Elon Musk is committing a genocide

The worst is not really covered as the worst.

—

It’s a precarious time for independent journalism, and especially for independent journalists who criticize the current fascist nightmare. If you find my writing valuable, please consider helping me keep on keeping on by becoming a paid subscriber. It’s $5/month, $50/year.

_

The Trump administration is doing so many truly horrific, evil things, it’s difficult to keep up, and difficult to take it all in. Trump is kidnapping people and sending them to El Salvador prison camps without due process. He’s gutting cancer research. He’s eliminating critical food safety measures. He’s resegregating the federal government. And on and on.

In terms of sheer pointless murder, suffering, and horror, though, the worst thing in the administration so far is an action that has not been a central focus of outrage.

Elon Musk and his soulless dead-eyed minions at DOGE have scrapped USAID and other foreign aid programs. The US spends about $12 billion a year on foreign aid. That’s a tiny sliver of America’s budget, but it has enormous impacts on global health. Nature estimates that because of Musk’s actions, there will be 25 million excess deaths in the next 15 years.

One of the worst atrocities in history

That is so much death and misery it is hard to get your head around. It is more than three times the number of Jews killed during the Holocaust. It is more than the number of Ukrainians killed by Stalin in the Holodomor. It is more than the number of people killed in the Armenian genocide and more than the number of people killed in the Cambodian genocide. It’s more than the number of people who were murdered by King Leopold in his horrific reign in the Congo. It’s around twice as many people as were kidnapped from Africa and shipped to the Americas in the entire Trans-Atlantic slave trade. It’s in the middle of the range of those killed by famine by Mao’s Great Leap Forward.

The shuttering of USAID, in other words, ranks with the absolute worst atrocities in the history of the world. Israel’s genocide in Gaza is unspeakably evil and nightmarish; Putin’s war crimes in Ukraine are an endless horror. Neither has or is likely to kill anywhere near as many people as Musk’s decision to unilaterally cease to provide people in need with AIDs drugs, food aid, and vaccines.

There’s good reason to see this as not just a human rights disaster, but as a genocide. Here’s the current definition from the UN convention.

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

a. Killing members of the group;

b.Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

c. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

d.Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

e. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Shuttering USAID is pretty clearly inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about death, physical destruction and bodily harm. The question here is whether those targeted by this qualify as a “group.”

I’m not a genocide scholar. But to me, it seems likely that the shuttering of USAID is part and parcel of the administration’s vicious xenophobia and racism. Musk, the guy who specifically shut down USAID, gave a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration. That’s a good indication that he sees himself as part of a white supremacist regime with genocidal goals of world domination.

Musk has said he believes USAID is wasteful and needs to be shut down for costcutting reasons. He’s also pushed garbled nonsense conspiracy theories claiming that USAID is “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.” These kinds of contradictory, incoherent, and false explanations strongly suggest that there is no real rationale, and that USAID is being shuttered out of animus. That is, Musk and Trump have ended the program not for any positive policy goal, but simply because they want to harm recipients.

This makes sense since Trump and Musk have made it very clear that they are marinating in xenophobia and hate towards non-Americans, non-white people, and especially towards non-white non-Americans. Closing USAID is a quick, efficient way for a Nazi to murder a lot of non white foreign children and their families. That sure looks like genocide to me.

Shouldn’t we care more?

You would think that the US government committing one of the worst genocides in history would be front page news in an ongoing way. But it is not.

News media have certainly reported on it and have treated it as an important story—that’s why I know about it! But it hasn’t received nearly as much coverage or outrage as (for example) the illegal deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, or Trump’s chaotic tariff implementation, or the administration’s war on Columbia university and Columbia’s capitulation.

I’m not saying those stories aren’t important. They’re all very important! But none of them are going to lead to the deaths of 25 million people. So why isn’t shuttering USAID given as many column inches as these other (important!) stories which, for all their importance, are just objectively going to affect fewer people and affect them in (overall) less final ways?

It’s not a mystery. Most of the people who are going to die because of the USAID cuts don’t live in the US and are poor. They are distant, largely invisible to US voters, and have little ability to protest their plight or make their voices heard in Washington.

For all those reasons, there is little political enthusiasm for talking about USAID or for making it a central issue in US discourse. The Trumpist right, obviously, loves murdering poor non-white people. Centrists don’t necessarily want to outright murder USAID recipients, but do want to be seen as bastions of efficiency, which means carefully distributing dollars to, and only to, the median US middle class voter. Even the left has an influential isolationist wing that believes that any US foreign policy is automatically evil. As a result it can have trouble shifting gears to make the case for the necessity or value of foreign aid programs.

USAID has survived this far through a kind of bipartisan conspiracy of quiet; it’s not very much money, it does a lot of obvious good, and so neither party made a big issue out of it. But the quiet was so quiet that now that the genocidal Nazis are in power, there’s not much in the way of public advocacy or pushback on behalf of foreign aid. There’s just a certain amount of silence, and a lot of death.

This is where I should explain what we should do, or how we should try to go about rectifying this. But unfortunately (and this is why it’s taken me so long to write this piece I’ve been thinking about for weeks) I have nothing.

It’s clear that this is not an issue that people are much interested in rallying around. It’s possible that if/when Trump leaves, Congress and the president will return to trying to prevent global starvation and disease in a nonpolitical way. It’s also possible that the issue has been permanently poisoned and politicized and that the GOP will fight it and the Democrats will just shrug since they don’t have any constituency to hold their feet to the fire. I don’t know how to ensure the better outcome there. I wish I did.

Trumpism is based on the evil, false, but popular idea that the lives of those within certain national boundaries are, and should be, more valuable than the lives of those on the other side of the imaginary lines. USAID was a shining example of what can be done when you refuse to believe in that fascist garbage. But the ease with which it’s been swept away, and the nervous lack of pushback, shows why Trump’s selfish nativism has resonated with so much of our ugly body politic.