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@ HebrideanUltraTerfHecate
2025-02-13 18:27:33
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/02/13/fact-checking-was-a-sham-industry/
It’s really a sham industry that, unfortunately, gets a lot of funding – particularly government funding. The US State Department is funding disinfo-tracking groups across the world to tell American social-media companies that they shouldn’t run dissenting content. It’s horrible.
O’Neill: What do you make of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) coming down hard on the US Agency for International Development (USAID)?
Soave: I would say that USAID can be substantially scrapped. The reason that DOGE has started this fight is because USAID is giving money to countries or humanitarian causes that are profoundly unpopular with Americans, regardless of their political persuasion.
For me, the conversation begins and ends with the fact that USAID was funding reckless, dangerous scientific research in Wuhan. I thought that had all been done under the National Institutes of Health, but actually USAID funded it, too.
Clearly, we need to do some auditing and accounting if this organisation was giving money to the facility that quite plausibly caused the Covid pandemic.
O’Neill: Now that the US seems to be changing in some quite palpable ways, what consequences do you think we’ll see in normally woke areas like university campuses?
Soave: When Trump won in 2016, there was an explosion of progressive activism. This time, it’s a lot quieter. So far, there has been no mobilisation on the streets, and not very much on college campuses.
My analysis is that the left is a much more fractured movement today than it was eight years ago, or even four years ago. I think Covid broke the left in a big way, and after Bernie Sanders exits the scene, there won’t be another leader to galvanise young progressives.