In the US there is supposed to be a strict separation of church and state, so you would think that the state would not be funding church work. Think again. The bishop who gave President Trump a lecture on refugees is part of a church which received $57 million for helping resettle refugees.

They say that the best disinfectant is light. In that case, the American government seems to be going through a deep cleansing, and the revelations about USAID and government spending have certainly been enlightening!

Until recently I suspect very few of us would have known anything about USAID (United States Agency for International Development), and yet this US agency had an annual budget of $50 billion (more than that of the CIA and State Department combined).

USAID? It sounds wonderful. Billions of US dollars going to help the poor, the starving and the sick. Only a cruel-hearted fascist could object and even seek to cancel it. Donald Trump’s new government is now accused of enabling billionaires to rob the poor – through Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). But dig beneath the outraged tweets and a most astonishing story comes to light.  It is almost unbelievable.

What do they spend the money on? The purpose is to promote soft power. Although there was good work done in genuine aid, significant sums were spent supporting foreign NGOs who would further the aims of the US government – largely the cultural imperialistic aims of the progressives who believe that their social doctrines alone are valid.

So much has come to light and the list of causes it was supporting is astonishing. For example, $2 million was given to fund Covid-19 research in Wuhan, some of which went to the Academy of Military Medical Sciences in China. The US paid the Chinese military to develop ‘gain of function’ in a virus which then escaped and caused tens of millions of deaths throughout the world.

It has also been claimed that USAID funded numerous journalists – including allegedly $20 million to journalists to dig up dirt on Rudy Giuliani. If true, hundreds of journalists throughout the world have been funded as ‘aid’.

The dangers are obvious: the US progressives will only fund those journalists who say what they want them to say. It is woke cultural imperialism – at the expense of the US taxpayer.

There are numerous examples of this – perhaps none more insidious than the claim that $473 million was given to Internews, an agency which funds nine out of ten media outlets in the Ukraine. Tanya Lukyanova’s investigation into this is revealing.

When White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt highlighted some of the projects being funded the clip of her press conference went viral: “$1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbia’s workplaces, $70,000 for production of a DEI musical in Ireland, $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia, $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru.”

Some fact checkers immediately sought to undermine the claims by pointing out that some of them were not from USAID but other US government departments, but that misses the point. It’s not just USAID; the waste in other US government departments is just as astonishing – as college kids who get to power act like children let loose in someone else’s chocolate factory.

Why spend $10 million creating transgender mice, rats and monkeys – including $2.5 million studying the fertility of transgender mice? Why give over $164 million to Islamist organisations?

Why are US taxpayers paying for a British charity to intimidate and bully British institutions and companies into accepting their ideology? The US Global Equality Fund, which focuses on ‘advancing LGBTI rights around the world’, gave Stonewall more than £500,000 in the past three years, making them Stonewall’s biggest donors.

When you look through the various files and reports that are coming out, there is enough material to keep a satirist surrealist going for months. Take the example of the British charity, Turquoise Mountain which promotes craft-making in Afghanistan. Among some of their other work, the film Bitter Lake shows a Turquoise Mountain woman lecturing Afghan women on the significance of Marcel Duchamp’s inverted urinal in an art gallery. Elon Musk has now stopped the $1 million they were due to get – much to the tearful disgust of the elitist podcaster Rory Stewart, whose wife runs the charity.

In a blistering article, Brendan O’Neill explains the real problem with this ‘soft power’ aid.

“For that’s what USAID’s funding frenzy really represented. It wasn’t just dumb and wasteful. It wasn’t just proof that America’s overclass who controlled the purse strings were morally a million miles away from the working men and women who filled the purse. It was also a kind of soft imperialism, the foisting of the eccentric ideologies of a self-righteous new empire on to the benighted nations of the Earth. Where the old colonialists brought the Bible and common law, the new ones brought genderfluidity and correct-think…”

Read More