Retired General Michael Flynn claimed early Monday that the end of U.S. funding for elections overseas has been followed by a wave of victories by "pro-sovereignty, pro-nationalist, pro-populist" candidates — a claim now circulating across a cluster of prominent conservative accounts.
Writing from the account @GenFlynn, the former national security adviser said USAID had stopped funding foreign elections "to the tune of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars," and that since then "more pro-sovereignty, pro-nationalist, pro-populist candidates have been winning" abroad. The post frames the development as a direct consequence and breaks off mid-sentence, inviting readers to draw the conclusion the post does not spell out.
The same claim was amplified in a broader list from @bennyjohnson, who wrote that "since USAID was defunded," rap music is "dead," the Democratic National Committee is broke, communists have lost elections across a string of Latin American countries — Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, Honduras, Bolivia, Peru and Costa Rica — with Brazil "next," the U.S. border is closed and migrant caravans are gone, nationalists are winning across Europe, and CNN was cut off mid-thought in the post. The post presents each item as an outcome of the funding halt without offering supporting evidence for any of them.
The two accounts are not alone. The claim is being carried across a widening set of right-of-center feeds, with @GenFlynn and @bennyjohnson serving as the most prominent nodes and the list format from @bennyjohnson functioning as a kind of running tally that others repeat. It is not yet known how the accounts arrived at the specific list of countries or how they are defining a "communist" loss in each case.
USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development, has for decades funded overseas programs including election assistance, governance training and civil society work. Whether any specific funding stream has been terminated, and whether any such termination would produce the electoral outcomes claimed, is not established by the posts themselves. The posts do not cite documents, budget records or election results to support their assertions, and the underlying claim that the defunding occurred as described has not been independently confirmed.
The Latin American list stands out for its sweep. Elections in Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, Honduras, Bolivia, Peru and Costa Rica are all characterized in the @bennyjohnson post as having gone against left-wing candidates, with Brazil described as "next." Each of those countries holds elections on its own schedule and under its own rules, and the post does not specify which contests it is referring to or when they took place.
In a separate thread of reaction, former NASCAR champion Tony Stewart told an audience he no longer watches the sport. In a video transcript posted by @TheChiefNerd, Stewart described the current racing product as "so neutered," comparing today's roughly five-hundred-horsepower cars with the eight-hundred-and-seventy-five-horsepower engines of his competitive peak.
"They're driving cars with 500 horsepower. When I at the peak when I was running, we were at 875 horsepower … and then they cut the nuts off of them … NASCAR, wake the f**k up. What are we doing?" Stewart said in the remarks.
In the fuller transcript, Stewart recounts the series moving to a seven-hundred-and-seventy-five-horsepower package — a change he said left him "miserable," calling the cars "pieces of shit" — before describing the current generation as around five hundred horsepower, a figure he said may have since climbed back toward six hundred. He then contrasts the series with a truck he said he would be promoting the following day.
"I'm going to do a commercial shoot tomorrow with Dodge and Ram and we're promoting a truck that has 777 horsepower that I can buy off a showroom floor," Stewart said. "And you can go to Talladega to the truck race and outrun that thing by theory. Sure with more power from a street truck that you can buy. It's like NASCAR wake the fuck up. Yeah, what are we doing?"
The argument in Stewart's remarks turns on a comparison between what a manufacturer sells to the public and what the racing series puts on the track — a complaint that the cars are now less powerful than a pickup a customer can buy. It is not known whether NASCAR has responded to the comments, and no statement from the series was included in the material circulating.
The two threads — the USAID claim and the NASCAR complaint — have been moving through overlapping conservative feeds, with @TheChiefNerd posting the Stewart video and @bennyjohnson and @GenFlynn carrying the funding claim. The accounts function less as separate stories than as adjacent items in a running argument about institutions, whether the subject is foreign elections or stock-car racing.
Next News Network could not independently verify the claim that USAID funding for foreign elections has been halted, nor the specific electoral and cultural outcomes attributed to it.
What remains unclear is the scope of the alleged funding halt. The posts describe it as a wholesale defunding, but do not distinguish between appropriated funds, obligated funds, paused programs or canceled contracts, and they do not say when the change is said to have taken effect. It is also not known which overseas election programs, if any, are affected.
On the racing side, the horsepower figures Stewart cites are his own recollections and characterization. NASCAR's current engine specifications and any recent rule changes were not included in the material circulated, and the series has not publicly commented in the posts reviewed.
Both threads carry the same rhetorical structure: a policy or institutional change, followed by a list of results presented as its consequence, with the causal link asserted rather than demonstrated. The posts reviewed do not attempt to draw a mechanism connecting a defunded agency to a Brazilian election or a stock-car engine package, and they do not address alternative explanations.
The posts also differ in register. The USAID claim is presented as breaking news and as a geopolitical scoreboard. Stewart's remarks are raw, personal and centered on what he says he used to drive versus what he says he sees now. What they share is the framing of decline — institutions the speakers say have been weakened, gutted or neutered, and a demand that they wake up.
Our Take
Two stories are circulating here, and both deserve more scrutiny than the feeds are giving them. On USAID, the posts assert a sweeping causal chain — defund the agency, and populists win from South America to Europe — without a single document, budget line or election result attached. That is a claim dressed as a scoreboard. It may turn out to be partially true; the Trump-era push to dismantle USAID's functions is real and ongoing, and voters across the hemisphere have indeed been swinging against incumbents of every stripe. But "since USAID was defunded" is doing enormous work in those posts, and the accounts carrying it have not shown the work. On NASCAR, Stewart is not making a political argument — he is making a fan's argument, and a car guy's argument, and it lands because it is specific: eight hundred and seventy-five horsepower then, five hundred now, and a showroom pickup with seven hundred and seventy-seven that would outrun the field. The sport's own leadership should answer that with numbers rather than silence. Our advice to readers on the first thread is the same as always: when someone hands you a list of victories and attributes all of them to one decision, ask for the receipts before you cheer.
