Feb. 6: What Is the USAID Fight About?

Soros-backed radio station investigated by ICC; Biden funded terror; Trudeau says Trump really wants Canada

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The Big Story

With Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) working on axing seemingly the whole of the federal government, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) looks set to become the first agency to fall. On Thursday evening, The New York Times reported that Donald Trump’s administration was planning to downsize USAID from more than 10,000 workers to just under 300 who are to be placed under the direct control of the State Department. In a Friday morning post on Truth Social, Trump bluntly called to “Close it down!”

Easier said than done, of course. Courts have already stymied several of DOGE’s downsizing initiatives, including, most recently, the attempted buyout of 60,000 federal employees, which a federal judge temporarily blocked on Thursday. (In a separate ruling Thursday, a different judge also blocked DOGE’s access to payment systems at the U.S. Treasury.) Two USAID unions filed suit against the proposed cuts on Thursday, and courts may rule that Trump lacks the authority to shutter the agency, which began under the executive branch but was brought under the control of Congress in 1998. And congressional Democrats, largely prostrate for most of the past three weeks, have at least somewhat pulled themselves together in defense of the agency. As Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) colorfully described it to Fox, “Some of my Democratic colleagues and the tofu-eating wokerati of USAID are screaming like this is a prison riot.”

We wrote about USAID on Monday, but we’re returning to it here because it’s quite clearly an opening salvo in the Trump administration’s broader war against the “deep state” and offers lessons about the political battles to come. As Axios reported Thursday, citing conversations with Trump officials, USAID is an appetizer for a broader war on the federal bureaucracy that will also include the far more important security and law enforcement agencies, which the administration believes—correctly—conspired with Democrats during Trump’s first term to block his initiatives and ultimately chuck him out of office. Earlier this week, the CIA offered buyouts to its entire workforce, an offer that was later extended to employees at the National Security Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the formation of a “Weaponization Working Group” to look into the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation’s investigations of Trump and his allies. Director of national intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard, meanwhile, will be tasked after her confirmation with examining “the ‘weaponization’ of the agencies under her purview,” according to Axios. So we expect to see more of what we’ve seen over the past week, except at a much larger scale.

What have we seen? On the one hand, plenty that justifies the administration’s hostility or, at the very minimum, is jarring to the American public. As we noted on Monday, USAID appears to have been simultaneously operating as a free-for-all global charity backing projects that sound like a Babylon Bee-style parody of elite progressivism—LGBTQ-friendly “sexual health” comic books in Peru, workplace DEI initiatives in Serbia—and as a slush fund of patronage for well-connected Washington insiders and Democratic Party clients abroad. That includes hundreds of millions of dollars to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) under the Biden administration. As the blogger Leslie Kajomovitz detailed in a series of X threads and Substack posts, it also includes a $310 million grant in 2016 to a Palestinian construction company for the establishment of a “cement factory” in the West Bank and Gaza and a total of $300 million since 2008 to Norwegian People’s Aid, found by a U.S. court in 2018 to have provided “material support” to Iran, Hamas, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. But those are just a few of hundreds of examples that have been crowdsourced over the past week, as members of what media theorist John Robb calls the “red tribe” have dug into federal spending databases.

The real examples of USAID malfeasance and waste have at the same time been supported by a tremendous amount of viral social media bullshit, produced through the same crowdsourcing techniques and then amplified by key nodes of influence in the broader MAGA social media world, including Musk and others adjacent to the Trump White House. To note some examples of false viral claims we’ve seen: that internet pundits ranging from Richard Hanania to Chris Rufo to Anita Sarkeesian are “funded by USAID,” that the Jan. 6 riot was funded by USAID, that USAID was responsible for Trump’s first impeachment (it funded a nonprofit reporting consortium that was cited in the Trump-Zelenskyy whistleblower letter), that USAID is a “CIA front,” and, most recently, that USAID backed a Wall Street Journal “doxx” or “hit piece” on a young employee of DOGE, who was fired Thursday after the Journal reported on his recent history of racist internet posts (the reporter had worked at USAID before going to journalism school, though there is no reason to think the agency had anything to do with the story, nor that any other reporter would have ignored the story, which was newsworthy).

Almost all of this “reporting,” true information, nonsense, propaganda, whatever—really, the surfacing of what Robb calls “packetized information,” both true and false—has emerged on X, with traditional media and journalism struggling to keep up with the torrent of information. By the time a claim can be either verified or debunked by a legacy outlet, it is irrelevant, and the hive mind has moved on to a new battle. Democrats seem, if anything, even more disoriented than the legacy press.

So how should we understand what we are watching? Not as citizen journalism, as Musk might have it, or even as discourse, but as political warfare. As Robb explained in a post that we featured yesterday as our Tweet of the Day:

Political warfare certainly involves the dissemination of information, some of which is true. But it is closer to propaganda than to journalism as traditionally understood, since the truth of a claim is secondary to its political effect (though Lenin always insisted that propaganda works best if it is true). Which brings us back to a quote we shared from Lee Smith in our Jan. 29 edition:

Sorry to all you X Premium users, but you are not the media. The media is the media. Places like The New York Times are all broken and rancid, but the forms are real, perhaps eternal. Twitter is more ephemeral than Roman graffiti, because no one would have let people write the vile shit on the walls of Rome that Elon monetizes. Is Dan Bilzerian also the media? No, he is not; he’s garbage. Media mediates, is a medium, a bouquet of mediums, hence media, plural. There are rules and gatekeepers, and all those people have lost their minds, but don’t for a second believe that a medium that makes it possible for Candace Owens to shit on the Jews in her silk lingerie is the media.

Smith was referring to the proliferation of antisemitic influencers on X, but the same is true of the networked tribes, political influencers, and digital swarms that now dominate the “conversation.” Beneath the layer of digital information/political war, of course, is a very real conflict over the levers of power in the American government. However one feels about that conflict, understanding it requires some distance from the digital frenzy, i.e., mediation. And while media may be a dirty word—and that may be for good reason—we haven’t found a workable replacement yet.

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The Rest

→The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is investigating a Soros-backed San Francisco radio station, KCBS 740 AM, for broadcasting the live locations of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents conducting deportation efforts in the area. The station is one of the 200 under the domain of American broadcast network Audacy, which Soros purchased a stake in last year, according to Fox News. In an interview with Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade Thursday, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said the broadcasts were “very concerning”:

You had ICE agents undercover doing operations in East San Jose, part of the town known for violent gang activity, and you had this radio station broadcasting the live location, identifying the unmarked vehicles that they were in.

The host of the “KCBS Radio Weekend News” revealed the color, make, and model of several vehicles being used for deportation raids in San Jose. The Enforcement Bureau is evaluating whether or not the station is violating the terms of its FCC license, which requires the station to operate within the “public interest.”

→The Biden administration allowed $1.3 billion of taxpayer dollars to end up in the pockets of groups that committed or sponsored terrorism, according to the Daily Caller. Biden’s aid programs funneled the money toward terror networks in the Arab world by reversing policies from Trump’s first term. The largest share of those funds went to Palestinian networks; more than $1.05 billion went to UNRWA (as we reported extensively) after Biden reversed a Trump-era ban on UNRWA funding before again reinstating that ban when it was found that 10 percent of the agency’s employees had links to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. A dozen of those employees directly took part in the Oct. 7 massacre. One of those 12 was a Hamas commander teaching elementary school for UNRWA; UNRWA schools teach a curriculum that glorifies terrorists and martyrdom, according to a 2023 U.N. Watch report. The rest of the $1.3 billion ended up with the Taliban after it reclaimed Afghanistan following Biden’s disastrous 2021 withdrawal. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction found that Biden’s continuation of government programs meant to help with “Afghan women’s rights” and “economic conditions” ended up in Taliban control.

→Quote of the Day

With such a government there should not be any negotiations as it is neither wise, nor prudent, nor dignified. If they violate our nation’s security, we will violate theirs. This is our duty … As required by Islam.

That’s Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaking to his country’s military forces on Friday ruling out the possibility of any negotiations being made with the Trump administration, according to the Financial Times. In the speech, he cited Trump’s 2018 decision to withdraw from Obama’s nuclear deal. His tough line likely comes in response to Trump’s executive order to restore his first term’s “maximum pressure” sanctions policy on Iran, though Trump has also expressed the desire for Iran and the United States to reach some kind of verified nuclear deal.

→Senate Democrats have delayed the Senate Judiciary Committee vote to confirm Trump’s FBI director nominee, Kash Patel, for another week, due to panel rules. This has led a flurry of right-wing accounts on X to accuse the Democrats of attempting to sabotage Patel’s likelihood of being confirmed. While that may be true, The Hill reports that the delay will do little to upset Patel’s chances, as he is still in a strong position with Republican senators. Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley has also used his rights to delay the vote, indicating “internal GOP dynamics.”

→Mar-A-Gaza’s Unlikeliest Supporter

Writing for Compact, Marxist academic and chief organizer of the Marxist group Platypus Affiliated Society Chris Cutrone has praised Trump’s “out of the box” proposal for the United States to take over Gaza by pragmatically removing it from the control of both Israel and Hamas—which, Cutrone believes, is the only viable choice for a lasting peace:

Trump’s purpose is clear: If Biden unintentionally facilitated the “genocide” of Gazans, then Trump is going to save them by apparently completing the process, removing the threat of “ethnic cleansing” by presenting it as a fait accompli. Even Israeli escalation in the West Bank is just part of the same process—not of expelling the Palestinians but of making it clear that there really is no alternative. Trump is trying to take advantage of having the Palestinians and Israelis exactly where he wants them.

→Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told his country’s business and labor leaders today that Trump’s talks of absorbing Canada are sincere, the Toronto Daily Star reports. His comments were mistakenly played out over a loudspeaker. Trudeau expressed that he believes Trump is well aware of Canada’s resources and that annexing the country is the best way to get access to them. The behind-closed-doors discussion was called to brainstorm ways to respond to Trump’s threats of tariffs hanging over Canada. As it sends 75% of its goods and services south of its borders, Canada is “highly vulnerable” to U.S. sanctions, Reuters reports.

→If you are as sick as we are of tasting wet cardboard while sucking down and trying to enjoy your morning iced coffee, rejoice: President Trump announced that he will be signing an executive order to end the Biden-era push for paper straws on Truth Social today:

→Rep. Maxine Waters and several other Democratic leaders of Congress attempted to enter the Department of Education today amid discussions of Trump signing an executive order to gut the department, and they were denied access by security personnel, leading to a standoff captured by several media outlets. It’s unclear if the representatives were intending to stage an insurrection, as right-wing commentator Benny Johnson suggested on X, or a mere opportunistic photo op, or a bit of both. In her characteristically eccentric manner, Waters repeatedly asked for the name and ID of the security officer who blocked her entry. Earlier this week, Waters made news for attempting to obstruct Musk’s DOGE efforts, according to ABC News.

→Ye, the rapper, producer, and fashion impresario formerly known as Kanye West, is back on X …

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