American taxpayers are no longer subsidizing foreign media once funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), prompting leftwing concern over the potential impact on global journalism and “democracy.”
USAID’s 2023 fact sheet, taken offline due to the hold, boasted the agency supported 6,200 journalists, 707 news outlets, 279 media-sector civil society organizations, the Columbia Journalism Review reported.
“We have articles scheduled until the end of January, but after that, if we haven’t found solutions, we won’t be able to publish anymore,” a journalist from a Belarusian reporter told RWB.
Anna Babinets, CEO of a media outlet based in Kyiv, echoed the Belarusian. “At Slidstvo.Info, 80% of our budget is affected,” she said.
As the savings enraged foreign media, it caused great concern among Democrats, who claim USAID’s work is imperative.
The agency’s work includes many radical left agenda items, such as $1.5 million to “advance diversity equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities,”$2.5 million for electric vehicles for Vietnam, $2 million for sex changes and “LGBT activism” in Guatemala, and $6 million to fund tourism in Egypt.
“The programs that have been frozen provide vital support to projects that strengthen media, transparency, and democracy,” Clayton Weimers, executive director of RWB USA, claimed in a statement. “President Trump justified this order by charging – without evidence – that a so-called ‘foreign aid industry’ is not aligned with U.S. interests.”
Globalists claim those impacted by the cuts are journalists countering Iranian and Russian propaganda, but taxpayers argue the USAID, reportedly a shell organization for CIA messaging, spent taxpayer money that pushed a left-wing narrative.
“USAID, like the National Endowment for Democracy, are well-documented CIA fronts that are designed to manipulate other countries’ internal politics for the benefits of DC elites and nobody else in the US. Both agencies have wrought destruction and can’t die soon enough,” Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald said on X.
J. Michael Waller, author of “Big Intel: How the CIA & FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains,” said that “USAID is not a front for the CIA. It’s worse than that.”
“USAID became its own unaccountable covert operations agency,” he said. “USAID ran covert ops without a presidential finding as required by law.”
Elon Musk posted: “USAID has been paying media organizations to publish their propaganda.”
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.
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