Confronting Brutality Requires Brutal Honesty
Leftist terrorism is a global epidemic, and it’s high time we started treating it as such.
What I’m Thinking About
Just over a week ago, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood before a room full of officials from more than sixty countries and said what few Western officials of his rank have been willing to say: that our approach to counterterrorism has a major blind spot, in the form of the hard left. Since the 9/11 attacks, Western nations, led by the United States, have developed a formidable apparatus to counter Islamic terrorism. But for far too long, when it comes to left-wing terrorism, Western governments and the media have insisted that the violence is aberrational. It isn’t. As Rubio outlined, left-wing extremists operate much like Islamic extremists. They are organized, and recruit, train, and fund their foot soldiers through international channels of finance and communication. And they have unleashed terror on nearly every continent.
It is time for Western governments to name the threat for what it is. Leftist extremists, like the Islamists, hate Western civilization. Their goal is to destroy it—to lay waste to the institutions and cultural achievements that make the West a magnet for the rest of the world. They target men such as Charlie Kirk because he loved his country and inspired other young people to do the same. We cannot defeat an enemy we refuse to name, and it’s a step in the right direction that our government now acknowledges the reality of this threat.
We cannot defeat an enemy we refuse to name.
What I’m Reading
I Was in the DSA. Here’s What They Really Believe.
A former member of the DSA reads the organization’s new platform so you don’t have to: in brief, the DSA wants to abolish the presidency, the Supreme Court, prisons, all debt, and every overseas military base. This is the platform now winning Democratic primaries across the country.
