One of the most unhinged columnists at The New York Times penned such a deranged rant against X owner Elon Musk that it begs the question of whether she was drunk before she turned it in.
“Elon Musk’s Legacy Is Disease, Starvation and Death,” cried columnist Michelle Goldberg in a ridiculous May 30 screed. Apparently, what threw her off was Musk’s celebration on X in February that his DOGE team had gutted the disgraced U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). USAID has become the focal point of a major scandal due to innumerous wasteful payments in tax dollars being doled out to a litany of leftist pet projects over the years.
By having “shred” USAID, as Goldberg put it, she outlandishly accused Musk of — wait for it — killing hundreds of thousands of people in the process. Liquor is one heck of a substance, isn’t it Goldberg?
Her nonsensical rambling to make Musk out to be the second coming of Mao Zedong spoke for itself. “Musk’s sojourn in government has revealed severe flaws in his character — a blithe, dehumanizing cruelty and a deadly incuriosity. This should shape how he’s seen for the rest of his public life,” Goldberg smeared. Then she absurdly turned to making Musk out to be a genocidal brute:
Though a rump operation is operating inside the State Department, the [Trump] administration says that it has terminated more than 80 percent of U.S.A.I.D. grants. Brooke Nichols, an associate professor of global health at Boston University, has estimated that these cuts have already resulted in about 300,000 deaths, most of them of children, and will most likely lead to significantly more by the end of the year. That is what Musk’s foray into politics accomplished.”
This is insane on its face because how on earth is it possible to quantify how many people died across the world specifically because USAID funding was cut?
Reviewing the so-called “methodologies” for Nichols’s research Goldberg relied on reeked of arbitrary speculation. In a nutshell, Nichols’s logic was simply: X million(s) was allocated by USAID to a health program (ex. HIV/AIDS, Malaria, etc.); the cost of treating a patient is X dollars so therefore USAID cuts would result in X number of deaths, literally exemplifying the hallmarks of hasty generalization fallacy by assuming a linear relationship between USAID tax dollars cut and deaths.
Goldberg apparently didn’t realize that Nichols’s half-cocked “Impact Metrics Dashboard” seemed to oversimplify a complex system by glossing over other variables like issues with program efficiencies, alternative funding sources, and treatment prioritization. When U2 frontman Bono trotted out Nichols’s same figure to attack Musk, podcast star Joe Rogan smacked the argument down as utterly ridiculous. According to Fox News, “‘They’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater,’" [Rogan] said acknowledging that while some aid groups do good work, the USAID system has been riddled with corruption. ‘For sure, it was a money laundering operation. For sure, there was no oversight. … Trillions that are unaccounted for.’”
But Hey, if Nichols’s propaganda works to serve Goldberg’s “Musk is killing people!” argument, then to heck with the details, right?
"If there were justice in the world, Musk would never be able to repair his reputation, at least not without devoting the bulk of his fortune to easing the misery he’s engendered,” Goldberg wailed. Of course, Goldberg said nothing about how Musk’s inventions have largely benefited the globe, such as Starlink to help bring internet access to remote locations around the world, revolutionizing the electric vehicle industry and modernizing space exploration.
Goldberg also conveniently left out the enormous USAID waste that have since been uncovered, such as paying for hundreds of thousands of meals to al-Qaeda-affiliated fighters in Syria. Or how about the millions paid out by USAID to Guatemala for sex changes? How about the hundreds of millions in USAID funding that inadvertently went to cultivating the Taliban terrorist group’s lucrative poppy production for opium in Afghanistan? Here’s a beauty: How about the $260 million that was doled out by USAID to a leftist nonprofit backed by George Soros pushing leftist government reforms across the globe? Or how about the fact that USAID was funding India’s first clinic for transgender people?
Do Americans have a right to be upset about any of this? Well, Goldberg’s readers wouldn’t know because she didn’t bother to mention any of it. She was too busy trying to get people to take her seriously that Musk is literally killing hundreds of thousands of children.
