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00:00Thank you all. Thank you all for joining us here today. I'm very honored that this distinguished group of people
00:04that have traveled from around the world to be a part of this important conversation. We're grateful to you. I
00:09also want to thank members of the president's team and cabinet that are here today. Our FBI director, Kash Patel,
00:14who's here with us. Thank you. Our secretary of education, Linda McMahon, has joined us as well. You'll hear shortly
00:20from Stephen Miller, the president's deputy chief of staff and one of his top advisors on homeland security issues as
00:26well. And of course, our secretary of treasury, Scott Bessent, is here.
00:29But again, I want to thank all of you, all of you that are here today. I want to thank
00:32the whole team here at the State Department as well for putting this together. It truly is an unprecedented event
00:37on an unprecedented issue, moment, I should say, in our history.
00:43So let me start by saying that the most essential duty of the state, the first responsibility, frankly, of any
00:51government of any kind, is the protection of its people, the protection of its country.
00:56This is a sacred obligation that should transcend all political and all ideological divisions. It is why, for example, we
01:05have militaries. It's why we have intelligence agencies.
01:07It's why counterterrorism bureaus exist, why police forces exist. Keeping our people safe is the reason why every country represented
01:15here has all of these things.
01:17We are all very well acquainted, as of now, of course, by now, with what has been described as traditional
01:24terrorist threats. For 25 years, the term counterterrorism, at least in the West, has meant first and foremost the fight
01:33against radical Islamist extremism.
01:36And there's a very poignant reason for that. On the 11th of September, in the year of 2001, 19 men
01:45murdered 3,000 people here in my country.
01:49Then that same enemy struck Europe, murdering nearly 200 commuters aboard trains in Madrid in 2004 and 52 more aboard
01:58London buses and the underground in the following year.
02:01The entire architecture of Western counterterrorism was rebuilt from the studs around the singular traumatic event.
02:10That made sense at the time. Our job was to keep our people safe, and the realm of terrorism, the
02:17specter of global jihad, was the premier threat to their safety.
02:20And so we went to work, and we assembled a global coalition, working with many of the friends that are
02:26represented here in this room today.
02:28We destroyed the ISIS caliphate, we killed al-Baghdadi and al-Zahari and bin Laden, and we built intelligence and
02:36law enforcement systems capable of anticipating and stopping attacks before the public even hears about them.
02:43Every country represented here today has disrupted a terrorist threat at some point emanating from this source.
02:51Jihadist attacks and plots in the United States are down by two-thirds since ISIS's peak.
02:57The number of people killed by jihadist terrorism in Europe dropped by roughly 97 percent from the year 2015 to
03:05the year 2024.
03:06In other words, to a very great extent, our counterterrorism strategy has worked.
03:13The threat has not disappeared, of course.
03:15It will continue to exist, particularly so long as we tolerate immigration systems that imports these threats directly into our
03:22respective homelands, but this threat has been severely diminished.
03:26The world looks very different today because of it.
03:30For far too long, however, our counterterrorism doctrine has had a blind spot.
03:34A blind spot when it comes to extremist violence from the political left.
03:40Even today, the very idea that far-left terrorism could be a serious threat is treated as a right-wing
03:46fever dream, or worse, as a dangerous fascist conspiracy.
03:51It's treated this way by many in the press, by many in academia and our universities, and by many of
03:57our legacy institutions.
03:59You will no doubt see the dogma rear its head in the coverage of this very conference.
04:04In spite of the clear and the undeniable reality, in spite of the objective numbers and statistics, in spite of
04:11the fact that in this room today, there are representatives from across the political spectrum,
04:15we will hear that this kind of organized violence and terror will be dismissed as a partisan fiction.
04:25A whole industry grew up in our countries around the study of extremism.
04:31We have think tanks and fellowships and journals and consultancies with the unspoken understanding among them that the only kind
04:39of political violence that was a true threat to our system.
04:42Sorry, that only one kind of political violence was a true threat to the system.
04:46A bomb planted by a neo-Nazi group was a nefarious and murderous act of evil.
04:53It is.
04:53But a bomb planted by a Marxist revolutionary, well, that's just merely a tragic excess of idealism.
05:00Perhaps its means were misplaced or overzealous, but its ends were virtuous and just.
05:08That's the implication of how they treat it.
05:10For years, this extraordinary ideological prejudice was embedded in the way we talked about political violence and extremism.
05:17It was repeated again and again until it was accepted as the neutral and objective baseline, so entrenched, so entrenched
05:27in the mainstream conventional wisdom that it came to be regarded as an apolitical fact.
05:34It is the reason why, here in my country, so many people in positions of power have repeatedly dismissed acts
05:42of violence and even terrorism as legitimate forms of political expression so long as they served a left-wing cause.
05:49It is why, during those George Floyd riots in the summer of 2020, as criminals and extremists burned and looted
05:58their way through America's great cities and nearly brought the country to its knees, city governments all across the country
06:06simply refused to prosecute the people conducting these acts of violence and terror.
06:11It is the reason for the now infamous image, maybe you all recall this, of a news anchor from a
06:19very prominent agency, a news anchor, standing in the neighborhood, consumed in flames.
06:25Meanwhile, the cryon on the bottom read that the protests were mostly peaceful.
06:32This was something worse than a double standard.
06:35Left-wing violence was not just excused.
06:38It was treated as sacrosanct, a protected class unto itself.
06:44That era has to end.
06:47The coalition in this room today includes political leaders and experts and law enforcement officials from more than 60 countries
06:54across the world.
06:56You have come here from a wide range of governments, parties, and political persuasions.
07:01Some of your governments and ours disagree publicly.
07:05Sometimes we disagree sharply about trade.
07:09About energy.
07:10About energy.
07:11You did not come here today because you have been persuaded on every single aspect of the American view of
07:18the world.
07:19You came here.
07:21You are here because two weeks ago, a 72-year-old woman was burned on over 80% of her
07:28body in her own home in Greece.
07:31And she died, executed by a firebomb because her daughter dared to stand for office.
07:39You are here today because, for five days this winter, the lights went out in Berlin, the longest blackout in
07:46the city since the Second World War, sparked by an attack that left tens of thousands of households without power
07:52in the freezing cold and left an 83-year-old woman dead.
07:56You are here and you came because a month after that Berlin blackout, a French 23-year-old succumbed to
08:03traumatic brain injuries, beaten to death on the streets of Lyon by a group of far-left militant thugs.
08:11You are here because your political leaders are being attacked and stabbed and shot in your streets, because your businesses
08:20have been bombed, because your railways have been sabotaged, because your police officers have been beaten and burned.
08:25You are here because this is real, and it is getting worse, and it can no longer be denied, and
08:33it can no longer be ignored, because it is time to crush this evil forever.
08:39The simple fact is, none of this that I've just described is new.
08:44Far-left political terrorism is not a recent-day modern novelty.
08:49It is not a fiction manufactured by conservative politicians.
08:52For most of the modern era, it was, in fact, the dominant form of political violence.
08:58Every one of our friends here from the nations of the Western Hemisphere remember.
09:02Remember the decades of kidnappings and bombings and assassinations and executions.
09:08The violent terror of the Tupamaros, of the Monteseros, of the FARC, of the ELN.
09:17You remember the inhuman savagery of Peru's shining path.
09:21The Maoist fanatics who massacred the peasant villages of Peru, hacking pregnant women and newborn infants to death with axes
09:30and machetes.
09:31You remember the tens of thousands of Marxist guerrillas trained to kill in Castro's terrorist camps.
09:40All of you here from Europe, remember.
09:42You remember the machine-gun massacres of Italy's Red Brigades, which held a five-time prime minister captive for 55
09:50days before subjecting him to a revolutionary so-called people's trial and executing him in 1978.
09:58You remember the Red Army faction's nearly three-decade campaign of bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations in Germany, murdering dozens and
10:08injuring hundreds more.
10:09You remember the 17th November organization in Greece, the Marxist extremists that terrorized Athens for more than a quarter century,
10:18including, by the way, shooting my country's CIA station chief dead outside of his home, in front of his wife.
10:30And here in America, we remember the same reign of deadly terror, justified by the same slogans, motivated by the
10:39same wicked ideas.
10:41We remember the weather underground, which bombed the Pentagon, which bombed the State Department, and bombed the Capitol.
10:49We remember the Black Liberation Army, which staged armed robberies and executed police officers at point-blank range.
10:58We remember the Symbionese Liberation Army, which shot a public school superintendent to death with cyanide-packed hollow-point bullets.
11:08In one 18-month period, between 1971 and 1972, the FBI counted some 2,500 bombings on American soil, a
11:22rate of nearly five a day.
11:24The overwhelming share of that violence came from left-wing extremists.
11:30Between 1970 and 1980, 93% of terrorist attacks in the West came from the far extremist left.
11:40These are numbers that would shock most Americans today because we've been taught to believe that this kind of political
11:46violence, it simply doesn't exist or it's being exaggerated.
11:50But it does exist, and we're actually underestimating it, and our nations bear the scars to prove it.
11:57And today, we face a new wave of this old evil.
12:01Here in the United States, the share of left-wing terrorist attacks and plots has risen to levels not seen
12:07in decades.
12:09In Germany, far-left violence has jumped by more than 40% in just the last year alone.
12:15In Greece, more than 80% of radical violence is now driven by far-left and anarchist actors.
12:22These are not abstract statistics.
12:25Americans have seen what those numbers mean.
12:28An all-out assault on our immigration officers, sniper attacks, explosives, armed ambushes,
12:34a transgender shooter opening fire on Catholic elementary school students as they pray,
12:39his gun marked with slogans like,
12:43Where is your God now?
12:45A health care executive executed in cold blood in the streets,
12:52multiple assassination attempts on a sitting president,
12:54and the murder of the greatest conservative activist of a generation,
12:58a man who happened to also be a husband and the father of two young children,
13:03shot and killed while speaking to a crowd of students.
13:07This is a distinctive and unique evil.
13:11It has always been driven by a hatred, above all else, a hatred for civilization itself.
13:17It is a revolt of the worst against the best,
13:20a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good.
13:25It is perpetrated by those who cannot build, who cannot create,
13:30who cannot achieve great things,
13:32and take their revenge upon the world for their own inadequacy
13:36by seeking to destroy those who can.
13:40This is what radical leftism is.
13:43It may wear various different slogans and ideologies across place and time.
13:47They can call themselves anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist
13:51or communist or anarchist or Marxist,
13:54but the fundamental character is always the same.
13:57It's always the same.
13:58It is a poisonous resentment,
14:01cloaked in the language of equality and justice and liberation,
14:05an overwhelming need to tear down what greater men have built,
14:08to wreck what is beautiful and what is right
14:11on behalf of people who are only filled with ugliness
14:15and have nothing else to offer the world.
14:18Through violence and through terror,
14:20they once again seek to impose their ugliness on all of us.
14:25The old dogma was wrong.
14:27The old dogma was wrong.
14:28None of this is driven by idealism.
14:30It is not utopian.
14:32In fact, it is the opposite.
14:36One of the criticisms you sometimes hear of communism, for example,
14:41is that it sounds good in theory, but it never works in practice.
14:45That's actually not true.
14:48Communism does not sound good in theory.
14:50The world it envisions for all of us is small, flat, gray, leveled of all exception,
14:58drained of all that is good and noble in the human soul.
15:01The world it envisions is a world without courage,
15:04a world without creativity or ambition,
15:07a world without heroes or glory or great causes to strive towards,
15:11without a world without miracles, without myths,
15:15without men who rise above the rest to do incredible and extraordinary things.
15:20And the world communism envisions is a world without God.
15:24For these architects of revolutionary violence,
15:27the towering achievement of our civilization,
15:30for them, it's an unbearable humiliation,
15:33a reminder of what they cannot do
15:35and a reminder of what they cannot be.
15:38So they choose instead to destroy.
15:40They attack pipelines, they attack railroads,
15:44they attack power grids and laboratories,
15:47the physical embodied symbols of power and invention and achievement.
15:54This is the nature of the terrorism we face today.
15:58They despise the West because the West is great.
16:04This is an international conference because we are facing an international,
16:09we are facing a transnational threat.
16:11These are not distinct and isolated cells.
16:14They are interconnected networks.
16:16They do not recognize our borders.
16:18They do not believe, in fact, in the nation state itself.
16:21They coordinate, they communicate, they travel, they train, and they act together,
16:29sharing the same infrastructure, sharing the same enemies, sharing the same mission.
16:35Antifa militants and their comrades travel from across Europe and to the Americas
16:39to participate in each other's attacks,
16:42to funnel propaganda and training materials and target information
16:46through shared encrypted channels,
16:49moving through underground networks of safe houses and finance
16:52and sustain their operations through transnational funds.
16:56And they work alongside hostile foreign states that share their mission,
17:01like Iranian proxy networks,
17:04who are increasingly intimately tied to leftist militant groups around the world.
17:10The Cuban regime's sprawling intelligence and ideological network
17:13helped to build the far left in our country and in our hemisphere,
17:17and it remains inextricably linked to the far left groups and movements
17:21across and beyond the West.
17:25Today's far left terrorists can raise money in one country.
17:28They can host their communications in a second country.
17:31They can receive training in a third country.
17:34They can recruit militants in a fourth country.
17:37And then together strike a target in a fifth country.
17:42And so we have no choice but to confront this menace together.
17:45We will either cooperate across our borders
17:48or the terrorists will continue to exploit the gaps between them.
17:53Under President Trump, for the first time,
17:56the United States is building the infrastructure,
17:58the partnership, and the strategy to defeat the scourge of far left terror.
18:03The president signed National Security Presidential Memorandum No. 7,
18:07outlining a comprehensive strategy to investigate and disrupt
18:10Antifa terror networks and their allies.
18:13Last November, the State Department designated four violent far-left extremist groups
18:19as foreign terrorist organizations.
18:22And there will be more designations soon.
18:25In December, we announced rewards for justice,
18:28offering up to $10 million for information disrupting the financing behind these groups.
18:33In May, we convened the first counterterrorism law enforcement workshop,
18:38joining American law enforcement officials and their counterparts in our partner country and nations
18:43together to map and develop strategies for dismantling these networks.
18:48The next workshop will be co-hosted with our partners in Germany.
18:52The coalition we're building together is already bearing fruit.
18:56And we are here today to build on that work.
19:01We can and we must identify and map this threat
19:06and rebuild our counterterrorism architecture to defeat it,
19:10just as we have done together before.
19:13Now we must do it together again.
19:15Through intelligence and information sharing,
19:18through coordinated law enforcement strategy,
19:21through financial targeting and disruption,
19:23we will dismantle these networks brick by brick.
19:28It is time for the people of the civilized world to defend ourselves,
19:34to stand united against this encroaching darkness,
19:39and fight, fight for what is ours.
19:43It is easy to destroy great things.
19:46It is far more difficult to make them.
19:49The enemies of civilization are only capable of the former.
19:54They are only capable of destroying great things.
19:56All they know is destruction.
19:59But we have built great things together.
20:03We have done it time and again.
20:05We know what we must do.
20:07And now we must do it.
20:09Thank you for coming today.