World News

In total, between 2019 and 2020, “IRI issued 11 advocacy grants to artists, musicians, performers or organizations that created 225 art products addressing political and social issues,” which it claimed were “viewed nearly 400,000 times.” Additionally, the Institute bragged that it “supported three civil society organizations (CSOs) from LGBTI, Bihari and ethnic communities to train 77 activists and engage 326 citizens to develop 43 specific policy demands,” which were apparently “proposed before 65 government officials.”

Between October and December of 2020, the IRI hosted three separate “transgender dance performances” across the country. Per the report, “the goal of the performance was to build self-esteem in the transgender community and raise awareness on transgender issues among the local community and government officials.” At the final performance, in Dhaka City, the US Embassy sent its “deputy consul general and deputy director of the Office for Democracy, Rights and Governance” to participate.

Finally, the IRI also carried out “community-specific quantitative and qualitative research,” which included “three focus group reports” and what it called “the largest published survey of LGBTI people in Bangladesh.”

In sum: “IRI’s program raised public awareness on social and political issues in Bangladesh and supported the public to challenge the status quo, which ultimately aims for power shift [sic] inside Bangladesh.”

In the US, Republican Party politicians have traditionally scorned government support for visual artists, transgender dancers, and rappers. But when an opportunity to install a more US-friendly government arose, the GOP’s in-house regime change organ eagerly transformed its domestic cultural enemies into political foot soldiers.

This is incredible. This is such a prime and opaque example of Rainbow Imperialism. It's like this example was cooked up in a lab. Here you have, the most vile supporters of the erasure of queer life in America doing queer activism in Bangladesh, funding queer artists and organizations to bring awareness to queer struggles within Bangladesh, for the explicit goal of creating political unrest in the country so that its leadership can be removed and replaced with a Compradore Dictator.

If this was an organization being run by the Democratic Party, you would be hard-pressed to get any liberal to look at this critically. All they would see is their chosen saviors doing savior shit in Bangladesh. They would conclude that the change in leadership is justifiable because they're "saving" queer people.

So how do they square this circle now? How do you reconcile the notion that the GOP is doing Trans Rights in Bangladesh to topple the government, but also trying to genocide Trans people through stochastic terror campaigns here in the homeland? What could the conclusion be for these liberals?