(CNN) — Secretary of State Marco Rubio and top White House adviser Stephen Miller on Thursday sought to paint a dark picture of the threat of “far-left terror” to the United States as they urged diplomats from around the world to “defend” their civilizations against the “scourge.”
In remarks focused almost entirely on the US, Miller spoke of the need to fight the “fatal cancer of civilization,” claiming that so-called left-wing terrorism, when “left to run its course, it always becomes a gulag.” He argued that the US’ political, legal, and judicial systems don’t work “if the threat of violence and terror goes on unchecked.” And he denounced Antifa protesters as “deformed,” saying, “their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred.”
“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,” Miller told a room full of representatives from more 60 countries and fellow Trump administration officials at the State Department on Thursday. “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.”
The fight against the alleged rise of “violent left-wing extremists, including anarchists and anti-fascists,” is a key priority of the Trump administration, which has argued that they are a foremost terrorist threat to the US.
However, multiple former officials said the issue has been politicized by the administration and that the threat from the “far-left” does not rise to the level of that posed by groups like ISIS or by far-right extremists, the latter of which was absent entirely from the administration’s counterterrorism strategy released in May. And critics have expressed concerns that the strategy is an attempt to amplify the threat and target those on the political left who oppose President Donald Trump’s policies.
Rubio said the threat had been dismissed “as a right-wing fever dream, or worse, as a dangerous fascist conspiracy,” but that its resurgence is “an undeniable reality” comparable to the left-wing attacks of the 1970s.
“They can call themselves anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist, communist, or anarchist, or Marxists, but the fundamental character is always the same,” Rubio said.
Rubio called on the countries in the room to work with the US to “identify and map this threat and rebuild our counterterrorism architecture to defeat it.”
“Through intelligence and information sharing, through coordinated law enforcement strategy, through financial targeting and disruption, we will dismantle these networks brick by brick,” he said.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who also spoke at the opening session, said his department was “expanding its efforts to identify organizations that abuse charitable and nonprofit structures as vehicles for illicit finance” for alleged far-left terrorism.
Rubio’s convening of the ministerial comes not only as the matter has become a key domestic focus for the administration, but also amid growing chatter about the top US diplomat’s potential political future.
Sixty-seven countries attended the event, a State Department spokesperson said on Thursday. They represented countries mostly from Europe, although there are countries from Asia and the Western Hemisphere with representatives. Israel is the only Middle Eastern country in attendance, according to the list provided by a spokesperson.
Many of the delegations were not be led by the foreign ministers of the countries, but rather ambassadors or working-level and technical officials. Several sources cited scheduling for the lower-level attendance, with invitations to the event only being issued at the beginning of July.
However, former officials said the ministerial appears to be a part of the administration’s broader effort to amplify the threat to suit a domestic political agenda. Several who spoke with CNN said that the reality of the threat from far-left extremists does not match the administration’s portrayal.
“We looked at terrorism of all stripes, including left-wing terrorism, but the reality and the data, both here domestically and abroad, indicate that left-wing extremism is not and has not been the type of threat or the degree of threat that far-right terrorism or extremist violence or jihadist violence have posed,” said Ian Moss, the former deputy coordinator for counterterrorism at the State Department under the Biden administration.
Moss, now an attorney with Jenner & Block, noted that there are “other forms of violent ideological extremism, Islamist violence for starters, and then certainly violent right-wing extremists or White identity terrorists, which are a real risk, a real concern domestically and internationally, and one that the administration seems to have not focused on.”
Michael Duffin, a former senior counterterrorism adviser at the State Department, said that “never” in his nine years of working on counterterrorism “had so-called left-wing extremism risen” to a level warranting such high-level focus.
“There’s no violent extremist element, organizational element on the left, that would justify the expenditure of these resources,” he told CNN. Duffin was among many State Department officials who worked on counterterrorism who were fired last year as part of the administration’s mass firings and overhaul of the department.
Last November, the administration designated four European Antifa groups as terrorists. Throughout Trump’s second term, his administration has also ramped up domestic pressure against alleged far-left extremists.
Trump designated the anti-fascist movement Antifa as a so-called “domestic terrorist organization.” Despite claims that Antifa is a top concern domestically, law enforcement agencies have struggled to define the amorphous group, its size, locations of chapters and other basic information.
This story has been updated with additional information.
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