They're Letting Cancer Patients Die to Fund Concentration Camps

I think it was JD Vance who once asked, “For what?”

Of course, he was derisively answering a question about whether he would apologize to the family of Alex Pretti for slandering their murdered son. But it’s a question I think a lot about as we watch our government, ostensibly on our behalf, prioritize punishment over pretty much everything else. 

This new video by Marcy Wheeler, which I produced for LOLGOP Studios, lays out something crucial that’s often lost in the chaos: every dollar spent on Stephen Miller’s mass deportation machine is a taxpayer dollar that could be spent on something else. I get why that’s not the first thought in your head when you imagine hundreds of kids languishing in a tent city concentration camp in Texas’ brush country or Minneapolis still under siege as much of America looks away. 

Yet those “something elses” are piling up into a devastating picture.

On January 30th, the Senate voted 49-51 on a straightforward proposition: take $75 billion from ICE and redirect it to healthcare. This is a vote that most of us missed, but both Marcy and Andrea Pitzer focused on it in their most recent videos. And when two of the smartest humans alive tell you something that I missed mattered, I try to fix my error. The vote failed, but it made visible what’s usually hidden—that funding a “domestic army” means defunding care for actual Americans.

Here’s what those choices look like in 3-D.

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Veterans → Goons

Trump cut VA positions and froze hiring for nurses and psychologists—while 94% of VA facilities report severe staffing shortages. That money instead paid thousands of militarized agents to invade Minnesota and shoot Alex Pretti, a VA ICU nurse, dead while he lay prone on the ground. Veterans who earned their care are denied it so goons can terrorize American citizens.

Care for Starving Children → Fascist Influencers

Trump killed USAID funding, creating a $60 billion gap. The Lancet estimates 22.6 million preventable deaths by 2030, including 5.4 million children under five, as a result of all the funding cuts in 2025 around the world, as allies aped the Trump regime’s cuts. In just six months, 600,000 people died preventable deaths, mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Where did some of that money go? To fund far-right movements in Europe. We’re literally taking money from starving children and giving it to Nigel Farage, supporting Nazi-ish parties in Germany, and funding that weird mix of fascist and Putin-purchased movements across Europe.

Cancer Research → Measles Outbreaks

Bobby Jr. terminated or froze 320 grants researching cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and heart disease—$561 million redirected away from cures. Meanwhile, measles outbreaks are hitting detention centers holding children like five-year-old Liam Ramos. We’re trading the possibility of curing cancer for the certainty of preventable disease spreading in camps where we’re holding American children.

Who Gets the Goods?

Mostly sicko white supremacists like Stephen Miller and Peter Brimelow, who’ve decided if they can’t have a white America, they can have a nation where white nationalism drowns out all sense. And they’ve managed to sync their project with a tiny group of wealthy benefactors who want tax cuts and fewer protections for consumers and the environment, along with less oversight in general. 

And the spoils go to the worst industries on earth. Private prison corporations cashing in on billion-dollar detention contracts. Defense contractors. Sorry. War contractors. Carbon spewers. And a committed base of true-red MAGA supporters who view the cruelty as entertainment, the domination as proof of power, the violence as vindication.

Who Pays?

Everyone else. Veterans denied the nurses and psychologists they earned through service. Cancer patients and their families losing hope for cures. Starving children in Africa abandoned like smited villages in the Old Testament. Americans living under occupation in their own cities. We pay in care denied, research abandoned, lives lost, and normalized state violence against citizens.

The Real Tax on Our Souls

This is about more than budgets. Every choice to fund authoritarianism over care is a tax on our collective wellbeing and souls—a tax that buys nothing but cruelty, instability, and the slow dismantling of American values. We’re not just losing healthcare and research funding. We’re losing any pretensions of decency.

The question isn’t whether we can afford healthcare, cancer research, or feeding starving children. We’re already spending the money—billions of it. The question is whether we’ll keep letting a small group of billionaires and ideologues decide that goons, concentration camps, and global fascist movements are better investments than human life.

When Tom Emmer insists ICE agents must be allowed to wear masks while raiding Minnesota, but votes to defund VA nurses, that’s a choice. When Marco Rubio cuts aid that was preventing millions of deaths to fund far-right influencers in Europe, that’s a choice. When we abandon cancer research to build detention camps with measles outbreaks, that’s a choice.

These are the trade-offs. The cruelty is a luxury item, paid for by abandoning care. Now we need to make these choices impossible to ignore.

So let me ask JD’s question back to him and everyone enabling this carnage: For what?