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Gawain Kripke's avatar

Conservatives are more skeptical of aid and USAID, but also play a key role in the coalition sustaining it. Saying conservatives killed foreign aid is post hoc rationalization. In reality is was conspiracy-minded cranks with personal vendettas and weird ideological bents. https://niawag.substack.com/p/conservatives-didnt-kill-foreign

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Hoffnung's avatar

Regarding:

>"USAID is unpopular among conservatives because it spread pro-LGBT messaging. I think pro-aid-reform people should have reached out proactively to conservatives who have these concerns. We could validate the concerns (DEI musicals in Ireland are indeed a dumb thing to spend money on) and provide a framework for criticizing them that doesn’t mean defunding important global health aid."

From my perspective that is just one example of "sub-partisan political activity" that USAID seemed to be funding. Some of what I had heard about, and been outraged about, was related to pushing gun control (apparently in foreign countries but in a way that would be expected to "spill over" to the USA, or in a way that would provide for a slush fund that would support a program in the USA). The other side of this is cases where after USAID was suddenly cut, various domestic political left-ish wing groups suddenly seemed to have funding problems for unclear reasons.

So basically I really want the lifesaving food / water / medicine stuff to come back (maybe with better auditing against slushfundery and patronage networks) but I really want it to be restricted to either not include this ideological stuff or, well, to give my side and equal cut of it.

(this is another thing that faces the issue where the 2A on establishment of religion starts to look awkward when there are many not technically religious ideologies around.)

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