank members of the President’s team, cabinet that are here today: our FBI Director Kash Patel, who’s here with us, thank you; our Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has joined us as well. You’ll hear shortly from Stephen Miller, the President’s deputy chief of staff and one of his top advisors on homeland security issues as well, and of course, our Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent is here. And – but again, I want to thank all of you, all of you that are here today.I want to thank the whole team here at the State Department as well for putting this together. It’s – it truly is an unprecedented event on an unprecedented issue – moment, I should say, in our history.So let me start by saying that the most essential duty of the state – the first responsibility, frankly, of any government of any kind – is the protection of its people, is the protection of its country. This is a sacred obligation that should transcend all political and all ideological divisions. It is why, for example, we have militaries. It’s why we have intelligence agencies. It’s why counterterrorism bureaus exist, why police forces exist. Keeping our people safe is the reason why every country represented here has all of these things.We are all very well acquainted as of now, of course, by now with what has been described as traditional terrorist threats. For 25 years, the term counterterrorism – at least in the West – has meant, first and foremost, the fight against radical Islamist extremism. And there’s a very poignant reason for that. On the 11th of September in the year of 2001, 19 men murdered 3,000 people here in my country. Then that same enemy struck Europe, murdering nearly 200 commuters aboard trains in Madrid in 2004 and 52 more aboard London buses and the Underground in the following year. The entire architecture of Western counterterrorism was rebuilt from the studs around the singular traumatic event.
Read the full transcript here.
Watch some clips below:
Professor Jacobson commented on Twitter/X:
Here’s the full speech:
Featured image via YouTube.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY