Tag: foreign aid

‘Disinformation’: Democrats refuse to believe USAID bankrolled transgender operas, woke activism

Confronted with almost $200 million in questionable spending by the U.S. Agency for International Development, congressional Democrats said it was just a pathetic excuse to cut off foreign aid.

The Democrats would not voice support for spending taxpayer dollars on transgender operas, “DEI musicals” and promotion of LGBTQ causes around the world. Instead, they said they didn’t believe it.

“I’d like to see the evidence,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts told The Washington Times when asked about her stance on USAID’s culture war activism.

Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia chalked it up to “mis- and disinformation” from the White House.

“Even if what you say is true, it makes up such a minute portion of federal taxpayer dollars,” he said, insisting that his constituents support U.S. foreign aid. “The value of the expenditures outweighs by far any mistakes that may have been made in terms of individual line items.”

Mr. Johnson and several of his fellow Democrats said the benefits of “soft power” of foreign aid make it all worthwhile.

Democrats have been outraged by President Trump’s moves to shutter USAID after Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency revealed the spending.

The questionable programs bankrolled by USAID included roughly $75 million spent on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in foreign countries.

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Wife of Federal Judge Who Threw a Wrench in Trump’s Agenda Has a Curious Connection to USAID: Report

The wife of a federal judge who blocked President Donald Trump’s decision to shutter government websites that promoted gender ideology founded an organization that received funds from the United States Agency for International Development, an agency that the administration is currently targeting.

U.S. District Judge John Bates issued a decision on Tuesday ordering federal health agencies to restore pages about transgenderism they had pulled after a Trump executive order about “gender ideology extremism.”

He reasoned that the websites were removed without any publicly provided rationale or opportunity for recourse, an apparent violation of the law, according to Politico.

“No backend remedy could ameliorate the inability to provide all required care during an appointment time to a patient who cannot return in the future,” Bates wrote.

The ruling came as left-wing organizations and elected officials challenged Trump administration efforts to address wasteful and fraudulent projects in government.

After the ruling, however, Shore News Network noted that Bates’ wife, Carol Rhees, started a nonprofit called Hope for Children in Ethiopia.

The organization has received funds from USAID, one of the agencies facing scrutiny under the government efficiency effort.

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GOP Rep. Tim Burchett Says Democrats Are “Terrified” Because DOGE is Going to Find a “Paper Trail” of Money That Went Overseas and Ended Up Back Into Pockets of Lawmakers

Congressman Tim Burchett (R-TN) said the Democrats are terrified of Elon Musk and DOGE because there is a “paper trail” of money that went overseas and right back into their pockets.

“You’re going to see a paper trail come back to Washington, DC. That’s why a lot of people are nervous. You’ll see a lot of retirements. They are stealing from the American taxpayer and now they’ve got their hand caught in the cookie jar, and all they can do is attack Elon Musk,” Burchett said on Fox News.

It is all hands on deck to stop Elon Musk’s DOGE from accessing federal data so the Trump Administration can cut wasteful government spending.

A coalition of Democrat state attorneys general recently filed a lawsuit to stop Elon Musk from accessing federal data.

Blue states such as Arizona, Michigan, Rhode Island, New Mexico, California, Massachusetts, and others filed a lawsuit arguing President Trump violated the Appointments Clause of the Constitution when he created DOGE and gave Elon Musk ‘unchecked power.’

Democrats have also been holding protests and lashing out at Elon Musk.

86-year-old Maxine Waters, the Democrats’ top attack dog, called Elon Musk a “gangster” and a “thief.”

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USAID’s Troubling Ties to the Woke Nonprofits That Called the Shots in the Biden Administration

The U.S. Agency for International Development wasn’t just spending your hard-earned tax dollars on transgender operas overseas—USAID also has troubling connections with the leftist pressure groups that infiltrated and advised the Biden administration.

My book, “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government,” exposes the woke activist groups that fed staff into the administrative state and pushed woke policies on the bureaucracy.

As President Donald Trump released information about USAID’s corruption, I started to notice a few familiar names from my research.

The American people should understand just how connected the woke enterprise is to the federal bureaucracy, and USAID provides a powerful example of those ties.

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Connect the Dots: Trump, Public Health, and the Third World

After several years of enduring all of the ‘woke’ progressive conspiracy theories regarding President Trump, I had come to believe that their favorite recreational activity was to go to a museum that had a Jackson Pollock painting hanging on the wall, in order to stare at it for hours trying to connect the dots. It got to the point that I began to think that the ‘drip method’ was actually a term that described the people viewing the paintings, rather than a description of Pollock’s painting style. 

At the risk of being guilty of the thing I’m denigrating (a favorite tactic of the left), I will attempt to connect some dots. Considering that I’ve been called far worse than a drip over the course of my lifetime, I consider this to be a fairly low-risk exercise.

A number of reporters, including some who write for Brownstone Journal have legitimately expressed concern that third-world countries would bear the brunt of the withdrawal of the US from the World Health Organization (WHO). Areas of concern include public health programs to address HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis (TB), and malaria. I share these concerns, but I will now connect a few dots to see whether these concerns are overblown.

First, I’ll provide some context. The immediate justification for US withdrawal from the WHO relates to activities surrounding their corrupt and incompetent handling of the Covid pandemic response. However, it’s been fairly obvious that ever since Donald Trump came down the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015, he has viewed all multilateral agreements as a ruse to rip off the US for billions upon billions upon trillions of dollars. Other examples include the Paris Accords, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, NATO, and former trade agreements with Mexico and Canada.

In some cases, the pacts were too costly to continue US participation, while others could be salvaged if negotiated by people who were looking out for America’s best interests. By any reasonable measure, Trump handled these matters fairly well during his first term and has earned the right to continue this process during his second term.

Getting back to WHO and the Covid response, one of the things that happened in Africa was that funds were diverted from HIV/AIDS, TB, and malaria programs in order to give Covid jabs (I refuse to refer to these shots as a vaccine) to a population with a median age of 26. This was a double whammy in that funds were diverted from programs that had been helpful in order to provide a treatment that harmed and killed more people than would have occurred if nothing had been done. The WHO was a major player in implementing these policies. The results for HIV/AIDS, TB, malaria, and Covid have been uniformly disastrous, and this doesn’t include the collateral damage that occurred, which may turn out to be even worse than the direct harms.

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Slovak PM Robert Fico Writes to Musk – Was Fico’s Would-Be Assassin Radicalized by USAID Media?

Populist pro-Trump Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico was shot outside a meeting in May 2024. He barely survived the attempted assassination.

The neoliberal activist and aspiring poet who shot Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico was moved by disagreement over funding for the Ukraine War.

Did USAID money lead to the assassination attempt on Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico? The patriotic, MAGA-style leader of the Slavic country has asked Elon Musk for information on the funding of Slovak “non-“governmental organizations and media by the US International Development Authority (USAID).

In a letter to the head of the Department for Government Efficiency (DOGE), Robert Fico asked for details of  USAID grants that may have been used for radical political propaganda in his country. Fico has previously charged that Soros media may have contributed to the radicalization and calls for violence that led to his near-assassination 2024.(The name Fico is pronounced “feet so”.)

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Why USAID No Longer Makes Sense

The Trump administration’s decision to decimate USAID, the foreign assistance agency, has sparked a fierce debate in Washington. While Republicans on the hill and in the media have largely directed their ire against the left-wing ideological character of USAID programs, most of their Democratic counterparts have defended the agency on humanitarian grounds. 

The White House, however, has offered the correct, most urgent view: USAID largely fails to advance American national interests, and Washington can no longer afford to spend taxpayer dollars on programs that don’t benefit Americans.

Reasonable people may disagree about the merits of particular USAID programs, but it’s clear that a large portion of funding goes to meddling in the internal affairs of other countries—presented as benign “governance” projects. In fiscal year 2023, $16.8 billion of the total $43.4 billion of USAID obligations were in this category, which has included such projects as bankrolling “independent media” in Ukraine and pouring tens of millions into elections in Georgia. Perhaps these efforts did some good, but the catastrophe that American meddling has helped produce in Ukraine, and the victory of a pro-Russian party in Georgia’s recent parliamentary elections, suggest that USAID can no longer reliably advance U.S. interests in Moscow’s sphere of influence.  

Of course, USAID has also funded genuine humanitarian projects that have saved lives, such as the United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). But even commendable humanitarian projects may not be worth the burden they place on the American taxpayer, meaning partisan debate about them is legitimate and indeed necessary. So long as people in North Carolina and Los Angeles are suffering from recent environmental tragedies, sending their hard-earned money to foreign lands does not sit right with many Americans.

Lost in the domestic hysteria of the moment is a more frank consideration of the sustainability of U.S. primacy in a changing global landscape. Washington doesn’t use USAID just to save lives, but also to expand and sustain American power globally. But if the “unipolar moment” is over and the world is now bipolar or multipolar, American cultural influence—sometimes called “soft power”—deserves reconsideration no less than the hard stuff.

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BOOM: Biden’s USAID Paid Terrorists, and Here’s HOW They Did It

Readers were shocked when we reported that USAID had paid Taliban and Al Qaeda terrorists. Now we’ve found out how they moved the money.

In the story “USAID Pays the Terrorists Who Kill Us,” I wrote:

The U.S. State Department and USAID pay millions of dollars per week to the Taliban, the bin Laden family leading the group, and the Haqqani terror network. Remember those guys? Didn’t we wage a 20-year-long war to get rid of them …???

…We left Afghanistan, left behind billions of dollars in equipment, the strategically important Bagram Air Base, and all the biometric data of our Afghani supporters who put their lives on the line to help our efforts to get the Taliban and the terrorists they were hiding from us. So, of course, when Joe Biden, Tony Blinken, and Jake Sullivan had us bug out in disgrace, they left the Taliban a ready-made kill list of our allies.

Former CIA targeter and DoD employee Sarah Adams has reported that the bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and Taliban families have intermarried. Paying the Taliban is paying Al-Qaeda. That wasn’t the plan when U.S. troops went into Afghanistan 20 years ago to get Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda terror cell, which brought down the World Trade Center Towers. 

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Microsoft Drops USAID-Funded NewsGuard After Ted Cruz Starts Digging

Microsoft has dropped NewsGuard, a left-wing fact-checking organization they partnered with that has helped the advertising industry justify blacklists for independent conservative media sites such as ZeroHedge.

The move came after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) began investigating Microsoft for funding the online “media literacy” censorship tool created by NewsGuard to help guide “learners of all ages through the overwhelming landscape of online news and information.”

Now we come to find out that NewsGuard was funded by USAID…

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The Demise of USAID: Few Regrets in Latin America

“Take your money with you,” said Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro, when told about Trump’s plans to cut aid to Latin America, “it’s poison.”

USAID (US Agency for International Development) spends around $2 billion annually in Latin America, which is only 5% of its global budget. The temporarily closed-down agency’s future looks bleak, while reactions to its money being cut have been wide-ranging. Only a few were as strong as Petro’s and many condemned the move. For example, WOLA (the Washington Office on Latin America), a leading “liberal” think tank which routinely runs cover for Washington’s regime-change efforts, called it Trump’s “America Last” policy.

While USAID does some good – such as removing landmines in Vietnam (themselves a product of US wrongdoing) – as an agency of the world’s hegemon, its fundamental role is aligned with projecting US world dominance.

Not unexpectedly, the corporate media have largely come to the rescue of USAID. They try to give the impression that they are mainly concerned that some countries would be badly effected by its loss. In fact, the follow-the-flag media understand that USAID is part of the imperial toolkit.

Both the Los Angles Times and Bloomberg suggested that USAID’s shutdown would “open the door” to China. The Associated Press described the withdrawal of aid as a “huge setback” for the region; the BBC echoed these sentiments. The NYT and other mainstream media point to the irony that many of its programs help stem outward migration from Latin America, an issue which is otherwise at the top of Trump’s agenda.

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