Porteroso said:

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I'll have to see more before I think the agency is beyond saving, but if this is true, it needs to be reformed. The idea that the US is funding any opera at all, outside of clearly earmarked arts funding, is ridiculous.

But I do doubt that it is as clear cut as you guys are making it.

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The mere fact that USAID was funding a Chinese lab closely linked to the Chinese military and functioning as a front for the Communist Party's Thousand Talents Program should have been enough to justify shutting down USAID. Everything else is just a bonus.

— Hans Mahncke (@HansMahncke) February 3, 2025

Good question https://t.co/c2b3W7gtL4

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 2, 2025

.@RandPaul Asks Samantha Power: 'Did USAID Fund Coronavirus Research In Wuhan China?'

"Should we be funding the Academy of Military Medical Research in China? ...Some of the research proposals in 2018 were the Wuhan Insitute of Virology asking for money to create a virus with a… pic.twitter.com/SZ53PzWKnq

— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) February 2, 2025

Porteroso said:

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I'll have to see more before I think the agency is beyond saving, but if this is true, it needs to be reformed. The idea that the US is funding any opera at all, outside of clearly earmarked arts funding, is ridiculous.

But I do doubt that it is as clear cut as you guys are making it.

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Why save it? Just in the name of moderation? Burn that infested house down, and then if you decide something really needs to be there, build it from scratch. The bureaucratic state has not earned the benefit of the doubt.

Under the Biden administration, billions of dollars were shifted from helping Americans in need to facilitating illegal immigration. Super messed up! https://t.co/stxpk2SNnb

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 4, 2025

Married A Horn said:

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They are also saying it is barely 1% of our budget, and therefore tiny and should be allowed to keep going. I'm sorry, but 1% of the United States of America's budget is HUGE.

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If I was earning $100,000 per year and I realized I was paying $700 per year (0.7%) for some movie channels I never watched, I'd eliminate them ASAP.

0.7% is SOMETHING!

Robert Wilson said:

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Porteroso said:

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I'll have to see more before I think the agency is beyond saving, but if this is true, it needs to be reformed. The idea that the US is funding any opera at all, outside of clearly earmarked arts funding, is ridiculous.

But I do doubt that it is as clear cut as you guys are making it.

---

Why save it? Just in the name of moderation? Burn that infested house down, and then if you decide something really needs to be there, build it from scratch. The bureaucratic state has not earned the benefit of the doubt.

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You make too much sense. But remember progressives want a big government, even if it's known to be corrupt.

Raze it and build up only what you need. Absolutely no American taxpayer dollars should be going to opera in another country.

The military, under Joe Biden and Mark Milley, openly plotted to incite race riots in Africa then use USAID to swoop in and give striking protestors no-show jobs on US taxpayer dime so they keep could keep getting paid while striking and protesting in the streets. pic.twitter.com/pzWV62Bsd4

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) February 3, 2025

.007 X 7,000,000,000,000 = $49,000,000,000

Budget now 6.95 Trillion. Fantastic start.

Its enourmous.

Redbrickbear said:

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The military, under Joe Biden and Mark Milley, openly plotted to incite race riots in Africa then use USAID to swoop in and give striking protestors no-show jobs on US taxpayer dime so they keep could keep getting paid while striking and protesting in the streets. pic.twitter.com/pzWV62Bsd4

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) February 3, 2025

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Usaid used to destabilize governments. This is quite possibly the biggest single rock the rats have been hiding under. Every single use I've seen is mind blowing... over 50 now for me and there are 1000s of these things.

Someone on X made a great point.

If that much fraud and waste was found in just a tiny 0.7% of the budget, how much fraud and waste is in the other 99.3%?

midgett said:

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Someone on X made a great point.

If that much fraud and waste was found in just a tiny 0.7% of the budget, how much fraud and waste is in the other 99.3%?

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I'm sure it's nasty to look under the hood at the rest of the funding…

Some bad stuff hiding in there no doubt

USAID Disbursement by Country (2023) pic.twitter.com/uFSI2yya3I

— Battle Beagle (@HarmlessYardDog) February 3, 2025

Redbrickbear said:

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USAID Disbursement by Country (2023) pic.twitter.com/uFSI2yya3I

— Battle Beagle (@HarmlessYardDog) February 3, 2025

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It's almost as if their job is to fund and perpetuate misery so they can capitalize on it.

I can’t possibly explain the scale at which the Democrats used our taxpayer dollars to enrich their friends (who then donated to them) but let me highlight 3 USAID expenses:

• $520M was spent on ESG consultants
• $1.2B given to "undisclosed recipients"
• $375M in DEI grants… pic.twitter.com/NmBeR7TqBL

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) February 3, 2025

Sam Lowry said:

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midgett said:

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Porteroso said:

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Robert Wilson said:

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Porteroso said:

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I'll have to see more before I think the agency is beyond saving, but if this is true, it needs to be reformed. The idea that the US is funding any opera at all, outside of clearly earmarked arts funding, is ridiculous.

But I do doubt that it is as clear cut as you guys are making it.

---

Why save it? Just in the name of moderation? Burn that infested house down, and then if you decide something really needs to be there, build it from scratch. The bureaucratic state has not earned the benefit of the doubt.

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There does need to be an agency that distributes foreign aid. I'm all for less aid in general, but we will always send aid. I'm not up for writing blank checks, which ironically is what these guys are being accused of. Say you're shutting down and starting from scratch, whatever, it just needs to be done responsibly.

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In many cases it's not a blank check. The receiving country or entity is told how the funds will be distributed. That's the catch.

I recall a case about a dozen years ago. The Clinton Global Initiative gave a significant sum for relief to Haiti following the earthquake. They showed how sewers ran through neighborhoods and how clean water really wasn't available. Funds were desperately needed for that purpose.

A chunk of the funds went to a brand new soccer stadium on the outskirts of town (you'd need transportation to get there). It was immaculate! (Perhaps my memory is fading and I saw the drawings of the facility). The key point is that the stadium had to be constructed by a specific company whose CEO, of course, had ties with the Clintons. Quid pro quo with government and charitable funds. Crap and all loopholes need to be ELIMINATED.

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Don't disrespect a brand new soccer stadium that helped to spread FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY! I know that because it was on TV.

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We should never pay for commie football

The democrat money laundering is over. The fact that they are screaming the loudest tells you everything you need to know.

Trump will see this for what it is - not bad policy, but money laundering. But will he prosecute? Can you prosecute?

Married A Horn said:

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Actual quotes from deep-staters. They literally are saying they are in charge of the Nation and our elected President Trump shutting USAID down is a coup.

.......................

"It's a coup," whined a current USAID official to the Wall Street Journal about the potential shuttering.

Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) claimed that Trump has no authority to close the agency because taxpayers' money was already earmarked to fund the fourth branch of government.

Establishment journalist Jamie Dupree said Trump's actions might have caused a "Constitutional crisis."

.....................

They are also saying it is barely 1% of our budget, and therefore tiny and should be allowed to keep going. I'm sorry, but 1% of the United States of America's budget is HUGE.

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Unfortunately they have a semi legit constitutional question about enumerated powers, and executive authority that some progressive legal initiative will take up at a liberal circuit court in order to get it to the Supreme.

What Trump and Doge are hopefully doing is exposing some of the insanity to the point where it's indefensible in the public's eye and Congressional Reps would be forced/shamed to pass legislation officially stopping funding and eliminating the agency.

Married A Horn said:

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But look at the comment the El Salvadorian president makes in that article.

He says most countries don't want usaid because he says that is used for opposition parties and destabilizing governments. It is democrat and establishment, republican money laundering to the max.

I haven't seen the budget yet for usaid, but a nice little side note is how much it will save us.

We need to see a lot of publicity on this one. And we need to see some perps walking!

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Apparently USAID spent 41.7 million dollars of our money to try and force the Georgia Dream party out of power in/after their last election. I'm sure the Romanian judges who nullified the results of their last election had a check cut to them as well.

Now that Quash has composed himself we should be hearing from him

What stage of TDS is this?pic.twitter.com/6neHM1MUpV

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) February 3, 2025

Redbrickbear said:

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I can’t possibly explain the scale at which the Democrats used our taxpayer dollars to enrich their friends (who then donated to them) but let me highlight 3 USAID expenses:

• $520M was spent on ESG consultants
• $1.2B given to "undisclosed recipients"
• $375M in DEI grants… pic.twitter.com/NmBeR7TqBL

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) February 3, 2025

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That's how taxpayer money is laundered

Audit USAID…Then Shut it Down! pic.twitter.com/ooeFeQmAO3

— Ron Paul (@RonPaul) February 3, 2025

Married A Horn said:

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Our tax dollars literally being used to kill and oppress us.

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It's what fascists do.

[It's insane. Turns out USAID spent $70,000 to produce a pro-DEI play in Ireland. The play scolded Ireland for its history and its Catholicism. Why are US taxpayers doing this? Why is the US government? As Elon Musk's DOGE investigators are finding, this kind of thing is what happens with woke institutional capture. I wrote a decade ago about how the Obama-era USAID collaborated with George Soros to translate, publish, and distribute Saul Alinsky's Rules For Radicals in the new country of Macedonia, which at the time was governed by a conservative party. Think about that: this humanitarian arm of the US Government seeded an emerging democracy in a culturally conservative part of the world with Saul Alinsky Thought. On your dime and mine.

But, but:

Someone should tell Obama adviser Ben Rhodes that his team shouldn't have turned USAID into an agitprop arm of wokeness and globalism, and kept it as a straight-up conduit for real development and charity aid. Instead, USAID did things like spend $42 billion to influence the recent elections in the country of Georgia which, proportionally speaking, would be like a foreign power spending over $3 billion to influence an American election. USAID has been a major funding arm of the unaccountable NGOcracy, which is entirely owned by the Left.
You've read here in this space a number of times (and also here) my grumbling about USAID director Samantha Power coming to Budapest a couple of years ago to give $20 million to local "transparency" and "pro-democracy" groups that oppose the elected Orban government, which the Biden administration despises. This was 100 percent about trying to lay the groundwork for a Color Revolution in a democratic NATO ally, because Washington did not like the way it is governed. It reminds me of this line from a 2020 interview with Darren J. Beattie on Niccolo Soldo's Substack:

Quote:

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In retail political discourse, democracy is pretty much exclusively used in an obfuscatory, euphemistic sense (it is obligatory for Colour Revolution spook NGOs to have "democracy" in the title).

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That interview is worth a read now that Beattie has been appointed to the State Department as Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. Keep in mind that Soldo, whose questions are in bold, is a smart-aleck, and poses these questions tongue very firmly planted in cheek:

Quote:

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I believe it is in the vital interests of all American citizens that the US Armed Forces teach Feminist Critical Theory to Pashtuni tribeswoman.
Yes, the woke poison has exerted its corrupting influence on every single institution in America, including the military. This is a tough pill that patriotic Americans need to swallow. Just in the way that Tucker Carlson and others have helped conservatives embrace a more critical view of corporatism, we need a similar kind of critical awakening when it comes to the national security apparatus.
If we don't confront China immediately they're going to attack Pearl Harbour, invade the West Coast, and stop us from importing 9 million Indian coders who depress salaries for American programmers. Why do you hate America?
We seem to share some concerns with the way the American right has come to frame the China problem. It used to be that emphasizing the threat of China was a great way to deflect from the Russia hysteria and, to a certain extent, the obsession with Iran and the Middle East. In that sense the China issue had a sort of second-order, proxy value. Now that just about everyone including the most die-hard neocons like Nikki Haley have jumped onto the China Hawk bandwagon, the position has lost much if not all of its second-order signalling power.
I fear that now much of the Cold War style China Hawk rhetoric actually detracts from the much more pressing threat to the American people which is the incompetent, corrupt, dysfunctional and perhaps even illegitimate ruling class.
Of course, one can combine China-hawkishness with a critique of the American ruling class by saying that the American ruling class cooperates with the CCP. But even here the emphasis must be squarely on the American ruling class and in practice this often gets drowned out in the performative saber-rattling you hear from a lot of conservative China Hawks.
I'll put it this way: It is not as though the American ruling class is intelligent, competent, and patriotic on most important matters and happens to have a glaring blind spot when it comes to appreciating the threat of China. If this were the case, it would make sense to emphasize the threat of China above all else.
But this is not the case. The American ruling class has failed on pretty much every issue of significance for the past several decades. If China were to disappear, they would simply be selling out the country to India, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, or some other country (in fact they are doing this just to a lesser extent). Our ruling class has failed us on China because they have failed us on everything. For this reason I believe that there will be no serious, sound policy on China that benefits Americans until there is a legitimate ruling class in the United States. For this reason pointing fingers at the wickedness and danger of China is less useful than emphasizing the failure of the American ruling class. The bottom line is the true enemies of the American people are no foreign nation or adversary---the true enemy of the American people are the people who control America.
This way of thinking points to a dilemma for the American ruling class. Contrary to a lot of the rhetoric you hear, much of the American ruling class, including the "deep state" is actually quite anti-China. To fully account for this would take longer than I have here. But the nutshell intuitive explanation is that the ruling class, particularly Wall Street, was happy for the past several decades to enrich both themselves and China by destroying the American working class with policies such as "free-trade" and outsourcing. But in many ways the milk from that teat is no more, and now you have an American ruling class much more concerned about protecting their loot from a serious geopolitical competitor (China) than squeezing out the last few drops of milk from the "free trade."
Of course, different factions of the American elite still have different attitudes toward China---with Wall Street still being the most favourable and the military industrial complex being the most hostile. The point though is that the American power structure gets that conflict with China over resources, 5G, AI, etc. is baked into the cake. The problem is that America has become such a dysfunctional joke in so many ways that it is hard to imagine it competing with an ascendant and serious China. And this brings us to the dilemma I alluded to earlier: the American ruling class wants to confront China to preserve its loot, but the ability to confront China in a serious way would itself require such dramatic domestic reform within America that this would threaten the very power structure whose loot is supposed to be preserved!
This bizarre dilemma I think is at the heart of our ambiguous and half-assed approach to China---we'd rather whine about Uighurs and call the Chinese racists, which simply reinforces the fundamental unseriousness that makes the prospect of beating out China in the long term seem rather bleak.

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There are certainly things about Beattie that are troubling, to put it mildly. But with these USAID revelations, I find the kind of people in the Deep State who were running these programs far more troubling, in terms of their views, and how they weaponized them globally with US taxpayer money. It is probably the case that if you want to root out this legion of bad actors, you need people like Beattie, who just do not care what respectable people think. That is to say, I'm very much open to the conclusion that the greatest threat to America's health is the sickness of its ruling class. And that includes normie Republicans.
It tells you something that all of this stuff was going on with USAID for many years, but the Republicans as a party never did anything about it (with a handful of honorable exceptions who tried).
Watch or listen to this long Joe Rogan interview with Mike Benz, a lawyer and former Trump State Department official, on the Deep State. He says what USAID really is: a mechanism for administering the US Empire:

Quote:

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There is no aid in USAID. It's not an aid organization. USAID stands for US Agency for International Development. What it's developing is all the activist organizations in foreign countries that the state department is building to gain influence. USAID was created to be a central hub that organized all the different foreign clandestine operations. It has a $50 billion budget. The entire intelligence community is only $72 billion. It's more than the CIA and the State Department. It's a switch player to assist the Pentagon, the State Department, and the intelligence community.

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I can't say enough about how important that Mike Benz interview is. All of it. He talks about how the Deep State turned its anti-free speech policies for foreign countries onto the American people. In this clip, Benz shows a 2019 video in which The Atlantic Council (seven former CIA directors currently sit on its board) trains journalists to identify populist policy positions, or any counternarratives to the established globalist one, as "disinformation." Please, please listen to it; you need to know this to understand what Trump and his team are up to and to resist the media narrative that says Trump's dismantling of entities like USAID is bad. E.g., Benz says the Washington establishment redefined "democracy" from "rule of the people" to "protecting normative institutions" which, surprise, are staffed and directed by globalists and left-wingers.] -Rod Dreher