Conservatives have never needed clarity more than we do in the present moment.
We know, for instance, that if it looks, sounds, and smells like wokeness, then it probably qualifies as wokeness. But that fact alone, in cases such as this, constitutes only a small part of a larger and darker story.
According to the New York Post, a $25,000 grant from former President Joe Biden’s State Department funded a “two-day drag workshop” in Ecuador.
A Spanish-language video, posted to the social media platform Facebook, showed men cross-dressing as they applied makeup and strutted around as if showcasing themselves on a catwalk.
The men also danced topless, fueled by their fetish- or mental illness-inspired view of what constitutes a woman.
Readers who, for whatever reason, might wish to view said video may do so here. (WARNING: Following the link will lead to a video that may offend some readers.)
Notwithstanding the grotesque parody of womanhood, one must give credit where due.
After all, according to the Post, the drag queens in the video spoke of using the workshop as a “political tool.” That showed that they understood the workshop’s broader objective.
And that brings us to the point on which conservatives must achieve clarity.
Do you support an audit of all government spending?
In general, of course, wokeness amounts to a neo-Marxist political movement. It divides people into identity-based groups and pits them against one another. This much conservatives understand.
Moreover, conservatives also seem to understand that wokeness has spiritual dimensions. Referring to men as “women,” for instance, inverts truth and thus deliberately promotes an atheistic, nihilistic view of God’s creation.
Nonetheless, when conservatives bemoan U.S. taxpayer-funded drag shows in Ecuador or transgender nonsense in Heaven knows where else, too often we frame that lament in terms of wasteful spending and wokeness run amok.
Perhaps that framing best resonates with the public. If so, then it serves as a useful introduction. But we cannot stop there.
For instance, in recent days X owner Elon Musk and his talented team at President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency have blown the lid off one of modern history’s darkest and most unfathomable scandals.
In short, Musk’s team publicly revealed the depth of corruption at the United States Agency for International Development.
Nominally a “foreign aid” organization, USAID long functioned as an arm of the State Department and Central Intelligence Agency. In recent years, too, it heavily funded Democrats and their allies in the left-wing establishment media. That, of course, explains why Democrats went positively apoplectic over Musk’s revelations.
Why would a “foreign aid” agency fund left-wing media outlets in the United States? Because USAID amounted to an all-purpose money-laundering outfit that did the bidding of American globalists.
Mercifully, Trump has placed USAID under Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s control. From there, one hopes that the Trump administration will destroy the agency and salt the Earth beneath it.
In short, when it sent money overseas, USAID had a political agenda, not a humanitarian one.
In a recent interview with journalist Glenn Greenwald, former State Department official Mike Benz explained.
“USAID exists as an illusion to fool you into thinking that USAID is not the State Department, but it is,” Benz said in a clip posted to the social media platform X on Tuesday. “The only reason it’s an independent agency is because that gives aid workers access to areas State can’t access directly.”
Moments later, Benz drew an important distinction between wokeness and what he called “blobness.” Benz has often used “the blob” as shorthand for what others call the “deep state.”
“It’s very easy to mistake wokeness with blobness,” he said.
Benz then spent several minutes describing how, following the resounding defeat of the State Department’s preferred candidate in the 2018 Bangladesh election, one particular “blob” agency deliberately funded transgender projects, as well as initiatives designed to sow racial division and destabilize the country, “ultimately culminating in throngs of street protests that forced the democratically elected prime minister to flee the country in a helicopter,” replaced by a “Clinton Global Initiative fellow” who canceled elections.
“You have tactical wokeness in service of statecraft,” Benz added.
“I think you have tactical wokeness in service of statecraft.” This is an important exchange I had with @ggreenwald tonight on USAID. I went over Wokeness vs Blobness, and why **the Republican** wing of NED funds transgender dance festivals, ethnic identity events and rap groups pic.twitter.com/EtlShGFkMR
— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) February 4, 2025
Meanwhile, the USAID-related bombshells have continued to develop in a fast and furious manner. On Wednesday, for instance, prominent journalist Michael Shellenberger reported that USAID, along with the State Department and CIA, helped fund Trump’s 2019 impeachment through the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a “supposedly independent investigative news organization” that actually received 52 percent of its funding from the federal government.
In sum, a U.S. taxpayer-funded drag workshop in Ecuador rightly repels us and leaves us outraged.
We must, however, go beyond waste and wokeness when articulating that outrage. As Musk and others continue to uncover it, we must absorb and then explain USAID’s hell-black activities. American voters need to know everything their government has done in their name, both at home and abroad.
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