Rubio's State Department Declares War on the American Left

A 100-page report brands left-wing activists, journalists, mayors and lawyers as subversive foreign agents. It's a dangerous new Red Scare. Don't laugh it off.

Yesterday Marco Rubio’s State Department released a 100-page report framing Cuba, a tiny island nation currently being suffocated by a medieval US siege, as a major threat to American civilization.

The report then goes on to frame left-wing American individuals, influencers, activists and journalists who oppose that suffocation, a blockade that has been tied to the deaths of an estimated 1,800 babies, as allies of or working directly with Cuban intelligence, and therefore posing an internal threat to the US.

As I explain in the video above with my Breakthrough News co-host Zoe Alexandra, this is an escalation of the Trump administration’s war on dissent, specifically against the left. It comes just days after Rubio held an international summit where he and Stephen Miller declared communism the greatest threat to the country and announced plans to escalate against left-wing groups in the US, which they loosely label “far-left terrorists.”

It’s easy to laugh this off as absurd myth-making. But these are the people running the country and they have the full weight of the US government at their fingertips. This is a new Red Scare hysteria that should be taken very seriously. And they’re folding it into their regime-change war on Cuba, an obsession of Rubio’s.

What’s actually in it

The report portrays an astonishing scope of people and groups as working with the Cuban government based on no evidence other than that they’ve gone to Cuba in solidarity against a blockade that is killing people. It then labels Cuba, and the groups opposed to the blockade, as also in bed with China, Russia, Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah. It’s insane.

This whole thing is built on wild fantasies stitched together from publicly available information about people and organizations who have never hidden their political beliefs. At its core, this is an attack on political ideas, on dissent from the destruction of Cuba, the genocide in Gaza, the war on Iran. Ultimately, it’s an attack on everyone who thinks money should go to free healthcare and education for all in the US rather than the endless destruction of the world for the profit of American imperialists.

Why DSA gets its own chapter

The report is heavily focused on the Democratic Socialists of America, which gets an entire section. It concedes that DSA wasn’t started by the Cuban regime but claims it’s ideologically in line with it and therefore a threat, especially as DSA candidates win Democratic primaries across the country.

This is clearly part of an attack on the rising support for progressive politics and even socialism among the electorate, which is exactly why DSA is winning. The only way the right, which is growing more openly fascist with an unpopular and sociopathic agenda, can win is to take away our rights and crush its left-wing opposition. That’s what it’s trying to do.

It’s also about overthrowing the Cuban government. By labeling Cuba a national security threat that is domestically puppeteering protests against ICE (one of the report’s actual claims, among other wild ones) they are laying the groundwork for further destruction of Cuba.

Beyond individuals and the DSA, this report goes after important institutions that make left organizing and protest effective. The People’s Forum, CodePink and the National Lawyers Guild each get their own sections. These are groups that do impactful activism, education and organizing across every progressive issue, not just Cuba. And it comes on top of a broader assault on the nonprofit sector of the left.

Where is everybody?

This has to be strongly challenged and opposed but the media barely covered it. Right-wing media went with the State Department framing. Mainstream media mostly ignored it. And only a handful of Democrats in office made noise, even though corporate Democrats are not immune from being labeled “radical left” themselves, it doesn’t matter if it’s true.

The report names everyone from LA Mayor Karen Bass, to influencer Hasan Piker, to CodePink, to DSA, to Zohran Mamdani, to Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s. Ken Klippenstein counted 43 American individuals and groups on this outrageous but very real government blacklist, which by the way even cites the ghosts of the McCarthy era’s own witch-hunt committees.

This is an attack on the right to dissent. If you value journalism that refuses to read from the State Department’s script, make sure you support independent media, which is the only kind of media covering this stuff. Subscribe. Share this. Because this attack is aimed squarely at anyone willing to tell the truth about it.