DlphnDrgnWlfMstr

[Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @ReichlinMelnick]

Reagan's final speech as President addressed this fact, and he thought it was one of the best things about this country.

[Rho Rider @RhoRider]

So Trump made $1.4B from crypto rugs & bribes…invested it all in stocks…then insider traded for 2 yrs to multiply it several x….
while his family & friends rode the same grift…making them all powerful billionares now immune from prosecution

Mad yet?

[Jesse Singal @jessesingal]

.@elonmusk's actions led directly to the death of a 10-year-old girl whose life could have been saved by a bed net and/or anti-malarial medication, both available pre-DOGE. Musk, now sitting on a trillion dollars, bragged about eviscerating aid funding

https://t.co/meGCzA28V4

[Jeremy @jeremyct]

Just got off the phone with my college roommate.

His daughter was diagnosed with leukemia in January.

He has insurance. Good insurance. The kind you feel safe having.

7 months later:
Savings: wiped out. 401k: cashed early. Penalties and all. House: refinanced to cover the gaps insurance decided weren’t their problem.

He told me he’s not the same person anymore.

Said watching your child fight for her life while simultaneously fighting an insurance company over coverage codes does something to you that doesn’t go away.

They did everything right.
Two incomes. No debt. Responsible their whole lives.

One diagnosis undid all of it in 7 months.

And somewhere a health insurance CEO is getting a $30 million bonus this quarter.

I don’t know how people defend this system with a straight face.

I really don’t.

[DlphnDrgnWlfMstr @WlfMstr]

@MicAPetroski @TheCalvinCooli1 lol LITERALLY not true

[DlphnDrgnWlfMstr @WlfMstr]

@GenXMood @TheCalvinCooli1 Hell yea

[Tom Nichols @RadioFreeTom]

I was arguing with academics over the idiocy of post-colonialist blamecasting and "dependency theory" and all that crap when Rufo was still a toddler. The United States saving millions of lives is not only an investment in a more stable world, but a good thing in itself.

[Steve Rattner @SteveRattner]

Trump has earned $2.3 billion since the beginning of his presidency through 4 different crypto schemes.

The common denominator for each: the Trumps win big, and you lose.

Data from @Reuters.

[HUMAN WA$TE @Dplanet]

🚨🚨 Here's the world's richest man, Elon Musk, calling Nicholas Kristof "an utter piece of shit and a liar."

Look at what Kristof actually asked him first.

Just a simple question: we were saving a life every ten seconds, we cut it off with no time for anyone to adjust, so children died who didn't need to - and isn't it bad when children die unnecessarily?

There is no answer to that question that leaves you looking human. "No, it isn't bad" is monstrous. "Yes, and I did it anyway" is a confession. Every honest door was shut. So Musk didn't reach for an argument. There isn't one. He reached for "piece of shit."

A man proud of his work defends it. A man who calls his critic a liar, with not one fact to offer, isn't proud; he's cornered.

Let me be clear about what this is and isn't.

This isn't an argument against America First. I'm not saying America must fund the world. I'm not saying cutting waste is wrong, or that foreign aid is sacred, or that a government can't decide its own priorities. I grant all of it. Waste is real. Cutting it is legitimate. None of that is in dispute here.

This was never about whether to cut. It's about how.

There is a version of this that a serious person could have done. Review the programs. Find the waste and cut it. Wind down what doesn't work. Keep the eight-year-old on her HIV medication through the transition. Hand off to other funders with time to adjust. That's cutting. It's slow, and careful, and afraid of getting it wrong - because the person doing it understands they are holding millions of lives in their hands.

That is the weight of a decision like this. Anyone who grasps what USAID did - an agency a Lancet study credits with preventing more than 90 million deaths - moves carefully, because the cost of moving carelessly is measured in human lives. Most of us, handed that, would feel the burden of it. We'd agonise. We'd run the scenarios, weigh the harm, look for the version that cut the waste without losing the child.

Is there any sign Musk felt one ounce of that weight?

He got a chainsaw. He put on the cap and the dark glasses and walked on stage like a rock star, vamping for the cameras. He posted about the parties he skipped to do it. He handed the job to a team with no expertise in aid, no evidence of waste presented, and let them hack the whole thing into a wood chipper over a weekend.

And now that the dead have names - Yamah Freeman, who died in childbirth when the diesel for the ambulances stopped; Achol Deng, eight, whose HIV medicine ran out; the children Kristof went to the villages and heard their parents' stories first hand - his answer is that the reporter is a liar.

Here is the part that should reach even those who cheered the cut. America First means protecting Americans. During an Ebola outbreak, as the agency was gutted, his appointees stopped the screening of US-bound air passengers - the people flying onward into American airports. That didn't put America first. It left the front door open during an outbreak. You could have voted for every dollar of it and still see that this was not what you were promised.

Because there is a difference between "we shouldn't be the world's charity" and "it's fine that children died." The first is a position millions of decent people hold in good faith. The second is where the chainsaw took them. Most people who voted for the first did not vote for the second.

I'm not going to reach for a clinical word. I don't need one, and neither do you. Watch what Elon does when the exits are shut, and call it whatever you think it is.

But I'll say this much, and I'll flag it as a moral judgment and not a legal one: to hold in your hands an agency that kept 90 million people alive, and to end it with a chainsaw and a grin and no visible weight at all - that belongs, morally, in the company of the great crimes. Not because a court would say so. Because a conscience would.

Why can't the man who cut the aid own the decision?

Why cry that Kristof is a liar if the work was righteous?

Where is Mr. Chainsaw now, when the names of the dead arrive?

[Danny Boy @Care2much18]

Quote: "This is how USAID spent your tax dollars"

I think people have lost the will to try fact-check this guy due to the volume of lies he spreads.

Also it's actually pretty difficult with this image and quite time consuming.

It just happens I had nothing better to do. /1

[DlphnDrgnWlfMstr @WlfMstr]

@Base1Aransa_s @BartonFlagg2 @stephen_richer Kooky stuff

[DlphnDrgnWlfMstr @WlfMstr]

He cares about the forgotten man

[FactPost @factpostnews]

The Trump administration has approved the use of cancer-linked pesticides diflufenican and epyrifenacil, both PFAS forever chemicals.

Neither pesticide has ever been used in the United States before.

[DlphnDrgnWlfMstr @WlfMstr]

@TheCalvinCooli1 @baseballcrank Your MAGA overlord employed Greg Bovino, dines with Nick Fuentes, invites Kanye West to the Oval Office, and his own VP referred to him as America’s hitler, so spare me your fake outrage and go look for Bigfoot ya kook.

[Barton Gellman @bartongellman]

Good God, this chart is stunning.

[Chris Mowrey @chrisdmowrey]

If you invested $10,000 in Trump coin on January 20th, 2025, it would be worth $415 today.

You lost everything. He made half a billion.

[David J. Bier @David_J_Bier]

Has a single conservative said: "Oh well, I guess these kids are in fact Americans, time to welcome them and enact policies that will assure that they have the best chance to succeed in this country." All I've seen is let's make their lives hellish and hope they leave.

[David French @DavidAFrench]

One thing that's interesting about Justice Roberts's birthright citizenship opinion is how his careful explanation of history shows how the immigration debate rarely changes. The argument that "these people are too different to join us" has just failed, socially, culturally, economically, and morally, time and time again.