(JOURNALISTIC) MADNESS: "Elon Musk misinformed Trump!"

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2025

In the Catturd seat: It's as we told you yesterday:

An intellectual giant named "Catturd" said it. And when Catturd said it, the intellectual giant Elon Musk believed it—or at least, so it had seemed. 

Forbes came along and debunked the claim. But Donald J. Trump was intrigued.

Catturd had launched an accusation against Samantha Power—and Power was one of the others. When she was head of USAID, she had looted the treasury of millions of dollars—or so Musk had seemed to believe, based on Catturd's tweet.

When people like Musk follow people named Catturd, a "night assault" is underway—and sure enough! Tuesday afternoon, right there in the Oval Office, the commander wanted to hear it again:

TRUMP (2/11/25): Could you mention some of the things that your team has found, some of the crazy numbers, including the woman that walked away with about thirty million?

MUSK: Right...

To appearances, "the woman" in question was Power. As Musk continued with his response, he somehow knew enough to avoiding saying her name.

So it went as the "night assault" continued. It was an assault of the Information Age, a night assault against the reign of rational conduct itself. 

Catturd spoke, and the president listened—and this was no isolated event. Last Friday evening, a major figure in "cable news" had actually told the world this:

GUTFELD (2/7/25): DOGE has exposed a pile of programs funded by USAID to foster gender and trans propaganda in foreign countries—countries where such things don't seem to benefit stability. Because nothing will bring a Muslim country together like drag queens reading the Koran to kids.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]

But that's the point. You have to destroy the world to build a new one where men can watch girls pee in locker rooms. 

Say what? USAID has been working "to build a new [world] where men can watch girls pee in locker rooms?" That was the point of the agency's conduct?

For the record, the gentleman cited no example of any such Muslim country, but that's what the gentleman said! In Tuesday morning's report, we posted the full text of his "monologue." 

Before long, he added this:

GUTFELD: As we learn that USAID was creating instability abroad, we see these same dirty tricks coming home. Because once you find yourself with a populist president who wasn't the elite choice, instability must be created artificially. Which means introducing the endless combustion of identity politics.

Elevate one's identity among others and you create conflict among groups, and there goes populist unity. People turn on themselves. What seemed to be an exported strategy to handicapped third world nations returned to where it started, like a sexually confused boomerang.

So imagine if we looked at America as a foreign country when Trump won. USAID did! You had a populist president, not an establishment puppet. What followed? Organized and immediate protests—race gender, climate, the three horsemen of funded, organized dissent. 

It was a color revolution, funded by people who pay taxes. Suddenly, you had trained agitators in the street with fresh signs and robust crowds and fueling the media that pushes incendiary hoaxes.

Add to that a crusade against so-called misinformation to empower censorship. Sound familiar? Sounds like everything USAID did in other countries.

Now maybe we didn't mind USAID before. Sure, they toppled governments overseas, but that wouldn't happen here. Now, by shining a light on what they and our government is doing, we find that they did try to destroy a populist movement for being a challenge to their power, with identity politics as a weapon. It was divide and conquer.

According to the "cable news" star, it wasn't just the looting of federal coffers described by Catturd. According to this influential Catturd type, USAID had been trying to destroy the MAGA movement for being a challenge to their power.

Hereat home, USAID had been trying to destroy the MAGA movement! They'd been using the same methods they employed to topple foreign governments!

According to Forbes, Catturd's claim turned out to be bogus. What about this set of claims?

We'll suggest that you see it for what it is! For now, let's start by considering what was said on Fox & Friends this morning.

Every so often, producers on the highly watched show produce an embarrassment of this type. This morning, Steve Doocy was tasked with interviewing Andrew Natsios, the (Republican) director of USAID under President George W. Bush.

Within the past week, Natsios has been shooting off his mouth all over Blue America's cable news programs. This morning, speaking to Doocy, he actually said that a certain unmistakable genius had misinformed President Trump about all those fiendish condoms!

Doocy struggled with the pronunciation of his guest's name. After that, this first exchange occurred, as a list of bogus claims scrolled past on the screen:

DOOCY (2/13/25): Andrew, apologies on the name. 

You know, we've been talking on the channel for a couple of days about some of the questionable USAID expenditures, and we've got a list of them. You would admit, those are head scratchers in some cases because they drifted away from the original goal of the agency. 

NATSIOS: Yes, but those aren't USAID projects. Those are State Department projects. Elon Musk misinformed the president. He said there was $50 million worth of condoms sent to Gaza. He meant—what the record shows, it's Gaza Mozambique, not Gaza Israel. 

And the project wasn't for condoms. It was for HIV AIDS—anti-retrovirals.

We sent condoms into Afghanistan—not to the Taliban—to health clinics that USAID had helped build twenty-five years ago, when I took over USAID. And they were sent in because a famine is developing there, and the first people who die in a famine are children under 5, pregnant women and lactating mothers...

Natsios went on from there with all his crazy talk. According to Natsios, the genius Musk had gotten everything right, except for what the money was for and where the money was spent, and except for the claim that this had been a USAID project. 

Other than that, the intellectual giant had gotten everything right!

Stating the obvious: As the flooding of the zone continues, none of these dueling claims will ever get straightened out.

Trump, of course, had taken the alleged $50 million in condoms—said to be $50 million in condoms to Hamas—and he had doubled the claim. 

In his typical way, he had said that USAID had sent $100 million of condoms to the Hamas gang. "Think of it," he dumbly said. To see him say it, click here. 

Natsios challenged an array of claims which have ruled the air at Fox. On CNN and MSNBC, he has engaged in much longer discussions within the past week.

President Trump had loudly declared that the fiendish USAID shipped $100 million in condoms—to Hamas, no less. When such statements are widely broadcast in the absence of challenge, that's the shape of a "night assault" on the foundations of an Information Age culture. 

Achaeans stormed the walls of Troy during the Late Bronze Age. Today, the Catturds are storming our own society's bulwarks.

Meanwhile, what was USAID really doing when Power and Natsios were in charge? 

In this morning's New York Times, Nicholas Kristof starts to describe the sorts of events which start to occur when the Catturds overrun a modern society's walls and place their own types in charge:

The U.S.A.I.D. Chaos Already Has Dire Effects

[...]

President Trump and Elon Musk were entirely right that America’s aid programs merited scrutiny and reform. Yet so far what these two billionaires have achieved is to crush the world’s poorest children in a cauldron of confusion and cruelty.

Having covered the United States Agency for International Development for decades, I reached out to my contacts around the world to get the real story of the Trump-Musk demolition.

In Sokoto, Nigeria, toddlers are starving because emergency feeding centers supported by U.S.A.I.D. have run out of the nutrient-rich paste used to save the lives of severely malnourished children. Nearby warehouses have the paste but can’t release it without a waiver from the agency—which is in such Muskian chaos that it can’t issue the waivers.

“Thousands of children can die,” said Erin Boyd, a former U.S.A.I.D. nutrition adviser who told me about the situation there.

[...]

Accounts of mayhem are flowing in from around the world...

That said, who are you going to believe? A person who has reported from all the countries where toddlers are starving and children will die? Or will you instead decide to trust an internet giant like Catturd?

Last Friday night, a major figure in "cable news" advanced a remarkable set of claims about what USAID has been doing—possibly the direction of Natsios, but surely under the direction of the fiendish Power. 

Before he started his monologue, he had entertained his large viewership in a familiar way. He'd offered a joke which turned on the premise that Joy Behar—she's 83 years old—is just too freaking fat.

(On this occasion, Behar was compared to an elephant—to a "pooping elephant" at that! This disordered 60-year-old man behaves this way every night. Other things he said this night were uglier and worse, and were baldly misogyny-adjacent. This is part of a "night assault" on our failing culture. Beyond that, it's an obvious form of journalistic insanity.)

Friday evening, his monologue done, the fellow's four panelists were asked to comment on what he had said about USAID. Tomorrow, we'll show you some of what the four flyweights said. 

For today, we'll limit ourselves to saying their names. People like these should be famous:

Gutfeld! panelists; Friday, 2/7/25
Todd Pirro: Co-host, Fox & Friends First
Dagen McDowell: Co-host, The Big Money Show
Rob Long: Writer and television producer
Kat Timpf: Regular panelist on Gutfeld! 

Those four were invited to speak.

We've called them "stooges"—Stepfords, even! Tomorrow, we'll give you the chance to decide:

In an era where people like Catturd and Musk hold sway, even as toddlers and children starve, have our assessments of these hirelings been sufficiently fair and balanced?

Tomorrow: Four out of four agree to agree with what has just been said!