Bono Twists Death Projections In Defense Of Corrupt USAID

I met Paul Hewson back in late 2002 in Dubuque, Iowa. He was insufferable then. The more things change, the more they stay the same. 

Paul, better known in rock & roll circles as Bono (not to be confused with the late, great California congressman Sonny Bono), rolled in unannounced to Dubuque’s taxpayer-assisted Grand Harbor Resort & Waterpark seeking taxpayer cash for his preferred causes. He brought with him the ever-insufferable Ashley Judd — who would nearly 15 years later offer a “nasty” vagina monologue during the obnoxious left’s first resistance movement against President Donald Trump. 

Other self-important stars joined the Midwest cavalcade in other cities, including champion cyclist Lance Armstrong, a doping cheater who would finally be forced to admit as much a decade later. #Livestrong. But on this gray December day in 2002, it was just Paul, Ashley, and a handful of celebrity-smitten local businesspeople meeting with a few reporters, including this much younger and less jaded journalist for Dubuque’s Telegraph Herald. 

And, of course, “Bono” Paul would quietly bring an NBC News crew with him because, well, that’s the kind of publicity whore U2’s front man has always been. Many of the stops were filmed for a documentary that debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2004. 

The pampered celebrities and their entourage traveled in style on three tour buses. The traveling revue was all part of Bono’s Heart of America Tour, in which he and his leftist friends sought to shine a spotlight on the AIDS crisis in Africa and debt relief for third world nations — and, per usual, to shake down U.S. political leaders for more taxpayer money. President George W. Bush was one of the shaken, as Rolling Stone reported in 2002, briefly pausing its PR war against the Republican commander-in-chief long enough to tell the kids that Bono thought Bush was pretty cool for pitching $5 billion in U.S. aid for the rock star’s pet project. The leftist mag fawned over the “dynamic duo” and their “crusade for economic assistance and AIDS funding.” 

“It is much easier and hipper for me to be on the barricades with a handkerchief over my nose — it looks better on the resume of a rock & roll star,” Bono told the publication in a March 2002 interview. “But I can do better by just getting into the White House and talking to a man who I believe listens, wants to listen, on these subjects.” 

Bush ultimately signed the Global AIDS Act more than a year later, authorizing $3 billion, which Congress cut by a third. Bono was ticked. 

“Bono said he’s very angry but he’s trying to calm down and get the president to open ‘America’s wallet,’” CBS News dutifully reported at the time.

The more things change … 

Bugger Off, Bono

On the latest episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Bono was back to attacking the land that he supposedly loves, or at least its duly elected president and his administration. Bono, one of the left’s most dependable useful idiots, falsely declared that 300,000 people have died thanks to the Trump administration’s move to cut funding and stop many of the operations of the corrupt and criminally wasteful U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

“This will f— you off,” Bono warned Rogan in asserting that tens of thousands of tons of food are “rotting” in warehouses from Djibouti to Houston as a result of the loss of the fired USAID-funded workers. 

“What is that? That’s not America, is it?” He added.  

As legal analyst Jonathan Turley noted, the source for the widely cited figure Bono regurgitated “is an example of how some facts are simply too good to check in the media.” The doomsday number is in fact a speculative model pushed by Boston University mathematical health modeler Brooke Nichols. 

The extent of the impact on aid interruptions is a matter of debate, but what is not is the fact that Nichols herself has said the 300,000 figure is not an actual body count but a projection. And the projection doesn’t take into account a number of factors. Bono, too, had to acknowledge as much in the middle of his gaslighting on Rogan’s show.  

“What is the value of a projection with such sweeping ‘likely highly variable’ assumptions?” Turley asks in a column published Sunday on his page. 

The value is propaganda. Fact-less currency meant to be gobbled up and perpetuated by Bono’s useful idiot pals in the Trump-hating corporate media. Mission accomplished. It’s meant to try to change the opinions of Americans who understandably are fed up with their country being the world’s thankless benefactor, often in places that hate the United States and would love to see it in ashes. Taxpayers have grown angry, appalled by the waste, fraud and abuse bleeding from bloated government agencies such as USAID, corruption uncovered by an administration that is doing something about it. 

But lest we forget, Paul Hewson is not an American citizen. As they say in his home country of Ireland, Bono can bugger off. The rock star and social activist who’s been browbeating U.S. leaders for decades to bail out impoverished nations lives in “one of Ireland’s most exclusive neighborhoods,” according to the Irish Star. 

U2’s Joshua Tree is one of my favorite rock albums, but I can definitely live without the sanctimonious rock star. 

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.