Hearing your average Joe suddenly start talking about USAID using the same talking points and tone as a Twitter Marxist Leninist tankie was indeed wild

The most ironic part about the entire USAID debacle was the complete failure of the new right to understand why American soft power was engineered that way, and what it was doing.

It was like an even more hamfisted change management process than the neocons upsetting their apple carts, before they understood how things were balanced on them.

Not to say anything shouldn't be changed, but jesus... folks need to have a little humility and curiosity -- try to understand what the folks before them were attempting to do and how.

Much of the DOGE-driven chaos is just executing Project 2025 objectives. The justification of course is retroactive. The objectives are domestic and political.

"Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem" has been a Republican cornerstone for decades. None of the DOGE stuff should be the least bit surprising, and to say that they fail to understand what these agencies do is to miss the point entirely. They don't care. Government agencies are axiomatically bad and shutting them down is axiomatically good, that's it.