Secretary of State Marco Rubio got a workout on Capitol Hill yesterday when he testified before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and the Committee on Appropriations. During his appearance at Appropriations, Rubio elicited groans when he had the unmitigated gall to suggest that never-ending buckets of U.S. dollars heading out the door under the auspices of foreign aid didn’t do anyone much good:
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The best foreign aid is foreign aid that ends because it’s achieved its purpose. So, take country X, and they say we want help with our law enforcement. The best foreign aid is foreign aid where, at some point, that country doesn’t need it anymore, because now they’re self-sufficient. South Africa is – I’m sorry, South Korea is a great example. South Korea was once poorer than North Korea. South Korea was once an aid-dependent nation. Today, it is an aid donor and the ninth or tenth-largest economy in the world. That has to be the goal of our foreign aid. It has to be that it ultimately ends because it creates self-sufficiency.
That makes sense, so naturally it invoked the proverbial needle-scratch from the august body of legislators. Reuters noted that during Rubio’s CFR appearance, Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) remarked that in light of cuts to USAID, he regretted voting to confirm Rubio. That prompted Rubio to quip, “First of all, your regret for voting for me confirms I’m doing a good job.”
As we have seen in the past, a certain level of performative keening is essential to our “holy slopjaws” in D.C. (as Jack Keruac once called them) who are constantly searching for clicks and sound bites. But the real entertainment was taking place off the field, so to speak. As usual, a coterie of ’60s holdovers put in an appearance and made sure that everyone in attendance knew that 1) they were affronted, offended, and outraged, and 2) they are in desperate need of professional help:
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The Democrat Party base gets removed from Secretary Rubio’s hearing on Tuesday.
These protesters are peak cringe. pic.twitter.com/FLNztXXWsc
— Paul A. Szypula 🇺🇸 (@Bubblebathgirl) May 20, 2025
As a former liberal, I want to look at them and say, “My people, my people, what has become of you?” But in retrospect, I think they may have been that way all along. Granted, I don’t remember them being quite this deranged, but while I was born in the ’60s, the weirdness of the era was in the national rearview mirror before I was nine or 10. So I missed all the good drama. While I don’t remember the madness, in retrospect, I remember conversations among the adults in my life that should have foreshadowed these antics.
The first woman really sets the tone. One wonders if she is fully cognizant of her behavior. Her’s is a special brand of weirdness. If I saw that look on the face of someone teaching my children, we would be homeschooling within the hour. If someone like that were behind the counter at the DMV, I would buy a bike. If she were my barista, I would switch to Diet Coke. The priest, Lord help him, looks as if he is barely aware of his surroundings. To her credit, the woman in red appears to be reconsidering her life choices. She seems to be thinking, “You know, I’ve got a nice bottle of Merlot at home. What am I doing here?” Â
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To a certain extent, these tantrums are the result of these folx sitting around the campfire, reliving their glory days when they burned bras and draft cards, dropped acid, and fled to Canada. The legends of the ’60s grew in the telling. I know this, having grown up in a house full of copies of Ms. magazine, a soundtrack of Joan Baez and Peter Paul and Mary, and reminders that when I turned 18, I had better register for the draft as a conscientious objector if I knew what was good for me. These people drew a fair amount of their identity from those things, and the ones who didn’t go on to grow up and maybe become dot-com millionaires are still clinging to the mythos.Â
Exclusively for our VIPs: The Nation’s Moral Vacuum on Display
Of course, the issue is that they continued to tell those stories to the following generations. They may not have sung “The Ballad of the ’68 Convention Riot,” but they passed the ideals down to their children, students, and others in their charge, who, in turn, kept the mystique and romance front and center for the next generation. In the era of TikTok, Instagram, a jaded, compromised media, and a corrupt education system, the rebellious acts of today are magnified and fed back on themselves until they are unbelievably amplified, making the participants even more destructive and dysfunctional. The old guard has some serious competition in the “Free, free, Palestine” crowd.
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I know there are boomers out there who matured, and not all of you are Abbie Hoffman retreads. But the ones who stayed behind are still muddying the waters. The Ghost of Protests Past will haunt us for a while.
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