'We Love Him Because You Hate Him'
People, if they decide to, can tap the broad bipartisan sentiment against DOGE's USAID cuts. Just know the dynamic at play ...
Introduction: I wish I saved the link to the comment a month back by a user on LinkedIn, in response to a complaint about president-elect Trump. “We love him because you hate him” the 30-something male professional wrote, along with an elaboration.
But it’s true. I recall when I wasn’t speaking to someone in my life, upon the three-year mark I finally chanced on the epiphany that my anger with that person reinforced my bond with them.
Even when we’re getting along with others, fighting is connecting. So is debate, seeing plays, playing games and sports, breaking bread, etc. etc..
But how do you protest in this environment, where anger augments your adversaries’ love? I know this sounds audacious, but I propose limiting the complaints right now to those aimed at the unelected Elon Musk, who is unconstitutionally and violently cutting spending (see “Catch-up Civics for adults” below, for an explanation of what I mean.) (See also: Vocabulary: ‘mayhem’ below.) I proposed this idea to a Tesla-owning friend: to dress in dry-clean business casual and assist the Elon Musk protesters happening at dealerships across the U.S.A. with a “Tesla Owners Against King Elon” placard sign. In such fashion, he wouldn’t be mistaken for a crunchy hippy who protests all things Trump. My Tesla-owning friend didn’t balk. But that’s as far as we got.
When we’re living in different information silos, with short-reel video hypnotizing people into inaction, someone who is famous to one reality and infamous to the other to sufficient degrees floats to the top of the algorithm. And our government.
Their Reality: Information spread by 1) an October 2024 Joe Rogan guest named Mike Benz, 2) RFK Jr. and 3) Elon Musk asserts USAID mutated into a *woke mind virus* globalist influencer operation.
Reality: Let’s be humble (I know it’s hard) and acknowledge this lies somewhere between their reality and our reality. But no, it’s not a midpoint. Not even close.
Our reality: Russia president Vladimir Putin in 2012 successfully ordered USAID out of Moscow as he cracked down on free speech. USAID is an independent agency, e.g. a government-created agency that doesn’t answer to the president, but rather the Secretary of State. The U.S. State Department now is run by Marco Rubio who stands at 5’10”. President Trump bullied Rubio in the 2016 primaries by calling him “Little Marco”. USAID fights infectious diseases in other countries and as a byproduct keeps communism not to mention despotism at bay.
Contents:
Catch-up Civics for adults
Madeline Albright tried folding USAID into State Department in the 1990s
USAID
Vocabulary: chaos, mayhem, treason, beclown, antivaxx
Who’s going to school ‘Little Marco’ on heightism?
Kill trees please (use paper)
This week’s acts of attunement
News not covered in this issue
Catch-up Civics for adults
It’s not politics.
Is this a teachable moment or what? After someone – in the Ronald Reagan years – pulled Civics from public school curriculum where I lived, few from my cohort down learned much about this subject. Article 1, section 9 of the Constitution of the United States grants Congress “power of the purse”. What is that? Read on.
Feb 14 Congress, not the president, decides on government spending - a constitutional law professor explains how the ‘power of the purse’ works (The Conversation) - “Historically, the British Parliament’s control over government funds created a powerful check on the crown, and Parliament developed the practice of annual appropriations to ensure that it would always have leverage over royal policy. Reflecting this history, James Madison, the fourth president and a leading figure in the Constitutional Convention, wrote in the Federalist Papers that the power of the purse was ‘the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.’ This sort of leverage over policy still matters.”
Feb 04 U.S. government officials privately warn Musks blitz appears illegal | The billionaires DOGE team has launched an all-out assault on federal agencies, triggering numerous legal objections. (Washington Post) -
📺 Feb 16 VIDEO: What Trump, Musk moves on USAID could mean for other government agencies | 60 Minutes (CBS 60 Minutes) - Republican Andrew Nazios former head of USAID said: “We're creating a system that violates the separation of powers. I don't want to be too pessimistic but it does appear we're heading into a constitutional crisis”
Left as an exercise for the reader: What is a constitutional crisis?
Madeline Albright tried folding USAID into State Department in the 1990s
Feb 04 What Elon Musk Said Is a Bold-Faced Lie | A former Republican director of USAID says the agency is critical to U.S. interests and cant be abolished or folded into the State Department. (Politico) - “The other problem is that the State Department’s time horizon is six months, a year, two years, and that’s it. For USAID it is 10 years, 15 years, 20 years. You do not build institutions in a couple of years. [Former Secretary of State] Madeleine Albright tried to do the same thing [fold USAID into State] in the 1990s. So this is not new.”
USAID
Feb 12 White House fires USAID watchdog amid funding freeze controversy (WAPT ABC 16 Jackson MS) -
Feb 04 USAID and the Media in a Time of Monsters | What the aid funding freeze means for independent journalism around the world. (Columbia Journalism Review) -
Feb 16 'Islamic State Will Capitalize' After Musk's DOGE Shutters USAID (Newsweek) -
Feb 16 The abrupt end of USAID-funded clinical trials is profoundly unethical (STAT News) -
Feb 16 Letters to the Editor—Klyde Warren Park, White Rock Lake, USAID, journalism (Dallas Morning News) -
Feb 16 [Translated: ] How Trump's war against WHO and USAID endangers global health (El Diario | Spain) -
Feb 16 [Translated: ] The suspension of USAID funds, the last great blow to the Latin American independent press (El Pais | Spain) - [Translated: ] The same message from Washington arrived in the email of several media directors throughout Latin America on the morning of January 27, 2025. The solemn and brief announcement called for an urgent meeting in the early afternoon.
Feb 15 Kansas lawmakers push to resurrect 'Food for Peace' amidst efforts to dismantle USAID (KCUR 89.3 Kansas City MO) - “When Elon Musk at least temporarily shuttered USAID, a program within it called Food for Peace immediately shut down. That's sparked anxiety from Afghanistan to South Sudan to here in Kansas, the so-called breadbasket of the world. KIM BARNES: I'm Kim Barnes. I'm the CFO of Pawnee County Co-op in Larned, Kansas.
Feb 14 U of I soybean lab’s pending closure due to USAID cuts hinders global disease research (NPR Illinois) -
Feb 14 Dismantling of USAID impacts Colorado organizations, small businesses (Denver Post) - “Hundreds of CEOs and staffers from Colorado-based organizations with life-saving, humanitarian missions gathered in a Five Points office space this week to weep, vent and strategize.”
Feb 14 COLUMN: Woke waste at USAID perfect place for Trump, Musk to chop (Las Vegas Review-Journal) - Saunders is a Republican columnist who once worked for the San Francisco Chronicle. To back up her claim she’s quoting former and long-time heroin addict RFK Jr.
Feb 14 Judge sets a 5-day deadline for the Trump administration to start lifting its USAID funding freeze (KIRO CBS Telemundo Seattle WA) -
Feb 14 Letter: USAID assures U.S. security and saves millions of lives (Concord Monitor NH) -
Feb 14 DepEd to 'exhaust all means' to save programs funded by USAID (The Phillipine Star) -
Feb 13 USAID funding freeze halts food security and ag research at Midwest university labs (KCUR 89.3 Kansas City MO) -
Feb 13 Trump's cuts to USAID threaten UNR’s global partnerships and research (Las Vegas Sun | NV) -
Feb 13 USAID funding freeze disrupts global tuberculosis control efforts (CIDRAP University of Minnesota) -
Feb 12 USAID staffers describe colleagues abandoned in violence in Congo as DOGE ends assistance programs (WTOP Radio Maryland) -
Feb 12 UT national security scholars: TX lawmakers in DC must halt destruction of USAID | Opinion (Austin American-Statesman) -
Feb 12 [Translated: ] Women will be the most affected by the dismantling of USAID (El Pais | Spain) -
Feb 11 Vatican charity says Trump administration's gutting of USAID is 'reckless' and could kill millions (Albequerque Journal NM) -
Feb 11 Defunding USAID is a costly mistake that will weaken America and its allies | Opinion (Commercial Appeal Tennessee) -
Feb 10 Volunteers are now tracking what's already been lost in the USAID freeze (WRAL NBC 5 Raleigh NC) -
Feb 10 Samaritan’s Purse continues international relief efforts despite USAID uncertainty (WSOC ABC 9 Charlotte NC) -
Feb 10 We Need USAID To Compete With China | Opinion (Newsweek) -
Feb 10 FactCheck: Sorting out the facts on ‘waste & abuse’ at USAID (Tucson Sentinel AZ) -
Feb 10 Elon Musk Pushes False Claim Ex-USAID Chief Earned $23 Million: The Biggest DOGE Hoaxes Spread On X (Forbes) -
Feb 10 USAID watchdog warns of lack of oversight of $8.2 billion in unspent aid (Wisconsin State Journal) -
Feb 10 Elon Musk USAID takeover threatens Louisiana rice industry (The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate) -
Feb 10 USAID is stripped of its lease and staffers turned away from DC headquarters (Las Vegas Sun | NV) -
Feb 09 Without USAID's Food for Peace, Kansas grain elevators have no market for sorghum (Topeka Capital-Journal) -
Feb 09 Trump is dismantling USAID and disrupting American families in the process | Letters (Tennesseean) -
Feb 09 Letters to the Editor: USAID, air traffic controllers, U.S. Rep. Al Green, heart trouble (Dallas Morning News) -
Feb 08 How USAID freeze could be the most catastrophic for women and girls (WVIT NBC 30 New Britain CT) -
Feb 08 China Steps In to Replace USAID (Newsweek) -
Feb 08 USAID (LinkedIn/) - “It strikes me that this analysis risks conflating foreign aid with USAID, the agency. I think many in the global dev community, including myself, would agree that foreign aid dependency is a real concern, that aid flows can be politically motivated, and that not enough funding reaches local orgs. But these are critiques of foreign assistance, in general, and not just USAID itself.”
Feb 08 33 USAID-funded projects hang in the balance (The Phillipine Star) - 33 USAID-funded projects hang in the balance
Feb 07 Ending USAID programs could undercut Trump's goal of slashing migration to the U.S., groups say (NBC News) - “In Colombia, a group with funds from the U.S. Agency for International Development helps employ Venezuelans who fled their country’s authoritarian regime and economic crisis. In Haiti, another program that gets USAID money is ready to distribute millions of tons of bean seeds to farmers and tools for fishermen that would help sustain families amid the countryās widespread hunger, violence and instability.”
Feb 07 Claims about Politico, ‘DEI musical’ and USAID spending distort the facts (Austin American-Statesman) -
Feb 07 Anti-USAID Video Shared by Musk Marks Russian Propaganda Triumph (Newsweek) -
Feb 07 Map Shows Countries Welcoming USAID Shutdown (Newsweek) -
Feb 07 Iowa agriculture industry leaders react to USAID changes (KCCI CBS 8 Des Moines) -
Feb 07 No, Chelsea Clinton, Ben Stiller And Politico Didn’t Get Millions From USAID: The Biggest DOGE Hoaxes Spread On X (Forbes) -
Feb 07 Shutting USAID deprives the U.S. of a vital foreign policy tool (Japan Times) -
Feb 07 Truth Be Told: Trump administration's claim of USAID waste is oversimplified (Wisconsin State Journal) -
Feb 07 'Toxic ideology': Former USAID appointee offers firsthand look at government DEI (KBOI CBS 2 Boise ID) - “Diversity programs and the governmentās foreign aid agency are both in the crosshairs of President Donald Trump’s new administration.Now, a former Trump appointee is sharing his experiences with both.”
Feb 04 Musk Falsely Claims USAID funds the BBC (X.com/ElonMusk) - “BBC is literally state-funded media”
Feb 04 U.S. government officials privately warn Musk’s blitz appears illegal | The billionaires DOGE team has launched an all-out assault on federal agencies, triggering numerous legal objections. (Washington Post) -
Sep 18 2012 USAid ordered out of Moscow as Putin's protest crackdown continues | American agency for international development has until 1 October to shut its office in Moscow (The Guardian) -
Vocabulary: chaos, mayhem, treason, beclown, antivaxx
Please look up the word “mayhem” as it’s a much better descriptor of the DOGE funding cuts than is the word “chaos.”
Please look up the word “treason” as you may be pressured to commit this if you’re working in contract with the government, you never know. And unlike President Trump you don’t have presidential criminal immunity bestowed upon him by the Supreme Court only last year.
The more I learn about RFK Jr., the more I see this antivaxxer’s confirmation as Health and Human Services secretary a beclowning of our country’s once-renowned reputation for integrity in science and health.
ANTIVAXX: Because news outlets continue to conflate the predator antivaxxers with their prey — the privately antivaccine parents — the TracingVRL editing team defined antivaxx in the Glossary tab. In short, you spell antivaxx with an ‘a’ at the start and a double-cross at the end, a-n-t-i-v-a-xx when referring to an evangelist who either unintentionally or intentionally tradeoff-skews facts about vaccines. To tradeoff-skew is to amplify the risks and downplay the benefits of a proven vaccine such as the combination measles, mumps & rubella vaccine also known as MMR.
Who’s going to school ‘Little Marco’ on heightism?
When TracingVRL artist-in-residence Gato Pescado created the paper dolls of two venture capitalists for the March 2023 issue of this newsletter “On Heightism” few people knew who Marc Andreessen was. Just seven months later, Andreessen practiced ironic transparency by publishing an overlong infamous document he called the techno-optimist manifesto, making himself into a household name.
On Heightism
Introduction: It’s becoming more clear with each month we got the “Roaring Twenties” all wrong.
May 17 2023 Disturbing Bromances (Virginia Heffernan’s Newsletter) - [TracingVRL says: please upgrade to paid to read this, then downgrade after getting this in front of Little Marco Rubio’s eyes. Thank you. ] “The workings of these radioactive dyads are almost always a black box to people like me, who are not party to them. But from Eisner and Korda I learned their hallmarks: The “love at first sight” lightning bolt. The role of physicality, including height, eyes, hair. The setting aside of common sense, moral compass, and even self-interest. The enormous costs. And finally: the regrets.”
Kill trees please
Every week I think I don’t need to do a thirty minute free-write in my red Mead Composition Notebook using pencil and paper. But using one’s hands relieves anxiety. And so every week when I put off the screen-break, delay the free-write, my thoughts start to jumble together again, the fourth letter in a word jumps to the second position, making a-t-t-u-n-e-m-e-n-t into a-u-t-t-e-n-e-m-t and I deceive myself into thinking another scroll of bluesky is taking action to better my life.
Reading from a newspaper every Sunday is an attention-span reset. I get a paper that comes with comics and a great entertainment section, a revamped ethnic food section aimed at budget-conscious diners, a Letters to the Editor section, a most engaging theater critic and a decent front section. And after only 90 minutes, I’ve consumed the same amount of content that would take me thirteen hours to find through a screen, and I feel 10 times more capable and oriented.
Another way to attention-span reset is to get a dead-tree magazine like Wired or Popular Mechanics (my favorite) that comes only once in a while. It’s like a friend in your mailbox, a soon-to-be barren rectangle cavern if DOGE cuts the United States Postal Service to a nub as is planned in Project 2025.
I’m not saying you should take a John Deere feller-buncher and then deceptively lobby government after every embercast-caused urban wildfire that you need to pave roads and clear-cut Sequoia National Park which won’t actually prevent fires but will earn Big Timber some logging rights, but just use some biodegradable paper once in a blue moon. Paper.
Paper. A medium which disappeared in late 1970’s Iran when the Shah took over, as documented in Reading Lolita in Tehran. Paper, the shortage of which forced German novelist Hans Fellada to use existing books in his home library to pen between the lines of those books’ existing text of the story Otto and Elise Hampel the postcard activists who paid with their lives for communicating with their neighbors during WWII. The novel was called Every Man Dies Alone and it’s really good but you have to read a rough draft as Falada died before he could revise it. I own a physical copy.
My point is the young’uns have been receiving a lot of fear-mongering that if they use paper they’re not just going to be left behind, they’re killing the planet. And the middle-aged have been harangued for using paper with the myth that it means they’re not “tech natives” or “tech savvy” which is so tired by now only school teachers are falling for it.
This week’s acts of attunement
Lack of shared stories and demise of the Fairness Doctrine hastens a public into anomie, which often leads to civic breakdown and violent war.
Act #1: A way to counter anomie is with shared stories. My first act of attunement was to watch the first episode of the new season of the popular show The White Lotus. It’s a campy accessible thriller-comedy that smartly and authentically delivers social commentary without being orthodox about which “side” of the political spectrum it’s on.
Act #2: There is a) DEI, then there’s b) DEI overkill, which we never heard about because without the Fairness Doctrine, and with Google’s advertising monopoly, we don’t have many common-view news spaces. A journalist has to “grow her audience” if they want to cover their costs. With a few exceptions, under these conditions growing your audience often means working your tail off creating outrage content to your political “side” or being an under-the-radar influencer’s influencer like yours truly.
Because DEI is getting so much traction for President Trump as a wedge, I read this article about DEI overkill in the New York Times. It’s very well done. Here’s a comment from that article:
Oct 16 2024 Comment on The University of Michigan Doubled Down on D.E.I. What Went Wrong? (New York Times) - “I’ve spent the last 20 years on numerous college campuses, starting as a student then continuing as a professional. My biggest observation is how people don’t talk to each other anymore. You mentioned the increase in complaints and that’s happening on campuses across the country. What’s worst is that so many students see administrative or disciplinary actions as solutions. It’s a mischaracterization of the problem, I dont still DEI programs or political ideologies as the issue here but rather people no longer know how to resolve issues through civil discourse, or more plainly said no one is talking to each other.”
Act #3: I by no means want harm done to transgender adults or youth. But the bathroom at the Westfield Mall in San Francisco, CA is a mess of a confusion of privacy rights and transgender politics. I’ve abruptly made this mistake a handful of times: I get off BART for a bio break, rush into the women’s side of the stalls, then emerge buttoning my trousers only to be caught off guard that I’m in a coed shared space with the women’s bank of sinks facing the mens’. I call this the “bathroom that broke San Francisco” silently to myself every time I read of a corporation like Wells Fargo announcing they’re relocating headquarters to another city.
I also recommend someone do a story on the chilling effect of transgender youth among parents. One parent wants to wait to start hormone blockers and stands firm the child must use “they/them” pronouns before they’re sure they want to transition. The other parent says they should start blockers and immediately respect the he/him or she/her transitioned pronoun preferences ASAP before puberty starts picking up speed.
News not covered in this issue
The continuation of news avoidance; hostile government cost-cutting, which is likely unconstitutional, at 1) the Federal Aviation Administration FAA, 2) the National Parks Service and c) many, many government departments not named in this section; grifting enrich_dentists_act bills by state lawmakers in response to RFK Jr’s confirmation; much negative reaction to RFK Jr’s confirmation; reaction to cuts at the National Institutes of Health (NIH); multiple comparisons to current American events with those of other democracies that fell into autocracies, dictatorships, overall cruddiness; the inspiring group Exreme Weather Survivors links Los Angeles residents recovering from the Pacific Palisades and Eaton fires with survivors of past hurricanes and fires for the most heartening coming together I’ve heard today. And many more news items not mentioned here.
Feb 15 Vince Gilligan Calls for Writers to Cut Back on Villain Stories Amid Current Political Climate: “They’ve Become Aspirational” (Hollywood Reporter) - [TracingVRL says: Vince Gilligan created my favorite show Better Call Saul of which the lead characters are rumored to resemble those from Dosteyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The show only works if you watch to the very end. Ditto for The Sopranos and The Wire. ]