By Selwyn Duke

What’s the greatest terroristic threat we face?

Is it Islamic jihad?

Is it “right-wing” terrorism?

According to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, it’s something too often ignored, winked at, and, sometimes, even encouraged.

It is, Rubio warned in a speech last week, left-wing terrorism. It’s a growing threat, too, yet pseudo-elite institutions often exhibit a perverse tolerance for it.

The secretary made his comments at the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism in Washington, D.C. The Deseret News reported on the story Friday:

Marco Rubio argued that Western counterterrorism has had a longstanding “blind spot” toward left-wing violence.

During a speech before 66 countries on Thursday, the Department of State head described a new transnational wave comparable in character — though not yet scale — to the revolutionary terrorism of the 1970s.

“Between 1970 and 1980, 93% of terrorist attacks in the West came from the far extremist left,” he said. “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. And our nations bear the scars to prove it.”

Rubio reflected on recent tragedies, including the shooting at a Catholic church in Minneapolis where schoolchildren were praying, the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and the multiple attempts to take President Donald Trump’s life — violence he said is inappropriately justified by many as “legitimate forms of political expression.”

He also mentioned crimes abroad, including countries such as Germany and Greece, places he said have since seen a spike in far-left violence in the last year.

A Dark History

Left-wing terrorism dates all the way back to what originated the political sense of the term “left”: The French Revolution. It was then, 1789, that the people shouting “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” would ultimately murder approximately 16,000 under guillotine blades. It didn’t matter, either, that the revolution’s main author, Maximilien Robespierre, had been a staunch death penalty opponent in 1791. Just two years later, he would begin overseeing the executions, perhaps exhibiting what are now called left-wing “situational values.”

Rubio himself referenced the above French connection more than once in his speech. As The American Spectator’s Francis P. Sempa wrote Tuesday:

For Modern Western progressives, the French Revolutionary slogan “pas d’ennemis à gauche” (“No enemies to the Left”) guides their every utterance and political outlook. Secretary Rubio rightly characterized this as an “ideological prejudice” that has become “accepted as the neutral and objective baseline” that is now “entrenched in the mainstream conventional wisdom.”

This ideological prejudice, Rubio explained, is why in the United States and other Western countries “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.”

And do you suppose this tacit approval would yield only more violence? Well, that’s precisely what we’ve witnessed. As I illustrated in “Violence, Inc.: A Leftist Enterprise,” virtually all today’s political violence originates with the Left. Why, the last 10 years have seen more than 600 Antifa/BLM riots, to just provide one example.

The Cause’s Causes

Quoting Rubio, and adding his own thoughts, Sempa also addressed the possible causes of the pathological left-wing violence, writing:

Left-wing terrorism, Rubio said, is “driven by a hatred above all else, a hatred for civilization itself.” He described it further as “a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice” that goes by different names: Marxist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anarchistic. And Rubio noted that left-wing violence and terror are not new to our time. Its ideological roots can be traced to the French Revolution and Karl Marx’s political theories. Whittaker Chambers believed its roots go all the way back to the Creation story in the Bible, where the serpent entices Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit by promising them “Ye shall be as gods.” Paul Hollander explained that Western intellectuals’ acceptance of left-wing terror and political violence grew out of the desire to perfect man, to create a Utopia on earth because for them God and heaven do not exist.

This godlessness factor is central. As the famed Fyodor Dostoyevsky paraphrase goes, “Without God, all things are permissible.” As I’ve often pointed out, leftists are characteristically — that is, in the aggregate — atheistic. And they’ve always been so. Why, just consider that the left-wing French revolutionaries instituted a new calendar that omitted the Lord’s Day. This was its main purpose, too, confessed its chief architect, Charles-Gilbert Romme: to “abolish Sunday” (and Christianity, of course).

The Deadly Connection

This is significant because while there are good atheists, atheism absolutely correlates with moral nihilism. (Though it’s often identified as “moral relativism.”) This is the idea that right and wrong don’t really exist — they’re just social constructs.

Some bristle at this assertion. But just consider what a more astute atheist I know of actually told someone close to me. “Murder isn’t wrong,” he insisted; “it’s just that society says it is.” While this statement is disturbing to most, it’s also something else: coldly logical. After all, if there’s no God — nothing above man authoring “right and wrong” (i.e., Truth) — it is only man saying that murder is wrong because man is then all there is to say anything.”

(For a deeper exploration, click here and here.)

This, by the way, is the explanation for the aforementioned left-wing situational values. When you’re rooted to nothing unchanging and transcendent — when Truth isn’t your moral yardstick — only one compelling guide remains: emotion. And what do we know about it?

Emotion changes with the situation — ergo, situational values.

In other words, leftists are too often people to whom “all things are permissible.” And all things include a lot of evil things.

Moreover, this morally nihilistic orientation is generally inculcated into them. As I explained in February, they are “low-virtue people.” This also informs as to why the Left, upon attaining power, always ends up extinguishing freedom. As our second president, John Adams, put it:

“Liberty can no more exist without virtue…than the body can live and move without a soul.”

Dark governments reflect dark souls.

This article was originally published at The New American.