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PaperclipPerfector  21hr ago (text post)   3008 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 5, 2026

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Back in 2025, DOGE axed USAID and, according to partisans on the left and right, the results have been monumental.

To the left, USAID was somehow singlehandedly keeping millions of Africans alive. The loss of USAID resulted in their deaths. Wikipedia, the fallen one, reports this:

The impact of the actions taken by the USAID on global health is wide-reaching.[34] A study published in June 2025 estimated that funding cuts and the abolition of the agency could result in more than 14 million preventable deaths by 2030, including 4.5 million children under 5 years old.[9] Another estimate (by epidemiologist and health economist Brooke Nichols) is that over a period of one year from when they began, the cuts will result in the deaths of as many as 262,915 adults and 518,428 children.[35]

Obviously this is farcical on its face. And nearly 18 months later, there is no evidence of the massive death wave that was predicted.

Not to be outdone, the right has its own version of a USAID conspiracy theory: that closing USAID somehow killed leftism in South America.

Since USAID was shut down, seven countries in Latin America have held Presidential elections (Bolivia, Ecuador, Honduras, Chile, Costa Rica, Peru, and Colombia). All seven have elected a President who is right of center. Brazil now remains as the strongest center of leftism in Latin America. But it looks like they might flip as well. In the first round of voting, Flávio Bolsonaro beat Lula by nearly 2 points. They now advance to the runoff.

Conservatives on X are crowing about how this shows that USAID was propping up leftist governments in Latin America. But... I just don't see the mechanism. The money spent was too small. The programs too ineffectual.

The likelier truth about USAID is, like most government programs, it was essentially useless. The biggest political effect is that it allowed leftists a sinecure with good pay and benefits. And cutting it was worth it for that reason alone. But did cutting USAID kill people in Africa or bring down communists in Latin America? Press D to doubt.

At least for the "killed people in Africa" claim, the numbers most cited about how many people cutting it would kill were beyond bogus to the point of what I would consider blatant academic malpractice: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-4eQZdxlPCU

Yes, and if true, it would be trivially easy for people to raise money and save those lives. The fact that no one really made an effort shows a lack of belief. If relatively small amounts of money is all it takes to save African lives, they all would have been saved long ago.

The fact that no one really made an effort shows a lack of belief.

I would argue that EA has been trying to pick up some of the slack. Likely they favored the most effective measures, but it seems to me that they stopped because they ran out of funds rather than because they thought that most of the things USAID funded were net negative

The truth is that before Trump, USAID was spending 12-15G$/a on global healthcare and EA (with a total budget of 1.5-2G$/a over all cause areas) is simply not in the position to simply replace the gap with some spare change.

Was there some USAID funded NGO delivering books with inspiring stories about racial justice to some structurally disadvantaged girls? Probably. Was this where the median dollar was spent? Unlikely, it seems more likely that it got into vaccination campaigns and the like.

In the past, USAID was part of a broader strategy of the US painting itself as the good guy. Sure, sometimes they would bomb the shit out of you and steal your oil, but overall they were not a terrible hegemon as these things go. Trump does not care about USAID as a tool of soft power because he does not understand soft power. His levers of foreign policy are tariffs and the US military.

In the past, USAID was part of a broader strategy of the US painting itself as the good guy.

USAID has been, since its early days, a tool for the CIA to do all of the things they are not legally allowed to do since the Church Comittee kneecapped their dirty tricks department.

If you wanted to overthrow a nominally democratic government, you called USAID.

This was a well-known talking point among the 70s and 80s hippies, but they seem to have conveniently forgotten about it recently.

The problem with USAID, is just like the Roman legions, it began to turn its attention inward and become a player in domestic politics.

USAID has been, since its early days, a tool for the CIA to do all of the things they are not legally allowed to do since the Church Comittee kneecapped their dirty tricks department.

Yeah but it seems like in a bunch of places that what originally started as a local CIA office with clearish aims 50-60 years ago then eventually got swallowed into this huge NGO complex and run by people with do-gooderism aims but insufficient understanding of what the projects they're suddenly taking over are actually supposed to be doing

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