OPINION:
What is radical leftism?
“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,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained last week at a conference of 60 countries convened to address rising left-wing violence.
Left-wing violence is the George Floyd rioters who burned down American cities in the summer of 2020. It is the armed ambushes on our immigration enforcement officials. It is transgender school shooters. It is the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and conservative influencer Charlie Kirk.
It is the numerous assassination attempts on President Trump’s life. It is pro-Hamas insurgents taking over college campuses.
“In spite of the clear and the 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 organized — that this kind of organized violence and terror will be dismissed,” Mr. Rubio said.
To a large degree in our society, radical left-wing ideology has been normalized — so much so that the Democratic Socialists of America are openly taking root in the Democratic Party.
DSA advocates for chaos and destruction, wanting to abolish the police, eliminate the Senate and Supreme Court, terminate border enforcement, stop cash bail and, in some cases, eliminate prisons altogether.
Yet they present these ruinous ideas under the guise of equality, justice and liberation, influencing younger generations to believe that the end (utopia) justifies any means necessary to achieve it (terrorism).
Mr. Rubio rightly explained: “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.”
There are numerous examples of the left downplaying left-wing violence while playing up the threat from the right. President Biden described antifa as “an ideology, not an organization,” while dedicating an entire speech to how Mr. Trump and the MAGA movement represent an existential threat to American democracy.
Sadly, many on the political left are blind to the extremism coming from within their own party.
For example, after Mr. Rubio’s speech, NPR was quick to note that in regard to “left-wing” political terrorism, “studies show that there are very few reported cases of such incidents in the U.S., especially compared to historically higher levels of far-right violence,” despite Mr. Rubio’s laying out a multitude of examples.
Mr. Rubio explained that throughout our history, radical leftism has worn many different slogans and ideologies, many of which sound hopeful to the downtrodden. Whether it be anti-capitalists, anti-imperialists, Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, DSA or Free Palestine, all of these movements are rooted in Marxist and communist ideologies.
“One of the criticisms you sometimes hear of communism, for example, is that it sounds good in theory, but it never works in practice,” Mr. Rubio said. “That’s 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.”
He continued: “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 — 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.”
That is the world our adversaries want us — the greatest nation on earth — to live in.
The opinion pages at The Washington Times have described how countries such as Cuba, Russia, Iran and China have used their elaborate networks to undermine Western civilization, whether from within our institutions of higher learning, through social media, or through the spurring, organizing and financing of protests on American soil.
Most are rooted in left-wing political sentiment.
Mr. Rubio’s speech was clear-eyed, well-reasoned and important in this time of heightened political divide. It is a shame that the mainstream media largely ignored it, because it served as a clarion call to every American looking to preserve our Western way of life.
• Kelly Sadler is the commentary editor at The Washington Times.
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