Musk targets another scam.
What Is NED? Elon Musk Takes Aim at Agency Founded by Reagan Administration
Published Feb 03, 2025 at 10:31
Billionaire Elon Musk has criticized the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a nonprofit organization established by the U.S. government during Republican Ronald Reagan's presidency.
"NED is a SCAM," Musk wrote on his social media platform X, formerly Twitter, on Sunday, in response to a user who used Musk's artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Grok to identify "red flags of corruption or concerns" with NED.
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https://www.newsweek.com/what-ned-elon-musk-takes-aim-agency-founded-reagan-administration-2025165 [/color]
Forty Years Bashing the National Endowment for Democracy
by Jim Bovard | Feb 4, 2025
After that merciless arm-twisting, I have no choice but to recap my National Endowment for Democracy bashes going back to shortly after it was launched in 1983.
In a November 29, 1985 piece in the Oakland Tribune, I hailed NED as “one of the newest, most prestigious boondoggles on the Potomac.” But there were plenty of scoffers early on: “NED has been called many things—an International Political Action Committee, the Taxpayer Funding of Foreign Elections Program, and a slush fund for political hacks who like to travel to warm climates in cold weather. In less than two years, NED has lived up to all these epithets.” My op-ed concluded, “The sooner NED is abolished, the cleaner our foreign policy will be.”
The following year, after fresh NED scandals, Senator Ernest Hollings (D-SC) howled, “This thing is not the National Endowment for Democracy but the National Endowment for Embarrassment.” Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) complained, “From its very inception, the National Endowment for Democracy has been riddled with scandal and impropriety.”
But it was a “jobs for the boys” program that enabled politicians to launder money to plenty of their aides and donors, so it survived one pratfall after another.
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https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/forty-years-bashing-the-national-endowment-for-democracy/ [/color]