Donald Trump’s bad policy is killing millions… billions… trillions of people.

Back in March I got in trouble on Twitter. Nicholas Kristof argued in a thinly reported piece in the New York Times that a few weeks of Trump administrative chaos was killing AIDS orphans in Africa. There were good reasons to doubt Kristof’s claims or at minimum treat them as unsubstantiated: First, there are other players in distributing HIV meds in Africa and it’s possible that the networks doing this work were sufficiently resilient to weather a few weeks of Trump executive order bewilderment. If med distribution was meaningfully affected by USAID being nuked or PEPFAR otherwise being scrambled, that would need to be corroborated by a minimal amount of reporting on these orgs which Kristof didn’t do. Second, the clinical vignettes were extraordinary. It’s highly unlikely that someone healthy goes off HIV meds, becomes rapidly immunocompromised, gets an opportunistic infection, and then dies, all within a few weeks. I guess it’s possible, but it’s so unlikely that more substantive reporting that supports causation is required (Is it too much to ask for a review of actual medical records? Corroboration from a physician? Anything?). Third, the attestations of calamity resulting from these programs being temporarily paused came primarily from… you guessed it… aid workers who are not exactly a disinterested party in funding getting shut off.

I voiced my concerns on Twitter, criticizing the Kristof piece as NGO agitprop and Boomer slop that by any reasonable evidentiary standard was ‘not even wrong,’ and people decided that I was evil. I also noted that I had no objections to PEPFAR and that it seemed like a good, inexpensive, and relatively effective program and that somehow made everyone even angrier. I also acknowledged anti-retroviral interruptions could lead to bad things including increased viral resistance and increased downstream mortality. This was also not enough. I was a Bad Person.

I am not alone though in being a Bad Person on the internet. There are other Bad People saying similarly bad things including one Emily Bass who lives in Brooklyn (the fascists are everywhere it seems) and who wrote a book entitled, ‘To End a Plague: America’s Fight to Defeat AIDS in Africa,’ that was approvingly blurbed by Rachel Maddow. Here is Bass’s bio:

On May 31, 2025, Bass wrote a piece for Think Global Health, an initiative of the Council on Foreign Relations, itself a massively influential uniparty NGO blob org. In the piece, Bass was critical of reporting on PEPFAR interruptions and concerned that media narratives were discordant with the reality on the ground:

Bass spent three weeks in Tanzania and Uganda post-PEPFAR chaos and during her trip, ‘spoke with clinicians and clients linked to at least 17 ART [anti-retroviral therapy] treatment clinics. All but one of those clinics still had antiretroviral drugs on its shelves. What I saw and heard is not an anomaly. PEPFAR, a 22-year-old disease-focused initiative widely viewed as one of the most successful American foreign aid initiatives of the twentieth century, received a limited reprieve in the form of a waiver allowing continuation of some activities, including lifesaving testing and ART for people living with HIV. Some USAID grants remained active or were restored after cancellation. In many other clinics, though, USAID was not providing ART at all.’ Bass noted that, ‘Country governments also make major contributions to HIV programs, providing staff, space, salaries, and supplies,’ and that it was the CDC and not USAID that was responsible for funding the majority of PEPFAR’s antiretroviral therapy, ‘During PEPFAR's last fiscal year, which ended in October, CDC supported 61% of all people living with HIV on antiretrovirals and 59% of all new initiations on treatment and received just over 40% of PEPFAR's total budget.’ Bass noted that deaths from PEPFAR interruptions would likely come later rather than sooner and cautioned that engineered hysterias and untruths could do more harm than good in the long run, ‘Deaths due to advanced HIV disease will be what epidemiologists call "a lagging indicator" that climbs up years after the inciting event. That CDC supported clinics are still operating and that some USAID-funded treatment activities have been picked up by other agencies means that the morgues and wards will not fill overnight. A more nuanced, no less anguished call to action by members of Congress and advocates is needed before skeptics have evidence to suggest that predictions of mass death were exaggerated.’

A functional media apparatus that wanted to inform its readers would be much better off delegating a story like this to someone like Emily Bass who, although an activist, is way more informed and capable of giving this subject its due than a habitual Third World misery tourist like Kristof. The New York Times, of course, has no interest in informing you. No one does it seems, not the media, not academia, not the NGOs, or the federal agencies. There are no good incentives, much less reliable business models, for informing the public and many good incentives for doing the opposite. Elite legacy media see its mission as exerting moral and technocratic authority to decide what you should know, when, and to what end. Don’t want to take my word for it? Here is Kristof in the Times’ comments section explicitly stating his motivations for the piece (ideological programming in service of counteracting Trump) and gauging its effectiveness:

The meta-narrative of all this is that you should be a Good Person happily swallowing the slop the New York Times and similar institutions churn out in service of ideological regimentation; after all, they are keeping us on Right Side of History. If you happened to have missed Kristof’s moralizing diktats the first time around, don’t worry, Kristof published another piece Saturday with the same claims, again lacking credible evidence, which in turn followed another piece Friday by Michelle Goldberg (whose career is one long exercise in serving warmed over lib shibboleths) that itself had repurposed Kristof’s initial reporting. (Kristof and Goldberg are enthralled by a death counter that purports to estimate the mortality effects caused by Trump’s NGO and humanitarian policy. The death counter doesn’t meet any sort of academic standard for assessing the effects of health policy, something I know a little bit about, but that doesn’t matter, libs love death counters: COVID death counters, Gaza death counters, African death counters. Death counters have the pretense of being empiric and I think libs enjoy the simultaneous psychological sensations of morbid knowingness and helplessness/ desperation. ‘Oh no, another hour passed and 103 more people are dead!’)

The quality of public information was not always this poor. As recently as 5 years ago, you could still expect New York Times journos to be aggressive in pursuing the truth, even if politically inconvenient. In 2020, veteran Times journo Donald G. McNeil Jr. was deeply skeptical of virologists’ denials that COVID could have originated in a lab. Released emails from the virologists showed McNeil was on the right path and probably inside the 5-yard line, although he was ultimately deceived. McNeil was subsequently ejected for a Reckoning-era word crime that plunged the Times’ newsroom into crisis and was replaced covering COVID by Apoorva Mandavilli, someone who was temperamentally, cognitively, and ideologically unfit for the job, although you can’t say she gave us nothing, there was this all-time-great banger:

There’s no question that high quality information on almost any matter of political or policy importance exists and is theoretically available; the problem is that unless you’re wealthy, powerful, or an in-group member *it’s just not for you.* A funny memory I have from COVID was a friend who worked at a big bank telling me that they kept top epidemiologists on retainer: If the bankers needed COVID information relevant to a business decision they could just call the epidemiologists up and find out what they really thought free from all the distortions imposed by academia, the media, and the government. Along the same lines, if HIV med availability in Africa were somehow consequential for the business interests of someone like Bill Ackman or Elon Musk, those guys would figure out inside a minute what was really happening on the ground. However, there’s no mechanism or institution working in service of the public in a similar way. Very often truth and clarity are provided to the public only after the fact when it’s been decided that no harm can come of it or when, as in the case of admitting to having been blind to Biden’s decline, some perceived benefit or profit motive arises. All of this is infuriating to a public who senses correctly that they are being told they can’t be trusted to be alone with their own minds and who won’t be transparently provided information lest they independently come to the ‘wrong conclusions.’

In their stewardship of the institutions, libs have some big decisions coming up about how they’re going to handle things. The moral hysterias they engineer using selectively presented information can always be justified by political expediency (libs often do get their way) but the manias inevitably cause reputational harm and distrust on the back end. And not only is the public increasingly distrustful, keeping the volume turned up all the way all the time leads to a deafness that makes more nuanced but still important discourse that can’t generate a certain level of noise impossible (last week you told us the Weimar Republic was crumbling and Hitler was ascendent and the anti-fascism professors were fleeing the country, what are you going to do to make us pay attention this week?). Libs also need to account for a right that is no longer morally anchored to Christianity. The sort of catastrophizing Kristof specializes in may have won over evangelical and Catholic Republicans in the aughts or even 10 years ago, but in 2025 it’s more likely to elicit a reactive I-don’t-care-let-them-all-die nihilism that, while socially, culturally, and spiritually corrosive, is a reasonable and predictable political response to the moral blackmail lib ideologues so routinely and incautiously employ to get their way.

At the end of the day, the repurposing of the institutions in service of informational control and ideological discipline in service of managed democracy has not been compatible with their existence in any meaningful form. Libs have to be asking themselves, ‘what was it all for?’, if in taking control of the institutions they brought them to a nadir of authority and trust, created near-complete ignorance in the public square, and stoked reactive populist energy that is now at its apex. The only way forward - a return to the core mission of democratizing meaningful information - would demand the revocation of privileges libs are loathe to give up. Libs need to work through the mess they’ve created and sooner rather than later. For the sakes of both the institutions and an informed public, I hope libs give up on some of their authoritarian dreams and have the beneficence and public-mindedness to create a path forward for the institutions.