How USAID Rules the World

A Russian prostitute, a German terrorist, a Texan lawyer, and a failed children’s book author walk into a bar. It sounds like the setup to a joke because none of those people seem to have anything in common, but they do. They’re all sponsored by the US government, and at least partially owe their success to American tax dollars.

The best targets for USAID sponsorship are people on the fringes of society, or feel unhappy and let down by the system for whatever reason. To name some people I ran into on Quora, Elena Gold is a prostitute and “mail order bride” trafficker who fled Russia to Australia. Roland Bartezko is a convicted terrorist who hates Serbs and Russians. Brent Cooper operates a Christian anti-communist summer camp in the Baltics. Misha Firer gets paid to spew Russophobic hatred all day, but those are the most extreme examples. The majority of servants of the empire are much more benign.

For example, a Russian woman who is successful and pays her taxes but gets bullied for being childless, or an openly gay man in Georgia who gets bullied for that, can possibly be groomed to serve American interests, and for the exact reason they feel their own countries let them down. LGBT and women’s reproductive rights are contentious topics that governments are constantly dealing with, usually incompetently, which creates fault lines US foreign agents can exploit.

USAID having a hand in virtually every contrarian social and political movement around the world has been known for decades, but what is lesser known is that they also fund artists, writers, musicians and many other seemingly innocuous individuals and groups. Imagine you are a fiction writer who finished your first book. Getting a major publishing house to consider at your work is close to impossible, and even if you do get published, you’re responsible for your own marketing, which is difficult and expensive. Then a shell company or NGO funded by USAID offers to fast-track you through an affiliated publisher’s review process, and even give a few thousand dollars to buy web marketing. This help is completely genuine and not a scam, but does come at a price.

In 2022, the empire felt threatened and summoned all of its servants from every walk of life. Millions of people, including people who had never publicly uttered a word about politics before, all in unison shook their fists and screamed Slava Ukrainii!

USAID spends about $60 billion a year. Or for better context, 47% of all global humanitarian aid combined. And most of that money is not being spent to buy bread for starving children in Africa. The large majority is spent to influence governments around the world, and USAID is by no means the only arm of the US government funding various propaganda projects. There are other DOS, DOD and CIA initiatives so it is difficult or impossible to accurately account for them all.

After advertising revenue and cable viewership collapsed, news is just not a terribly profitable business, and most national and international outlets are redundant. They would go bankrupt without constant injections of money from USAID. We saw this with Politico specifically, which is on the verge of going bankrupt after Trump froze USAID.

For social media specifically, a study conducted in 2022 found that 80% of pro-Ukraine accounts on Twitter were bots, most likely funded by the US government.

Trump freezing USAID’s budget was a great mask-off moment, because now we can see just how artificial the whole slava ukrainii scam is. Yes, some of the usual suspects are still active, but on Quora and Facebook I have noticed a massive drop-off in the number of odd accounts regurgitating anti-Russian propaganda. These are the bots and troll farms. Real people like Elena or Misha are hurt by USAID being frozen, but still continue their personal grifts. But the bots and troll farms cannot function at all without constant injections of money. That’s why they have mostly dropped off the face of the planet. But when Trump presses the button again, they’ll be back.