February 11, 2025
After USAID, America Will Never Be the Same
By Christopher Chantrill

Did you notice something in the last week? Our liberal friends perked up and found themselves a new enemy. Previously, every card-carrying liberal knew that Donald Trump was the enemy. But that was before the midnight raid on USAID under Commando Bro Musk. How dare, how dare Elon Musk send his racist sexist tech kids to bomb the sacred groves of USAID!

I have to admit: I had no idea about USAID. It took Musk and his tech kids to wake me up to the fact that USAID is a slush fund -- the slush fund -- for our educated ruling class. And all the best people have served their time at USAID and benefited from its largess. Does our ruling class take care of its friends or what!

And the WSJ doxxer Katherine Long that doxxed Big Balls was once an intern at USAID!

Oh yeah! USAID does wonderful things for the poor and oppressed of the world. And there’s a heckuva bridge available right now, real cheap, in Baltimore.

I must admit that four years ago when I first wrote about Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and the political as the distinction between friend and enemy, saying “Liberals: Try Reading Nazi Carl Schmitt!” I really had no idea about all this. That’s because, even though I talk and think about politics all the time, I don’t believe in politics, don’t believe it ever solves anything.

For our liberal friends, politics is how they are going to save the world. And that means that anyone who opposes their political agenda is not just an enemy but an evil enemy. I just think of liberals as fools and knaves, and USAID alums as corrupt fools and knaves.

Enough of enemies, let’s talk about the question of the friend.

What do you do to your enemy? You defeat him, or arrest him, or imprison him, or lawfare him.

What do you do to your friend? You gift him. Hello USAID.

I have come to realize over the last four years as a student of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt that in politics the first thing that matters is waging war on the enemy, whether it’s racists or TERFs or Trump. Today, it’s Elon and that Big Balls kid. The other thing is shoveling taxpayers’ money at your supporters, from USAID to Green New Deal. Nothing else matters. Justice? Diversity? Equity? Inclusion? Reparations? It’s all about the money.

Whatabout the Deficit, you ask? Good point, citizen: we need an Inflation Reduction Act to shovel money at climate change. But whatabout inflation? Good point: see above.

So, the question in Trump Era 2.0 is: what do we do now?

I have a three-part answer to this question: Who, What, and How.

The first question is: Who. Who should be our rulers?

The simple answer is: Not the educated class. The record is clear. Under the rule of the educated class in the last century or so we have seen two gigantic world wars, two gigantic economic wipeouts with famines, one each in Russia and China. Then there are the numerous political purges from Nazi Germany’s war on Jews to Soviet Russia’s war on kulaks to Maoist China’s Cultural Revolution, to our own McCarthyism and now DEI Wokeism. Then there’s endless incompetent economic policy, from the FDR New Deal to the LBJ guns-and-butter to the Carter stagflation to the Obama stimulus to the Bidenflation. The time has come to retire the failed educated class and start again.

And a change in the ruling class seems to be happening. Tech bros, anyone?

The second question is: What. What should the government do?

Right now, the four big things the government does -- pensions, health care, welfare, education -- are all a mess. The government’s pension plan is broke. The government’s health care plans are stupidly expensive and overregulated. The government’s welfare plan has produced feral, fatherless children and deaths of despair. The government’s education system teaches woke ideology but barely teaches children to read and write. It’s time to try something else.

The third question is: How? How should the government operate? We don’t know. A century ago the experts told us that a professional bureaucracy was the way to administer and regulate the state and avoid a “spoils system.” But Hayek said that the administrative state could not work because it lacks the bandwidth. And Stigler told us that the regulatory state could not work because of “regulatory capture” by the regulated. And now we know that the administrative state and USAID are a spoils system on steroids. It’s time to try something else.

We Americans can argue about everything in the world. We can argue about who should be the rulers. We can argue about what government should do. We can argue about how to make government work. But let’s not be enemies. And let’s not trust anyone that ever got a dime from USAID.