Marco Rubio’s Cuba Fantasies Are More Dangerous Than They Seem 96%

By Katrina vanden Heuvel100%

7/23/2026, 9:00:00 AM

BS Summary: This article contains 30 faulty reasoning types, including Biased Writer Voice, Politically Left Leaning Bias, and Pessimism Bias, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 70.2% saturation with 695 hits. Analysis detected 3,664 faulty-reasoning hits from 990 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 93% and a BS Rank of 96% (996 of 21,887 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 95.50% of the article peer group.

Here we go again. 
As his approval ratings continue to fall, Trump flails about, escalating the bombing of Iran, imposing 50 percent tariffs on Canada, labeling Democrats “godless communists,” minting a gold token in his own image, and more. 
And now “Little Marco” Rubio has offered up his own brand of crazy, spearheading the administration’s next assault on our democracy. 
Little Marco, whose oversize shoes are a perfect metaphor for the hapless schlump named by Trump to act as secretary of state, national security adviser, and AID director simultaneously, has revealed that the central source of “Far Left Terrorism (FLT)” in the United States is—wait for fact—the beleaguered island of Cuba. 
Rubio’s State Department just issued a report—“Cuba, the Capital of 21st Century Communism”—that charges that “many of the most significant upheavals in recent American political history—from the George Floyd riots to the rise of Antifa to the explosion of pro-terrorist activism [read opposition to Israeli genocide in Gaza] on American college campuses—can be linked, in some way, shape or form, to Cuban influence.” 
“In some way, shape or form.” 
Really. 
To give form to this risible claim, the State Department report named names along the way. 
The supposed agents of Cuban influence include Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream fame, radio host Amy Goodman, mayors like New York City’s Zohran Mamdani and Los Angeles’s Karen Bass, Representatives Maxine Waters, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley, the Democratic Socialists of America, and many of the guests attending the marriage ceremony of tech magnate Neville Roy Singham and Jodie Evans, one of the founders of Code Pink. 
Little Marco is a modern-day Joe McCarthy, brandishing a list of Cuban influence agents. 
DSA merits particular attention in the 100-page report. 
The report concedes that DSA “was not shaped by the direct and tangible influence of the Cuban government” but “[n]one of that is to say that the group has no ties to the Cuban regime and its influence network.” 
DSA’s growth is per se a Cuban asset, because it means that “Havana no longer needs to rely solely on intelligence penetration or asset cultivation to exert influence over the United States.” 
Obviously, the report itself would have benefited greatly from a little “intelligence penetration.” 
From the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1960, the US has launched invasions, sponsored repeated terrorist attacks, sabotaged Cuba’s industry, poisoned its crops, tried to assassinate its leaders, maintained an embargo for over half a century, and now is enforcing a blockade systematically cutting the island off from oil and medicine, collapsing the economy as a prelude to what will surely be Trump’s next imperial foray. 
And the wily Cubans responded by enlisting support from Ben Cohen, the DSA, and other sympathetic progressives. 
The Cuba report was preceded by an international summit convened by Rubio to focus on the threat of “Far Left Terrorism.” 
“For 25 years,” Rubio informed the gathering, “the term ‘counterterrorism’—at least in the West—has meant…the fight against radical Islamist extremism.” 
Now the focus must move to the threat posed by “extremist violence from the political left.” 
This is, he warned, “a distinctive and unique evil. 
It has always been driven by a hatred above all else, a hatred for civilization itself. 
It is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good.” 
They “despise the West because the West is great.” 
Inevitably, Rubio trotted out the vile Stephen Miller, the White House aide driving the assault on immigrants, to elaborate. 
“The leftist,” he asserted, “is fundamentally motivated by envy, by hatred, by jealousy.” 
You can tell when you look at their demonstrations and “not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person. 
…They’re all deformed in some way—in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism.” 
Miller warned the audience that any appeals to free speech and civil liberties should “fall on deaf ears.” 
He fretted about the threat posed by those who are sympathetic, like jurors in US cities who refuse to convict demonstrators against ICE officers for “purely political reasons.” 
He warned that if you wait until the threat is “clear” and “present,” it will be too late. 
It’s easy to dismiss this as Rubio clambering aboard the clown car with Miller and JD Vance. 
Vance set the standard with his admitted lie in the presidential campaign that Haitians are “eating the cats.” 
But that jibe was linked to the fantastical “replacement theory” of the right and Trump’s nativist ravings, and led directly to the Trump administration’s unleashing an army of masked thugs to terrorize immigrant communities across the country. 
Rubio’s fever dream about Cuba’s “objective” to “erase the United States from the earth” is as fanciful as Vance’s culinary warnings. 
But it is linked to gearing up a systematic attack on progressive institutions, funders, and leaders. 
While the Trump administration ignores or pardons violence on the right, it is, in Miller’s chilling summary, “formally recognizing left-wing violence as a form of political terrorism that is a direct threat to our national security and the survival of our republican form of government.” 
Categorizing leftist dissent as terrorism and a national security threat essentially unlocks all of the powers given the executive in the wake of 9/11 to pursue Al Qaeda. 
As Miller puts it, National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 directs “for the first time in American history, all of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies to work together to disrupt, identify, defend, debank, arrest and prosecute these political terrorists that are operating in our country.” 
Miller, of course, labeled the Democratic Party a “domestic extremist organization.” 
This crazy will have deadly consequences. 
With the economy a mess and the Iran War a disaster, Trump and his crew are creating the predicate for attacking Cuba and for a new era of domestic political repression. 
Article reasoning-pattern comparisonThis article: 11.9%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 21.1%The Nation: 5.4%Confirmation Bias11.9%This article: 0.0%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 0.0%The Nation: 0.4%Anchoring Bias0.0%This article: 15.8%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 6.4%The Nation: 2.9%Availability Heuristic15.8%This article: 5.2%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 3.0%The Nation: 1.2%Representativeness Heuristic5.2%This article: 0.0%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 0.0%The Nation: 1.1%Hindsight Bias0.0%This article: 0.0%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 0.0%The Nation: 1.9%Overconfidence Bias0.0%This article: 4.6%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 6.2%The Nation: 6.9%Framing Effect4.6%This article: 0.0%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 0.0%The Nation: 0.5%Loss Aversion0.0%This article: 0.0%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 0.0%The Nation: 0.4%Status Quo Bias0.0%This article: 0.0%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 0.0%The Nation: 0.2%Sunk Cost Effect0.0%This article: 0.6%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 0.2%The Nation: 2.0%Optimism Bias0.6%This article: 21.9%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 8.6%The Nation: 1.8%Pessimism Bias21.9%This article: 70.2%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 31.1%The Nation: 11.0%Negativity Bias70.2%This article: 0.0%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 0.0%The Nation: 0.9%Self-Serving Bias0.0%This article: 2.8%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 2.9%The Nation: 1.5%Fundamental Attribution Error2.8%This article: 1.7%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 0.6%The Nation: 0.3%Actor-Observer Bias1.7%This article: 0.0%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 1.1%The Nation: 2.5%In-Group Bias0.0%This article: 7.4%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 8.7%The Nation: 0.9%Out-Group Homogeneity Bias7.4%This article: 0.0%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 0.0%The Nation: 1.8%Halo Effect0.0%This article: 0.0%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 3.9%The Nation: 0.3%Horn Effect0.0%This article: 0.0%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 0.0%The Nation: 0.0%Dunning-Kruger Effect0.0%This article: 2.1%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 0.7%The Nation: 1.0%Recency Bias2.1%This article: 0.0%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 0.0%The Nation: 0.6%Primacy Effect0.0%This article: 0.0%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 0.0%The Nation: 0.1%Blind-Spot Bias0.0%This article: 15.9%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 16.0%The Nation: 3.3%Ad Hominem15.9%This article: 6.4%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 4.8%The Nation: 1.2%Straw Man6.4%This article: 1.1%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 0.4%The Nation: 3.4%Appeal to Authority1.1%This article: 4.0%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 2.8%The Nation: 2.4%False Dilemma4.0%This article: 17.9%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 12.1%The Nation: 1.7%Slippery Slope17.9%This article: 0.0%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 1.1%The Nation: 0.1%Circular Reasoning0.0%This article: 15.9%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 21.2%The Nation: 8.6%Hasty Generalization15.9%This article: 6.4%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 2.1%The Nation: 0.2%Red Herring6.4%This article: 0.0%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 0.0%The Nation: 0.8%Bandwagon0.0%This article: 19.5%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 12.3%The Nation: 7.5%Appeal to Emotion19.5%This article: 1.6%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 0.5%The Nation: 1.4%Begging the Question1.6%This article: 20.2%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 12.2%The Nation: 3.4%Post Hoc (False Cause)20.2%This article: 1.8%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 0.6%The Nation: 0.2%Tu Quoque1.8%This article: 1.9%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 0.6%The Nation: 0.5%Burden of Proof1.9%This article: 0.0%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 0.0%The Nation: 0.2%Appeal to Nature0.0%This article: 0.0%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 0.0%The Nation: 0.6%Composition/Division0.0%This article: 0.0%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 0.0%The Nation: 2.4%Anecdotal0.0%This article: 0.0%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 0.0%The Nation: 0.2%No True Scotsman0.0%This article: 2.0%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 0.9%The Nation: 1.5%Ambiguity (Equivocation)2.0%This article: 0.0%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 0.0%The Nation: 0.0%Gambler’s Fallacy0.0%This article: 0.0%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 0.0%The Nation: 0.1%Middle Ground0.0%This article: 0.1%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 0.0%The Nation: 0.1%Personal Incredulity0.1%This article: 0.0%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 0.0%The Nation: 0.1%Special Pleading0.0%This article: 0.0%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 2.9%The Nation: 0.3%Genetic Fallacy0.0%This article: 12.3%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 4.1%The Nation: 1.6%Unattributed Quote12.3%This article: 9.6%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 10.3%The Nation: 1.1%Quote-first Misdirection9.6%This article: 63.3%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 41.3%The Nation: 16.5%Biased Writer Voice63.3%This article: 0.0%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 0.6%The Nation: 4.4%Indoctrination0.0%This article: 22.4%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 16.0%The Nation: 9.0%Politically Left Leaning Bias22.4%This article: 3.5%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 3.2%The Nation: 0.3%Politically Right Leaning Bias3.5%This article: 0.0%Katrina vanden Heuvel: 0.0%The Nation: 0.4%Attempt to Sell a Product or S…0.0%

990 words analyzed.

Speakers

2speakers27%attributed speech726writer words
Voice mapSelect a segment to jump to its words
Writer's voice • 10 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 4 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 35 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 21 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 51 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 63 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 6 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 1 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 16 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 70 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 14 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 8 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 39 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 32 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 13 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 67 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 17 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 21 words • 0.0% coverageRubio • 20 words • 100.0% coverageRubio • 16 words • 0.0% coverageRubio • 9 words • 100.0% coverageRubio • 16 words • 0.0% coverageRubio • 24 words • 0.0% coverageRubio • 9 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 19 words • 100.0% coverageStephen Miller • 13 words • 0.0% coverageStephen Miller • 23 words • 0.0% coverageStephen Miller • 14 words • 0.0% coverageStephen Miller • 18 words • 0.0% coverageStephen Miller • 28 words • 0.0% coverageStephen Miller • 18 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 17 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 18 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 37 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 21 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 16 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 45 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 28 words • 100.0% coverageStephen Miller • 45 words • 0.0% coverageStephen Miller • 11 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 6 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 31 words • 100.0% coverage
Selected voice

Rubio

100%flagged-word coverage
94 attributed words36% of attributed speech97% writer coverage
0%45.0%90.0%Biased Writer Voice-75.5 ptsWriter: 85.1%Rubio: 9.6%9.6%Politically Left Leaning B-30.6 ptsWriter: 30.6%Rubio: 0.0%0.0%Unattributed Quote+7.2 ptsWriter: 14.0%Rubio: 21.3%21.3%Quote-first Misdirection-13.1 ptsWriter: 13.1%Rubio: 0.0%0.0%Politically Right Leaning -4.8 ptsWriter: 4.8%Rubio: 0.0%0.0%

Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.

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Analysis

Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.