Washed-up non-U.S.-citizen Irish pop star, Bono, for some reason, was invited to a Zoom video call alongside former presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush to empathize with former USAID employees and commemorate all of the alleged good work the agency has done over the years, fomenting color revolutions in the Third World and forcing them to embrace transgenderism and racial strife for their own good.
Related: John Bolton Vows to Resurrect USAID Post-Trump
Via TIME (emphasis added):
On Tuesday, USAID shutters its doors for good.
The agency’s dismantling began just days after President Donald Trump returned to the White House at the start of this year. Tech billionaire and one-time Trump ally Elon Musk, who was spearheading the Department of Government Efficiency, singled out the agency as a locus of “corruption and waste,” despite the fact that it constituted just about 0.5% of government spending.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who took the reins of the agency in February, said in March that more than four-fifths of USAID programs were cancelled, and the approximately 1,000 that remained would be absorbed by the State Department by July 1, even amid court battles about the constitutionality of USAID’s closure.
On the eve of USAID’s final day, former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama gathered with former staffers as well as U2 singer and humanitarian Bono on a video call. Obama described USAID’s gutting as a “travesty” and a “tragedy,” according to the Associated Press.
A recently published study, upon which the latest wave of media pearl-clutching is based, predicted that 14 million people will perish in the coming years due to the dismantling.
Related: Yale ‘Fascism Professor’ Flees Country to Escape Trump’s Fourth Reich
Via The Lancet (emphasis added):
In this retrospective impact evaluation integrated with forecasting analysis, we used panel data from 133 countries and territories— including all low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs)—with USAID support ranging from none to very high. First, we used fixed-effects multivariable Poisson models with robust SEs adjusted for demographic, socioeconomic, and health-care factors to estimate the impact of USAID funding on all-age and all-cause mortality from 2001 to 2021…
This study is the first to evaluate the impact of USAID funding—including all areas of its humanitarian and development assistance—on mortality, both overall and disaggregated by age and cause, over the past two decades and with projections to 2030. Our findings show that USAID-supported efforts have helped to prevent more than 91 million deaths across all age groups, including 30 million deaths among children. High levels of USAID funding were associated with a 15% reduction in all-age and all-cause mortality, a 65% reduction in mortality from HIV/AIDS, a 51% reduction from malaria, and a 50% reduction from neglected tropical diseases. Substantial decreases were also observed in mortality from tuberculosis, nutritional deficiencies, diarrhoeal diseases, lower respiratory infections, and maternal and perinatal conditions. By age group, the most pronounced reductions were seen in children younger than 5 years (32%). According to the forecasting models, the current steep funding cuts—coupled with the potential dissolution of the agency—could lead to more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, averaging more than 2·4 million deaths per year. These deaths include 4·5 million among children younger than 5 years, or more than 700,000 deaths annually.
Self-described “award-winning site for progressive news and media criticism,” Crooks & Liars, lambasted the USAID dissolution, citing the Lancet study and labelling its essay “Trump’s holocaust.”
I’ve begun publishing a series on the iron laws of journalism I’ve learned over the years. Although this one might not make the list, it’s worth an honorable mention: the legacy media’s likening every X issue of the day to a “holocaust” is way overwrought and seldom appropriate in the given context.
There was only one holocaust, and it had nothing to do with so-called U.S. foreign aid (which, again, is a euphemism for meddling in sovereign nations’ internal politics to turn their children into eunuch gender goblins).
