היוזמה החדשה של שר החוץ האמריקני למאבק בטרור של השמאל הקיצוני | פרשנות

And joining us now live to discuss Secretary of State Marco Rubio's conference is Simon Hankinson. He's a former Foreign Services Officer and now a Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation. Good morning Simon and thank you for joining early. For those that are not too familiar with extremist violence from Marxist groups like Antifa, can you share your reaction to yesterday's meeting that was of course organized by Secretary Rubio? I've been obviously following this for a long time. I was at the State Department as a Consular Officer where we have to screen people for all kinds of different ineligibilities. But ever since I got to Washington and worked at Heritage, it's been really obvious that the national media, most of the national media, considers anyone who's a conservative to be far right. They always insert the far there. But anyone on the left pretty much gets a pass unless they actually commit murder. And if you look at today's campuses in the United States, no conservative can go on a U.S. campus unless it's one of maybe a handful of conservative or Christian or otherwise safe spaces without worrying about security. Whereas any far left speaker, even someone like Bill Ayers, a convicted terrorist, can walk onto any campus in the country, including conservative campuses, and doesn't have to worry at all about security. So we have a real radicalization problem in our campuses. And if you look at who is leading the riots against immigration and customs enforcement and at the forefront of the Democratic Socialists of America campaigns for things like what they call housing justice and other socialist aims, it tends to be people who are funded by these dark money groups and whose aim is ultimately socialism. And if we look at history, we know from China, from Russia, from Vietnam, from Cuba and on and on, socialism or communism, and they're roughly the same thing, comes with violence. People get killed in large numbers. So I think the secretary is doing the right thing to call attention to what people have been, I think, willfully ignoring for quite some time. Yeah, the connection between the ideology and it leading to violence and those going hand in hand, I think, is a really important point. You also make a very interesting point of illustrating how it's fully on display, this double standard that Secretary Rubio is describing on college campuses. Are there other examples that you can think of where this double standard has been applied and could be seen pretty obviously? I think in visas, there's been public outcry on the left when someone like Mahmoud Khalil is considered to be detrimental to national security by the Secretary of State. And they attempted to deport him as if all of a sudden, having far left views, wanting to essentially demolish capitalism and the Western societies in which they live, including the United States, is OK. And it isn't. You can't go to China on a student visa and then say publicly that you want to destroy the Chinese Communist Party. You will not last very long. You can't go to Iran and say that you want to destroy the theocracy that runs the country. Well, we are not a totalitarian state like those, but we also do have some basic fundamental rules. And so people who come on student visas should respect those rules. And I think there has been a double standard where people on the left think it's perfectly OK for someone like Mamdani to come here as a child, as an immigrant, to become an American, but at no time to actually appreciate what the United States is and what it stands for, to want to replace it with whatever he imagined the utopia was that he left. You make an interesting point about if you went to China or Iran, because Marco Rubio describes that the interference is actually coming from foreign adversaries or there's connection to foreign adversaries. I want to play a clip right now of him describing that. Let's play that. Antifa militants and their comrades travel from across Europe and to the Americas to participate in each other's attacks, to funnel propaganda and training materials. And they work alongside hostile foreign states that share their mission, like Iraq's Iranian proxy networks, who are increasingly, increasingly intimately tied to leftist militant groups around the world. The Cuban regime's sprawling intelligence and ideological network helped to build the far left in our country and in our hemisphere. Simon, your reaction to those comments, particularly that foreign adversaries are working in cahoots with those elements you described earlier in our discussion? Yeah, I mean, we have the receipts. There's a person who I believe has American citizenship and probably others named Neville Roy Singham, who lives in China, who funds activists and potentially terrorists in the United States. We have George Soros, who is probably now an American citizen as well, but who funds all kinds of groups on the left, including those that protest occasionally violently in the United States. The founders of BLM, they were trained in Brazil and Cuba. They've attended conferences of international socialism under the Foro de Sao Paulo, which was started by Lula da Silva, the Brazilian president. So, you know, they're not hiding it. They're perfectly, it's the Internationale, the old Soviet movement before World War II, between World War I and World War II. It's not gone away. It's still there. The dream is to create one global Soviet, and they haven't given up on it. And the money trail is easy to find if you look hard enough, and some people have. And I'm hoping that the Department of State, the Department of Treasury, and the U.S. government is going to take this very seriously and try to figure out who is paying for what illegal activity and put a stop to it. Yeah, hopefully those are the next steps. Simon Hankinson, thank you so much for joining us this morning. Thank you.