00:00For far too long, however, our counterterrorism doctrine has had a blind spot.
00:04A blind spot when it comes to extremist violence from the political left.
00:09Even today, the very idea that far-left terrorism could be a serious threat
00:14is treated as a right-wing fever dream, or worse, as a dangerous fascist conspiracy.
00:20It's treated this way by many in the press, by many in academia and our universities,
00:26and by many of our legacy institutions.
00:28A bomb planted by a neo-Nazi group was a nefarious and murderous act of evil.
00:34It is.
00:35But a bomb planted by a Marxist revolutionary, well, that's just merely a tragic excess of idealism.
00:42Perhaps its means were misplaced or overzealous, but its ends were virtuous and just.
00:49That's the implication of how they treat it.
00:51For years, this extraordinary ideological prejudice was embedded in the way we talked about
00:57political violence and extremism.
00:59It was repeated again and again until it was accepted as the neutral and objective baseline,
01:06so entrenched, so entrenched in the mainstream conventional wisdom that it came to be regarded
01:12as an apolitical fact.
01:15It is the reason why, here in my country, so many people in positions of power have repeatedly dismissed acts
01:24of violence
01:24and even terrorism as legitimate forms of political expression, so long as they served a left-wing cause.
01:31It is why during those George Floyd riots in the summer of 2020, as criminals and extremists burned and looted
01:40their way through America's great cities
01:42and nearly brought the country to its knees, city governments all across the country simply refused to prosecute the people
01:51conducting these acts of violence and terror.
01:53It is the reason for the now infamous image, maybe you all recall this, of a news anchor from a
02:00very prominent agency, a news anchor, standing in the neighborhood, consumed in flames.
02:07Meanwhile, the cryon on the bottom read that the protests were mostly peaceful.
02:13This was something worse than a double standard.
02:17Left-wing violence was not just excused, it was treated as sacrosanct, a protected class unto itself.
02:26That era has to end.
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