Antifa on the Terror List, Neo-Nazis on None: What Washington Is Really Offering Europe Is Political Paranoia

On Thursday, representatives from more than 60 countries, most of them from Europe and Latin America, gathered in Washington and listened as the U.S. secretary of state explained what he called the real terrorist threat of our time. Marco Rubio spoke of an alarming rise in left-wing political violence and of communists and Marxists whose defeat, he claimed, would determine what the future looks like. Counterterrorism, he said, had suffered from a blind spot for far too long, and he invited those in attendance to help close it.

"In one 18 month period between 1971 and 1972, the FBI counted some 2,500 bombings on American soil—a rate of nearly 5 a day. The overwhelming share of that violence came from Left-Wing extremists... 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."

America is falling back into the 1960s in 2026. Anyone who stands against it already knows the price. Journalists are working under enormous pressure, and Europe keeps watching without realizing that this work has long been about them too.

The numbers Rubio relies on come from a study published last year, and they do not support the conclusion he is drawing. As of July 4, 2025, the report states, left-wing attacks had outnumbered right-wing attacks for the first time in more than three decades. Between 1994 and 2000, the average was 0.6 left-wing incidents per year compared to 20.6 right-wing incidents. From 2016 through 2024, the numbers stood at 4 versus 22.7. By the summer of 2025, they stood at 5 versus 1. The increase is largely explained by an almost nonexistent starting point on the left combined with a sharp decline on the right. The authors themselves explicitly warn that right-wing terrorism could return at any time and conclude that both sides deserve continued attention.

Rubio accused political leaders of having tolerated left-wing violence for far too long and illustrated his point with a comparison. A bomb planted by neo-Nazis, he said, is universally described as an evil act of murder. A bomb planted by Marxists is too often dismissed as a tragic excess of idealism. The first half of that sentence is beyond dispute. The second is not. A bomb is still a bomb, no matter who builds it, and whoever plants it belongs in court. But Rubio's own department contradicts his claim. Last November, the State Department designated four anti-fascist groups in Europe as foreign terrorist organizations. No neo-Nazi organizations appear on that list. There is, in fact, leniency toward one side - just not the side Rubio claims.

"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 fire bomb because her daughter dared to stand for office!"

"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."

"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!"

The individual incidents Rubio refers to are, for the most part, real. What the available evidence does not support, however, is the conclusion that they add up to a dominant far-left terrorist threat across the Western world.

Even the latest CSIS analysis that Rubio himself relies on explicitly states that while left-wing attacks outnumbered right-wing attacks for the first time in 2025 - including incidents as minor as handing someone a box of photographs - their deadly impact remained very limited. Between 2016 and 2025, 13 people were killed in left-wing attacks, compared to 112 in right-wing attacks and 82 in jihadist attacks.

One thing also deserves attention. What exactly has been placed on those lists? Antifa is not an organization with members, officers, and a headquarters. It is a political label. You cannot place a political label on a terrorist list. So instead, governments select identifiable groups and treat them as stand-ins for something much broader.

Carl Schmitt, the chief legal theorist of Nazi Germany, described exactly how this works. Politics, he argued, begins with the distinction between friend and enemy, and sovereignty belongs to whoever decides when an exception exists. No attack has to occur first. It is enough for someone to make the classification. Once a person has been placed on the wrong side, they remain there until the machinery of the state is finished with them. Schmitt wrote those words for a regime that first identified its enemies and then rounded them up.

Stephen Miller, the architect of the administration's deportation policy, stepped to the microphone after Rubio and delivered the operational message. If civilization is your home, he said, then you must defend it with the same determination and force you would use if an enemy had broken into the house where your family lives. That level of commitment and urgency, he argued, is now required. The people he was talking about are fellow citizens who run for office and get elected.

"The leftist is fundamentally motivated by envy, by hatred, by jealousy. The leftist looks at what is beautiful and what is good and what is natural and is filled with envy and hatred."

Who belongs to it is decided by an equation that does not survive even the most basic scrutiny. Democratic socialism, as represented by the American left, calls for universal health care, higher taxes on the wealthy, and stricter rules for corporations. Under communism, private property largely disappears. Here, the two are thrown into the same pot. The president describes the growing left wing of the Democratic Party as communists who want to completely destroy the traditional American way of life and are even prepared to carry out assassinations. Vice President JD Vance calls communism a turning point unlike anything the United States has ever experienced. House Speaker Mike Johnson warns of radical candidates who openly describe themselves as Marxists.

The sharper tone of recent months has a reason, and it can be attached to a name. Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani became mayor of New York, and several of his political protégés defeated incumbents in last month's primaries there. Since then, Washington has treated election results as a security threat. Rubio's own family history supplies the basic tune. His parents left Cuba and arrived in Miami in May 1956, several years before Fidel Castro came to power in Havana. That very government, the former Florida senator said on Thursday, used its far-reaching intelligence and ideological networks to help build the extreme left in the United States and across the hemisphere. A family's biography becomes an explanation of the world, one in which every American citizen who calls for health care for all is hanging from a string tied to Havana.

The treasury secretary made clear just how serious this administration is. For decades, Scott Bessent told the guests, the United States had developed the most sophisticated financial counterterrorism tools in the world, and it was now mobilizing some of those same tools used against terrorists abroad to confront this emerging threat at home. He said it in a subordinate clause, and that subordinate clause contains the entire matter. A system built for bombers is now being turned against the domestic political opposition, four months before an election in which that very opposition is running.

That leaves one question: What exactly were those 60 delegations doing there? They were not being briefed. They were being recruited. Washington is offering a procedure for export in which the political classification of an act helps determine whether it is called terrorism and whether the accounts of those involved are frozen. Europe has experience with where it leads when a state first names the internal enemy and then reshapes the procedures around that name. Anyone in Berlin, Paris, or Rome considering this offer should look at the numbers used to justify it. There are five cases. And a country that uses five cases as a reason to summon 60 governments is not looking for perpetrators.