Democrats Showed Up To Elon's Nazi USAID Siege Today, And They Were Pissed

More like this, please, much more!

Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar at today’s press conference in front of USAID

We have spent the last day or two puzzling over President Elon Musk’s apparent antipathy towards the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an antipathy so all-encompassing that it reached the point where he claims he was the one who got his co-president Donald Trump to agree to shut the entire place down. Which they have been doing quite handily! And also illegally, since the agency was created by a duly passed law — the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 — that Congress has not repealed.

At first we assumed Musk's hatred of USAID — which he called “a viper’s nest of radical left Marxists,” thus proving that he has no idea what any of those words actually mean — was the usual wingnut anti-government attitude about foreign aid. Conservatives always think the nation is giving too much money to foreign countries. Well, nonmilitary money to foreign countries, because we can never give enough bombs and missiles and surplus F-16s to the likes of Israel and Egypt. (Ukraine we’re okay with, those poor bastards need every Bradley Fighting Vehicle they can get.)

But humanitarian aid? Wingnuts always think it’s some gargantuan line item in the national budget. Then someone tells them for the gazillionth time that no, the United States spends about $60 billion a year, less than one percent of the nation’s budget, on non-military humanitarian and development aid. Then they shut up for about five minutes. Then they start up again. The crud under your fingernails has a longer memory.

This amount of aid is a drop of a drop in the bucket that is our national budget, and it buys the United States a lot of goodwill in the developing world. That makes it a pretty good investment! It’s the sort of soft power that has been a part of our foreign policy for decades, and has probably been a better vehicle for promoting American values than, say, spending a couple of trillion dollars to unnecessarily occupy Iraq and slaughter hundreds of thousands of its people was.

For heaven’s sake, USAID’s work helped bring about the end of apartheid in South Africa! Why would Elon Musk, who is from South Africa, be mad about ... oh, we see:

U.S. policy was to help bring an end to apartheid and establish a nonracial, democratic government. In response to this policy and the Act, USAID/South Africa was responsible for financing projects that apartheid victims viewed as critical in promoting social, political, and economic change through peaceful means.

Apartheid ended in 1990, which by what we’re sure is some incredible coincidence, is around the time Musk came to America, overstayed his visa, and never fucking left, much to the nation’s current detriment and chagrin.

Now trying to stay on top of all the news coming fast and furious about Musk and the harem of unfuckable twentysomething-year-old energy drink-guzzling tweakers he has empowered to rip the guts out of the government has been like trying to grab onto a downed, writhing electrical line. But it has been wild reading and listening to some of the justifications for shutting down the agency that have been coming from these weirdos:

Jason Calcanis is one of Elon’s billionaire oligarch buddies who helped him buy Twitter. He is apparently unaware that one can already look this information up in public databases, and that there was already an inspector general at USAID, as there is at every federal agency, to look for fraud, and also that yes the United States can become insolvent, but not for anything having to do with how much money it is spending. Our dollar is literally the world’s reserve currency!

Also, there are people who depend on funding from USAID to do lifesaving work every single day, which means people will die if you freeze its payments for 100 days, but none of those dead people will be Jason Calcanis, so he doesn’t give a fuck.

Amazing how these guys seem to think they are the first people who have ever thought about how best to run the American government.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump has at least twice publicly referred to USAID employees as “lunatics” and accused them of sending $100 million worth of condoms — last week it was only $50 million, apparently inflation hasn’t come down since Trump was inaugurated — to Hamas. He is also justifying shutting down the agency by referring to one of his usual bogeymen, fraud. As in, There is so much fraud at USAID. Trust me. We’ve already seen proof. No, I won’t show it to you:

On Monday, while there do not yet appear to have officially been mass layoffs, the agency appears to be getting folded into the State Department, or these freaks claim it is. (Again, Congress has not authorized this!) Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that he is now USAID’s acting director. (He says!)

Meanwhile, Democratic Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii announced he will block all of Trump’s diplomatic nominees until Musk is gone and USAID is back up and running. So we hope Rubio wasn’t planning on having any ambassadors or political foreign service appointees working on anything anytime soon, because that could take a while.

Also, a bunch of Democratic House reps and senators staged a rally outside of USAID’s headquarters on Monday afternoon. They took turns blasting Musk’s takeover as “illegal” and “unconstitutional.” Jamie Raskin reiterated that it is Congress that has the power to decide whether the United States government spends money on agencies like USAID, not some ketamine-addled Nazi loser who has to pay people to win video games for him.

Then the elected officials tried to walk into USAID headquarters, only to have security turn them away, allegedly on Musk’s orders. This is the moment where we remind everyone that ELON MUSK IS NOT AN ELECTED OFFICIAL OR A (REAL) GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEE. DONALD TRUMP SAYS HE HAS A “JOB” NOW, BUT FUCK YOU. AS SUCH HE HAS ABOUT AS MUCH LEGAL AUTHORITY TO DO WHAT HE’S DOING AS WE DO.

Christ.

Still, the Democrats are making hay here, finally. Or as Chris Hayes noted on BlueSky, people finally seem to be getting up off the mat.

Watch the full Democratic press conference below:

OPEN THREAD!

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