McCarthyism 2.0: Marco Rubio’s Cuba Derangement Syndrome

It’s NSPM-7, 10 months in. On Monday, Marco Rubio’s State Department dropped a 100-page report titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism” – a sprawling conspiracy theory arguing a tiny island nation that Washington is currently strangling under a medieval-torturous siege that’s killing infants is one of the gravest threats to American civilization. But the report doesn’t stop at Havana: It names dozens of US activists, streamers, journalists, labor leaders, and sitting elected officials, from LA Mayor Karen Bass, to Hasan Piker, to Zohran Mamdani, to Amy Goodman, to CodePink, DSA and the National Lawyers Guild. Their crime? Having the wrong politics.

It’s a tangled web of baseless claims bordering on the comical – if it weren’t so dangerous. BT Live’s Zoe Alexandra and Rania Khalek break down Rubio’s absurdist argument that a broke, blacked-out island suffering gravely at the hand of US imperialism is somehow also the puppet master of the American “left,” and what it reveals about the socialist spectre keeping the Trump administration up at night. It’s a Mad Libs of every boogeyman at once, with special guest appearances by Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Hamas, Hezbollah — the whole supervillain roster!

“They’re not telling you what it means to be a left-wing terrorist – they throw around words without defining them because they’re talking about ideas”

@RaniaKhalek & @ZoeAlexandra_ok on why Rubio needs to convince you Cuba is an existential threat to the US