2. The "biggest erosion" framing ignores what already happened. The geographic combatant commands – AFRICOM, SOUTHCOM, CENTCOM, PACOM – have been absorbing soft power functions for decades & DOD runs parallel programs that often dwarf USAID's budget
3. The agricultural price floor point is dated; that was a Cold War-era mechanism that had already been significantly restructured.
4. Most USAID funding was tied aid – taxpayer money labeled "foreign assistance" that was contractually required to flow back to US contractors, agribusiness, & Beltway NGOs, making it a domestic subsidy laundered through the language of humanitarian aid. Plenty of people inside USAID did genuine work, but the architecture was built to serve multiple masters, and development was frequently the least important one.
That's... pretty much a good definition of soft power, and frankly not even a cynical one. Your argument presupposes a world where "clandestine infra" and whatnot simply wouldn't happen if we didn't do it. But obviously it would, it would just serve someone else's interests.
And fine, you think the cold war US was bad, clearly. And maybe it was, but it was better (for the US, but also for the world as a whole) than the alternatives at the time, and it remains so today. China's international aspirations are significantly more impactful (c.f. Taiwan policy, shipping zone violations throughout the pacific rim, denial of access to internal markets, straight up literal genocide in at least one instance) and constrained now only by US "soft power".
The world sucks. Whataboutism only makes it worse.
Besides security guarantees/defense aegis, the heaviest lifters in U.S. soft power projection are structural and cultural forces that operate largely independent of government:
- Dollar hegemony & financial infra
- Cultural exports
- Universities & research
- Private sector (including tech)
but in this instance I can't help but wonder from a game theory standpoint, is there anything GAINED by affecting USAID in a way in which we clearly lose some (relatively small per your comment) amount of soft power?
That is to say, a perfectly played game would involve not making any sacrifices unless it was to gain some value or reduce some loss. What is gained (or not lost) here?
Domestic 'gain' is fiscal + political + transparency. USAID was pass-through where taxpayer dollars flowed to NGOs and contractors whose missions aligned with whatever administration or congressional bloc was in power – but with enough layers of separation to obscure the nature of the spending.
Foreign 'gain' is a move away from liberal internationalism to transactional bilateralism/resetting expectations wrt American largesse. We were being outbid everywhere anyway, and the org was ineffectively doing something DoS should be doing.
In a thread about USAID it makes sense to talk about the damage to USAID. If these other pillars of soft power matter more to you, then try writing productive comments lamenting their destruction rather than downplaying in this discussion.
> USAID is nowhere near the most effective nor the most important source of soft power for the U.S.
And the goalposts move again. Your original point was that soft power was bad. After pushback, now it's "soft power is good but USAID was inefficient".
I submit that neither of these arguments was presented in good faith and that your real goal is just defense of DOGE.
If you believe this, why did you just go "well, what about China?"
Basically: analysis of international relations and influence techniques can only be correct when it treats with the influence of all parties, and not just the US. You agree with that framing, right?
So? Let's not pretend like DOGE actually cared about that.
For people with operational experience, the concern is real and predates DOGE by decades – USAID cover compromised actual development workers, created force protection problems, and poisoned the well for legitimate civilian programs.
Addressing it would be to provide the functions without the IC.
Another problem is the US is broke. With a 6% of the GDP deficit, it can't invest abroad. This is the curse of being the reserve currency. Subversion is the only thing the U.S. can afford. Countries around the world knew that about the U.S. and USAID.
This isn't a problem if the money is well spent.
The problem is that a very small fraction of the money is being spent on anything that can reasonably be considered "an investment".
The status quo in US foreign policy was that as long as you're pliable to US interests, then the US was nice to you. You get democracy and get bounded autonomy, more autonomy than was afforded to subjects under any previous empire, to the extent that people would question whether the US even was an empire. Despite US being incredibly powerful militarily, the US was seen as non-threatening to friendly countries. That was an incredible magic trick, since those two things are usually correlated. This drew countries into its orbit and expanded its influence.
Countries could see the contrast to being in the Soviet Union's orbit and having your grain stolen, your people getting kicked out (Crimea) or being put into a camp.
This theory is a way to conceptualize the problem with Trump's bellicose and volatile attitudes towards Canada and European countries. If everyone sees you as a threat, this theory predicts that they will balance against you. In concrete terms, this theory predicts that countries who aren't threatened by China (due to being far away) will become closer to China if they feel threatened by the US.
Similarly, the deficit probably has solutions if the electorate is willing to approach thoughtfully and consider the revenue as well as expenditure side.
This may be another way of saying it's impossible, at least until it isn't.
I think you misunderstand soft power if you think the belt and road initiative is better. The belt and road initiative largely builds infrastructure to aid Chinese interests and locks countries into loans, while providing minimal employment to the locals.
Go to any Sub-Saharan African country, for example, that have benefited from the belt and road initiative and poll them on their opinions of the United States and China. It's not even a competition.
> So instead, you have those timid humanitarian aids program which largely served as intelligence and subvertion network.
Those programs have saved millions of lives. Hell, PEPFAR alone (Presidential Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) is estimated to have saved 25 million lives. Millions of vaccines have been delivered, millions of children provided childhood nutrition.
> Another problem is the US is broke.
USAID cost next to nothing compared to everything else in the budget, these arguments about tightening our belt is disingenuous at best. The USAID budget was less than $45B a year. If we paid for that with a flat tax distributed evenly across all US taxpayers (the least fair way to do it!), that would come out to ... $24.50/month/taxpayer.
By what metric does the Belt and Road Initiative provide more soft power than USAID? Do you have any evidence of this?
> So, you do the next best thing which is to plant covert agents in NGOs. That's was the real purpose of USAID
That’s offensive to the men and women who worked hard as part of USAID and other foreign aid programs to help others. My wife didn’t spend 2 years in the middle of nowhere in Zambia teaching children to spy on them. My friends didn’t spend 4 years in Mongolia to spy on them.
The Belt and Road Initiative is reputed to be 7 times bigger than the Marshall plan in today's dollar. It's getting hard for the US to compete with that.
So you find an organization filled with aid workers who are dedicating themselves to saving lives, with some instances of CIA infiltration. And the Trump administration, which is fully in charge of both the CIA and USAID, decides the right thing to do is ... get rid of the aid workers?
What do you think is the moral thing to do here?
(the hatred of USAID seems to be tied into hatred of the State Department, and in turn Hilary Clinton. I'm sure someone can unravel the alleged thought process there)
Given the timeline of the Musk family's arrival and departure... one might believe they viewed the end of Apartheid as a bit troublesome.
> the hatred of USAID seems to be tied into hatred of...
...foreigners, people of different races, and multiculturalism in general. There, I unraveled their primary thought process for you.
Remember, we're talking about administration officials who probably couldn't spell USAID, who say immigrants "poison our blood", and who have no problem spending billions on other countries when the money goes towards hurting them instead of helping them (see: Venezuela, Iran, etc.).
Tends to make them targets of suspicion.
Source: My father[0] was in the CIA, and worked at an NPO, in Africa.
Your father was a great man.
They actually did vaccinations until they found him and then quit, leaving a bunch of people with only the first dose.
And a complete distrust for Doctors Without Borders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_fake_vaccination_campaign_...
>The program was ultimately unsuccessful in locating Osama bin Laden.
Your cite disagrees
It’s clear that just like the California-spent billions on the homeless, a large amount of the money was going to support the nephews and cousins etc of the connected in cushy jobs.
Yes, in as much as that is a nonsense phrase meant to sound bad. If USAID buys wheat from American farmers, the money stays in the US and the wheat is exported.
#-- Governor Gavin Newsom met with San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie on January 16, 2026, to announce over $419 million in new state funding for homelessness and mental health efforts in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. The funding comes from the sixth round of the Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention (HHAP) program and includes $39.9 million for San Francisco to support shelter operations, navigation centers, and services through June 2029.
A check of pretty much any UN vote shows that this was a completely and utterly ineffective method then.
Example: https://cuba-solidarity.org.uk/news/article/4669/world-overw...
Got a source for this? I wanna read on this.
* https://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2...
* https://theconversation.com/american-farmers-who-once-fed-th...
* https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2025/02/13/mus...
* https://betterworldcampaign.org/blog/what-us-farmers-get-fro...
And in addition to farmers, a lot of companies/non-profits (for, e.g., logistics) were paid by USAID programs, as well as researchers for things like global health initiatives.
More info here.
https://www.agweb.com/news/policy/politics/usaid-dismantling...
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/14/nx-s1-5296876/trying-to-keep-...
I predict that these predictions will mostly not happen.
UA started being at the top in 2022: care to guess what humanitarian disaster started at that time?
After them, we have DRC, Jordan, Ethiopia, West Bank and Gaza, Sudan, ….
Oh. That's why.
When the National Partnership for Reinventing Government successfully cut spending in the 90s, they took 5 years to carefully evaluate what the government was doing and why, followed legal processes to propose improvements, and saved a lot of money simply by finding ways to streamline processes and procedures.
DOGE has taken a completely different approach, slashing and burning without understanding the consequences of their actions (or potentially, not caring), and intentionally doing it without involving other stakeholders. Many of the things they've cut that they thought were stupid were immediately found to be important and reversed. Some of the other things they’ve cut we’ll be finding were important for decades to come.
DOGE is just Chesterton’s Fence as a service.
Unfortunately DOGE and its boosters are some of the most intellectually lazy and fundamentally uncurious ever to walk the earth, base sociopathy aside.
Even if one assumes DOGE was doing exactly what they claimed to be doing (they were not) and take the government's most generous claim of how much "waste" they cut and how much they saved at face value ($150 billion, which is nonsense - the verified estimates I've seen cite maybe $1.5 billion at the most) and ignore the actual cost of DOGE (unknown, but estimated at at least $10 billion to cover paid leave for employees, other estimates I've seen go as high as $135 billion) then it was still entirely pointless.
But it doesn't matter to them because they don't actually care about cutting government waste, they care about cutting "woke" and "DEI" and anything they can associate with leftists or Democrats. Elon Musk literally described DOGE as "dismantling the radical-left shadow government"[0]. It was never about money, it was always about entrenching right-authoritarianism and purging the government of wrongthink.
DOGE was an exercise in vice signaling.
Which is a real shame because there was a real opportunity to inject a fresh set of eyes on what is surely a problem-rich environment.
It will unfortunately serve as discredit to all future efforts that look anything similar.
If they believe that foreign countries should have the ability to control their own destinies without interference from the US and being manipulated into doing what is best for the US and not for that country, you would be 100% against USAID.
Not on the menu. The question is do you want them controlled by the US or by China?
You are not familiar with “win-win”, it did in fact fund a wide variety of charity out of the goodness of people on the ground who were motivated to help people. The justification for people saying “why are we doing this” is that it serves US interests to be a benefactor.
It was not a monolithic psyop to trick people, it was funding helpful programs in return for goodwill, and not that expensive to boot.
It was killed because we want tax cuts NOW and this is not a tax cut.
I'm reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal ; one side effect was people importing baby formula to China from Australia, because they trusted the Australian food safety authorities more than the Chinese ones.
The DOGE gutting has most likely set up some sort of similar problem that hasn't arrived or gone public yet. Not to mention the background level of problems like the Purdue Pharma one.
On the big scale, like in gov't, the disasters that did not happen end up also not getting any credit to the institutions and regulators, so on the budget it feels (to uninformed voters) that these departments are simply wasting taxpayer money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox
> On the big scale, like in gov't, the disasters that did not happen […]
Michael Lewis (of The Big Short fame) has two books on the things that government(s) do that no one else (often) can, either because they're too big, too expensive/unprofitable, or a co-ordination problem where it effects many actors simultaneously:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifth_Risk
* https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/788713/who-is-govern...
"What roads would any dare to tread, what safety would there be in quiet lands, or in the homes of simple men at night, if the Dúnedain were asleep, or were all gone into the grave?"
This is one of the more frustrating things working in SRE/ops/infra. Yes, if you have really good metrics and monitoring you can show to some egghead exec that might care that your numbers are improving - but lots of times that visibility doesn't exist, or no one cares very much. I've been advised more than once in my career to just "let it break" so when I come to fix it after I had warned about it breaking, it makes me more visible, when I easily could have prevented it in the first place. This mindset is rampant, in my own career anyway. I think it's really idiotic.
> I'm reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal ; one side effect was people importing baby formula to China from Australia, because they trusted the Australian food safety authorities more than the Chinese ones.
It's a problem with libertarian thinking, generally. Most of the things libertarians rail against exist for good reason, and the libertarian "solution" is actually the thing that already failed in the past.
Your typical libertarian becomes one by reading a ~300 page propaganda book as a teenager or young adult that outlines the problems with Soviet central planning, adds in some legitimate gripes about present-day government rough edges, then lays out a compellingly-neat libertarian free-market fantasy. It's very black and white, offering a stark, false choice between Soviet central planning or minimal government libertarianism.
It doesn't prompt anyone to think about history before the complained about government functions arose: e.g. how was food and drug safety before the FDA? How did that work out for the people then? Were people really better off being able to buy radium water to try to cure what ails them?
It's also very selective. I've never seen any libertarian advocate the abolition of all the government bureaucracy and regulation that protect property rights.
It's a neat trick to pull to say something is a terrible disaster but also that you won't show why and that's by design. Impossible to refute.
Long term it will affect us all, likely more than the cuts the news prefers to focus on (tragic though they may be).
Can't it simply be a case of aggressive and overoptimistic attempts to cut spending (especially spending viewed as ideological) doing far more harm than good?
I won't pretend to know what the actual motives were, but financial "efficiency" seems suspect to me.
Citing doge as a source shows that your viewpoint is built on provenly bad info.
And Frankly it’s insulting to HN readers that it’s being cited given how well published it was that their estimates were grossly inflated, unreliable, and kept trying to claim credit for cutting things that were already ended.
This is the actual waste that needs to be looked before the checks are even signed. No way in hell DOGE or anyone in the current administration will actually look at bad spending. Specially now this administration likes the name Department of War. These are the same companies that bribe ... I mean donate to politicians to retain this corrupt funding.
I think this is obvious. It was one of many goals, that aligned under an umbrella of activities. Asking for specific data creates a paper trail and triggers regulation. Restricting access, taking outright possession of hardware, and firing people along the way, helps shield the activity.
> Can't it simply be a case of aggressive and overoptimistic attempts to cut spending
aka "Aww shucks, we were just doin our best."
No rational organization would take many of the actions that were taken, if one of their primary goals was accountability. It was a smash and grab (disorganized would be fair to say), with an ad-hoc rationalization that was never reasoned.
To hide the true purpose behind a curtain of "aggressive and overoptimistic attempts to cut spending".
Maybe they were naive and useful idiots, but that doesn't just happen by accident.
Clinton left office with the budget in surplus.
Government can work if you pick good leaders.
They have contempt for government, they seek to degrade it with the hopes of further discrediting it in the eyes of the public.
Typically those that take the slash and burn approach are trying to break things yes - in the UK is has generally come from those with a small government agenda who want to break things to justify privatizing them or scrapping them altogether.
If I were king for a day I’d make it so the government agencies somewhat regularly (say, every 5-10 years or so) would be subjected to significant budget cuts (without stopping with the yearly increases they already get). That would make it similar to many businesses, and force the management at the agencies to actually figure out how to do things efficiently.
Of course, people would whine incessantly as we saw with DOGE the second those cuts hit a program where the media can cause an uproar about hungry children or health programs or whatever.
It'd be better to audit them to make sure that the money was being used smartly and that those agencies were accomplishing what there were created for. Arbitrary cuts would mean that agencies that were well functioning and lean would be suddenly unable to do the job we've been paying them for and it could encourage them to push for more funding than they need just so that they can survive the random cuts every 5-10 years.
We don't need to intentionally cause a crisis that will impact the lives of Americans who depend on the services their taxes fund. There are smarter ways to identify waste and hold accountable any people mismanaging funds. Government shouldn't be run like business, but honestly I'd also question the wisdom of companies who acted that way.
Not to mention the US government in particular was quite literally deliberately designed to be inefficient as a way to safeguard personal liberties as well.
Not to say we shouldn't cut inefficiencies where we can, but the early DOGE promises were obviously made from a place of profound ignorance and (worse) lack of curiosity.
Justice will continue be served as more of these lawsuits make their way through the courts and their crimes are exposed.
I truly hope our future DSA gov takes this experience to heart.
To me, the whole Doge initiative scores quite poorly in this regard: Initial promises appear not realistic (or even worse: deceptive), while the (preliminary) results are lackluster, too.
My impression is that the vast majority of "savings" was never achieved by promised efficiency gains or elimination of pure waste, but instead simply by cutting projects, i.e. slashing some form of public service or benefit in order to save tax money. Which is obviously inferior.
I think promises along that exact line deserve extreme skepticism: "Simply" slashing regulations/public budget for "easy gains" is just not credible, and if anyone is gonna bring up the same arguments in favor of nuclear power or similar things I'm just gonna label them "liar/idiot" and watch reality endorse my view...
That doesn’t seem inferior at all. There’s very little to be gained by doing everything the same but with less money; the only way to make an actual difference is to quit doing the stupid shit that’s expensive. That’s what 90% of the world means by efficiency, i.e. don’t do the things that don’t need done.
So obviously they eliminated one and gutted the other.
throwing it away and starting over for purely political reasons is a completely negative outcome. the best you could hope for is to replicate what it was, but odds are against you.
One of the many fired IGs last year was investigating Neurolink - so noone in Musk-world will have considered them apolitical either.
Nothing government-related or government-adjacent will ever be broadly accepted as apolitical again in the US, regardless of intent or truth. Its very depressing.
You could take a good will attitude to DOGE then. I think many (including Elon) genuinely believed they could cut fraud and waste. But by their own admission, they were only mostly an advisory committee.
You can only do so much. Congress still has authority, and that's how it works, that's how the system is intended. And the reason DOGE hasn't done much is exactly because congress isn't willing to cut spending. It NEVER will. It didn't under any president including Reagan.
So basically you have an ever increasing deficit and spending because the way the political system is setup drives this. In fact, it happens in basically every democracy, so maybe it's just something that happens in democracies.
So - you could call the promise of DOGE lies, but I think they were a lie from Trump and not Elon. I think Trump promised Elon cuts, to get his help in the election, then backtracked, and that's exactly why Elon stormed out, he didn't get what he wanted.
And the US government is still massively overspending. Trump didn't really cut anything.
But needs some overall graphic, some charts or something, to tell a story. Something like dollars spent versus saved, to show how this whole effort was in-efficient.
And. I'd like to see something similar for Project 2025.
Doing so but more efficiently would not have improved it.
Here's a single counterfactual to your statement that nothing was disrupted: approximately 1,500 grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities were cancelled abruptly.
So, it's working as intended? I'm all for cutting as much money from government spending as possible, because we are $36T in debt and we can only get out of this by cutting spending.
Which is fine, just be honest about the statement from the top. If you are sharing an opinion, share an opinion, don't state it as a fact.
Who is swallowing the propaganda?
Although I mean trivially a non-rebated tax will cause inflation because it increases prices ... and recessions are called by NBER after you leave one so a year is way to little time.
Planes have actually been falling out of the sky. I'm not sure its from Social Security cuts but I mean if your stance is "planes falling out of sky = issue with social security cuts" then uh your evidence is in [1].
[1]: https://apnews.com/article/ups-louisville-plane-crash-ntsb-e...
You should know that Gdp won’t be fully calculated until the end of the term. So your numbers of 4% (expected, now who’s making up numbers). As well as the Gdp hasnt grown in meaningful areas but AI. Something not expected to last as few people use it.
Please with all your wisdom of how this works and all your short term evidence provide the basic proof anything you’re saying is true.
[0] https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/us-jobs-report-january-2...
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/gdp-growth-by-president-8604042
[2] https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2026/02/who-is...
Just go shopping.
If you start quoting government statistics to defend a point, remember that the people that reported any numbers that contradicted the regime, were fired. So those are no longer trusted.
You're living in a bubble.
90% of Trump’s tariffs are paid for by American consumers and companies
https://fortune.com/2026/02/13/new-york-fed-economists-confi...
https://www.project2025.observer/en
https://progressivereform.org/tracking-trump-2/project-2025-...
look how many people in the US just post on facebook and think they have done enough.
You can have non-violent, non-peaceful protest. (E.g., making a ton of noise at specific places to disrupt their ability to work there isn't peaceful, see also blockading businesses and roads.)
A lot of civil disobedience fits in non-peaceful (not calm, not orderly) and non violent.
"Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. "
source: https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/pacifism/english/e_pa...
Rejecting violence is un-american lol.
People probably don't focus on that because it's the least worst aspect of any of this. Also the President of the United States rugpulled the public on two memecoins and wiped out $4 billion, and no one talks about that either.
DOGE actions appear to have been largely based on the chaotic whims of Elon in response to perceived slights and tweets sent to him and did not have any significant effect on the budget. They chased after ghosts previously investigated by IGs and found insignificant, such as dead people on the social security rolls.
Real budget reform proposals remain out there from CRFB and others, and perhaps some future administration will undertake them when social security becomes insolvent in a few years.
There is so much conflation (maybe intentional, I dunno) between the goal of cutting spending and the method that DOGE employed. If DOGE went in methodically and actually cut waste and fraud I'd cheer them. What actually happened was a mixture of:
- Cutting things without knowing the details and then later having bring them back at extra cost (e.g. employees)
- Cutting things regardless of consequence based on ideological views (or just randomly?)
- Not actually saving anything and just lying about it
Most people: “hey dude that’s a huge mistake for xy and z reasons”
There’s always one: “most Americans spend too much and save too little, we should applaud this guy!”
—- Edit - to head off any nit picking, 10x is illustrative not exact - It’s 3x up to $28B for ice while the usaid spend was either $22B for pure usaid spend, or $35B with co-managed other state dept stuff as of 2024. So depending on accounting, ice either far surpassed it or at least countered all cuts since the spend wasn’t fully eliminated . (And that’s not even touching on the moral turpitude of simply letting hundreds of millions of dollars of food and medicine rot as a consequence of the cuts as warned by the relevant inspector general before I’m assuming they were fired)
Which ones? By how many employees? If a department went from 2 to 4 people that isn't prima facie outrageous.
The article only named 2 groups that received USAID funding:
Mexicans against Corruption and Impunity
Article 19 (a free speech group)
Now I don't know if these groups do what their names advertise. But Mexico is a sovereign state. If its government thinks it's against the national interest for Mexican non-profits to receive foreign money, they are free to pass laws to do so. And far more likely to work than telling a foreign government to "please stop sending money".
You're quoting the guy that weakened democratic institutions, attacked electoral authorities, attacked journalists, increased military power, spread disinformation, and worsened the COVID pandemic. Notice how he didn't call out USAID during Trump's presidency, but did call them out during Biden's? I'm sure him having a public friendship with Trump has nothing to do with him waiting to call out USAID. Or the fact that USAID funded Mexican free speech groups that spoke out against López Obrador. Yep, just a super nice president getting oppressed by the big mean international aid group, I'm sure that's all it was.
If we're going to remember that USAID has been used for evil, then you must also remember how it was used for good. 92 million lives were saved over 20 years. That's potentially 92 million dead people over the next 20 years if USAID remains shuttered.
The same thing happened with NY Times headline about spending $6B over 3 years on immigration services. Too much money! Now here we are $40B deep in one year for Dhs et al. And that’s the tip of the iceberg. Trump’s spending on Dhs alone is expected to hit $480B by the end of his term. How’s that for reigning in spending?
We could have had healthcare, instead people chose hate, fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
Two primary assertions are being made:
1) DOGE wrecked infrastructure. I think this one is self evident.
2) DOGE harvested data (which we know is true) to provide it to ICE and Palantir (this we have no concrete evidence for, but does not feel implausible).
That's odd. The Federal government is specifically using that data to (incompetently, at least for now) inappropriately disenfranchise people[0]
So no. Not deranged, actually happening[0] right now.
It's an accurate description of a deranged and openly fascist government and its behavior.
If that makes the party shooting innocent Americans in the street then publishing racist memes about them afterwards seem reasonable to anyone, then they have already picked their side, and the rhetoric isn't even the issue.