Do They SeeOne Species?

In March 2025, Secretary Rubio announced the cancellation of 83 percent of USAID's programs, saying they did not serve the core national interests of the United States. On July 1, 2025, USAID officially stopped implementing foreign assistance. Rubio celebrated it, declaring an era of "government-sanctioned inefficiency" over (CNN via WTTW).

The day before, The Lancet — one of the most respected medical journals in the world — published a study estimating that USAID-funded programs had prevented roughly 92 million deaths across 133 countries between 2001 and 2021, including more than 25 million deaths from HIV/AIDS and 8 million from malaria. The same study projected that the cuts could result in more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030 — about 4.5 million of them children under the age of five. The authors compared the scale of that loss to a global pandemic or a major war, and stressed that unlike those events, this one would come from a conscious, avoidable policy choice (NBC News).

What was the response from the man who led the dismantling? In testimony before Congress in May 2025, Rubio said that no one had died because of the USAID cuts. A senior State Department official waved off the Lancet findings as based on incorrect assumptions (Health Policy Watch).

I want you to think about a five-year-old in a refugee camp who no longer receives the food or the medicine that used to arrive. That child has a name. That child has a mother. That child shares 99.9 percent of their DNA with your own son or daughter. You do not get to call that child an "inefficiency."

Beginning in September 2025, the United States military began destroying boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific that the administration said were carrying drugs. The first strike killed 11 people. Secretary Rubio announced it, defended it, and promised there would be more. He also acknowledged that the drugs on that first boat were probably headed to Trinidad or some other Caribbean country — not the United States (CBS News).

By September 2026, the Pentagon itself had claimed attacks that killed at least 230 people. In many cases, the administration provided no public evidence that the boats were even carrying drugs. Human rights organizations have condemned the strikes as extrajudicial killings. Allied governments have raised questions about their legality under international law. The Pentagon's own inspector general announced it would evaluate whether the military followed its targeting framework. When Rubio was questioned by the Senate in June 2026, he said the Defense Department had determined the strikes were legal (PBS NewsHour / PolitiFact; Democracy Now!).

Here is what I want every American to understand: in this country, even a person accused of the worst crime imaginable gets a trial. They get a lawyer. They get evidence presented against them. They get a jury. What we have watched is the United States government deciding — on its own word, from the sky — that human beings are guilty and executing them on the open ocean. No arrest. No evidence. No trial. No names.

If a government can do that to people on a boat it labels "narco-terrorists," the only thing standing between that power and anyone else is the label.

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched a large-scale attack on Iran. Rubio acknowledged that Washington acted knowing Israel was preparing to strike and that Tehran would retaliate against American forces. American service members died. The war spread across the region; the independent monitoring group Airwars documented civilian harm in 14 territories in the first 40 days alone (Airwars).

In the opening days, Iran reported that 168 people died in a strike on a girls' school. Rubio's response: the United States "would not deliberately target a school," and the matter would be referred to the Pentagon (Dawn). In September 2026, after renewed U.S. strikes, Iran's health ministry reported 18 people killed and more than 100 wounded — including, according to the Iranian Red Crescent, four people killed and 67 wounded at a wedding ceremony. The Secretary-General of the United Nations said he was deeply alarmed and called for an immediate halt (Khaleej Times / Reuters).

Deliberately attacking a school, a hospital, or any civilian structure is a war crime under international humanitarian law. Whether these strikes were deliberate is exactly what an independent investigation exists to determine. "We wouldn't do that" is not an investigation. It is a press release.

In March 2025, Secretary Rubio invoked emergency authority to bypass the normal congressional review process and expedite roughly $4 billion in weapons to Israel — the second time in a matter of weeks the administration had done so, bringing approved sales to nearly $12 billion in the administration's first weeks (Deccan Herald / NYT). That same period, the administration rescinded a policy that had required the U.S. government to report potential violations of international law involving American-supplied weapons. And within days, Israel announced it was halting all goods and humanitarian aid into Gaza — a population of two million people (Shafaq News).

Let me be honest, because honesty is the only thing that separates a movement from a party: this did not start with Marco Rubio. The previous administration also used emergency authority to rush arms to Israel without congressional review, and approved nearly all of Israel's weapons requests. This is a bipartisan pattern. That is exactly my point. The machinery keeps running no matter whose name is on the door — and the people who operate it keep asking to be promoted.

In 2025, Secretary Rubio personally oversaw the revocation of student visas for people involved in protests against the war in Gaza — hundreds at first, which he later estimated to be in the thousands. He called them "lunatics." One of them, Tufts doctoral student Rumeysa Öztürk, was grabbed off the street by masked federal agents after co-authoring a student newspaper op-ed. Rubio confirmed that he revoked her visa (The National; The National).

Think about what was being punished. Not violence. Words. An opinion. A student asking her university to hold a government accountable for violations of international law.

And when international judges tried to do exactly that — hold people accountable — Rubio went after them too. Starting in June 2025, he sanctioned judges of the International Criminal Court (Axios). He sanctioned more in December 2025. In July 2026, he announced a "whole-of-government" effort to systematically disable the court and threatened its member states (IBTimes). In August 2026, he sanctioned the court's president (Express Tribune / Reuters). The sanctions were extended to a United Nations Special Rapporteur and Palestinian human rights organizations. In October 2026, the administration announced broader sanctions on the ICC just hours after a former judge of that very court, Navi Pillay, received the Nobel Peace Prize (The National Desk).

You can disagree with the ICC. You can argue about jurisdiction and sovereignty — and plenty of serious people do. But when a government's answer to allegations of war crimes is to sanction the judges rather than open its own records, ask yourself what it is afraid the evidence would show.