A funny thing happened after USAID was shut down. Kids stopped identifying as gay. 

Not all of them, of course. But the LGBT rates have plummeted.

The Washington Post is absolutely baffled about all of this. But Scott Jennings helpfully mocked the beltway rag for playing dumb.

“'What’s causing it is unclear'” lmao," he guffawed.

Elon Musk chimed in: "Indeed."

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But the Woke brigade is having a little trouble parsing all of this. What's the inside joke? Why are conservatives chortling about this development? And why is USAID involved?

It's simple: Because the LGBT agenda is an astro-turfed fad that was largely generated by our culture. 

And the rates are crashing back down to earth as the left loses its stranglehold on the culture.

"Half as many 9th graders identify as Bi compared to 3 year(s) ago," an X commenter posted.

The WaPo article is worth quoting at length, because it gets into the heart of the story.

Young teenagers are less likely to identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual than they were a few years ago, according to a new analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.

The decline is particularly striking among ninth-grade girls, according to Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University who published her analysis of the 2025 data on her Substack “Generation Tech.” In 2021, 30 percent of ninth-grade girls identified as lesbian or bisexual. Last year, 17 percent did.

“It really does look like a free fall,” Twenge said. “But what’s causing it is unclear.”

Twenge has been researching generational differences for decades. As part of that work, she regularly analyzes data from the CDC’s biennial Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System.

The rate of boys who identify as gay or bisexual has remained roughly the same over the past decade. But a few years ago, after the pandemic shutdowns, the CDC data showed big upticks in the percentage of high school girls identifying as lesbian or bisexual. Within a few years, those rates began to drop, but only by a few percentage points. Though the overall numbers have continued to decline, older teenagers’ sexual orientation has held relatively stable. They are still more likely to identify as lesbian or bisexual than teenagers were before the pandemic.

The “free fall,” Twenge found, mostly comes from a huge drop in the number of freshmen girls who identify as bisexual. While 26 percent of ninth-grade girls identified as bisexual in 2021, only 13 percent — half as many — did in 2025.

So, they are unsurprised as the LGBT rates shoot up, but are baffled when the rates plummet? What kind of "researchers" are these?

Regardless, the WaPo story actually cites the USAID connection and bridles at conservatives who want to credit Trump for halting the LGBT craze.

Online, conservative activists celebrated the news as a win brought on by the Donald Trump administration.

“Amazing what happens when you cut the Department of Education and USAID,” Terry Schilling, the head of the American Principles Project, wrote on X.

It is true that the LGBT rates start dropping under Biden, but the massive spike also started under Biden. The trend lines reflect the cultural fad wearing off and this continuing under Trump.

The researchers try to dismiss the cultural argument by acting confused about why so many ninth grade girls have stopped self-identifying as gay or bi, while pointing to rates among 17-year-olds and 18-year-olds not dropping as steeply as a kind of counter-argument.

It's simple: Younger people are more sensitive to culture and environment and respond more quickly to trends than those who are older. The trendlines are sharp enough to demonstrate there is a real effect occurring across all groups.

Thus, we should all get the USAID joke, which is not really a "joke" as a point about the left's cultural hegemony and the way it uses propaganda to brainwash young people.

Siraj Hashimi drove this point home in PG-13 language.

There were a number of responses to the Washington Post that made the counter-point explicit.

RedState colleague Becky Noble remarked on this trend and explained why young people are so susceptible to fads.

The name of the game for young people, more specifically teens, is a rabid desire to fit in. It's impossible to ignore the fact that the study largely covers the years of the Biden administration, thought to be the most pro-LGBTQ administration in the nation's history. Combine that with a media that makes being gay somehow trendy and cool, and popular brands like Bud Light and Target that catered to the LGBT community, and you have a perfect recipe for kids who may genuinely be confused, but who also are told that being gay is "edgy" and "cool" at the same time. Not to mention the tick-off-your-parents factor.

At some point in the early 2000s, the LGBT agenda flipped from promoting "tolerance" to outright cultural engineering. The left went after children with an all-out push to convert as many of them as possible to the "gay lifestyle," because it is strongly correlated with radical activism.

Get children to rebel against social norms, against their parents, and against Christianity, and turn them into Marxist foot soldiers for the Woke cause.

This is why the Democrats abused USAID to push LGBT causes around the world. And it is why leftist publications like the Washington Post are so deeply invested in this issue. 

Radicals don't actually care about who young people sleep with, so long as they are politically in bed with the Democrat Party.