Hostage Puppy

February 9, 2025

By NZB3

I wake up this morning to a dramatic headline from Three News: “…President Donald Trump’s decision to gut the humanitarian agency, USAID. It comes as the United Nations warned millions of people would die if the funding was pulled as planned.”

You can watch the full clip on their site here.

Or, I’ve clipped it to Anarkiwi here.

What a dramatic spin! Millions? What the hell is going on here when Trump is only wishing to purge the wasteful spending and Woke programs from his foreign aid budget? An explanation soon came to hand..

“There is a tactic that I call the “hostage puppy.” A group spends much or most of its time and money in horrible, counterproductive ways, but they are also keeping an extremely cute and vulnerable puppy alive. If anyone tries to cut their funding or shut them down, they wheel out the puppy, show its soulful eyes to the cameras, and explain that if their budget is cut or they are shut down, the cute little puppy will die.

The puppy takes many forms and can be more or less literal.

[…]

The puppy can take many forms, but the common theme is that if you try to fix or shut down the failing organization, everyone will learn you’re a puppy killer. Surely you wouldn’t want to be a puppy killer?

How do you save the hostage puppy? By reminding everyone that it is not the case that there is only one group of people on earth that can care for the puppy. Other means of caring for the puppy are probably available, ones that don’t involve also throwing a lot of resources into a hole in the ground or worse. In fact, you should take the puppy away from the people holding it hostage. They probably don’t actually have its best interests at heart if they’re using it that way.” – Perry Metzger, Facebook (2025) via Michael Strong, via Sean Malone

That explains that one, thanks!

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