Isn't Voice of America like the USA's equivalent of Deutsche Welle?
Basically a vehicle for internationally transporting news from the US American perspective?
Trump really hates any and all soft power the USA have available.
this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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Soft is a no-no word around Trump. He wants rock hard power, gay porn hard power.
Yes, it's one of the US's propaganda presses
They put out plenty of content about the US's flaws and failures
yeah totally him and not some other dipshit trying to get back to superpower status.
Sooo... Weakening US influence around the world in order for Putin to fill the vacuum? What is Trump's Russian codename again?
Krasnov
Pee tape kovnik
Per CNN (per US Agency for Global Media), number of regular listeners, in millions, of VoA...
- Indonesia 64.8
- Nigeria 37.4
- Mexico 37.1
- India 29.1
- Iran 12.2
- Peru 11.9
- Russia 10.1
- Ukraine 9.8
- Iraq 9.3
- Egypt 9.0
How is everything that is "anti-Trump" radical? You fucking dictator.
"If you smell shit everywhere you go it's probably because you're covered in it" Anon
I don't understand the naysayers here.
This is hilarious. Trump wants to simultaneously expand the American empire, while he dismantles the tools of it that he's too stupid to understand the importance of.
No matter their mission statement, or any tangible benefits they might have provided, both USAID and VOA, were tools of empire. These aren't mutually exclusive concepts.
See, the thing is, those tools of empire were government-funded. Congress allocated money and resources to those tools for them to do their jobs. The intent is to eventually replace those with privately owned, profit-motivated alternatives. Why do you think they cut NOAA and NWS funding and fired all their probies? So that private companies can fill the void. Then if you want life-saving weather information in the event of a tornado or hurricane, pay a monthly subscription fee to some billionaire's weather/disaster alert service.
This isn't fundamentally changing anything. It's about using different tools for the same goal.
America cannot dominate the world militarily, nor could that even serve the goals of its contemporary brand of neoimperialism.
Soft power i.e. culture, propaganda, and diplomatic/idealogical relationships, are the foundation upon which it's built.
Yes, military hard power plays a critical role, but it cannot replace soft power.
This isn't empire for the sake of raw nationalism, and nothing would accelerate the American collapse faster than dismantling the state's soft power tools. The end result will be attempts to maintain power by spending its military resources on peer, or near peer conflicts.
In Trump's brain, soft power isn't properly deferential to him personally. That's what it amounts to.
It all comes down to his raging narcissism; soft power is done with tact and diplomacy in whispers. For Trump, that's weakness. It's not true power unless people/countries/organizations proclaim his power with effusive thank-yous and obsequious shows of capitulation.
It's not enough to lead the free world; the rest of the world needs to be properly thankful for it in a way that he himself finds acceptable. (namely by making a big show of bending the knee)
It's not really about changing it for cold hard power, but changing how their soft power will be projected. I've seen some theories that the rethoric is going to change from being about freedom of expression and LGBT rights and similar to ideas about traditional family values or something, and I think it's very plausible.
...and how will that be disseminated? That's what organizations like VOA and USAID were for.
Trump has the capacity to destroy organizations, but I find it doubtful he could recreate them out of whole cloth.
That's my point.
He can't recreate them out of whole cloth, you're right. But he's got friends who could. They have the capital, they have the manpower, they have the brainpower, and could easily leverage all of that to creating privately owned alternatives, paving the way for Curtis Yarvin's world to exist. America as we know it would be dead and replaced with hundreds, if not thousands, of small city-states owned and controlled by corporations, whose executive boards would have absolute free reign to control. If you've ever played BioShock, it would be akin to a bunch of Raptures, but on dry land.
Yarvin posits it as a collection of corporate city-states that would compete for citizens like corporations compete for customers. If you don't like the oppression going on in your current city-state, you can simply move to another one and join it.(Nevermind that the corporate oligarch running your current city-state could write policy forbidding you to leave, or placing conditions on your emigration, such as taking all your money.) There's also some crypto nonsense about how borders wouldn't exist because you can be a citizen of one of those "network states" without ever having visited simply by logging in and signing up like you could for a social network. (Nevermind that the corporate oligarch running your current city-state might have beef with the oligarch of the state you wish to join and could restrict access to their network.)
Trump's mission is to weaken the US, NATO, and the EU. Eliminating VoA helps do that. Notice how he isn't threatening China with invasion, but Canada and Denmark instead.
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Trump doesn't want to expand the American empire though. He makes noises about it, but words are cheap. Judging by his actions he wants to create chaos so oligarchs can profit.
The ultrawealthy have no national allegience.
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As an American, I would like to apologize that the idiots of this country re-elected Mango Mussolini. And I'm sorry that the rest of the world has to suffer because of this idiot and his cronies.
You don't have to self-identify as "American" if you don't want. You don't need to apologize for a system over which you have virtually no control. The first step to resisting an evil system is probably disavowal.
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Under $300 million a year to spread US propaganda to over 300 million people. That's a fucking bargain man.
This is going to give up so, SO much soft power because of a snowflake's ego. This is a bad deal.
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It must also be weird for the sycophants who he just nominated to staff it too.
The equivalent of "Daddy got you a pink convertible and you get three minutes to drive it before the repo guy comes"
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