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Secretary Rubio Opens the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism, Jul. 16, 2026

July 16, 2026 · U.S. Department of State · 0:47:46

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What happened

Secretary of State Marco Rubio opened the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism at the Department of State on July 16, 2026, introduced by Deputy Secretary Christopher Landau before an international audience; the State Department’s full-session feed of the ministerial is recorded as an alternate source. Rubio began with first principles — “the most essential duty of the state” is “the protection of its people” — and with the record of the post-9/11 campaign: the coalition that destroyed the ISIS caliphate and killed bin Laden, al-Baghdadi, and al-Zawahiri, after which, as he stated the figures, jihadist attacks in the United States are down by two-thirds since ISIS’s peak and people killed by jihadist terrorism in Europe dropped by roughly 97 percent from 2015 to 2024.

His argument was that this success left “a blind spot” — extremist violence from the political left, treated, he said, by much of the press, academia, and legacy institutions as “a right-wing fever dream” or partisan fiction, and by an extremism-studies industry that applied a double standard: a bomb planted by a Marxist revolutionary excused as “a tragic excess of idealism” where a neo-Nazi’s bomb is murder. That prejudice, he argued, is why acts of violence were dismissed as legitimate expression when they served a left-wing cause and why cities refused to prosecute during the 2020 riots. Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller also addressed the ministerial.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent followed, telling the room he had himself been the target of an assassination attempt by a left-wing activist, and laying out the financial campaign: Treasury’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, OFAC, FinCEN, and IRS-CI are being mobilized against political-terrorism funding networks, including organizations that abuse charitable and nonprofit structures — an evolution, he said, of the post-9/11 mission. As he stated them, the administration has designated four far-left Antifa extremist groups abroad as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and OFAC has sanctioned 17 sham charities and nonprofits for funding Hamas in this administration alone.

Why it matters

The ministerial is the administration’s counterterrorism doctrine formally widened: the Secretary of State convening allied governments around far-left political violence as a shared threat, with Treasury’s financial tools attached — a new front opened in the host’s own words, against which designations and prosecutions can now be measured.

Scoreboard watch

Scoreboard watch: the dated enforcement figures as stated by Secretary Bessent on July 16, 2026 — four far-left Antifa groups abroad designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (fall, as he stated it) and 17 sham charities and nonprofits sanctioned by OFAC for funding Hamas in this administration. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.

Sources: U.S. Department of State, “Secretary Rubio Delivers Opening Remarks at the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism” (official upload, embedded above). Remarks as delivered; transcript reviewed in the site’s private research store; full transcript at state.gov.