Saturday, Jennifer Welch, one of the nation’s leading “I want Republicans to die and I’m going to insinuate that without actually saying it” people, sat down with Silicon Valley Congressman Ro Khanna to hang out and get cozy discussing the future of “progressive” governance in America.

In a now viral clip from her show IHIP News (full episode here), Khanna said Musk “possibly sentenced to death” 4.5 million children by dismantling USAID, and demanded he be subpoenaed and face investigation once Democrats take power. Welch heartily agreed, saying Dems needed to push the talking point that Musk was “killing millions of the poorest people on the planet.”

Musk’s response on X was brief, as usual: “Time to sue this liar.”

Unfortunately, this unhinged accusation doesn’t start with Ro (a bumbling traitor selling his soul for 2028) or end with Welch (leader of the yay-assassination fan club). It starts, as these things tend to, with The Lancet (a leading medical journal), which last summer published a study titled “Evaluating the impact of two decades of USAID interventions and projecting the effects of defunding on mortality up to 2030,” authored by a multinational consortium of academics.

In the study, researchers analyzed mortality trends across 133 countries, comparing those that received more USAID funding with those that received less. After controlling for things like GDP per capita, they estimated that USAID funding prevented roughly 91 million deaths over two decades.

They then estimated that continued cuts could mean 14 million more deaths by 2030, including 4.5 million young children. This, of course, assumes we live in a fake world. A world in which DOGE’s funding reductions remain in place through 2030 (unlikely); where the lifesaving waiver the State Department actually issued doesn’t exist (it does); where Congress doesn’t turn around and fund emergency AIDS relief at nearly its prior level (it did); and where two decades of built-up infrastructure (clinics, training, and supply chains) evaporates the moment a grant lapses (it doesn’t).

And, oh, I almost forgot! A world where the United States is the only country on Earth that could ever be moved to fund medicine for the poor.

Even sympathetic experts won’t fully vouch for the study’s findings. Our World in Data, reviewing the “91 million lives saved” claim, noted that several experts have flagged methodological problems and warned against relying on this paper alone. The core issue, in their estimation, is that countries getting lots of USAID were also getting richer and healthier for many reasons the model can’t fully account for. Less sympathetic critics go further: writing in Reason, NYU statistics lecturer Aaron Brown points out that the entire global decline in mortality over those two decades was about 79 million — so the study credits USAID not just with every life saved on Earth, but with 11 million phantom lives on top.

But we have a democracy to save, so the math be damned.

Take Derek Thompson, for example, who wrote this back in May to describe America’s political and cultural decay into “vicemaxxing:”

Taking crypto money from desperate followers, then taking medicine from dying children: In January 2025, Donald Trump launched $TRUMP, a cryptocurrency meme coin, which allowed his family to earn more than $100 million from trading fees even as more than 800,000 investors lost more than $2 billion, making it one of the most nakedly extractive presidential self-enrichment schemes in history. Three days later, the president signed an executive order freezing all U.S. foreign assistance, resulting in the estimated death of more than 500,000 people around the world, most of them children.

Incredibly, the deaths of more than 500,000 people, most of them children, at the hands of this administration don’t even earn their own bullet in Derek’s piece.

Let’s take a step back and follow this logic: essentially, every dollar not sent to a shadowy bureaucracy doing medical aid but also lots of other shit results in X dead children. Therefore, every expendable dollar you, personally, do not contribute to said shadowy bureaucracy actually *sentences to death* Y children. By this logic, we are all mass murderers, literally killing kids, by our own greed. The scope of our individual culpability is directly proportional to the amount of wealth we possess. While I will be rich someday, I am currently not rich. Ro Khanna has approximately 1,000x more money than I do. Meaning, he has killed around 1,000x more kids than me by greedily hoarding his wealth and not contributing to international medical aid. Or he’s denying poor children in California childcare. Or whatever…

See how this works?

So what is this really? A speculative work of quasi-fiction (how many children have you saved recently, Congressman?) based on no hard facts at all, parroted by supposedly rational center leftists, entirely and shamefully for the purpose of cynical politics.

Beyond the resentment and self-righteousness, what these accusations show is that Welch, Khanna, et al. have no policy ideas capable of creating wealth for working class people — which is why they reach for a scapegoat. The sad irony is their scapegoat is capable of creating wealth for working class people. So while it’s likely true neither Welch nor Khanna care about Elon’s safety from the would-be assassins inspired by their mass murder accusations, they really don’t care about the welders at SpaceX who became millionaires, either. In fact, I would bet everything that heart-warming anecdote makes them genuinely angry! Which just about tells you everything you need to know.

Here’s your semi-weekly reminder that we do live in an Assassination Culture™, though.

“Listen up, Democratic establishment,” she said in October after laughing maniacally at a No Kings Protester expressing gladness that Charlie Kirk was murdered. “You can either jump on board with this shit, or we’re coming after you in the same way that we come after MAGA. Period.”

Right now, the way Welch sees it, folks like Elon and Trump are in the crosshairs, but the pendulum always swings the other direction after a time, and then we’ve certainly descended into a deeper circle of Hell. Communist baristas don’t actually benefit (none of us do) from… whatever this is.

— Max Weiner