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Opinion
Stop the Sadistic Trump Administration Policies Choking Cuba
Instead of threatening the island further, the president must ask Congress to end the embargo that began in 1960 so that the economic reconstruction of the country can begin.
Mar 20, 2026
President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House, “I think I can do anything I want with it” referring to Cuba. His remarks are reminiscent of his recorded Access Hollywood statement to host Billy Bush, “When you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything... Grab them by the *****.” No, Mr. President, you have no right to despoil Cuba as you please.
Cuba is being choked by this administration’s sadistic policies. The best we can do for the 10 million people living there is not to rape the island but rather end the embargo—and reset the opening of relations that had been the hallmark of progress during the Obama administration.
I led educational tours to Cuba before Trump destroyed rapprochement, increased sanctions, and suffocated the blossoming of enterprises tied to tourism and small business entrepreneurship. Unfortunately, the Biden administration chose to follow Trump rather than returning to Barack Obama’s approach aimed at improving relations between the two countries and supporting the emerging free market economy.
There is growing popular sentiment in Canada, Mexico, Spain, and other countries that are providing humanitarian aid to Cuba for their governments to show their independence from Trump’s chaos by breaking the blockade and dispatching lifesaving fuel. It is time to end the embargo of Cuba.
Decades of US policies aimed at destabilizing Cuba hurt ordinary citizens and set back progress within Cuba.
Vermont’s Sen. Peter Welch has been a leading voice of reason with respect to Cuba. He is clearly concerned about the terrible price ordinary people are paying as a result of the blockade of fuel supplies. I urge readers to listen to Sen. Welsh’s recent speech.
Senator Welch has proposed a forthright plan to end the suffering of the Cuban people:
First, Trump should end restrictions on the rights of Americans to travel to Cuba. Welch says, “The American and Cuban people should freely interact with one another.”
Second, the president should maximize support to Cuba’s private sector, particularly small businesses.
Third, Cuba must be removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. As Sen. Welch pointed out, “No other country agrees that it applies.”
Fourth, the president must ask Congress to end the embargo that began in 1960 so that the economic reconstruction of the country can begin.
Sen. Welch does not mince words about the need for political reforms in Cuba, beginning with the release of political prisoners and the right to speak freely about the society and government. But he also makes it clear that decades of US policies aimed at destabilizing Cuba hurt ordinary citizens and set back progress within Cuba and in the development of healthy relations between the US and Cuba.
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Pete Hegseth's Holy War
The US now finds itself in a long-term war waged by an angry, fanatical Fox journalist, not a competent secretary of defense.
Mar 20, 2026
Pete Hegseth is carrying out a Holy War at the Pentagon and abroad. He has rightly come under fire for incompetent leadership and mediocre management of the Iran war. The war was a mistake in the first place, both because Iran did not pose an immediate threat to US interests, and because President Donald Trump assumed a rapid victory and regime change would secure oil for the US and its allies for decades to come. But motivated by Christian Nationalism, fueled by angry masculinity, and blinded by ideological certainty, Hegseth’s crusade was doomed to failure from the start. Within the Pentagon, the battle against “woke” ideas and diversity has shaken leadership and hurt morale.
On the international front, Hegseth’s religious conviction about the immorality of Iran’s Islamic leadership led him to the conclusion that his god would protect the US in any war. Yet devoid of real goals and plans, motivated by ignorance about Iranian society, and discarding the intelligence community’s dire warnings about the chances of failure, Hegseth pushed on. The US now finds itself in a long-term war waged by an angry Fox journalist, not a competent secretary of defense.
The Crusader
Hegseth’s worldview is steeped in mistaken views of the 11th century Crusades, infused with white male privilege, and seasoned with ideology rather than intelligence briefings. Hegseth developed his views at Princeton University where he studied politics. He became a frequent contributor to and publisher of the Princeton Tory, the school’s conservative newspaper. In his writings he “strived to defend the pillars of Western civilization against the distractions of diversity.” He attacked the university for encouraging and supporting “pre-marital sex, homosexuality, abortion, and a general hostility toward faith and religion.” He declared that “the homosexual lifestyle is abnormal and immoral.” He rankled at the buzzwords of diversity, tolerance, sexual liberation, and multiculturalism which he took to be anti-Western. He concluded that the university “has abandoned almost all its moral/truth-seeking guidance to undergraduates.”
Hegseth took advantage of Reserve Officers' Training Corps funding for his education at Princeton, seeking to overcome the dangers of multiculturalism by becoming a soldier of god. After graduation he joined the Army National Guard, becoming a major, and was deployed three times abroad earning two Bronze Stars. Hegseth’s tattoos carry his Christian nationalism for all to see: a Jerusalem cross on his chest, a Christogram here, a “Deus Vult” (“God Wills It,” a Crusader battle cry) there, an American flag here, crossed muskets there, and other grotesque inkings common in violent far-right communities.
Hegseth failed to understand that technology alone does not win a war, nor does his insistence on the elimination of “wokeness” in the Pentagon.
Hegseth’s holier than thou attitude about the need to wage war on “wokeness,” Islam, and other evils was hardly tempered by a whistleblower report on his tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America (CVA), from 2013 until 2016, which describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated; sexually pursuing CVA female staffers; creating a hostile workplace; and drunkenly chanting in public, “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!” A history of alcohol and sexual abuse suggests an individual unfit to lead the Department of Defense (DOD), and in fact Hegseth was forced out as chief executive of CVA amid allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.
Hegseth’s certainty that white males must control society seems confirmed by a string of abusive acts. His former sister-in-law claims that his second wife feared for her personal safety during their marriage, and often hid in a closet. She herself experienced an angry, intoxicated Hegseth screaming in her face. Claims of rape against Hegseth in 2017 did not result in charges against him, but did result in the future DOD secretary paying the woman in question a $50,000 settlement. His own mother, Penelope, sent him an email that said: “You are an abuser of women—that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego.” Married three times and fathering a child out of wedlock, Hegseth said, "I have failed in things in my life, and thankfully, I'm redeemed by my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” Ultimately, Hegseth found salvation in the narcissism of Donald Trump. In 2017 Hegseth became co-host of "Fox & Friends Weekend." He ingratiated himself to the president by incessantly promoting the lie that vot
er fraud had led to Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.
Purifying the Pentagon
Appointed secretary of defense by Trump, Hegseth announced, “We became ‘the woke department’… Not any more. We’re done with that shit.” He set out to purge the Pentagon of woke, gay, and transgender personnel that he believed weakened the US military. He said, “For too long, we’ve promoted too many uniform leaders for the wrong reasons—based on their race, based on gender quotas, based on historic so-called firsts.” Yet there were questions from the start about his own minimal “qualifications” as a Fox News host and Trump sycophant. In March 2025, only months into his Pentagon appointment, he risked the lives of US soldiers by proudly sharing classified war plans in unsecured communications with a journalist. Loyal to Trump, he kept his job.
Trump, who has no military experience, but four draft deferments and a FIFA soccer peace prize, began his second term by firing a distinguished F-16 fighter pilot, General Charles Q. Brown, Jr., as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Hegseth followed along, carrying the president’s racist water by ending diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in the Pentagon, and by purging defense department libraries and websites that addressed anti-racism and sexism. His racism carried so far as an order to stop classifying nooses and swastikas as hate symbols (this effort to permit Nazi symbols among the Coast Guard was abandoned). But his white Christian chest-thumping intensifying, Hegseth ordered the renaming of Navy ships that honored African Americans; the purging by Pentagon archivists of the biography of Jackie Robinson; and the removal of a picture of the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, the Enola Gay, because “gay” is forbidden.
Hegseth’s goal, he said, was to eliminate the “social justice, politically correct, and toxic ideological garbage that had infected our department.” There would be “no more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses. No more climate change worship, no more division, distraction or, gender delusions, no more debris.” There would be no more fat soldiers, but only fit ones. And there would be no beards, “no more beardos,” only the paramount clean-shaven look of individual expression. Calling for Aryan purity, he said, “We don’t have a military full of Nordic pagans, but unfortunately, we have had leaders who either refuse to call BS and enforce standards or leaders who felt like they were not allowed to enforce standards.” Women could serve only if they could kill as effectively as Hegseth’s warriors. To mold these warriors, Hegseth determined to permit bullying and hazing “to empower leaders to enforce standards without fear of retribution or second-guessing.”
Why his anger at “beardos”? Hegseth said that anyone who needs a shaving exemption for more than a year would be forced out of the service. This ended a policy created mainly for Black and brown troops with pseudofolliculitis barbae, a skin condition that makes daily shaving lead to cuts, sores, and scarring. For Hegseth, “grooming standards” were commensurate with the “warrior ethos.” In the name of the warrior mindset, Hegseth extended his purge to women, gays, and transgender individuals. Hegseth eliminated the Women, Peace, and Security program at the DOD as “woke” and “divisive” although it is codified in a 2017 law that Congress passed unanimously and was signed by Trump. Hegseth’s Pentagon is now forcing transgender service members to leave in the name of military preparedness. (Hitler, too, despised homosexuality. He had Ernst Röhm and other gay SA members murdered in 1934 because of their "degeneracy"; the Nazi regime made the persecution of homosexuals a priority. Perhaps Hegseth studied the Wehrmacht at Princeton?)
White Christian Officer Training
US Ivy League schools, MIT, CalTech, Chicago and other universities were crucial to the US to wage the Cold War, strategize the arms race, and build radars and other weapons. But the anti-intellectual Hegseth decided to end officer training, fellowships, and graduate-level education programs at Ivy League and other top-tier universities starting in the 2026-2027 academic year because of their allegedly “woke ideology” and anti-American sentiment. He claimed the need to refocus “the US military on maximum lethality, warfighting, and accountability; prioritizing combat effectiveness, merit-based standards, and a direct, combative culture over political correctness.” He insisted that the DOD needs “more troops, more munitions, more drones, more Patriots, more submarines, more B-21 bombers… more innovation, more AI… more space, more speed.” And he believes he can achieve these goals by shifting programs to conservative schools that stress Christian nationalist thinking.
Toward those ends, Hegseth announced the elimination of several senior service college fellowship programs for the 2026-2027 academic year and beyond. He desired “strategic thinkers through education grounded in the founding principles and documents of the republic, embracing peace through strength and American ideals, and focused on our national strategies and grounded in realism.”
The failure of the Trump-Hegseth Holy War against Iran underlines the need to divorce religious beliefs from declarations of war.
What he meant by this was doctrine steeped in the ideas of limited government, free enterprise, constitutional originalism, and Christian morality. The new partner institutions included such conservative beacons of white Christianity as Liberty University (whose past president resigned in the midst of a sex scandal); Baylor University (whose past president ignored a campus rape scandal, helped Jeff Epstein avoid prosecution, and who investigated Bill Clinton over real estate deals and Oval Office oral sex at a cost of $52 million); Regent University (that has long pushed the Christian orientation of its founder, Pat Robertson, who called for letting LGBTQ advocates and Muslims kill themselves); Hillsdale College (whose president at the time of the Clinton infidelity was allegedly having a long affair with his daughter-in-law who then committed suicide); and Pepperdine University (which was long embroiled in a lawsuit over sexual orientation of students). The trainees will be ready for religious wars, if morally ambivalent.
War Crimes and Holy War
The failure of the Trump-Hegseth Holy War against Iran underlines the need to divorce religious beliefs from declarations of war. While the medieval Crusades had largely political-military significance for control of the Holy Land, such Christian nationalists as Hegseth have recast that history as a holy war against Moslem infidels. In the ongoing war that the US launched on the Islamic Republic, Hegseth emphasizes that the Christian god is on his side. He said: “Our capabilities are better. Our will is better. Our troops are better. The providence of our almighty God is there protecting those troops, and we’re committed to this mission.” He asserted that the Trump administration was carrying out hold battle against “religious fanatics who seek a nuclear capability in order for some religious Armageddon.”
Hegseth’s reliance on religious justifications—and his certainty that Trump expected a quick victory to distract Americans from the Epstein scandal—hurried the US into its attack. But there was no justification: Iran was not within days of deploying ICBMs or nuclear weapons, and was hardly prepared to attack the US. Indeed, negotiators on both sides were close to a US-Iran agreement to forestall nuclear weapons development—and recreate the agreement that Trump abrogated in 2018 in the first place.
The great danger, now realized, was that Hegseth confused personal religious and ideological imperatives with military need. The Nazis conflated Bolshevism, Judaism, and Slavic racial inferiority, hurried into a war with the USSR that Hitler expected to win within days or weeks, yet plunged the world into war. So, too, Hegseth mixes hatred of Islam, Iran in particular, with religio-spiritual embrace of the Christian Bible, Western civilization, and a sacred mission for Israel, in the end transforming a war against the Islamic Republic of Iran into a religious crusade.
Hegseth: Waging War with No Plans
Hegseth ignored real time challenges that, after initial “victories,” have left the DOD in a bind as to how to move forward. In the first two days of the attack, the US spent $5.6 billion in munitions: More than 2,000 munitions were rained down on nearly 2,000 Iranian targets. But the armaments are hardly in an unlimited supply, must be replaced, and it will take months to do so, especially for precision, smart weapons. This will leave the US vulnerable elsewhere in the world. Hegseth failed to understand that technology alone does not win a war, nor does his insistence on the elimination of “wokeness” in the Pentagon. Hegseth assumed that initial firepower would bring Iran to its knees, but he has only strengthened the resolve of Iran’s leaders to stand up to the US, and has even brought its oppressed people into some agreement with the theocracy.
Hegseth has worried so much about beards, DEI, and Holy Wars that he attacked Iran without minesweepers that the DOD decommissioned in the autumn. These might have opened the Strait of Hormuz to the world’s oil traffic, one-third of which passes through the Strait. And without allies—Trump’s odious behavior and policies have turned away even England, France, and Canada—the US is isolated in this war. It has little recourse to their stockpiles, let alone their minesweepers. How long will Hegseth—and his witless president—wait to ask Congress to replenish the Pentagon budget and secure more munitions to continue “the most intense strikes”? And how can Hegseth justify the fact that, when planning for his Holy War, he ordered the Pentagon to buy up tens of millions of dollars of steak and crustaceans in order to spend its budget authorization before the end of the fiscal year?
For Hegseth, who embraces quick, empty responses and has forgotten any analytical tools he may have learned in college, any negative comment is “fake news.”
The troubling subservience to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war aims in Ukraine has handicapped the Hegeth and Trump Iran fiasco as well. Trump has both refused to condemn Putin’s support for Iran through intelligence sharing, military cooperation, and providing drone components and satellite imagery all of which are likely harming US soldiers. Russia is generally prolonging a war in the Middle East that benefits its closest Middle Eastern partner in the fight against the US and Israel. Trump has eased sanctions on Russian oil, which is permitting Putin to earn millions of dollars in oil revenues to fund his four-year-old invasion of Ukraine. Recall that in his first month as defense secretary, Hegseth endorsed Russia’s territorial occupation of Ukraine. At the very least, Hegseth is uninterested in Russian support for Iran.
Hegseth still promises in this war “intense strikes,” “the most fighters, the most bombers, the most strikes; intelligence more refined and better than ever.” He ridicules the Iranians as “desperate and scrambling.” Likely to justify the US murder of 180 children, he announced, “Like the terrorist cowards they are, they fire missiles from schools and hospitals... deliberately targeting innocents." The missile hit midmorning when children would certainly be present. Where is the Christian morality? Committed to a different Jesus than the one in the Bible, Hegseth told US soldiers to ignore legal advice about when they were permitted to kill enemy combatants under their rules of engagement. Hegseth smirked in couplets, “Maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct.”
What Has the War Department Wrought?
Hegseth, the former Fox News host, knows how to manipulate the messages to confuse the public. He uses press conferences to attack the media for their reporting on his and Trump’s war—from its initial justifications, to his overconfidence, to miscalculations regarding closure of the Strait of Hormuz, to faltering world oil supply, and to the massive unpopularity of the war as US deaths and costs accumulate. He might as well say to the American people, “Let them eat lobster.”
Into the third week, the Iran war has led to the deaths of at least 13 US service members and has burned through more than $11.3 billion worth of taxpayer dollars. The Persian Gulf has been plunged into chaos as Iran mounts retaliatory strikes against military bases and oil refineries in the region. But for Hegseth, who embraces quick, empty responses and has forgotten any analytical tools he may have learned in college, any negative comment is “fake news.”
The secretary of military propaganda admonished the press to learn the craft of Fox: “Allow me to make a few suggestions… I used to be in that business, and I know that everything is written intentionally, for example, a banner or a headline.” He called for right-wing takeover of CNN and other media. Pete needs one more tattoo: “What, me worry?”
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$200 Billion for Trump's Iran War Is Beyond Grotesque
Every Member of Congress should announce, right now, that they will reject this monstrous war funding proposal.
Mar 20, 2026
The Trump administration’s planned $200 billion war spending request is grotesque beyond words.
It should properly be understood not just as a request to replenish supplies, but to expand, escalate, and perpetuate the illegal, unconstitutional, unpopular and devastating war on Iran. Congress should understand that approving any portion of this funding opens the gates for one, two, and potentially many more war funding requests in the future.
How dare the administration propose this gargantuan sum to expand an illegal war of choice at the same time it has rammed through deep cuts in health care and food assistance, refuses to spend foreign assistance at a cost of millions of lives, and has cut spending on protecting clean air, maintaining our national parks, investing in health research, protecting consumers from fraud, and so much more.
Two hundred billion dollars is enough to materially change the lives of Americans and truly make our country stronger. It would be enough to restore food assistance to the four million Americans and Medicaid to the 15 million Americans who will lose those crucial supports under the Republican reconciliation bill; establish universal pre-K education; pay for the annual construction of more than 100,000 units of housing; double the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency; and expand Medicare to cover dental, vision and hearing.
Every Member of Congress should announce, right now, that they will reject this monstrous war funding proposal, before it is formalized.
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Americans Agree: The Government Shouldn't Use AI Tech to Spy on Us
What is lacking is any action by Congress to protect our rights. Do we want to live in a country where our fundamental rights depend on the terms of service of powerful technology companies?
Mar 20, 2026
Americans, it turns out, have a clearer view of the AI surveillance debate than most of Washington. A new poll from Americans for Responsible Innovation finds that 76% of Americans oppose allowing the government to force AI companies to hand over unrestricted access to their technology for surveilling citizens. The public, in other words, increasingly understands that our Fourth Amendment protections are under threat.
What is lacking is any action by Congress to protect our rights. Do we want to live in a country where our fundamental rights depend on the terms of service of powerful technology companies? The fight over whether the Pentagon should be able to use frontier AI for mass domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons has clarified the challenges we all face, especially under an administration with scant regard for the law.
It’s commendable that Anthropic took a principled stance and said no to the Department of Defense (DOD). But it is an outlier, for now. Others, like OpenAI, are eager to profit from the billions in government contracts and swooped in to replace Anthropic.
Frontier AI model companies are also only one part of enabling even more domestic surveillance of US citizens. Other companies, such as Microsoft and Amazon, provide critical infrastructure for AI models. For example, every query the Pentagon runs through GPT, every bulk data analysis, every AI-assisted profile of an American citizen that touches OpenAI’s models runs on Microsoft’s Azure cloud.
American citizens and consumers understand what is at stake here, and that is why an overwhelming majority oppose giving the government unchecked surveillance power.
OpenAI and Microsoft jointly confirmed on February 27 that Azure remains the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI’s APIs, and that any collaboration between OpenAI and a third party, including for government use, is hosted on Azure. Microsoft is the infrastructure. And infrastructure is where surveillance lives. Other companies like Palantir use these models to build surveillance tools. Palantir reportedly has signed a billion-dollar contract with the Department of Homeland Security.
These companies hide behind terms of service, which they claim will stop the government from surveilling US citizens. But these are empty worlds.
OpenAI agreed to DOD terms when Anthropic wouldn't, and then scrambled to dress up the deal with reassuring language after the backlash nearly buried it. Sam Altman himself admitted the whole thing was “rushed” and that “the optics don’t look good,” which is one way to describe handing the Pentagon sweeping AI capabilities while your competitor gets blacklisted for insisting on civil liberties protections.
When The Guardian reported in February that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had more than tripled the data it stores on Azure in just six months, from 400 terabytes to nearly 1,400 terabytes, while deploying Microsoft’s own AI tools to search and analyze images and video, Microsoft responded with a one-liner: Its policies and terms of service “do not allow our technology to be used for the mass surveillance of civilians,” and the company does “not believe ICE is engaged in such activity.” That’s it. That is the entirety of Microsoft’s public position on AI-powered government surveillance in 2026: a terms-of-service claim and a profession of ignorance about what its own customer is doing with its own platform.
This is in contrast to the position Microsoft took in Israel, where last September Microsoft terminated access to Azure for an Israeli military intelligence unit after reporting confirmed the platform was being used for mass surveillance of Palestinians. The company’s president, Brad Smith, then declared that Microsoft prohibits its technology from being used for mass surveillance of civilians “in every country around the world”...except the US it seems.
These companies’ positions are strategically convenient and profitable for them, but untenable for all of us. Legal experts have spent weeks explaining why OpenAI’s revised contract language is insufficient to prevent surveillance, because the operative standard is “consistent with applicable law,” and the US government has historically interpreted that standard to accommodate sweeping surveillance programs.
The same applies to the terms of service of cloud service providers like Microsoft and Amazon. Have these changed substantially since the Snowden revelations that the National Security Agency was conducting mass digital surveillance? Instead of backing down, Amazon, for example, is extending this digital surveillance network into the real world via its Ring service. Dario Amodei is right, what’s at stake now is much larger—“a true panopticon on a scale that we don’t see today, even with the CCP.”
American citizens and consumers understand what is at stake here, and that is why an overwhelming majority oppose giving the government unchecked surveillance power. That kind of consensus is rare in American politics, and it cuts across partisan lines. Congress should act, and companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and the frontier AI companies should be on notice.
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