Trump’s NGO Apocalypse

In popular culture, the word ‘apocalypse’ means ‘the end of the world,’ as portrayed in the Book of Revelation. But etymologically, it comes from the Greek word meaning ‘unveiling.’ What Donald Trump is doing to the unelected NGO-cracy in Washington now is an apocalypse in both senses of the term. His team, led by Elon Musk, is uncovering massive state funding, through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), of NGOs and activist groups that serve as de facto arms of globalism, and destroying them by taking their taxpayer money away. 

Most Americans have never heard of USAID, and if they have, imagine that it is a humanitarian agency dedicated to providing disaster relief and doing things like helping poor Africans build hospitals and water wells. And some of its massive budget ($40 billion in 2023) does go to worthy projects like that. 

But that’s not why Trump has targeted USAID, whose funding has been put on temporary hold, and which is in the process of being shut down by executive order, with its responsibilities relocated to the State Department. Trump’s people have uncovered a sprawling network of funding for NGOs that advance not humanitarian relief and development, but activists who spread globalist progressivism worldwide, and who even work to undermine elected governments disfavored by Washington. It’s the use of soft power to effect regime change.

In a long, must-listen interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, the former State Department official and free speech crusader Mike Benz outlines in detail how the Deep State uses USAID to spread globalist ideology, including progressive cultural values, and shut down populist politicians and initiatives. 

Here’s how it works. In 2023, then-USAID administrator Samantha Power visited Budapest, and met with activists opposed to the elected government of Viktor Orbán. She left a $20 million gift to be distributed among “pro-democracy” and “transparency” groups, including those that “improve the lives of LGBTQI+ people in Hungary.” That’s a chunk of change that can go very far in a small country of only 10 million. And it was clearly an attempt to seed a Color Revolution in this democratic NATO ally, whose nationalist government has been a thorn in the side of globalists in Washington and Brussels.

Over the years, USAID has committed millions to George Soros’s Open Society Foundation to effect political and cultural change in Eastern Europe. One of the targeted countries was the Republic of Macedonia, a culturally conservative nation that is two-thirds Orthodox and one-third Muslim. Between 2012 and 2016, the Soros Army in that country received $5 million from USAID to field culture-war mercenaries to fight what it termed “the ruling party’s promotion of a socially conservative, exclusionary agenda that relies on traditional gender ideology.”

Were the American people aware that $300,000 of their tax dollars were going to queer Macedonia? Not likely. But there’s more.

Back in 2015, USAID partnered with Soros to translate, publish, and distribute Rules For Radicals, the notorious Saul Alinsky revolution manual, in the Republic of Macedonia, which at the time was governed by conservatives. That year, Macedonia was roiled by anti-government protests, some of them violent. 

Again, USAID has not only spent a fortune to advance globalist politics. It has also been a financial generator of cultural revolution. The White House recently released a selected list of far-left initiatives the agency has funded, including:

• $1.5 million to “advance diversity equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities”
• $70,000 for production of a “DEI musical” in Ireland
• $2.5 million for electric vehicles for Vietnam
• $47,000 for a “transgender opera” in Colombia
• $32,000 for a “transgender comic book” in Peru
• $2 million for sex changes and “LGBT activism” in Guatemala

Last year in Bratislava, at a conference after the U.S. election, a Slovak conservative told me he hopes the incoming Trump administration will wake up to how the U.S. funds a network of progressive NGOs advocating against what he believes are Slovak national interests. For just one small example of how ‘development’ money goes from USAID to back cultural revolution, The American Spectator reports that USAID has given money to the heavily Catholic country: 

• “to help promote and protect the human rights of LGBTQI+ people in Slovakia;”
• “to create a supportive environment for Slovakia’s LGBTQI+ minority;” and
• “to support diversity, acceptance, and solidarity towards LGBTQ+ people and their families in eastern Slovakia.”

Ireland is not a country one would have expected to need American development grants, but as the White House accurately said, $70,000 in US taxpayer money paid for a musical show that, in the words of the USAID grant, advocates “the U.S. and Irish shared values of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.” 

The tentacles of USAID’s funding of the NGO industrial complex go incomprehensibly far. It turns out that the second-largest funder of BBC Media Action, the philanthropic arm of the British state broadcaster, was—surprise!—the American taxpayer. A BBC Media Action statement this week said 8% of its annual funding comes from USAID. According to BBC Media Action, its purpose is to work in 30 countries globally to build “stronger democracies, a safer, more habitable planet and inclusive societies.”

The organization’s website says, “We also [address] discrimination and harmful social norms affecting people in LGBTQI+ communities, and [strive] for diverse and meaningful representation of these groups.” Of course they do. But one doubts very much that they care about “diverse and meaningful representation” in the media of any group whose values would be alien at Davos or at meetings of university faculties.

While BBC Media Action emphasizes that it is separate from the BBC’s news division, USAID has also given money to the mainstream liberal online media outlet Politico, which is highly influential in Washington circles. The media company received a total of $8.1 million in USAID money under the Biden administration, which it also covered. Though it might have been a coincidence, after Trump suspended USAID funding, Politico temporarily could not meet its payroll. In any case, in this Tuesday report about Trump’s mass layoff of USAID workers, Politico neglected to mention that it receives millions in USAID funding.

You get the idea. What Donald Trump and Elon Musk are doing is gutting the globalist hydra by cutting off its lifeblood: U.S. government funding. It is to be hoped that funding will be restored for USAID projects that truly serve humanitarian purposes: hospitals, vaccination programs, infrastructure, and more. But whenever you hear wailing and gnashing of teeth over how heartless Trump is taking charity away from the world’s poor, remember that those stories are written and broadcast by the kind of people who define ‘democracy’ as outcomes that they and their social class prefer. 

It should not have come to this. But then, if USAID had not given itself a role as a worldwide funder of cultural and political revolution to support globalism and the American Empire, it would not have. This is not the end of the world, but it is the end of a world, in which unaccountable left-wing activists and their captured institutions advance radical programs with no accountability to the taxpayers funding their folly.