And You'll Know They Are Christians By Their ... Murder Of USAID?

An aspect of this Trump/Musk chainsaw massacre that needs some more attention.

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OK now let’s talk about an aspect of this Trump/Musk USAID massacre that needs some more attention.

Watching Donald Trump and his South African oligarch patron Elon Musk destroy the United States to sell it for parts, we’re learning just how deeply ignorant many MAGA Trump conservatives really are about how the world works.

Whether they’re having regrets about their vote for Trump, or are at least a little uneasy, or whether they’re still fully fucked up on the Kool-Aid and just absolutely convinced that Elon’s and Donald’s daily attacks on the country are just what America’s needed for a long time, it’s one of those things that makes you go “Hooooly fuck, these people are beyond stupid, in the literal sense of those words!”

Put simply, they don’t know what they don’t know. They’re too fully misinformed and disinformed, so completely brainwashed, so wholly unable to grasp basic cause and effect, so unable to understand the interconnectedess of things, yet simultaneously so desperate to believe they’re smart, that there’s something about the world they understand and you don’t. It’s Dunning-Kruger Syndrome on a potentially apocalyptic scale.

I saw a post on Bluesky yesterday that set off a little light bulb for me that I wanted to share with you all. One of my motivations with this newsletter has been that, when I see a situation that feels like it needs translating, a belief or thought process that’s widespread in the right-wing MAGA Christian world but a foreign concept to the outside world, to try to notice those things and write them down, so we can all better understand our enemies. (Sorry, but they are. We are either going to figure out how to win, or white MAGA Christian nationalist conservatives are going to literally level this country in ways that would make Hitler blush.)

It was this post, from a professor and Substacker named Don Moynihan:

Moynihan was responding to a quote from an Atlantic article entitled “Inside the Collapse at NIH,” about the horrific consequences Donald Trump’s federal funding freeze and his other braindead executive orders — like the anti-DEI shit, for instance — are already having at that agency, which is so vital to just about every medical breakthrough you can think of. He said, “There is a belief in MAGAland that the private sector will just fund this stuff. For example, Sean Hannity said that ‘most of the solutions for cancer are going to be found in the private sector, not with public money.’ But thats simply not true.”

That’s simply not true. But it’s a peephole into exactly how the brain of the modern American MAGA conservative is broken, their inability to understand how private sector funding and research are inextricably bound together with public funding and research, how if you cripple the latter, you will cripple the former, and so forth.

It made me think of other ways that broken brain reveals itself, and one specific way in particular. I replied, my mental wheels starting to spin:

This relates to the sick influence of conservative Christianity. These people have been raised to believe the free market will take care of everything AND that the church will take care of all the "charity" stuff. Neither the free market nor the church ever has, and the math simply doesn't work.

But it's all fantastical thinking, which itself is related to the utter inability of any of these people to actually understand how things work, or why there would need to be so many employees in any given dept.

Also the same brain that looks at red electoral maps and can't understand where all those Dem votes are coming from because they can't mentally comprehend how many people live in those blue dots.

The free market is God on one side, and should replace the government in all such matters! We should run America like a business! Privatize everything! We don’t need a president, we need a CEO! AKA a dictator!

And then for all those other parts of government conservatives hate the most — you know, the parts that help people, that feed children, that keep people whose only crime is being poor from dying — there has long been a delusion, a cancer of magical thinking, that the Christian church could step up to fill in the gaps left by the removal of social services, by the removal of food assistance and other forms of government help.

Not that it necessarily would want to. Not that it necessarily should.

But it could. You know, if conservative Christians in the church wanted to do that, out of their love for God.

Perhaps.

The qualification is necessary here, because as we all know, acts of charity by the church come in a number of forms. There are those who do it because it’s the right thing to do, churches that feel motivated simply by their faith to help their fellow human beings, in their own backyards and across the world. These tend to be more liberal and mainline churches. Think about your local Episcopalian churches. Some Catholic churches are really strong in this area. Worldwide, the Catholic Church does a lot of good, when it’s not doing evil.

On the other extreme, you have those churches and missionaries that dangle food in front of hungry people in far off lands in exchange for signing up for their multi-level marketing version of Christianity, the kind that emphasizes “soul-winning,” and sees mission work as primarily an opportunity to win converts. If the hungry end up fed and the sick end up healed, it’s mostly so they’ll be able to pay attention to the missionaries’ predatory sales presentation.

But what I’m trying to get at here is that there are millions of people out there who maybe aren’t freaking out about the devastating impacts of what Donald Trump and Elon Musk are doing, not because they’re ignorant of it, but precisely because they just figure the private sector and/or the church will step in.

What Are Trump And Musk Doing?

What Trump and Musk are doing is brutality.

This week, they terminated 5,800 projects that were under the umbrella of USAID, such as “H.I.V. treatment programs that had served millions of people, the main malaria control programs in the worst-affected African countries and global efforts to wipe out polio.” A program that finds and helps feed malnourished children in Yemen. Tuberculosis treatment around the world. Responding to Ebola in Uganda. Shelters taking care of 33,000 women in South Africa, victims of domestic violence and rape. Clean water. Prenatal care for the poorest people in the world. Postnatal care. (Pro-life!)

You want to keep reading a fucking list? Keep reading a fucking list.

“People will die,” said Dr. Catherine Kyobutungi, executive director of the African Population and Health Research Center, “but we will never know, because even the programs to count the dead are cut.”

You can’t even keep an accurate count of how many people Donald Trump and Elon Musk are killing right now.

And this is just one kind of brutality they’re committing, in one area. The Bulwark referred to it as a “midnight global health massacre.” What Trump has done to HIV/AIDS funding, treatment and prevention in hacking PEPFAR to pieces is perversely sick, and you know what happens when you stop giving people vulnerable people HIV preventatives? It’s quite helpful to the virus, when it comes to mutating into new drug-resistant strains!

There’s a new mystery “hemorrhagic fever” in Congo that’s killing people within 48 hours. This is the kind of stuff that American aid money goes to combat. Or did.

Add that to what Trump and Musk are doing to veterans, and to education, and the National Weather Service and the Federal Aviation Administration and yeah, it’s just goddamned fucking sick.

The Supreme Court will today receive arguments on whether USAID and the Marco Rubio State Department have to pay for $1.5 billion of aid that’s already been finished. A judge had said it had to be released this week. Chief Justice John Roberts granted Trump a victory for now and put a pause on that ruling.

We’ll see what happens.

And You’ll Know They Are Christians By The Way They Sneer At ‘Compelled Giving’

It wasn’t hard to find examples on the internet of the conservative Christian mentality about why they hate foreign aid and welfare and the like. I came upon this Reddit thread from eight years ago from someone who was trying to figure out why so many Christians felt that way.

One answer really got at this mentality, and in so doing demonstrated just how far up their asses so many conservative Christians are about life here on earth, and just how far they’ll go to avoid being anything resembling decent fucking human beings. They explained that “Christians” wouldn’t like government welfare because “it is compelled giving, not giving out of a love for God.”

They quoted Jesus Paul, who wrote in 2 Corinthians 9:7, “Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.” They argued that “giving out of any reason other than love for God is not an act of following Christ.” They quoted Luke 16:13, where Jesus said “No servant can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.” They concluded, “It is not the place of a Christian to compel others to give, the only thing that should compel a person to give is Love for God and love for their neighbor.”

Apparently lost on that person was the notion that paying taxes to the government and supporting large-scale aid and welfare because that’s the only system large enough to respond to so many needs at once could in and of itself be done cheerfully and out of love for Christ.

Another reply captured the magical thinking of it all, the fantasy that the Christian church can just do everything, we don’t need no stinkin’ government:

But there is no mandate that they must use the system set up by a government as a mechanism to deliver aid. Working within their community, groups (whether religious or otherwise) are able to deliver more appropriate financial support, along with the emotional support that is also vital. Having more money taken out of their paycheck and put into a massive, faceless governmental pool is not the best way to help people.

Or in simpler words - all Christians should help the needy, but they don't have to do it solely through a governmental welfare system.

Hey, real quick, make a list of all the times in history a government has totally wanted to help people, but they didn’t have to, because Jesus Christ’s church was so fuckin’ on that shit that there was no one left in need of help.

I’m just scratching the surface here, but this mentality is pervasive among millions of the very people who voted for Trump and who reflexively support what he and Apartheid Karen are doing. In just googling around for this newsletter, I found articles arguing that yes the Church can do everything the government does, and articles from Christians trying to communicate that no really, the Church cannot do this on its own.

I found articles called “Charity is no part of the government.”

I found articles called “Whose job is it to take care of the poor?” (That one argues that if it’s really just the Church’s job, all these Christians better be writing some huge fuckin’ checks to their churches.)

I found some shit going all the way back to 1970 that argued, “It is not only the right, but the duty, of every Christian to ac­tively seek the demise of all gov­ernment welfare programs, for they are in total conflict with the Christian doctrine which recog­nizes man as a being possessing free will—the fundamental prem­ise upon which all Christian mo­rality is based.”

Hoo boy.

Hashtag #NotAllChristians, Yadda Yadda

In researching today’s newsletter, I also found articles from Christians and Christian organizations devastated by Trump’s USAID cuts, that specifically argue that they are “anti-Christian at the core.” That last link notes that Catholic Relief Services and the evangelical World Vision are being hard-hit by Trump’s and Musk’s crime spree against the least of these. I found articles about what Christian charities — private faith-based charities! Even Trump buddy Franklin Graham’s Samaritan’s Purse! — are doing now that Trump and Musk have begun this massacre.

It’s an interesting juxtapostion, isn’t it? Watching specifically Christian charities devastated by Trump’s and Musk’s murder of USAID, while conservative Republican Christians dance on its grave.

I wrote on this today not because I specifically saw a bunch of examples of right-wing Christians expressing this mentality out loud, but because it dawned on me that this mentality that exists within the conservative church was clearly a big contributing factor to the MAGA response to Trump’s and Musk’s chainsaw massacre of the United States government and its ability to do good for, again, the least of these, the ones Jesus was always going on about. (And without the qualifications Paul added, which conservative Christians use as offramps to get out of being decent human beings.)

Again, this is one of those things where right-wing Christians’ brains are just absolutely broken, maybe irreparably, though the Lord does work wonders. Some of the broken-brained are literal monsters. The Trump administration is full of them, Christian nationalist leaders like Russ Vought, Donald Trump’s head of of the Office of Management and Budget, who helped create the Project 2025 playbook Trump and Musk are largely following right now.

If you grew up in the conservative church, you already knew about this. If you didn’t, know it now. Know that people are thinking it. Know that it’s one of those “underlying assumptions” beliefs that informs how these assholes act in the world.

And when you see it in the wild, mock the shit out of it. Call them fucking stupid and hopelessly ignorant for thinking the private sector or the church can, will, or even wants to step in to replace the things Trump’s benefactor Elon has killed with his big tough guy performative masculinity chainsaw.

Let the know how sick they’d have to be to support this.

Let them know who has the goddamned Moral High Ground here.

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