It has come to our attention that the Trump administration has released a list of people and organizations who have, it claims, subverted American national security and advanced the cause of tyranny and terror and stuff at the behest and under the malign influence of (of all places) Cuba.
Yes, that Cuba—an island 90 miles from the US, about the square mileage of Virginia, with a population (10.9 million) slightly less than that of North Carolina. Where balmy tropical breezes gently become hurricanes, and the per capita income (in 2024) was $9,605.
That’s the enemy. Not Russia, whose (pro-Trump) meddling in the 2016 election is so well-established, its documentation is included in material the White House itself released last week. Not China, which, by hook (state-sponsored research) and by crook (theft of US intellectual property) seeks to overwhelm us with everything from electric vehicles to flimsy chests-of-drawers to cheap AI. Not the open metastasizing of fascism throughout Europe and, with the GOP’s blessing, the United States.
No, the problem is Cuba, which, according to Secretary of State Little “Liddle” Marco Rubio, is “The Capital of 21st Century Communism.” This is a bit like calling Burning Man “The Capital of 21st Century American Witchcraft,” but Rubio, who sold his soul to the devil so long ago Satan has lost the receipt, hopes you, or someone, will find it concerning.
He connects these groups and individuals on the aforementioned list with what he calls “Political Left Terrorism.” For a look at the entire list, go here and thank Ken Klippenstein, who notes:
As for who these supposed agents of Cuban influence are, the report is remarkably explicit. It names people like Ben Cohen (of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream fame), Mayors Zohran Mamdani and Karen Bass, media figures like Amy Goodman and Hasan Piker, and organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America and the Amazon Labor Union.
The implication is clear: Secretary of State Marco Rubio thinks there should be a modern-day blacklist of the political left in America. In fact, the report explicitly mentions the “blacklists, McCarthy-era investigations and prosecutions” of the 1950s and their effectiveness at dismembering the Communist Party USA.
Communism—or, rather, the accusation of being “a Communist”—is making a comeback these days, as is that quaint, old-timey way of flinging that accusation, McCarthyism. Mike Johnson—Speaker of the House, ardent Christian hypocrite, adjourner-of-Congress-when-things-get-dicey—had some frightening, terrifying words to say about the topic at a House Republican Leadership press conference, which he delivered in that familiar boyish, sincere, “gosh, you guys, I’m just telling the simple truth” voice he uses for lying through his teeth. From his website:
We’re fighting right now in Congress over whether we’re going to maintain our status as a constitutional republic or we’re going to trade that in, dismantle the foundations and go down this dark road of death to Communism. That is the question on the ballot this fall.
Never mind the fact that the president whom Johnson so slavishly serves is treating the Constitution as a doormat diaper. Just dig that second sentence. With that, all is revealed.
They’re exhuming Communism, stuffing it into a suit of armor, gluing a lance in its fist, and tying it up on a horse, so they can warn us that it is about to attack, and that—not the price of gas and groceries, not the useless and idiotic debacle in Iran, not the destruction of our alliances, not the open grifting and self-dealing and bribery and market manipulation and insider stock trades, not the exorbitant costs of education and housing, not the subversion of the renewable energy industry in favor of climate-warming fossil fuels, not the destruction of Federal medical and science research, not the preposterous tariffs, not the obvious mental deterioration of the President (“We had transgender for everybody. Men in women’s sports came ravaging through our cities.”), not the murders and imprisonments of innocents by ICE, not the blatant corruption of the Justice Department, not the decimation of Medicaid, not the obvious cover-up of the Epstein files in an effort to shield a child sex-trafficking ring, not the ongoing jobs recession while the obscenely rich get obscenely richer—that (Communism!) is the problem, and that’s why people should vote for Republicans in November.
Will it work? Is Communism terrifying enough to drive voters to the polls and spook them into pulling the lever/popping the card/filling in the oval for the GOP? Well…
We asked our new best friend, Claude, what percentage of the US electorate came of age after the fall of Communism. Claude “thought” about it for a surprisingly long time, then said:
…somewhere around 58–62% of the US voting-age population/ electorate turned 18 after the fall of Communism — the lower end if you anchor to the Soviet collapse (1991), the higher end if you anchor to the Berlin Wall (1989). [emphasis Claude’s]
IT’S PLFLASTERSPEKTAKEL LINZ! “What?” IT’S PFLASTERSPEKTAKEL LINZ! “What’s that?” A THREE-DAY STREET FESTIVAL IN LINZ, AUSTRIA. “Okay, b—”
Never mind. Just buy THE SPLIT.
It turns out that running against Communism in this day and age may be not all that different from running against the Illuminati or the Masons. Half the voters (and all the young ones) barely know what Communism was. If Mike Johnson wants to point to Ilhan Omar’s headscarf, or Karen Bass’s L.A., or the Ben & Jerry’s section of your grocer’s ice cream aisle, let him.
Desperate? You betcha. But who can blame them? The leader of their party, whom almost without exception they worship or fear, or both, is a demented mobster, a cross between Al Capone and Jabba the Hutt. His cabinet is almost comically destructive and incompetent. The Republicans in the House comprise a zoo of idiots, racists, meatheads and jerks. The Republicans in the Senate comprise a genteel coterie of liars, traitors, cowards, meatheads, and jerks. There is no reason for anyone to vote Republican other than oligarchs, their heirs and assigns, and their yacht crews and caddies. There is good reason for every other eligible voter in the country to either vote Democratic, or stay home and not vote at all.
And Mike Johnson and Marco Rubio know it. (Donald Trump may or may not know it, too, but to try to figure out what Donald Trump “knows” is to wander into an epistemological Mordor from which few can emerge undamaged.)
As will be plain to every eye, the GOP has nothing to run on. All they have to run against is an imaginary enemy consisting of “antifa”—a pretend designation of a made-up boogie-man organization that doesn’t exist. It’s like running against SPECTRE (James Bond), THRUSH (The Man from U.N.C.L.E.), or KAOS (Get Smart!). Oh, and against some people who attended a wedding in Cuba. And, of course, Zohran Mamdani. He’s popular in New York, yes, because (it’s unbelievable) he’s a brilliant communicator and he actually seems to be doing things for his constituents, but look! He has a Z right there, in his name. Like Zod, from the first Superman film. “Kneel before Zod!”, right? If that isn’t scary, what is?
And so Republicans, with their trademark combination of bad faith, blatant dishonesty, total lack of shame, and the assumption (well-justified) that their base audience consists of morons, is publishing this list. Our reaction to it has been, quite frankly, one of indignation and outrage. And we’ll tell you why: Not only because it maligns (or attempts to) people who are profoundly better, more worthy, and more admirable than authoritarian lackeys like Marco Rubio and Mike Johnson, but also because we’re not on it.
Readers of a certain age, if they’re still alive, will recall the last time an “enemies list” surfaced in the news. It was during the administration of Richard Nixon. Nixon’s Enemies List—which has its own damn Wikipedia page, if you really want to know—at first consisted of twenty names, most of which, when read today, provoke a sincere “Huh?” Just about the only one everyone will have heard of is Paul Newman. Maybe you’re familiar with Daniel Shorr (a tv journalist) and, maybe maybe, Mary McGrory (a newspaper columnist).
Obviously, then, being on the list did not confer historical immortality. Just ask S. Harrison Dogole. (“Who?” Exactly.) No, the point is, people on Nixon’s list took it as a point of pride, and everyone else acknowledged their achievement, tendering “Way to go!”s and “Attaboy!”s to all and sundry. What an honor, to be considered so important an enemy of the man we were sure, in our naïvety and summer-child simplicity, would surely be the worst president who would ever possibly exist.
Ah, we were young and foolish then. We know better now. The badness of Richard Nixon is to the monstrosity of Donald Trump as a tummy ache is to the Bubonic Plague. Which is all the more reason to want to be acknowledged by the Trump regime as being a nemesis on par with (the excellent) Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, or the National Lawyers Guild.
Because what are we, chopped liver? We bow to no one in our detestation, not only of Trump, but his cabinet, his advisors, his attorneys, his staff, his golf buddies, his children, the people who fawn on him at Mar-a-Lago, and anyone who talks to, looks at, or thinks about him without disgust. We have mocked him, personally and by name, in no fewer than two books (Monsters of the Ivy League, available here, and The Split, available here). We have denounced, made fun of, and deplored him in this very newsletter for 85 weeks.
“But wait,” someone will say. “How can you be considered worthy opponents of Trump if you have no connection—however tenuous and contrived by Rubio—to Cuba? Have you ever taken part in a Cuban-inspired assassination plot? Or been to a wedding in Havana?”
Almost! One of us (EW) speaks Spanish—or, at least, used to, although he’s gotten pretty “rusty” (“oxidado”) over the years. But then add this: It was no more than three nights ago that he prepared a can of black beans in the Cuban style (onions, green pepper, garlic, cumin, oregano, apple cider vinegar, sherry). He combined them with white rice in a side-dish the Cubans themselves call Moros y Cristianos. Black Africans and White Christians in one dish! You can’t get more Communist, or at least bogus/bullshit “Communist,” than that.
So, maybe next time. Maybe Rubio will publish a revised enemies list, consisting of its current roster of names plus “the guys who wrote The Split and now write Splitsville.” Until then, our congratulations go out to all the people and organizations on the current list, with whom we join, if not in a vile, anti-American document issued by a poisoned State Department, then in our shared little corner of Splitsville.
That, you may know, is our term for a geo-political entity harboring two or more distinct “nations.” In this version of Splitsville, the two of us dwell with the Enemies Listees, as well as with everyone else who opposes the Trump regime (and who, along with us, we nominate for that list). On the other side of the Splitsville tracks reside Marco Rubio, Mike Johnson, and the rest of those pathetic, sick little fucks, along with the millions of vile specimens and benighted numpties who love, like, or tolerate Trump.
Incidentally, neither of us has ever met a genuine American Communist, and all this talk about them has stimulated our curiosity. If you’ve ever met one, please tell us how it went. Was it scary? Smelly? Did you engage in polemical debate? Did he (or she!) wield a hammer and a sickle? Did they seize your means of production? Afterward, did you find yourself fantasizing about abolishing private property, nationalizing all corporations so you could replace the free market with a state-owned and centrally-planned economy, establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat and massacring millions of peasants?
Because that’s what they all want, whether they exist or not. Just ask Mike Johnson.
READ THE SPLIT. IT’S FUN, IT’S FUNNY, AND IT’S BETTER THAN A POKE IN THE EYE WITH A SHARP STICK. DON’T BELIEVE US? TRY IT.
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