Five Things We Learn from This Historic Conference
- The Blind Spot Was Real—and Deadly For decades the West rebuilt its entire counterterrorism architecture around jihadist threats while treating left-wing violence as idealism gone wrong. That double standard cost lives and nearly destroyed cities.
- This Evil Is Not New—It Is Returning From the Weather Underground and Red Brigades to Shining Path and FARC, far-left terrorism was the dominant form of political violence for much of the 20th century. The new wave looks different only in its tools and networks—not in its hatred of civilization.
- It Is Transnational and Well-Funded Antifa and allied groups move people, money, training, and propaganda across borders. They use encrypted channels, safe houses, nonprofits, and even state sponsors. No nation can fight this alone.
- Envy and Hatred Drive It—Not Justice As Stephen Miller said so clearly, the root is not sincere conviction but envy of the beautiful, the ordered, the godly, and the productive. It seeks to tear down rather than build.
- The Time to Act Is Now—Before the Point of No Return Waiting until the horror is undeniable means you have already lost. President Trump’s NSPM-7, the new FTO designations, Rewards for Justice, and the financial war being waged by Treasury are the beginning of a serious counter-offensive. The free world must join it.
Far-Left Terrorism: The Blind Spot Exposed Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s Historic Global Call to Crush an Old Evil Rising Anew
Friends,
On July 16, 2026, something unprecedented happened at the U.S. State Department. Secretary of State Marco Rubio hosted ministers and officials from more than 60 nations for a ministerial conference on the “resurgence of transnational far-left terrorism.”
This was not another talk-shop. This was a clear-eyed declaration of war against a form of political violence that for decades has been excused, romanticized, and ignored by the same institutions that claim to study extremism.
I watched the opening session carefully. What follows is the full account of what was said—every major word from Deputy Secretary Christopher Landau, Secretary Rubio, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent—organized so you can read it clearly, feel the weight of it, and act on it.
This is not left or right. This is good versus evil. Civilization versus chaos.
Opening: A Familiar Horror Returns
Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau
“Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the State Department. It is an honor and a privilege to have you here.
For those of us who grew up in the 1970s, the topic that we are going to be discussing today is all too familiar. From the Red Brigades and the Baader-Meinhof group in Europe to the Weather Underground here in the United States, the Tupamaros and the Montoneros in South America, many of our countries have familiarity in the past with political terrorism. And unfortunately, we are seeing a resurgence of that again today.
And so that is why we are gathered here to talk about this dangerous trend.
Obviously, we know the good news is that it can be defeated because it has been defeated, and we can defeat it again. But that is going to require some clear leadership. It is my great privilege to underscore the host of today’s conference and to introduce him.
He is from one of the most dynamic cities in our country—Miami, Florida—where international relations just flows in the air because so many different cultures are present there. He is someone who served in the United States Senate with great distinction for 14 years, and he now is the chief steward of policy for our great President Donald J. Trump. So, it is my great honor this morning to introduce our Secretary of State, Marco Rubio.”
The Sacred Duty of Government
Secretary of State Marco Rubio
“Thank you very much.
Thank you all. Thank you all for joining us here today. I am very honored that this distinguished group of people has traveled from around the world to be a part of this important conversation. We are grateful to you.
I also want to thank members of the president’s team and cabinet who are here today. Our FBI director, Kash Patel, who is here with us—thank you. Our Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, has joined us as well. You will hear shortly from Stephen Miller, the president’s deputy chief of staff and one of his top advisers on homeland security issues as well. And of course, our Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, is here.
But again, I want to thank all of you who are here today. I want to thank the whole team here at the State Department as well for putting this together. It truly is an unprecedented event on an unprecedented issue—a 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. It 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 is why we have intelligence agencies. It is why counterterrorism bureaus exist. It is 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, 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 is a very poignant reason for that.
On the 11th of September in the year 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 that made sense at the time. Our job was to keep our people safe, and in the realm of terrorism, the specter of global jihad was the premier threat to their safety.
And so we went to work. We assembled a global coalition, working with many of the friends that are represented here in this room today. And we destroyed the ISIS caliphate. We killed al-Baghdadi and al-Zawahiri and Bin Laden. And we built intelligence and law enforcement systems capable of anticipating and stopping attacks before the public even hears about them.
Every country represented here today has disrupted a terrorist threat at some point emanating from this source. Jihadist attacks and plots in the United States are down by two-thirds since ISIS’s peak. The number of people killed by jihadist terrorism in Europe dropped by roughly 97% from the year 2015 to the year 2024.
In other words, to a very great extent, our counterterrorism strategy has worked. The threat has not disappeared, of course. It will continue to exist, particularly so long as we tolerate immigration systems that import these threats directly into our respective homelands. But this threat has been severely diminished. The world looks very different today because of it.
The Deadly Blind Spot
For far too long, however, our counterterrorism doctrine has had a blind spot—a blind spot when it comes to extremist violence from the political left. Even today, the very idea that far-left terrorism could be a serious threat is treated as a right-wing fever dream or, worse, as a dangerous fascist conspiracy.
It is treated this way by many in the press, by many in academia and our universities, and by many of our legacy institutions. You will no doubt see the dogma rear its head in the coverage of this very conference.
In spite of the clear and undeniable reality, in spite of the objective numbers and statistics, in spite of the fact that in this room today there are representatives from across the political spectrum, we will hear this kind of organized violence and terror dismissed. It will be dismissed as a partisan fiction.
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 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 is just merely a tragic excess of idealism. Perhaps its means were misplaced or overzealous, but its ends were virtuous and just. That is the implication of how they treated 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 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 riots in the summer of 2020—as criminals and extremists burned and looted their way through 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—maybe you all recall this—of a news anchor from a very prominent agency 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.
Why 60 Nations Gathered
The coalition in this room today includes political leaders and experts and law enforcement officials from more than 60 countries across the world. You have come here from a wide range of governments, parties, and political persuasions. Some of your governments and ours disagree publicly—sometimes we disagree sharply—about trade, about energy, about immigration.
You did not come here today because you have been persuaded on every single aspect of the American view of the world. You came here because two weeks ago a 72-year-old woman was burned over 80% 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 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, it is getting worse, and it can no longer be denied or ignored. It is time to crush this evil forever.
History’s Bloody Record
The simple fact is none of this that I have just described is new. Far-left political terrorism is not a recent 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.
Every one of our friends here from the nations of the Western Hemisphere remembers the decades of kidnappings and bombings and assassinations and executions. The violent terror of the Tupamaros, of the Montoneros, of the FARC, of the ELN. You remember the inhuman savagery of Peru’s Shining Path—the Maoist fanatics who massacred peasant villages in Peru, hacking pregnant women and newborn infants to death with axes and machetes.
You remember the tens of thousands of Marxist guerrillas trained to kill in Castro’s terrorist camps. All of you here from Europe 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.
And here in America, we remember the same reign of deadly terror justified by the same slogans, motivated by the same wicked ideas. We remember the Weather Underground, which bombed the Pentagon, which bombed the State Department, and bombed the Capitol.
We remember the Black Liberation Army, which staged armed robberies and executed police officers at point-blank range. We remember the Symbionese Liberation Army, which shot a public school superintendent to death with cyanide-packed hollow-point bullets.
In one 18-month period between 1971 and 1972, the FBI counted some 2,500 bombings on American soil—a rate of nearly five a day. The overwhelming share of that violence came from left-wing extremists. Between 1970 and 1980, 93% of terrorist attacks in the West came from the far-left extremist left.
These are numbers that would shock most Americans today because we have been taught to believe that this kind of political violence simply does not exist or is being exaggerated. But it does exist, and we are actually underestimating it. Our nations bear the scars to prove it.
The New Wave of Terror
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% in just the last year alone. In Greece, more than 80% 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 healthcare 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 to also be a husband and the father of two young children—shot and killed while speaking to a crowd of students.
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. 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 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. The old dogma was wrong. None of this is driven by idealism. It is not utopian. In fact, it is the opposite.
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 is actually not true. Communism does not sound good in theory. The world it envisions for all of us is small, flat, gray, 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 toward, 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.
For these architects of revolutionary violence, the towering achievements of our civilization are an unbearable humiliation—a reminder of what they cannot do and what they cannot be. So they choose instead to destroy. They attack pipelines. They attack railroads. They attack power grids and laboratories—the physical embodied symbols of power and invention and achievement.
This is the nature of the terrorism we face today. They despise the West because the West is great.
A Transnational Enemy
This is an international conference because we are facing a transnational threat. These are not distinct and isolated cells. They are interconnected networks. They do not recognize our borders. They do not believe, in fact, in the nation-state itself. They coordinate, they communicate, they travel, they train, and they act together—sharing the same infrastructure, sharing the same enemies, sharing the same mission.
Antifa militants and their comrades travel from across Europe and to the Americas to participate in each other’s attacks, to funnel propaganda and training materials and target information through shared encrypted channels, moving through underground networks of safe houses and financing and sustaining their operations through transnational funds. And they work alongside hostile foreign states that share their mission, like Iran’s proxy networks, who are increasingly intimately tied to leftist militant groups around the world.
The Cuban regime’s sprawling intelligence and ideological network helped to build the far-left in our country and in our hemisphere, and it remains inextricably linked to the far-left groups and movements across and beyond the West.
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.
Under President Trump, for the first time, the United States is building the infrastructure, the partnerships, and the strategy to defeat the scourge of far-left terror. The president signed National Security Presidential Memorandum Number Seven, outlining a comprehensive strategy to investigate and disrupt Antifa terror networks and their allies.
Last November, the State Department designated four violent far-left extremist groups as foreign terrorist organizations, and there will be more designations soon. In December, we announced Rewards for Justice, offering up to $10 million for information disrupting the financing behind these groups. In May, we convened the first counterterrorism law enforcement workshop, joining American law enforcement officials and their counterparts in our partner nations together to map and develop strategies for dismantling these networks. The next workshop will be co-hosted with our partners in Germany.
The coalition we are building together is already bearing fruit, and we are here today to build on that work. We can and we must identify and map this threat and rebuild our counterterrorism architecture to defeat it—just as we have done together before. Now we must do it together again.
Through intelligence and information sharing, through coordinated law enforcement strategy, through financial targeting and disruption, we will dismantle these networks brick by brick. It is time for the people of the civilized world to defend ourselves, to stand united against this encroaching darkness, and fight—fight for what is ours.
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.
Thank you for coming today.
And now I want to introduce someone I work with very closely and who has been a leader in this field. He is a deputy chief of staff and one of the key advisers to President Trump. He also heads up all of our homeland security initiatives and understands this issue probably as well as anyone in the United States government. Stephen Miller.”
The Nature of the Enemy
Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller
“Good morning, distinguished leaders and guests. It is good to see so many familiar faces, and thank you, of course, to Secretary of State Rubio for organizing this conference and for leading this initiative.
Here in the United States, we have taken the necessary and essential action of formally recognizing left-wing violence as a form of political terrorism that is a direct threat to our national security and the survival of our republican form of government.
President Trump issued a directive—in our parlance, it is called a National Security Presidential Memorandum, or NSPM. NSPM-7, to be exact—that directs, for the first time in American history, all of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies to work together to disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute these political terrorists that are operating in our country.
It is very important to understand that left-wing political terrorism seeks as its ultimate end the overthrow of our system and form of government. And we have seen this take place many times in many places throughout the years. Secretary Rubio has provided you many examples.
Left-wing terrorism always ends in bloodshed, misery, and suffering. It can only travel in one direction. There is no point at which the left-wing terrorist is satisfied with his gains and ceases progressing. Inevitably, left to run its course, it always becomes a gulag. It always becomes the mass imprisonment of political enemies, the stripping of their rights and freedoms, inflicting immense pain, humiliation, and suffering in order to establish complete and total control—through psychological and physical and actual terror. And we have to understand that that is the scope and the extent of the threat that we face.
And as Secretary Rubio also pointed out, this is an international network. Antifa, as an example, operates in dozens of countries all throughout the world. They share common networks of funding and organization and information sharing. And so all of our intelligence agencies and law enforcement entities should be collaborating and coordinating and working together in order to root out these organizations.
One of the hallmarks of left-wing violence and terrorism is its completely pretextual and disingenuous appeal to civil liberties in an effort to shield its own violence. This is the tactic that the left always uses to try to protect itself from facing criminal punishment.
It is essential that we are wise enough and strong enough to understand that these appeals must fall on deaf ears. When the leftist—who does not believe in freedom, who does not believe in civil rights, who does not believe in any ordered notion of justice—protests that we are violating his rights, understand that he is lying to try to persuade people who are not closely following the political scene that some injustice has been perpetrated against him.
We must stay the course and be completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilization. If the left is allowed to use the real or actual threat of violence to destabilize our institutions, then those institutions cannot and will not succeed.
So here in the United States, for example, we saw in the recent past clear threats of violence against our Supreme Court to try to shape how they rule on upcoming decisions. The leftist does this with the full desire, intent, and understanding that the threat of violence against a public figure or their family is meant to cow them into behaving or acting or conducting themselves differently.
You had the combination of a violent left-wing organization threatening our nation’s highest court and the federal government and the Department of Justice turning a blind eye to it. Those are the conditions in which this kind of violence can fester as a cancer and ultimately destroy a society. Nothing that we do works if the threat of violence and terror goes on unchecked.
Our political systems do not work. Our judicial systems do not work. Our legal systems do not work. Our jury trials do not work. And at the same time, we have to understand there is a real threat that those who are not themselves terrorists but who support left-wing violence will create the conditions that allow that violence to go on without any meaningful inhibition.
So to be specific, we have seen some of our nation’s cities in America—like Washington, D.C., and New York City—engage in something that is known as jury nullification. This is when a person is obviously guilty of a crime but the juror, because they are ideologically sympathetic to the perpetrator, will not convict them of the crime which they have obviously committed.
We have seen in the United States again and again individuals who are part of left-wing organizations who have committed assaults against ICE officers or federal law enforcement who have been brought to court—where clear evidence has been presented against them—yet the jury has refused to convict for purely political reasons.
When you have reached that point, it demonstrates how deeply the cancer has begun to infest your society—where people have created an internal rationalization structure to justify unsanctioned violence against the state and state actors to achieve a political end.
We have to use every lawful and legitimate tool that we have to demonstrate that justice will be served and delivered and to prove that these kinds of tactics and techniques will ultimately fail. If the leftist learns and observes that their violence and criminal activity helps and ultimately succeeds in achieving their desired political end, they will be endlessly emboldened.
Here in the United States, we have seen a growing and deeply alarming increase in attempted assassinations against public figures—most notably, of course, the multiple assassination attempts against President Trump, the successful assassination attempt against Charlie Kirk, and many others. This is a fatal cancer to civilization.
And the greatest risk that we have is that our institutions have grown too soft and too cowardly to be able to defend themselves against a mortal threat. If your civilization is your home, you must defend it with the same passion and force as if an enemy intruder is inside your own house where your family lives. That is the level of dedication and urgency that is required.
And the greatest threat is that even though there are far more of us—there are far more people who believe in order and civilization and liberty and the rule of law—if we are softer than those who seek to end us, then the smaller but more radical minority will succeed.
It is easy to dismiss what I am saying and to say, ‘Surely it cannot be that bad. It cannot be that dire.’ But again, I point to the examples in our own country where, for example, our Immigration and Customs Enforcement—which has been duly statutorily authorized to carry out routine enforcement of immigration law—has been subjected to an over 8,000% increase in violent assaults. These are not one-off episodes. This is repeated, systemic, organized, funded insurrection and armed resistance against the federal government.
There was a sniper from a sniper nest who, using an assault rifle, tried to shoot ICE officers in Dallas, Texas. These are the episodes that we are talking about, where we have had repeated direct violent attacks on federal law enforcement in order to veto the ballot box with violence.
And the leftist justifies this violence to himself by saying that they alone are the arbiters of what is right or wrong—not the law, not history, not civilization, not public opinion, certainly not God. The leftist assumes for himself judge, jury, executioner.
But let us not pretend for a moment that these radical leftists—these terrorists—are operating from a place of sincere political conviction. Sure, there are plenty of useful idiots that they use who may believe these discredited ideologies. 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. The leftist looks at a perfect family with the perfect life and a perfect job and perfect kids that goes to church every Sunday and is filled with a feeling of inadequacy and jealousy. And they covet, and they turn those emotions ultimately into a desire to subjugate, to oppress, and to inflict pain and suffering.
It is not a coincidence that when you look at these violent Antifa demonstrations, if you see any photograph of those who were assembled—to be blunt, not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person. Not one looks normal. They are all deformed in some way in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerisms. Why is that? Why? You look at two photographs: you see a normal American street; you see an Antifa protest. Why do the people that are violently demonstrating—why is there not one normal-looking person among them?
Every one of them, through the course of their life and their decisions, has scarred their body and their appearance in many different ways to the point in which their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred.
Trust your instincts, to all people and across all civilizations. You know what normal is. You know what beautiful is. You know what good is. You know that families are right. You know that children are precious and beautiful and must be protected. You know that the criminal and the junkie and the predator is a threat to normal, healthy living.
This is so much deeper than issues about taxation and regulation—although they are incredibly important. It is about normal, healthy, ordered living. And the violent leftist, for these deep-seated reasons—going back to the earliest wisdom taught to us in the Bible about coveting (and I am not talking about rich versus poor; I am talking about a much deeper kind of coveting)—coveting people who are morally superior, who are superior in the simple, truthful way they live their lives. People that they look at who are happy and ordered and peaceful and contributing to their communities. That burns an ember in them.
And that is how you end up with the horrors we have seen throughout history, where good families are dragged out into the street and executed. And you might say again, ‘You are describing a future that seems impossible to conceive of.’ When it comes to preventing these horrors, it is the burden and the duty of good people of all walks of life to understand that you will always be accused of raising the alarm too loudly.
If you wait until the point where the worst outcome is so obvious that no one can deny it, you have already lost the battle. That is the fundamental point. If you say, ‘I will not raise this alarm until the threat is so present and so clear and so obvious and so imminent that none can deny it,’ it is already too late.
I would rather prevent a threat from occurring and be accused for the rest of my life of having falsely raised the alarm—knowing in myself that I was right—than, for fear of being judged, having waited too long until the point of no return has been crossed. The good news is that we are far away from the point of no return. So all of us should organize together and work together for the good and the benefit of all the people in our societies—of all walks of life, of all persuasions—to deliver for them what they are justly entitled to, which is to live with safety, with fundamental human dignity, and with the ability to live in peace and harmony with their families and neighbors.
Thank you all, and God bless.”
Choking Off the Money
Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent
“Good morning. And before I proceed, I am going to go off script for a minute—which is always dangerous—but I am going to remind everyone in this room and all the media that I was the subject of an assassination attempt in February 2024 by an adult left-wing activist two hours after being sworn into my job. So any of you who want to report that this is a fiction and does not exist, be there for the sentencing this August.
So, good morning. Thank you, Secretary Rubio, for convening this ministerial and for the invitation to be here. We are here together because the resurgence of political terrorism—transnational in design and far-left in doctrine—is no longer the concern of any one nation. It demands a response that draws upon the distinct and combined strengths of every government represented here today.
Ours begins where every campaign of terror does: its financial lifeblood. And at President Trump’s direction, the United States Treasury is bringing the full weight of our authorities to defend the integrity of the U.S. global financial system.
More than 20 years ago, in the wake of 9/11, Treasury became the first finance ministry in the world to establish an office dedicated to disrupting the funding networks of terrorist organizations. Treasury’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence—referred to as TFI—was created in recognition of the reality that America’s financial system is essential to its national security.
TFI’s mandate to identify, disrupt, and disable illicit foreign funds that threaten our homeland has become one of the Treasury’s defining responsibilities. And today, we are extending that abiding mission to meet an evolving threat. The resurgence of organized political terrorism has long occupied a blind spot. The international community has struggled to identify this danger, much less defeat it. But as the threat of terrorism evolves, the institutional tools that defend against it must adapt.
We once understood terrorism principally as an external menace. That is no longer the world we inhabit. Increasingly, we are confronting sophisticated organized networks that cross borders to incite violence within them. Meanwhile, old ideological boundaries are now giving way to new operational alliances. The unified front between international Marxism and radical Islamic movements need not share the same ultimate vision to share the same immediate enemy of free and self-governing societies. That convergence should concern every government represented in this room.
These terrorists understand an enduring truth: Societies are rarely subverted from afar until they have first been weakened from within. So as it tears at the social fabric that allows our societies to function, left-wing terrorism is the visible manifestation of a much broader and more insidious effort to undermine the philosophies that built Western civilization and sustain all we hold dear.
Some of these activities are overt: bombings, assassinations, and organized violence in our streets. Others are quieter campaigns to suppress speech, intimidate political opposition, and sabotage our national institutions. Of course, whatever form they take, none of these attacks sustain themselves. Violence requires money, channels through which funding can move, and institutions behind which it can hide.
Increasingly, legitimate nonprofit and charitable structures are being exploited as a mechanism to conceal the movement of illicit funds to support political terrorism. For Treasury, the application of our authorities to combat these networks represents the natural evolution of our mission.
Through our Office of Foreign Assets Control, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, and IRS-CI, we have spent decades developing the world’s most sophisticated financial counterterrorism capabilities. And now we are mobilizing some of the same tools that we have deployed against terrorists abroad to confront this emerging threat here at home.
Like every form of illicit finance, these networks rely on the global financial system. It is our mandate to deny terrorist groups access to those channels. Now, we think of nonprofits and charities as good, altruistic organizations—and most of them are. We think they represent the very best of civil society—and many of them do. But the very qualities that make these institutions worthy of the public’s trust can also make them appealing to those who endeavor to exploit them.
At President Trump’s direction, Treasury is expanding its efforts to identify organizations that abuse charitable and nonprofit structures as vehicles for illicit finance. We are examining where tax-exempt status has been exploited, where charitable entities have become financial conduits for foreign influence activity, and how those entrusted with stewardship of these organizations have instead enabled violence. Where the evidence leads, we will not hesitate to follow. And of course, we will hold these organizations’ officers and directors accountable.
And just as financial institutions must know their clients, they must know their grantees. That work is well underway. In the fall, the United States designated four far-left Antifa extremist groups abroad as foreign terrorist organizations, denying them access to the U.S. financial system and depriving them of resources they need to carry out attacks. Meanwhile, in this administration alone, OFAC has also sanctioned 17 sham charities and nonprofit organizations for funding Hamas’s terrorist activities and operations.
As Treasury continues to map and disrupt the flow of funding that enables these entities to operate, no terror organization should delude itself into the belief that its financing lies beyond our reach. No facilitator should assume that anonymity confers impunity, and no jurisdiction should expect to enable or harbor these activities without consequence.
To be clear, in the fight against domestic terrorism, we must respect the constitutional rights—freedom of speech, association, and assembly—of all Americans. As such, it is important to emphasize that the Treasury will act based on suspected unlawful conduct by these terror organizations, not because of their beliefs or ideologies.
At Treasury, this work is mission-critical, but we cannot do it alone. The threat is transnational. Our response must be no less so. Indeed, our cooperation must be as disciplined as the networks we seek to dismantle. The global financial system is one of the great achievements of the modern world, and we must never allow it to become a sanctuary for those who seek to subvert it.
So, on behalf of the United States Treasury, let there be no uncertainty about the work before us and the resolve with which we will undertake it. We will identify illicit funding however artfully it is concealed. We will dismantle the networks that sustain political terrorism, however respectable their fronts may be. We will pursue those who enable political violence, however distant their jurisdictions. And we will deepen our collaboration with every nation represented in this room for as long as this work requires.
This is our commitment, and we ask that you make yours, too. Secretary Rubio, thank you again for convening us here this morning. Let us work together to translate the spirit of this ministerial into a commitment that endures well beyond it. And let us deny our adversaries the one thing on which they count most: that those of us assembled in this room will grow weary in our cooperation before they do.
Thank you all for being here today, and the U.S. Treasury looks forward to working with you. Thank you.”
Closing the Session
The opening session concluded with thanks to the speakers and an announcement that the first panel would begin shortly. Officials from nations across Europe, Latin America, Asia, and beyond were present—proof that this threat is no longer deniable.
A Word for the Church
Brothers and sisters, this is not merely a political story. It is a spiritual one.
“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” (Ephesians 6:12)
The same spirit that once filled the Weather Underground and Shining Path is rising again—hating the family, hating the church, hating ordered liberty, and hating the image of God in man.
We are called to pray for our leaders (1 Timothy 2:1-2), to expose the works of darkness (Ephesians 5:11), and to stand firm in the truth.
We’ve prayed since 2009, asking the Lord to prevent this evil, and we’re now seeing how God has raised up American and national leadership that is confronting this evil firsthand. The very thing we’ve seen ignored or accepted as “normal” is now being confronted as the demonic evil it is. These are amazing days, and we must continue to pray, asking the Lord to bring the blanket of evil that spreads across America and the world to justice — and to free the people to seek the Lord and live for Him. Our God is a just God; His throne is established upon justice and righteousness. With His strong right arm, He can silence the evildoers and bring them to nothing.
We cry out to You, Father, in Jesus’ name, asking You for justice upon those who seek to destroy the borders You set for the nations, the authorities You established as Your servants, and the freedom of Your people to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ across America and the world.
May God give wisdom and courage to every nation represented in that room. May He protect the innocent. And may He raise up a generation that refuses to call evil good.
The fight for civilization is not optional.
It is time to crush this evil forever.