Aug 10, 2026 · 50 min · 8 segments
For this week's episode, we discuss the State Department's recent report "Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism", which was released three weeks ago. Matt and Sam are joined by D, a lawyer with…
It feels like there's forces within the U.S. right now who are preparing for something like a neo-red scare.
There's been a spate of media coverage the last few weeks on the DSA, in part because they've opened up this fissure within the Democratic Party in attacking the U.S.'s connection to Israel, which sort of looms as an important absence throughout the text.
Since Trump's first administration, there's been this effort to build up the specter of Antifa as this boogeyman and as a way to criminalize left-wing opposition.
And this text kind of does this interesting job of innovating on that premise and kind of expanding it in a more kind of global scope.
There's the recent subpoenas of the People's Forum's financials and communications info.
And both, you know, Singham and Fergie Chambers are being investigated for their financial support of the left.
As part of the America 250 celebrations, there was a series of statements made by Trump and the government about socialism and communism directly.
And in January, when U.S. Special Forces arrested the Venezuelan President Maduro and his wife in the aftermath that's kind of left Cuba isolated, lacking basic infrastructural support, the power grid basically has barely functioned since then.
And one of the critiques that made then, you know, is that the U.S. didn't really build up a kind of public support or a narrative explanation for that aberration and why it's now ongoing, you know, seven months later.
And I think this for me is some of the broader context, you know, before we even get into the text that I'm kind of thinking about, you know, why release this text now? What does it mean? What is it sort of, what are the implications of it? What is it leading towards? So yeah, maybe Sam, we can go to you about some of the kind of context that you were approaching it with.
I was thinking about sort of two central contexts.
So the first one you just mentioned is, is sort of the shifting role of the United States in Latin America as sort of maybe we see Marco Rubio take the reins a little bit more.
So whether that's the sort of extrajudicial killing of these fishermen in the Caribbean, the sort of illegal and kind of crazy abduction and arrest of Maduro and sort of regime change there to right now, what is just this sort of almost like without precedent in this sort of long 60-plus year campaign against Cuba of just like intense immiseration and suffering of the blockade on the Cuban people.
So I think that's like one crucial thing is sort of like justifying this new posture of the United States or renewed posture of the United States.
But then I think domestically we've seen a...
An attempt to build a sort of ideological set of justifications for a wide scale crackdown on the left and specifically trying to attack what formerly would have been like protected freedoms, like freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, just like.
particular ideological positions.
And so we've seen everything from starting with the arrest of the folks in Prairieland who are just doing a noise demo outside of a detention center last july to in you know you mentioned it but in in september we have the national security policy memo number seven which describes antifa as sort of this this threat and they say it's you know anti-christian anti-capitalist ideology um they say like radical sex and gender but they're sort of like flailing a little bit it feels like it's kind of everything um Then we see these four Antifa organizations get described as terrorist organizations in like January or December.
But then I think the real, this report comes out four days after the ministerial on the resurgence of political terrorism.
And we see Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller really starting to hone in on a sort of description of what the left is and sort of trying to articulate it.
And we can get more into it.
I think there's really interesting resonances between the way they're talking about the left in this document in sort of recent speeches to the sort of U.S. exported national security doctrine that all the sort of Southern Cone dictatorships used to repress social movements and civil society during the military dictatorships in Latin America.
It feels like there's forces within the U.S. right now who are preparing for something like a neo-red scare.
There's been a spate of media coverage the last few weeks on the DSA, in part because they've opened up this fissure within the Democratic Party in attacking the U.S.'s connection to Israel, which sort of looms as an important absence throughout the text.
Since Trump's first administration, there's been this effort to build up the specter of Antifa as this boogeyman and as a way to criminalize left-wing opposition.
And this text kind of does this interesting job of innovating on that premise and kind of expanding it in a more kind of global scope.
There's the recent subpoenas of the People's Forum's financials and communications info.
And both, you know, Singham and Fergie Chambers are being investigated for their financial support of the left.
As part of the America 250 celebrations, there was a series of statements made by Trump and the government about socialism and communism directly.
And in January, when U.S. Special Forces arrested the Venezuelan President Maduro and his wife in the aftermath that's kind of left Cuba isolated, lacking basic infrastructural support, the power grid basically has barely functioned since then.
And one of the critiques that made then, you know, is that the U.S. didn't really build up a kind of public support or a narrative explanation for that aberration and why it's now ongoing, you know, seven months later.
And I think this for me is some of the broader context, you know, before we even get into the text that I'm kind of thinking about, you know, why release this text now? What does it mean? What is it sort of, what are the implications of it? What is it leading towards? So yeah, maybe Sam, we can go to you about some of the kind of context that you were approaching it with.
I was thinking about sort of two central contexts.
So the first one you just mentioned is, is sort of the shifting role of the United States in Latin America as sort of maybe we see Marco Rubio take the reins a little bit more.
So whether that's the sort of extrajudicial killing of these fishermen in the Caribbean, the sort of illegal and kind of crazy abduction and arrest of Maduro and sort of regime change there to right now, what is just this sort of almost like without precedent in this sort of long 60-plus year campaign against Cuba of just like intense immiseration and suffering of the blockade on the Cuban people.
So I think that's like one crucial thing is sort of like justifying this new posture of the United States or renewed posture of the United States.
But then I think domestically we've seen a...
An attempt to build a sort of ideological set of justifications for a wide scale crackdown on the left and specifically trying to attack what formerly would have been like protected freedoms, like freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, just like.
particular ideological positions.
And so we've seen everything from starting with the arrest of the folks in Prairieland who are just doing a noise demo outside of a detention center last july to in you know you mentioned it but in in september we have the national security policy memo number seven which describes antifa as sort of this this threat and they say it's you know anti-christian anti-capitalist ideology um they say like radical sex and gender but they're sort of like flailing a little bit it feels like it's kind of everything um Then we see these four Antifa organizations get described as terrorist organizations in like January or December.
But then I think the real, this report comes out four days after the ministerial on the resurgence of political terrorism.
And we see Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller really starting to hone in on a sort of description of what the left is and sort of trying to articulate it.
And we can get more into it.
I think there's really interesting resonances between the way they're talking about the left in this document in sort of recent speeches to the sort of U.S. exported national security doctrine that all the sort of Southern Cone dictatorships used to repress social movements and civil society during the military dictatorships in Latin America.
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