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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   6764 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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ficticious X millions for gay condom art to zanzibar

No clue what this is in reference to.

I think that is comedic exaggeration. USAID was funding similar things. Trans theaterperformances and whatnot. Raw progressive culture warring funded by my tax dollars. Also I presume graft in which a cut is kept by a non profit.

I don't want to excuse everything Trump has done by pointing to the excesses of the other side. On the other hand, now suddenly they care that Republicans (or Trumpists) are getting a taste of this.

Presumably a joke about USAID funding all sorts of nonsense and no one has really tracked through everything they did like navigating the Darien Gap, but the closest specific example is probably the Columbian trans opera.

Sure, that stuff looks like nonsense. Practically anything that goes to fund art or "culture" more broadly probably has a chance to end up funding some woke nonsense. That stuff is bad and it's good that Trump canned it.

In terms of comparison though, $47K is quite small.

$47K is quite small.

It's one memorable and culture-warry grant out of 6,000.

That doesn't help the "USAID spending was corruption" case. It highlights how insubstantial the objections are and how feeble the attempts to draw an equivalence to Trump's corruption are. The argument is, essentially, that spending money on things conservatives don't like is fraudulent and that these petty amounts are equivalent to direct abuse of office for personal gain and billions in direct self-dealing.

(Underlying all of this was the incredible mendacity of DOGE and assorted fellow travelers in their claims of finding fraud/waste, such that any individual allegation can't be taken seriously without significant additional investigation)

How many examples would you like?

$47k is as much income tax as has been withheld from my from 2018-2025. I don't think the fruit of my labor for eight years of my life is quite small, and I don't think nearly a decade of taxes extracted from me should be spent on this crap.

Eight years of my life for a trans opera in Colombia. Rooting it out isn't mendacity, it's what I voted for.

Similarly, annual estimates for Medicaid fraud are $50-100 billion per year, or the total lifetime taxes of roughly 100,000-200,000 Americans.

And yet Rick Scott is still a Republican in good standing...

to be clear, that 6,000 is for 2025, not over USAID's lifetime, correct?

In terms of comparison though, $47K is quite small.

It's one program, out of many thousands of programs. I think we can agree that it's selected for how well it fits the point. Do you believe it was an unrepresentative outlier? If it was an unrepresentative outlier, how did it get approved in the first place?

USAID's 2025 budget was 34 billion dollars, a roughly 30% increase over the 2001-2024 average of 23 billion.

What's your estimate for the percentage of that .536 trillion dollars that amounted to something between conspicuous waste and taxpayer funding of Blue Tribe partisan political activity?

Why do you think this activity required a ~33% increase in 2025 specifically?

My first thought was inflation might explain a good chunk of it but the chart on wikipedia indicates the increase in USAID outpaces inflation (11.8 billion in 2001 should be equal to $21.13 billion in 2024), and also seems like USAID funds really started increasing in 2021. Also that 23 billion is the average after accounting for inflation in 2023 dollars. Wikipedia also says 2023 was an exception year with $16 billion in funds for Ukraine but even accounting for that 2023 had 43.79 - 16 = 27.79 billion which is above the average of 23 billion.

Considering under which admin USAID funding really ramped up I think it's fair to conclude it would've likely kept going up if Kama was president.

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