A Saturday Fox News article headlined “Bono’s ‘300,000 dead’ claim over USAID cuts gets smacked down by Rogan, Musk: ‘Liar/idiot’” unintentionally revealed, once again, an extreme state of confusion in the MAGAverse as to what is and is not a flex of political, policy, and media strength for convicted felon President Trump’s regime and the vast propaganda ecosystem that keeps it afloat, all of it through the omissions of various facts pertinent to the subject matter in the article.

But first here’s what is in the article, starting with lede: “U2 frontman and longtime global activist Bono took a swing at the Trump administration disbanding the US Agency for International Development (USAID)) on ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’ podcast, blaming the cuts for a staggering 300,000 deaths. And he was swiftly fact-checked by Rogan and Elon Musk in a takedown that lit up social media.” Okay, insufferable messianic Irish rock star owned by bald idiot who thinks dragons are real and male urinary incontinence sufferer. Real feel-good, America First story in Foxland.

“‘This will [fucking piss] you off,’ Bono warned, claiming tens of thousands of tons of food are ‘rotting’ in warehouses from Djibouti to Houston because of recent USAID cuts, and that the people who ran those warehouses have been fired,” the story continues, using “claim” to describe an assertion that no one in the Trump Administration actually disputed. Trump simply fired the USAID Inspector General, Paul Martin, the day after he issued that report without publicly providing a reason for it. No, nothing about Martin’s report or his firing is mentioned in the Fox News story.

(The start time of the above embed is when Bono begins talking about the food)

“So there’s a lot of fraud, a lot of money-laundering. But also, we help the world and when you’re talking about making wells for people in the Congo to get fresh water, when you’re talking about food and medicine to places that don’t have access, no way that should have been cut out. And that should have been clear before they make these radical cuts,” Rogan said and whoops, that wasn’t in the Fox News story about the interview either. That’s in a Daily Beast recap with a different headline.

Instead they isolated this response from the dipshit:

Weird how Fox couldn’t pick out anything longer than that and even then they still had to paste in the “baby with the bath water,” right? Anyway, continuing with “Reacting on X to a clip of the conversation, Elon Musk slammed Bono directly. ‘He’s such a liar/idiot,’ Musk wrote. Musk, who has championed sharp cuts to what he sees as a bloated foreign aid machine, pushed for major USAID reforms under the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) before his formal departure this week. His response ignited debate online, with conservatives cheering for overdue accountability.”

The first “conservative cheering” cited in the article? A “popular online commenter”:

I agree 100% with Elon Musk that Bono is an idiot and a liar.

— Catturd ™ (@catturd2) May 31, 2025

“One commentator also wrote, ‘They’ve made this 300,000 number up and propagandized people with it,'” Fox writes as if the $50 million for condoms for Gaza was real. “Another eagle-eyed X user posted, ‘Bono starts off by saying, ‘It’s not proven.’ So he’s lying.'” Put a pin in that one.

“Bono’s 300,000 figure comes not from confirmed deaths, but from a speculative model built by Brooke Nichols, a mathematical health modeler at Boston University, projecting what could happen as a result of the cuts,” the article says next “Nichols has said that the number is a projection, not a direct count, due to the absence of real-time tracking in many affected regions,” and then quoting her caution over it as written in a Washington Post piece, that the model is indeed speculative.

Speculation is bad, right?

But you know what’s actually missing from the “alternative viewpoint” and “differing opinions” on this matter? How many people they think will actually die as a result of the deletion of USAID. Like if it isn’t 300,000 then what is it? If the guy’s an idiot and a liar then why isn’t anyone in the MAGAverse correcting him with what they at least believe to be a more realistic number?

Or, to be more direct: Why can’t they just grab their balls and claim it’ll be zero?

Remember that whole rainbow fentanyl thing from back in 2022, when Fox News and Republicans were warning that children were going to be dropping dead left and right on Halloween because the deadly opioid would be disguised as candy and handed out to trick-or-treaters?

You remember how National Zero and other outlets were pretty confident that it was all bullshit and that zero kids would die, much less would there be any nationally reported cases of it being even found in the kids’ candy? And then we were 100 percent right about that because we knew all along that it was simply a pretty uninspired attempt to get “suburban moms” on-board with them before the midterms (even though Halloween was freaking nine days before election day that year).

Yeah, it’s kind of hard to see what if anything Ketamine Brain and Catturd and the “eagle-eyed” dickbag that Fox News didn’t even bother to credit could point to now or in several months that “debunks” the information that Bono shared with Rogan. Like are they going to feel like it was a win if, say, by September a report shows that around 150,000 deaths worldwide could be credibly attributed to the abrupt cutoff of US foreign aid to poor populations in Africa, Asia, and so on?

And sure, they almost certainly won’t even bother to address it, but the point is that Fox News is getting so fucking lazy that they’re not even “moving the goalposts” so much as neglecting to put them on the field in the first place. This kind of hole in their propaganda operation speaks to something, maybe a talent drain and/or burnout among those who remain, that does not bode well for them going forward. Not even five months in and the lib ownership is fading.